THE FIRST MOUNTAIN MAN
THE FIRST MOUNTAIN MAN
PREACHER’S PURSUIT
William W. Johnstone with J. A. Johnstone
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 1
Preacher pressed his back against the gully’s rock wall and tightened his hands on the flintlock rifle he carried slantwise across his chest. He listened intently, ignoring the thudding of his heart and trying instead to pick up the stealthy sounds of the man creeping up the gully after him.
His side stung a little where a rifle ball had ripped his buckskin shirt and burned across his flesh. He put that pain out of his head, too. ’Tweren’t nothin’, he told himself. He’d been hurt lots worse plenty of times.
A tall man in his thirties, dark-haired and bearded, lean-bodied but still powerfully built, Preacher knew these mountains as well as most men knew their own faces…or the bodies of their wives. The two varmints who’d tried to ambush him had made a bad mistake in doing so.
One of them had already paid the ultimate price. He lay dead or dying on one of the slopes higher up, his guts torn open by a shot from Preacher’s rifle.
His companion was still alive, though. He was the one trying to sneak up on Preacher now. Normally, Preacher would have just waited for the man to come along and then blown a hole through him, but that was hard to do without any powder.
A lucky shot aimed at him had clipped the rawhide thong by which the powder horn was slung over Preacher’s shoulder. It had skittered over the edge of a long drop, gone before he could even try to grab it. He had already emptied his rifle and both pistols while trading lead with the two would-be killers, so he couldn’t reload.
But that didn’t mean the man called Preacher was helpless. Far from it.
He’d been toiling up a long, steep slope to check on some traps. His horse and dog were down at the base of the slope, left behind because there was no real reason for them to have to make the tiring climb. He was halfway to the top when he heard the shrill neigh from Horse and the half-snarl, half-bark from Dog and recognized them as warning signals. Somebody was close-by who shouldn’t be.
The first shot had rung out as Preacher started to turn. The heavy lead ball struck a small rock near his feet and blew it to smithereens. He saw the puff of powder smoke from a clump of fir trees and was bringing his rifle to his shoulder to return fire when another rifle cracked from above him and he felt the fiery lance slice across his side.
They had him between ’em, drat the luck.
He let loose with a round aimed at the fir trees anyway, then turned and dashed along the face of the slope, figuring to work his way around a rocky shoulder that jutted out ahead of him. More shots came after him, but his long legs carried him too fast for the lead to find him.
He reached the shoulder, ducked around it. Behind him, a couple of men yelled at each other. White men, Preacher noted. They were speaking English, peppered with a lot of cussin’.
“I got him, I tell you!”
“The hell you did! Did you see the way that bastard was runnin’? No son of a bitch who was wounded could move that damned fast!”
He could tell from the sound of their voices that they were angling toward him from above and below. He set the rifle down and drew the pistols from behind his belt. Both were double-shotted, with powder charges heavy enough that the recoil from them might break the wrist of a normal man.
Preacher was anything but normal.
He heard rocks clatter close by, kicked loose by the man who was closing in from above. Preacher swung around the rugged knob and saw the man trying to skid to a stop about fifteen feet away and bring his rifle to bear. Preacher squeezed the trigger of his right-hand pistol before the muzzle of the rifle could line up on him.
One of the balls missed, but the other one plunked itself in the man’s belly. He screamed as he doubled over and pitched forward, rolling a couple of times before he came to a stop. He kept writhing and wailing.
“You son of a bitch!”
The cry came from the other man, who fired a pistol at Preacher even though he was still a good forty feet away. The ball missed, but it came close enough that Preacher heard the hum of its passage through the air. He darted around the rocky shoulder, stuck the empty pistol behind his belt, grabbed up his rifle, and started running again.
He had gotten a good look at the man he’d shot, and knew that he had never seen the son of a buck before. The fella was squat and bearded, with a big felt hat that had fallen off when he collapsed. Preacher hadn’t taken the time to study the other fella’s face, but he had a feeling he had never seen that one either.
Now, why would two men he had never met before want to kill him? He had a decent mess of plews back at his camp, but nothing worth killing—or dying—over.
Preacher didn’t spend a lot of time pondering the question. It was enough to know that they’d tried to ventilate him, which, according to his way of thinking, meant it was perfectly all right for him to blow their lights out.
He kind of wanted to talk to that second man, though, and maybe find out what was going on here. That meant he had to take the rapscallion alive.
For that reason alone, Preacher hurried along the side of the mountain, looking for a spot where he could turn the tables on his pursuer and get the drop on the man. Otherwise, he never would have run.
Fleeing from trouble stuck in his craw. He had always been one to face up to it head-on. That was the way he had lived his life ever since he came West some twenty years earlier.
Of course, he hadn’t come straight to these mountains. There’d been a little matter of fighting the British first at New Orleans, under ol’ Andy Jackson…
Preacher put those thoughts out of his mind, too. Bein’ chased across a mountain by some son of a gun who wanted to kill him was no time for reminiscing.
Preacher threw on the brakes as he leaped over