Preacher wanted to pull the trigger, but he had never shot a gun without knowing what he was shooting at, and he didn’t want to start. He held his fire with his finger still taut on the trigger, ready to squeeze it.
He heard a few small sucking sounds. The mud tugging at the feet of whatever was out there, he thought. The thing was leaving.
But it would be back, Preacher told himself. It had been dogging their trail for several days, and he didn’t think it would stop just because he had yelled at it.
He didn’t think their stalker was human. A man would have shown himself already. Judging by the glimpse Preacher had gotten of the thing during the storm, it was too big to be a man. That meant it had to be some sort of animal, but if that were true, it had a keener intelligence than most animals, or else it would have forgotten about the wagons and wandered off by now.
Preacher stayed where he was with the pistol pointing out into the darkness until his instincts told him the thing was gone. He didn’t tuck the weapon away when he finally started back toward the wagons. In fact, he drew the other pistol and held it ready as well, just in case something came at him out of the shadows.
Nothing did. By the time he got back to the wagons, the entire camp was awake and waiting to find out what was going on. Casey, with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders, came up to him and asked, “What was out there, Preacher?”
The mountain man shook his head. “I don’t know. Some sort of animal. I saw its eyes glowing in the light, but only for a second. Then it turned around and left.”
Roland Bartlett was standing beside Casey. He said, “Well, then, if it was just an animal, we don’t have to worry about it, do we?”
“I didn’t say that,” Preacher replied. “Whatever that thing is, it’s pretty big, and it’s smart, too. It’d be a good idea to keep our eyes open. But then, that’s always a good idea out here.”
The men began to head back to their wagons to get some more sleep. Casey came over to Preacher and laid a hand on his arm. “Do you really think we’re in any danger from this thing?” she asked.
Preacher smiled, but the expression didn’t hold any real humor. “We’ve been in danger from one thing or another ever since we left St. Louis,” he told her. “And if you recollect, it was a mite perilous back there, too!”
By morning, the trail was still pretty muddy, but the big puddles of standing water were beginning to dry up. The sky was mostly clear, the cool breeze from the north was still blowing, and Preacher thought maybe the trail would be dry enough by midday for the wagons to pull out.
He told Leeman Bartlett they would remain where they were for the time being, then saddled Horse and rode out to the area where he had seen the glowing eyes the night before. Dog trotted alongside him. Since the rain had stopped before Preacher went out and challenged the thing, he thought he might be able to find its tracks.
Sure enough, the marks were on the ground, leading off to the northwest. But the mud had been soft enough at the time the tracks were left that it had flowed back into them, blurring and obscuring any details. Even though Preacher dismounted and studied the tracks closely, he couldn’t tell what sort of animal had made them.
He could follow them, though, and he did so, swinging back up in the saddle. Dog ranged ahead of him as he rode northwest.
The wagons fell out of sight behind him. Preacher was a little worried about Garity and the other hard-looking men who had ridden past, but he didn’t expect them to double back and attack the wagons. They had struck him as men who wouldn’t risk anything unless the odds were on their side.
Eventually, the tracks led to a rain-swollen creek and vanished into the fast-moving water. The creature must have plunged right in, demonstrating a complete lack of fear where the flooded creek was concerned. As Preacher reined in and sat on the bank, frowning at the rushing stream, he wondered what sort of varmint would do a thing like that.
He wasn’t going to try to swim Horse across the creek. It would be too easy for both man and horse to be swept away. He turned the gray stallion and called, “Come on, Dog,” to the big cur. They headed back toward the wagons, which were several miles away.
Preacher had covered about half that distance when a series of faint popping sounds came to his ears. He stiffened in the saddle for a second as he immediately recognized the sounds for what they were.
Gunfire.
“Son of a bitch,” he muttered as he leaned forward and dug his heels harder into Horse’s flanks. The animal responded by leaping into a gallop.
Preacher couldn’t hear the shots anymore over the pounding of Horse’s hooves. Maybe the situation wasn’t as bad as he thought it was, he told himself.
But he couldn’t convince himself of that, and sure enough, when he came in sight of the wagons, he saw a number of men on horseback riding back and forth, firing rifles toward them. Since the wagons weren’t pulled into a circle, the traditional defensive formation, the bullwhackers and the other men had been forced to take cover underneath the vehicles. As Preacher raced closer, he saw puffs of powdersmoke coming from under the wagons and knew Bartlett’s men were putting up a fight.
Preacher figured Garity and the men who had ridden by the day before had joined up with some others and come back to attack the freight caravan.
He was coming at them from behind, so they didn’t seem to know he was there. When he was within rifle range, he reined Horse to a halt and was out of the saddle even before the stallion stopped moving. He pulled the long-barreled flintlock rifle from the fringed sheath strapped to the saddle and rested it across Horse’s back.
Preacher eased the rifle’s hammer back and lined the sights on one of the attackers. He would be shooting the man in the back, which he didn’t like, but since the varmint was trying to kill folks Preacher had befriended, the mountain man figured he had it coming. Preacher took a deep breath and squeezed the trigger.
The black powder went off with a dull boom as the rifle kicked back hard against Preacher’s shoulder. The cloud of smoke that poured from the muzzle obscured his vision for a second, but as it cleared, he saw the man he had targeted was on the ground, kicking out his life spasmodically. The heavy lead ball had slammed into his back and driven him right out of the saddle.
Preacher didn’t try to reload the rifle. The other attackers would have noticed that one of their number had
