White Death

by John J. McLaglen

  ‘Now,’ said Herne, simply running at the closed door, hitting it a solid blow with his shoulder. It burst open with a splintering and tearing of wood, its lock flying across the room.

  The man had been standing close behind it, obviously trying to work out what was happening, and the door sent spinning away, to land on his back against the far wall.

  Yates and Herne both stood in the doorway, looking down at him, guns ready in their hands.

  ‘Josiah Nolan, if I don’t miss my guess. And this,’ throwing the ring to him, where it tinkled on the wooden floor, rolling like a child’s top, ‘is yours. Maybe you’d better try and find another finger to put it on.’

  ‘You must be Herne and Bates,’ said the man on the floor, grinning up at them.

  ‘Yates. And you’re Nolan.’

  ‘I have that honor, sir. May I rise from this undignified and uncomfortable position?’

  ‘Sure. But try anything and you’re dead,’ said Yates.

  ‘My my! How very dramatic. I’ve heard about how hot-tempered you westerners are, but I hadn’t realized it was true. Really.’

  With a grunt, Nolan got up off the floor, dusting down his elegant clothes. He looked about twenty-five years old, with a chubby, puffy face that spoke of too much food and too little work. He wore a smart suit, with a brocade waistcoat and a shirt with ruffles of lace to the front. Leaning easily against the wall, Nolan seemed totally unworried by the threat of the two guns.

  ‘You and your murdering bastards of friends killed and raped my wife. And his wife took her own life after what you done to her.’

  ‘She should have been pleased with the honor that I and my friends did her. A poor-looking woman. Both of them, indeed, and living in such conditions. I can hardly imagine that the authorities permit such things to happen in our fair and decent country.’

  The room seemed filled with the triple click of Yates easing back the hammer of his gun. ‘You lousy, stinking bastard!’

  ‘Really, Mr. Yates. I can hardly be held responsible for your wife’s death, as I was … Er, occupied, in the other room at the time. And as for your wife, Mr. Herne, then you should be pleased that she chose to rid herself of this painful affliction of such a squalid life. If she had lived I would have taken action against her for causing me painful wound.’

  He waved the bandage at them. It was unbelievable to Herne and Yates that the man – hardly more than a boy –should be so self-possessed. In his arrogance, it never seemed to occur to him that he and his friends had done a deadly wrong, nor that the two men in the room with him might kill him.

  ‘My father – you’ve heard of Senator Nolan from San Francisco – knows of my accident, and is sending his physician here to this one-horse town to attend to me. Your local man is about as much use as a barrow of horse-shit, and not much more congenial as company.’

  Nolan was astoundingly indifferent to his own danger, seeming as though he was trying to insult them and anger them. Yet, could he be that stupid? Time was that Herne, the Hunter would have relied on his sixth sense to guess that there was something dangerously wrong in the man’s manner. But it had been three years since he last faced a man in anger, and he had even holstered his pistol, confident that Wild Bill had the rich boy covered.

  ‘Even the food was appalling. Look at that – ’ casually pointing over to their left, and a little behind them.

  Yates turned and stared where Nolan was pointing, the barrel of his Colt wandering way off target. Herne half-turned, his head beginning to move, but something of the old skill still remained, nearly buried beneath the years of easier living, and his eyes didn’t leave their enemy.

  Like a snake flicking out its head after a mesmerized Jack-rabbit, so Nolan moved like a flash as soon as they were distracted. First angering them, he had then thrown them completely off guard, and now made his move. A small Deringer, with an over-and-under barrel, appeared in his unwounded left hand. So fast that Herne had a moment to wonder if he was wearing some kind of Sharps’ trick rig with a spring release.

  Yates cried something out, firing from the hip, even though his gun wasn’t pointing anywhere near Nolan. The bullet tore a chunk out of the far wall, burying itself in the scarred white wood.

  Herne himself started to dive to his right, reaching for the Colt as he fell. But the old speed had gone, and his fingers fumbled, dropping the gun as his elbow hit the floor. He saw Nolan hesitate for a fraction of a second, wondering which target to take first.

  He decided to take Yates, who was cocking the Colt ready for his next shot. There was the vicious snap of the little pistol, firing its .33 bullet from its three and three-quarter inch barrel, with its Damascene swirls and gold engraving.

  And he missed.

  The bullet ripped through Yates’s trousers just above the knee, flattening itself in the leg of a chair. That gave Herne the chance he wanted, picking up his gun, sighting and firing, before Nolan could loose off a second shot. Yates had been thrown off balance by the near miss, and had flung himself to the floor.

  Herne fired three times, cocking with his thumb and squeezing the thin trigger. The first shot snapped by Nolan’s face, making him jerk back his head in a reflex action. The second bullet went feet wide to the right as Herne tried too hard for speed. The third shot struck home, smashing into the young man’s shoulder. Blood splattered out of his back as the heavy bullet exited, but it was only a slight flesh wound, and Nolan was still on his feet, and still holding the lethal little gun.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Jed. Bust him!’ screamed Yates, rolling frantically to one side, and loosing off another speculative shot at Nolan that hit the ceiling, loosening a shower of white plaster all over the three of them.

  ‘I’m trying for Christ’s sake!’ yelled back Herne, bitingly angry with himself for his own sloppiness in not putting the man away with at least one of the three shots.

  Nolan dodged behind the bed, so that only his white face and arm could be seen by his attackers. And the arm ended in a bright little Deringer. Herne saw the flash of the gun and slid behind a chair by the door, conscious of the frailty of its cover. He noticed Yates out of the corner of his eye, scrabbling along on his stomach.

  There was enough light in the bedroom for all of them be able to see the others. Jed heard the thin metallic click that told him Nolan had reloaded the handgun, and now had two shots. Reaching round the back of the chair he snapped off a couple of bullets at Nolan, but both went high, the younger man ducking safely behind the bed.

  ‘Come on boys!’ shouted Nolan. ‘All this gunplay’s going to bring out some other folk who might not take kindly if you kill the son of someone like a powerful senator who could snuff out this hick town like a spent cigar.’

  It was a stand-off. Neither Yates nor Herne wanted to attack Nolan and risk a bullet in their skulls from his small, but lethal weapon. The Deringer was useless at any range over about eight feet, but in the confines of a room it was as much use as any bigger gun.

  Suddenly Yates shouted to him. ‘Jed. Get the son-of-a-bitch’s head down. I got me an idea.’

  It was more than Herne had, so he fired off three more shots in the general direction of Nolan, having the satisfaction of seeing the pasty face drop down out of sight for a moment. In that moment, Yates made his move.

  Scuttling sideways like a bulky crab, he slid over the rough floor, and fired four times. Under the bed. There was a piercing scream of agony, and Nolan crashed sideways from cover, both hands clutching at his leg.

  ‘My leg! Aaaargh! Nooo!!’

  Nolan toppled on the floor, his shattered knee unable to take his weight, both hands trying to hold the ruined joint together. At least one of Yates’s .44/40 cartridges from the Frontier Colt had hit home under the bed, ricocheting the pine boards, and picking up a spray of splinters on its way. It had hit Nolan plumb at the centre of the knee, cracking the top of both tibia and fibula, blasting the patella into shards of powdered bone, and wrenching the bottom of th
e thigh bone from its junction with the knee. Cartilage and ligament were torn apart, crippling the man in a web of stunning agony.

  As he writhed on the floor, Nolan screamed high and thin, like a stallion at the gelding. His gun had dropped from fingers, and lay somewhere behind the bed.

  Warily, in case this was another trick, Herne climbed to his feet, and stood by Yates looking down at the man they had come to kill. In the other room, behind them, they could hear groaning as Doc Newman started to recover consciousness from the blow to the head.

  ‘Please. Don’t kill me.’

  ‘I figured that’s what my wife probably said to you and your friends, you bastard,’ spat Yates, aiming a kick at Nolan, but stopped by Herne.

  ‘Come on Bill. Let’s kill him and get away from here.

  We’ll never get to any of the others if’n we get caught here by that crud deputy.’

  Nolan strained to look up at them, gaining a brief mastery over the pain that was consuming him. His eyes burned into them like coals, and there was a depth of bitter hatred in his voice that was like a blow from a fist. ‘You’re dead. Both of you. For what you done here to me, you are both dead! ‘He screamed the last word. ‘My Pa hears about what you done to his boy, then he will crucify you. By tomorrow you are going to be begging to die.’

  Yates grinned at him, the Colt steady in his hand. ‘Maybe we will die tomorrow. But you, Josiah, are going to die today.’

  Aiming carefully, he fired three more times. Hitting the other knee, and both elbows. After one last cry of rending pain, Nolan fainted, flopping back in his own blood. Crimson streams flowed from both arms and legs, collecting in a dip in the floorboards like a lake, then dripping out of sight, through a crack down under the foundations of the cabin.

  ‘Finish him, Bill,’ said Herne, carefully reloading his own gun, slotting the cartridges in, flicking up the cover and easing down the hammer.

  ‘Nope.’ Yates grinned. ‘I figure we ought to leave him like that. A forty-four through each knee and elbow is sure as Hell going to slow that bastard down some. I figure he won’t even, walk again. Nor do nothing, come to that. He’s even going to need one of his Pa’s servants to wipe his ass for him. Leave him. Let him suffer for the rest of his life like he and his buddies made Rachel and Louise suffer.’

  Herne looked down at the prostrate man, stirring as the pain began to get through to him again. Nolan’s eyes opened, and for a moment shock kept his mind clear.

  ‘Don’t leave me. Please! Don’t. Pa, don’t let them hurt your Jo. Please Pa.’ And then his brain took him away and he began to babble. Yates laughed at him.

  Unhurriedly, Herne cocked and aimed his Colt, squeezing the trigger, feeling it buck in his hand. Seeing the red rose of bright blood blossom in the centre of Nolan’s forehead, right between the eyes, making the skull bounce and judder; with the force of the bullet’s exit through the back of the head.

  ‘Now what you want to do a thing like that for, Jed? He’d have been better alive.’

  ‘I know that. But I want revenge. I want to see all seven of those men dead in front of me. That’s one.’

  He reached over and tugged a sheet off the bed, throwing its snowy whiteness over the ravaged corpse, noting with a passing interest the way it stuck to the places where blood still flowed. The redness seeping through the linen like ink through blotting paper.

  ‘There. Come on now, Bill. I know how bad I messed up on that one, and I don’t aim to do it again. Before we try for number two, I’m going somewhere to get me some practice with this,’ holstering the warm gun. ‘Next time things are going to be different, I can promise you that.’

  That moment, Doc Newman appeared in the doorway looking in horror at the sheeted body of Nolan. Blood still trickled down his own forehead where Herne’s gun barrel had knocked him cold.

  ‘That’s awful. You two . . . you don’t know what you’ve done. Senator Nolan won’t rest till he’s hounded you down. His son was in my care.’

  Yates and Herne pushed by him, Yates pausing at the door. ‘Well, Doc. I guess it looks like you just lost another patient.’

  Chapter Five

  It took nearly three weeks before Herne was satisfied. Three grueling weeks of bruised hands and bleeding fingers. The thumb on his right hand that worked the hammer to cock the Colt was red-raw, but he wouldn’t stop. Every morning, he was out soon after sun-up. Relentlessly driving himself on. Recovering the old speed and accuracy.

  The way he’d fumbled the killing of Nolan had appalled Jed. Time was he’d have faced a man like Nolan, even with the toy Deringer ready in his hand, and still reckoned that his own speed would have been enough to pluck him down, before the other man could squeeze the trigger.

  They had both agreed that Tucson had become too hot for them for the time being. Leaving money and instructions with their ramrods, they had lit out westwards, content to keep under cover in case Senator Nolan sought revenge for the murder of his son.

  Jed and Yates had travelled together part of the way but parted when they reached the fork in the stage route.

  Yates going north to see Becky in Phoenix, and Herne continuing on to a small spread run by a friend of from the Civil War. The friend was away hunting, but his woman — an Apache half-breed — fed Herne and kept silently out of his way while he drew and fired and drew and fired. Again and again and again.

  She watched him from the adobe house, and she mutter to herself in the tongue of her Chiricahua mother, and crossed herself in the way of her Mexican father. She had seen bad men before. Men who would kill as easily as spit in the dust, but she had never seen one like this Herne. He was old, with graying hair, yet when he stripped off in the mid-day heat, his body was as firm and as well-muscled as any young buck from the mountains.

  And his speed with a gun! She blinked at the way his hand seemed to blur down to his bolster, and the click of the hammer was lost in the crack of the gun firing. There was something in his eyes that made her turn away from him, avoiding his shadow in case it fell across her. She had heard her husband call the man ‘Herne the Hunter’ when he got drunk on pulque and talked of the old times. Saying he was the best. The very best.

  The squaw believed it. And she kept away from the angel of death she saw perched upon his shoulder.

  Yates arrived after three weeks, to report that his wife’s sister, Rosie, was far from well, and finding the high spirits of Becky a great strain.

  ‘I reckon she ain’t goin’ to make it, Jed. The old lady’s face is the color of a whore-house blanket, and she looks near seventy. We got to get things moving if’n we want to keep the kid off our backs.’

  ‘I’m ready. Near as I can judge, I’m about as fast as ever was. I won’t let us down again, Bill.’

  Yates had changed in the three weeks that they’d been apart. He admitted that a fair amount of his time had been spent in the saloons of Phoenix. He’d put on some weight, and his eyes looked puffy and bloodshot.

  The nearest man on their target list was Pete Sheldon. From Gila Bend. A small township the other side of the Sauceda Mountains. Through Indian country. The territory of the Cucapas and the Cajuenches.

  Herne tipped his hat to the wife of his friend, as she hid behind the hessian curtains of her house, and dropped a handful of jingling silver on the front porch. Set his spurs to the big black stallion, and galloped off towards the northwest, and towards the second step of their revenge.

  The trail to Gila Bend was dusty, winding among jagged red-tipped peaks. Yates brought word of a band of Mescalero Apache bucks, and they were careful when they camped, their backs against a huge pile of tumbled boulders, to keep watch.

  Yates, just as dawn paled the eastern sky, woke Herne shaking his shoulder, whispering in his ear: ‘Indians. I can hear them moving about a hundred yards off. Sounds like a half dozen.’

  Herne was instantly awake, revolver in hand, the other hand dropping to his boot. Camping out for the night in those sort of surroundi
ngs, it was only a fool who would take off his boots. Tucked down the right boot, honed to a razor’s edge, and with a point like a needle, Herne carried his old Civil War bayonet. Another memory from the past that Louise’s suicide had awakened, and dragged out of a locked drawer.

  Somewhere out in the desert, they both heard coyotes crying, and both knew enough of the frontier to spot the difference between the real sound and that made by human throats. It was certainly Apaches.

  Their hobbled horses moved restlessly, scenting the smell of the Indians. Yates’s dun tossed her head and whinnied softly.

  ‘What we goin’ to do, Jed?’ asked Yates, nervously holding his gun out towards the light brush around them.

  ‘Wait for them, or don’t wait for them. Me, I reckon it’ better not to wait for them.’

  The noises had stopped. Herne glanced at Yates, pointing to the right. ‘Go that way about thirty paces, then fire off three or four shots and shout like the Devil. I’ll do the same this side. They won’t be sure how many there are of us, an if I know Apaches, they won’t want to tangle unless the odds are a lot better than ten to one.’

  The trick worked. Herne knew well enough that if they’d encountered a raiding war party, then things would have been harder. But if they were a few bucks off for a high time, then they’d be easily discouraged.

  He fired the moment he heard Yates’s gun barking, fanning out his shots in a half-circle in front of him. There was a yelp of surprise from about fifty paces away, as one of his bullets must have passed uncomfortably close to a target.

  Then there was crashing and shouting, and he heard the clatter of ponies’ hooves over the shifting pebbles, heading away across the plain towards the rising sun.

  Pausing for a moment, Jed ran back to their camp, picking up the heavy Sharps, sprinting back to the edge of the brush, where he found Yates down on one knee, firing steadily at the backs of a half dozen disappearing Apaches, whooping off across the desert