Herne the Hunter 21

by John J. McLaglen

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Real hurtin’ … they killed the breed. My brother get away?’

  Herne hesitated. ‘Yeah. Yeah, he did. Not a scratch on him, Mr. Knightley. Got a horse and lit out.’

  ‘Good. I wouldn’t …I’m oldest…want die. I want to … Ethan Corleon that bloody bastard. Gunned down an old squaw spilled water on his boots. That was …’

  ‘That was why they came,’ finished Herne, face set in a grim mask of anger. It was so typical of the older rider. Corleon exercised his own uncontrollable rage, and flames swept clean across the land.

  ‘You get goin’, Jim,’ said the doomed man, his breathing harsh and pained.

  ‘Jed. It’s Jed Herne.’

  ‘Kill me, ’fore you go. And give my brother … he was younger. Near choked on some beans and …’ The voice faded away to a relentless muttering again as the brain closed down the lines.

  Before leaving the wrecked way station, Jed drew his pistol and carefully put a .36 ball between where Knightley’s eyes had once been.

  Eight

  During his sixteen years of life, Jedediah Herne had earned plenty about keeping out of trouble, and about low to get your own way. But he was only a boy. Certainly he’d killed a man, but it had been, more or less, self-defense.

  The few days that followed after he smelled smoke upon that ridge made a change in his life that was to mark him all his days. They turned him from being a lively and sometimes uncontrolled boy into a calculating and ruthless killer.

  He was surprised how easy it was to turn from boy into man.

  ~*~

  The next station was eighteen miles along the line. Dusk vas nearly on him and his horse was already full tired. After putting the tortured man beyond the reach of fur-her pain, Jed had checked out the sheds for any food. With the rain that had been falling there wasn’t a great problem with water. Indeed there was a well at the station hat ran free from fall through spring. But a Pony Express rider didn’t often carry much in the way of food with hem.

  On a shelf in the unburned out-building Jed found a jug of molasses, and some flour. A crock of butter and some alt. Broken on the floor was a large glass jar of pickled oysters.

  Herne took what he wanted, considering stopping and making himself some biscuits among the ashes of the bunkhouse. But caution prevailed. If the Cheyenne were still anywhere around they might have heard the sound of his shot. Though the rain would have tended to muffle the noise. The best thing to do was move on away and fine somewhere to camp for the night while he and the gelding recovered their strength.

  ~*~

  A half-mile further west there was another canyon opening to the north, and Jed walked his horse into it. His pistol still drawn and ready. The rain had stopped again, but the air breathed damp and heavy. There had been an old tarpaulin in the corner of the shed and Herne had used his knife to cut off a length of it. Using it to lay over himself while he slept, the Colt cocked and ready by his head. The night passed quickly.

  ~*~

  Dawn came up reluctantly, a watery sun hardly showing through a heavy cover of low clouds. It had rained during the night and the gelding lapped gratefully at several puddles lying in basins of rock. Jed joined it, laying on his stomach, head cocked to one side to watch for any attackers. But the canyon was quiet.

  Herne swallowed a half dozen of the oysters, grimacing at their bitter slickness. He unbuttoned his breeches and pissed on a jagged boulder, watching incuriously as hi urine steamed in the cold, damp air. Before leaving the camp he folded up the makeshift blanket and tucked it over the mochila. Then checked his pistol, ensuring that the spare cylinder was also capped and ready for immediate use.

  Only then, at a little after seven, did he lead the horse out of the canyon, back on the trail. Swinging up on it back, and moving westwards at a fast canter.

  ~*~

  The gelding had recovered much of its stamina from the rest. When the horses were being bought up by the field managers for the Pony Express, only the best and toughest animals were purchased. Five hundred in all, no more than fifteen hands high and guaranteed sound in wind and limb. An average horse would have cost about fifty dollars. The Pony paid around two hundred dollars to make sure of getting what they wanted.

  Next along the line came one of the swing stations. Well over a hundred of them dotted the trail, broken by the larger stations where riders would meet and change. At the swing stations there would only be basic food and drink and fresh animals.

  Herne knew the couple who ran the next place along. The husband was Josiah Clifton, well into his late fifties. His wife, Aurora, was ten years or so younger. A raw-boned woman who had once bent a skillet across Jed’s skull for cussing in her presence. Yet her own language would have shamed most stage drivers.

  Both of the Cliftons had lived in this part of Wyoming for around ten years, and they’d be about ready for anything that came along. Once a rider didn’t arrive on time, or within an hour or so, then they would immediately assume that something must be wrong and they’d start to make some basic safety precautions. Tether the spare stock near the house. Get the slitted shutters up over the windows and have the heavy bar ready to drop over the door-latch. Put out the fire and block off the chimney. Check the firearms. Bring in what water they could and make sure they had food. Indians rarely bothered to try and lay siege to any home or farm. They didn’t have the patience for it.

  So, if they’d received warning, then the Cliftons should have been all right.

  ~*~

  The Clifton swing station stood among great swathes of woodland, soaring away from the huts and the corral, on the slopes of the foothills. As Jed came along the winding trail towards it he constantly sniffed at the damp wind that blew in his face. Seeking, and dreading, the same scorched, bittersweet scent that had greeted him the previous afternoon.

  But there was nothing.

  Eventually the chimney of the station came into sight, sticking up above the trees. The corral was behind the house, not visible until a rider came within a hundred yards. Herne had always wondered whether the Cliftons would not have been better advised to have cut the underbrush back further from their home and prevented an attacker from coming close under cover.

  The rain that had sliced down during the night had effectively obliterated all trace of tracks on the beaten roadway. Certainly nobody had been along the trail that morning. And there was no sign of fire damaging the buildings of the swing station. Not even smoke threading from the chimney.

  ‘No smoke at all?’ said Herne, reining the horse and sitting still. It was nearly noon on a chilly day. In a region where wood was plentiful there wasn’t any reason not to have the comfort of a fire.

  One aspect of Jed Herne’s growing maturity was his increasing caution. A callow boy would have suspected trouble and come whooping along, eager to plunge into the heart of a fray.

  He moved immediately off the trail, walking the gelding under the trees, threading a path parallel to the road, edging in closer to the house. Finally stopping when he was almost within sight. Dismounting and tethering the animal. Continuing on foot.

  Stopping once he glimpsed the station through the trees.

  Everything seemed normal. Apart from the quiet. He couldn’t hear any sound from the horses that there should have been in the corral. At least a half dozen animals should have been there.

  And they kept geese. Aurora was mighty proud of her geese, he recollected. A dozen or more of the noisy, quacking creatures, that she claimed were better guards than dogs. Even said that the Romans or the Greeks or someone like that used to have geese guarding their houses. It was beginning to look much like the geese hadn’t done the Cliftons much good.

  Herne cat footed his way nearer, pausing only when he was on the very edge of the cover, less than twenty paces off. There was not a single sign of anyone living there. The door was open, swinging gently backwards and forwards in the light wind. Inside he could see that there was a p
late on the table, and a bucket of water with a dipper resting against it.

  Josiah was a man proud of his job. Not the kind of man to walk away from the station and leave it open like that. Yet, if the Cheyenne had been there, why wasn’t there some evidence of their presence?

  Cautiously, head turning constantly, Jed broke cover and ran to the house, flattening himself against the rough wood of the wall. Standing still, fighting for control over his breath. Licking his lips, finding that the palms of his hands were slick with perspiration. Waiting and listening.

  For a moment Herne thought that he had caught the faintest whisper of movement from the trees away behind him and he froze, eyes raking the walls of green. Nothing happened. But he realized that if there were still Cheyenne around the safest place might be inside the swing station.

  To think and to act were close to being the same with young Jedediah Herne, and he moved immediately. Stopping in the neat kitchen, looking around. Wrinkling his nostrils at a smell he couldn’t locate. A little like a privy that hadn’t been emptied for a while too long. It wasn’t like Aurora Clifton to allow her home to become fouled like that.

  Once inside he realized that there had been visitors. Muddied marks about the floor, looking like moccasins. And someone had been through the drawers of the pine dresser, taking things out. Dropping others. There was always a long gun, a Sharps, hanging on pegs over the center fireplace. That was missing.

  But there wasn’t any sign of either of the Cliftons.

  Jed stepped through into the living room, seeing that the door to the sleeping-quarters was closed. He didn’t fancy entering that far room through the door, not even with a pistol in his hand. Even though his commonsense told him that there couldn’t be anyone there. If the Cheyenne had been to the station, then they must have gone hours back. And it looked like both the Cliftons had warning of their approach and had fled into the woods around.

  He took a couple of silent steps towards the closed door.

  ‘Best stand still, mister.’

  He recognized the voice. But he didn’t make the mistake of trying to turn around and earn himself a bullet in the kidneys.

  ‘It’s Jedediah Herne, from the Pony, Mrs. Clifton. Can I turnaround?’

  ‘Oh, yeah, Jed. I know you now. Just that in the dark in here I didn’t … Sure.’

  It was Aurora Clifton, holding a battered Army Colt that looked as though it had been used for stirring stew, hammering in fence-posts and poking the fire. But she held it with a sense of purpose, and it was cocked. As the boy faced her she eased down the hammer, tucking it back into the wide leather belt she was wearing. She was dressed in a long skirt of blue wool, over men’s boots. And a stained cream blouse. A woolen shawl, black, was pinned over her broad shoulders.

  Jed tried a smile, but it barely even made it as far as his lips. ‘Sure made me start, ma’am.’

  ‘Where’s Josiah?’

  ‘Haven’t seen him, ma’am.’

  ‘It was Cheyenne. You seen any sign of them purgatorial sons of bitches?’

  ‘No, ma’am, I haven’t. But the Knightley spread was burned out.’

  ‘All dead?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘Jedediah … Please don’t keep on callin’ me ‘ma’am’, like I’m some stooped old fuckin’ schoolmarm. You hear me?’

  ‘Yes … Yes, I do.’

  ‘They took the long gun. I was out in the woods. One of the mustangs been runnin’ a mite lame, and I took the bastard out for exercisin’. Heard them. Around a dozen, I figured. I guessed best place to be was out there, so I found a cave I knowed and slept there.’

  The woman was remarkably self-possessed. Her hair was tangled and there was a smear of mud across one cheek, but her eyes were bright and she looked filled with energy.

  Just seeing her standing there made Jed feel a whole lot better.

  ‘You said the Knightleys was dead?’

  He nodded. ‘And their breed.’

  ‘Bad, son?’ There was a note of sympathy in her voice.

  ‘Hell … I never … never seen anything like it. They did some real bad … You know.’

  It was her turn to nod. ‘Sure, Jed. I guess I know better than most. I was took by Oglala Sioux when I was but eleven. I learned some lessons there.’ She smiled. ‘And I learned them damned fast, you can bet.’

  ‘You figure that Mr. Clifton might have made it away?’

  ‘I’d sure like to think that. Facts don’t show up. He’d have been around. Be here by now.’

  ‘You think they took him with them? Back to their camp?’

  ‘I don’t rightly …’ she sighed. ‘After so many years without trouble. Them Cheyenne whore-suckers sure make a body angry.’

  ‘Before I … he died, Mr. Knightley said that the trouble came from Ethan Corleon.’

  For a moment he thought that Aurora Clifton was going to spit on her own living room floor. ‘That son of a dog! Comes sniffin’ round my skirts when he’s here. Scar-faced little runt. I told him he tried to get his hand up me one more time I’d knock him down, and put my pistol here where the sun don’t shine. Pull the trigger and blow his brains out his mouth. What did he do?’

  ‘Killed a Cheyenne squaw, he said.’

  ‘Yeah. That’d surely do it. And I bet you, Jedediah, that Mr. Corleon is off free, never lookin’ back at the blood bein’ spilled.’

  ‘I guess so, ma’am.’

  ‘If they took Josiah, then he’s a dead man. Their women’ll have had him for too long. Needles and beads and fire and all. Poor devil. Josiah deserved better than that. I’d have prayed for a fast passing for him. Good man. Got his faults. Who don’t? But life surely ain’t perfect, Jed. And that is a fuckin’ all-time truth.’

  ‘What shall we do?’

  ‘I got that mustang out yonder. He’ll carry me. You mounted?’

  ‘Yeah. Gelding out in the woods.’

  ‘Good boy.’ She stepped in closer and patted him on the cheek. Letting her hand remain for a moment touching his face in a surprisingly gentle gesture. ‘You’re only a lad. What, eighteen?’

  ‘Sixteen, Mrs. Clifton.’

  ‘Sixteen! Call me Aurora, Jed. We’ll be together awhiles now. Sixteen. Hellfire and fuckin’ piss-boilers! I had me four babies when I was sixteen. And seen them all die. It’s not easy, boy.’

  ‘We goin’ to look in there, Aurora?’ pointing at the closed bedroom door.

  ‘Sure. Truth is, son, I have me a kind of fear as to what we might find there. No reason but. … I’d take it kindly for your company.’

  The fact that such a tough, middle-aged woman was depending on him also made Herne feel better. Stronger.

  The door opened easily on oiled strap hinges. Shutters were across the windows, and it was impossible to see across the room. Aurora went and flung them open, blinking at the brightness.

  ‘Rain’s passed, boy,’ she said.

  But Jed was looking at the double bed that stood in the far corner. Blankets were pulled over it, and a patterned patchwork quilt. Beneath it there was the clear shape of someone lying there.

  ‘I see it,’ she whispered.

  ‘Should I—’

  ‘No. You go outside, Jedediah, and see what food’s left in the kitchen.’

  ‘But it might be …’

  She touched him lightly on the shoulder. Gripping with her fingers. ‘I know what that is, son. Sure as the Good Lord makes eatin’ apples, I know what’s lyin’ there on our marital bed.’

  ‘I’ll go find some food, then.’

  ‘Sure. Leave me be awhiles. When I come out then we can get movin’.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘On. Only place to go. In the end we’ll come against some station that the Cheyenne haven’t reached and there we can rest. Now, you go.’

  As he began to close the door to the bedroom behind him, Jed made the mistake of looking back. Seeing that Aurora Clifton had pulled down the blanket. In that fragment of frozen time Je
d was never sure what he saw. All it seemed like was a collection of meat from a butcher’s store, all ragged and torn and jumbled.

  ~*~

  Once he thought he might have heard her crying, but he wasn’t sure.

  Nine

  Jed was hesitant about saying anything to the woman.

  ‘Pardon me, Aurora?’

  ‘What is it, Jed?’

  ‘I’m not rightly sure you should have fired the swing station.’

  Behind them, as they moved steadily on westwards, he could still see the great shroud of black, oily smoke that towered several hundred feet in the cool sky.

  ‘Maybe right, son.’

  ‘The building kind of … well, it was owned by the Pony, wasn’t it?’

  ‘It was. But it was my home, Jed. Should have been my home, and Josiah, for the rest of our natural days. Now it’s gone. Fitting end for my husband. Funeral pyre for him, seen for fifty miles off. He’d have liked that. Quiet man, you know, Jedediah. But with some real fiery sparks glowin’ inside him.’

  ~*~

  As they rode on, the woman astride the mustang, Jed found himself thinking about how he was going to have to kill Ethan Corleon. Already he’d killed two men, but the first had been on a violent impulse, in a rage. And Knightley had been a mercy killing. This was something different. The older galloper had willfully set a torch to a trail of powder, and now the fires were racing across the land.

  Charley Howell talked a lot about debts and owing people. Ethan had set himself a bill of reckoning, and if nobody else turned up to claim it, then Herne was prepared to close the account.

  ~*~

  The next swing station was only twelve miles further on, over a rough section of the trail that wound between high walls of rock, and forded a river. Despite the rain they were able to make the crossing without too much difficulty. The weather brightened during the day, and far off ahead of them they could see an occasional patch of sunlight moving across the face of the Rockies.

  The far side of the water Jed swung off the back of his gelding, letting it drink. Aurora Clifton followed his example. He gave his reins to her and went further up the bank, stooping and examining the marks in the dirt.