The stroke was swift and sudden: at first when Beaumont stared at his arm he thought all Lacy had done was to cut away the front of his jacket sleeve. Then he felt the quick pulse of burning pain and saw the skin begin to leak blood. He let out a moan of despair and through it Lacy heard the sound of a horse and riding approaching fast.
He cursed under his breath and hurried to the nearest window. Easing back the shutter he glimpsed in dim silhouette the tall figure on the dapple grey, slowing now as he moved between the lines of trees that led to the house.
Lacy frowned and let the shutter move back into place. He glanced quickly at Beaumont, who was kneeling now before the slashed portrait of his father, letting the blood from his cut arm drip endlessly down into the carpet.
He left the room, shutting the door behind him, checking as he went the Smith and Wesson holstered inside his coat.
Hart brought the grey down to a walk. The porch was empty save for a wicker rocker; a lantern shone from above the entrance. Hart looked at the windows, seeing no movement. He slid down from the saddle and looped the reins about a post, stepping around the animal’s rear. A sound at the side of the house warned him and his thumb flicked the safety thong away from the hammer of his Colt. Alert, he waited: the bent-backed Negro came cautiously around the corner.
‘Sir, I don’t know what’s goin’ on up there, but there’s been such awful sounds.’
‘What sort of sounds?’
Before the servant could reply, something crashed loudly inside the house. Hart jumped up the steps and pushed the door open, going inside fast, hand covering the butt of his Colt.
In the hallway the flowers stood in vases, the same plethora of colors. Another crash sounded from the first floor. Hart ran up the stairs and along the corridor. He hesitated for a second outside the room in which he’d spoken to Beaumont before; glass and china crashed and splintered inside. He turned the handle and went in.
Mason Beaumont was close to the far wall, before a glass-fronted cabinet, the contents of which were strewn about the room. Hart’s eyes quickly took in the spreading chaos. Chairs overturned, plates and cups shattered, glasses splintered; the only thing remaining on the wall behind Beaumont was the slashed portrait of his father.
Beaumont stared at Hart as if he failed to recognize him. A trail of saliva and vomit ran from the right side of his mouth; the sleeve of his coat on the left side was cut away and hung darkly, rich in blood. A dribble of blood came away from the curled fingers of Beaumont’s left hand.
He threw back his head and let out a high, screaming laugh that was animal, inhuman. Hart felt something move inside himself that he didn’t recognize. He went over to Beaumont and shouted at him, shook him; when that didn’t work he took a pace backwards and slapped him hard around the face, twice.
The laugh stopped abruptly; Beaumont’s head leveled and he saw Hart for the first time.
The Negro servant hurried past Hart and stopped beside his master, touching him carefully and leading him over towards the chair?
‘You come over here now, sir. You sit down here. We’ll look after you, we will.’
The Negro looked up at Hart and there were tears in his eyes; he looked past Hart at the same time as Hart whirled about, hearing a footstep on the boards beyond the room.
The short-barreled Smith and Wesson .38 was tight in Lacy’s hand; everything about him was composed, calm. He looked at Hart through the round lenses of his wire-framed spectacles and moved slowly inside the room.
‘You’re stupid, Hart. You may be fast with that gun of yours, but you’re stupid. Why else would you ride in here on your own and let a man come up behind you the way you’ve just done?’
Hart’s eyes narrowed; his body began to dip into a crouch, fingers of his right hand arching out over the Colt. Lacy watched him, smiling tightly.
‘That’s it, Hart. Make your final stupid play. There’ll be two bullets in you before your hand’s closed around that grip.’
Hart hesitated, knowing the truth of what Lacy had said. The pain from his left shoulder was driving through him, brought to life by his ride out from town.
Lacy took several more steps into the room; to his right, Mason Beaumont continued to moan in his chair, the Negro kneeling beside him.
‘When you’re dead, Hart,’ said Lacy, ‘I get it all. All.’
Beaumont lurched forwards, nearly slipping from the chair. Lacy was distracted for a fraction of a second, but it wasn’t enough. The gun didn’t waver; the finger remained tight against the trigger?
Beaumont was kneeling on the floor now, the Negro’s arms cradling the top of his body. Pieces of his family’s past Uttered the carpet all about him - the saber lay to one side, a few feet to Beaumont’s left.
Hart crouched slightly forwards, not taking his eyes off Lacy’s face, ‘If it isn’t me, it’ll be somebody else, you know that don’t you?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I’m sayin’ you’ll carry on grabbing what ain’t yours until the day comes you try for too much. Maybe that time it won’t be someone like him over there you’re lyin’ to, robbin’ blind.’
Hart nodded towards Beaumont, who was trying to stand now, the Negro helping him. With a cry he lost his balance and went heavily to the floor.
Lacy grinned, a tight smile passing across his tight-set lips.
‘What I’m sayin’,’ Hart went on, goading him, ‘is that you’re a double-dealing bastard who needs to sneak up on a man from behind.’
Lacy’s smile froze on his face. ‘It doesn’t pay to rile me, Hart. Not in your position. Not at all.’
The Smith and Wesson came up a little, Lacy’s arm straightening. The nerves in Hart’s right hand tingled as the fingers hovered. Mason Beaumont struggled on the ground and the hilt of the saber knocked against his hand: his eyes closed, widened, mouth opened in a shout; his fingers closed around the hilt and he swayed upwards, the Negro jerking unsteadily out of his way.
Lacy heard the movement and the cry – didn’t want to turn –had to turn – head going round just as the figure in the white suit swung the saber blade towards him.
Lacy jumped and pulled his pistol round towards Beaumont. Even as he fired the edge of the blade struck his side, the force of the blow cutting through his neat, striped suit, his shirt, cleaving between his ribs.
Hart drew as Lacy turned away, the Colt coming up from the greased holster, his thumb bringing back the hammer, the triple click lost in the midst of Beaumont’s yell, Lacy’s cry of realization as the saber struck home.
Hart waited until Lacy staggered two, three paces back, surprise for the first time in his eyes. The Smith and Wesson was still in his hand and he fought to bring it level, pain washing over him.
Hart watched the gun come up, stared hard into Lacy’s face and fired. The first shot split Lacy’s breast bone and sent him back towards the door in a leap. His legs began to give under him and blood came easily now from the saber wound in his side. Hart brought back the hammer a second time. He sighted along the barrel and fired. The bullet spun Lacy through a near circle, smashing through the ribs on the left side of his body and exiting between his shoulder-blades with a splatter of blood and tissue that clung to the wall beside the door.
Lacy was on all fours, crawling, trying to crawl, not knowing where he was trying to go or why.
Beaumont watched him, fascinated, the saber still in his right hand.
Lacy stared up at Hart, trying to focus his vision, desperate to shake clear the blurring which drifted in front of his eyes like clouds. Slowly, his fingers fumbled for his wire-framed spectacles, found them, lifted … they fell away from his grasp on to the carpet and Lacy’s body convulsed twice, rapidly.
Hart stepped closer, left boot treading down on to the spectacles. Lacy heard as if income clear distance the crunch and crackle of wire and glats, the clicking back of the hammer of a gun.
Nothing more.
From less than three feet, Hart put a slug
into the top of Lacy’s head and blew most of it away.
He continued to stare down at the dead man for several moments before stepping back and reholstering his gun. Mason Beaumont was swaying unsteadily, the servant hovering near him.
‘Look after him,’ Hart said. ‘I guess I’ve done here.’
As Wes Hart rode slowly along the avenue of trees he turned his head and looked back. A wash of light swept through the shutters of the upstairs room where Beaumont had lived. Flames licked at the woodwork; within a matter of moments thick smoke began to push up through the air towards a slim crescent of moon.
Hart clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth and the grey broke into a trot. At the end of the avenue he reined her in and sat round in the saddle.
The top half of the house was ablaze. The pillars that stood alongside the porch were bright with flame. From where he was Hart could hear the crackle and fall; could smell the acrid, bitter smoke. Outlined against the fire, two figures moved haltingly across the porch, one supporting the other.
Hart turned away again: when he heard the resounding crash that was likely the front wall caving in, he did not look back.
He was already thinking about other things; thinking that for too long he had turned away from too much. His left side and shoulder ached and he thought of Kate Stein and imagined the coolness of her hands on his body. When he’d picked up his things in Tago, that was where he would go.
Horse and rider rode the dark trail back to the silver town alone. Behind them, a shimmering red glow lit up the night sky as Beaumont’s mansion burnt steadily to the ground.
About the Author
Initially a teacher of English and Drama, the novelist John Harvey began writing in 1975, and now has over 100 published books to his credit, most recently a collection of short stories, A Darker Shade of Blue, and a novel, Good Bait. The first of his celebrated Charlie Resnick novels, Lonely Hearts, was named by The Times as one of the 100 most notable crime novels of the last century. Flesh and Blood, the first of three Frank Elder novels, was awarded both the British Crime Writers' Association Silver Dagger and the US Barry Award in 2004. In 2007 he received the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger for Sustained Excellence in Crime Writing, and in 2009 he was made an honorary Doctor of Letters by the University of Nottingham. A published poet, John ran Slow Dancer Press for nearly twenty years; in addition, he has written many scripts for television and radio, including dramatisations of novels by Graham Greene and A.S. Byatt and (with Shelley Silas) Paul Scott's The Raj Quartet. John was one of the original 'Piccadilly Cowboys' and we are proud to reissue his Herne the Hunter series, which was co-written with Laurence James under the name 'John J. McLaglen'.
Piccadilly Publishing
Piccadilly Publishing is the brainchild of long time Western fans and Amazon Kindle Number One bestselling Western writers Mike Stotter and David Whitehead (a.k.a. Ben Bridges). The company intends to bring back into 'e-print' some of the most popular and best-loved Western and action-adventure series fiction of the last forty years.
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If you enjoyed this book we recommend others in the
HART THE REGULATOR series:
1: CHEROKEE OUTLET
2: BLOOD TRAIL
Hart the Regulator 3 Page 13
