Herne the Hunter 20

by John J. McLaglen

Sanchez screamed and went for the knife on the ground. Herne blocked him and swung him away, at the same moment pulling his Colt back from the breed’s belt.

  The clicking of the hammer sounded awful loud.

  Sanchez stared hard and threw himself on the gun.

  The impact muffled the shot to a dull roar. The .45 slug entered below the rib cage and tore an exit hole through the right buttock. Sanchez was going to take seven more painful hours to die, but to all intents and purposes he was already dead.

  Outlined against the pale glow of the fire, Mitch stood between two guns and didn’t know whether to pray or run. He looked at the marshal and said: ‘Okay, let’s go.’

  ‘What d’you mean, let’s go?’

  ‘I mean you’re wearin’ a badge and you ain’t about to shoot me down in cold blood when I ain’t armed.’ Mitch dropped his pistol to the floor.

  ‘If I were you,’ said Jim Wickens, ‘there wouldn’t be no second thoughts.’

  ‘Yeah,’ agreed Mitch, ‘but you ain’t.’

  Jim Wickens spat on the ground between them. Over by the fire, José was rolling over and over, groaning and moaning, asking for someone to go and help him.

  Nobody did.

  Wickens let the sawn-off barrels slack and point at an angle to the ground. ‘All right,’ he said, resigned, let’s go!’

  Mitch grinned. ‘I told you,’ he said.

  He was still standing there, still grinning, when Mary Anne Marie shot him through the back of the head.

  ~*~

  They were getting an early start and figured to stop a couple of hours out and stretch their legs, build a small fire and brew up a pot of coffee.

  Irma hung out of the rear wagon all the way down the main street, half hoping that the marshal would step out of his office and wave them a good journey.

  He never did.

  Jim Wickens heard the trundle of wheels, the crack of a whip as they left the livery barn and set out for the road north. He would have taken a shot of Scotch whisky if those poor bastards hadn’t finished it for him. He tilted the pot on the stove and had black coffee instead, driving the noise of the wagons out on the street from his mind, thinking instead of the lash of surf on the rocks, the high swoop and call of gulls, the spray of the sea across his face.

  Soon, Jim, he said to himself. Soon.

  Ten

  Stephanie was but eighteen. Her family had come from the South, had formed one of the links in the underground railway which had shuttled escaping negro slaves north to comparative freedom. Her mother and Harriet Beecher Stowe had been close friends and she had been one of the few allowed to read the manuscript of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ before it was published in serial form in the ‘National Enquirer’.

  Her father had been well-to-do, kindly; he knew he’d married an exceptional woman and understood that the best way for them both to find happiness was to let her have her head -more or less.

  The mother spoke at public meetings about women’s rights and women’s suffrage and was pelted with rotten fruit in Hartford, Connecticut on no less than seven separate occasions.

  She was in the habit of taking Stephanie with her, often leaving the child to crawl around the platform during the course of her speech. As Stephanie grew older she was torn between love for her mother and shame that she was making a public spectacle of herself. The issues remained unreal to her until she was rising fifteen and from that point onwards she found herself in almost total accord with her mother’s words. She went with her to meetings of the local women’s voluntary association, of which her mother was chairwoman. She helped with the organization of charity functions, the distribution of clothes and food to the poor; she (ironically, she often told herself now) went into the seamier parts of town in campaigns to reclaim soiled doves and lead them away from a life of disease and ungodly vice.

  ‘No matter how downcast these poor creatures may seem,’ her mother said once, ‘remember they are God’s children like yourself and under each painted breast beats a heart of gold.’

  Stephanie had not forgotten.

  When she was three days short of her sixteenth birthday, her father had been struck down in the street by a runaway carriage. He lay in a coma for five days and on the morning of the sixth he opened his eyes long enough to ask his wife’s forgiveness and died.

  Stephanie’s mother mourned with complete seriousness for two months. At the end of that time she thrust into Stephanie’s hands a copy of a pamphlet by Catherine Beecher titled: The Duty of American Women to their Country’.

  As she read it the girl slowly came to understand that they were going west – her mother had applied for a post as teacher and she was to be her pupil assistant. They were sallying forth to stem the tides of barbarism, to bring Christian morality to the frontier.

  By the time their wagon train had approached the salt flats close to Mormon country they had lost over half their number to disease, desertion or snakebite. When they broke away themselves and reached New Mission, Nevada, they found that the school house had been burnt down in a bad winter to provide fuel and that of a promised population of seven hundred and fifty there were but forty-nine and only seven of those were children. Stephanie’s mother unpacked her belongings and her Bible and her other books and set to teach those seven everything that she knew. After a week of school in the back room of the store, she was down to three pupils and one of those was almost stone deaf and could make nothing more than the most perfunctory sounds.

  Stephanie begged that they move on and try somewhere else but her mother said they must stay until she received a reply from the Baptist Teachers Association and news of a fresh posting.

  She was still waiting when she stepped barefoot onto a rusty arrowhead and the poison rushed through her body like wildfire. She begged the stable owner, who doubled as town barber, to cut off her leg and save her life. He got as far as drinking a half bottle of whisky and sharpening a butcher’s knife, but his hands were trembling so much by that time that he didn’t dare do anything other than run out into the night.

  Two days later, after much pain and prayer, she was dead.

  Stephanie had buried both of her parents before her eighteenth birthday: she had no intentions of burying herself. An attack of smallpox as a young child had taken her as close to death as she wanted to go.

  She traded the Bible and books and her mother’s clothes for a mule and supplies and a .38 pistol with initials carved into the butt.

  She had inherited her mother’s determination and sense of purpose, without her Christian desire to educate the world. She knew that apart from the pockmarks on her face she was considered pretty. A little experimentation with powder allowed her to push the worst of the marks into the shadow. She rode out of New Mission with no clear idea where she was going, other than that she was going to survive.

  Her mother had pointed the way west and there was still aways west to travel.

  She had been on the road some seven weeks when she came upon a couple of wagons traveling in the same direction. As she warily drew alongside them she was surprised to find that they were both driven by women; she was even more surprised by the look that came over the leader’s face as she took the cheroot from her mouth and asked her why didn’t she tie her mule on behind and climb aboard and ride with them for a while.

  There were odd moments, when she closed her eyes, afraid that her mother, somewhere, was watching what she was doing and disapproved. But then she remembered what her mother had said about hearts of gold, and giggled a little before opening her eyes once more.

  Eleven

  When they came down off the boulder-strewn Old Ridge Road, there were poppies, bright and scarlet, everywhere they looked. Stephanie’s pale blue eyes grew wide with excitement and she pulled out a small sketchbook from her bag and began to draw, exclaiming at intervals at the lurch and sway of the wagon. Mary Anne Marie passed the time talking to Herne, content to ask him about his past while she gave away very little of h
er own.

  In the second wagon, Ilsa was handling the team, while Irma sewed up the fraying ends of various garments and Christiane leaned back against the canvas and played her accordion.

  As the road narrowed and the hills to either side steepened and came closer, they came up towards a man riding an old mule. The mule was so short and he was so tall that his bare feet near to scraped the ground. He was wearing a battered top hat which bent to the side like a tin chimney and a coat made from pieces of fur loosely and poorly sewn together. Resting across his thighs as he rode was an ancient looking musket which would surely have exploded in his face if he’d ever tried to discharge it.

  Mary Anne Marie pulled the team to a halt and he swept his top hat from his head and bade them all a fine day and God’s blessing.

  They offered him water from the barrels tied on to the side of the wagon, and gave him some biscuits which he said a short grace over and ate greedily and messily between toothless gums.

  After a little talk it was clear that he was heading to the Santa Inez valley to carry on with the spreading of God’s word.

  Herne waited until he’d finished pulping through the last mouthful of biscuit, a fine spray coating his whiskers and the front of his coat.

  ‘You seen anythin’ of another preacher in these parts? Name of Kenton. Got two sons that ride with him.’

  The man made an involuntary shuddering movement and wiped the back of his hand over his mouth, rubbing it backwards and forwards.

  ‘Know him, don’t you?’

  ‘Uh-uh. No, sir. Nobody by that name. Not nobody at all. Not …’

  Herne jumped down from the wagon and stood close in front of him. He was a good head taller than Herne but there seemed little muscle of strength in his body. His eyes were wide and watering.

  ‘You’re frightening him,’ Mary Anne Marie called down.

  ‘If I have to.’

  ‘Take it easy with him. He’ll tell you what you want to know. Won’t you, friend?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am. Oh, yes, ma’am. Anythin’ at all, only I never set eyes on no one called … what was that name now?’

  Herne bent down quickly, smoothly, and drew the bayonet blade from the inside of his boot.

  The man gasped and spittle began to run down his chin.

  Herne fingered the well-honed edge of the blade carefully, eying the man all the time. He didn’t need to do so for long.

  ‘Three Points,’ he gasped out breathlessly, now that he’d started wanting to get it all said as soon as possible. ‘He was over to Three Points. Couple of weeks back, maybe not that much. I was workin’ there, preachin’ by the store most nights an’ gettin’ a good crowd. Little money comin’ in. I was doin’ all right for myself.’

  ‘An’ God,’ Herne interrupted him.

  ‘Oh, yeah, sure, Him too. This preacher an’ his boys rode into town and next thing I knew there was a gun pokin’ in my back and this feller he was tellin’ me to get the hell out of there an’ not look back. Said there weren’t room for more’n one preacher an’ he was it. I tried arguin’, explainin’ there was enough folk around for both of us but he .… he …’

  His eyes blinked and he began to tremble all down his long, thin frame and Herne could only guess at exactly what Kenton had done.

  Ilsa came up and gave him a glass of brandy and he swallowed it down and coughed and a few tears ran down his cheeks and got lost in his ragged beard.

  ‘He still there?’ Herne asked.

  ‘Far as I know.’

  ‘How many days ride?’

  ‘No more’n a couple on this old mule. Good horse you could make it easy in a day. Just cut back to the east off this road.’ He stood there blinking, his bent top hat in his hand.

  Herne slid the bayonet blade back from sight.

  ‘We ain’t comin’ with you,’ said Mary Anne Marie firmly.

  ‘I know it.’

  ‘But you’ll reckon on goin’ yourself?’

  ‘Don’t like to in a way. ’cept I said I’d catch up with him. Took money on it. Day’s ride ain’t a deal one way or another.’

  Mary Anne Marie nodded, her curly hair bobbing a little against her neck; this day her eyes shone in the light greener than he’d noticed them before. ‘You do what you got to do,’ she said, ‘we’ll meet up along the trail.’

  Herne grinned. ‘If the preacher don’t send me to salvation first.’

  She smiled and shook her head. ‘I ain’t got no worries on that score.’

  Herne wasn’t so sure. But he stuffed a few things down into his saddle bags, made sure he had enough ammunition for his Colt and Sharps, took a farewell snort from Ilsa’s brandy bottle and rode off through a field of red poppies to the line of pines beyond.

  ~*~

  Three Points sat in the valley below the northern peaks of the San Gabriels and sunned itself like a dog with fleas that was too lazy to scratch. A couple of old timers sat on the porch out front of the clapboard store and shaded their eyes with the brims of wide, white sombreros. A sign outside the store offered tequila and wine at cut rates. Somewhere along the street, Herne smelt chicken frying. He dismounted and tied his horse to the hitching rail and went into the store. Flies brushed past his head and he flapped them away with his left hand. A sour-faced man, with a bald, dome-like head and a grubby white apron spread over his belly like a sail, came out from behind a stack of crates and bade him good day without managing to sound as though he meant it.

  ‘Lookin’ for a preacher?’

  The storeman looked Herne up and down. ‘Fixin’ to get married or buried?’ He didn’t laugh.

  Neither did Herne.

  Neither did the flies.

  ‘Buryin’ comes closest,’ Herne said.

  The bald man looked pointedly at the smooth grip of Herne’s Colt and nodded, shaking a couple of flies off the slope of his nose. There was a smell of rotting meat somewhere that threatened to make Herne retch.

  ‘You the law?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘But close, huh?’

  ‘Close enough.’

  A ginger and white cat ran from between a couple of flour sacks, a small rat in its jaws. The animal paused, surprised to see strangers, arched its back and trotted off out of sight with its prize.

  ‘Feller name of Kenton. Reckons he’s a preacher. Got a couple of—’

  ‘Couple of boys along of him, one of ’em none too bright?’

  ‘Sounds about right.’

  ‘You missed him by three, four days.’ He wiped an arm across the front of his head, smearing away the sweat then rubbing it down the front of his apron. As the off-white material was pulled taut over his belly, Herne saw the outline of a pistol butt poking from his belt. ‘Shame you never got here before. Might’ve saved this town a mess of trouble.’

  Herne was getting giddy from the heat and the stench of rotting meat and the constant hum and buzz of fat blue-bellied flies. He jerked a thumb towards the door. ‘Why’n’t you step out on the porch an’ tell me what happened? Don’t look like you’re exactly run over for trade right now.’

  The store owner didn’t look as though he understood the reason for anyone wanting to stand outside in the direct heat of the sun, but it wasn’t every day he met a stranger and it wasn’t every day either he had a story to tell.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ he shrugged and followed Herne outside.

  The two old-timers scarcely turned their heads or altered the pattern of their breathing. Off down the street a Mexican woman was walking slowly along with a large pitcher balanced on her head, two small bare-foot kids tagging along behind her.

  The sun was a bright fire in the sky.

  Herne tipped off his hat and wiped round the inside of the brim before settling it back down. He leaned sideways against the storefront and waited for the bald man to tell his story.

  It seemed that the preacher had gone hell-bent for glory and salvation the minute he arrived in Three Points. He was out there on the s
treet, stomping up and down declaiming from the Good Book and warning of the evils of perdition and pillars of salt like they was just that minute about to come down out of the mountains and claim every single citizen.

  He sent the eldest boy out round the surrounding farms and ranches and gave word of a big evening meeting in the livery barn, on account of that was the largest building around.

  He hired a couple of the fellers who could play a tune on cornet and clarinet to march up and down the street before the meeting and transported old Mrs Winkler’s piano by wagon into the barn so she could pound out a few hymns to get the congregation in the right mood.

  Right after the singing and a few dozen assorted Halleluiahs, the preacher he climbed up on top of a hay bale and spat out fire and damnation for what most folk in the crowd-and that meant most of the town – reckoned couldn’t have been less than an hour and a half.

  No one could recall anything like it. The words seemed to come from his mouth in a torrent that never seemed to be going to damn up. All the congregation was sitting there shivering and quaking in their best clothes and telling one another they’d seen the light, true enough.

  Suddenly, his two boys appeared at the entrance to the barn and that acted like a signal for the preacher to stop the sermon and ask folk to pass round the collection plates. Them boys stepped along the rows of people and took in the plates and passed them down again. All the time the preacher was telling folk to lighten their wallets and lighten their consciences. Give heartily for the cause of the Lord. Unburden yourselves of all your ill-gotten wealth. Blessed are the poor for they shall inherit the Kingdom of God!

  When all the money was taken up they had a quick prayer and Mrs Winkler started up on another of her hymns. Preacher Kenton and his boys stepped out the back of the barn and that was the last anyone in Three Points saw or heard of any of them.

  At first, when folk realized what had happened, they cursed themselves for throwing so much good money into the collection plates and thought that was the end of it. That was until they got back home, or into work the next day, and found out that during the preacher’s sermon about perdition, his sons had been making a tour of the town, robbing and stealing everything they could lay their hands on. They took a wagon to carry it all away, three fresh horses and a trail that headed north towards the Los Padres Forest.