Free Soul Catcher by Michael C. White

Now, though, the gag was back in the boy's mouth and held in place by a piece of rope that circled his head and affixed him to the tree behind him. It was tied so tight that his mouth was drawn back into a frightful grimace.
    "You gonna tell us where she at, or you want I should cut the whole gawddang thing off, boy?" Preacher threatened.
    Squatting on his haunches like some demented gargoyle, Preacher looked back over his shoulder at Cain and grinned mischievously. His smile was thin and cruel, drawing the skin of his skeletal face hard over the sharp hill features. Preacher held what remained of the bloody ear in his left hand, pulling it tautly away from the Negro's skull so when he did finally draw the razor-sharp knife across it with his right hand, it would come neatly away in one stroke, as if he were filleting a trout. In the time Cain had known him, he had come to learn that Preacher was the sort of man who not only had an aptitude but a passion for inflicting pain. He often bragged about how wealthy planters back where he came from in Botetourt County would pay him two dollars to whip a disobedient slave or to part an ear from the head of a runaway, though he said he'd just as soon do it for nought. ("Ever see a no-earred nigger?" he'd offered as proof that cutting one ear off curbed their desire to run a second time.) Around the campfire once, he'd even related the story of how they'd lynched a nigger for not giving way on the sidewalk to a lady. "Shoulda seed how that darkie danced when he was aswangin' from that tree," he'd bragged.
    In Cain's profession, he saw a good deal of this sort of cruelty. Saw it with certain masters or overseers, agents or traders, patty rollers or slave catchers. A kind of sadism born out of wielding power over another living thing, to do cruelty simply because you could, like a boy casually pulling the wings off a fly. It wasn't violence so much he objected to. Cain was on fairly intimate terms with it. He'd been called upon to kill men--four in peacetime and only God knows how many in the war--and often he'd had to hurt people or cause suffering, but on every single occasion it had been a necessity, something he'd no choice but to do. Not something he had taken pleasure in.
    The boy's coat front was covered in blood, though Preacher had as yet cut only the lobe off one ear. In the light of the campfire, the blood shone dark, the color of claret wine. Nearby, the two dogs that belonged to Little Strofe lay tethered to a spindly birch. They were some mixed breed of hound, lean and long of ear, with tapered muzzles and coats a dappled brown. Wet and shivering against the cold mountain rain, the two looked on the scene with some odd expectancy in their glossy eyes, almost as if at any moment they'd be released and the boy would, too, and he'd run and they'd be called upon to hunt him down again. The excitement of the chase, a wonderful game of hide-and-seek--that's all this was to their canine brains.
    Cain glanced over at Strofe, who sat on a log, eating eggs and corn pone. He wondered when the big man was going to put a stop to this, rein in Preacher's craziness. But Strofe didn't seem concerned. Since they'd started out, he'd been more or less in charge of the other two: directing them to water the horses or start a fire or shoot some game. Generally speaking, Preacher followed his orders, though with a surly, ill-tempered acquiescence, as if the notion were actually his own idea and he hadn't to obey anyone he didn't want to. Even as big as Strofe was and despite the fact that he was Eberly's overseer, and thus Preacher's boss, he sometimes appeared wary of confronting Preacher directly and giving him a command. If he had to tell the skinny blond man to do something or to stop doing something, he would tell him without making eye contact. Maybe say that Mr. Eberly wouldn't look favorably on such and such a thing.
    "You save me some a them eggs, Strofe," Preacher called over. "I'm