LITMIR.BIZ

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see, you should have convinced me right off that you were tellin’ the truth,” Deaver said. The ugly smile never left his face.

      One of the trappers who was renting a bunk came running into the trading post’s main room, drawn by the yelling and the shot. He carried a flintlock rifle slanted across his chest and wore only a pair of long underwear.

      Before the man could even demand to know what was going on, Manning pulled a pistol with his right hand. He used his left to keep the knife planted firmly in Pete’s hand, which had blood puddling under it. Manning lifted the gun and fired, the dull boom of the shot filling the room.

      The ball punched into the chest of the man who had just run into the room. He staggered back a step, dropped his rifle, and fell to his knees as a bloodstain bloomed vividly on the long underwear. He pitched forward on his face and didn’t move again.

      “My men …” Pete rasped. “They will—”

      “They won’t do a damned thing,” Deaver said. “The rest of the boys have finished cuttin’ their throats by now. You should’ve posted a better guard, Pete. That poor fella up in the tower was wearin’ a bloody grin from ear to ear before he knew what was happenin’ to him.”

      Pete groaned. His employees were dead, and so was one of his customers. He didn’t know where the other trapper was. Probably hiding, hoping these vicious animals would overlook him.

      “I’ll ask you again, and you better not lie to me,” Deaver said. “Where was Preacher goin’?”

      “I don’t—” Pete began.

      Manning leaned on the knife and twisted it. The razor-sharp blade cut deeper in Pete’s hand. Pete couldn’t hold in the scream that welled up his throat.

      His wounded shoulder was bleeding heavily. He felt the hot flow dripping down his arm as it dangled uselessly at his side. He knew he would pass out soon, so if he was going to fight back, it had to be now.

      He suddenly jerked back as hard as he could with his right arm, putting his considerable strength behind it. The knife sliced through muscle and bone and filled Pete with pain worse than any he had ever known existed, but abruptly his hand was free. He had forced the knife to cut its way right out.

      He couldn’t make a fist with that ruined hand, but he could swing his whole arm. He threw himself forward over the counter and crashed his forearm against the side of Manning’s head. The blow knocked Manning into Deaver, and both of them got tangled up for a minute. That gave Pete time to roll off the front of the counter and land on his feet.

      He kicked Manning in the groin and barreled into Deaver, knocking the smaller man off his feet. If he could get outside, Pete thought, he might be able to give Deaver’s men the slip in the darkness. He would probably still bleed to death, but at least he would have a chance to get away.

      He was only halfway to the front door when a pistol roared behind him. Something smashed into the back of his left knee, knocking that leg out from under him. He tumbled to the floor, knocking over some boxes that clattered down around him.

      Pete tried to lift himself, but neither of his arms worked well enough now. Deaver rushed up and kicked him in the jaw. Stunned, Pete rolled onto his back.

      Deaver leaned over him, cursing.

      “I’ll kill you, you blasted—”

      “Wait a minute,” Manning croaked. He stumbled into Pete’s view, which was blurry now because his spectacles had fallen off. Pete could still see well enough to know that Manning was clutching himself where he’d been kicked, and Pete felt a little bit of satisfaction from that, anyway.

      Manning went on in a pain-wracked voice, “Let me … work on him. He’ll tell us … what we want to know.”

      “Yeah,” Deaver said. “That’s a good idea. Let’s cut these trousers off of him.”

      Pete started to bellow in outrage even before he felt the touch of the cold steel. Once he did, the bellows turned to shrieks of pain.

      And in the end, of course, he told them how the mountain man and his companions had talked about spending the winter in the Assiniboine village. Deaver and Manning believed him this time. After being tortured like that, no man could have uttered anything except the truth.

      Pete knew there was no hope for him now. He was hurt too badly to recover. But he managed to husk out, “Go ahead … and kill me.”

      Deaver shook his head and grinned.

      “I don’t think so. That’d be too easy. There are some knives over there in a case, Caleb. Get a couple of them and we’ll stake him out.”

      They spread his arms, and Manning drove a knife through the palm of each hand, then used a maul to hammer the blades even more deeply into the floor.

      “What about his feet?”

      Deaver shook his head.

      “He ain’t goin’ anywhere, just like that.” He jerked a thumb at the rooms in the back. “Go check those out and make sure nobody else is back there. We’re not leavin’ anybody alive except for the Dutchman here, and he won’t be alive for very long once we burn this place down around him.”

      Pete groaned. Bad enough they were going to kill him, but did they have to destroy the business he had worked so hard to build, too?

      Clearly, nothing was beyond the viciousness of animals such as these.

      A moment later, through the red haze that was beginning to fill his head, Pete heard a pistol shot. He knew that Manning had just murdered that other fur trapper. Now no one would ever know what had happened here or who was responsible for this atrocity.

      “I threw around some coal oil,” he heard Deaver say. “Get that candle. We’ll light it and get out of here.”

      A moment later, Pete heard the whoosh of flames and felt their heat against his face. In a matter of seconds, they were all around him, rapidly turning into an inferno.

      The roaring blaze behind them turned the night sky an ugly, garish shade of orange as Deaver, Manning, and the other three men rode away from the trading post. Manning shifted uncomfortably in his saddle, and Deaver asked, “Feelin’ any better?”

      “Not much. That old man deserved everything he got.”

      “Yeah, but at least he told us where to find Preacher.”

      Manning hesitated, then said, “We don’t have time to go after him right now, Willie. You know that. We’ve got to rendezvous with those other fellas. I was willin’ to come back here tonight, but—”

      “Don’t worry,” Deaver broke in impatiently. “I haven’t forgotten about that business we have to take care of. But Pete said Preacher was plannin’ to winter with Bent Leg’s bunch of redskins. And our business won’t take us all winter. There’ll be plenty of time later on to teach that son of a bitch and his friends a lesson they’ll never forget.”

      “All right,” Manning said with a grin and a nod. “I like the sound of that.”

      They rode on as the flames leaped high behind them, consuming Blind Pete’s Place and everything in it.

      Yes, sir, Deaver thought, it was going to be a long winter.

      Especially for Preacher.

      CHAPTER 4

      A storm roared down out of Canada a few days later, bringing with it a biting wind and hard pellets of sleet that pelted down, making life miserable for man and horse alike.

      Because of that, Preacher considered them lucky to have found a cave where they could get out of the weather. It was empty, so they didn’t have to share it with a hibernating grizzly bear.

      People had used the chamber in the side of a rocky hillside for shelter in the past. That

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