From the corner of his eye, Matt had seen Smoke’s daring play, and he jumped into the doorway and used his rifle to mow down the men going to the left. At the back of the room, Preacher had thrown down his empty Sharps and snatched up another Winchester, and with deadly accurate fire he held off the men attacking from that direction.
For about thirty seconds, it sounded like a small war was going on as the thunderous gunfire echoed back from the peaks surrounding the beautiful little valley where the cabin was located. Then the hammers of Smoke’s guns clicked on empty chambers. With Matt covering him, he scrambled to hands and knees and dived back through the doorway. Matt hurried after him, slamming the door closed and dropping the bar in its brackets again.
“You give them ol’ boys what-for?” Preacher drawled.
“I reckon we did, Preacher,” Smoke said as he sat with his back against the wall and started reloading his Colts. “The last I saw, they were skedaddling back to the trees.”
“The ones who could still move, that is,” Matt added.
The other two knew what he meant. They had turned back this attack and done considerable damage to the enemy force. As silence fell again, they heard the pathetic moans of wounded men. Not one of the defenders wasted any sympathy on those varmints. The gunnies had known what they were getting into.
“It was a mite of a hornets’ nest in here,” Preacher said. “Plenty o’ slugs flyin’ around.” He touched a gnarled finger to his cheek, and the tip came away bloody. “Felt like one of ’em kissed me, and sure enough it did.”
That little bullet burn on Preacher’s cheek was the only injury they had suffered, however. They had been very lucky so far, and they knew it. Luck would only last so long, though, and they knew that, too.
“Bannerman must be paying those boys pretty well,” Matt commented. “That many gun-wolves don’t come cheap.”
Smoke said, “If there’s one thing Reece Bannerman has, it’s money, and plenty of it.”
“Then why’s the dang fool want more?” Preacher asked. “Why’s it so all-fired important that he steal this valley from Crazy Bear’s people?”
Smoke had finished reloading his guns, and now he picked up his rifle again and took his place at the loophole. As he peered out at the silent trees where the gunmen were hidden, he said, “I guess some men never get enough, no matter how much they have.”
“Well, I ain’t a-gonna let it happen,” Preacher declared. “We’re gonna get outta this fix somehow and show Bannerman he can’t get away with it. I owe Crazy Bear a whole heap o’ thanks for what he done for me. That’s why I come a-runnin’ when I heard he was in trouble.”
“Crazy Bear’s a good man,” Smoke agreed. “I was glad to help out when I got your letter, Preacher.”
“And it’s a good thing I was visiting Smoke at Sugarloaf at the time,” Matt added, “because I want to be in on this, too.”
“You just want to see that daughter of his again,” Smoke said with a smile.
“I won’t deny that,” Matt said.
Preacher snorted. “You young fellas may be fond o’ Crazy Bear, but I owe the ol’ rapscallion my life. I ever tell you that story, Smoke?”
“I don’t think so,” Smoke said, although as a matter of fact, Preacher had told him the story before. It was a pretty good yarn, though, and they needed something to pass the time while they waited for Bannerman’s hired guns to attack again.
So as the three men stood and watched and the heat grew worse in the cabin, Preacher drawled, “It was about thirty year ago, I reckon, and I was on my way through this same valley. Weren’t no ranches nor towns hereabouts in those days, though. ’Twas still mighty wild country, and it might cost a man his hide if’n he didn’t keep his eyes open…”
BOOK ONE
Chapter 1
An eagle soared through the vast blue sky overhead. The tall man in buckskins saw it as he rode along the edge of the trees, just as he saw the chipmunk that raised its head from a burrow in the clearing fifty yards to his left and the squirrel that bounded from branch to branch in a pine tree off to his right. He saw a dozen moose grazing half a mile ahead of him, and he saw the wolf slinking toward them through tall grass. A bear lumbered across a hillside nearly a mile away, and Preacher saw it, too.
But he never saw the man who shot him.
The heavy blast of the rifle echoed across the landscape and up the canyons that cut through the mountains. Preacher didn’t hear it until after the slug smashed into his body and drove him forward in the saddle, over the neck of the rangy gray stallion. He tried to grab on to something and stay on the horse, but his whole body seemed to have gone numb from the bullet’s impact and his muscles refused to work the way he wanted them to. As the horse shied, Preacher toppled from the saddle.
Even though his body wouldn’t cooperate, his mind still worked. He kicked his feet free of the stirrups just before he fell. He didn’t think the horse would bolt, but he hadn’t had the animal all that long and didn’t have complete confidence in him yet.
Preacher wasn’t completely numb. He felt the jolt as he landed heavily on the ground. Somehow he kept the fingers of his right hand clamped around the long-barreled flintlock rifle he’d been carrying across the saddle in front of him. He had a couple of those new-fangled Colt’s Dragoon revolvers that he’d picked up in St. Louis tucked behind his belt, too. If he could get to cover, he knew he could give a good accounting of himself.
Making it to cover might not be easy, though. Feeling began to flow back into Preacher’s body, but it brought with it waves of paralyzing pain.
Preacher knew how to deal with pain. If a man wanted to live, he learned how to ignore it. Whether it was in body or spirit, in this life hardly a day went by without something hurting. The trick was not to give in to it.
Still clutching the rifle, Preacher rolled to his right, closer to the trees. It was a good thing that he moved when he did, because another shot sounded and a heavy lead ball smacked into the ground where he had been lying a heartbeat earlier. Preacher kept rolling, even though every movement sent fresh bursts of pain stabbing through his body.
He was within a few feet of the trees now. He came up onto his hands and knees, then got his feet under him and launched into a dive that carried him to the edge of the pines. Vaguely, he heard another shot and felt a ball tug at his buckskin shirt as he flew through the air. He slammed into the ground again, the impact softened slightly by the carpet of fallen pine needles on which he landed.
More shots sounded, coming close enough together now that Preacher knew there was more than one bushwhacker. He scrambled around to the other side of a thick-trunked pine and rested his back against the rough bark. He tried to take a deep breath, but that made the pain in his left side worse.
All right, he told himself, he had a busted rib, or a cracked one, anyway. Probably just cracked, because if it actually was broken, all that falling and rolling and jumping around surely would have plunged the jagged end of a bone into his left lung and he’d be drowning in his own blood by now. So, he decided, the rib was cracked but still hurt like hell, and it could still break easily if he wasn’t careful.
Then there was the fact that his left side was covered with warm, sticky wetness. He might bleed to death if the hole wasn’t bound up soon. And any time a fella was shot, he had to worry about the wound festering. There were just all kinds of ways to die out here on the frontier.
Holes, he corrected himself as he gingerly poked around on his side. The rifle ball had struck him in the back, on the left side, glanced off that rib, and torn its way out the front of his body. He was lucky the bone had deflected it outward, rather than bouncing it through his guts. He really would have been a goner then.