“Thanks. I best be travelin’. Headin’ east,” he lied.
“Best be glad you ain’t headin’ west, lots of hardcases thataway. Lookin’ for that outlaw gunfighter and murderer Smoke Jensen. Got six thousand dollars on his head and the ante’s goin’ up.”
“I’m too old for that kind of nonsense,” Preacher said. “Leave the hard ridin’ and the gunsmoke to the young bucks.”
“I know what you mean.” The shopkeeper laughed, patting his ample belly. “’Sides, with me it’d be unfair to the horse!”
Outside of town, Preacher swung wide and headed west, into the Cochetopa Hills, then south into the wilderness, then angled southwest, straight through some of the wildest and most beautiful country in the world. Days later, in the Needle Mountains, he was ambushed.
He felt he was being watched as he rode, but figured it was Indians — and Indians didn’t worry him, since most of them thought him to be crazy, and he could usually ride through them, singing and cackling.
The slug that almost tore him from the saddle hit him in the left shoulder, driving out his back. Preacher slammed his heels to his pony’s side and, keeping low in the saddle, headed for a hole he knew in the mountains. Through his pain, he could hear men yelling off to his right.
“Get him alive! Don’t kill him.”
But “getting Preacher” took more doing than the men chasing him had. Another rifle barked, the slug hitting him in the leg, deflected off his leg bone and angled upward, ripping a hole when it exited out his hip, taking a piece of bone with it. Savagely reining his pony, Preacher leveled his Henry. He emptied two saddles and shot the horse out from under a third rider, grinning with grim satisfaction as the horse fell on the man, crushing him. The man’s screamings ripped through the mountains. Preacher slipped away, hunting a hole where he could tend to his wounds; he was losing a lot of blood.
Preacher rode hard, barely able to see, barely able to hang on to his saddle horn. The pack animals trotted along, keeping pace, frightened. Finally, in desperation, he tied himself in the saddle.
All though the afternoon he rode, half conscious, until he reached a small lake just west of the Animas. There he slid to the ground, dragging his bad leg. In a fog of pain, Preacher loosened the saddle cinch, allowing air to flow between saddle and hide. What he did not need now was a galled-up horse. He was fearful of removing the saddle; didn’t know if he would have the strength to swing it back on the pony. He put on his pickets, and collapsed to the earth.
All though the cold night he dreamed of his Indian wives and his kids, as his wounds festered and infected, fevering him. Their images were blurred, and he could not make out their faces.
He dreamed of the mountains and the valleys as they were when he first saw them, close to sixty years back. Lush and green and wild and beautiful. And he dreamed of his compadres, those men who, with Preacher, blazed the trails and danced and sang and whooped and hollered at the rendezvous … back when he — and they — were full of piss and vinegar and fire.
But most of them were now dead.
He dreamed of the battles he’d had, both with white and red men. And he wondered if his life, as the way of life of the red man, was ending.
When the chill of dawn touched him with her misty hand, Preacher knew he was close to death.
Twelve
His babbling and shouting woke him, jerking him into a world filled with pain. “Got to get to Smoke!” he was saying as he opened his eyes. “Got to get to my boy!”
And he knew his feelings toward the tall young man were just as parental as if he were his own flesh and blood.
And he knew he loved the young man with the dark brooding eyes and the cat-quick guns.
Dragging himself to the lake, he washed his wounds and bound them, the sight of them sickening him. He had been hit much harder than this, but that was years back, when he was younger and stronger. He knew he should prepare poultices for his wounds, but didn’t know if he had the strength, and, more importantly, the time.
He dragged himself to his pony and tightened the cinch and swung into the saddle. “I’m seventy year old,” he muttered. “Lived past my time. Turned into a babblin’ ol’ fool — maybe I am touched in the head. But I got to warn my boy they’s comin’. And I got to cover my tracks better than an Injun.”
Having said that, he touched his heels to the pony’s side and moved out, gritting his stubs of teeth against the waves of pain that ripped through him.
Modern-day doctors would have said what the old man did was impossible for a man half his age. But modern-day doctors do not know and will never know the likes of the mountain men who cut the trails of the way west.
A chill was in the morning air when Preacher rode up to the cabin on the knoll in the valley. He was a gaunt shell of the man who had ridden out in the middle of the summer. Through sheer iron will, stubbornness, and hard-headed cantankerousness, he had brought the pack animals with him.
“Howdy, purty thing.” He grinned at Nicole. “I brung your durned ol’ cannin’ jugs.” Then he fell from his pony and into the arms of Smoke.
They tended to his wounds, as best they could, for his leg had become infected and it was swollen and grotesque. Nicole turned a tear-stained face to her husband.
“I think he’s dying, Smoke.”
“Bend down here, son,” Preacher said. “I got something to tell you — and don’t argue with me. I ain’t time for no debate.”
Smoke squatted beside the bed.
“I covered my back trail,” Preacher whispered. “So you be safe for a time.” Slowly and with much pausing for breath, he told Smoke and Nicole what he knew, and about the gold in the bottom of his father’s grave at the Hole.
“When your woman births the baby, wait till spring and then get the hell out of this country. Find you a safe place to live out your lives. Right now, you get my fancy buckskins out of that there trunk over in the corner and then leave me be for a while.”
On the porch, Nicole asked, “What is he going to do?”
Smoke sighed heavily, a numbness gripping his heart. “Get all dressed up in his fancy buckskins and sash and such, prepare himself to die, mountain-man style.”
Smoke and Nicole sat on the porch of the cabin and waited, listening as Preacher hummed a French song as he dressed.
“I don’t know why he’s doing this,” Nicole said, tears running down her face.
“He’s doing it because he’s a mountain man.” Smoke’s eyes were on the mountains in the distance. “I’ve got to do something.” He rose and walked to the lean-to.
He selected a gentle horse, a mare, too old for breeding. He saddled her and took her back to the cabin. Preacher was waiting with Nicole on the porch.
Preacher’s eyes touched the horse, returned to Smoke. “I see you didn’t forget ever’thing I learned you.”
“No, sir,” Smoke said, fighting back tears. “Preacher? What is your Christian name?”
The old man smiled. “Arthur was my first name — why?”
“Because if we have a son, I want to name him after you.”
“That’d be right nice. Now help me on that nag yonder and stand back.”
Preacher was dressed in clean, beaded buckskins. His dying suit. He wore new leggings and moccasins and a wide red sash around his waist. A cap of skunk hide and hair on his head.
“You look grand,” Smoke said.
“You tell lies, too,” Preacher retorted. “Help me on the mare.”
In the saddle, Preacher looked at Smoke. “You know I’m gonna shoot this horse, don’t you, son?”
Smoke nodded. Nicole put her face in her hands and wept. “I don’t understand,” she said.
“So I can have something to ride when my human body is gone, girl. So don’t you fret and carry on. One old life is endin’, but you carryin’ new life. That’s the way of the world.” He looked at Smoke. “You be mindful of what I learned you, boy, you hear?”