She shook her head. “No, they’ll be all right. This is a smooth trail and shouldn’t give them any problems. We need to get to the ranch and see if we can find Smoke.”
Less than an hour later, they rode up to the ridge overlooking the MacDougal spread, and were astonished to see the main ranch house and the barn engulfed in flames.
“Holy smoke!” Cal whispered as the four sat on their horses staring at the burning ranch.
A voice called from a nearby clump of boulders as a head appeared on top of the largest rock. “You folks looking for me?”
They turned their eyes and saw Smoke sitting on top of the boulder watching the ranch burn.
Sally jumped down off her horse and ran as fast as she could toward her husband, who’d also jumped down off the rock and was running toward her.
After they’d embraced and kissed—and kissed some more, Sally leaned her head back and said, “And just what is going on here, Smoke Jensen?”
He looked down at the burning buildings. “I’m just teaching a man a lesson, sweetheart. He lost his son, through no fault of his own, but then he went out seeking vengeance, and now he’s lost his daughter, his best friend, and his home. I only hope the lesson sticks.”
He put his arm around her and walked her back toward their horses. “Now, let’s go home,” he said, a smile on his face. “I don’t believe I was quite through welcoming you back home when I was forced to leave.”
Don’t miss PREACHER’S JUSTICE, next in the First Mountain Man series, coming from Pinnacle Books in January 2004.
For a preview of this novel, just turn the page . . .
The sky over the Rocky Mountains was a brilliant, crystalline blue. Though it was cloudless now, it had snowed steadily for the previous twenty-four hours, and a deep pack on the ground was painfully bright under the relentless sun. It also made traveling difficult, so the man everyone called Preacher had not even attempted to ride his horse this morning. Instead, the mountain man and fur trapper had taken a pack mule with him, and he led the animal, laboriously breaking a path through the nearly waist-deep snow. The mule was carrying a string of beaver traps that, over the previous several days, had been carefully inspected. Repairs were made as necessary.
Preacher, who was twenty-seven years old, had been trapping in these mountains since he was fourteen. He had a dark shock of hair, which he kept trimmed with a sharp knife. Though it was sometimes difficult to do so, he also managed to shave at least two or three times a week so that, while he often had stubble, he never had a beard. His eyes were dark. From a distance, one might think they were brown, but upon closer examination they proved to be a deep, cobalt blue. He was a little taller than average, slender of build, but with broad shoulders and muscular arms and powerful legs strengthened by his years of trapping in the mountains.
Preacher looked toward a distinctive peak and saw feathery tendrils of snow streaming out from it in the cold, piercing wind of the higher climes. The snow crystals glistened in the sun and formed a prism of color to crown the beauty of the rugged mountains and dark green trees. From that peak, which Preacher called Eagles’ Beak, the young mountain man got his bearings. Thus oriented, he started up a narrow draw until he found the creek he was looking for.
Preacher ground-hobbled his mule, took some of the traps, then stepped out into the stream, breaking through the thin ice that had formed at the stream’s edge. The nearly paralyzing cold shot up his legs as he waded in the water, looking for the best place to put his traps. It would have been easier and less painful to move along the shoreline, but he’d learned long ago to use the water as a means of masking his scent from the beaver.
Finally, he came to the place he had discovered five years earlier, a place rich with beaver that had so far been undiscovered by the other trappers. Since his discovery, he had worked this area as if it were his own private reserve. While there was no such thing as privately owned land here, the trappers recognized and followed a code of the right of territory according to who came first.
Dropping all his traps in the water, Preacher began setting them, depressing the springs by standing on them and putting one foot on each trap arm to open them up. When the traps were opened, he engaged the pan notch, holding them in the set position.
As each trap was set, he would extend the trap chain to its fullest length out toward the deeper water, where a trap stake was passed through the ring at the end of the chain and driven into the streambed.
Finally, he placed the bait. The bait was a wand of willow, cut to a length that would permit its small end to extend from the stream bank directly over the pan of the trap. Bark was scraped from the stick and castoreum was smeared on the end of the switch, so that it hung about six inches or more above the trap. Castoreum was an oil taken from the glands of a beaver. Once his traps were set, Preacher returned to the tiny cabin he would call home whlie wintering in the mountains.
It was no secret that Preacher had hit upon a mother lode of beaver. Every year his catch was consistently the highest, or very near the highest, taken. While others may have envied him his good luck, they were bound by the code they all followed not to horn in on him.
But there was one trapper who wasn’t bound by this or any other code, and he was determined to find Preacher’s secret location. He didn’t know where Preacher trapped, but he did know where he lived. He had made camp near Preacher’s cabin, surviving the storm just passed, in order to follow him to his secret place.
The recent snow made it very easy to follow, because he didn’t even have to stay in contact with Preacher. All he had to do was follow the path left by Preacher and his mule through the snow.
“It’ll be like taking a sugar-tit from a baby,” he said with a gruff laugh.
When Preacher returned to check out his traps a few days later, he was surprised to see that they had all been removed and replaced by another man’s traps. Angrily, he removed the new traps and put his own back in place. The process took most of the day.
It was one thing to crowd in on another man’s territory. That was done from time to time, and it nearly always brought about harsh feelings. But to actually remove another man’s traps was an affront of the worst kind.
Preacher considered breaking the offending traps, but finally decided against it. Instead, he left one of them on the bank of the stream and placed rocks on the ground in the form of an arrow, pointing toward his cabin, indicating that if the man wanted to retrieve his traps, he would have to come see Preacher to get them. When Preacher returned to his cabin, he hung the poacher’s traps up on the outside wall, in plain view of anyone who might happen by.
Exactly one week later, Preacher was tending to his mules when he saw a lone figure, trekking across the
