Herne the Hunter 24

by John J. McLaglen

  All too often they found that glory costs. Costs in blood and pain. And that in the middle of the main street was where you started paying, staring up into the sun, wondering who was doing the moaning.

  Jed was tired of all that.

  Truth was, he was becoming tired of the riding and the hunting. The fistful of dollars smeared with someone’s life-blood. Since his wife died, eternities ago, and Whitey Coburn had ridden along the trail one last time, Jed had found it harder to go on.

  Now he turned slowly and faced the lad, who stopped his draw, frozen by the cold anger in the stranger’s face. The boy’s hand checked, an inch above the butt of his pistol, trembling. Not making that final irrevocable movement.

  ‘Let it lie, sonny,’ said Herne, voice as chilling as Sierra melt-water. His own hand never moved towards the Colt, but the threat was clear.

  The Irishman broke the tableau, leaning across and starting to wipe at the spilled beer. ‘Best leave it lie, Micah,’ he said, quietly.

  ‘I’ll …’ the boy .was surprised at how thin and high his voice suddenly sounded. ‘I’ll do what I fuckin’ please, you fat Mick. And keep your fuckin’ advice to yourself.’

  The barkeep didn’t speak, winking in Herne’s direction, pouring the boy another schooner of beer.

  The tension slithered away from the Paradise Gate, and the conversations resumed. Herne took a deep, slow breath, relaxing himself. Wondering how many more times in his life this particular drama was going to play itself out.

  Until one day he’d find some boy that was faster than him. Who couldn’t be talked away or faced down.

  That day would surely come. And that would be one ending.

  Jed Herne knew well enough that there could be a hundred different endings, but all of them would come to the same, slow darkness.

  ‘I ain’t heard nothin’ ’bout them. Not since old Gold Knife went and bought the farm’

  ‘Cuchillo Oro? Folk said he was some kin to Mangas Colorado. When did he die?’

  The loungers had stopped their whittling for the day, coming inside as the sun became almost unbearably hot. Now they stood in a jagged row along the front of the bar, talking idly about the Indian troubles they’d known.

  Jabez Webb scratched himself inside his torn shirt, shifting his weight and letting loose with a loud fart. ‘Damn beans,’ he grinned.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Jabez,’ muttered Marvin Ettinger, moving several paces to his left. ‘Smells like somethin’ died in your breeches.’

  ‘Only good fart’s a dead one, Marv, you know that. Just like Indians.’

  One of the, other locals spoke up from the end of the bar. ‘There’s folks hereabouts, Jabez Webb, that might figure Apaches ain’t no source for joshin’ about.’

  Herne glanced across, seeing that the remark brought a spate of nodding. He hadn’t heard any word of trouble as he’d ridden westwards, but he was a man who kept to himself. Nonetheless, if the local Apaches were out raising hell, then he needed to pay some attention.

  ‘Three spreads burned out in less than ten days.’ Ettinger ticked them off on his fingers. ‘The Dutchman, Billy Antrobus and his kids, and there was Daniel Zetner, with his breed wife and all his damned family.’

  ‘They hit the stage from Yuma only three weeks ago. Killed the guards, driver, and seven passengers. Took a big payroll.’

  Herne became more interested. Apaches who robbed a stagecoach of money were something new and rare. It might mean rewards being posted. Or a bounty on the warriors responsible. Jed had nothing against Apaches. Nor any other tribe or people for that matter. Long as they minded their own business, then he’d mind his. Unless there was some money in it. He listened more carefully.

  ‘Where’s the fuckin’ soldiers?’

  ‘Yeah, Marvin. Where are they? Yellow-bellied sons of bitches. Stay in their safe forts while us decent folks get butchered.’

  Micah Abernathy had managed to down three more large glasses of warm beer, and he’d managed to forget the way the lean stranger had simply looked at him and made him back off. He’d forgotten that look in the Older man’s eyes. Like opening up a grave at midnight had been his thought. The kind of eyes that never smiled.

  Micah had forgotten all that.

  ‘I don’t recall havin’ seen any of them soldiers since …’ the Irish barkeep hesitated. ‘Not since that old Captain. ... what was his name, Jabez?’

  ‘Brittles.’

  ‘What?’

  The bearded man belched. Brittles. Captain Nathan Brittles. Tough old bastard.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right. A darlin’ of a man. Kept them red demons in their places.’

  ‘But now,’ sighed one of the trappers, laying aside his cards.

  ‘True,’ chorused the rest of the line of drinkers, nodding in tempo.

  ‘You seen any signs of Apache, mister?’ asked the man called Ettinger.

  Herne looked up for a moment, steadying the rickety table. ‘Not in days. I heard that the local Chiricahua been quiet.’

  ‘Had been.’

  ‘Yeah. Now there’s talk of gettin’ up a party of brave souls to raid the bastards.’

  ‘Burn ’em out!’ cheered Micah Abernathy. ‘My Pa says the answer to the Indians is fuckin’ easy. Kill every man over ten. Castrate every male child under ten. That way there won’t be no more problem. What d’you say, huh?’

  There was a chorus of agreement from the men around, though Herne detected a certain lack of enthusiasm. The boy noticed that Jed didn’t join in with the others and he took a clumsy, lurching step towards the seated man.

  ‘You some kind of fuckin’ Indian-lover, old man? Sell ’em liquor, or guns? That your trade, you stinkin’ old man?’

  It was coming.

  Jed could feel it. Tightness across his temples, the fingers of his right hand itching for contact with the butt of the pistol.

  There’d been times when he’d cared about moments like this. Not now. Not any longer. Killing was just a trade you had to learn.

  ‘Hold on, Micah,’ cautioned someone from by the bar. Jed didn’t see who it was; his eyes were now locked to the advancing boy.

  ‘He’s drunk, mister,’ called a voice from the corner of the room.

  ‘I killed me drunks before,’ replied Jed, voice as quiet as if he was discussing the price of eggs with a parson’s wife.

  ‘Killed who?’ sneered Micah. ‘Old women and drunk Indians?’

  ‘What’s your name, mister?’ asked the barkeep. ‘I’m certain sure, I am, that I’ve clapped me glims on you before now.’

  Micah stopped, uncertain for a moment. Looking back at the fat Irishman, and then at the stranger.

  ‘My name’s Herne. Jedediah Travis Herne,’ replied the shootist.

  ‘Christ on the Cross,’ breathed the barkeep. ‘You’d be Herne the Hunter?’

  Jed nodded. ‘Been called that more years than I can recall.’

  The Paradise Gate was silent. The century was rumbling on towards its close and many of the great, legendary shootists were six feet under, running worm factories. Even the leaders of the Indians were fading away, becoming names to be breathed during the ghost dances, when the white buffalo was called by the shamans.

  ‘Herne the Hunter in this saloon, as I live and as I fuckin’ stand here,’ sighed one of the trappers, shaking his head in wonderment.

  ‘I don’t care if you’re Abraham Lincoln come back from the dead, I’m still goin’ to blow your Indian-lovin’ head off your shoulders, old man,’ hissed Micah, venomously.

  ‘Fuck it, boy,’ called Webb, backing away towards safety out of any possible line of fire. ‘He’s around the best there’s been. He’ll murder you if—’

  ‘Shut your mouth, you tub of lard, or I’ll spill your tripes in the dirt,’ yelled Abernathy.

  ‘You read too many of them dime books, son,’ said Herne.

  Below the level of the table his right hand had already flicked the retaining thong off the hammer of the hols
tered pistol.

  Ready.

  In the sudden, lethal stillness, everyone caught a new sound. Out in the sun baked cauldron there was the noise of horses.

  The batwing doors kicked open and an old woman came tottering in, a flurry of patterned gingham.

  ‘It’s the Lordsburg stage! And it don’t look like anyone’s drivin’ her!’

  Chapter Three

  It was a Butterfield stage, pulled by a team of four horses. Fully-loaded it was capable of carrying a dozen passengers, in varying degrees of discomfort. Normally it would carry a driver and a shotgun guard, ready to protect life and property against any road-agents or marauding bands of warriors.

  Often a good driver would whip the animals to a flaring gallop as they entered town, enjoying the sensation of a spectacular arrival. Reining them in to a hard-braking halt in the center of the main street, making women cry and the little children whoop and holler.

  Not this time.

  Though he didn’t seem to move fast, Jed Herne was one of the first out on the stoop, blinking in the bright light. The rest of the drinkers from the Paradise Gate thronging behind him, the near-fight with Micah Abernathy forgotten in the new drama.

  Across the way, from a sturdy brick building, Herne noticed that the local lawman had also heard the shouting. A skinny man, pushing fifty, clipping on a tarnished star as he ran.

  But everyone’s eyes were turned up the street, away towards the oncoming stage, framed by its own curtain of orange dust.

  ‘There’s a body on the box,’ called Webb.

  ‘Looks like Harry Priest,’ said Ettinger, quietly. ‘Son of a bitch ...’

  Herne stepped down into the dirt of the street, feeling hot sand crunching beneath his boot-heels. Squinting towards the stagecoach. Seeing that the horses were death-tired, the right leader barely able to set one hoof in front of the other. All of them were lathered and caked with crusted sweat. And one had a feathered arrow protruding from its flank, a trickle of dried blood running down.

  The man on the box was also covered in blood, streaming from a dozen shafts that angled out from chest and back. He was slumped across the seat, the reins tangled loosely around his gloved wrists. One of the doors was unlocked, swaying a little way open, then back again as the rig came closer. There was not the least sign of life on the stage.

  ‘Those fuckin’ Chiricahua,’ breathed the boy, Micah, immediately behind Jed. Standing so close to him that he could smell the sourness of liquor on the lad’s breath.

  ‘We got to get the Cavalry in,’ said the sheriff, finally getting the clasp of his star to fasten on his vest.

  Herne didn’t speak. Contenting himself with moving towards the stage, taking the head of the nearest leader, gentling it, holding it to a halt. The rest of the township came flocking around him, the children being halfheartedly shooed away by white-faced mothers.

  The coach bristled with arrows. At Jed’s reckoning there had to be close to a hundred, all over the sides and rear of the coach. The shafts and flights showing clearly that they were Apache weapons.

  The horses stood still, heads down, the right leader whinnying softly to itself. Herne gave the animal a pat on the flank, letting go the traces, moving around the side of the stage. The fat barkeep was on the other side, pulling open the swinging door.

  ‘Holy Mary!’ stepping away, doubling over, hands on his fleshy thighs. Vomiting uncontrollably, thick bile splattering in the dust around his feet. ‘Oh, Holy Mary, mother of …’ the rest lost in another bout of violent retching.

  The lawman stepped in close, narrowing his eyes as though that might make it better. Glancing quickly in, then looking away again, face paler than bleached parchment.

  ‘Get the women and little ones out of the way. Come on, folks, let’s …’

  Reluctantly, slowly, the crowd began to dissolve, leaving only the men around the stationary coach. Not one of them had summoned up the nerve to go and look inside. To see what the barkeep and the sheriff had seen. Herne moved around the back, looking at the arrows. Tugging at a couple of them with his hand, forehead wrinkling with concentrated thought.

  Most of the luggage was gone, but a couple of square chests remained, lashed to the top of the stage. Jed glanced up, wondering what the attackers had left. And why.

  ‘Who’s in the stage, Rogers?’ asked Micah, swaying a little, holding on the side of the coach to steady himself.

  ‘It’s that little girl from the whorehouse in Newman’s Crossing. What the bastards have left of her.’

  Herne stood by the open door, glancing along the row of waiting men. Seeing the same sickness and fear in all of their eyes.

  He looked inside, breathing slow against the sour-sweet stench of violent death. He’d smelled it a hundred times before, and he never really gotten used to it. And what was in the coach was like plenty of other places.

  It still didn’t make it any better.

  Least he could stand still and look in without wanting to run and throw up, like the Irishman. He hissed between his teeth.

  The inside of the coach was more like a slaughterhouse than a stage. The leather seats were slobbered with gouts of dried and drying blood. The wood around the windows was chipped and scarred, and there were more arrows driven deep into the upholstery.

  And there was the girl.

  She was naked, the silk dress sodden on the floor, by her feet. Knives had been driven through the palms of both hands, holding them to the wall of the stage, and her feet had probably been tied apart. That was hard to tell, as her legs had been so badly cut and burned. The whole area around her genitals had been skinned, the flesh peeled away, then someone had lit a small fire in her lap.

  She might once have been pretty.

  That was hard to tell, as well.

  Herne had seen enough victims of Indians to know what to expect. But even he was surprised at the crude extent of the savagery. It looked like an axe had been used, smashing in the top of her skull, matting brown blood and pink-grey brains in the long red hair. The eyes had been gouged from their sockets, the nose slit down its length. Her mouth sagged open, lipless, the stumps of her white teeth showing splintered and uneven amidst the clotted remnants of her jaw.

  Jed didn’t take too much notice of the hideous wounds. He was more interested in the knives, leaning into the coach to examine them more carefully. From the decoration on the hilts there was no doubt at all that they were a pair of Chiricahua hunting-knives. Good ones at that.

  When he stood out in the sun again, Herne’s face was expressionless.

  ‘Figure we best get … get her out of there real soon,’ said the sheriff, his voice cracking with tension.

  ‘She ain’t goin’ to get no prettier,’ said Herne, walking once more around the dusty, stained rig, paying particular attention to the arrows that decorated it.

  ‘The payroll’s gone,’ said the sheriff, pointing up at the top of the coach.

  Ettinger climbed quickly up, careful not to touch the corpse of the driver, pulling at the ropes that held the two remaining boxes in place. ‘Maybe there’s somethin’ in these. They could’ve missed them.’

  Sheriff Rogers stood with the rest of the men, waiting expectantly. Herne was a few paces off from them. He looked up at Ettinger, back to the lawman.

  ‘Won’t be no silver. Nor somethin’ that gotten left there by an oversight.’

  ‘How come you know so much, old man?’ sneered Micah Abernathy.

  ‘They’ll likely …’ began Jed, but a call from Ettinger interrupted him.

  ‘Oh, Christ … The devils filled ’em with bits of the poor folks that… eyes and ears and … cocks and all the …’

  Without another word he jumped clumsily down off the box, taking a few steps away from the Butterfield before he emulated the barkeep and threw up, noisily in the dirt of the street.

  Sheriff Bob Rogers hitched up his pants, fighting to keep his voice from trembling. ‘Guess this means tryin’ to get a posse u
p.’

  ‘They’re all dead, Sheriff,’ said Herne.

  ‘They might not have …’

  ‘You want to talk through your ass, you best get the crap out there first,’ said Herne, coldly. ‘They send back bits in a box, and do that to a pretty girl, then all you do with a posse is eat tip some miles and maybe end up in one of them boxes.’

  ‘Just ’cos you’re scared, you skinny old bastard,’ sneered Micah.

  ‘Don’t talk …’ began the lawman, but he was interrupted by Marvin Ettinger.

  ‘That there’s Herne the Hunter, Bob. The shootist.’

  ‘I heard …’ clearing his throat to try again. ‘I heard of you, mister.’

  ‘He’s just a yellow-gutted old drifter,’ shouted Micah. ‘My Pa said you was to throw no-goods like him out of Bulmer’s Wells.’

  ‘That right, Sheriff?’ asked Herne.

  His patience was slipping away from his control like dry sand through the fingers of a corpse. Over the last few months he’d been noticing that he no longer suffered fools gladly. Truth was, he just didn’t suffer them at all.

  ‘I guess you aren’t …’

  ‘My Pa’ll have your badge, you gutless old fucker,’ yelped Micah Abernathy, standing facing Herne, his hand moving slowly towards the butt of the pistol, the fingers flexing and tensing.

  ‘Stand away, lawman,’ whispered Herne, his voice penetrating.

  ‘Micah, why …?’ began Sheriff Rogers, conscious that he was offering a damned sight too little and a damned sight too late.

  With the merest shuffling of his feet, Jed turned himself at an angle, sideways on, dropping into a half-crouch. Making himself as small a target as possible.

  Men who saw what happened told of it to the end of their days. The sheer speed of it. Yet, Herne was so good at killing that he didn’t seem hurried. There was no flash and dazzle. Just the hand on the butt as Micah started his draw. The thumb clicking back the hammer of the Colt, the light triple sound seeming deafening in the stillness of the street. The pistol up and leveled, before Micah’s own gun was even clear of the tied-down holster.