Death Rites

by John J. McLaglen

  For a few moments the snow eased, just as he came level with the first of the remaining houses in the street. Aware that the lull would expose him to anyone looking out, Herne dodged into the building, feeling the floor-boards creaking under his boot-heels.

  The interior had been stripped at some time when the township was dying, and little remained to show what it had been. Jed couldn’t remember who might once have owned it, but guessed it had been a private dwelling.

  An old mattress lay crumpled in one corner of the floor, with stains on it that showed it had been through a variety of uses. A large black mark in the centre was long-dried blood.

  On the wall immediately above it, someone had used a stub of blunt pencil to write the words: “It was God that made me a prostitute.”

  In another hand beneath it someone had scrawled: “If I give him five dollars will he make one for me?”

  The dust was so thick inside the wrecked house that it was obvious that nobody had set foot in it for several months. More probably for several years.

  So Jed felt safe enough in using it as a temporary base. He clambered up the rickety remains of the stairs to look out through the snow towards the huts clustered about the mouth of the Norwich Hills mine.

  It was only a little after midday, but the light was poor, and he squinted through the cracked window-pane to see if he could detect any sign of life.

  A spider’s web fluttered at the edge of the glass, trembling in the draught. Across the land-slip and up the hill, Herne saw that the snow was banking up. From what he remembered the main shaft ran into the side of the hill, with another deep pit opening up a hundred yards or so away, where they’d been trying to find another way of reaching the mother lode.

  The group of huts was just visible, and he watched in silence for several minutes, the first nagging doubts beginning to creep into his mind.

  Suppose they weren’t there?

  In a lull in the storm he saw a black square appear in the side of one of the huts. A door was being opened. A figure appeared and looked out at the blizzard. Then the door was quickly shut again.

  Herne let out a sigh of contentment.

  They were there.

  Chapter Eleven

  The range was about six hundred yards.

  On the flat, with reasonable weather and visibility, Herne would have risked a shot at the bandit. If you got hit by the great, booming, fifty-five caliber bullet of the Sharps rifle, then most times you stayed hit.

  But this wasn’t a shot worth making.

  There was no good rest for the long rifle. It was uphill. Through snow and poor light. With a gusty wind that veered from light breeze to screeching gale from moment to moment.

  Herne was faced with a difficult choice.

  If he stayed where he was in the relative comfort of the make-shift shelter, the storm might go on for days before it blew itself out. Water would be no problem, and he could probably have lasted on the small amount of dried meat he had with him. There had been times when he had survived as long as nine days without proper food.

  But it was the cold that would kill him if he waited there. With no food to stoke the boilers of his body, it would eat at him. He had seen it other times with other men. The way that even strong fighting shootists would give up. Sit down and refuse to get up again. Gradually slipping into a strange sort of waking sleep. The blood flowing slower round their bodies. Until they finally closed their eyes and never got round to opening them again.

  Also, if he waited where he was, they might realize that Diego and Danny weren’t coming back. They’d take fright and move out. Possibly at night when he was sleeping. If he missed them then he lost all chance of retrieving the pendant. As well as giving up on three thousand dollars for the printing plates.

  It was damned difficult.

  Because the other alternative left to him was to go in after them. Get closer and hope to pick one, or both, of them off. But they might not come out. Herne wasn’t about to bust in the door with his foot and rush in shooting. He’d seen the pulp magazines that portrayed heroes who did that sort of thing. All it would get him would be a bellyful of lead.

  To spend more than a couple of hours outside in the wind and snow would also be enough to kill him off.

  It was damned difficult.

  Cal and Luke would be expecting their two comrades back in Norwich Hills by nightfall. Allowing for the weather, they might not begin to worry much until the next morning.

  So Herne had, at least, that much time.

  Until dawn there wasn’t much that he could do. If the weather changed appreciably during the next fifteen hours or so, it would wake him.

  So he slept.

  Easily and dreamlessly.

  There had been nights when he had woken sweating with the horrors of his wife’s death rising before him in a dream. It had been like that after the living nightmare of Lawrence, when he had ridden with Quantrill and his Raiders and they’d butchered and slaughtered and burned. He’d been very young then. Apart from the notorious gang of Northern butchers, led by Caleb Thorn, Quantrill’s men had been the worst.

  Not many men could sleep easy after seeing what the young Jedediah Herne had seen.

  Several times an alteration in the force or the direction of the wind disturbed him, and he would roll out of his one blanket, glancing through the dusty window at the leaden sky.

  Each time it was only a minor change, and each time he slipped back into sleep. It had been Doc Holliday who had told him, between coughing blood into an embroidered lace ’kerchief, that the human body stored sleep, and that it was always a good idea to catch up on it whenever the chance came. It seemed a sensible idea and Jed had always tried to follow it.

  Not that there were a whole mess of chances for long sleeping when you were a hired gun or a bounty hunter. Sleep too long and you might never wake up.

  First light brought him to his feet, slipping the Colt back into its holster. All through the night it had remained in his hand. Throwing the blanket over his shoulder like a poncho, walking to the window, feeling the cold stiffening his muscles. Wondering what he was doing, at forty years of age, punishing himself like this.

  The thought passed.

  The wind was definitely easier. The next building up the street, close to the earth-slip, had a single shutter remaining on one of the first floor windows, and it flapped ceaselessly to and fro. But it wasn’t battering itself to splinters the way it had been the night before.

  The whole of Norwich Hills was shrouded in snow, the whiteness blurring the outlines of the mining equipment, leaving the black mouth of the shaft gaping more clearly, like a bullet hole in white skin.

  There was a thread of gray smoke drifting away from the hut where Herne had seen the figure appear. Its door stood partly open. Even as Herne watched through the clear light of the morning, he saw one of the two men - Luke, he thought from the build - come from behind one of the tangled heaps of wood and wire and hurry into the hut. He seemed to be buttoning up his clothes.

  With the snow no longer falling, and the wind dropped, Herne might have risked a shot at him, but the Sharps lay on the floor.

  He looked at the thickness of the snow hanging on the angled roof of the building next door, judging that close to eighteen inches had fallen during the previous storm. Enough to slow down a man on foot, but not enough to stop a horseman escaping from Norwich Hills.

  “Time to be movin’,” said Herne to himself, spinning the chamber of the Colt by habit, making sure he carried a full load. If he’d ever stopped to think about it he’d have laughed at it; if anyone filed a half inch off the nose of one bullet in the gun, he’d have known it the moment he drew it, the alteration in the delicate balance of the pistol would have warned him.

  But habits died hard.

  Once he was out of the door and across the further side of the slip he would be out of sight of the hut. If he went fast he could cut the odds against them moving while he was also unable
to see them. In the old days there had been back gullies along the whole length of the street, but the erosion of earth and wind and rain had altered all that, and the rear of the house teetered perilously over a sheer drop to a canyon three or four hundred feet deep.

  Snow, banked several feet deep, blocked off the doorway, forcing Herne to clamber over splintered and rotting boards to get out through one of the windows, knocking out a few gleaming shards of glass from the comer of the frame.

  Before he moved from the shadow of the building, Jed eased the thong down over the hammer of the Colt, not prepared to take a chance on it slipping out of the oiled holster if he fell in the snow.

  The rifle was in his left hand, half-hidden under the gray blanket. Herne paused a moment, staring up the incline towards the old workings of the Norwich Hills mine, concentrating all his attention on the hut where he’d seen Luke Barrell. Apart from a tell-tale thread of smoke worming from a ramshackle metal chimney, it gave the impression of being deserted. The door was closed and there didn’t seem to be any windows. Though there could easily be cracks. Perhaps the two men were actually watching him as he stood there. Maybe both with rifles. Both with a bead on him. Just waiting for the moment to shoot.

  If it was a difficult shot aiming up the hill, it would be an impossible one down towards the street. He looked at the snow that drifted across the trail in a sullen, shifting pall of dusty white. Trying to guess if there were any deep ruts concealed by it, where he might turn an ankle or fall and break a leg.

  There didn’t seem to be anything and he gathered himself like a sprinter at the start of a race, powering from the shade of the stoop and bounding across to the other side, disappearing over the edge of the trail in a flurry of ice and snow.

  Panting with the effort, Herne watched his breath pluming away and vanishing as the dying wind caught it. Despite the fact that it was no longer snowing, it was still bitingly cold, and he rubbed his fingers to keep the blood flowing. The art of the shootist was a variable one at the best of times, but in cold weather it became more hazardous. It was so easy to fumble. To miss the first vital grip on the butt. Or the thumb could miss the first pull on the hammer.

  Sliding and floundering through snow that sometimes reached his groin, Herne clambered up the edge of the draw until he could once again see the hut that was his target. As far as he could tell, nothing had altered in the few minutes that he’d been out of sight. The smoke still stood like a wisp of gray flag, and the door was still closed.

  It had been grindingly hard physical work, and Jed lay back out of sight, wiping sweat from his head with the corner of the blanket. Checking the guns hadn’t been damaged by the deep snow.

  Then working his way around higher up, slipping down four yards for every five he climbed. Pausing every now and then to peek over the brim of the draw to check all was unchanged.

  Once he thought he heard the whinny of a horse. It seemed to come from the mouth of the mine, but it was hard to tell. It might even have been Herne’s own horse, Jubal, registering its protest at being left alone with nothing to eat for the whole night.

  It took more than an hour to reach the position that he wanted. High on the flank of the hill, nestled down among snow-packed boulders, with a fine view down on the hut. Less than three hundred yards from the door.

  As he looked at the workings of the mine, the main shaft that ran into the mountain was nearly below him; a little to his right. The hut was further away. Then came the tangle of metal and fallen struts where the cables and the buckets had run down into Norwich Hills with the ore.

  Circled with rubbish was the mouth of the pit that had been bored, futilely, to try and save the mine from closing when the vein of silver ran out.

  He heard the noise of horses once again, and guessed that they must be just inside the old mine working, sheltered from the weather.

  There was something else interesting that Herne was now able to spot from his eyrie. A line of tracks led through the snow to a flimsy wooden screen about six feet high by eight feet wide. It was just possible to glimpse that the snow behind it was pitted and trodden, indicating where Luke and Cal had been going to relieve their bodily needs.

  Away to his right there was another cluster of boulders that would bring him within one hundred yards of the screen, and Herne decided to take the chance and move to it. Stepping like a fox on ice across the slippery slope, twice nearly falling. Saving himself by jabbing the barrel of the Sharps hard into the packed snow to hold him like a climber’s axe.

  If anyone had walked from the hut during that climb, and looked up towards the snow-wrapped peaks of the Pinaleños, they couldn’t have failed to see Herne stuck there like a fly pinned to a sheet of white paper. But he made it, sitting resting in his new position, able to look down from a place of authority.

  The Sharps was already loaded. He cocked it, licking his finger and holding it up; to be sure of the veering wind. Looking round him to see if and when the sun would break through. There was such heavy cloud cover that it seemed likely more storms were on the way.

  “One hundred ... maybe one-twenty,” he said, adjusting the sights on the long gun.

  It was an easy shot for a gun like the fifty-five Sharps. Much of the area behind the frail screen was now visible to him.

  He rested the barrel of the gun on the rocks and sat and waited.

  It was twenty-eight minutes before eight. Even as Herne was tucking the pocket-watch back in an inside pocket of his coat he saw the dark shape of the door opening, on the side of the hut nearest to the remnants of the township.

  And out came Luke Barrell.

  Still wearing the clothes of the priest, right down to the roman collar. He called something back inside the little square building, and Herne heard the soft voice of Cal Ryder answering him.

  He eased the barrel forward among the rocks, pointing it in the general direction of Barrell, waiting until he was clear of the hut before risking a shot. He wasn’t totally confident that the bang the Sharps had taken on the rutted ice might not have damaged the foresight.

  The door shut again, and Barrell hopped like a scalded frog along the path. Jed noticed that the man was barefooted, so he guessed that what he planned to do behind that leaning wall wasn’t likely to take long.

  Because of his worry about the sighting of the rifle, Herne decided to take a shot at the planks while the bandit was still out of sight. Aiming at a prominent knot-hole almost dead in the centre.

  The notch of the sight lined up as he held his breath, finger caressing the trigger. Like all first-rate shots Jed fired two-eyed, not squinting along the barrel with one eye shut.

  The familiar boom of the charge, and the cloud of black powder smoke that virtually obscured the target. Herne waved it aside with his hand, screwing up his forehead when he saw that the shot hadn’t hit the mark he had aimed at. It had torn a great hole in the wood a hand’s span to the right and an inch or so high. As he reloaded the gun, Jed was mentally refiring the shot with that correction built into it. At the same time aware of the effect the bullet had made.

  “Hey!”

  There was no reply from inside the hut. It looked as if it had been built strong enough to withstand the effects of blasting and it was quite possible that the man inside wouldn’t have heard the noise of the shot.

  “Hey! Cal, you brainless son of a bitch! That damned near hit me while I was ... No!”

  The second bullet must have been closer. And it went precisely where Jed had aimed. With a Sharps rifle, accuracy at such a short range of a hundred yards went without even saying.

  “Cal! Will you …?”

  Jed levered a fresh round into the breech, quickly sighting and firing a third time. A touch to the right this time.

  “Aaaaahh!”

  There was a glimpse of a leg flailing about behind the one side of the screen and Jed snapped off a quick fourth shot at it, having the satisfaction of seeing it jerk and hearing another scream of pain.
/>   “Jesus! Cal! You dirty double-crossin’ bastard. Come out like a man.”

  Luke Barrell must have been wearing his gun, as Herne saw the puffs of smoke from a pistol bursting from behind the wooden wall, and heard the lighter crack of the shots.

  Four of them hit the walls of the hut where Cal Ryder was waiting. Maybe even asleep.

  “Cal! Now stop it, you hear. I’m hurt bad.”

  “Got to get worse before it gets better was what I always heard!” yelled Herne from the safety of the snow-covered rocks.

  “Who the ...? Who the Hell’s that?”

  “Remember the Bozeman Trail, Luke?”

  “What?”

  “Near Fort Laramie.”

  “Agent?”

  “Bounty, Luke. I was there.”

  “Jesus. Back in seventy-one?”

  “Seventy.”

  “Come out and let’s see you.”

  “Gun-runnin’ to Arapaho bucks isn’t pretty, Luke, nor is leavin’ your friends to dangle in the wind.”

  “Herne! Herne the Hunter. It was you on the train like I thought.”

  Jed put another bullet through the screen, aiming low and left, making Barrell yell out again.

  “Where’s that bastard Ryder? Cal! Cal!!” He fired another couple of shots at the hut, sending splinters of stone whining into the air around the working.

  “He’ll get his, Luke.”

  “What do you want, Herne?”

  “I’m paid to get the printing plates back for the money.”

  “Cal’s got them. Let me try and trick him out and you can take them and let me go.”

  “You’re a real nice guy, Luke Barrell. There’s somethin’ else.”

  “What?”

  In the silence Jed could clearly hear him spinning the chamber of his pistol and trying to reload it quietly; a muffled curse as he dropped a shell in the snow.