Herne the Hunter 20

by John J. McLaglen

  A posse from town followed them that far next morning, but after that the trail ran into a stream and although they went almost a mile in either direction, they couldn’t tell for certain which way the Preacher had gone.

  The store owner paused and cleared his throat and spat down into the dust of the street. Within seconds it had dried to nothing. ‘One thing,’ he said with a sour growl, ‘he ever comes back here again, we’ll send him on his way to salvation so fast his boots won’t even touch the dirt.’

  ‘Amen to that!’ Herne leaned away from the wall and tugged at his shirt where the sweat had stuck it to his body. ‘No idea for sure which way he went after the posse turned back, huh?’

  The man pushed his tongue against a gap in his teeth and patted his belly in a friendly enough sort of way. ‘Charlie Mudgeon, he used to be a scout for the army, ten, fifteen years back, He’s three parts Indian an’ he knows these things better’n most. Charlie, he swore blind that bastard was headin’ for the fort.’

  ‘What fort’s that?’

  ‘Fort Tejon.’

  ‘That Army?’

  ‘Was. Not since a dozen years back now. First off they had the First Dragoons stationed there, watchin’ over the Indians but most of the Indians in these parts are too peaceful to rub two sticks together in anger. After that they moved the Dragoons out and filled the place with damned humped beasts called camels.’

  He broke off and stared at Herne. ‘You ever see a camel?’

  ‘Uh-huh. Saw some camel racin’ out in Nevada one time. Can’t say I took to ’em overmuch.’

  ‘You ever smell a camel?’

  ‘Guess I never got that close.’

  ‘Think yourself lucky! Those bastards like to stink a man to his grave!’

  Herne remembered the smell of meat inside the store and reckoned that if the camels were a lot worse than that they must have been pretty damned bad indeed.

  ‘Anyway the Army never took to the camels as cavalry mounts and the camels never took to this desert out here the way they do back in wherever it is they come from. Guess they butchered the whole lot of ’em an’ sold ’em for meat an’ cleared out of the fort not long after.’

  ‘What’s it used for now?’

  ‘Everythin’ an’ nothin’. Parts’ve fallen to ruin, but most of the old ’dobe’s standin’, far as I know. Last I heard it was bein’ used by a couple of crews of horse rustlers takin’ stock down to the border. It ain’t the kind of place to turn your back on anythin’ but a nice thick wall.’

  Herne nodded. ‘I’ll bear that in mind.’

  ‘You goin’ up there?’

  ‘I reckon.’

  ‘After that bastard preacher?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  The bald man shook his head so that the sweat flew; he rubbed at his belly till the flesh wobbled under the loose, greasy apron. ‘Only one thing I got to say.’

  ‘Say it out.’

  ‘God go with you, feller. God go with you!’

  Twelve

  Mary Anne Marie Delaney was one of the thirteen children born to Martin and Maureen Delaney in County Wicklow. When Martin made his way by steamer to the United States he took Mary Anne Marie, his favorite daughter because she was the youngest, and William, his favorite son because the eldest, along with him. Maureen and the rest of the children were to follow later, when he had established himself and made a home for them.

  Eighteen months in a tenement house in the Bowery did little except to drive them to the limits of endurance. Father and son worked in the docks; Mary Anne Marie kept house, took in washing, worked when she could in the hash house three blocks towards the river.

  Martin wrote long letters home, telling Maureen not to give up hope. If ever he thought he had done the wrong thing (and of course he often did) there was no sign of it in his letters. He told his children that they would have to leave New York before the rest of the family could be sent for; he decided that California was the best place to travel to the Gold Rush was getting into full swing. For two more months they scrimped and saved, ate little but soup made from potato peelings and butchers’ bones intended for the dogs. A passage on a cattle boat traveling round the Cape was booked. Martin lost his footing on a greasy wharf and fell forty feet; the stone wharf broke his hip and he bounced off and into the water, except that he didn’t hit the water, he hit the hull of a small boat and broke both legs and fractured his pelvis in three places.

  There were two weeks before the boat was due to embark and it only took Martin one of them in which to contract pneumonia as he lay in his pauper’s hospital bed.

  Mary Anne Marie and William went from the funeral to the quayside. When they docked in San Francisco months later their father’s death seemed like a bad dream, their mother and brothers and sisters seemed so far away now that they could neither of them imagine seeing them again. For the next few years both wrote long letters, describing life in the gold camps. Replies grew less and less frequent and when they eventually stopped they were more relieved than surprised.

  William had prospected around Sonora for the better part of a year without a great deal of luck. He soon found that the hectic life of the camps repelled him, the sight of men who were eaten up by gold fever frightened him: he did not want to become like that. He wanted order, discipline, a sense of purpose. William joined the Army and found what was, for him, the perfect life. Now he was wearing a sergeant’s stripes and he wrote to Mary Anne Marie from wherever he was stationed, sending her souvenirs and daguerreotypes, small presents like ribbon and lace. Sometimes the letters and packages caught up with her and sometimes they did not.

  Mary Anne Marie left Sonora with a man who boasted a trimmed arid waxed moustache, a team of mules and a gold nugget the size of an eye hanging from his watch fob. In Jackson he lost heavily at cards, got drunker than usual, gamble, gain and lost his mules, his last remaining money and his mining equipment. Mary Anne Marie found him unconscious and upside down in a muddy puddle. There was a lump the size of a large egg on the back of his skull and his hair was matted with blood. She turned him over so he shouldn’t drown and saw that somehow whoever had attacked him, had missed the gold nugget. She took the watch, took the nugget and left him where he lay.

  She worked in a saloon in Angel’s Camp and persuaded a fair-haired gambler of teach her the arts of five card stud. Soon she was good enough to be making money at the tables and most of what she made, she saved. The gold nugget was between her breasts, stitched into her under-things. While it was there, she felt she had a hedge against the world.

  After Angel’s Camp, Mary Anne Marie moved to Murphy’s and rented a room on the second story of a substantial brick and limestone building called simply Murphy’s Hotel. She had her own private bath and linen sheets on the bed and she was beginning to dress like a certain kind of lady. Her evenings were spent in the hotel bar, dealing stud. She won more than she lost and she gave a percentage to the hotel owner and still she was making a lot of money. Too much. A couple of cheap cardsharps rigged a deck against her and then accused her of cheating, switching some marked cards into the ones she was dealing. She was already wearing a derringer on her thigh, but that wasn’t going to do her any good against three or four drawn guns. All it would do was get her shot.

  Mary Anne Marie hired a carriage and a team of horses and drove herself to San Francisco. Inside a week she knew that she had made the right decision. She took a room in the Occidental Hotel on Montgomery Street and traveled from game to game, gaming palace to saloon. She was taking tea one afternoon in the Upper Court of the Palace Hotel when she realized she was working her way into a profitable but lonely rut: the only way she could stay successful at the poker tables was through keeping herself strictly to herself. It wasn’t what she wanted.

  She was sitting there, looking a little sadly into the bone china cup she was cradling in her hands, when one of the other customers asked if she could join her. Sarah Jane Mawby was a formidable lady with blue-rinsed
hair, a voice like an opera singer at full stretch and a bosom to match – she was also the proprietor of one of the classiest brothels in San Francisco, a three story brick house on Kearny Street.

  Mary Anne Marie went to work for her, helping her to run the place, taking responsibility for the welfare of the girls, greeting the night’s customers in the foyer and welcoming them, ascertaining what little quirks and peculiarities they might want humoring.

  After four weeks a grey-haired man in evening dress offered twice the going rate if she would leave the reception desk and accompany him to one of the upstairs rooms. Sarah Jane gave her permission and Mary Anne Marie agreed.

  After six weeks she had decided that she was in love with a sloe-eyed girl with honeyed shoulders and an expression of almost complete disdain. She hadn’t realized the girl was Sarah Jane’s lover. Very soon she was out on the street and it had been made clear to her than she would be fortunate to find employment in another house in the city. The alternatives were to stay and work in one of the filthy cribs on the tenderloin or strike out for fresh ground.

  Mary Anne Marie still had the gold nugget sewn into her underthings and she decided it was the time to spend it. She talked to a couple of the girls from Sarah Jane’s, bought a sturdy wagon and a pair of horses and set out for the mining camps and towns of southern California.

  She knew that she was leaving behind the plushness and comparative safety of San Francisco for good, but what she was gaining made that worthwhile. She could come and go more or less as she pleased; she was her own mistress and master, too.

  When she wrote her infrequent letters to William she carefully avoided all mention of what she was doing to earn her living and he carefully avoided asking her. If she ever thought of her mother back in Ireland it was as if she was trying to call back a dream at the moment of waking -always fading, always receding.

  All things considered, Mary Anne Marie Delaney was a contented and satisfied woman.

  Thirteen

  Another dawning, another campfire, another pot of coffee heating while bacon and flapjacks sizzled in the pan. Herne couldn’t recall the last journey he’d made cross country where the food had always been as good.

  Mary Anne Marie’s hair was still in its rag and paper curlers and she was enjoying her first cheroot of the day. She opened her mouth enough to let the soft grey smoke drift out over her lips and into the bright, almost frosty air.

  ‘You want to ride in after him, don’t you? Into that fort?’

  Herne stretched back, spreading his arms; the hard ground had left him with a dull ache at the base of the neck. ‘Seems too good a chance to miss.’

  ‘That’s what you said about Three Points.’

  Herne shrugged, slightly annoyed by the tightness of the woman’s voice. “He’d been there. I didn’t miss him by more’n a couple of days.’

  ‘And here?’

  ‘Hell! How’m I supposed to know till I see?’

  He was on his feet and walking around the fire, annoyance clear in his stride and the way his bronzed skin dragged taut over high cheekbones.

  ‘What’re we supposed to do this time? Carry on up the trail or hang around an’ wait for you?’

  ‘Lady, that’s up to you!’

  Herne stared at her across the crackle of the fire. Ilsa and Irma lifted their backs from preparing the food and watched with concern: the trouble with two people as strong as Herne and Mary Anne Marie was that they were always going to be toeing the line against one another, each testing the other out.

  Mary Anne Marie took the cheroot from her mouth carefully and fixed Herne with the eyes. ‘I thought it was your problem, too,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Okay. But you knew when we set out I was after this feller. I told you fair an’ square. You knew the only reason I agreed to ride shotgun over you an’ these women was I was headin’ this road anyhow.’

  ‘The only reason aside from the money,’ Mary Anne Marie agreed.

  ‘I don’t need your money!’ stormed Herne.

  She held out her hand. ‘Then you can just give it right back.’

  Herne’s mouth tightened to a pencil line across his face. He drove a fist down into the palm of his other hand and turned on his heel fast.

  When he was out of sight, Irma said, ‘Maybe you drove him too hard.’

  ‘Did I hell!’

  ‘He’s only a man.’

  Mary Anne Marie’s anger burst like a bubble; she shook her head and laughed and reached out a hand towards Irma. For a moment they hugged one another warmly.

  ‘Give him a few minutes to cool off,’ Mary Anne Marie said, ‘then one of you walk out an’ find him. Bring him back for breakfast before it spoils. We don’t want him goin’ off to find this preacher on an empty stomach.’

  Half an hour later, Herne was feeling full and happier. He nursed a mug of black, strong coffee in his right hand, leaning back against the stump of a wide pine. The girls were all gathered round the fire, lazily content. Christiane was feeling strong enough to walk without help, the color returning to her face.

  ‘Will you bring him in alive?’ asked Stephanie. This man you’re hunting?’

  ‘I guess I’ll try.’

  ‘And if he won’t come?’ asked Ilsa.

  Herne looked at her and shrugged. ‘I’ll see ’bout that when it happens.’

  ‘You mean you’ll kill him?’ said Irma.

  ‘Not necessarily.’

  ‘But you might.’

  Herne nodded, ‘I might. If he don’t give me no choice.’

  ‘Doesn’t that upset you?’ asked Irma. ‘Killing a man.’

  Herne drank some of the coffee. ‘That depends on the man.’

  ‘This man?’

  ‘I don’t see as how he’d be any great loss to the world.’

  ‘But is that for you to decide?’ Mary Anne Marie was leaning forward, her hair no longer in curlers, her eyes intense and more brown than green.

  ‘Uh-uh.’

  ‘Who then?’

  ‘Him. The moment he goes for his gun.’

  No one said anything for several minutes. The birds were busy in the trees and overhead. Off to the side a couple of the horses were acting restless. Herne finished his coffee and stood up.

  ‘You’ll take care, won’t you?’ Mary Anne Marie looked up at him, shielding her eyes against the rising sun.

  Herne half-grinned. ‘That don’t mean you’re gettin’ worried about me, does it?’

  ‘Of course we are,’ said Ilsa, shocked.

  ‘Yeah,’ agreed Mary Anne Marie, if you get yourself killed we’ll have to find someone else to take your place.’

  The girls all swung their heads towards her to read the expression on her face as she spoke, but Mary Anne Marie had played poker too many times to give anything away.

  Stephanie giggled uncertainly.

  Herne nodded briefly and went off to saddle his horse.

  ~*~

  Fort Tejon had already begun to crumble towards decay. The rough abode of the outer walls was showing signs of the buffeting it took from the winds that came down off the peaks, often bringing snow blizzards in their wake. The stockade gate had long since been dismantled and chopped into kindling. Of the interior buildings, only the stores and the officers’ quarters presented much show of stolidity. The troopers’ barracks had never been properly finished and the men had been forced to use various kinds of makeshift accommodation, ranging from regulation tents to timbered lean-tos that had been built off the main wall.

  All that remained of the army in the courtyard was a broken flagpole, splintered to less than half its original height. A well in the center had a circular adobe wall built round it to about three feet and this was badly chipped away in more places than not.

  The corral had been remade recently and right now it held two dozen head of two year olds whose brand would be changed before another full day was out.

  There were some twenty people presently using the abandoned fo
rt as a combination of cheap hotel and hideaway and the only one of them who could be accounted a regular inhabitant was a former corporal in the First Dragoons who’d taken his retirement and gone back to the place where he’d felt most at home.

  The corporal – and that was what most folk called him, Corporal – had taken over the old store and right then it was pretty well loaded with maybe forty sacks of flour, sacks of potatoes, kegs of butter, crates of dried mackerel and small, fat barrels of molasses.

  He made a living from selling supplies to those who passed through and he had a Mexican woman who cooked up tortillas and enchiladas most nights; these they sold along with beer that tasted slightly of soap or sour whisky that was good for disinfecting a gun-shot wound but not a lot else.

  Herne had no way of knowing whether the preacher was at the fort and the only thing to do was to ride in and hope that Kenton wasn’t the first person he came face to face with. Nothing was more certain than that the man would recognize him and be as like to shoot first and ask any possible questions one hell of a lot later.

  From half a mile off Herne had seen the thin spiral of smoke filtering up into the clear air. He’d checked the load in his Colt and slid the gun up and down a few times in its holster. He didn’t bother to slip the safety thong back over the hammer. Instead he resettled his Stetson at more of an angle on his head and clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, encouraging his mount to break into a trot.

  The first person he met inside was a swarthy-looking man with a long butcher’s knife in one hand and a chicken, struggling wildly and vainly, tight in the other.

  The man glanced at Herne a couple of times, took in the gun at his hip and the flat expression on his face – flat and hard – and failed to see anything he didn’t expect.