‘I’ll tell you. Let’s just think about what they’ve been saying Sheriff. I seen a lot of folks brought back from Indians. Sure, some of them was clean off their heads; some of the little ones lost their names and all trace of ever having been white and Christian. But,’ and he paused to reinforce what he was saying, I’ve never heard of a case where five children, held for only a short time, and having been took at a late kind of age, have forgotten their second names. It doesn’t make any sense. Aaron must have been fourteen or so when he says the Mescalero took him. In that time he doesn’t show much signs of having suffered. Caleb’s only been taken a few months. Yet they all say they can’t recall anything about their previous lives. Families. Names. Dates. Places. I tell you, Sheriff, it’s a load of lying shit!’
‘You mean they ain’t never been held prisoner by any Apaches?’ stammered Abernathy. Trying desperately to hold on to his exhausted, reeling senses.
‘No. Those are Mescalero knives. And they stink of Indian grease. They’ve been held, all right. But my guess is that they weren’t held for long. And that they were all taken at the same time.’
‘Then …?’
‘Then why? Yeah, Sheriff, that is one hell of a fine question. I wondered if it was some kind of a trick to lure you out here. Then that white-headed boy called me by my name, and I guess now I’m wonderin’ if it might be a way of reachin’ me. But. Hell! I just don’t know.’
Abernathy scratched meditatively at his groin. ‘But they say they know about Susannah Jackson and where she is, don’t they?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And they just seem to think that killin’ poor Miss Hersham was all right. Like stampin’ on a scorpion. They don’t show a jot of remorse.’
Herne lay back on his elbow, looking across at the pale blurs that were the five silent children. ‘I know, Sheriff. There are too many damned questions to this puzzle and not enough answers. They say that the Mescalero took the Jackson girl off a train. Butchered everyone else, and they’ve got her up somewheres near Houghton’s Bluff.’
‘What used to be Houghton’s Bluff,’ corrected the lawman wearily.
‘And they got away. Now, we know they’re lyin’ about the way they’ve been kept. How long and all. So what puzzles me is how much they really know. How do they know about the girl? We never mentioned her name, but Aaron knew it. And that she’s the daughter of a senator. There’s something just doesn’t set right.’
‘They say they’ll show us where the dead are from the train,’ said Abernathy, hesitantly. ‘Not far from here.’
‘Maybe. We’ll give it a try on the morrow. We’ll send the children along ahead of us. Keep an eye on them. I can cover them from a good quarter of a mile with the Sharps. That’s all we can do.’
‘What about tonight?’
‘What?’
‘Tonight?’ The fat lawman sighed a great sigh, ‘I guess you’re goin’ to say we have to keep watch to make sure they don’t try nothing on us while it’s dark.’
Herne grinned at him. A smile that lacked any element of mirth. ‘You guess right, Sheriff.’
‘Should I take first?’
The shootist looked at him. Seeing a tired, overweight old man, wishing this particular can of worms had never gotten opened. Abernathy was close to being at the end,
‘I’ll go first, Sheriff. I’ll wake you a little after midnight.’
‘Thanks, Jed. Jesus! Thanks.’
It was close to three before Jed woke the sheriff. He was used to doing without sleep for long periods, his body toughened and trained by the life he led. It wasn’t particularly a generous gesture. Having brought Abernathy so far, and with his deep-seated suspicion that all was not right, he might as well try and help the lawman to survive so that he could be of some use in whatever perils might lie ahead of them.
The children were no trouble. He had made them all lie against a steep wall of rock, where they would have to pass him to reach the main trail or their animals.
Once he thought that he heard the distant sound of men passing on horseback, a distance away. Faint and muffled, but it lasted only a few moments and though he strained his hearing for it, the noise didn’t come back again.
The rest of the night, until he roused Abernathy, Herne was locked in with his own thoughts, pondering the array of mysteries.
There were large riddles, as well as small ones. The little boy, Caleb. Whitey Coburn had always been a successful ladies’ man, despite his strange appearance. Or, as he used to claim, because of his strange appearance. And there was something about Caleb that put Jed in mind of his old, dead friend. But the boy claimed that he knew nothing about his parents. Whitey had never married, but there’d been plenty of women. One in particular. A whore from out Dallas way, Herne remembered. Amanda. That had been her name. About ten years ago.
But that was a small enigma.
What it was all about was the large one. Five mysterious children appear in a little township, Tyler’s Crossing, and commit a senseless and particularly brutal murder of a helpless old woman. Just hours before Herne rode in. Followed by the story of the kidnapping by local Mescalero Apaches of a senator’s daughter. A reward. The children leading them on. The ghost town of Houghton’s Bluff.
Memories. Times that were past, creeping out to haunt him.
Just before he woke the lawman from a muttering uneasy sleep, Herne heard one of the children cry out. A low, desolate cry of loneliness. He walked, cat-footed, over to where the five of them were sleeping, looking down at them by the light of the half-moon that hung itself over the surrounding hills.
It was Caleb. Lying on his back, one arm thrown wide, the other to his face. The thumb securely between his pale lips. The face serene and calm, despite the cry, though the eyelids twitched and danced as if he was having some turbulent dream.
Herne knelt silently down beside the child and studied the face, waiting for some minutes. But the cry wasn’t repeated, and he finally rose and went back to his own place, his worries unresolved.
They were moving by the time that false dawn had faded, the east finally lightening with the pink promise of a fine day. The children rode their part-wild ponies with an expert ease, bunched together. Herne and the sheriff walked their horses for the first hour or more to shepherd their strength, avoiding conversation. The children had promised to take them to where they said Susannah Jackson was being held, so there seemed little danger of them attempting any kind of escape. They could have done that the previous evening, but had clearly chosen to remain behind and wait for their two pursuers.
‘Could we please have our knives back, Sheriff Abernathy?’ asked Aaron.
‘1 doubt that, boy,’ replied the lawman. ‘Right now they stay here in my saddlebag. They’re evidence against you for murder.’
‘But we was …’ began one of the twins.
‘Shut up, John One,’ snapped the girl. ‘Or you’ll get what for.’
It was an interesting little spat between the children. The first sign of dissent that Herne had noticed, and he decided that he’d have to try and get one of the younger boys on his own and press him.
Perhaps the twin called John One. If he could remember which one he was. The boy with a large smudge of mud across the back of his pants. That was the one.
The trail to Houghton’s Bluff wound in among the foothills, snaking along narrow arroyos and sliding down sandy bluffs. Caleb’s pony slipped and fell, sending the boy tumbling over like a discarded doll, but he sprang up again at the bottom. Going immediately to the animal and slapping it as hard as he was able over the head to teach it a lesson. Herne nodded approvingly. Some folks believed in training a horse with kindness. Jed shared the belief of most men who worked with horses and relied on them for their livelihood - and often lives - that a horse remembered a clubbing blow between the eyes better than all the lumps of sugar and pats on the neck.
Time was this track was wide enough for a loaded oxcar
t,’ said Abernathy as they paused at the bottom of a steep ascent.
If Herne’s memory was correct, then Houghton’s Bluff was up that trail. A stiff climb of a couple of miles, stretching up over a thousand feet. But it was right what the sheriff had said.
The wagon ruts were nearly gone. Washed away by the rains. And part of the trail seemed to have gone the same way. Peering up under a shading hand, Herne was able to make out a place around a quarter of the way up where there’d been an earthy slip. The path narrowed to what looked only a couple of feet, dangerously undercut.
Once a town began to die, the Arizona weather did everything necessary to hasten the end.
Aaron led the way, sitting easily, bare-backed on the stolen pony. The children had been vague on just how they’d managed to escape from the Mescalero, as though they’d never thought to be asked about it. There was a muddled tale of sneaking away in the night and taking the knives from sleeping warriors.
It was another small lie, as Herne and Abernathy knew that it was out of the question for all five of them to have stolen weapons without disturbing at least one of the Mescalero.
John One came second, followed closely by his twin brother. Then the girl, slumping, with little Caleb bringing up the rear.
Abernathy came next, with Jed as rearguard.
The ambush came at the narrowest part, where it was impossible to group against an attack. The first shot took one of the twins clear off his pony, exploding his head like a mortar bomb of blood and brains and bone. Herne saw the body fall, seeing in passing the mud on the trousers.
But he was too busy to mourn the passing of John One.
Chapter Seven
‘Get down!’ yelled Herne, already out of the saddle, the Sharps in his hand as he peered about them. Seeing from the gouts of powder smoke where the main body of their attackers were. Ahead and above. It could be worse. Even a good shot found it hard to fire down at an angle, and the Apaches were not traditionally fine marksmen with their stolen rifles and carbines.
His horse trotted back a few steps, around a corner from the firing. Abernathy was fighting his bucking animal, snapping off wild shots from his Tranter. The children had slipped immediately from the ponies, letting them run free, diving for cover from the fusillade of shooting. The body of the little boy lay where it had fallen.
The attack at least removed one doubt from Herne’s mind. He had wondered whether the Mescalero had been holding the parents of the children captive and had used them to lure the sheriff and himself into a trap. But it was unlikely that the Mescalero, who would have given some sort of word to the children, would then go back on it and kill them as well.
So there was someone else.
But that was something that Herne would have time to wonder about—after he’d coped with the ambush on the steep trail.
He saw one of the Indian warriors shifting his cover, and cocked the Sharps. Holding it snug into his shoulder, squinting along the barrel. Gently squeezing the filed-down trigger and sending the big fifty caliber round on its booming way. Seeing the small figure in cotton shirt and breeches throw up its arms and slide down the orange face of the rock.
It was difficult to tell how many of the Apaches there were. From the volume of the shooting it seemed like the party of ten or so that Jed had tracked at the waterhole earlier. Nine or so, he corrected.
‘Eight,’ he said, out loud, seeing that a lucky shot from the lawman’s pistol had brought down another of the young bucks from further up the trail.
Abernathy at last got his bay gelding under control and dragged it to the hanging face of the cliff, where he had reasonable protection from the Mescalero shooting.
‘How many?’ he yelled back to Jed.
‘Round eight, I make it. Five ahead up the trail and three above us.’
‘We sit tight?’
‘You got a better idea Sheriff?’ shouted the shootist.
There was no reply.
It was a question of who was going to move. The children and both men were safely in hiding. The firing became sporadic and finally ceased altogether, the Apaches realizing that they were fruitlessly wasting ammunition.
There was a period of perhaps a half hour when nothing happened. Herne saw Abernathy trying to move to him and waved him back before he showed himself to the waiting Indians. The children kept very still and quiet, though Jed once spotted someone - Aaron, he thought - edging through the jagged boulders of the landslip, then he too disappeared again.
There was a long tortuous back trail out of Houghton’s Bluff that Herne remembered. He’d traveled that way after finishing off the Nelson family. Killing the father and two of the sons, leaving Walt Nelson a helpless cripple.
The Apaches would know about that trail, he thought. But would they bother to try and split their forces and take them from the rear? It wasn’t the usual Indian way. They would normally ride in, attack and then ride away again. The rare times they got themselves organized, as they’d done ten years earlier on the sun-baked rolling grasslands above the Little Big Horn River, then the white man had little chance.
‘I figure on a charge. Maybe soon,’ he hissed to the lawman, sweating in the overhang of rock.
‘Could be. They get over that slip and we’re in big trouble.’
The earth had subsided from the cliffs, virtually blocking the path. Leaving only a narrow gap, wide enough for a single rider to pick his way through, if his horse were not frightened by the yawning chasm at its flank. The whites were trapped on a broad plateau on the lower side of the slip, with the Apaches holding the upper stretch of the trail. Herne knew that they couldn’t retreat without coming under heavy fire. So all he could do was hope that the natural bravery of the Mescalero would give him a single chance of defeating them.
It was the sudden whinny of a pony that told Herne the Hunter that the attack was imminent. If they were coming at them, then they’d come in force, leaving only one or at best two braves to keep watch. It was time to make a move.
He slithered along, keeping close to the overhang, until he was close by the lawman.
‘Give me your Winchester, Sheriff,’ he whispered.
‘Why?’
‘Just damned do it, before … Just give it me. You have the Sharps. I need a rifle to fire fast. You pick off any that get past me.’
Abernathy handed over the walnut stocked forty-four. ‘Got ten rounds in it.’
‘Ten certain, or ten maybe?’
‘Well …’ he swallowed to try and control his nervousness. ‘I figure around ten.’
‘Then it’s ten maybe.’ Herne had nothing but contempt for a man who kept a gun partly loaded and didn’t even know for sure how many rounds the piece was carrying. And that contempt showed in his voice.
‘I got more in my—’ whined the fat man, groping around the back of his belt.
‘Forget it,’ snapped the shootist.
‘But what are you …?’ began Abernathy, but he was talking to empty air. Herne had ghosted away, wriggled past where the children hid, until he was flattened against the safe side of the earth-tip. Only three or four feet from the gap where the Apaches must come. Sighing, the sheriff picked up the Sharps rifle, feeling the weight of it. Checking it was loaded and thumbing the hammer. Holding it cradled, ready for the attack.
It didn’t take long.
Less than five minutes later there was a burst of shooting from the Mescalero bucks higher up the path, sending bullets and stones ricocheting and howling across the broad plateau of the trail. Herne guessed that this would be the cover for the rest to charge, and he was right. There was the rhythmic pounding of hooves on the hard earth of the path. Then, the first howling of the warriors as they came near to the gap.
There was little point in simply killing the first man at the narrowest part. The others would withdraw and not much would have been achieved. Herne knew he had to try and do a whole lot more.
‘Kill the bastards, Mr. Herne,’ called a voice fr
om behind him. Quiet, yet brimming with hatred. The girl’s voice. ‘Kill them for what they did to John One.’
He waved a hurried hand to show that he’d heard them, but all of his concentration was needed for the task to come.
The first rider reined in his pony, pulling back on the coarse rope bridle, bringing it rearing on its hind legs. Heeling it on with a yell, to force it at the two foot wide path. Taking it at a slow walk. Herne, leaning well back, keeping out of sight.
Letting the first one through. The second. Then pouring in a hail of lead against the backs of the warriors. Levering and firing the gun at point-blank range, seeing the blood flower from their bright shirts, dappling the flanks of their animals.
Three rounds for each Mescalero. Then two more for the third man, caught halfway through the gap. The pony jerking forward towards Herne, throwing the corpse of its rider over its back.
‘Eight,’ counted Herne between his teeth, levering the spent cartridge case from the breech, hearing it tinkle among the rocks. The lever also cocking the gun. Seeing a fourth Apache, halfway through the gap, aiming a carbine at him from the waist. Pressing the trigger.
Nothing. The dry click of an empty gun. There wasn’t even time to curse. Nor to drop the rifle and draw the Colt from its holster,
Jed flicked the gun around, grasping it by the polished barrel. Swinging it at the Mescalero as if he was intending to hew down a great redwood with a single mighty stroke.
‘Jesus Christ!’ breathed the lawman, twenty yards away. It was all too fast for him, carrying him inexorably out of his dream. At that moment of cataclysmic carnage Sheriff Ralph J. Abernathy knew that all of this wasn’t worth anywhere near five thousand dollars. And he wished he was safe back in his office at Tyler’s Crossing tucking into a second helping of Gabriella’s chili and beans, washed down with some rough red wine.
The sound of the rifle butt snapping in two was almost drowned out by the scream of the Indian as it hit him across the face. A scream that was almost immediately choked in the eruption of blood. The stock had hit the young brave as he was leaning forwards, concentrating on hitting the white man with his own bullets. He never even saw the blow, simply feeling the dreadful power. It smashed through his lips, snapping off most of his front teeth at the gums. Driving on, through and up, pulping his nose into shards of bloodied bone. The force of the swing was so devastating that his face hardly checked it, and the splinters of bone were pounded backwards, through the soft tissues of his skull, into his brain.
Death School (Herne the Hunter Western Book 14) Page 5
