An eagle soared through the vast blue sky overhead. The tall man in buckskins saw it as he rode along the edge of the trees, just as he saw the chipmunk that raised its head from a burrow in the clearing fifty yards to his left and the squirrel that bounded from branch to branch in a pine tree off to his right. He saw a dozen moose grazing half a mile ahead of him, and he saw the wolf slinking toward them through tall grass. A bear lumbered across a hillside nearly a mile away, and Preacher saw it, too.

But he never saw the man who shot him.

The heavy blast of the rifle echoed across the landscape and up the canyons that cut through the mountains. Preacher didn’t hear it until after the slug smashed into his body and drove him forward in the saddle, over the neck of the rangy gray stallion. He tried to grab on to something and stay on the horse, but his whole body seemed to have gone numb from the bullet’s impact and his muscles refused to work the way he wanted them to. As the horse shied, Preacher toppled from the saddle.

Even though his body wouldn’t cooperate, his mind still worked. He kicked his feet free of the stirrups just before he fell. He didn’t think the horse would bolt, but he hadn’t had the animal all that long and didn’t have complete confidence in him yet.

Preacher wasn’t completely numb. He felt the jolt as he landed heavily on the ground. Somehow he kept the fingers of his right hand clamped around the long-barreled flintlock rifle he’d been carrying across the saddle in front of him. He had a couple of those new-fangled Colt’s Dragoon revolvers that he’d picked up in St. Louis tucked behind his belt, too. If he could get to cover, he knew he could give a good accounting of himself.

Making it to cover might not be easy, though. Feeling began to flow back into Preacher’s body, but it brought with it waves of paralyzing pain.

Preacher knew how to deal with pain. If a man wanted to live, he learned how to ignore it. Whether it was in body or spirit, in this life hardly a day went by without something hurting. The trick was not to give in to it.

Still clutching the rifle, Preacher rolled to his right, closer to the trees. It was a good thing that he moved when he did, because another shot sounded and a heavy lead ball smacked into the ground where he had been lying a heartbeat earlier. Preacher kept rolling, even though every movement sent fresh bursts of pain stabbing through his body.

He was within a few feet of the trees now. He came up onto his hands and knees, then got his feet under him and launched into a dive that carried him to the edge of the pines. Vaguely, he heard another shot and felt a ball tug at his buckskin shirt as he flew through the air. He slammed into the ground again, the impact softened slightly by the carpet of fallen pine needles on which he landed.

More shots sounded, coming close enough together now that Preacher knew there was more than one bushwhacker. He scrambled around to the other side of a thick-trunked pine and rested his back against the rough bark. He tried to take a deep breath, but that made the pain in his left side worse.

All right, he told himself, he had a busted rib, or a cracked one, anyway. Probably just cracked, because if it actually was broken, all that falling and rolling and jumping around surely would have plunged the jagged end of a bone into his left lung and he’d be drowning in his own blood by now. So, he decided, the rib was cracked but still hurt like hell, and it could still break easily if he wasn’t careful.

Then there was the fact that his left side was covered with warm, sticky wetness. He might bleed to death if the hole wasn’t bound up soon. And any time a fella was shot, he had to worry about the wound festering. There were just all kinds of ways to die out here on the frontier.

Holes, he corrected himself as he gingerly poked around on his side. The rifle ball had struck him in the back, on the left side, glanced off that rib, and torn its way out the front of his body. He was lucky the bone had deflected it outward, rather than bouncing it through his guts. He really would have been a goner then.

Breathing shallowly through clenched teeth, he pulled up his buckskin shirt and used the heavy hunting knife that was sheathed on his hip to cut off two pieces from his long underwear. It wasn’t easy to do, because his left arm was still partially numb and he couldn’t use it very well. He managed to wad one of the pieces of woolen fabric into a ball and shove it into the exit wound. He couldn’t reach the place where the ball had gone in with his right hand, though, because it was around on his back. He had to grit his teeth even harder and force his left arm to work. It took a few minutes that seemed more like an hour, but finally he pushed the wadded-up cloth into the bullet hole.

That would help slow down the bleeding. He knew if he lost too much blood, he would pass out, and if that happened, chances were he would never wake up again. His enemies would slip up on him and cut his throat.

He didn’t know how many there were. The shooting had stopped now, but from the sound of the volley a few minutes earlier, he figured five or six.

Nor did he know who they were. He had spent five decades on this earth, as testified to by the leathery skin of his face and the numerous silver strands in his dark hair and beard, and few men lived that long without making enemies. Preacher had probably made more than his share, although he had also left many of them dead behind him, either in shallow graves or out in the open for the scavengers and the elements to take care of. It depended on how put out with them he’d been when he killed them.

But there were still plenty of folks out there carrying grudges against him, and obviously he had crossed trails with some of them today.

Unless the bushwhackers were just no-good thieves who wanted to kill him and take his outfit. He had a good horse, a sizable batch of supplies on the pack-horse he’d been leading, and some fine weapons. No pelts yet; it was too early in the season for that. These days, not many people would bother stealing furs, either. The mountains weren’t trapped out yet, far from it, but the fur trade wasn’t what it used to be. The last great rendezvous had been eight years earlier, in ’42. A lot of the mountain men had gone back east to be with their long-neglected families. Others had headed west to look for gold in California.

But Preacher had no intention of leaving the mountains for good. When his time came, he intended to die here.

Maybe today.

He listened intently. The woods were quiet. The shooting had scared off all the animals. If the bushwhackers started skulking around, he would hear them.

He was disgusted with himself for letting somebody shoot him in the back like that. He didn’t know where they’d been hidden or how carefully they had concealed themselves, but he didn’t care. He should have known they were there, lying in wait for him.

Was a time when he would have known, because Dog would have smelled the sons of bitches, and Horse probably would have, too. But the big wolf-like cur was gone, and so was the gray stallion that looked a lot like Preacher’s current mount.

Over the years, Dog had tangled with outlaws, savages, grizzlies, panthers, and lobo wolves. He had gotten chewed up, shot, half-drowned, and mostly froze. None of that had killed him, but time had. The years always won in the end.

Horse, at least, was still alive as far as Preacher knew. He had left the stallion back in Missouri with an old friend who had promised to make Horse’s final years as comfortable and pleasant as possible. Preacher wasn’t sure he had done the right thing, though. Being put out to pasture was a hard destiny. Maybe he should have brought Horse back to the mountains with him one last time.

If he had, he woudn’t be sitting here with a couple of bullet holes in him, he told himself. Because Horse’s keen senses would have alerted him that there were enemies nearby.

Off to his left a ways, something rustled in the brush.

A grin that was half-grimace drew Preacher’s lips back from his teeth. He reached to his waist and drew out one of the Dragoons. It was a fine weapon, well balanced, with a seven-and-a-half-inch octagonal barrel and a cylinder that held six .44 caliber loads, although Preacher always left one chamber empty for the hammer to rest on. Engraved on that blued steel cylinder was a scene of Texas Rangers battling Comanches. Preacher figured it was based on the fight at Bandera Pass a few years back. Captain Jack Hays, who’d been in command of the troop of Rangers involved, had told Preacher all about that ruckus one time when he was down in San Antonio de Bexar.

Yes, sir, a mighty fine gun. It shot straight and true, and between the two revolvers and the flintlock rifle, he had eleven rounds ready to go. More than enough to kill every one of those damn bushwhackers.

Of course, they’d probably kill him, too, Preacher reflected, but they wouldn’t live to brag about it.

Another rustle, to his right this time. They had him surrounded. And they were so confident that they had him trapped, one of them was bold enough to call out, “We’re gonna kill you, old man, if you ain’t dead already. You got anything to say?”

Preacher didn’t respond, except to draw his other Dragoon. His left arm was still a little weak, but he was able to hold the revolver fairly steady.

“You should’ve minded your own business back at that trading post, old man. You must be soft in the head. Who in his right mind would kick up such a fuss over a damned Indian whore?”

So that was why they wanted him dead, Preacher thought. They had trailed him all the way out here, a week or more, over some fracas at a trading post? He supposed that the fella whose guts he’d spilled on the ground meant something to them. A friend or maybe even kinfolk. Even so, the man had been a sorry son of a bitch, hardly worth dying over. Seemed like they were bound and determined to do just that, though.

“Shut up, Riley,” another voice, older and harsher, said. “That’s enough. Let’s get this done. You boys ready?”

Preacher was ready. He braced his back against the tree trunk and raised both Dragoons in front of him.

That was when a cry rang out through the trees, half-laugh, half-scream, a jagged, nerve-scraping sound that was one of the craziest things Preacher had ever heard.