Blood on the Divide Read Online Free Page B

reaches of the mountains and the rivers.
    Preacher saddled up and gave Hammer his head and let him go. Hammer soon began following wagon tracks and Preacher, with a sigh, let him have his way. He found no fresh signs of graves along the way for the next two days, so the pilgrims were staying lucky. So far. Two days later, he saw the buzzards circling. He checked his weapons and pushed on, steeling himself for the awful sight that would soon present itself to him.
    He came up cautiously on what was left of the wagon train he’d seen back at the post. It was anything but a pretty sight. The men and women and kids had been hit whilst they were abed. Nearly all of them was dressed in bed clothes, which was something Preacher never could understand about pilgrims. They dress up to go to bed, then take off their dress-up-to-bed clothes to dress up again when they got out of bed.
    Rifle in hand, Preacher walked among the silent and stiffened dead. The women and the girls had all been raped and the men tortured pretty bad. Preacher had seen sights similar, but not on this large a scale. A man might say it didn’t bother him – as Preacher had often said – and a man might say that a man gets used to it – as Preacher had often said – but a man really don’t get used to it. A man just steels himself for the task, that’s all.
    The buzzards were everywhere, many of them too bloated from human flesh and entrails to fly. They just waddled around and looked disgusting. Preacher found an intact shovel amid the wreckage and rubble and knocked half a dozen of the big, lumbering carrion eaters in the head until the rest of them got the message and waddled off a few yards away from the bodies, to stand out of harm’s way and stare malevolently at the man who spoiled their dining.
    Preacher began the laborious task of dragging what was left of the bodies off the trail and over to a ravine. There, he dumped them over the side. It wasn’t very sedate, and certainly no one would call it Christian, but it was the best the mountain man could do. Damned if he was going to dig a lot of holes in the rocky ground. It would take him a week. By that time the bodies would be stinking so bad not even the buzzards could stand it. He really had no idea how many men and women and kids had been massacred, for they’d been dead several days and the buzzards and the varmits had been hard at work, dragging bodies and parts of bodies off into the woods to eat or stash for later.
    Preacher changed out of his buckskins and into homespuns and worked all that day. It was late afternoon when he had nearly filled the small ravine with bodies and caved in the top to crudely cover the remains. He made a cross out of rocks, like a T on the ground, carefully working the rocks into the ground so’s they’d stay put . . . at least for a time. He’d gotten used to the smell, but knew the vile odor had permeated his clothing and they’d have to be thrown away. Which was the reason he’d changed into homespuns. He found some soap amid the rubble and stowed the bars in his pack. He camped a mile from the ambush site and the next morning, after a bath, began casting around for sign. What he found disturbed him more than a little.
    While he was gathering up a few stray horses that had wandered back to the ambush site and building a crude corral for them, he ruminated on the sign he’d found.
    It appeared that maybe half a dozen or so people had escaped the slaughter and headed into the woods. And from the size of their footprints, they either was women or kids or both. There wasn’t a man-sized print to be found.
    â€œLord have mercy,” Preacher said. “Little children adrift in the wilderness. If they was borned out here, they might have a chance. But these is town kids, and I bet most of them don’t know left from right.”
    He went off the trail and into the timber, staying with the tracks of