“Here it comes,” Jules said excitedly.
“Are you anxious to get home?” Sally asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” Jules said. “I’ll be glad to give this money to Ma and Pa. Plus,” he added with a broad grin, “this here will be the first time I ever rode on a train.”
The smile left his lips. “It’s the first time either Billy or Mike ever rode on a train too. They was really lookin’ forward to it.”
Sheriff Dawson came up to them then. “I thought you might like to know that an inquest was held, and it was found that the shootin’ and killin’ was all justified,” he said.
Smoke just nodded, but said nothing.
Dawson smiled. “And you’ll be goin’ home with almost one hundred thousand dollars. I reckon this is one trip you’ll be real glad you made.”
“Oh, yeah, I’m just all broke out with joy,” Smoke replied.
“You don’t sound all that happy.”
“Mike, Billy, Hank, Andy, LeRoy, and Dooley,” Smoke said.
“I don’t understand.”
“No,” Smoke said. “You wouldn’t.”
The train pulled into the station then, chugging, clanging, spewing steam and dripping glowing embers onto the track bed.
“Come on, Sally,” Smoke said. “Let’s go home.”
Turn the page for an exciting preview of
THE FIRST MOUNTAIN MAN:
PREACHER’S SHOWDOWN
by William W. Johnstone
with J. A. Johnstone
Coming in January 2008
Wherever Pinnacle Books are sold!
Chapter One
Civilization stank.
As the man called Preacher paddled the canoe down the Mississippi River, he scented St. Louis before he ever came in sight of the settlement sprawled along the west bank of the stream the Indians called the Father of Waters. The smell was a mixture of wood smoke, tanning hides, boiling lye, rotting fish, burned meat, and a hundred other less-than-pleasant aromas. Preacher preferred to think of it as just the smell of civilization, and he thought it stank.
But then, he reckoned that after months in the wilderness, he was no fragrant flower. And the plews piled up in front of him and behind him in the canoe didn’t smell too good neither. He chuckled. Soon enough, he’d be rid of the plews, since he planned to sell them first thing when he reached the settlement. Then he’d find a place to stay and maybe soak off in a tub full of hot water some of the months of grime that had collected on his body. Some folks claimed it was unhealthy to bathe too often, and the life Preacher had chosen to lead was already perilous enough as it was, but sometimes a fella just had to live dangerously.
Preacher was a tall, rangy man, although his height wasn’t too evident while he was sitting in the canoe. His broad shoulders and muscular arms strained at the buckskins he wore and revealed the power in his body. His long, thick hair was black as midnight, save for a few silver strands, as was the bushy beard that concealed the lower half of his rugged face. His eyes, shaded by the broad brim of his felt hat, were dark and deep-set under prominent brows. His face and hands were tanned to the color of old saddle leather. He was in his early thirties, having been born as the eighteenth century turned to the nineteenth. He was no longer considered a young man in this day and age, but Preacher’s active, outdoor life and iron constitution gave him the strength and vigor and attitude of someone younger.
He had left home at an early age, not really running away from the farm or his family, but rather running
Ever since then, he’d been wandering. After spending some time on the river, he had joined up with Andy Jackson’s army and fought the British down at the town of New Orleans back in 1814. Then he had headed west with some mountain men, and except for occasional forays back to civilization in St. Louis or down yonder in Texas, he had spent the intervening years in the Rockies, making his living by trapping beaver and other animals and selling their pelts, and trying to stay out of trouble.
He hadn’t been any too successful in that last goal.
But he’d spent the previous spring trapping and had a good load of plews, so he thought it would be all right to make a trip downriver to sell them, then head back up the Missouri for the fall season. The fur companies had begun to establish trading posts in the mountains where he could have disposed of his pelts, but Preacher had a hankering to visit the settlements again. He knew it was probably a mistake to do so. He wouldn’t be happy once he got there and would be eager to get back to the frontier. But he had come anyway.
The river was narrower here than it was farther downstream, but it was still a pretty impressive thing, flowing as it did between high, wooded banks. Preacher figured he was still a mile or more above St. Louis. The south breeze would carry the smell of the settlement that far. His muscles worked with smooth efficiency as he dug the paddle into the water first on one side of the canoe, then on the other. The sleek craft, made of slabs of bark sealed
