Ignoring the fact that he was still naked, he lunged toward the door and slid out into the hallway. Movement from the stairs caught his eye. He saw a beaver hat disappearing down the staircase and almost snapped a shot at it, but he held off on the trigger. He didn’t want to waste powder and shot on a hat unless he could be sure of ventilating the head under it, too.
He hadn’t known Abby for more than a couple of hours, but he was filled with rage at her useless death. He supposed the two bastards who’d interrupted his bath had been gunning for him and the girl had been killed by accident…but at the same time, he wasn’t sure why anybody wanted to blow holes in him either. He hadn’t had any run-ins with anybody since arriving in St. Louis earlier in the day.
Of course, there had been that attempt to bushwhack him while he was still on the river, he recalled. Maybe somebody held a grudge against him because of that. Or maybe some old enemy had spotted him. He had a few of them, although most of his enemies had a habit of winding up dead.
Those thoughts flashed through Preacher’s brain in less than the blink of an eye as he broke into a run toward the stairs. He didn’t know who the two men were, and he didn’t really give a damn. They had killed Abby and tried to kill him, and he was going to settle those scores if he could.
Skidding a little because his feet were wet from the water dripping off his body, he reached the top of the stairs. Startled shouts came from the main room below. The tavern’s patrons had heard the shots, and then they had seen the two murderers rushing out.
Now a tall, mostly pale, completely naked gent with long hair and a beard came charging down the stairs with a pistol in each hand. It was no wonder that the people in the tavern yelled in alarm and got the hell out of his way.
Preacher ran out into the street. St. Louis was pretty dark after nightfall. The light that came from the doors and windows of some of the buildings furnished the only illumination in the street. Preacher couldn’t see the men he was pursuing, but he could hear them, running away to his right. He went after them. An occasional startled cry came from folks on the street as the naked, gun-toting mountain man charged past.
Preacher spotted a couple of running figures ahead of him as they passed through a rectangle of light that spilled from an open door. They were in sight only for a second, not long enough for him to draw a bead on them. He kept running.
But only for a moment, because muzzle flame suddenly bloomed in the darkness ahead of him. Something sledgehammered into Preacher’s head, and he went backward as if he had just run into a wall. One of the men he was after must have reloaded on the run.
That was the last thought that went through his mind before a black tide claimed him.
Panting heavily, Schuyler Mims and Colin Fairfax paused in the stygian darkness of an alley. “Are you sure… sure you hit him?” Fairfax gasped.
“I saw him…go down,” Schuyler replied as he bent over and rested his hands on his knees. “How could we have missed him…with all three shots in the tavern?”
Fairfax was getting his breath back now. “We couldn’t have known that bitch would get in the way. And then I never saw anyone move as fast as Preacher did when you tried for him again. It was just bad luck all the way around, damned bad luck.”
“Especially for that whore,” Schuyler said.
Fairfax grimaced in the darkness. “That wasn’t our fault. Blame Preacher for taking her up there.”
That didn’t make a whole lot of sense to Schuyler, but he didn’t waste any breath pointing that out. Instead he asked, “What do we do now?”
“What do you mean?”
“Preacher’s liable to come after us.”
“You shot him, remember?”
“Yeah, but I don’t know if he’s dead,” Schuyler said. “I got a feelin’ he takes a heap o’ killin’.”
“Come along,” Fairfax said. He led the way toward the far end of the alley, which was marked by a faint glow from the street. “Even if he’s still alive, I doubt that he got a good look at us. He doesn’t know who we are, so we don’t have to worry about him finding us. In fact, we could make another try for him—”
“Not hardly,” Schuyler said, for once standing up to his partner. “We’ve tried to kill Preacher twice, which is probably one more time than most folks ever get a chance to try. I ain’t goin’ after him a third time.”
Fairfax scowled as they emerged from the alley onto another of St. Louis’s hard-packed dirt streets. He didn’t like it when anybody disagreed with him or refused to go along with his suggestions. But Schuyler sounded adamant about this, so Fairfax decided not to push the issue.
“I suppose it would be best to avoid the man from now on,” he admitted in a grudging tone. “But we have to do something for money. We’re almost flat broke now.”
“We could go see Shad Beaumont. He’s always lookin’ for good men.”
Fairfax fingered his rather pointed chin and frowned in thought as he considered the suggestion. “Beaumont’s a dangerous man,” he pointed out.
“Well, hell, so are we. Ain’t we?”
Neither of them were too sure about that, considering how their last two endeavors had turned out. But they had to do something, unless they wanted to resort to begging or honest work, and those things didn’t appeal to them at all.
“All right,” Fairfax said with a decisive nod. “We’ll go see Shad Beaumont, and even if that bastard Preacher
Preacher was alive. His head hurt too damned much for him to be dead.
“Disgraceful! Utterly disgraceful! Why, he probably came straight from some harlot’s bed before passing out in his besotted iniquity.”
Preacher didn’t know about his besotted iniquity, whatever the hell that was, but he had sure enough passed
