Preacher's Wrath

Book 0: Preacher/The First Mountain Man

by William W. Johnstone, J.A. Johnstone

Genres: Action & Adventure; Westerns

Synopsis

The First Mountain Man encounters an old friend—and several enemies—in this rip-roaring adventure from the legendary bestselling Johnstones.

IN JOHNSTONE COUNTRY, MEN ARE AS MONUMENTAL AS THE MOUNTAINS THEY LIVE ON.

While in St. Louis, Missouri, to sell furs, Preacher runs into Darius Clutterbuck, an old friend who left the Wild West for a more civilized existence east of the Mississippi. Married to the lovely—and wealthy—widow Maggie Tinsley, Clutterbuck is passing through town on his way to the Rocky Mountains to show his new bride and brother-in-law the beauty, wonder, and excitement of the American frontier.

Maggie and her brother get more than they bargained for when they’re ambushed by would-be thieves. Luckily, Preacher is there to help Clutterbuck protect his family. Considering the lawless nature of the landscape ahead, Preacher agrees to accompany the group out west. But the outlaw gang, led by Erle Whitfield, a vicious killer itching to put Preacher six feet under should the First Mountain Man interfere with his plans, tails them out of St. Louis. But Whitfield isn’t the only threat on the trail. A band of Blackfeet have a score to settle with Clutterbuck, and they’re not above slaughtering his new family.

Determined to keep them all safe with his fast draw and deadly aim, Preacher is caught off guard by an enemy he never suspected . . .

Release date: December 15, 2026

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 304

Sample

Preacher didn’t look back, but he knew the men had followed him into the alley. He might not have eyes in the back of his head, but his instincts served him just about as well.

This late in the day, shadows gathered in the narrow confines of the passage between buildings in St. Louis. Earlier, Preacher had sold a load of pelts at the office of a fur trading company.

The fur trapping business had declined considerably in recent years, but with enough hard work, a man could still make a decent amount of money at it. With the coins stowed away in a small leather pouch, the decision of what to do next had been an easy one.

He regarded Red Mike’s tavern, not far from the riverfront, as his second home, so to speak. His true home could be found in the Rocky Mountains, the high country where a man could breathe fresh air and see for miles and miles.

He had spent a heap of pleasurable hours in Red Mike’s, though, and looked forward to doing so again.

And then, he had spotted three unsavory looking gents following him. Preacher figured right away they had nefarious designs on those coins in the pouch attached to the belt around his middle. Rather than wait for them to jump him at a time and place of their choosing, he decided it might be better to lure them in and get it over with.

Then he could go on about his business of paying an enjoyable visit to Red Mike’s.

Preacher hummed a tuneless ditty to himself, with apparently not a care in the world, as he strode through the alley’s gloom. If the varmints didn’t make a move soon, he might have to consider the possibility he’d been wrong about them.

Then he heard a swift rush of footsteps behind him and told himself with a grin, nah, he’d been right all along, as per usual.

Big, strong hands swooped down and closed around the butts of the Paterson Colts holstered at his hips. He drew the big revolvers as he pivoted to face his attackers. His thumbs looped over the hammers and pulled them back as the guns rose. His keen eyes spotted vague shapes charging toward him.

“Hold it right there, if you want to live!” he called to them.

They must have valued those coins more than their own lives, because they kept coming.

Preacher had given them fair warning. The Patersons boomed and bucked in his hands as flame spouted from their muzzles, followed by gushing clouds of powdersmoke. In the mountain man’s muscular grip, the revolvers’ barrels barely came up. He brought them down and fired again almost instantly.

Even with the heavy lead balls slamming into their bodies, the would-be thieves’ momentum carried them forward a couple of steps before they tumbled off their feet. They sprawled on the alley’s hard-packed dirt floor and twitched a little before the stillness of death claimed them.

“Bad luck for you fellas I had my killin’ pants on today,” Preacher said as he lowered the Patersons.

Then he frowned slightly as he realized only two dead men lay before him. He had seen three men following him a short time earlier, and they’d all seemed to know each other. He had assumed they would come after him together.

That thought had just gone through his mind when something crashed into the back of his head, knocking him forward. Preacher didn’t pass out or lose his footing, but the wallop had knocked him for a loop and started the world spinning the wrong way around him.

In a small part of his brain, he chided himself for allowing the third bandit to sneak up on him. He tried to make a habit of staying as watchful for trouble in St. Louis as he normally did in the mountains, but clearly, he hadn’t done a good job of it today. The third man had gotten behind him and clouted him with something, and now he moved in to finish the job.

Preacher forced his muscles to work. He twisted around and tried to bring the Patersons to bear, but then his right foot came down on something soft and squishy, probably a piece of rotten fruit somebody had dropped, and shot clean out from under him. He sat down hard.

The third man kicked him in the chest and knocked him onto his back. The man clutched a club in both hands and brought it down in a sweeping blow that would have crushed Preacher’s skull if it had connected. The mountain man jerked his head aside just in time to avoid the blow. As it was, the cudgel brushed his left ear.

The attacker bent over Preacher and pulled the club back to try again. He straightened slightly, and as he did, he suddenly grunted and arched his back. He dropped the club and pawed behind him instead. He swayed back and forth a couple of times, stumbled to the side, tripped on Preacher’s leg, and pitched against the wall of the building, striking it hard enough to bounce off.

He wound up face down on the ground. Just enough light remained in the alley for Preacher to see the bone handle of a large knife jutting up between the man’s shoulder blades. His torso concealed the cold steel of the deeply buried blade.

Movement made Preacher glance toward the end of the alley, where he had entered a few moments earlier. The man who stood there advanced another step. A good twenty feet separated him from the dead man with the knife in his back. If this newcomer had thrown the knife, which seemed likely, it had been a darned good throw. The sort Preacher himself might have made.

The stranger stopped. Preacher clambered to his feet, putting out his left hand that still held a revolver to brace himself against the wall.

When he came upright, he dragged in a deep breath. The cobwebs clogging his brain after getting walloped began to clear. He didn’t holster the Patersons, but he nodded to the newcomer and said, “If you’re the one who tossed that pigsticker, friend, I sure am mighty obliged to you.”

“I knew it!” the stranger exclaimed. “I caught a glimpse of you on the street a few minutes ago, and I knew it was you, Preacher. Then I saw you go into this alley, and when two of those fellas followed you and the third hurried off, I knew good and well they had mischief in mind!”

“Mischief’s a good word for it, but it didn’t end well for ’em. Are you sayin’ you know me, friend?”

“Danged right I do.” The man came closer, made a motion with his hand, and flame flared up from the lucifer he had just snapped to life with his thumbnail. The glare illuminated not only his rugged face, but also the three corpses sprawled in the alley. “It’s me, your old pard Darius Clutterbuck!”

Darius Clutterbuck. The odd name did ring a bell, but Preacher couldn’t place it immediately.

Then his mind went back about five years to a day when he’d been paddling a cedar dugout canoe as hard as he could against the current of a swiftly flowing stream high in the mountains. He occupied the front position in the little craft, and in the back, behind a stack of pelts, another man’s paddle bit into the water with the same speed and strength as Preacher’s.

About a hundred yards behind them, three more canoes, full of grim-faced Teton Sioux warriors bent on murder, also cut quickly through the water. The warriors didn’t howl or screech. They wanted the scalps of the two white men and devoted all their energy to overtaking them.

“We can’t get away from those red devils like this!” Preacher’s companion called from the canoe’s rear seat. “Maybe we better fort up on that island!”

Preacher had already spotted the place ahead of them where the stream split into two channels for a hundred or so yards, forming a heavily wooded island maybe fifty yards wide between them. The trees growing there would provide plenty of cover, but once he and Darius Clutterbuck went to ground there, they would be stuck. The Sioux would be able to surround them.

Because of that, Preacher hesitated to stop, despite the pursuit closing in from behind.

Then, as he looked along the river beyond the island, he saw colorful beadwork and feathers among the brush lining the banks. More Sioux waited ahead, ready to ambush them, and if he and Clutterbuck tried to paddle past, the warriors would skewer them with arrows.

How in blazes some of the varmints had gotten ahead of them, Preacher didn’t know, but it didn’t matter. The trap had closed and caught him and Clutterbuck in its deadly jaws.

He changed the angle at which he dug the paddle into the water and sent the canoe veering toward the island.

“Got more lurkin’ on the bank up ahead,” he called over his shoulder to Clutterbuck. “We might not be able to get away from ’em, but we’ll make ’em pay a high price for our hair!”

Clutterbuck laughed, the bleak, fatalistic amusement of a man who knows doom awaits him.

“I hope one of ’em gets close enough I can spit in his eye!”

Preacher didn’t intend to waste even the energy required for such a defiant gesture. He would put all his effort into killing as many as possible of the enemy before they killed him.

Pushing against the current, they reached the island’s tip. As soon as the dugout’s nose crunched against the mud, Preacher leaped out and grabbed the canoe. Clutterbuck splashed into the water behind him. They dragged the craft toward the trees ten feet away.

The Sioux in the canoes behind them had drawn closer. Their war bows could launch an arrow that far. A dozen of the deadly missiles hummed through the air, but aiming from a moving canoe could be a tricky business. The shafts either sailed wide or fell short.

Preacher and Clutterbuck hauled the canoe and its load of pelts through a gap between two of the trees. They crashed through underbrush and kept going until they reached a clearing.

“We’ll leave it here,” Preacher said as he lowered his end of the canoe to the ground.

Clutterbuck did likewise. The two men grabbed their rifles out of the canoe and ran back to where they had come ashore. Fifty yards away, the three canoes continued toward the island. Each canoe held five Sioux warriors. Two paddled while the other three sent arrows winging toward their quarry.

One of those arrows thudded into the tree where Preacher took cover. The head stuck there and the shaft quivered. Preacher brought his rifle to his shoulder, eared back the hammer, and fired so quickly it seemed he hadn’t aimed.

The ball followed an unerring path, however, and drilled into the prow of the leading canoe, right at the waterline. That blasted a hole in the craft, and water surged into it. Clutterbuck fired at one of the other canoes and holed it, as well. Both dugouts slowed immediately as they took on water.

Preacher propped his empty rifle against the tree and drew the two flintlock pistols from behind the belt at his waist. He leveled the pistol in his right hand and fired.

The weapon was double-shotted and charged with a heavy load of powder. The boom it made when it went off floated over the river.

Both balls struck the warrior paddling the leading canoe. The impact drove him backward against the man behind him, who knelt there with an arrow nocked and drawn back. The collision jolted the man off-balance and sent him toppling over the side into the river. He released the arrow as he fell, but it splashed into the river rather than flying toward Preacher and Clutterbuck.

Preacher already had his second pistol aimed and ready. With a burst of flame from its muzzle, it roared and the next man in the canoe lurched against the side as the balls smashed into him. Already awash from the hole Preacher had shot in it, the craft suddenly capsized, dumping the other two warriors into the water along with him.

The Sioux swam fairly well, in general, Preacher knew, but the two he had shot were either dead or too badly wounded to make it out of the river. The other three would be hampered by getting dunked and might lose their bows.

A few feet away, Clutterbuck had emptied his pistols and wounded a couple of warriors in the second canoe. It had begun to sink, too, and wouldn’t make it to the island. The Indians abandoned it.

The third craft, still loaded with five healthy warriors, surged ahead. Arrows whipped through the branches and smacked into the trees as Preacher and Clutterbuck took cover behind them and reloaded.

The actions of the two mountain men displayed swift, practiced efficiency. Out here on the frontier, a man had to keep a cool head in a fight. That gave him the best chance of survival.

Of course, in this situation Preacher and Clutterbuck had almost no chance of living through it, but that didn’t mean they would give up. They would fight to the last breath, like veteran frontiersmen should.

“The ones upstream may be comin’ at us from that direction,” Preacher said. “Maybe you’d best go try to hold ’em off.”

“And leave you here to deal with the rest of this bunch by yourself?”

“If we get overrun from either direction, it won’t end well.”

“That’s true,” Clutterbuck admitted as he finished ramming home another load in one of his pistols. He grinned. “Good luck, Preacher. It’s been nice knowin’ you. I’m glad we partnered up for a spell, even a short one.”

“I ain’t givin’ up just yet,” Preacher said. “It ain’t over until I’m dead, and I aim to hand out some more punishment ’fore I cross the divide.”

With that, he leaned around a tree and spotted a warrior leaping ashore from the canoe that had just grounded. Preacher’s rifle blasted again, and the man turned a backflip before he ever set foot on the ground. He hit at the water’s edge with a splash and didn’t get up again.

His friends screamed in rage and charged out of the canoe.

Preacher met them with both pistols blazing.

Two more warriors spilled off their feet with bloody holes blasted in them. Preacher dropped the empty pistols and yanked a tomahawk and a heavy-bladed hunting knife from his belt. If the Sioux had remained offshore, they could have riddled him with arrows. But they were caught up in battle lust now, the same as him, and wanted to kill him up close and personal.

Preacher gave them the chance.

One warrior swung a tomahawk at his head. He ducked under the sweeping blow and brought the knife up in a swipe almost too fast for the eye to follow. The razor-sharp blade opened a long, deep slash in the man’s throat. Blood sprayed from the wound in a crimson fountain as he stumbled forward.

Preacher tripped him, causing him to topple sideways into the other warrior. Even tangled up like that, the last warrior from this canoe tried to hit Preacher with his tomahawk. Preacher blocked the blow with his tomahawk and drove the knife under the man’s arm, through his ribs, and into the heart. The warrior died in wide-eyed shock as Preacher jerked the knife free.

The other Sioux from the canoes that had sunk had been swimming toward the island, but after seeing Preacher slaughter their companions with seemingly effortless ease, they must have thought better of continuing the attack. Indians bent on revenge often bore a resemblance to a force of nature, unthinking and unstoppable, but at the same time, they still possessed a canny instinct for survival. They didn’t fight against overwhelming odds, and they avoided people they considered not right in the head.

Standing there on the shore with a tomahawk in one hand and a blood-dripping knife in the other, grinning as he shouted, “Well, come on, boys! Ain’t this a fine day for dyin!” they must have figured Preacher to be as crazy as a loon. He lifted the weapons and did a little jig to reinforce that impression.

The surviving Sioux turned and began swimming toward the bank instead.

Preacher let them go. This wouldn’t be the first time he had dodged certain death at the hands of Indians by acting loco. He’d be more than happy to do so again.

He looked around to see what had become of Clutterbuck. He thought he had heard the man crashing off through the brush toward the other end of the island just before the third canoe grounded, but he didn’t see Clutterbuck now or hear any shots from that direction. That puzzled him.

Maybe those other Sioux had killed him already and even now skulked toward Preacher.

A moment later, he heard somebody making a racket pushing through the thick growth. Preacher knew he didn’t have time to reload his guns, so he tightened his grip on the knife and tomahawk and readied himself to do battle again.

Then he heard Clutterbuck shout, “Preacher! Hey, Preacher!”

Well, they hadn’t killed him, anyway, the mountain man thought.

Clutterbuck appeared a minute later, grinning from ear to ear. “It’s over,” he announced. “The rest of those heathens took off for the tall and uncut.”

“Why in blazes did they do that?”

Clutterbuck beckoned to him. “Come and see for yourself.”

Preacher wiped the blood from his knife and slid the blade back in its sheath. He tucked the tomahawk behind his belt and picked up the pistols to do likewise with them. Then he retrieved his rifle and followed Clutterbuck to the other end of the island.

Before they got there, he heard men shouting to each other in English. As he and Clutterbuck emerged from the trees, he saw a larger boat at that end of the island. A buckskin-clad man had come ashore with a rope to tie it to one of the trees.

At least a dozen heavily armed men in buckskins and homespun stood on the deck around a small cabin. Preacher recognized at least half of them as fellow fur trappers. He figured this boat and crew comprised a trapping expedition sent up the Missouri River and this tributary by one of the fur companies back east. In the early days of the mountain man era, most trapping had been carried out by just such large, well-equipped expeditions, but as the years passed, individual trappers had taken over most of the business. Groups such as this still ventured west at times, though.

And this one had come along just at the right time to spook the Sioux and save Preacher and Darius Clutterbuck from getting their hair lifted.

Preacher greeted the newcomers enthusiastically and shook hands all around, as did Clutterbuck. The leader of the expedition, a man named Silas Duffy whom Preacher had known for several years, said, “Looks like good luck all around we showed up when we did. We’d be happy to have the two of you fellas throw in with us.”

Clutterbuck grew more serious. “Hold on a minute. Preacher and I have a load of pelts, but they’re ones we took our own selves. I’m obliged to you boys for your timely appearance, but I ain’t sure I want to throw our furs into a communal pot.”

That seemed a mite ungracious to Preacher, but he understood what Clutterbuck meant.

“Don’t worry about that,” Duffy said. “We’re on our way back to St. Louis ourselves. You can travel with us without being official members of the party.”

“Well, in that case, you’ve got a deal,” Clutterbuck said. “Right, Preacher?”

“Yeah, I reckon I can go along with that,” Preacher said.

“I’m glad to hear it,” Duffy told them. “Those Sioux are liable to regroup and try to stop us from getting through, and having two more guns with us might make all the difference!”

As it turned out, having Preacher and Clutterbuck along didn’t make any difference at all, because the rest of the trip had unfolded in an utterly peaceful fashion.

Once they reached St. Louis, Preacher and Clutterbuck sold their furs for a good price, split the money, and said they might trap together again the next season, but that hadn’t happened. No good reason why not, they just hadn’t run into each other again.

Until now, in this filthy alley with dead men at their feet.

The memory of the fight on the island had flashed through Preacher’s brain in a matter of seconds. The match Clutterbuck held still burned, but as the flame crept closer to his fingers, he shook it out and dropped it to the alley floor.

“Let’s get outta here,” Preacher suggested. “It ain’t likely the police will show up to poke into that shootin’, but you never know. I’d just as soon not stand around half the night answerin’ questions.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Clutterbuck said as he bent to retrieve his knife from the back of the man he had killed. He wiped the blade clean on the corpse’s shirt and then stowed it away somewhere under his coat.

“I was headed for Red Mike’s. We can still circle around and get there.”

“Red Mike’s,” Clutterbuck repeated. “Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a while. That sounds like an excellent idea to me, Preacher.”

The two men strode along the alley to the far end, where Preacher turned right onto a smaller street. After a block he turned right again toward the mighty river rolling past St. Louis.

A few oil streetlamps had already been lit for the evening, and light spilled from some of the buildings they passed, as well. A shallow arch of red and gold remained in the western sky, the last vestige of daylight. Those things provided enough illumination for Preacher to get a good look at his companion as they walked.

Clutterbuck had said he recognized Preacher when he saw him on the street. The opposite would not have been true. Preacher had a feeling he could have walked right past Darius Clutterbuck without ever noticing him, let alone recognizing him.

Clutterbuck had been a bearded, buckskin-clad frontiersman the last time Preacher had seen him. Tonight, he sported only a neatly trimmed brown mustache that matched the curly hair under a dark brown, narrow-brimmed, flat-topped beaver hat. That was a gentleman’s hat, and the brown suit, ruffled white shirt, dark gray cravat, pearl stickpin, and square-toed, black patent shoes Clutterbuck wore completed a gentleman’s outfit.

From the looks of him, Clutterbuck had come up quite a bit in the world. Nobody would mistake him for a fur trapper now. A prosperous fur trader, maybe.

Preacher, on the other hand, hadn’t changed much. He still wore buckskin trousers and shirt, high-topped moccasin boots, and a brown felt hat with a broad, floppy brim. The salt-and-pepper stubble on his rugged face hadn’t known the touch of a razor in a while. Instead of twin flintlock pistols shoved behind his belt, these days he had a pair of gun belts buckled around his hip with a Colt Paterson revolver riding in each holster. Just behind the right-hand gun, his hunting knife rested in a fringed sheath. While he visited St. Louis, he had left his tomahawk in his war bag, and he had left the war bag at the livery stable where the rangy gray stallion called Horse and the big, wolf-like cur known as Dog waited for him.

“I suppose you’re here in town to dispose of some pelts,” Clutterbuck commented as they walked.

“That’s right. There are some tradin’ posts up in the high country now where a fella can sell his furs if he wants to, but I been comin’ downriver to St. Louis for so long it’s kinda hard to break the habit.” Preacher grinned. “Besides, after a season in the mountains, it’s nice to come to town and do a little rompin’ and stompin’ for a change.”

Clutterbuck laughed. “Oh, I remember that feeling all too well! A fellow has to let off a little steam now and then, or he’ll explode!”

Preacher eyed him and said bluntly, “You look like it’s been a while since you’ve been west of the Mississipp’.”

“That’s true,” Clutterbuck allowed. “An opportunity to travel back east and go into business came up, and I seized it.” He chuckled. “Thankfully, there are no Sioux bent on lifting my hair in Philadelphia.”

Maybe not, thought Preacher, but he had been to Philadelphia and found plenty of things not to like about the place. Clutterbuck, on the other hand, seemed to have fit right in there. . .