Death in Gold

by John J. McLaglen

  The barkeep passed Herne a whiskey bottle and a glass and the gunfighter poured himself a good tot and drank it down in a single swallow.

  He nodded to the man behind the bar and began to move away but he was called back. The bald head leaned over the counter. That right what you said? You’d have bothered killin’ a nothin’ like Hap?”

  Herne looked back at the man with cold, unwavering eyes. “Knew a man once, down Lincoln County way. Billy Bonny, least that’s what he was christened. Said to me one time, “Jed, when you’re the fastest it ain’t the second fastest you got to worry about most, nor the third. It’s the fifty-first. The one you don’t know. The one you can’t work out. The one as might do any damned thing. That’s when you need to be real careful and take the least chances.”

  Herne stood up straight. “Longest damned speech Billy ever made, least in my hearing. But sure was sense.” He looked at the changing expression in the barkeep’s eyes. “I’d have killed him right enough. Before he could’ve pulled back the trigger on that old thing he’d have been plumb dead.”

  He coughed and spat down into the wide rim of the cuspidor alongside the bar. Poor bastard!”

  Jed Herne walked briskly across the main street. For one thing the nights were getting colder. For another he knew better than to linger in that open space. The lights from the saloon would mark out his shadow as he stepped towards the softer light which showed in the doorway of the hotel where he had a room.

  He pushed open the door and walked across the threadbare carpet and up the bare boards of the single flight of stairs. He was tired; the bed would feel good under him. A mattress of straw was better than a blanket on the ground.

  Huh! Herne smiled ruefully to himself as he turned the key in the lock. Was a time when I would’ve thought that was real soft.

  He stepped through into the darkness and as he did so he heard clearly, like hammers on the brain, the triple click of a gun being cocked.

  Chapter Two

  Jed Herne froze. Mouth slightly opened, breath half drawn. Inside his head a clock ticked away the seconds as the shadows began to reveal the outlines of a shape. He could not see the gun, but he could guess where it was. His own right hand was snaking downwards, cautious and deadly as a rattler preparing to strike.

  The shape shifted.

  “Jed?”

  The harsh, metallic tick of time in Herne’s brain was replaced by a flash of recognition, then a cold shiver of shock the full length of his spine. But Coburn was …dead!

  “Whitey?”

  The room seemed to be getting lighter with every moment; the shape took on form, features. Herne saw the outline of the gun; watched as it was holstered. Saw the snow-white hair, the face of the albino. A face in which only the eyes were as yet unclear.

  Herne had no need to see the eyes to know them. He was unlikely to forget. Where the blood vessels of the iris showed through, they shone pinkly through the snow of the man’s face.

  The man who had long been his friend.

  The man who had taken a contract to kill him.

  Isaiah Whitey Coburn.

  Few men called him Whitey and lived to speak the name twice. Herne was one of these. He steadied his shaken nerves and asked, a tone almost of outrage in his voice, “Hell, Whitey. What game you playin’?”

  “No game, Jed. Can’t a man stop by to see a friend when he’s a mind?”

  “Sure. Only some folk might think it a strange way to go visitin’ friends.”

  “Can’t be too careful these days, Jed. You know that probably better’n me.”

  Coburn stifled what might have been a chuckle or a cough. Herne could see the pink eyes now, the lean white face above the slim, wiry body.

  “Seems to me your hand’s still mighty close to that Colt of yourn, Jed.”

  Herne nodded. “Seems to me the last time we met you was takin’ dollars for puttin’ a bullet in my hide.”

  This time it was, a snort of laughter, harsh and short. “That’s right enough.”

  “That still the case?”

  “No more.”

  “How come?”

  Coburn looked up at the man who had been his friend for more years than he cared to remember. “Money ran out. Money that was payin’ me. Heard tell you put a shell into old man Nolan’s brain and all his hard-earned money just ran out along of the blood. Seemed to me that when that happened, my contract was finished. Terminated.”

  Herne’s fingers moved inches further from his gun.

  “Speakin’ of terminated, Whitey, I thought that’s what you were. Didn’t reckon on seein’ you agin this side of the Divide.”

  Coburn spread his hands wide. “Hell, Jed. That weren’t nothin’“

  “As I remember it was by the Rich Stream Falls and they was all iced over like some fancy wedding cake. You took a leap while we was fightin’ and your heel skidded on the ice. Nothin’ but the moon to see by an’ that was covered by cloud most of the time. Last I saw of you was your arms flailin’ fit to bust. Last I heard was four words risin’ up from the darkness.”

  “What words was those, Jedediah?”

  “Far as I recall they was son of a bitch.”

  Whitey Coburn stood up and laughed aloud. He stepped towards Herne and clasped him by both arms, holding him in a firm grip.

  “Thank the Lord for that,” he said. “I’d have been plumb unhappy if n I’d thought of goin’ to my death with a prayer on my lips. Happen that was what saved me. They do say the Devil looks after his own.”

  Herne grinned back. “They surely do say that.”

  “Son of a bitch!” said Coburn softly. “Son of a bitch.”

  Fifteen minutes later the two men were sitting in front of the small wood fire that Herne had lit in the grate. Coburn had produced from his pocket a bottle of Jim Beam best Kentucky Bourbon and they were sitting back warming their bodies with the fire and their throats with the alcohol.

  In a life where there had been little trust, little true friendship, Herne was glad for such a moment.

  “Heard you got yourself a job,” drawled Coburn as the contents of the bottle gradually decreased.

  “Right enough.”

  “An’ .you’re lookin’ for men.”

  “Yep.”

  Coburn cleared his throat and spat down into the fire. The ball of spittle struck the underside of a log, sending up a jet of hissing arid crackling green flame. “Had any luck?”

  “No. Some’ve tried. Weren’t good enough.”

  Whitey Coburn said nothing, merely nodded.

  Herne pushed at the edge of a log with his boot. “An old timer with one arm and a couple of kids, that’s all there’s been.”

  “Uh-huh, Figures.” Coburn reached for the bottle and poured them both another shot. It sure was a good place to be! Damn well was!

  He leaned towards Herne and studied Jed’s face in the flickering light of the fire. Not all that long ago he’d been doing his level best to lodge a bullet in it. Nothing personal, though, a job of work like any other. And Coburn’s work, like Herne’s, was with a gun; like Jed, he treated his work seriously.

  “Don’t forget we was kids once,” Coburn reminded him.

  “I know it. Thought about it earlier this evenin’. Boy come in the saloon, fresh-faced, young. Likely saved all his money from workin’ on the farm to buy hisself a gun. Practiced Sunday mornings stead of goin’ to church.”

  “He not practiced enough?”

  “Not yet. Maybe not ever. Reckon he’s comin’ twenty already. You an’ me, we’d done our share of shootin’ by then.”

  “Too damn right!” Coburn drained his glass and poured in some more. “Way I recall, we was both around eighteen when we was riding with that bastard Quantrill”

  “Jesus Christ! William Clarke Quantrill! That would have been round the time that kid back in the saloon was born.”

  “Whole lot happened since then.”

  Herne looked at the bottle of bourbon, at the orang
e light refracted through the almost empty glass. “Still ain’t no way I’m goin’ to forget it. Little more ‘n a month afore my nineteenth birthday we rode into Lawrence.”

  He kicked out at the fire again, sending sparks and smoke high up into the chimney, staring absently into the flare of flame.

  “Lawrence, Kansas.” He mused.

  … Out of the dark center of Herne’s memory a woman ran towards him. Her arms were stretched wide in a gesture of appeal. He could see the wide brown eyes fixed upon him, saw the mouth open but was unable to hear the words she uttered. They were lost in the general atmosphere of terror and destruction that filled the air.

  As she came alongside his horse’s flanks, he noticed a small scar on her right cheek. One detail picked from so many -yet he had never forgotten it. The scar, the brown eyes, the back of her dress on fire, burning her body.

  Her hand had briefly touched his leg, then she had plummeted suddenly backwards as though struck by some invisible fist Herne had watched her roll over on her back, screeching in pain. The flames had been quenched but by then it was too late. A bullet, one of many that were flying through the air at the time, had penetrated her neck and ploughed out through her throat.

  After the massacre, Quantrill claimed that no women had been killed. He might even have believed it. But in that bloody, burning holocaust it was impossible to tell whether the running figures were man or woman, adult or child.

  … Herne had felt something tugging at the bridle of his mount, trying to turn it. He had lashed out with his boot Once. Twice. The third blow had freed the attacker’s grip and sent him sprawling on the dirt of the main street. Herne pulled his pistol from its holster. His first shot went wide and he cursed the awkward heavy action of the gun, a double-action Tranter .44, one of a number imported by the Confederacy from Britain.

  It did its work the second time. The form on the ground jerked into an acute spasm of agony, half of its face blown away. When Herne stared down at what remained he realized he had just killed a boy of little more than eleven or twelve years old.

  … Coburn was being dragged from the saddle and set upon with lengths of wood, iron pans, a butcher’s knife. Herne had ridden hard into die midst of the crowd, the rebel yell loud on his youthful lips and his curved saber held high above his head. He had taken it from the corpse of a Union lieutenant after a group of Quantrill’s men had ambushed them a week before.

  As the butcher’s knife came down dangerously close to his friend’s face, Herne plunged the saber blade downwards, slicing through flesh and sheering bone.

  Through his vision a bespectacled face now loomed out at him and he saw once more the edge of the saber as it split the nose in two as neatly and precisely as meat on a wooden block. The blood had spurted high enough to dapple his uniform trousers and the saddle of his horse.

  Then Whitey had been smiling at him as he clambered up on to a riderless mount and wheeled it round, heading for the thick of the fray.

  … And all the time the smoke had got thicker, darker, causing the lungs to cough up acrid bile and the eyes to water and smart. The fire had sped from timber to timber so that eventually it had been akin to fighting a battle in the midst of Hell.

  … A white-haired old man with three bullet wounds in a diagonal line across his chest, wandering aimlessly about amongst the carnage. Singing hymns.

  … A mother sheltering in the rear of a blazing building, her arms spread over her two children like a mother hen about its chicks. She need not have bothered; both were dead already.

  … Slowly dragging himself along the edge of the boardwalk, a Union soldier, a straight-bladed Prussian cavalry saber embedded in his spine.

  … The screams of an old woman who turned suddenly towards Herne, her hands holding her breast as it fell forwards from her chest, only a thin flap of skin still unsevered.

  … Lawrence, Kansas. The twenty-first of January, 1863. The birth of Quantrill’s Raiders. There was no way in which either Jed Herne or Whitey Coburn would forget it – their baptism of fire. Herne shifted in his chair and blinked around the still darkening room. The flames were duller now, the atmosphere colder. He looked at Whitey alongside him, eyes closed in sleep or perhaps lost in his own thoughts, who could tell? The bottle of Jim Beam lay on its side by his foot, empty.

  “Herne! Herne the Hunter! We know you’re up there.”

  The voice cut through Jed’s thoughts and he was instantly awake and alive; back in the present A gunman who was older than perhaps he had any right to be, certainly better than most of his contemporaries who were now dead. Maybe that was why he was still alive.

  But there were always those around who would do their best to change things.

  “Herne! You get down here and face us out! Less’n you’re afraid!”

  Herne stood up and automatically tested the weight of his Colt. Coburn was alert now, waiting for his partner’s lead.

  “What’s the matter old man? It past your bed time?”

  Coburn looked up at Herne questioningly as the last remark was greeted by raucous, drunken laughter from outside in the street.

  “This’ll wake the old bastard up!”

  A volley of gunshots cracked out, followed by more whooping and yelling.

  “Seems,” said Coburn laconically, “as though you’ve got company?

  Herne grinned ruefully: “Happen you’re right.”

  “Friends of yourn?”

  Herne edged back the curtain and glanced downwards. “Not exactly.”

  “Come on, Herne. You ain’t gonna show me up this time.”

  Herne let the tattered curtain fall back into place. “Thought so. It’s that damned kid from the saloon, I didn’t reckon his pride’d let him sit that one out. He’s been back to the ranch or wherever he got hisself some drinking partners. Soon as they got enough inside ‘em, they rode back into town.”

  Another shot rang out and Herne looked down on the street Quite a crowd was gathering along the opposite side, outside the saloon. At its center he recognized the bald bartender, his scatter gun resting across his left arm, right hand around the butt He was looking up at the window of Herne’s room.

  “How many?” Coburn asked.

  “Six. All with the cradle marks fresh off their fool asses.”

  “What you reckon on doin’?”

  “Damned if I know. Blasted fools might holler themselves out of if it I let ’em keep it up for long enough.”

  Coburn raised a white eyebrow in disbelief.

  Herne nodded slowly. “I don’t think so either.”

  Down below the barkeep was talking to the youngster who had made his play against the silver coin. They spoke for several minutes, both gesturing and shaking their head in turn.

  When the discussion was over, the bald man turned hastily away and went into the hotel. A few moments later he was knocking on the door of the room.

  “It ain’t locked.”

  The man stepped quickly inside, careful to keep the weapon he was carrying down at his side.

  “Walt, ain’t it?” asked Herne.

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Herne.”

  “They send you up here?” he pointed towards the window.

  “Hell, no. Kids like that ain’t goin’ to send me anywheres. Why, you saw in the saloon how I deal … “

  Herne held up his hand. “Sure. Sure. What’s your piece?”

  “I tried to talk ’em out of it.” He looked from Herne to Coburn and back again, scarcely marking Whitey’s albino face and hair. A bartender learns not to react to such things; it isn’t good for business.

  “And?”

  “They won’t shift. Say that if you don’t come out, they’ll shoot up the hotel and anyone who gets in their way and tries to stop ‘em.”

  Coburn checked the cartridges in his Colt “If they’re no more than you say there must be folk in town to stop them.”

  The bald head shook from side to side. “No sheriff here in town. Least, not a live one.
Can’t see no one else making a stand – not in a quarrel that ain’t rightly theirs.”

  “Meaning it’s ours?” asked Herne.

  “Well, Mr. Herne, it’s you they’re after. Your name they’re callin’ yonder.”

  Herne nodded and glanced at Whitey.

  “If you an’ your friend showed in the street, likely that would be enough to sober ’em to their goddamn senses.”

  Coburn slid his gun into its holster. “An’ if it don’t?”

  The shouting from outside grew louder, angrier.

  “I could take ’em a message,” said the bartender hopefully.

  “All right, Walt. You tell ’em to give us a couple of minutes. We’ll be down.”

  The sweat shone on the man’s head and the dull yellow of his teeth showed in a late flare from the dying coals in the grate. He turned and let himself out of the room.

  “You don’t have to get into this, Whitey,” said Herne, as he checked his own .45. “Ain’t your fight.”

  Coburn grinned: “Don’t seem to be nothin’ better to do. Fire’s goin’ out, bottle’s empty. Too soon to go to sleep.”

  There was a hasty knock and the hotel door opened again to show Walt’s face peering round it.

  “Your friend.” he said, gesturing at Coburn, “he as fast as you are, Mr. Herne?”

  Herne hesitated a second, then gave a grim smile. “Don’t know for sure, but I do know one thing – I sure as hell wouldn’t like to live on the difference.”

  Chapter Three

  The waning moon was obscured by clouds that drifted carelessly across it The lights of the saloon spilled out through the batwing doors and on to the hard, dirt street. An oil lamp showed in the window above the general store, a few buildings to the right One of the tight group of spectators held a hurricane lamp high in the night air.

  The bartender ducked out of the hotel, looked hastily around, then scurried over to his saloon, stopping alongside the entrance and breathing heavily. Before he could steady himself, the leader of the gang of drunken youngsters grabbed him by the collar.

  “What’d he say?”