Herne the Hunter 24

by John J. McLaglen

  He remained behind only a couple of minutes.

  Stopping long enough to check that everyone was dead.

  From the way the bodies were placed, and from the wounds that they’d taken, it looked as though Darke had compromised between the two plans.

  Sending some of his men along the trail, to kill from close in, while the rest of his renegade platoon stayed hidden and ambushed the helpless posse. Helpless; but with one heroic exception.

  Luther Cash.

  Nothing in his whole life could have become him one half so much as the manner of his leaving it.

  It was obvious that there had been some considerable confusion. Most of the posse had gone down from several bullets, many at close range. In some cases at such close range that the material of their coats and shirts was scorched by the muzzle flash. Within seconds the defile must have been a shambles of dead and dying men, and rearing horses. And among them all, only one man had made a fight of it, and sold his life dearly.

  The old man’s body was jammed into a narrow crevice in the rock, overhung with looming boulders. In such a position that it was impossible for him to have been gunned down from above. And the soldiers who had made the mistake of trying to close with the white-haired old-timer from the front had paid the ultimate price for their foolish misjudgment.

  Three soldiers, lying in a tangled heap in front of Luther’s bloodied corpse. One shot clean through the face, the thirty-six ball striking him neatly between the eyes, kicking him on his back. The second one had been gut shot. As Jed bent to look more closely, he saw that someone had followed on and slit the dying renegade’s throat. Almost certainly either the officer or the heavy-built Sergeant Quincannon.

  The last of the trio had been knifed by the old shootist. From the wounds on Luther’s own body, it was obvious that they had stood off him at the last and poured in lead, shattering his right arm, sending his Colt Navy yards away. And then one of them had strutted in to deliver the killing thrust with a bayonet. Forgetting that a wily old fighter like Luther Cash would also be carrying at least one hidden blade of his own. And he had used it to deadly effect, spilling the tripes of the deserter in the dirt at his feet.

  Herne spat in the dust at the sight of the old gunfighter’s body. At the finish one of the soldiers had moved in and virtually blown the head off his shoulders with a sawn-down scattergun.

  It was a brutish ending.

  ‘Man could find a worse passing,’ said Jed, tipping his hat to the mangled body. If you had to go out, then there were worse ways than with three dead enemies, hitting a lick for something you believed in. Luther Cash might have been an old man, long years past the best, but he’d gone out in style.

  Herne could appreciate that.

  Since the deceit was out in the open, time was running short.

  Darke and his depleted band were now riding fast and hard. A couple of miles further on Jed found that one more of the deserters had gone off to the left, leading all the pack animals. Leaving the remainder of the platoon to go on unhindered. It meant from the way they were swinging around in a wide arc that the train must be their next target.

  Jed hoped that the young Chiricahua squaw had gotten through with the message of warning to Austin Nick about the renegades. If she had, then there was still a good hope.

  But first he had to follow on with the rest of his plan.

  Back to the Apache rancheria. Back to Nahche, leader of the Chiricahua.

  Chapter Thirteen

  There were a dozen wagons wheeled tight in a circle, their oxen tethered in their center.

  Big Conestoga rigs, high-sided, each one with its canvas top in place, weathered and stained. They had already traveled over a thousand miles from Independence, Missouri, following a southern route that had now brought them into the baking deserts of the South-West. Fifty or sixty miles from the crossing of the Colorado River, summer-low. Not far from Vicksburg.

  Twenty-five adults and seventeen children, including a baby at the breast, barely fourteen days old.

  The train had been caught in a valley, close to a meandering strip of water called Drowned Squaw Creek, overlooked by the tortured shapes of buttes and mesas.

  As soon as the dust had appeared, Austin Nick, the leader of the train, had ordered the wagons to pull into the traditional defensive circle. If it hadn’t been for the warning letter, delivered by an impassive Apache squaw, he wouldn’t have bothered. Even at that distance he could clearly make out the fluttering pennant of the Cavalry, recognizing the dark blue uniforms of the fifteen or so soldiers.

  Without Jed Herne’s urgently convincing letter, it would have been a simple matter for the deserters, under the ruthless Captain James Darke, to simply ride in, smiling, and butcher them all.

  Even now, it looked as though it could be a damned close-run thing.

  The ammunition had been running lower and lower, despite the warnings to try and make every bullet count. Out in a whirling circle of dust, the attackers were difficult targets. Hard to even spot, hiding behind the necks of their galloping horses.

  Finally, with no sign of rescue, or of the renegades giving up their attack, Nicholas Pilch had called a halt to the shooting.

  ‘We must wait. Tell all to hold their fire. Lure those bastards in and then hope to hit them as they come at us.’

  It was a faint, and shrinking, hope but the best that he could muster. He knew that several of the women had their own final defenses prepared. The young, pretty, pregnant wives of Bart Harvey and Jack Nolan amongst them. Better a ball through the head than the shameful ending that the besiegers might bring.

  The silence crept across the land.

  As word spread through the defenders, the firing slipped away, gradually, until there was no further resistance from the wagons. Every soul there gripped his or her weapon, hearts beating, mouths dry, the palms of the hands slippery with the sweat of fear.

  Waiting.

  The horsemen also stopped their firing, reining in at a shout from Sergeant Quincannon. They held their mounts still, the dust slowly settling like a blanket being draped across a crumpled bed. The scene cleared until it became like a tableau, modeled by children.

  Then, many things seemed to happen, all at once.

  The soldiers began to move again, slowly closing in on their prey.

  Austin Nick took a deep breath. ‘Wait until they are near!’ he called.

  Knowing that they had but a few volleys left. Then it would be hand to hand, and the ending would be very near.

  A bugle sounded, flashing, polished, in the bright sunlight.

  Teresa Harknett, in her wagon, had the derringer ready cocked, her lips moving in a prayer. ‘I lift up mine eyes to the hills, from whence cometh …’

  And there they were.

  It was as though the sounding of the bugle had been a signal. The doomed travelers looked outwards, and up. To the scraped edge of a mesa, a quarter mile to the east. And saw that it was suddenly lined with the silhouettes of many riders.

  ‘Saved, God damn it,’ whooped Bart Harvey, throwing his hat in the air, revealing the prematurely balding head beneath.

  ‘Oh, sweet Jesus.’ sighed Patrick Smith, the unfrocked Jansenist priest from Pittsburgh, laying down the sixteen shot Winchester carbine. He smiled at his woman at his side, swallowing hard, realizing that life still held a future for him and her.

  The Cavalrymen also saw the riders on the skyline, and Captain Darke held up his hand, checking their advance towards the train. Stopping barely fifty paces from the nearest rig.

  It was truly a classic scene from the annals of the frontier west. Beleaguered travelers, surrounded by hostile attackers, and their rescuers, looming in a long row, waiting the signal.

  The relief party weren’t well-mounted on regular horses, like the soldiers. They rode ponies, mostly barebacked. Carrying a variety of weapons. Austin Nick hissed through his teeth. ‘Son of a damned bitch! That old bastard did what he said in the letter. He broug
ht ‘em down to help us. That beats all.’

  There were short, stocky men on the mesa, in cotton breeches, tucked into soft leather boots; Loose shirts and bright head-bands, holding back their thick, flowing hair.

  Chiricahua Apaches, with their notorious war chief, Nahche. And at his side, leading the entire party, was the tall white man with the graying hair.

  Herne the Hunter.

  Chapter Fourteen

  From the windy ridge, Herne caught the sound of cheering drifting up from the beleaguered wagon train. Saw hats being waved, and the travelers embracing each other with relief.

  ‘It is not late, Herne Hunter,’ said Nahche, sitting his dappled pony as though it was an extension of his own body.

  ‘Close run thing,’ the shootist replied.

  The soldiers straggled below them, as though they were waiting for an order. Herne wondered what Darke would do. Even if he kept his men together, there were enough of the vengeful Chiricahua to give them a dreadful mauling should they cut and run. But if they stayed to fight, then the Apaches would definitely slaughter them in a very few minutes.

  In the place of the renegade officer, Jed decided that he would have faked a withdrawal, then turned and attacked the approaching Indians, hoping to take them sufficiently off balance to be able to break through with most of the small command intact, then hold them off in a rearguard action until you reached the comparative safety of the maze of twisting, narrow paths a couple of miles further back.

  ‘We shall fight them, friend Herne,’ Said Nahche, raising his carbine over his head as a signal to his warriors to ready themselves.

  ‘Let’s do it,’ said Jed, in English, knowing that the Apache leader had more than a smattering of the white man’s tongue.

  ‘It is a good day to fight and to die, my brother.’ replied Nahche.

  Austin Nick watched, leaning on the tongue of the nearest wagon, his ramrod, Paddy Neumann, at his side. Seeing the Indians come sweeping over the lip of the mesa, whooping and firing.

  ‘Never thought I’d be damned grateful to see Apaches ridin’ in at us,’ he grinned. Having to repeat what he’d said above the noise of cheering from everyone around him.

  Some of the settlers had moved outside the defensive ring, waving and calling. Mocking the Cavalrymen as they milled and circled. Christina Nolan and Dorothy Harvey danced out, hand in hand, doing a jig, up and down.

  It was a wonderful moment.

  Herne rode alongside the chief, knowing that to move ahead of him would be to show a bitter lack of respect. Yet to fall behind Nahche would betray a lack of honor. He had kept the Sharps bucketed, realizing this would not be a fight for a long gun. He had not yet bothered to slip the retaining thong off the hammer of the Colt, knowing that it would only serve its purpose when the battle came to close quarters. All around him the Chiricahua braves were snapping off rounds from their rifles, though it was near impossible to come close to your target from the back of a galloping pony.

  Out of the corner of his eye the shootist saw some of the men and women from the train coming out onto the flat desert, celebrating their rescue. It even registered on him that the two young, pregnant mothers that had made such an impression on him were dancing, showing their own relief.

  ‘We kill them, Herne Hunter!’ bellowed the chief, his face split with a great grin. The lust for battle was etched clear in his eyes and his white hair flowed behind him.

  ‘Try and leave some alive for the law,’ Herne tried, knowing that there wasn’t a whole lot of chance of that happening. The Chiricahua were rabid for vengeance. Not only for Stalking Moon, the son of Nahche, but also for the way that the renegades had been trying to put the blame on them for their own bloody outrages.

  ‘We kill those we kill. Maybe leave one or two for you, Herne Hunter.’

  Jed wasn’t so sure.

  Captain Darke called out an order, and the bulk of the patrol began to form a defensive circle against the approaching Indians. Herne and Nahche were a few paces ahead of the rest of the braves, closing fast on the soldiers.

  Two hundred paces.

  One hundred and fifty.

  ‘They’re doomed,’ said Austin Nick, seeing that the treacherous deserters had no chance at all of withstanding the charge. They were too few to make a proper circle.

  The rest of the settlers also saw that, moving even further away from the safety of the wagons, putting their own guns down in their relief. Dorothy and Christina danced on, both weeping with their happiness.

  The distance had closed to one hundred paces, and the first white puffs of smoke were coming from the rifles of the soldiers.

  It was at that crucial moment that James Darke made his try. A try for life and for safety. He shouted to the big Irish sergeant, and the two of them broke away from the rest of the men, spurring furiously towards the surprised travelers from the wagons. Pushing their big horses in at a full gallop.

  Aiming for Dorothy Harvey and for Christina Nolan.

  Austin Nick and Herne were the first to spot the new and threatening danger. The leader of the train snapped off two rounds from his Winchester carbine, but the two blue-clad figures were experienced in mounted combat, and they both ducked and weaved, making a clean shot difficult.

  ‘Come back!’ came the cry from a dozen throats, but the two young women were locked into their own dance of delight, and there was a fatal delay of several seconds before they heard the shouts. And saw the danger.

  Herne’s reaction was different.

  He guessed immediately that Darke hoped to take the women as hostages for his own and the sergeant’s safe passage away. So he tugged on the reins, sweeping away from the main charge of the Apaches, calling out to the surprised Nahche over his shoulder.

  ‘Those two men are mine for counting coup, great chief. Good hunting! ‘

  The Chiricahua waved a hand in acknowledgment, returning the call of ‘Good hunting’. Leading his band in a whooping thrust at the remaining members of the renegade Cavalry patrol. Jed knew that it could only be a matter of three or four minutes before the Indians were triumphant. But those minutes could be fatal for the two women from the train.

  Darke was in the lead, well-mounted on a big bay, spurring it in, aiming for the Nolan woman. Quincannon was at his heels, picking Dorothy Harvey for his target. Clumsy with their swollen stomachs, both of the settlers’ wives tried for safety. But they had no chance.

  ‘Stop shootin’,’ yelled the husbands, their cries echoed by Austin.

  ‘You’ll hit the women. Don’t fire!’

  Herne was moving almost parallel, ignoring the firing from the Troopers, knowing that he had little chance of being hit by them at that range, moving fast. His mind was racing, wondering how best to play this particular hand. Certain that he could keep pace with them, and perhaps find a place to ambush them, using the long Sharps. There had to be somewhere that he could pick off both men. He was so good with the buffalo gun that he could guarantee to hit a man through the head at two hundred yards.

  It would be all right.

  Darke leaned far out from the saddle, bracing himself for the pull. Hefting Christina Nolan across the back of the pounding mare, directly in front of him. Holding her flat. Ignoring her screams. The shock had knocked all the breath from the pregnant woman, and she could hardly fight back.

  It was a masterly piece of horsemanship, that Herne found a grudging moment to admire.

  Quincannon was less skillful, but what he lacked in expertise he made up in brute strength. Dorothy Harvey tried to dodge away from him at the last moment, but his fingers clamped in her long hair, jerking her off her feet. For a few yards she was half-running, half-floating alongside the big Irishman, then he hoisted her clear of the earth and dropped her across the saddle-bow in the same way that Darke had done.

  Double-loaded, Jed was confident that the two big horses would quickly tire. They’d been moving fast and hard since they’d massacred the posse from Abner’s Crossing,
so there wouldn’t be much stamina left to them.

  The two soldiers began to pull away from the train, angling towards the shootist. He saw that he’d come in around a hundred yards behind Quincannon, who was half that distance behind the officer.

  ‘I’ll pistol this fat-bellied slut, if you come closer, you dog!’ called the sergeant, and Herne dutifully kept his ground.

  Everything was happening at once.

  Nahche and his men had reached the defensive circle of the soldiers, ignoring their sporadic fire. The deserters had no chance, with such reduced numbers, making it impossible to keep up the withering flood of lead they needed to hold off the Apaches.

  Some of the settlers were watching that part of the battle, but most were looking on, helplessly, as the two women were carried away by Darke and Quincannon. Harvey and Nolan were almost beside themselves with frustrated anger.

  ‘Do something, Pilch,’ screamed Harvey at the lean wagon-master. ‘Do something, fuck it!’

  Austin raised the carbine again to his shoulder, squinting along the barrel. Both the soldiers had slowed to pick up the women, and it wasn’t an impossible shot to try and hit their horses. But still the wagon-master hesitated, knowing the risk to the women if they were thrown.

  Austin Nick had no way of knowing what Herne’s plan was. He hadn’t heard the shout from Quincannon. All he saw was the shootist apparently reining back, allowing a bigger gap to open up. Maybe Herne’s horse was lamed? Maybe he was out of ammunition?

  Maybe?

  ‘God’s wounds! Please stop them!’ Nolan was in tears, falling to his knees in the dirt, shoulders shaking with his grief at seeing his young wife plucked from him.

  Nick Pilch finally acted. Aiming and firing, feeling the jolt of the gun. Peering through the burst of smoke and seeing that Darke rode on, untouched.