One afternoon, when his mother — God bless her — was away, seventeen-year-old Hollis had shot his father six times on various parts of his body. This included, stigmata-style, the palms of his upraised, begging hands, but not the man’s head, because that crown of thorns would have seen the mean old bastard dying much too soon. How Hollis had relished the variety of expressions — surprise, pain, rage, fear, and various shades of each — that crossed his father’s face as the man died there in his study, crumpled on the floor by his desk, a towering figure no more, surrounded by all those books about God and sin and salvation.
As he’d planned, Hollis had quickly packed a bag, mostly with his father’s clothes, since all he had were a couple of shirts and pants and a pair of shoes. He’d taken the money from the tin box in the desk — seventy-five dollars, a fortune — his dead father on the floor making no protest, before saddling up the best of the buggy horses and making his way to the wagon train outside Springfield.
Wearing his father’s black frock coat and hat, and sprinkling his speech with the many Bible verses he’d swallowed, if not digested, Hollis was assumed by one and all to be a godly man. Or at least that was the case before he was thrown off the wagon train somewhere in Colorado after two married women got into a fight over him and one of their husbands drew down on him, dying for it, of course.
By that time, he carried with him the nickname “Preacher,” granted him by those around him before they understood his true nature. And as he rode through the West, perfecting the lethal proficiency with a six-gun that he’d first demonstrated back home in his father’s den, Hollis would never correct those who assumed he was a real reverend. Or that he at least had once been one. And he was barely twenty before the “man” got added on to “Preacher.”
The Preacherman fell into his self-created profession gradually. He had no desire or training or, for that matter, talent for any usual Western trade. Cowboying was too hard and too dirty, and prospecting was harder and dirtier. He was no damn clerk or farmer, turning his nose up at anything menial, and much of the outlaw life didn’t appeal to Hollis, either. Rustling or claim jumping was, after all, just a left-handed way of cowboying and prospecting.
So what might he be good at?
First, he had a way with a gun — he was fast and accurate, a skill enlarged upon by his lack of respect for any human life but his own.
What else?
Well, from his father he had picked up a certain bearing, an unearned dignity that attracted others to him. Farmers had him over for Sunday dinner; politicians running for office invited him to sit up on the stage; merchants either charged him nothing or provided a discount. Churchgoing women invited him in when their men weren’t around; trollops never asked to be paid; virgins sought his religious guidance, only to be schooled in sin.
More important than these disposable females were the gutter gunhands who gathered around him like flies to honey. He’d been through almost as many of these creatures as he had women. At first — discreetly, not wishing to spoil the false impression of piety he would ride into town with — Hollis had gathered such would-be desperados in the one line of outlawing he could stomach: robbery.
Starting out with stagecoaches, Hollis would ride at the rear of two or three masked others and shout orders. His boys would be in the line of fire, dealing with stagecoach drivers, shotgun guards, strongboxes, passengers and their possessions — and if somebody got brave, Hollis would not be the one who got the bullet. He lost four or five boys in this line of work, and the one bank he robbed saw two more buying it before Hollis got a bullet hole through a perfectly good black Stetson. Enough of that!
But by this time, he had a stake, and he took up traveling alone again and set upon gambling, which was another of his talents. At this point he was mistaken less and less for a godly man, the suggestion now being that he had once ridden circuit but had lost his calling, if not quite his faith. And it was as a cardsharp that he accidentally came upon his unique profession.
On three different occasions — three — he was accused (rightly, but that is incidental) of cheating at poker. On each occasion he taunted his accuser — with “ ‘The Lord detests lying lips,’ Proverbs, twelve, twenty-two,” among other appropriate shaming verses — goading them into drawing first.
With his speed and accuracy, Hollis had no problem besting these challengers. He wouldn’t even bother getting to his feet before drawing his Colt Single Action Army .45 and sending them to glory. In no instance was he held longer than an hour before a local lawman or justice of the peace declared the killing self-defense. Only once in those three times was he asked to leave town.
The three dead men were a cowboy, a rival tinhorn, and a local rancher. The variety of the victims encouraged him that he might be on to something. His reputation as a gunfighter inevitably led to backroom offers by various respectable types, mostly wealthy but sometimes merely successful merchants seeking to remove some human obstruction from their path. While flat-out murdering somebody seemed risky to Hollis, and a little distasteful, killing someone in self-defense was both an interesting challenge and a legal way out.
That was how the Preacherman’s profession developed. If you wanted a man dead, you crossed Hollis’s palm with the requisite silver. And here was where the challenge came in, as the Bible verse — spouting hired gun would needle and insult the intended victim, sometimes over days or even weeks, until that victim pulled on him. In this manner, Hollis protected his client, since the grudge appeared to be between the victim and Hollis himself.
The two currently riding with the Preacherman were typical of the rabble he periodically gathered — lowlifes attracted by his killing reputation who would settle for crumbs from whatever bread he might bake.
This pair — Trammel and Landrum, a scarecrow and a porker — were no better or worse, no smarter or dumber than those who’d preceded them. Their function was to be there to back Hollis up if a victim turned out to have unexpected help. Friends of a sort to handle any real friends the target might have.
Right now, the Preacherman and his two-man congregation were seated at a wobbly table in a two-story adobe structure that might have been a church. They had walked up here from the Victory not long after the sheriff knocked Trammel down and took his gun away.
The Cantina de Toro Rojo was no house of worship, however, rather a temple of sin looming over the humble adobes huddled along the narrow lane that led here. Trinidad’s modest barrio, its inhabitants like the slumbering serfs of a medieval castle, lay silent but for this lively cantina.
Hollis had been in dozens of such watering holes — straw covering the dirt floor; walls of yellow, their once bright murals now faded to pastel. A little hombre in a sombrero tickling a cheap guitar; a fat, sweaty bartender with a droopy bandido mustache, his bar a couple of planks on two barrels, with no stools. A scattering of mismatched tables and chairs, the ghost of refried beans haunting the place, no food service this time of night.
The all-male clientele ranged from gringos, both cowboys and town folk, to Mexicans, the latter vaqueros from area spreads, with a few black cowboys on hand, too. Nobody seemed to care. That included four young señoritas with old eyes who circulated open-mindedly. Lots of dark hair rode their bare shoulders; their peasant blouses threatened to spill their contents like fruit from a basket; and black skirts striped with red and yellow and green, plump with petticoats, swirled and twirled. They were not waitresses — you went to the bar yourself for that kind of service.