Apart from the fifty-five caliber Sharps, he also carried his Peacemaker at his hip, the leather retaining thong tightly in place over the hammer to prevent it falling from the greased holster as he climbed. And the trusty bayonet was snug in the sheath inside his right boot. One man though, alone against a dozen bandits.
‘One at a time,’ he said to himself, slowing down, taking more care about pebbles shifting beneath his heels. There was the glow of afire ahead of him, and he could now smell cooking clear and strong in the night breeze. Frying oil and peppers.
The trail was narrowing, the walls of rock squeezing in on either side of him and he knew that he was near the point that El Poco would have placed one of his sentries.
‘There.’
From where he was the silhouette he could see could easily have been mistaken for an ordinary Apache. He wore the same cotton pants and loose shirt and his long hair was tied back with a headband of flowered material. He looked to be around five feet four inches tall and was carrying a rifle cradled in his arms. In poor light and at fifty yards, Jed couldn’t make out what kind of gun it was.
He had to be one of the deserters from the Cavalry. Since the full-blooded Apaches would never break their word, the man was probably a half-breed.
But that didn’t mean that he was any less dangerous than a full-blooded Indian.
Herne began to close in oil the guard, sliding through the moonlight like a grey ghost, pausing to carefully place his rifle on the ground. Straightening up, the silvered light flickering off the blade of the bayonet in his right hand.
Anyone watching the shootist would have thought he was playing some macabre charade, lifting each foot to an exaggerated height before slowly setting it down a few inches further forward. His eyes never leaving the sentry, stopping every time the breed moved, molding himself against a large boulder. Waiting until the man turned his back again before beginning to creep on once more.
He had reached within ten feet, leaning in a splash of deep shadow, choosing the moment when he would go for the bandit.
When the breed called out in Spanish. ‘What you doin’ creepin’ round that way?’
Herne came within a hair-trigger of drawing his pistol and trying to shoot his way out of the trap. But he held off for that moment, and saved himself.
‘El Poco he send me to take your place,’ came the second voice from the darkness on the far side of the trail.
‘Then why you try to creep up like that, amigo? I could have killed you.’
‘Sure. And maybe pigs can fly! If I had wished it I would have cut your throat from one ear to the other. Fuckin’ easy, compadre. Better go. El Poco he is drinking pretty heavy and going soon to have fun with the prisoners.’
‘That will be good,’ laughed the breed. ‘And you miss it, huh?’
‘Si, that is right. And you have drinks and watch. I think he will have a lot of sport with them’
Coming out in the light, Herne saw that the speaker was a full-blooded Mexican. Squat, with a drooping moustache and small eyes, set like currants in greasy dough. His sombrero was trailed down his back and as he walked towards the breed the bandit stumbled, only saving himself with a hand on the cliff.
The shootist realized that it was going to be easier. With a new sentry who was drunk.
‘Adios, Hernando,’ said the breed, padding off along the trail.
‘Adios. Have laughs,’ called the Mexican, sitting down and belching, the top of his head just visible above a large stone. His back towards the patiently waiting Herne.
It was too easy.
There’d been other occasions when the shootist had killed men, silently, in the night. But never with as little difficulty as this time. The bandit was humming to himself, a song about a girl named Adelita and a soldier going away to fight in a war for the glory of his beloved country.
Hernando died swiftly, his life draining from him in great pumping gouts of scarlet, jetting out among the thirsty stones from the severed arteries in his neck. There was just time enough for him to draw in a single half-breath of choking fear, but there was a hand across his mouth, gripping his jaw so tightly that he couldn’t cry out for help. The Mexican killer had no last thoughts of his past flashing before him.
There wasn’t time.
Jed laid the corpse down carefully, making sure that the rifle didn’t drop with a clatter among the stones. He wiped the bayonet on the dead bandit’s shirt, seeing the blood stark black on the white cloth. Stood up and retrieved the Sharps, and made his way onwards.
One of the good things about the change in the sentry was that it gave him more time before there was any risk of anyone finding dead Hernando.
~*~
The moon didn’t reach into the deepest parts of Lost Woman Canyon. It left dark pools of shadow that seemed to open up at Herne’s feet. The shootist quietly walked further in, waiting every now and again, darting quickly forwards, and then checking his stride. Constantly on the alert for any sight of a second guard, perhaps high on the cliffs. But the night was quiet.
Quiet apart from the swelling sounds that drifted towards him from the camp of El Poco. There was the noise of someone playing a guitar, very fast and very badly. Twice Herne caught a scream. Like a hog at the gelding, high and thin. It sounded as though at least one of the Ray brothers was still alive.
But for how long?
~*~
There was a ledge up to the right that became more and more narrow and finally disappeared into the thin air. But by climbing it, Herne figured that he might be able to find himself hi a good position to look down on the Mexican camp. The sound of the guitar had stopped, and he could now hear loud laughter and clapping of hands. Cheering and whooping as if the bandits were witnessing some kind of rodeo.
The shootist’s lips clamped into a thin line, guessing that whatever he saw was unlikely to be good news for Carola Ray,
He made his way up the ledge, being forced to bend, crawling along and keeping as flat as he could so that he would be invisible to a casual glance. Stopping twice and looking back as he thought that he heard the sound of someone moving behind him. But the canyon held its silence.
The light from fires danced ahead of him and he flattened himself to the dirt, creeping along on his belly, stopping and cautiously raising his head to look directly down into the camp of El Poco.
Seeing one of the most bizarre sights that he had ever witnessed.
Hearing the voice of a woman at the same moment, from close behind him.
‘Forgive me, Jed, but I had to follow. I had to.’
~*~
The Chiricahua Apaches were only a half mile away from the canyon. The place they called the Canyon of the Big Rain. The thirteen women and six younger children were all camped safely four miles back, with a couple of the older warriors to guard them, ready to move out along back trails if there was any sign of danger.
Geronimo himself was leading the main group, though he was suffering from the results of being drunk on three bottles of whiskey they’d taken from the pouches of the patrol that they’d ambushed. They had watched with captured binoculars, nodding with professional admiration the courage of the white gunman called Herne the Hunter.
‘He goes alone,’ said Nachez.
‘Truly he has great bravery. For someone who is not a true person,’ added Geronimo.
They stalked in to the mouth of the canyon, stopping when they found the corpse of the sentry with his throat gaping open. There was a split of opinion. Some of the hot-heads wanted to follow the white man in and take advantage of whatever might happen. But Geronimo and the older men were for caution.
‘We wait,’ said the chieftain. ‘And it might pass that our prey fall from the beak of the hawk. Yes. We wait.’
Chapter Eleven
Herne was torn between anger at the woman and a dreadful fascination in the scenes of the Mexican camp. He tore his eyes away for a few moments.
‘What the Hell are you doin’ here
?’
She was panting with tension, her own eyes going past him to look down through the darkness into the bowl of light.
‘I couldn’t wait. Not on my own. Truly, I’m sorry, Jed. But … Oh, Blessed Jesus! Look at that.’
‘I’m looking.’
‘Can’t you?’
His face was bitter. The voice cold as the midnight wind through a deserted graveyard. ‘Could have done. Maybe. Something. But with you here ...’
‘I can’t go back.’
‘Hell, I know that.’
Both of them stopped talking, each wrapped in the visions from the camp in Lost Woman Canyon.
There were several fires there, some for cooking, but some simply to give light for the bandits’ pleasures. Jed had automatically counted the men. Ten left. Most of them drunk, or perhaps high on mescal.
The assortment that he’d suspected. There were five Mexicans. Three breeds, all dressed like the first sentry had been in traditional Apache clothes. The ninth man was a negro, very tall, lounging back, strumming at the guitar, a half-empty bottle at his side.
And the tenth was El Poco himself.
Jesus Maria Diego.
Shaped like a malevolent nightmare. Less than five feet tall and fat. A round head set on top of a round body, like a child’s drawing, with a thin moustache and eyes that looked black from a distance.
Herne and Carola Ray were barely thirty yards from the nearest of the fires, but the shootist knew that they were reasonably safe. Just as a man in a well-lit room can see little of movement beyond his windows, so the bandits would be able to see nothing beyond the bright circle of their own fires.
They were close enough to see everything, and to hear most of what was happening.
They could particularly hear Jesus Maria Diego. He laughed a lot. A girlish giggling, that seemed to bubble up from some obscene deeps within his body.
El Poco was stylishly dressed in a silk shirt, marked down the front with whiskey, buttons torn where his belly had put too great a strain on the material. His pants were elegantly cut, but they were stained. The bandit leader was very drunk and the fly buttons gaped open, revealing a monstrous penis. Though he might be a dwarf, there was nothing dwarfish about his sexual equipment. It seemed close on a foot long, bouncing against his thighs as he jigged to the music of the guitar, thick as a baby’s forearm.
He laughed a lot.
‘Jed?’
‘Yeah. What?’
‘Where’s Ike and Thad? I don’t see them.’
She was squinting, shading her hand, her voice an insistent whisper above the crackling of the fires and the calling and laughing of the bandits. Jedediah had seen the two prisoners, but he wasn’t sure that he particularly wanted the woman to see them. Not until she had to
‘Carola.’
‘What is it, Jed?’
‘Get a good hold on yourself.’
‘Why?’
‘Just keep quiet.’
‘I am.’
‘Then look yonder.’
From where she was, a couple of yards lower on the ledge, it was difficult for her to see where the shootist pointed and she levered herself up to look in the direction of ...
‘Noooo!’ The cry was muted, barely a ripple of sound, yet its intensity vibrated through her body She lowered her face to her arms and lay there, unmoving, fighting to steady her breath.
Herne had caught rumors of El Poco and his unusual tastes, but he hadn’t realized how far they had gone through the rest of the gang.
Thaddeus Ray was tied naked, spread over a rough framework of branches. His legs were forced apart and his ankles bound to the bar that ran across the base while his hands were lashed behind his back, a further cord pulling them up tight to his neck. The position meant that his buttocks were forced unnaturally high.
The fire glistened on the back of his thighs, giving mute evidence of the way that the Mexicans had been using him for their own vicious pleasures, darker streaks of blood telling their own story of agony. A hank of rag was tied in his mouth, forcing the jaws apart, stopping him from screaming.
Isaac was a few yards round to the right, nearer El Poco himself. He was also naked, and tied. Bound with rawhide thongs into a kneeling position, head strained by having his wrists brought up behind his back in a similar way to his brother. Even as Herne watched one of the breeds staggered up to the helpless man, calling something out to one of his fellows, bringing a burst of rowdy laughter. The man unbuttoned the thin cotton pants, spreading his own legs to make sure he was at the right height. Grabbing Ike Ray by the hair, tangling his fingers and tugging to force the prisoner’s mouth open wider.
Herne watched silent, ignoring the sobbing from Carola Ray. As long as she wept quietly, her reaction didn’t concern him. There was a temptation to take his Sharps and put a bullet through the skull of the breed, but there was little point. If he was to try and save the lives of the two men it had to be planned. Carefully planned.
But he marked the Apache down, noting that he wore a shirt of bright red flowers against a white background. Herne would remember him.
After he had finished using Ike Ray the breed gave his hips a final contemptuous jerk, wiping himself on the white man’s hair. Giving him the final insult of urinating in his upturned face before swaggering away.
El Poco had watched the degrading spectacle and called out to his man in his thin, sniggering voice.
‘What did that cur say, Jed?’ asked Carola, finally forcing herself to watch.
‘He said it would soon be time for the horses to change and take a turn about.’
‘You mean Thad is to … Oh, Jesus Christ, help me now and spare them from this suffering. Smite down these ungodly bastards and send them spinning to eternal suffering in the flames of Hell!’
Herne looked around the camp, trying to ignore the two Ray brothers, seeing that the bandits had built themselves a rough shelter of branches against the back wall of the canyon. Presumably that was where they would all be sleeping. Though there was a smaller hut by the further cliffs, which must be where El Poco would take his own rest.
Was it worth waiting until they fell asleep, or would that be too late for Thad and Ike?
‘Is that blood on Ike’s face?’ asked Carola, straining up on one elbow to see better, her initial revulsion overcome by a morbid fascination.
‘Yes.’
‘They have beaten him before using him to?’ But she couldn’t finish the sentence.
‘Sort of.’
‘What does that mean, Jed?’
‘Means that I guess they knocked out all his teeth first.’
‘Why?’
He looked at her for a moment, seeing the tautness of the skin across her cheeks, the eyes blinking with nervous strain. ‘So as he don’t bite them.’
For a moment he thought that she was going to throw up over the edge of the narrow trail, but she managed, with a visible effort, to control herself.
~*~
An hour passed.
The shootist still hadn’t seen anything approaching a chance and his plan was still dependent on all the bandits falling asleep and leaving Thad and Ike somewhere that he might sneak in to rescue them.
He knew damned well what a long shot that was.
And like most long shots it didn’t come off the way he’d hoped.
El Poco had been waddling around the camp, drinking from the neck of a green bottle, his arm around the waist of a young boy. Sometimes around the waist, and sometimes inside his pants.
During the hour that Carola and Herne had been watching, Ike and Thad had mostly been left alone. Nobody further had come to use the photographer brother and only once had Thad been sodomized, by another of the breeds. The negro had approached Thaddeus, still carrying the guitar, but had passed on by to where one of the bandits was ladling out what smelled like a chili stew.
Most of the band seemed tired and Herne noticed that several of them were already making their way towards t
he hut, disappearing and not coming out again. His guess was that the time must be easing close towards midnight.
Jesus Maria Diego and his young catamite walked towards the helpless Thaddeus and Herne eased the barrel of the Sharps over the edge of the ledge, ready to shoot the dwarf down. El Poco drew his pistol, flourishing it at his prisoner, whispering something to his lover, who laughed and kissed his leader on the lips, stooping low to reach him. The bandit waved the gun around once more and then bolstered it. Herne noticed that it looked like a silver-chased, pearl-gripped Peacemaker.
He pulled back the rifle, relaxing again for a moment. Carola laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘What was happening, Jed? Why were you going to shoot him down just then?’
‘Somethin’ I heard ‘bout El Poco.’
‘What?’
‘Doesn’t signify.’
‘Tell me. Please.’
‘No. Talking never gets it done.’
‘I want to know.’
‘Just a tale I heard ‘bout him and a priest.’
‘What?’
The shootist rolled on his elbow and looked at her again. Seeing that despite the appalling strain she was enduring, there was nothing in her face that told him she might give in.
‘You’ve seen what a sick bastard he is?’
‘Good Lord, yes! I would rather have a dying leper in my bed.’
‘He did his usual game with this priest. Old man, they say. The priest cursed him all the time, while he was taking his pleasures with him.’
‘And?’
‘Señor Diego had his men hold the priest, while he drew that pretty pistol of his.’ It seemed for a moment that the woman was going to stop him. She opened her mouth to protest and then closed it again. ‘Rammed it up the old man and pulled the trigger six times.’
‘He is the Devil himself!’
‘Me … Guess I’d rather meet the Devil than El Poco any day of the week, including Sundays.’
~*~
So Herne waited with the woman.
~*~
Geronimo! (Herne the Hunter Western Page 9
