Sidewinders (23 page)

Two Bears took out the shirt Blue Bull's wife had given him from the pouch where he had put it and handed it to Preacher. Preacher called Dog to him, knelt beside the big cur, and let Dog get a good whiff of the shirt.

“Find the fella who wore this,” Preacher said. “Find him!”

Dog ran into the canyon, pausing about fifty yards in to look back at Preacher, and then resuming the hunt.

Preacher swung up onto Horse's back and nodded to Two Bears.

“He's got the scent. All we have to do is follow him.”

They rode into the canyon, moving fairly rapidly to keep up with Dog. Now that they were relying on Dog's sense of smell rather than trying to follow tracks, they could set a slightly faster pace.

The canyon was about fifty yards wide, with rocky walls that were too steep for a horse to climb, although a man might be able to. Although there were places, Preacher noted, where the walls had collapsed partially and horses might be able to pick their way up and down as long as they were careful.

Preacher frowned slightly as he spotted a shiny place on a flat rock. The mark was small, barely noticeable. Preacher knew that the most likely explanation for it was that a shod hoof had nicked the rock in the fairly recent past. Blue Bull, like the rest of the Assiniboine, would have been riding an unshod pony when he came through here.

So another rider, most likely a white man, had been in the canyon recently. Preacher couldn't be sure it was today, but the evidence pointed in that direction. The antelope herd had started through the canyon, only to encounter a man on horseback. That had startled the animals into bolting back the way they had come from.

Then, Blue Bull's curiosity aroused by the behavior of the antelope, the Assiniboine warrior had ridden into the canyon as well, and . . .

Preacher couldn't finish that thought. He had no way of knowing what had happened then. Blue Bull could have run into the same hombre. There might have even been more than one man riding through the canyon.

This was Indian land, maybe not by treaty but by tradition, and the ranchers in the area had always respected that because of the long history of peace between the whites and the Assiniboine. They had never stopped white men from crossing their hunting grounds, as long as everyone treated each other with respect. It was possible some cattle had strayed up here from one of the ranches, and cowboys from that spread had come to look for the missing stock.

However, that bad feeling still lurked in Preacher's gut. It grew even stronger when he saw Dog veer toward a cluster of rocks at the base of one of those caved-in places along the canyon's left-hand wall. There was no hesitation about the big cur's movements. He went straight to the rocks and started nosing around and pawing at them.

“Your animal has lost the scent,” Standing Rock said. “There is nothing there.”

“We better take a closer look,” Preacher said. He glanced over at Two Bears, who nodded. The chief's face was set in grim lines, and Preacher knew that his old friend had a bad feeling about this situation, too.

The search party rode over to the side of the canyon. Nothing was visible except a pile of loose, broken rocks, some of them pretty big, but the way Dog continued to paw at the stones told Preacher most of what he needed to know.

“Move those rocks,” Two Bears ordered.

“But—” Standing Rock began. He fell silent when Two Bears gave him a hard look. Scowling, Standing Rock dismounted. He went to the rocks and started lifting them and tossing them aside. Several other warriors got down from their ponies and moved to help him.

They hadn't been working for very long before Standing Rock suddenly let out a startled exclamation and stepped back sharply as if he had just uncovered a rattlesnake.

Preacher leaned forward in the saddle to peer into the jumble of stone. He had a pretty good idea it wasn't a snake that Standing Rock had come across.

It was a foot.

Visible from the ankle down, the foot had a moccasin on it. The rest of the leg to which it was attached was hidden under the rocks.

The other warriors had recoiled from the grim discovery as well. Curtly, Two Bears ordered them to get back to moving the rocks. They did so with obvious reluctance.

Everybody knew what they were going to find. It didn't take long to uncover the rest of the body. It belonged to a young Assiniboine warrior. The rock slide that had covered him up had done quite a bit of damage to his features, but he was still recognizable. Standing Rock said in a voice choked with emotion, “It is Blue Bull.”

“He must have been standing here when those rocks fell on him and killed him,” one of the other men said.

“Why did he not get out of the way?” another man wanted to know.

“There must not have been time,” Standing Rock said. “My . . . my friend . . .”

Deep creases appeared in Preacher's forehead as the mountain man frowned. He said to Two Bears, “Somethin' ain't right here. You mind if I take a closer look?”

“Go ahead,” the chief said with a nod.

Preacher dismounted and approached the dead man. Standing Rock turned to face him. The warrior's stubborn expression made it clear he didn't want Preacher disturbing his friend's body. Like all the other tribes, the Assiniboine had their own rituals and customs for dealing with death.

“Standing Rock,” Two Bears said. “Step aside.”

“I won't do anything to dishonor Blue Bull,” Preacher said to Standing Rock. “It's just that I don't think this is what it seems to be. Look at how he's layin' on his back with his head toward the wall and his feet toward the middle of the canyon.”

“That means nothing,” Standing Rock snapped.

“I think it does,” Preacher said. “Let's say he came over here and was standin' facin' the wall for some reason. When those rocks came down on top of him, likely they would've knocked him facedown. If he heard the rocks start to fall and turned to try to run, not only would he be facedown, his head would be pointed toward the middle of the canyon.”

“You cannot be sure about these things,” Standing Rock insisted.

“Maybe not, but I think there's a pretty good chance I'm right. What it really looks like is that somebody dragged Blue Bull over here, then climbed up the canyon wall to start the rock slide that covered up his body.”

Two Bears said, “He would have had to be unconscious or dead for that to happen.”

Preacher nodded.

“Yep, more than likely. Maybe we can tell, if you let me take a good look at the body.”

“He was my friend,” Standing Rock said. “Stand back. I will do it.”

“Sure,” Preacher said. He moved one step back, but that was as far as he went. He wanted to be able to see whatever Standing Rock found.

Standing Rock knelt beside his dead friend and looked him over from head to toe.

“There are no injuries except the ones the rocks made when they fell on him,” Standing Rock announced.

“Turn him over,” Preacher suggested.

Standing Rock sent a hostile glance at the mountain man, but he did as Preacher said and gently took hold of Blue Bull's shoulders. Carefully, he rolled the body onto its left side.

A sharp breath hissed between Standing Rock's clenched teeth. Preacher saw what had prompted the young warrior's reaction.

A bloodstain had spread on the back of Blue Bull's shirt, just to the left of the middle of his back. In the middle of that bloodstain was a small tear in the buckskin.

“A knife did that,” Preacher said. “Somebody stabbed him in the back, probably out in the middle of the canyon, and then tried to hide the body.”

Two Bears said, “That would mean . . .”

“Yep,” Preacher said. “This was no accident. Blue Bull was murdered.”

 

 

The big man paced back and forth angrily. Despite his size, his movements had a certain dangerous, cat-like quality to them. His hat was thumbed back over his blocky, rough-hewn face.

“Let me get this straight,” he said. “You didn't have any choice but to kill the Indian.”

“That's right, Randall,” replied one of the men facing him. “He seen us. He might've gone back to his village and warned the rest of those redskins that we're up here in the hills.”

The eyes of the man called Randall narrowed as he stared coldly at the two men he had sent out as scouts.

“There are several big spreads bordering the Indian land,” he said. “And Two Bears doesn't mind if the punchers who ride for those ranches cut across the Assiniboine hunting grounds. You
know
that, damn it! We all do. So what in hell made you think that running into a lone warrior was going to cause a problem?”

The two men, whose names were Page and Dwyer, shuffled their feet uncomfortably. They didn't like being in dutch with the hard-bitten ramrod of this gun-hung bunch that waited in the hills for nightfall.

Thirty men, along with their horses, stood around in whatever shade they could find, watching as Randall confronted the scouts. The others were every bit as rough and menacing looking as their leader.

Page had spoken up earlier. Now Dwyer said, “You weren't there, Randall. You didn't see how spooked that redskin acted. He knew somethin' was up, I tell you. Page and me did the only thing we could.”

“And we covered his body up good and proper,” Page added. “Nobody'll ever find him.”

Randall said, “You seem mighty sure about that. You know that as soon as the rest of his people miss him, they'll come looking for him.”

“They won't find him,” Page insisted.

Randall wanted to say something else. He wanted to cuss the two fools up one way and down the other. Instead, he just jerked his head in a curt nod and said, “You'd better hope they don't. Finding one of their own warriors stabbed in the back is likely to spook them a lot more than running across a couple of riders would have.”

Earlier, when the two men had come back from scouting the approaches to the Assiniboine village, they had brought an Indian pony with them, trailing from a rope lead held by Dwyer. When Randall had demanded to know where the animal came from, they had hemmed and hawed around for a minute and tried to say they found it, but it hadn't taken long for his cold stare to get the truth out of them.

They had run into a warrior in a canyon that cut through a ridge several miles from the Assiniboine village. The Indian kept asking questions, the scouts claimed, so Dwyer had distracted him while Page got behind him and put a knife in his back. Then they had dragged him over to the side of the canyon and caved in part of the wall on him. Chances were they were right about nobody finding the body, at least not in time to have any effect on the mission that had brought Randall and his men to this part of the territory.

With the matter settled for the time being, unsatisfactory though it might be, Randall turned and stalked away to give himself a chance to control his anger. He looked up at the sky.

In a couple of more hours, it would be dark.

And once night had fallen, he and his men could ride down out of these hills and do what they had been sent here to do. That thought put a faint smile on Randall's rugged face.

The prospect of killing always did.

See the novel
Preacher's Fury.