Thirteen
Nothing else happened to disturb Preacher’s slumber, but he was still uneasy the next morning anyway. No one else seemed to be, though. Jake had enjoyed the hospitality of Red Horse’s lodge and became good friends with Green Grass, and Corliss and Jerome were pleased that the first day of the expedition had gone so well.
But there were a lot more days to come before they reached their destination, Preacher reflected, and a lot more chances for something to go wrong.
It was a little late in the morning before the wagons rolled out. The sun was already up, but it was still an orange ball low on the horizon.
Preacher had saddled up Horse, and now he rode fifty to a hundred yards in front of the lead wagon with Dog trotting along beside him. From the way Horse pranced along, the big stallion was grateful for the chance to stretch his legs again. Preacher ran him a little bit, just to get some of the kinks out. Horse tossed his head, happy to be back on the trail.
The terrain along the river was just as easy as it had been the first day out of St. Louis. The wagons’ course wasn’t quite as straight as it had been the first day because now they were following the bends of the broad, muddy stream. Preacher could have led the party over some shortcuts, but he didn’t see any real need to do so. Better to let the pilgrims get used to following a river. If they were able to do that, it would greatly increase their chances for survival if anything should happen to him. He wasn’t indestructible, after all, and accidents happened sometimes.
During one of the times when they stopped to rest the teams and let the oxen graze, Jerome took a new flintlock rifle from one of the wagons and handed it to Jake, along with a powder horn and a shot pouch. Jake accepted the weapon with a glowing smile on his round face.
“Are you sure that’s a good idea, giving the kid a gun?” Corliss asked. “He’s liable to blow his own foot off, or even shoot one of us!”
“That’s why he has to prove to me that he can handle a weapon safely,” Jerome said. “Preacher, can you show him how to shoot it?”
Jake said, “I already know how to shoot.”
“Let’s see you load that rifle then,” Preacher suggested.
Because he was short, Jake had a little trouble with the rifle’s long barrel and equally long ramrod. But he was able to pour powder from the horn down the barrel, wrap a patch around a heavy lead ball from the shot patch, and shove the ball home with the ramrod, seating it firmly on the powder charge. Then he pulled back the hammer and put a pinch of powder in the pan.
“All right, it’s charged and primed and ready to shoot,” Preacher told the youngster. “Don’t point it at anybody. See that rock out yonder?” He pointed to a rock that jutted up about a foot from the earth, some twenty yards distant from the wagons. “See if you can hit it.”
“I can hit it,” Jake declared as he lifted the rifle to his shoulder. The weapon was heavy, and the barrel weaved from side to side as Jake placed his cheek against the smooth wood of the stock and tried to sight in on the rock that was serving as his target. He took a deep breath, and the barrel steadied.
Jake pressed the trigger.
The hammer struck the flint, and the spark set off the powder in the pan, which in turn ignited the charge in the barrel. It went off with a dull roar. The recoil kicked back hard against Jake’s shoulder, staggering the boy. Black smoke poured from the muzzle. Jake caught his balance and then waved a hand in front of his face, trying to clear away some of the smoke so that he could see the rock again. He let out a whoop of triumph as he saw what Preacher had already seen.
A white streak on the rock showed where the rifle ball had glanced off it. Jake had hit the target on his first shot.
Jerome saw the evidence of Jake’s accuracy, too, and nodded. “All right, I’m convinced,” he said. “You can keep the rifle, Jake.”
“Thanks, Mr. Hart!”
Corliss shrugged and said, “Well, maybe he won’t shoot anybody else . . . if we’re lucky.”
Beaming with pride, Jake carried the rifle across his knees as he rode on the wagon seat next to Jerome. The wagon train pushed on, still following the Missouri, as it would until they reached the little settlement of Westport, which truly marked the edge of civilization’s westward expansion. Heading southwest from there, there were no more towns until the Mexican city of Santa Fe. Heading northwest, there were no real settlements short of the ones along the Pacific coast in the Oregon country, only a few scattered British and American forts established in order to help protect the fur trade.
It was a big, wild country out there. Preacher and men like him called it home, but whether or not it would ever be settled was a question still open for debate. If it was to be settled, trading posts like the one the Hart cousins intended to establish would be the first real step in that direction.
After several days of travel, the Missouri River curved to the northwest and then took a more westerly turn. The members of the party had fallen into a routine by now. The weather had cooperated, and each day the wagons were able to cover a good stretch of ground. As the miles rolled away behind them, the nagging feeling that something was wrong continued to plague Preacher from time to time, even though he had seen no evidence of trouble.
Thinking that someone might be following them, he doubled back on their trail one day, riding more than a mile in the direction they had come from. His keen eyes searched the horizon, and narrowed in suspicion as they spotted a faint haze of dust in the air. Some more wagons, or a good number of riders, were back there several miles behind the wagon train. That didn’t have to mean anything; the dust could have come from a hunting party of Indians, or some immigrant wagons, or even a troop of army dragoons on patrol.
But he was going to keep a close eye on the wagon train’s back trail. If the followers came too close, he would have Jerome and Corliss and the other men circle the wagons.
Anybody who tried to raid this wagon train would get a hot-lead welcome. Preacher would see to that.
* * *
Schuyler hadn’t had any trouble following the trail so far. The wagons were so loaded down with cargo that their wheels cut deep ruts in the dirt. Not only that, but it had quickly become obvious that they were following the river.
“We can get ahead of ’em any time we want,” he told Fairfax one night while they were gathered with Beaumont’s men around a tiny fire that had been built down in a depression so that its glow wouldn’t be visible to the people they were stalking. No sense in warning Preacher that somebody was back here.
Fairfax shook his head. “We don’t want to get ahead of them, not for a long time yet.”
“Yeah, I know. I was just sayin’, in case you’d changed your mind—”
“I haven’t,” Fairfax snapped. “We’re sticking to my original plan.”
Schuyler nodded, trying not to frown. Fairfax had been pretty sharp with him lately. He had been that way with all of them really. Shad Beaumont had made it clear to his men that Fairfax was in charge, and obviously he liked being in command. He barked orders and strutted around like some sort of military officer. He had even started treating Schuyler that way, forgetting that they had been partners ever since they’d started traveling together. Sure, Schuyler preferred to let Fairfax do most of the thinking, but that didn’t mean he liked it when the other man bossed him around.
He wasn’t going to say anything about it unless he had to, though. Pulling off this job successfully was more important than protecting his feelings.
Anyway, from what little Fairfax had said about his background during the months they had been partners, he’d never had much luck. Born into a well-to-do family in Philadelphia, Fairfax had clashed with his father and his older brothers, and had eventually been forced to leave the city because of some scandal. Since then he’d led a hardscrabble existence, doing whatever he had to in order to survive. Sort of like Schuyler himself, who had run away from the family farm in Ohio after killing a man during a tavern brawl. Life was just hard all the way around, but now they had a chance to make it better. All they had to do was kill seven or eight men and steal those wagons and the trade goods they were carrying.
“I want to at least be in sight of the mountains before we strike,” Fairfax went on. “It might even be better to circle around the wagons and wait for them in the foothills.”
“That means we’ll be followin’ ’em for a month or more,” Schuyler said.
Fairfax nodded. “Yes, but we brought plenty of supplies with us.”
Schuyler rubbed his angular jaw, frowned worriedly, and said, “That’s that much more time we take a chance o’ Preacher figurin’ out that we’re followin’ the wagons.”
“We’ll be careful,” Fairfax said in an offhand, unconcerned manner.
Schuyler nodded. Still, the idea of Preacher being ready for them when they finally attacked continued to gnaw at his guts. He was beginning to get a bad feeling about this whole deal.
But it was too late to back out now. Too late to do anything except go ahead and hope that success and a big payoff would be waiting at the end of the trail.
* * *
The wagon train reached Westport and laid over there for a day to give the livestock a chance to rest up after the haul from St. Louis. Preacher explained to Corliss and Jerome that they would make several more stops like that during the journey. It was better to spend an occasional day resting than to have the oxen start to break down.
Westport wasn’t very big, but there were a couple of well-stocked stores. This was the jumping-off point for the trading caravans that headed down to Santa Fe, so a lot of wagon traffic passed through here. A few miles north, the settlement of Independence was also becoming an important departure point. Preacher knew one of the merchants in Westport, though, and was able to get a good deal for the cousins on the supplies they needed to replenish before striking out into the wilderness. If you ran out of flour or bacon halfway across the plains, you were out of luck. There was no place to buy any more.
Westport was also the last place men could stock up on whiskey and enjoy a little female companionship. The Harts’ drivers all wanted to visit the local saloons and whorehouses. Preacher told them to go ahead. He would stay and watch over the wagons, along with Jake.
As for Corliss and Jerome, Preacher didn’t know if they were interested in drinking and whoring. Corliss was engaged to Deborah Morrigan, of course, but that didn’t stop some men from carrying on with other women while they were away from their betrothed.
Corliss climbed into his wagon to sleep, though, and Jerome joined Preacher and Jake. “This is really it, isn’t it?” he said as he sat down on a wagon tongue. “The edge of civilization?”
“Yep,” Preacher agreed. “From here on, it’s all frontier.”
Jerome stared off into the darkness to the west. “This seemed like such a good idea back in Chicago. It was going to make us rich men. Now I’m not so sure we should have come out here. There are so many dangers . . .”
“You plan on gettin’ up tomorrow mornin’?” Preacher asked.
“What?” Jerome shook his head in confusion. “Of course I plan on getting up.”
’Then you’re already runnin’ one hell of a risk, because you don’t know you’ll still be alive in the mornin’. You don’t even know the sun’ll rise, or goeth down in the evenin’, like it says in the Good Book.“
“In Ecclesiastes,” Jerome said with a chuckle, “also known as the Book of the Preacher.”
“Smart fella, ol’ Ecclesiastes.”
“I take your point, Preacher. We take it on faith that the earth abideth forever. So we might as well have faith that our efforts will be rewarded, too.”
Jake yawned. “Grown-ups sure do like to talk a lot. I think I’m gonna turn in.”
“Good night, Jake,” Jerome said. When the boy was gone, he took out his pipe, packed tobacco in it, and smoked for a while as he and Preacher talked quietly about their route for the rest of the journey. Preacher had made sure that both Jerome and Corliss studied the maps they had before they ever left St. Louis, and he wanted them to keep the trail fresh in their minds. After a half hour or so, Jerome went to his wagon to sleep, too, leaving Preacher alone.
Which he didn’t mind at all. He had always been a solitary sort of gent, happy when he was around other people but happy with his own company, too.
He was sitting on the ground with his back leaned against a wagon wheel when he saw someone climb stealthily out of one of the other vehicles.
Preacher drew in a deep breath, but otherwise gave no sign of what he had just seen. That wagon was the one Pete Carey drove, and Carey was off carousing in the taverns and brothels of Westport. Jake, Jerome, and Corliss were all asleep in other wagons, or at least they were supposed to be. The mysterious figure who had just emerged from Carey’s wagon was too tall to be Jake anyway, and not big enough to be Corliss Hart.
That left Jerome, but Preacher had watched with his own eyes as Jerome climbed into the lead wagon a short time earlier. He supposed Jerome could have slipped out the other side of the vehicle, snuck over to Carey’s wagon, and crawled inside, but for the life of him, Preacher couldn’t think of any reason Jerome would do a thing like that.
Silently, Preacher came to his feet as the shadowy figure moved away from the wagon. The starlight revealed that whoever it was wore the same sort of rough work clothes as the teamsters, as well as a dark felt hat with a large, round brim.
Without making a sound, Preacher followed the figure as it went to one of the other wagons and stopped beside a water barrel lashed to the side of the vehicle. The intruder took something that had been slung around his neck on a strap and held it to the barrel. A water skin, Preacher decided. The son of a bitch was stealing water.
That wasn’t as terrible a crime where they were headed as it was in some of the more arid parts of the country. A lot of streams, some small and some large, would be crossing their trail, so they would have plenty of opportunities to refill the water barrels as they went along.
But that didn’t matter to Preacher. Stealin’ was stealin’, and anyway, whoever this was had no right to be here, clambering in and out of wagons that belonged to the Hart cousins. Preacher wondered if the interloper had been hiding out in Carey’s wagon all along. Maybe the fella only came out at night, and that was what had roused Preacher from sleep on several occasions, causing him to have those uneasy feelings. It made as much sense as any other answer.
The answer Preacher wanted now was the identity of the skulker. He moved closer, still as silent on his feet as the Indians who were his friends and sometime enemies, and by the time the intruder finished filling the water skin and turned away from the barrel, Preacher was only a couple of feet away. His hands rested on the butts of his pistols, and he drew them from behind his belt and drew back the hammers as he raised them.
“Don’t move or I’ll blow holes in you,” he grated.
The intruder dropped the water skin and cried out in surprise at the sight of Preacher and that menacing brace of pistols, then cringed back against the wagon. With a low moan, the figure crumpled to the ground in what appeared to be a dead faint.
And Preacher was left standing there with a shocked look on his face, as he realized that the voice he had heard cry out belonged to a woman.