‘Aw, he’s not going to get this high up with all this rain coming down.’
Herne had, in fact, got on to the level below the man without too much difficulty. Getting higher was the problem. He made a leap for an overhang, caught it, found his fingers slipping off due to the wetness, ended up clutching the edge of the section of rock.
The man heard the noise and looked around. He saw Herne’s hands along the edge and smiled to himself This was going to be easy!
He stood over the rim, boot raised. Two firm stamps of his foot and Herne’s body would be scattered all over the ground below. The boot began its downward journey. At the last moment, Herne swung his weight on to one side and lifted his right hand, grabbing for the ankle. He caught hold of it firmly, jerking forwards as he did so. The man fell backwards heavily, winding himself.
It left time enough for Herne to clamber up to his level. Only just enough for the bounty hunter’s gun was out and pointing in Herne’s direction.
No time to think. Dive!
Herne’s body went crashing into the man’s stomach, the bullet sailing over his head and out into the storm. Herne landed on top of his opponent, ramming his knee hard between his legs. He lifted the man’s head and shoulders by the material of his coat and slammed them back down.
Then he jumped clear, reaching for his Colt. 45.
But his fingers closed on emptiness.
The gun had been thrown from his holster by the fall and lay on the edge of the rock, out of easy reach.
And the bushwhacker was coming back at him. Herne managed to half-duck a punch but he was still caught on the left temple and sent staggering sideways. Another flurry of fists followed and Herne was pushed back against the side of the rock.
He threw up his right arm and parried one hammering blow, then grabbed out with his other hand, seizing the man’s right arm by the wrist. But failed to counter the man’s upraised leg which crashed straight into his groin.
Herne doubled up in agony but managed to hold fast to the man’s wrist. A knee rattled against his ribs and forced him back on to the face of the rock once again. His hold was broken.
He shook his head to clear it and watched the man trying to bring his gun into play again. In one quick movement, Herne felt for the handle of his bayonet, brought it clear from his boot and threw it. The blade struck the bounty hunter high in the chest and sent him backwards to the edge.
Herne jumped forward a couple of paces and grabbed for the handle of the bayonet. With his other hand he pushed — it was the only way to free the long blade. As it slipped from the man’s body, the impact of the shove sent him over the edge.
The last Herne saw of him was a desperate flapping and flailing of arms, like a bird pushed out of its nest too soon by an over-anxious mother.
Herne squatted down and steadied his breathing, wondered if the other bushwhacker was still above him, or if he had gone round the top and back to where ever Coburn was waiting.
It didn’t matter too much anyway. He began to climb back down to the ground, keeping his back close to the wall of rock. The rain had eased off a little, but there was still too much of it to make visibility anything but dreadful.
He waited a moment or two at the bottom, then sprinted for the spot where he had left Becky.
At first he thought she was no longer there. Until he saw a movement from the shiny, black shape crammed between the two rocks. Herne reached down and raised her head up.
There was no expression in her eyes.
‘Look, Becky. I’ve got the odds down. But Coburn and some others are still around somewhere. I don’t think we should wait for them to find us. The river’s worse than ever, but lower down, by the ferry, it might be possible to get across.’
He looked at the raging, dark waters that had begun to spread over the low-lying land at the river’s edge.
‘We must get on the horses and ride as fast as we dare. It’ll be hard for them to keep their footing, but we don’t want to give Coburn an easy target and if he’s going to be chasing us we don’t want to make that simple either.’
He looked down at her, but there was no response. Perhaps it had been driven out of her by the cold rain that had been hammering incessantly on her head.
‘Right. Let’s go.’
Herne swung himself up into the saddle and Becky followed suit.
‘Stick close to me,’ called Herne, ‘and hold on tight!’
Then he was away, his animal plowing up great furrows of water as it galloped towards the ferry.
The rain cut into Becky’s face and stung her like a multitude of needles. She peered through the gloom in a vain effort to see clearly where she was going. Urging her horse on so as to keep close to Jed.
Suddenly she felt the animal’s feet begin to slide from under him. She pulled desperately at the reins in an effort to get the horse to right itself.’ but there was nothing she could do.
The legs finally went from under him and Becky found herself hurtling sideways and then splashing down on to the muddy ground. Herne, ahead of her, didn’t appear to be aware of what had happened.
Becky rolled and slithered further and further towards the river. Everything she tried to grab hold of gave way in her hands. She clawed frantically at the mud but only succeeded in tracing patterns through it.
Until she came to a sudden stop against something hard.
Becky looked round, then upwards. Her heart stopped, her mouth sagged open: it was a pair of boots. The owner of which leered down at her through the mist which was rising off the ground. He had the strangest eyes and skin she had ever seen. Becky had seen no man like him before.
It was Isaiah Coburn: the albino.
‘What a present to be made to us in such difficult times,’ he grinned.
Then two wiry arms reached down and Becky was caught fast in an iron grip that seemed to cut right through her flesh and bite into her bones.
‘Now,’ said Coburn, ‘I wonder what Jed’ll do when he finds out you’re missing?’
The albino chuckled and Becky shivered in his grasp, partly from the cold and rain, partly from the sight of the man who laughed into her face.
Coburn pushed her down by the tops of her shoulders and then Becky felt her legs being pulled away from underneath her. She was lifted awkwardly down into a rough shelter that had been made out of several thick planks of wood which looked as if they might have broken away from the ferry.
These were propped up by other broken planks and rammed hard into the earth. It gave some kind of shelter from the onslaught of the rain, though if the river continued to breach its banks it would not keep out any of the flood water.
Becky looked at the man who had taken her by the legs. He was a big man with a ·large, heavy face and had to bend himself into a very uncomfortable position in order to keep inside the shelter.
Coburn, she noticed, though as long in the body, seemed to be able to curl himself with much more grace and ease. Becky got the impression that he would find comfort of sorts in any situation.
‘Well, honey,’ said the fatter man, ‘I reckon you’ll be staying here with us till this shower’s over. ‘Cause I don’t see your friend coming back for you. Maybe he’s decided to go on without you.’
He smiled evilly at her and Becky dreaded the possibility that he might be telling the truth. Why had she been so horrible to Jed? She couldn’t blame him if he did ride off and leave her to fend for herself.
Coburn was looking at her intently.
‘You’re a pretty little thing, through all that wet,’ he said finally, ‘so maybe he won’t leave you with us. Then again, he might. It depends what Jed thinks important at the moment, don’t it?’
The shot that rang out and rattled against the wood above their heads put an end to speculation. Herne had come back all right.
Without hope of Ending cover and realizing that it was equally impossible to try and charge the shelter, Herne had flattened himself in the mud and was lying ther
e with his Sharps aimed at the planks.
Coburn eased his gun round the side of the shelter and fired a couple of times in Herne’s direction.
‘You’re wasting your time, Jed,’ he shouted above the noise of the continuing storm. ‘There ain’t no way you’re going to winkle us out of here.’
Herne sent another shot skidding along the top of the wood.
‘See what I mean,’ Coburn called, ‘you can’t get a good shot at us, but sooner or later one of us is going to get you lying there like a corpse already. Little more rain and we won’t even have to bury you. You’ll just float away down river.’
Herne showed his exasperation with another wasted bullet.
‘’Sides,’ Coburn added, ‘there’s as much a chance one of your lucky shots’ll get the girl, like as it’ll get us. Be a shame that. She’s a powerful pretty little thing, Jed.’
‘Sure is,’ shouted his companion, Elliott, ‘when this rain’s settled down a little I might just have me a time with her.’
He laughed in Becky’s face and she spat at him, swinging her open hand at the same time. Coburn caught her arm from behind and held it tight.
‘Listen, missy,’ he hissed, ‘we got trouble enough without you starting to play up. So keep quiet and still like a good little girl — else I just might let Elliott here do what he likes with you.’·
The strange eyes bored into her as she looked round at him.
‘Understand?’ he said.
Becky turned away.
‘He’s pretty quiet out there all of a sudden,’ observed Elliott.
‘Take a look.’
‘What? And get my head blowed off?’
‘I said, take a look! Unless you want to tangle with me.’
Elliott lifted his head above the level of the shelter and scanned the steaming ground.
‘He’s gone!’ he shouted back down, then ducked his head back. ‘Nothing in sight except water and mud.’
The two men looked at Becky, who stared back at them in utter helplessness, trying to keep the tears from brimming up in her eyes.
Herne had seen the sense of Coburn’s taunts. He was getting nowhere except muddy and wet. So after the last shot, he’d run back through the rain to where he had left his horse and headed for the ferry as fast as he could.
There was more than one way of getting into that shelter.
Neither had he forgotten that there were another two, possibly three, men to be accounted for. And that the obvious place for Coburn to have deployed them was at the ferry itself.
He jumped from his horse and checked his gun. The ferry was in sight on the next bend in the river, where it narrowed slightly.
As he got nearer still, he could see at least one man on the end of the landing, by the rope on which the raft was pulled across.
Herne dropped to one knee and drew his gun. Steadying his aim with the left arm, he drew a careful bead on the man with the rope in his hands.
The arms flew off the rope almost before the shot itself was heard. He staggered backwards, seemed to regain balance for a moment, then finally fell forward so that his neck struck the rope as he went down. His head jolted sideways and he struck the wood of the landing, rolling off into the swelling waters of the Carson River.
Herne was already on his feet and running for the shack beside the landing.
He was almost half-way there when the door crashed open and one of Coburn’s men came out shooting. But not shooting straight enough. Herne fired on the run and the first bullet splintered the woodwork beside the door.
That was enough to send the man scuttling back inside. Herne swerved round in his run and made the side of the building before anyone else had time to take a shot at him.
The door was six feet away and he thought there were probably two men inside.
Herne also thought of Becky down river with Coburn. He didn’t have time to waste.
A mighty kick sent the door flying open and almost off its hinges. Herne jumped in, gun in hand, hammer cocked and ready. Only one man. Facing the door, gun also ready. The blast from Herne’s .45 threw him back against the far wall, hands to his face. Herne saw the lingers become covered in blood and when the hands fell away a moment or so later, there was very little of the man’s face to be seen beneath them.
The second man, thought Herne. Outside.
There was another door at the end of the shack which led out on to the landing itself. Herne opened it cautiously, but the bounty-hunter was no longer interested in the money on Herne’s side. He was only interested in saving his own.
He had cut the rope holding the ferry and was crouching on it, hoping that it would carry him away from Herne and downstream. Which had been Herne’s idea exactly.
Herne ran hard to the end of the landing and jumped, landing on the edge of the raft and sending the man flying over on to the boards.
Herne kicked viciously at the man’s head as it lifted some six inches off the floor. There was a crack as the boot jarred against the jawbone and broke it. Then his two strong arms reached down and lifted the man sufficiently to throw him off and into the raging river.
Herne watched as limbs threshed in the torrent for a while, then sank from sight for good. He lay flat on the centre of the ferry and looked hard at the shore.
The water was moving so quickly that he was almost past the wooden shelter before he had noticed it. He tried to get a steady aim, but with the movement of the water that was nigh on impossible.
He saw the backs of two men, Becky huddled down in between them, and took aim at the broadest back. He fired twice. The first shot missed completely but the second hit Elliott in the back of the thigh. He screamed out with pain and fell forward, hitting his head against the planks.
Coburn turned fast, gun ready, and saw Herne on the raft.
‘Hell, girl,’ he said, with a grudging smile of admiration on his lips, ‘Jed must think something of you after all.’
He fired off a couple of shots in Herne’s direction, but the speed of the ferry made it impossible to judge what he was doing.
Coburn grabbed hold of the back of Elliott’s coat and lifted him up. The man’s eyes were narrowed with the pain from the cut across his forehead, the wound in his leg. He looked at Coburn for a second then lapsed into unconsciousness. The albino viewed him with disgust and let him fall down on to his back.
‘I’ll be seeing you, missy,’ said Coburn to Becky. ‘And you can tell Jed I’ll be seeing him, too.’
He ducked his head under the corner of the shelter and was almost instantly lost to Becky’s sight.
All that she could see was the shape of Jed swimming slowly but powerfully through the flood water towards her.
That, and closer, the reddening river directly beneath her gaze, where the blood from Elliott’s gashed head mingled with the dark swirling waters.
Eleven
The hostility that had been brooding within Becky disappeared the moment she saw Jed battling with the current in order to save her.
The albino had said that he must like her a whole lot to risk everything for her like that. So she had better accept that, Becky thought to herself.
After all, though she might not like the idea of the pursuit of the men from the gambling train, it was the strength of Jed’s affections that was driving him on. When a man loved that much, that strongly, it was foolish to try and deny that love.
And now they had come to Carson City in search of a man named Larry Harvey. He was to be number five: then there would be two left. Two young men, twins, who lived in the Sierra Nevadas. At least it would not mean another cross-country trek.
Then, of course, there was Coburn. Just to hear Jed talk of the albino had been enough to fill her with a mixture of dread and respect. Now that she had seen him face to face, it was the dread that was uppermost in her mind.
‘He frightened me, Jed,’ she said to Herne as they were eating their first meal in Carson City.
‘Who, Whitey?’
<
br /> The girl nodded and cut into her steak.
‘There was something in his face that . . . I don’t know . . .that suggested there was a cruel streak in him.’
Herne shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t want to say that about him. Maybe that’s just the albino in him that makes him seem that way. I don’t think I ever see him doing anything I’d exactly call cruel.’ He broke off in a chuckle, remembering some incident in the past. ‘Must say, I have seen him do some pretty odd things, though. Like the time he fired slugs into this cowboy’s wooden leg till it crumbled under him, like he’d been attacked by the fastest eating woodworm you ever did see.’
Herne laughed loudly and only stopped when he had filled his mouth with another heaped forkful of beef
‘How can you have a cowboy with a wooden leg, Jed?’ Becky asked in all seriousness.
Herne laughed some more. ‘Guess they keep him for herding the three-legged cows.’
He slapped down at his thigh and guffawed.
Becky looked at him in amazement. She hadn’t seen him like this since . . . since those early days on the homesteads, when she’d run over to the Herne place and Jed would put down his axe and pick her up and whirl her round his head until she shouted out with dizziness and fright.
Then he would set her down to the ground gently and she would run off into the house to see what Louise was baking that day.
Herne looked at the girl and half—guessed what she was thinking.
‘You’re wondering what’s made me so all-fired happy today, ain’t you, Becky.’
She nodded her head brightly. ‘Yes, I am. What has got into you?’
· He pushed his empty plate away from him and stretched out his legs alongside the table.
‘Don’t rightly know. But I guess it’s got something to do with us getting here all in one piece when there were times yesterday I thought we’d end up as so much dead meat floating down the river.’
‘Jedediah!’ she exclaimed, shocked. ‘What a thing to say!’
‘Sorry, Becky. But maybe that’s the only way to look at it.’
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