Pale Rider (23 page)

A loud crash filled the cabin and both women spun around to face the front door. It had been kicked open. The Preacher stood in the entrance, filling it for a moment before he entered. He held Megan easily in his arms.

Sarah instantly took in the filthy skirt, the torn blouse, and her eyes went to the Preacher’s face. He saw the question half-hidden by the shock.

“She’s all right,” he told her reassuringly. “No harm done. She just needs a little rest.”

He crossed to the small back bedroom and disappeared within. The movement broke Sarah’s paralysis. With an inarticulate cry she bolted to catch up to him, stroking her daughter’s cheek as he moved to the side of the bed, the same bed that Sarah had begun to fear would stay empty for the rest of the night and perhaps forever.

While she hovered close by, he set Megan down on the clean covers. Gently he raised the girl’s head to slide the pillow beneath the long tresses. All the while she was staring up at him, at her mother, past them both at the ceiling. She did not speak. It was as if her mind were somewhere else, her thoughts borne on wings of terror and confusion to a different moment and place in time.

Discreetly, the Preacher arranged her torn blouse.

“What happened?” Sarah whispered at him, her eyes never leaving her daughter’s face.

“It was Josh Lahood.” The big hands moved again to adjust a bit of torn cotton. “He tried to—he tried to, but he didn’t.”

Megan’s eyelids fluttered and her mind came back from wherever it had been. She was looking at him again, and this time she saw him.

“You’re home, Megan. Everything’s all right. You’re back in your own room and your mother’s here.”

A single sob, a wrenching sound at once full of gratitude and longing, was torn from her throat. Reflexively she reached up to encircle his neck with both arms.

Sarah saw the gratitude in her daughter’s eyes, but she saw the other thing that was there, too. Something as startling as it was unexpected. It made her think back to Megan’s long silences of the past few days, to the distance she’d seemed to be placing between herself and her mother. Sarah had dismissed it as mere youthful, girlish moodiness. Now the real reason was revealed, and it stunned her into silence.

Stunned her, because in her daughter’s face she saw mirrored her own secret hopes and longings.

She wanted to speak, to say something, but the realization of Megan’s feelings numbed her. Nor was that the final shock of the evening. Now that her daughter’s safety was assured, she had time to take in the collarless shirt the Preacher was wearing, and the holstered pistol slung at his side. Her eyes moved from the sobbing Megan to the tall man’s face. It was a new face and yet the same, the face of a familiar stranger if such a thing were possible. Surely it was possible, for suddenly the Preacher seemed a man in which all possibilities emerged.

Hurried steps on the porch outside. They halted and were followed by Hull Barret’s urgent call.

“Preacher? You in there?”

The tall man straightened and turned toward the door. As he spun his eyes locked with Sarah’s for the briefest instant. In that moment he saw within the stormy conflicts, the doubts and confused desires that were playing upon her soul. Caught off guard with her innermost thoughts and feelings revealed, she turned away quickly to hide her face and the flush of embarrassment that stained her cheeks. Mercifully he said nothing, merely pushed past her to the big room beyond.

He stepped into the kitchen just as Hull came in from outside. Seeing the man he sought standing there without his turned-around collar and with a gunbelt around his waist, the miner froze. What he’d come to say came tumbling out almost absently.

“I, uh—Ev’s goin’ around the camp sayin’ you’d brought Megan back. Is she all right?”

“She’s fine, Hull. A little tired, a little scared, a little mussed up, but nothing a good night’s sleep in her own bed won’t cure.”

The miner hesitated, still trying to make sense of the Preacher’s transformation and fit it to what he had to say. Everything had happened so fast. In one day everything had changed. And now this, the most unexpected change of all.

But at least he was back. “You’d better come outside.”

The tall man looked past him. “Trouble?”

Hull nodded. Together they exited the cabin, heading for the creekbed. Bess Gossage watched them leave and wondered.

The wagon had been pulled up away from the bank. The Preacher stared a long time at the torn body that lay in the buckboard’s bed. His expression did not change. When he’d looked long enough, he reached out and pulled the bloodstained tarpaulin back down to cover the motionless form.

Eddy Conway forced back his tears as best he was able while he tried to explain. “Then him and his men, they shot him. They kept shooting him, it seemed like. Over and over. The bullets kept hitting him forever.” His voice trailed off into the night.

“Why’d they do that?” His brother was mumbling to himself more than to the assembled group of miners. He was staring brokenly at the tarp. “Why’d they have to do that? He wasn’t hurtin’ nothin’. Daddy never hurt nobody in his life. Why? Why why why?”

The silent men had no answer for the simple Teddy. The search for Sarah Wheeler’s missing daughter had exhausted them. This new tragedy had numbed them into silence.

Up until now Lahood had done no more than harry and bedevil them, killing chickens, dirtying laundry, and breaking up their equipment. Many times it had seemed no worse than a wearying, burdensome game. Spider’s corpse was indication enough that their nemesis was through playing. There would be no more games.

Conway had been in Carbon Canyon longer than any of them. He was the one who’d found the first color, who’d determined that the creek had more to offer the persistent than just dust, who’d welcomed each newcomer with a gruff greeting, inviting them to try their luck. He hadn’t begrudged the new arrivals their claims or their occasional discoveries, seeming to take as much pleasure in another man’s find as he did in his own. Conway had been indestructible, as solid as the surrounding mountains.

Now he was dead, shot to pieces by cold, uncaring strangers Lahood had brought in to put an end once and for all to his argument with the settlers of Carbon Canyon.

“It was him, wasn’t it?” Ev Gossage looked up at the Preacher. “The Marshal you warned us about?”

The tall man turned away from the wagon to stare downstream. “Yeah. Stockburn. Stockburn and his deputies. I figured him to be here about now. That’s the way Lahood would want to work it.” He glanced back toward the wagon and its sad, solitary load. “What I didn’t figure was for Spider to go riding off into town to get drunk.”

Teddy looked from his father’s body to the Preacher. “He said—the Marshal said to tell the Preacher to come to town in the morning. He said for you to come or else he and his men would come up here lookin’ for you.”

Silence. Hull frowned at his friend. “I don’t figure it. Why you? It’s our claims he wants.”

All eyes focused on the stranger in their midst, on the man who had returned to them wearing a six-gun instead of the collar. They began to drift away, distancing themselves from him. It was as if he carried some dangerous disease, and it was prudent to distance yourself from a sick man, whether he was your friend or not. The symbol of the disease was the gun that hung at his hip.

It had nothing to do with personal feelings of friendship. The presence of the gun changed things even more than did the absence of the collar. Only Hull Barret stayed close. Barret—and Conway. No longer would they have the old man’s cagy defiance to inspire them to resist.

“That night, the night you warned us about this Stockburn, it sounded almost like you knew him.” Jake Henderson’s voice was hushed. “Spider asked you that hisself. Is it true?”

Everyone waited for the Preacher’s reply. He let his gaze sweep over the group, touching each man individually, and all who were so touched remembered it forever afterward.

“The vote you took the other night showed courage. You voted to stick together. That’s what you’ve got to do. I don’t have anything to do with that. You’ve built something in this place that’s worth fighting for, but you’ve got to decide that for yourselves, and you’ve got to be ready to defend what you’ve made with something besides words.

“Spider went in alone. That was his mistake. He went in drunk, which is worse. Something all of you’d better learn good, and you’d better learn now: only by standing together can you beat the Lahoods of this world. Whatever happens tomorrow, never forget that. If you do, you’re lost. You might as well sign your souls over now to any man that’ll pay you for ’em.” He turned his gaze on the still form outlined by the tarp.

“You’ve got a brave man there. He deserves a proper burial. You all know how to use a shovel. You’d best get on with it.”

An uncertain voice piped up from the back of the crowd. “Preacher, we ain’t got no proper cemetery here.”

“There’s others buried in this canyon, ain’t there?”

“Well, yeah.”

“It’s a man who makes the ground hallowed, not the other way around. He died for this place. It’s fitting he be buried here.” The tall man turned away and started to head upslope.

“Preacher?” Ev Gossage spoke a little too quickly. The tall man paused and turned to face him. The miner looked to his neighbors for support but that did little to alleviate the uncomfortable knot in the pit of his stomach. “You
are
goin’ into town tomorrow, ain’t you?”

The Preacher gazed back down at him for a long moment. Then he spun on his heel and strode off into the darkness without replying. Hull Barret whirled angrily on his friend.

“How can you
say
that, Ev? Didn’t you hear a word of what he just said?” He looked past Gossage, at his other neighbors, “didn’t any of you hear what he just said?”

No one replied and none of them would meet his eyes. They began to drift away, singly at first, then in twos and threes, skulking off into the darkness in the direction of their homes.

But the night couldn’t protect them from their own fears, and their minds would not let them escape from their own burning embarrassment.

XI

He wanted to be alone, despite Hull’s protestations that he was still welcome in his cabin. Nothing against Hull’s hospitality, he explained. He just wanted to be alone.

So they put him up in Ulrik Lindquist’s old place. He sat at the table sliding cartridges into the .44 one at a time, checking each one carefully. The golden light of the oil lamp was turned up all the way, the wick riding high in its holder. The coffee pot Hull had provided steamed away on the stove behind him.

There was a creak from the front porch. The door was opened from outside. It let in the cold night air and the shawl-wrapped figure of Sarah Wheeler. She stood there for a moment, looking at him. Then she closed the door behind her.

He turned his attention back to his work. In the soft light the pistol took on a glow of its own, the blued steel seeming to produce its own internal illumination. He spoke without looking up at her.

“Megan feeling any better?”

“She’s sleeping. She cried herself to sleep. I cleaned her up as best I could. Better just to leave her alone for awhile. I wanted—I wanted to come and thank you for what you did. Megan’s all I’ve got. Sometimes I forget that. Living in a place like this can make you forget what’s really important. Thank you for bringing her back to me.”

“No need for the extra thanks. I’m just glad I happened by.”

She watched him silently as he manipulated the engine of death. First he methodically loaded the remaining chambers, then he picked up a soiled rag and ran it over every part of the weapon, refining the already awesome shine. He held the pistol easily, handling it with a quiet familiarity that frightened her. His neck looked naked without the white collar to hide it from view.

There was so much happening inside her that she didn’t know how to deal with, so much she needed to say that she couldn’t put into words. She moved toward the table until she was standing very close to him.

“That first day, when Hull told me what you’d done in town, I knew you were a gunfighter.”

He half smiled. “Really? Now how did you know that?”

“Nobody in this country goes up against three men without a gun to back him up.”

“They don’t?”

“Don’t tease me.” She nodded curtly at the well-worn .44. “What about that?”

“Lots of people carry guns. That doesn’t make them all gunfighters.”

She mulled that over before replying. “Megan told me what you did to Josh Lahood. Right there in the middle of his camp, in front of all his men. Who but a gunfighter could do such a thing and get away with it?”

“Seems to me I recall something about another fellow a long time ago who went up against a bunch of soldiers without much caring what might happen to him.”

“Yes, and look what did happen to him.”

There was silence for awhile. He made a final check of the gun, shut the cylinder with a click. Then he nodded toward the steaming coffee pot. “Cold out tonight. Want some coffee?”

She didn’t move, couldn’t speak. The cabin was not airtight and a gentle breeze pressed in from around the door, ruffling her hair. Finally, “There’s a lot of talk going around. Everyone’s sayin’ you’re going into town to face that Marshal and his deputies. By yourself.”