White Death

by John J. McLaglen

  ‘Wastin’ your time, Bill. They been out of range of that Colt for a full minute.’

  ‘Thought I might still wing one, and keep them off our backs for later.’

  ‘I got me a better idea,’ said Herne.

  Carefully, the big man loaded the Sharps, taking his time over it, making quite sure that everything was just so.

  Yates hopped up and down, watching the Indians become smaller and smaller dots, fading towards the horizon. A great mesa towered over the sandy rocks of the desert, about three-quarters of a mile distant, and they were already within a couple of hundred yards of that.

  ‘If’n you can’t stand still, Bill, then do something useful. Kneel down and give me a shoulder for a rest.’

  ‘Damn it! They’re way out of range, even for that cannon of yours.’

  ‘Kneel down and shut up.’

  First Herne held a finger up, wetting it, to get the wind force and direction. It was light, barely whispering in behind them. Unhurriedly he kneeled down behind Yates, resting the long barrel on his shoulder. Licked his finger again, and put a tiny tab of spit on the foresight to make it show better.

  ‘Still now, Bill. Hold your breath.’

  The first of the riders was just rounding the shoulder of the bluff, no bigger than an ant. Yates held his breath, feeling the weight of the gun. Silently mouthing a prayer for Herne to hurry up.

  There was the crack of the explosion, sounding deafening right in his ear, and the barrel of the Sharps was removed as Herne stood up. Yates also stood, shading his eyes with his hand, straining towards the rising sun. Only four of the Apaches were still visible. Three, then two. Then the last rider threw up his arms, like tiny twigs at that distance, and toppled backwards from his pony. The other rider carried on, and disappeared. The stray pony also vanished. A cloud of dust blossomed as the Indian hit the dirt, then slowly drifted away, showing them the body lying quite still.

  Yates threw his hat in the air, giving out a great whooping rebel yell. ‘God damn! That was the best shot I ever did see in all my life.’

  For a moment Jed felt a great temptation to say: ‘It was the worst. I was aiming at the horse,’ but he resisted it, and simply grinned. The first time he’d smiled for near a month.’

  On the road to Gila Bend, with no more sign of the Mescaleros, Yates kept talking about the amazing shot with the long Sharps, until Herne was forced into replying.

  ‘Had a friend, dead now, who was on the other side in the War. One of Berdan’s Sharpshooters. Reckoned he could loose off six shots a minute, easy. At any range up to near a mile.’

  Yates flicked a hand at some flies that clustered round his face. ‘Hell! I heard about them. But I don’t believe that sort of shooting.

  ‘I rode with Quantrill. Not a time I’m rightly proud of. It’ll be twenty years come January. The twenty—first. That we raided and burned Lawrence. Killed us a couple of hundred folks there. Roasted them alive. Could smell the meat charring from twenty miles downwind.’

  They rode in silence for a time, but Yates was still intrigued by the long shot and pressed Herne for details.

  ‘How d’you sight at that distance?’

  ‘The Sharps was only sighted for one thousand yards. Then, during the Wilderness Campaign of that son-of-a bitch Grant, the Blues saw some good old boys working at a signal tower near a mile away. So they call up the Sharp shooters, and their officer climbs a tree. "Fire a volley,” he sings out, and they do. He looks through his glass and sees the Confederates looking down the hill. "Low!" he calls out. So they whittle some wooden sights, and aim up. Fire again. “A mite high" cries their officer. So they range in, carving away until they got it right. But I had my rifle sighted properly up to a mile. Those Apaches weren’t above three-quarters of a mile off.’

  Yates laughed, slapping the neck of his mare, raising a cloud of dust. ‘You’re one out of the barrel all right, Jed. One out of the barrel. I declare you’re looking better and sharper now than I’ve ever known you. Must be coming back to the good days of Herne the Hunter.’

  They paused on a bluff overlooking the township of Gila Bend, with the white of the river like a silk ribbon across the desert. Herne turned to Yates.

  ‘Bill; I sometimes wonder if you got any brain at all in that thick skull of yours. You reckon they were good days?’

  ‘Sure. I wish I’d had your life, Jed.’

  Riding side by side, the two men cantered down the trail into Gila Bend. ‘It isn’t a life that adds up, Bill. What do I have to show for it? Bar-tenders and whores all over the west that I know by their first names. Or knew by their first names. Until I met Louise I had no friends, no family, no children. And no prospects.’.

  ‘But your gun got you everything.’

  ‘Yeah. I once knew a gunman called Lee. Got killed some little place down in Mexico shooing flies for some dirt-farmers. He always put the other side of this argument when it came up. And some of what he said is right.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like people you step aside for no one. Like the insults you have to swallow –none. Folks who make you do things you don’t want to do – none. And, most important, enemies – none.’

  ‘No enemies, Jed?’

  ‘Alive.’

  Pete Sheldon was the town undertaker. A quiet man, slipping-painlessly into middle-age. It only took Yates and Herne a half hour in the ‘Red Moon’ bar to learn that up to four years ago Sheldon had been just another quiet man in a quiet town. Then he provided the funeral arrangements for the richest banker in the area, and married his widow two months later.

  Six months after that she fell down the stairs of their house and broke her neck. Sheldon’s brother was the doctor, and he told everyone that it was accidental death. Which didn’t stop the rumors about how the lady in question got bruises round her throat just from falling down a flight of stairs.·

  But it meant that Pete Sheldon instantly became one of the big men around Gila Bend, and was currently running for the post of mayor. The bar-keep reckoned that he could be bucking for Governor within five years with all that heap of dollars backing him.

  Lounging on the sidewalk outside the saloon, the two men leaned back in a couple of battered rocking-chairs and watched the town going on round them. The main street, that would become a river of mud at the first sign of rain, a dusty canal, stirred up now and again by a rig jogging through.

  ‘That’s Mr. Sheldon now. In the grey suit with the silvery hair. The wife of our minister passed away a couple of days back, and they’re shipping her back to her folks in Vermont. Mr. Sheldon’s doing all the arranging for it himself. Got a special airtight coffin up from New Orleans just for her.’

  ‘I’m obliged,’ said Herne, rising slowly, and walking across the street after the undertaker, followed by Bill Yates. As they neared the office of Sheldon, they both slipped the thongs off their guns.

  ‘Number Two, Jed,’ whispered Yates.

  They had agreed while they waited outside the Red Moon to play it as it came. Herne went in first, with Yates at his heels. A tiny silver bell over the door tinkled and an inner door swung open. A bird-like head peeped out, with a face that seemed all bone and teeth. Teeth that owed more to the skill of the local dentist than to natures.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Mr. Sheldon?’

  ‘Yes? What do you want? It’s a busy time and my assistant’s gone out to have his dinner. Unless it’s important, I’d rather you came back this afternoon and saw him.’

  Both men looked at him, seeing a man with a face like a fox, with a sharp pointed nose and a thin grey moustache. His tie was grey, tied in a loose knot, and held at the front with a gold pin, topped by a massive seed pearl.

  ‘That mean you’re here on your own, Mr. Sheldon?’ asked Herne.

  ‘Yes it does.’

  ‘It’s a sort of private matter, you see. Perhaps we could go through the back and talk it over. Bill, shut the door there so we won’t be disturbed.’
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  Yates slipped the catch on the front door, tugging down a sun-bleached roller blind that stubbornly resisted his efforts to get it to stay. Finally, with an angry curse, he succeeded.

  The mortician watched this with a puzzled face. ‘Listen, I don’t think that I know you gentlemen, do I?’

  Herne pushed him by the shoulder, sending him staggering into the back. ‘You don’t know us at all, Mr. Sheldon, any more than we know you. But, if you’re a religious man, then you could say that you knew both our wives.’

  ‘I don’t think that … Oh …’ His hands flew to his mouth, and his dentures clicked together, like two halves of a miniature keyboard.

  ‘Oh, Mr. Sheldon. Maybe we’ve just rung a little bell, for your memory. Our wives, Mr. Sheldon. You were on a train, back near Tucson, with Josiah Nolan. Doing a spot of gambling. Faro, was it, Mr. Sheldon?’

  ‘Blackjack. It was blackjack and poker most of the time. But listen to me. Please.’

  Yates slapped him hard across the face, knocking him on his back. His false teeth clacked out of his mouth, spinning on the floor near a table. Bill stepped quickly across, grinding them under his heel. The undertaker looked up at him in anguish, blood coming from his nose and lip, the red marks of Yates’s fingers livid across his cheek.

  ‘Please!’ Yates looked across at Herne.

  ‘That’s what that other murdering bastard said. Nolan, when we killed him back in Tucson. With bullets through his knees and through his elbows, he tried to crawl to us, saying “Please”. He’s dead, Sheldon, and soon you’ll be meeting him again, roasting down there in Hell.’

  The undertaker made no attempt to get up, lying on his back, grey coat covered in dust, hands plucking nervously at his gold watch–chain. The sixth sense that had deserted Herne back in Tucson was back, and he bent down, and on an impulse ripped the jacket off, revealing a neat little pearl–handled Colt in a shoulder holster. With a thin smile he tugged it off and threw it in the corner.

  ‘What a dangerous customer you are, Mr. Sheldon. Such a pretty little gun. Didn’t need that for your wife, did you? Long strong fingers you got there.’

  ‘What do you mean? Listen to me, I’m a rich man, I know that what I did was wrong. But I’m prepared to pay anything if you’ll let me go. I . . . Did you truly murder Nolan?’

  ‘Truly, and thanks for the offer, but we’re not in the taking vein today. More in the giving.’

  While Herne watched the mortician, Yates wandered round the big back room. There was a large vat of murky fluid in one corner, and several sections of pine coffin made up and in parts in another corner. On trestles in the middle of the floor was the grandest coffin that either of them had ever seen.

  It was part wood and part bronze, with angels carved all over it, interwoven with wreaths and tendrils of laurel. The inside was white silk with heavy padding. Yates leaned over it, rubbing his fingers over the soft interior of the lid.

  ‘That is the damnedest coffin I ever saw. Looks more like the inside of a Phoenix bordello. And who is the lovely little lady inside it?’

  Keeping one eye on Sheldon, Jed walked over and joined his friend at the side of the enormous structure. The dazzling interior already held an occupant. A middle–aged lady, with a severe face softened by the white silk surround. She was dressed in a high–necked dress of black bombazine.

  ‘Looks like she’s smiling a mite at us,’ said Yates.

  Herne shook his head. ‘No. That just means that she’s if about ready to go underground.’

  ‘It’s been very hot the last few days, and the family wanted it left open as long as possible,’ explained the mortician from the floor. ‘And please don’t lean on that. It’s the finest quality silk, and the whole thing is costing the poor bereaved nearly eight thousand dollars.’

  ‘High price of dying in Gila Bend,’ whistled Bill Yates, rubbing his hand over the fabric.

  ‘It is a special,’ said Sheldon, obviously irritated by what he took to be slights on his professional expertise.

  ‘What’s it waiting for?’ asked Herne, wrinkling his nose at the strong scent of flowers placed in vases round the room. A necessary addition when he saw the deteriorating state of the body in the coffin. The eyeballs were already going milky and starting to rot.

  ‘I’m here to close it down. Then my assistant will come back and tidy up ready for shipment back east.’

  ‘Suppose he finds it screwed down, and you gone? What’ll he do?’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  Herne smiled at the puzzled expression on the little man’s face. ‘If you tighten it all down on that great … thing. And, if your assistant comes back from his dinner and you’re not here. What will he do?’

  Sheldon scratched his nose, looking bemused. ‘Well, I will still be here. But if I were not, then he would lock this door — I have strict rules on that. The departed is never to be left in an unlocked room. And then he would carry on with his work.’ · ,

  ‘Where does he eat?’

  ‘I … I don’t understand.’

  Jed strode over and kicked the undertaker hard in the pit of the stomach. The attack had been completely unexpected, and Sheldon made no move to protect himself. The air whooshed out of his lungs, and he doubled up, gasping for breath, retching and gagging. ·

  ‘That make you understand?’

  Yates laughed. ‘He still ain’t answering you. Maybe if I put a spur through the side of his face it’ll help him to remember.’

  ‘No. Give him time.’

  Sheldon sat back, face as grey as his suit, rubbing his stomach with pain. ‘You didn’t have to do that. Not at all. I would have told you. I don’t want to hurt anyone. It was all Nolan’s idea. I’m glad you killed him.’

  ‘Hey now. What happened to "old Jo” that we were so friendly with? You aren’t very loyal, Mr. Sheldon. Or may I call you Pete? Pete; where is your assistant?’

  ‘Across at the hotel on the corner. The "Earlham". In their restaurant. Tall blond fellow. But why?’

  ‘To tell him not to come back this afternoon. That you’ve gone and we’re taking a message.’

  Sheldon laughed nervously. ‘I’m sure I don’t understand you, Mister … ?’

  ‘Herne. And this is Mr. Yates. His wife was killed and mine killed herself afterwards. Go on.’

  ‘Why tell Mr. Albrecht that I’m not here? I am here and I intend to be here all afternoon.’

  Herne grinned at Yates. ‘That is the one true thing that Pete here has said all today. He’s going to be here for all afternoon. And then some.’

  To their amazement, the mortician seemed oblivious to their threats. Still gasping, he stood up, walking to join them by the coffin.

  ‘I’m sorry, but I was never much at riddles. Please don’t lean on that. It’s the finest item I’ve ever seen. So rich and heavy?

  ‘What would happen if she weren’t dead? Just sort of in a daze? Like if she started screaming?

  Sheldon laughed, his cackle resounding round the big room. Bouncing through the flowers, and seeming to ripple the sullen surface of the huge tank in the corner. ‘Why! The idea! She would have scant hope of being heard through all this. Indeed, I can safely say that if she were screwed down in it now and came alive, we would not hear her screaming to be released. There is the double silk, all with heavy padding. A layer of pine, and a reinforced layer of mahogany. Then the bronze and wood cover to weigh all down. It is quite airtight. If she were alive, which she is clearly not, I doubt that there would be enough air in there to sustain life for more than … let us say, three or four hours.’

  ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you Pete. That little lecture of yours gives me all the answers I need to have. Three or four hours. That must be about the time that my wife and I Rachel Yates suffered from you and your friends. Josiah Nolan went speeding to Hell with a few moments of exquisite pain to remind him of his sins. You, Pete, will have much less pain, but a great deal longer to ponder on yours.’


  ‘What do you mean?’ asked the undertaker, the ghost of comprehension tainting his face.

  ‘Goodbye Pete. Give our best wishes to Josiah,’ said Herne, kneeing Sheldon hard in the groin, bringing up his leg to crack under his jaw as he doubled forwards. With a gasp the little man slumped to the floor.

  ‘In the box?’ asked Yates.

  ‘Right. Nice way of doing it. What they call ironic. Get the old lady out, and dump her in that tank in the corner. Weigh her down so she doesn’t swim up and frighten anyone before time. I’ll put him in her place.’

  It took a couple of minutes. Yates had problems, as their occupant of the ornate coffin was as stiff as a board, and he had to slide her out like a plank of seasoned oak. As her intestines had also been scoured out she was lighter than he had looked for, and he had to use several bags of nails to stop her floating to the scummy surface of the tank.

  While he was doing that, Herne lifted the undertaker me her place, laying him out carefully. As an afterthought plucking a white lily and folding his limp fingers around it. The pale face and the grey hair looked right against the gleaming white silk. The muted effect was only spoiled by the bright ribbon of scarlet that streamed from the half–open mouth, where Pete Sheldon had bitten through his tongue.

  Working hard together, they managed to lower the lid over him, feeling the massive weight as it settled in place. There was a rope and pulley system strung out over the trestles, but they didn’t bother to use it. Time was passing and they didn’t want Mr. Albrecht to return unexpectedly and find his master being prepared for interment without the minor ritual of first being dead.

  The screws slid home in their beautifully engineered sockets, and then it was done. Herne gave the bronze monster a familiar pat. "Right nice, Bill; I feel the great satisfaction of a job well done. Part of a job, that is.’

  ‘I just wish we could have hurt him a mite more. He didn’t suffer, Jed. I want to see those bastards suffer so bad that it hurts.’

  Yates knocked on top of the coffin. ‘Hear me in there? I want you to suffer!’

  He pressed his ear to the cool metal, straining to see if there was any noise. ‘Can’t hear nothing louder than the buzzing of a fly drowning in a crock of buttermilk. Not even that loud.’