White Death

by John J. McLaglen

  Jed was a good husband. As a top gun he’d made big money, and he’d spent it too. When they talked about marriage, he’d told her all about his past. The killing and the blood and the running. And the money. And the way he’d spent it on cheap women and dear liquor. But there had been a little tucked away safely. What he’d called his ‘burial ‘ money’ and they’d bought the ranch with it. A couple of hundred acres of homestead with some stock, and a couple of horses and a mule. And things were going well.

  The bad days were buried. The dust on the Sharps rifle and the locked drawer in the bureau where his Colt with the worn grips rested bore witness to that.

  Smiling at her friend’s pleasure, Becky took a bite out of the apple, her even white teeth gnawing a lump from the very center of the fruit.

  ‘Aaargh! Sainted Jesus!’

  She gagged and nearly vomited, retching and heaving, spitting bits of apple on the board floor, throwing the rest down on the table.

  ‘What in … ?’ exclaimed Louise, staring in bewilderment at the coughing girl.

  ‘Look!’

  The apple lay rolling slightly from side to side on the pale wood of the table, finally settling with the bitten part uppermost. Louise picked it up, and then dropped it again with an expression of disgust.

  It was rotten!

  Not just with a small bad patch to it, but rotten clean through. Amazingly, the skin was untouched and perfect, but the inside gave the lie to it. Soft and brown, with light green patches of fungus tainting it. And it was crawling with worms. Tiny, blind, white creatures that writhed and burrowed among the slimy pulp.

  ‘Oh, that’s terrible, Becky.’ She picked up the apple and opened the door, lobbing it out into the snow where it lay on top of the crisp layer of white. By morning it would have gone. The rats were a problem on the homestead.

  Trembling from the unpleasant shock, Becky had another drink of milk before leaving for her home.

  ‘It wasn’t really the badness. It was coming across it in what seemed such a perfect fruit. That’s what made it worse. The shock.’

  The clock chimed ten times, its small brass bell pealing out across the cabin. Louise started at the noise, and decided that she must have dropped asleep for a few minutes. The catalogue she’d been holding had fallen to the floor, and she picked it up and carefully opened it again at the picture of the green velvet dress.

  ‘That is the purtiest thing that I ever did see,’ she said to herself.

  The log fire had fallen low, the embers glowing redly, casting deep pits of shadow into the corners of the room. She wondered whether or not to light the oil lamp, and finally decided that it wasn’t worth it. She normally retired to bed early, and what with Jed being away, and feeling more tired than usual, she felt it was about time to go into the other room and go to sleep.

  The bedroom was freezing cold, sealed off in an attempt to keep the rest of the house warm. Louise opened the door, and then shuddered at the wave of icy air that fell out and wrapped itself round her. Although it seemed wicked to get undressed in front of the fire, it was preferable to slipping between freezing blankets in a chilled nightdress.

  Moving quickly, she went into the bedroom, pulling the door shut behind her, reaching for her gown on top of the bed. It was a moonlight night outside, and the room was filled with a silver light. As her hand reached out for the nightdress, with its small flowers embroidered by herself, Louise’s eye was caught by a movement at the window. She looked that way, and barely stifled a scream.

  Just for a fraction of a second there had been a man’s face pressed against the glass, flattened by the pressure, the nose white, and the eyes staring at her like pools of night. The mouth and chin were concealed by a long scarf, while the rest of the head was hidden under a brown Stetson, pulled down low over his forehead.

  As soon as he saw that he’d been observed, the man vanished, and the woman heard steps crunching fast through the snow, away down the hill. She ran to the other room, and pulled back the curtain, wiping at the layer of frozen condensation on it. There he was! A dark figure, lurching unsteadily away towards the brightly lit train.

  ‘And good riddance,’ Louise said to herself, pretending not to notice how shaky her voice had gone.

  She found she’d left her nightdress on the bed in the other room, so she repeated the trip, and this time brought out its comfortable flannel weight, laying it over the back of a chair to warm. The curtains were firmly pulled at the front of the cabin, but they were flimsy, and gave little protection, if anyone should chance to look in. However, it seemed as though the peeper had probably only been a solitary man, one of the train crew she guessed, since no gentleman would do a thing like that.

  The thought reassured her, and Louise sat down, and kicked off her shoes, letting them clump on: the floor. In summer she wore no stockings, and the sudden cold snap hadn’t made her change her habit. The dress had buttons down the back, and hooks and eyes at the neck. With an effort she managed to undo them, surprised how her fingers all seemed to have become thumbs. ·

  She stepped out of it, letting it fall about her with a whisper of clean cotton. Her shift was also of cotton. The in same pretty flowers that she’d sewn on· herself those long hours back home, when she wondered what her beau would be like. What sort of man would finally marry her and sweep her off and plunder her willing body with his hot embraces.

  Before moving out to Tucson, Louise Herne had been an avid reader of the more sensational type of ladies’ romance book.

  She wondered whether or not to keep on her shift, but Jed liked her naked under the nightdress when he came home, and there was always just the possibility that he and Wild Bill might come back that night, once the snow had eased a little. But, knowing Wild Bill Yates as she did, after three years of having him for a neighbor, she suspected that any chance of passing another night in Tucson, with its girl and lights and whisky and gambling, might prove too great a temptation for him.

  Still, there was just the chance. So she pulled off her shift, stretching in front of the fire, the dying light throwing pools of shadow over her stomach, with just the suspicion of a swelling, and across her fine, firm breasts, the nipples standing out as she casually scratched at them, running a finger nail round each one for a moment of wicked pleasure.

  Then the memory of that grinning, leering face at the window came slobbering back to her mind and she flushed in the red glow, and quickly tugged on her nightdress, tearing a seam under the right arm as she did so.

  But that didn’t matter. She was warm and secure. The door was bolted, though she had left the heavy latch-bar off, in case Jed came home and couldn’t get in. The fire was now only a tiny red eye amid the ashes, the fresh tang of the smoke fading. Louise heard the noise of singing again from the railroad, and she shivered.

  She paused at the door to the bedroom, listening to the rowdy, drunken voices, shaking her head as a trick of the wind seemed to be bringing them closer. Head on one side, Louise Herne listened harder.

  It wasn’t a trick of the wind.

  They were coming closer!

  Feeling her heart pounding in her chest, the breath suddenly dried in her throat, the woman ran to the front of the house and peered from the darkened window down over the sheet of snow towards the train. And there, coming unsteadily towards her, was a group of men. One carried a lantern, and three of the others held bottles. All were singing and shouting. It was instantly obvious that they were drunk.

  Even as she looked out, paralyzed with fear, she saw one of them fall over and slide a few yards backwards, feet stuck up in the air. Two others staggered back to help him, and all three collapsed in a tangle of limbs.

  At any other time it might have been funny, the combination of the drink and the snow, but now it had a bizarre, terrifying menace. That men in that condition should bother to leave a warm train at this time of night, and climb a hill on deep snow, meant they must have some very powerful force to drive them on.


  Louise remembered yet again that face at the window.

  ‘No! Please, God! No!’

  The latch bar. That was the first thing to do. She picked up the heavy beam, dropping it in her haste, finally managing to lift it and slot it in place. It couldn’t stop a determined assault; she knew that. But it might delay them. Give her time to reason with them.

  At the back of her mind there was the dim relief that Becky hadn’t stayed the night with her.

  The singing was louder now. A voice called out: ‘Hey, lady! There’s a whole deck of fine fellows out here just eager to make your acquaintance.’

  ‘My husband’s asleep in the back,’ she said, voice shivering. ‘If you wake him he’ll come out and kill you all.’

  There was bawdy laugher. She heard feet round the back, and a hand trying the rear door, but that was firmly bolted and barred and stayed that way for most of the year.

  ‘Lady. We been watchin’ and we know your old man and his friend are in Tucson. Just you and us, lady!’

  ‘Go away!’ she screamed, her nerve cracking. Unconsciously, her hands clasped over her breasts and stomach, where the new life was stirring.

  ‘Seven of us out here, ma’am. We’d take it right kindly if you’d let us in, without we have to do some harm to your pretty little cabin.’ A different voice. Southern, and more cultured.

  They weren’t even making a pretence about what they’d come for. Her eyes flicked round, looking for some way of making them go away. And caught the gleam of the dying fire on the brass-bound stock of the Sharps rifle.

  Jed had taught her how to use it, but it was far too much gun for her to handle with any kind of ease. She had seen her husband, when out hunting early in their marriage, bring down a deer at half a mile with the single shotgun, but it was too heavy and ponderous for her.

  There was a note of anger in the voice outside. ‘If you don’t show us some hospitality, ma’am, then we might just have to invite ourselves in. And we wouldn’t take at all kindly to that.’

  Louise could hear the noise of feet, moving away. She risked a glance through the side window, and was horrified to see three of the men, wrapped in parkas and heavy coats against the bitter cold, walking quickly towards the Yates spread across the ridge.

  She dragged a chair through the darkness, wincing as its legs scraped on the floor. Then she was up on it, the seat feeling cold to her bare feet, straining, upwards to lift the gun off its pegs.

  ‘The bitch is up to something,’ shouted one of the men, and a hand fumbled at the handle of the front door.

  ‘I’m with child,’ she cried out, despair making her voice fill with tears.

  ‘If you ain’t now, then you sure as hell will be before this night’s out,’ called back one of the men, his sally being greeted with hoots of laughter and an echoing rebel yell.

  Desperately, Louise was trying to handle the long gun, racking her brains to remember what Jed had told her. ‘Lever down on the trigger-guard and the breech drops open. Slide the cartridge into the chamber, and close her up again. Pull back the hammer, and you’re ready to fire.’

  There was a small carved box of cartridges on the mantel, and she grabbed one out and followed the instructions. The cartridge nearly slipped from her fingers, but she finally rammed it home and cocked the gun, using both hands to pull back on the stiff hammer.

  Meanwhile, the battering on the door had been getting louder. The shouts had stopped and the attackers were setting to it with deadly earnest. The bar was beginning to creak and crack with the pressure, and Louise realized that it couldn’t be long before it yielded.

  ‘I have a gun!’ She had to repeat it before anyone heard what she was saying. ‘We got a dozen, lady.’

  ‘I got me a barrel on mine that you won’t believe, ma’am.’

  ‘Mine’s a nine inch Colt, lady,’ called another.

  ‘When you see mine, you’ll reckon it’s your birthday. Open up and get ready for it!’ shouted a third.

  There was an extra strong heave, and the bar split down the middle, splinters of wood flying around the darkened room. Mouth pulled open in a mute scream of terror, Louise pulled the trigger on the Sharps.

  There was a loud explosion, and a flash from the muzzle.

  A cry of pain.

  Blackness.

  Chapter Two

  William Yates had drunk far too much the night before, under the roof of the ‘Fortune Wheel’, one of the biggest saloons in Tucson. He’d also wagered twenty dollars on the tumbling of a pair of dice, and had lost.

  ‘I got me a mouth like the bottom of a buzzard’s out-house,’ he moaned as he and his neighbor, Jed Herne, rode slowly back along the winding trail from the city to their spreads.

  The snow was beginning to thaw as the sun showed its orange face over the surrounding hills. Water rushed down a narrow stream, and dripped off the branches of bushes. The horses had been penned up in a crowded livery stable, unusually full with the mounts of cowboys caught by the weather, and were glad to be out again in the fresh air. Herne’s black stallion, called ‘Billy’ because its unpredictable temper reminded Jed of his old partner, William Bonney –the ‘Kid’– bucked and skipped, until he brought his hand down in a great clumping blow between its ears and stopped its tricks.

  ‘Be back in a half hour,’ said Herne, standing up in the stirrups, looking ahead over the next rise, gazing across the sheet of melting snow towards his spread. The day after tomorrow he and Louise would be enjoying their third wedding anniversary. After all that time he somehow still found it amazing that he was married at all. And to girl barely half his age.

  For the twentieth time that morning, since they left the ‘Gold Trail’ hotel, he felt for the bundle tied securely to his saddle.· The bundle that contained the green velvet dress with the white lace at collar and cuffs that he’d seen Louise mooning over for months. It had been expensive, but when he thought about what he owed his wife, he reckoned that any price was cheap.

  Yates had a pack mule in tow, and he tugged irritably at the lead rope, cursing the animal as it floundered through a deep pocket of snow at the side of the trail. The mule was loaded with provisions that they’d bought, riding into Tucson together as they did once a month. Yates had his faults, a foul temper when he was in drink being one of them, but he was a good neighbor, and his wife Rachel was a good-natured and friendly woman.

  And there was Becky.

  A skinny brat of eleven when they first moved out to their spread, but gradually growing up. Herne began to wonder idly about the girl, when Yates interrupted his thoughts.

  ‘Train’s gone!’

  Below, and a mile or so ahead of them, they could see the black snake of the Southern Pacific Railroad winding away across the whiteness, like a child’s scribble on a clean page of a book. And where it had stood in the snow, there was a clean, green space, just the length of the locomotive and two coaches. The ground around the place was trampled and dirty. Mud and earth kicked up by the efforts of the crew to dig themselves out and get moving again.

  ‘Feller in the saloon said it was a special, and that it lit out and through Tucson like the bats of Hell were flying after it. Must have been stuck there since it started to come down.’

  Herne reined in, sitting back and looking at the scene, his dark brown eyes scanning the land ahead of them as though he looked for some sort of clues to what had been happening.

  ‘Tracks there. Looks like they came up to my place for coffee or shelter. Must of pleased Louise. Always said she wanted some classy company for a change.’

  Yates shifted the plug of chewing tobacco to the other side of his jaw and spat, the spittle staining the snow a light brown where it landed. ‘Us folks not good enough for her, is that it Jed?’

  Herne laughed. ‘Hell, no. And you know that ain’t so, Bill. If that was right, then your Becky and Louise wouldn’t spend so much time together.’

  Mollified, Yates heeled his horse forward again. ‘That’s da
mn right. More like sisters than anything else. Still, they are more of an age.’

  He never missed a chance to get in a dig about the difference in the ages of Herne and his wife, but Jed recognized it for what it was, jealousy, and let it pass.

  As they got nearer, they could see the tracks more clearly. The ground near the front of the Herne spread was trampled and clear of snow, and the path between their houses was also bare and well-trodden.

  ‘Looks like they had themselves a real ring-a-ding while we was away,’ commented Yates, a note of anxiety entering his voice.

  Jed didn’t reply, just spurring his mount on to a fast trot, followed by his neighbor, still cursing at the unwilling mule. The hooves of Billy splattered up the wet snow, throwing it out along their tracks, kicking up under his belly and soaking Jed’s fine boots.

  When he was known all along the frontier as ‘Herne the Hunter’, Jed truly had been the best. He knew it. But one of the reasons for his survival had been a kind of sixth sense. The ability to see the leaf out of place in the wood that meant an Apache ambush. Or spot the slight difference in the color of a waterhole that meant there’d been men there more recently than there should have been. Or stand in a crowded and noisy room and hear the click of a Deringer’s hammer being cocked in a man’s inside pocket.

  And now he had that feeling. There was something wrong. Some piece out of place in the puzzle, and he couldn’t yet figure out what it was. But the prickling of the graying hairs at the nape of his neck told him to look for it.

  ‘Smoke!’ he suddenly shouted, spurring Billy to a full gallop, managing to keep his seat in the saddle despite the big stallion’s slipping in the treacherous mixture of mud and snow.