Preacher's Inferno

Book 28: Preacher/The First Mountain Man

by William W. Johnstone, J.A. Johnstone

Genres: Action & Adventure; Historical Fiction; Westerns

Synopsis

A village is destroyed. A vengeance is born. And one man blazes a trail to hell and back to pay the devils their due—in bullets and blood. They call him Preacher . . .

JOHNSTONE COUNTRY. FIGHT FIRE WITH FIRE.

It starts as a happy reunion between Preacher and his fellow trappers in a peaceful Indian village. But it ends swiftly in death and destruction when a rival tribe attacks the village, slaughters some of Preacher's Crow and mountain man friends, and carries off the women and children as prisoners. Preacher was off hunting when it happened. Now he's teaming up with old friend Lorenzo and half-breed Tall Dog, to get the prisoners back—and get revenge. But the road to justice is paved with some very dark omens. And the trail leads to the baddest place on God's good earth: the bubbling quicksand pits, hot springs, and geysers of the Wyoming wild country known as Colter's Hell . . .
 
Here—where earthquakes shake the land and no man is safe—Preacher and his friends must wage a three-man war against one of the fiercest tribes this side of the devil's inferno. And once the shooting starts, it's going to get a hell of a lot hotter . . .
 
Oh, and there's also a question of 100 missing rifles . . .

Live Free. Read Hard.
 

Release date: December 28, 2021

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 304

Sample

For the moment, Preacher lay on his stomach in the brush without moving. That steady-as-a-rock motionlessness was the way he always prepared himself for a kill shot. He breathed slow and easy and stayed focused on his quarry. On this hillside looking down, he was just one more predator in the foothills of the Gros Ventre Range.

Gros Ventre was what the French called the Atsina Indians who lived in this region with the Shoshone, Crow, Bannock, and Blackfeet. French explorers had gotten the name wrong in the translation of the sign language they shared. The translation from French to English was big belly. Or maybe the French mapmakers had chosen the name deliberately because the Grand Tetons, north and west of the Gros Ventre Range, called Les Trois Têtons, translated into “the three nipples.” And seeing them, especially from a distance, certainly brought those womanly attributes to a man’s mind.

A small group of pronghorns fed among a copse of pine trees farther down the slope. The trees stood mostly straight and tall, angled back toward the foothills so the tips would find the morning sun, and they were dense enough that if a man didn’t know what to look for, or how to look for it, he might miss the pronghorns grazing in the trees.

The spring and early summer had been good to the pronghorns. Water was still plentiful, and the grass was green and thick. In the winter, when the snow came, things wouldn’t be so fine for them. The numbers they’d built up during the good months would work against them then. If herds carried too many members, they’d run the risk of starving when grass got hard to come by.

But for now, they were sleek and sassy and had plenty of meat on them. Pronghorn didn’t think much past the here and now of things. A man who could hunt could eat well off a herd like that, and Preacher was one of the finest hunters to ever walk the mountains.

With their heads held high and proud, their round eyes watchful, and their ears pricked, the pronghorn bucks circled the herd, kept the does and the young clustered, and remained wary to potential threats. They kept their eyes moving and flicked their ears to track even the smallest sounds.

A small flock of white trumpeter swans flew over the trees, probably headed for the nearby Snake River. The adults had six-foot wingspans and made a lot of noise in passing. The pronghorns shied a little at the racket, and Preacher worried he was going to miss his opportunity if the herd bolted. The swans continued on their way, though, and after a moment, the pronghorns returned to grazing.

All their coats, brown from neck to hindquarters and white bellies and haunches, shined in the dappled sunlight that slid through the gently waving branches. The bucks had tall, thick antlers that hooked on the ends.

A man on foot without a firearm would have a hard time handling a lone pronghorn. The bucks weighed more than a hundred pounds, and a few of them looked like they’d go as much as a hundred and fifty pounds. And there wasn’t much quit in one of them when defending the herd.

Watching the beautiful creatures made Preacher’s heart sing, though he wouldn’t have told many people that, and never anyone who wasn’t a mountain man like him. Only a true man who made his life under the wide-open sky could have understood what stirred his soul while he studied the pronghorns.

It wasn’t just the prospect of good meat that put a smile on Preacher’s rugged, bearded face. Mostly, he was just grateful to be back home in the mountains. It was where he belonged, and of late he’d been traipsing far from his customary neck of the woods. His travels had taken him away from the mountains for months.

He studied the herd like a man reading a menu in a fancy restaurant in New Orleans. He wanted a buck that was strong and healthy, one that had plenty of meat on it.

The mountain man wasn’t planning on just eating good himself today. He was going to pack out meat to friends that he was looking forward to seeing again. When visiting, he wasn’t a man to come to the table empty-handed. By this time tomorrow, he planned on being at the mountain man rendezvous near Jackson’s Hole.

Anticipation filled him at the thought of seeing old acquaintances. He hadn’t seen some of them in years, and he was sure there would be sad news of those who had died during the time he’d been gone. A mountain man’s life was hard and filled with the dangers of Indians, bears, snakes, catamounts, bad falls, and loose rock during the spring melts.

And that was if the winter didn’t take a man with the freezing cold or sickness. He hadn’t been to a rendezvous yet where someone hadn’t been lost to one thing or another.

Lord help him, Preacher looked forward to being back in the mountains for winter with snowdrifts so high they covered anything that would have looked fetching to a civilized person.

He liked seeing new things every now and again, which was one of the reasons he enjoyed his trips to St. Louis to sell his furs. He got to see some of that burgeoning civilization that was casting greedy eyes out West. He usually didn’t like what he saw, all those people planning on rolling on west to the Pacific Coast and the free land there. He’d taken note of the goings-on so he could be wary of those people, most of them with their own agendas, and he’d realized again why he loved the mountains so.

While he was in St. Louis, he could sit in Red Mike’s and meet with other men like himself who lived by their wits, the strength of their backs, and the keenness of their eyes. They could swap lies in fun and jest, and they could tell stories about the things they’d seen and done that might interest a curious man or a fiddlefooted one.

Preacher knew himself to be guilty on both counts.

Those stories that got exchanged, though, were important because they painted oral maps of places, people, and things a mountain man would find useful while exploring new places. Or even places he hadn’t visited in a while.

Things were changing in the mountains and it was all Preacher could do to keep up with it.

St. Louis was a hardscrabble city that was showing growth pains, and Preacher’s latest trip there, after a nasty bit of business, had taken him south along the great river. New Orleans had proven cold, secretive, and downright deceitful if Preacher had to be blunt about it. He’d sailed as a prisoner on a pirate ship before making his escape and arranging his return to the city to wreak vengeance on those who had wronged him.

Even Texas and Nuevo Mexico, which he’d only just returned from, were getting too neighborly with civilized ways, and a large slice of treachery. At least out in the mountains a man knew mostly what he could expect from others whose trails crossed his own. Most folks, peaceable and those who would take advantage of others, stayed out of the high country. Places down south were a confluence of opposing forces that changed sides quickly.

Preacher had longed for the mountains and the solitude.

“Lord, I have missed this place,” Preacher whispered out loud and surprised himself. As a hunter, he knew better than to go talking to himself while he was hunting.

The pronghorns continued their grazing, never knowing he was only a short distance away.

Dog shifted a little next to the mountain man. The big cur looked like a gray wolf and had often been mistaken for one. His wise eyes were focused solely on the pronghorns. His pink tongue lolled, and his ears twitched. He shifted his attention to Preacher and whined a little.

“Easy, boy,” Preacher said softly to his trail companion. “I can taste them steaks, too. We’ll have all we want right shortly.”

Deftly, Preacher eased up his rifle from his side, pulled the butt to his shoulder all while keeping the barrel low in the grass and making no disturbance. He laid his sights over a proud buck eighty yards away.

The pronghorn was full grown, muscular, and wary. The shot would be an easy one to make even at the distance, but Preacher wanted to be sure of the kill. Tracking a wounded animal would be simple enough for him even in the ragged tree line that ran though the foothills, but he didn’t want the pronghorn to suffer.

Preacher aimed a few inches behind the buck’s front leg, where the heart would be, and gently eared back the rifle’s hammer. The click of the flintlock didn’t travel far, and the distance would put the sound late to the pronghorns’ ears if it did reach them because he didn’t plan on wasting any time.

Totally focused, Preacher slid his finger over the trigger, let out half a breath, and squeezed the trigger just as the pronghorn’s head came up sharply and its ears flicked toward the mountain man.

The rifle bucked against Preacher’s shoulder. The ball caught the pronghorn right where he’d aimed, and the buck stutter-stepped and went down in a loose sprawl on the other side of the spreading, gray cloud of powder smoke unleashed by the rifle.

With the sharp report of the rifle echoing around them, the pronghorn herd broke cover and ran for the high and uncut in a rippling, bounding mass. The other bucks circled them and headed them to safety farther down the foothills.

When Preacher thought about the way the pronghorn buck had gazed in his direction, an uneasy feeling touched him. He was certain any sound he might have made had gone unheard—until he’d fired the rifle.

That meant the buck had seen something that caught his attention, and that something was behind Preacher. An itch dawned between Preacher’s shoulder blades, and he recognized that feeling.

He wasn’t alone on the hillside.

Dog growled and his hackles grew stiff. His big, wedge-shaped head swung to the left, away from Preacher. At the same time, the rustle of someone moving in the brush in that direction reached Preacher’s ears.

“You ain’t been payin’ proper attention, old son,” Preacher said to himself.

Despite his focus on the pronghorns, the mountain man knew he wasn’t an easy individual to sneak up on. Whoever was out there was good. Dog hadn’t marked them, either, and the big cur was canny in the mountains.

Preacher let the rifle lay because he had no time to reload it. He reached for one of the flintlock pistols he carried tucked into his belt at his back. By the time he worked the weapon free, Dog nipped his arm hard enough to pinch even through Preacher’s buckskin shirt sleeve.

Taking the big cur’s warning, the mountain man rolled to his left, and Dog darted through the brush on his belly and stayed low. Two arrows fletched with turkey feathers thudded into the ground where Preacher had been. Judging from the angle, they’d come from farther up in the foothills. Preacher had approached downwind of the pronghorns, so he hadn’t smelled whoever was hunting him because whoever it was had been downwind from him.

Another arrow cut the air over the mountain man’s head.

On his back a few feet from his original position but still somewhat covered by brush, Preacher looked farther up the foothills and spotted movement. At least three Indians converged on the mountain man’s position from sixty feet away. All of them wore paint and buckskins that allowed them to blend somewhat with the trees around them.

When they saw that he was aware of them, they discarded any notion of slipping up on him quiet-like and came faster down the slope. They stayed behind cover where they could find it, and there was plenty of it.

Preacher rolled to his feet and came up with the pistol in his hand. He cocked the weapon and aimed at the closest warrior, then squeezed the trigger as the man darted out from behind a tree. Packed with a double-shotted load, two .45-caliber balls instead of one, the pistol kicked in Preacher’s hand and powder smoke obscured the tree line.

Struck by the pistol balls, his chest bleeding from two wounds that stained his buckskin shirt, the warrior cried out in pain and dropped in mid-run.

Preacher thought the Indians were probably Blackfoot warriors. Those bands traipsed through the mountains, too, and attacked wagon trains headed toward the Pacific coastline. They considered mountain men to be their mortal enemies . . . and they had a deep and abiding hatred for the one called Preacher.

Unwilling to leave the rifle, especially now that he knew who he was up against, and where at least some of his attackers were, Preacher ran back for it. The pistols were good out to fifty feet, sometimes more, but a rifle made a man who could use one a whole lot more dangerous because of the increased range.

Of course, range wasn’t going to remain a factor for long. Buckskin-clad shadows darted through the trees toward him and loosed arrows as they came.

A half-dozen more shafts pierced the air around Preacher.

When he reached the rifle, he bent down briefly without breaking stride to pluck it from the ground and headed for a thick spruce. The low-hanging branches would offer some defense from arrows, but they would also limit his view. A battle always involved trade-offs.

Especially one where he was outnumbered.

“Dog,” Preacher called.

The big cur sprang out of the brush and ran at the mountain man’s heels. When they reached the tree, Dog moved impatiently, darted from side to side around the tree, and checked on all fronts for enemies. The hair on the back of his neck stood up, and a deep growl came from his throat. He was eager to rip some throats out.

“Watch,” Preacher ordered. “Stay with me.”

Dog answered with a soft, impatient bark.

“Things have already gotten a mite interestin’, and we’re gonna step up the tune those braves called.”

Preacher had seen three Indians. He’d shot one of them, maybe even killed him, but until he saw the body himself and knew the Indian was dead, he wasn’t going to count him out. The mountain man didn’t know how many more Blackfeet were out there, but if the number of arrows that had whipped through the air was any indication, it was more than three.

He had another flintlock pistol loaded and ready behind his belt, and he wore two of the Colt Paterson revolvers he’d been given by the rangers he’d run into while down in the Republic of Texas. The Patersons rode in holsters made for them. He had two more of the new ree-volving pistols in his saddlebags, but his saddlebags were with Horse and his pack animals, all of them too far away to help now.

Calmly and coolly, because that was the only way to deal with the situation he was in, Preacher dropped the rifle butt-first on the ground and took a cartridge from his possibles bag. He tore the cartridge open with his teeth, poured the powder into the barrel, and dropped a. 45-caliber ball in afterward. He freed the ramrod from the rings under the barrel, shoved the ramrod into the muzzle to set the ball properly, and put it back under the barrel.

He kept an eye on Dog because the cur’s ears were sharper than his own. He poured powder from his horn into the rifle’s lock and eared the hammer back. Working quickly, he loaded the empty pistol, too, and tucked it back behind his belt.

The Colt Patersons held five rounds each and he carried them with the hammers resting safely between cylinders to prevent an accidental discharge. He had extra loaded cylinders for the Patersons in his possibles bag, but it would take time to swap them out. That was time he was sure the Blackfeet swarming around him wouldn’t give him.

He saved the revolvers for the moment because the. 36-caliber balls loaded in those were smaller than the .45-caliber loads in the flintlock pistols, especially since they were double-shotted. The Patersons had less knockdown power, but that was an acceptable trade-off considering their other capabilities.

Thirteen rounds and he’d be down to the tomahawk and big hunting knife he carried. Preacher intended on making as many of those rounds count as he could.

“Ghost Killer!” a deep-voiced man bellowed in the Blackfoot tongue. “I see you!”

Ghost Killer was a name the Blackfoot tribes had given Preacher. For a time, he’d declared war on them and made a habit of slipping into their camps in the dead of night and slaying warriors with his knife or tomahawk. There was no love lost between Preacher and the Blackfeet, and there never would be.

“You’re lyin’,” the mountain man bellowed back. “You want to know how I know?”

There was no answer.

Dog shifted at Preacher’s feet and his attention was torn on both sides of the tree.

“I know you’re lyin’ about seein’ me,” Preacher said, “because if you could see me, I could see you and you’d be dead.”

An arrow skimmed off the tree and shredded bark that fell over Preacher. Another thudded into the tree and stood out like a marker tracking back to the archer. Two more arrows missed the tree, hit the ground, and skidded through the brush.

Marking the direction of the embedded arrow and trusting it to be a signpost, Preacher whirled around the tree and tucked the rifle to his shoulder. He studied the woods over the rifle’s sights, spotted a Blackfoot warrior nocking a fresh arrow to his bow at the side of a tree seventy feet away in the shadow of a towering pine, and centered his aim in the middle of his opponent’s face. He squeezed the trigger.

When the ball struck the archer, he dropped his bow and fell backward, then the powder smoke haze blocked Preacher’s vision and marked his position under the spruce.

Knowing he needed to take the fight to his attackers because staying in one place would allow them to surround him, the mountain man slung the rifle over his shoulder and drew his two flintlock pistols. He’d reload the rifle if he got the chance, but for now he had to get moving. The powder smoke would draw his attackers. Hunkering down in one place wasn’t going to work. With him moving, the warriors hunting him would have to move, and that would reveal them to him.

“Dog,” Preacher growled and set himself, “hunt!”

The big cur launched himself from hiding around the other side of the tree. Dog hunted by smell, and he’d warred against the Blackfeet enough to know their scent. Even upwind of the Indians, the cur had probably sniffed them out and been alerted to their presence. That was what he’d warned Preacher about.

Pistols in his hands, Preacher followed a half-step behind his trail companion. Running hard, the mountain man stayed bent over to offer a smaller target for his enemies.

Arrows whipped through the branches overhead and pierced the brush around Preacher. He drove himself forward with the pistols in his hands and his arms raised to protect his face from the branches that clawed at him.

Two Blackfoot warriors stepped out from behind a lightning-blasted lodgepole pine. One of them had a rifle and the other raised his bow with an arrow nocked back. He released the bowstring, and his companion eared back the rifle’s hammer.

Preacher twisted and dodged, and the turkey feather arrow fletching brushed his right cheek and ear as the shaft sped by. The warrior with the rifle stood a little behind and to the side of the archer. He stood steady and pulled the rifle to his shoulder.

Raising the pistol in his right hand, Preacher shot the Indian with the rifle in the chest before the warrior pulled the rifle trigger. The stricken Blackfoot fell backward and took the unfired rifle with him. Preacher trusted Dog to take the other warrior.

Without a sound, Dog covered the distance to the Indians in the blink of an eye. The cur sprang up and sank his fangs into the archer’s groin. The Blackfoot warrior cried out fearfully and in pain. Heavy and muscled, and traveling at nearly full speed, Dog took the man down and landed on top of him.

Trusting his old friend to deal with the Blackfoot warrior he’d knocked down, and knowing other Indians would come running, Preacher quickly knelt beside the warrior he’d shot, laid his pistols on the ground, and picked up the rifle the man had dropped.

The weapon was clean and looked new. Most rifles captured by Indians weren’t as well-cared-for as this one. He tapped the butt against the ground to make sure the ball in the muzzle was still more or less in place, then he brought the weapon up to his shoulder and scoured the trees.

A Blackfoot warrior slipped out around a white-barked aspen less than thirty feet away and bent his bow. He kept a low profile so not much of him showed.

Preacher aimed on the fly, squeezed the trigger, and hoped the rifle’s sights were fairly true. The ball shattered the bow and deflected off-center, but still tore out the Indian’s throat in passing. He dropped his ruined bow and grabbed for his neck. Blood gushed between his fingers as he stumbled away. The arrow struck the ground well short of Preacher.

Only a short distance away, Dog tore at the Indian’s groin he’d chomped his jaws on. The Blackfoot wailed in agony and tried to hammer the cur with his fists. He finally thought to grab the knife sheathed at his waist. As he drew the blade, Dog released his hold on the man’s groin and lunged up his prey’s body to sink his fangs into the Blackfoot’s throat. Before the Indian could thrust his knife home, the cur ripped his throat out, then caught the wrist of the arm wielding the knife.

In the time that took, Preacher barely had time to drop the spent rifle and pick up his pistols. Muzzle dripping red with the blood of his vanquished foe, Dog looked up at the mountain man.

“Good job, old son,” Preacher said, “but we ain’t out of the woods yet. There’s more of ’em here. Let’s get this finished quick before they get a chance to regroup. Hunt!”

Dog scented the air and loped off.

Preacher thrust his spent pistol behind his back and drew one of the Colt Patersons. On the move, trailing only a few feet after the cur, the mountain man eared back the revolver’s hammer. He doubted any of the Blackfeet in the forest with him had seen a repeating pistol.

“Ghost Killer!” the first Blackfoot warrior called again. “Are you going to continue to hide from me?”

Preacher tracked the voice. It came from deeper in the woods ahead of him.

“Dog,” the mountain man called softly. “Heel.”

The big cur joined Preacher and together they headed farther up the incline. Having the high ground would give him an edge, but it also took away valuable running room if he had to retreat. The Blackfoot warriors could surround and corral him.

The trees and brush were tightly packed. With a practiced eye, Preacher cut through the wilderness and fetched up against a large wedge of rock sticking out of the hillside. He listened intently and reloaded the rifle and pistol.

He considered his options. Horse and the pack animals lay in the other direction, away from where the Blackfeet had settled in. They’d probably cut his trail from the south and come on expecting to catch only a couple of white men. He might be able to reach Horse and ride off, but that would leave the Blackfeet trailing him.

He didn’t much care for the idea of leaving enemies behind him, and he wasn’t one to cut and run on a fight, either. Especially a fight he didn’t start.

He grinned despite the situation. He was more at home here fighting Blackfeet in the mountains than he’d been battling pirates at sea or even Comanche warriors in Texas. He was home, and fighting for his life was just part of that.

Weapons ready once more, Preacher put his back to the rock and looked down the incline. In the distance, the Snake River glimmered silver where it threaded through the trees.

“Preacher!” a man called out hoarsely. “Get yourself gone! I’m done for! You can’t help me!”

The voice was familiar, but before Preacher had the chance to run it through his mind again, an agonized scream echoed through the trees.

The mountain man took an even breath and kept his mind clear. Going off half-cocked wasn’t going to do anyone any good.

“Come down here and face me, Ghost Killer,” the Blackfoot warrior commanded in his tongue. “Do it or this man will die.”

“He’s gonna die anyway,” Preacher replied in English, because he figured that would aggravate the Indian doing all the talking, and an aggravated man didn’t always think straight.

“If you don’t come out, I will kill him slowly. You will list. . .