Faith sidled up to him when he was alone. “I have noticed, Mister Preacher, that your quaint manner of speaking sometimes vanishes and you do seem to be able to speak proper English. Why is that?”
“I ain’t got no idee, Missy.”
“There you go again. Do you wish people to believe that you are nothing but an ignorant buffoon?”
“I don’t give a damn what people believe me to be, Missy. What other folk think ain’t no concern of mine. It’s what they do that I pay heed to.”
“What are you running from, Mister Preacher?”
“Huh?”
“It’s obvious to me that you are hiding out here in this desolate place because of something terrible that occurred in your past.”
“Is that right?”
“Yes. It is. Did some lady break your heart years back and you had to run away to ease the pain of love lost?”
Preacher stood in the light rain and blinked. “What are you talking about, Missy?”
Old Snake had slipped up and was standing a few feet away, behind Faith. He was listening and struggling to contain his laughter.
“You can tell me, Preacher,” Faith said, stepping closer. He could feel the heat from her body. “I want to be your friend. I really, really do.”
“Uh-huh.” Preacher resisted an urge to grab her and run off under a wagon with her. Faith was ripe in all the right spots and even with a dark floppy hat covering her cut-off strawberry curls, she was lovely to look at and quite desirable. Faith was pushing hard to get bedded down. However, with anywhere from twenty to two hundred Pawnee, or more, prowling around the encirclement, Preacher concluded that this was a poor time to be thinking about romance.
“Yes,” she whispered, stepping closer still. Another two inches and she’d be crawling inside his buckskins.
Steals Pony unknowingly saved Preacher from what was fast becoming a very awkward moment. “They come, Preacher!” the Delaware called.
“Get back to your wagon, Faith,” Preacher said. “This night’s about to blow up in our faces.”
Preacher turned and was gone, old Snake right behind him. “How many?” Preacher asked Steals Pony.
“Too many,” the Delaware said softly. “We’re not that far from the Platte, and they must have just broken their winter camp there. This would be quite a prize for them.”
“I can smell war paint,” Snake said. “My God, there must be hundreds of them.”
“Several hundred, at least,” Steals Pony agreed. “I think they know about the women.”
“I got the women under the wagons and behind boxes and the like,” Blackjack said, striding up, big as a bear. “They’re scared, but game.”
“I don’t understand this,” Preacher said. “Something’s got ’em all stirred up and we ain’t it. We’re just bearin’ the brunt of whatever it is.”
“You reckon Jack Hayes and that trash with him somehow is mixed up in all this?” Ned asked.
“It wouldn’t surprise me none. I just can’t figure out what it might be.” He turned his face skyward. The rain had stopped for the moment. “They’ll be hittin’ us right about now,” he said. “Get in place.”
The first wave of the war party came at the westward women and their few men in a silent surge of painted-up fury. “Now!” Preacher shouted, and nearly a hundred rifles smashed the wet night, turning it into a bloody, pain-shrieking darkness.
Whatever the Pawnee expected, it certainly was not this. The only white women they had ever encountered were all cowering, trembling types, and that is what they believed they would encounter on this train. They were wrong. The heavy balls from the rifles tore their flesh and bloodied the ground. The Pawnee lost nearly fifty men in the first few seconds, and that was quite enough for this night, thank you.
They gathered up their wounded and their dead and pulled back to talk this over. They looked with contempt at their medicine men, who had promised them that their medicine was good. The medicine men shrugged and took the hostile looks stoically. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t, the shrugs seemed to imply. Sometimes the thrown bones lied.
Those women whose jobs it was to reload the rifles and pistols worked fast, and within seconds, the women behind the rifles were ready for another charge.
But it did not materialize. The night grew steadily quieter as the Pawnee pulled back, well out of range. Some of their dead were too close to the wagons for them to recover, and the mountain men were quick to take advantage of that.
Most of the women and many of the Missouri men looked on, horrified, as Preacher and his friends pulled out knives and began mutilating the bodies.
“Stop that!” Faith shouted.
“Shut up,” Preacher told her. “We ain’t likin’ this no more than you all. But it’s got to be done.”
“Why, for God’s sake?”
“Cut out the eyes so’s they can’t see their way to the Great Beyond. Cut off their hands so’s they can’t fight any enemies they might come up on. Now they’ll be forever lost in the darkness. To wander forever.”
“That’s the most unchristian thing I have ever witnessed!” Miss Claire Goodfellow said.
“You shoulda seen Nora Simms, Betty Rutherford, and Phyllis Reed,” Ring called over his shoulder, his long-bladed knife flashing bloody in the night. “Then mayhaps you wouldn’t be so aghast at this.”
Steals Pony let out a blood-chilling, wild war cry and held up two severed hands. He called out loud in Pawnee, heaping insults on the dead. Faith shuddered. Eudora smiled.
“Every other person get some rest for a few hours, then take your partner’s place,” Preacher called. “Work it out, ladies. It’s gonna be a long night.”
“I thought you said they wouldn’t return?” Faith’s voice cut into the damp night.
“I said they probably wouldn’t be back,” Preacher replied. Under his breath he muttered, “I wish I hadn’t said nothin’.”
“What’s that?” Faith called.
“Nothin’,” Preacher said. “Just nothin’ at all.”
“Are you going to leave those disgusting bodies right there?” she called.
“No, Missy,” Preacher replied wearily, for it had been a long day. “We’re gonna pick ’em up and tote ’em over to where the Pawnee have made camp and dump the bodies there.”
That shut her up for about five seconds. “Well, you don’t have to be sarcastic about it.”
“Hush up,” Preacher told her, wiping his hands on the wet grass to remove the Pawnee blood.
It was the wrong thing to say to Faith. Whatever ardor they might have experienced a few moments ago suddenly cooled and evaporated into the night air. She told him to absolutely, positively never again tell her to hush up. Of course she was quite vocal about it and it took considerably longer to express her thoughts, but that was the sum of it.
Blackjack looked at her in awe. He shook his head. “That woman can shore string words together, can’t she?”
“If Preacher don’t give her what she’s a-cravin’ pretty soon,” Snake whispered, “we’re in for a long trip.”
“Have mercy on us,” Steals Pony replied.
About that time, a lady named Madeline Hornbuckle found a very large rattlesnake curled up in her blankets and she let out a war whoop that brought the whole camp running. The snake disappeared, but no one got into blankets for the rest of the night.
It poured from the skies the next day, and Preacher told the ladies to rest—and shake out their blankets for the umpteenth time.
“Go kill a rattler and bring it back here,” he told Steals Pony. “That’s the only thing that’ll calm these women down. Damn bunch of city women anyways.”
“I have a better suggestion,” the Delaware said.