Some of Jessie’s men took the horses left behind by Dugan and the others. As Preacher got ready to mount up on Horse and ride back to St. Louis, the man who’d led Jessie’s group asked, “What are you going to do now, mister? Go back to Beaumont’s place?”
“That’s right.”
“What will you tell him?”
“The truth . . . some of it, anyway. We got bushwhacked. I’m the only one who got away.”
Preacher had checked to make sure that was true. All of Beaumont’s men were dead. Their bodies had been hauled out of the river and left on the bank in a grisly display.
“You reckon he’s gonna believe that?”
“He won’t have any reason not to,” Preacher said, although he expected that Beaumont might be a little suspicious of his story. Beaumont wouldn’t be able to prove any differently though.
“Well, I suppose it’s your business. Seems to me like you’re playin’ a mighty dangerous game though.”
Preacher just shrugged. The man was right. If Beaumont found out the truth, things could get bad in a hurry. But that was a risk Preacher was prepared to run. The danger had always been there, right from the start.
He said so long, swung up into the saddle, and rode north along the river. He had gone about half a mile when he heard a sudden flurry of shots behind him. Reining Horse to a stop, Preacher hipped around in the saddle to look back in that direction. He couldn’t see anything. The bends of the river and the trees that grew along its banks hid the riverboat from his view.
But that was about where the shots were coming from, he realized as the reports continued, a steady, ominous booming that might have been mistaken for thunder if the skies hadn’t been clear except for some high, fluffy white clouds.
Grim lines formed trenches in Preacher’s cheeks as he listened to the shots die away. He turned Horse around and watched as black smoke began to rise in the sky, blooming and billowing. He dug his heels into Horse’s flanks and sent the stallion racing back along the shore of the river.
As Preacher came around a bend a few minutes later, he saw that the riverboat had drifted away from the shore and into the middle of the river. It was burning, flames leaping up at the base of the column of smoke. The blaze stretched from one end of the vessel to the other, and it was burning so fiercely that Preacher knew the boat was doomed.
He knew as well that there was no one left alive on board to fight the fire. Those shots he’d heard had been Jessie’s men gunning down the captain and crew. He didn’t know why they would have done such a thing, but he was sure that’s what had happened.
The men were all gone now, putting distance between them and the murders they had committed. There was nothing Preacher could do to stop them. It was too late.
Too late to do anything except turn Horse around and start again toward St. Louis with a bitter, sour taste filling his mouth.
Chapter 21
It was late enough by the time Preacher got back to the settlement that he didn’t go to Jessie’s Place. He headed straight for Beaumont’s house instead.
When he got there and rode around back to the carriage house, he found Lorenzo waiting out there with a worried frown on his face.
“Something wrong?” Preacher asked as he swung down from the saddle.
“You damn right they’s somethin’ wrong, boy,” the old man replied. “The boss is so mad he’s fixin’ to chew nails. Somethin’ happened today whilst you was gone. I don’t know what it was, but it was bad enough to make him half-crazy. I got my black ass outta there ’fore he decided to shoot it off.”
“Nobody tried to kill the boss, did they? It’s my job to stop things like that from happenin’, but he’s the one who told me to go do whatever I wanted to this afternoon.”
“Naw, ever’thin’ was fine until a little while ago. I brung Miss Jessie over here, and I reckon her and the boss had theirselves a fine ol’ time. But when I got back from takin’ her back to her house, there was a fella here I didn’t know. I heard Mr. Beaumont yellin’ at him, and then the fella, he went scurryin’ outta here like the Devil his ownself was after him.” Lorenzo grunted. “I reckon that’s about the size of it, too. When I tried to ask the boss what was wrong, he ’bout bit my head off.”
Lorenzo frowned as he looked at Preacher, who had started to unsaddle Horse.
“Say, boy, you look like you been dunked in the river.”
“I have been,” Preacher said. “And I’ve got somethin’ to tell the boss that ain’t gonna make him happy. I got a feelin’ he’s already heard about it, though, from the way you said he’s been actin’.”
One of those drivers who’d been chased off from the wagons must have come back here and told Beaumont what had happened, Preacher thought. The man might not have known all the details, but he would have been well aware that the theft of the cotton from the riverboat hadn’t gone as planned. That by itself would have been enough to cause an explosion of Beaumont’s hair-trigger temper.
Preacher took his time about tending to Horse, as if he were reluctant to go into the house. As a matter of fact, he was, but not because he was afraid of Beaumont, even though that’s probably what Lorenzo thought was going on. He was reluctant because he thought that if he came face to face with Beaumont, he might pull out his knife and bury it in the man’s chest just to end this terrible business right here and now.
All the way back to St. Louis, Preacher had struggled to come to grips with the fact that some of the blood spilled from the captain and the crew of the Harry Fulton was on his hands. If he hadn’t come to St. Louis and started this business of posing as Jim Donnelly, he wouldn’t have thrown in with Jessie and Cleve. He wouldn’t have gotten stuck in the middle of a war between the two of them and Beaumont.
Preacher knew the attack set up by Jessie and Cleve would have taken place today whether he was involved or not. But he had thought long and hard about it, and the only reason he could see for the murders of the captain and crew was to keep his secret safe. The drivers with the wagons who worked for Beaumont had been let go with their lives because they had never seen him and didn’t know he’d betrayed Dugan and the other river pirates. But the captain and crew had seen him. Somebody, either Jessie or Cleve, had ordered that they be killed and the riverboat burned just to make sure there were no survivors who could talk.
All to keep Preacher safe so they could continue using him against Beaumont.
That knowledge was a damned bitter pill to swallow. Preacher didn’t really blame himself for those murders. He hadn’t pulled the triggers or set the riverboat on fire, but his presence had escalated things to the point that someone believed wholesale slaughter was necessary.
“You goin’ in there?” Lorenzo asked.
“Got to,” Preacher said. “Mr. Beaumont’s expectin’ me back.”
Lorenzo folded his arms across his chest. “Well, I’m stayin’ out here with the horses, where it’s safe.”
“Probably ain’t a bad idea,” Preacher said as he walked through the open double doors of the barn and started toward the house.
As he stepped in through the back door, he heard a crash from somewhere upstairs. It sounded like someone had just thrown something against the wall. There was another crash as he went up the stairs.
Beaumont was so mad he was throwing things, Preacher thought.
When he reached the upstairs hallway, he heard ranting and cursing coming through an open door at the end of the corridor. That was Beaumont’s bedroom, Preacher knew, although he had never actually set foot in there. He approached the door carefully. It was possible Beaumont had a gun in there, and if he was loco enough, he might take a shot at anybody who poked his head inside.