What other kind of men rode into Fort Tejon?
The second person Herne met was walking over towards the long, low adobe that had been the officers’ quarters. He was carrying a bucket in his left hand and whistling tunefully through the dark hairs of a thick moustache. The twin Colts at his belt were reversed for a cross-draw, jutting forward past his hips.
He, too, looked at Herne quickly and then swung his head away again. It wasn’t the sort of place where you minded anybody’s business but your own; you didn’t pass the time of day with strangers, ask too many questions.
Herne swung the horse round to pass between the well and the edge of one of the smaller buildings. He heard a hesitant footstep and swung fast in the saddle and he was ten or more years back in Texas. Him and Whitey Coburn and it was a hot little town with the stink of gunpowder heavy over it and everyone as jumpy as toads in a hickory swamp on the Fourth of July.
The face was smaller now, as though time and the sun had shriveled it until it was like a blackened walnut. The eyes that peered out through the deep ridges were no more than points. What hair remained on his head had become shaded with grey and lay flat on his scalp as though it didn’t belong there.
Herne only remembered him as being a man three-parts old. Now he had to be almost all the way there.
‘Jed Herne!’ he gasped in a hiss of breath. His fingers spread and curled and settled slowly back till the nails were grazing the horned skin of the palms.
‘Cootie Jones.’
‘Yeh-heh!’ Cootie nodded his head up and down fast and his wiry shoulders hiccupped in rhythm. ‘Never thought to run into you again, not after all this time.’
‘Me neither.’ Herne looked away from Cootie, towards where a couple of men had come into sight down by the far end of the corral. They didn’t seem to be paying over much attention – not yet.
‘Last time you was with Whitey back in Texas – that’s it, ain’t it?’
‘I reckon.’
Cootie shook his head. “Last I heard you’d hung up that fast gun of yours an’ got married.’ He glanced at the butt of the Colt sticking up from Herne’s holster. ‘Maybe I heard wrong.’
‘Uh-huh. You got it right.’
‘Didn’t take, huh?’
‘Somethin’ like that,’ agreed Herne quickly, dismissively; there were wounds he didn’t want to open.
‘Never works out,’ Cootie was saying.’ Man can’t change his way of life just over a few words an’ a woman. Ain’t natural.’
Herne ignored the words, blanking them out. Instead, he looked pointedly down towards the corral. ‘See you’re still in the same line of business, Cootie.’
Cootie looked at him a shade suspiciously, backed off a couple of paces. There was a pistol angled into his pants belt and he let his hand drift towards it, though he’d seen Herne in action enough times to know any play he made was always going to be his last.
‘You know me, Jed, never could resist a fine piece of horseflesh.’
‘Specially with someone else’s brand on it, huh?’
The couple down at the corral end were watching them more curiously now, wondering who the stranger was that old Cootie had found such a lot to talk about.
‘Which side of the law you ridin’, Jed?’
‘My own.’
Cootie jerked his head nervously. ‘There’s ranchers up north pay good money for regulators. Cut out the rustlin’ on their land.’
‘Yeah,’ nodded Herne, ‘I heard that.’
‘And?’
Herne grunted, half-smiled. ‘Don’t worry, Cootie. Not this trip.’
‘Honest?’
‘Ever know me waste breath over a lie?’
Cootie wiped the palms of his sweating hands down the side of his loose cotton pants. ‘Fixin’ to run ’em down to the border day after tomorrow. Fetch a good price down there.’
Herne glanced over; the men hadn’t moved – they were still watching. ‘Look prime.’
‘Yeah, you betcha. Only kind worth stealin’!’ Cootie’s laugh was dry and hollow, like stones rolling around in a rusty can.
‘Those two fellers,’ Herne said, ‘they who you’re ridin’ with nowadays?’
Cootie looked in the direction of Herne’s gaze and nodded: ‘That’s them. Three more of us over to the store.’
‘Big team.’
‘Big enough.’
‘Maybe you best have a word, stop ’em lookin’ so damned anxious.’
Cootie chuckled. ‘Ain’t got the balls of the likes of us, Jed. You an’ Whitey an’ me. These fellers always got one eye over their shoulder, lookin’ for the lawman who’s goin’ to be ridin’ ’em down. Us, we did what we had to do an’ walked tall because of it. Ain’t that the way it was, Jed?’
‘Sure, Cootie, that’s the way it was.’
Herne looked at Cootie’s five foot six inches and couldn’t think of a time when he’d have walked tall.
‘What you here for, Jed?’ Cootie asked, his voice tightening. ‘If it ain’t nothin’ to do with rustled horses an’ such.’
‘Lookin’ for a feller.’
‘Just the one?’
‘Two more run with him.’
Cootie cleared his throat and spat down at the sandy ground. It sounded like iron being scraped hard against rough-cast stone. ‘This feller got a name?’
‘Kenton.’
Cootie let it sink in; he rocked back a little on his heels and set his head to one side.
‘Then you got a wasted journey, Jed. Ain’t no one by that name here.’
‘This feller,’ Herne went on, ‘passes himself off as a preacher most times.’
The tightening of Cootie’s already wizened face told him he’d struck gold. Cootie’s hands flapped for a few moments like they were out of control and then he moved in closer and said in a rasping whisper: ‘Never knew him for no Kenton, but he’s the one you’re lookin’ for, I guess. Two young fellers along of him.’
‘His sons,’ put in Herne.
Cootie shrugged. ‘Could be. Either way, they rode in two days back. Kept ’emselves to ’emselves pretty much. Cept last night back in the store we was sittin’ round an’ doin’ a little drinkin’, little hollerin’, you know the way it gets.’
‘I know.’
‘This Kenton feller-hair like snow an’ a voice like he was callin’ down thunder – he up an’ tells us how we’re on the road to perdition an’ if we don’t see the error of our ways, we’re all bound for the bottomless pit.’ Cootie chuckled. ‘Sounds funny now to say it, but back then he almost had some of them real mean boys thinkin’ as how they might turn over a new leaf and take up sheep farmin’ or storekeepin’ or such.’ He shook his head from side to side. ‘Some speechifyin’, I’m tellin’ you.’
‘Yeah,’ nodded Herne ‘I heard him.’
Cootie glanced at Herne’s holstered Colt and then at the two rustlers who were making their way up alongside the corral fence, heading their way. ‘You don’t want to see him to argue ’bout no scripture, Jed.’
‘That’s a fact.’
‘Want to tell me what for?’
‘Sure,’ said Herne, ‘only let’s wait till your friends can hear it, too.’
The two men were nearly up to them. Both were craggy looking, late on in their thirties, both wore wool pants with leather patches stitched over the seats and along the insides of the thighs. One wore a white Stetson pinched in tight at the crown, and the other was bareheaded. Both were carrying guns at their hips.
The man with the two reversed Colts was heading in their direction from over Herne’s right shoulder; he was still whistling, only this time the tune was different.
Cootie waited his time and then introduced Herne all the way round.
‘Jed’s come for that fool preacher,’ Cootie finished off.
‘I don’t see no badge,’ snarled the bareheaded man, drawing in his chest and allowing his thumb to work a mite looser at the side of his belt.
‘Ain’t none to see.’
‘Bounty hunter?’ snapped the man with the twin Colts.
‘That neither.’
‘Then maybe you’d best explain,’ advised the man in the Stetson.
‘Okay. This feller an’ his boys, they robbed a bank over in Texas. Shot up a kid no more’n seven years old an’ the doc had to cut his leg off to keep him from dyin’. The boy’s pa sent me after him, guess he wants some kind of recompense for his boy not bein’ able to walk.’
‘You been hired to kill him.’
‘Ten years in the penetentiary’d serve.’
“You fixin’ to give him that choice?’
‘Depends how much time I got to talk it out.’
The men hauled off and had a quick, whispered conversation with one another, now and again glancing over their shoulders. Herne knew that he’d find things a lot easier if they let him go ahead and didn’t step in his way. But if that was they play they wanted to make …
‘Okay,’ said the feller in the Stetson, ‘you want him, you wait till he pulls out. We don’t allow the law in here an’ the way we see it, you’re close enough to spell trouble. He rides outside the walls, he’s all yours.’
‘An’ what if he don’t?’ asked Herne, his voice hard and flat.
‘Looks like you got a wait on your hands,’ laughed the redhead.
Herne’s eyes narrowed. If he stepped back now and let them call this their way, he could be bidin’ his time for as much as a week or more. By that time Mary Anne Marie and the wagons would be too far along the trail for him to catch them up without driving his mount into the ground.
‘No,’ he said, angling his right arm clear from his body. ‘No, it won’t do that way.’
‘The hell it won’t!’ yelled the redhead and ploughed his left hand towards his holster.
Herne jumped forward and hit him on the side of the jaw with a jab that jolted his head back sharp and brought his teeth together hard enough to take off a quarter-inch of tongue.
He stared at Herne a little glassy-eyed and Herne punched him again, an uppercut that set him on his back on the packed dirt.
The leader of the bunch hesitated longer than he should have and finally made his own move. Herne’s body rocked sideways and he rammed the top of his skull full into the man’s astonished face. He staggered back spitting blood and pressing his fingers against the broken bone in his nose.
Herne’s right hand sprang back like a whip and the Colt was there, the hammer coming back under his thumb in an action that was as automatic to him as breathing.
No one else had even begun to clear leather.
‘Jesus Christ!’ hissed Cootie. ‘You ain’t lost none of it! No, you ain’t lost a bit!’
The man on the floor opened his mouth and blood dribbled away from the end of his shorn tongue. Five yards to his right, his companion was till moaning and holding his nose and moaning some more.
‘Jesus Christ!’ echoed Cootie. ‘I ain’t seen nothin’ like that since the time you an’ Whitey—’
‘Where are they?’ Herne cut across him. ‘Which building?’
The man with the twin Colts dimmed his anger long enough to reply; he didn’t see the sense in going up against a man like this one if it could be avoided. He’d just keep out of the way and be thankful he hadn’t come to take them two dozen prize horses back to where they rightfully belonged. ‘Over past the store,’ he said with a jerk of the head. ‘Place there used to be some kind of barn. They’re in there. Less’n they’re inside the store itself.’
Herne nodded his thanks.
‘You all keep clear, that understood. If I don’t walk clear out of this you can squabble ’bout the body.’
‘My nose!’ called the man whose white Stetson now lay on the ground behind him. ‘What about my fuckin’ nose!’
Blood and mucus sprayed around him as he spoke.
Herne dropped the Colt down into his holster and stepped forward at the same time. He pressed the spread fingers of both hands across the man’s terrified face and set his broad thumbs to either side of his nose.
‘Hold tight!’
He ground his teeth together and moved the thumbs against the broken bone, feeling for a moment and then pressing down hard and fast.
‘Aaagh!’ The man screamed and bucked beneath him and pulled his head clear but by that time it was done.
There,’ said Herne, stopping smoothly to wipe the blood clear on to the dirt, ‘now there’s no hard feelin’s.’
He stepped between them and paused a few yards on, looking back over his shoulder. ‘You fellers keep in mind what I said.’
~*~
The room was low and dark on account of a piece of heavy sacking being nailed across the door and there being no windows. Inside Howie Kenton lay stretched on a mattress over by the side wall, using a needle and thread to darn one of his socks. His elder brother was running an oiled cloth through the chambers of a dismantled pistol. The preacher was standing as straight as he could, his shock of white hair pressed up against the roof as he buttoned the front of his black shirt.
‘Shit!’ called Howie, as the needle slipped wide and pierced the end of his thumb.
‘Mind your tongue!’ yelled his father, turning towards him with an outstretched hand.
‘Pa, this damned—’
‘I said, mind your tongue!’ The preacher swiped at the boy’s head and Howie managed to half-duck beneath the flailing hand, avoiding the full force of the slap.
Across the narrow room Stanley laughed mockingly and only shut up when his father eyed him too.
‘Seventeen,’ said Stanley mockingly, looking at his brother, ‘seventeen and he can’t even use a needle without stickin’ it in his own hand.’
‘Let him be, Stanley,’ warned his father, dark eyebrows rising in a steep arch. ‘You faults ain’t so few you can afford to be criticism’ others.’
‘That’s it, Pa,’ called Howie, taking fresh heart. ‘Let him take the mote first from his own eye before
He didn’t get any further.
Herne’s voice burst through from outside and froze him silent.
‘Kenton! I said, Kenton! If you’re in there you got ten seconds to throw out whatever weapons you’re carryin’ and step out after them. If’n you don’t then I’m comin’ in after you.’
Kenton looked quickly at his sons, Stanley already fumbling over the pistol, struggling to reassemble it fast. The preacher pulled a long-barreled Colt from inside his broadcloth jacket and thumbed back the hammer. Howie was lifting a sawn-off shotgun from the floor close by the mattress end.
Outside, Herne’s voice was still counting down: Four … three … two—’
‘Let’s talk about this,’ called Kenton, lifting the gun to fire through the sacking in the direction of the voice.
‘One!’
The preacher fired through the center of the sacking, making it leap as if suddenly alive.
Herne was no longer in the same position. As soon as the last word was out of his mouth he had jumped aside and grasped the thin iron handle of the lantern he had brought out from the store. As the preacher cursed and fired a second time, Herne swung back the lantern and hurled it hard for the middle of the doorway. The sacking was carried back into the room far enough to brush against the preacher’s chest. The lantern struck the floor by his feet and burst into flames, the first of them claiming the flailing ends of the sacking and shooting upwards.
The preacher cursed and backed against the wall; Howie flattened himself against the side of the room with the shotgun tight across his chest.
Stanley clicked the final shell down into place and looked at his father expectantly.
The fire had taken the old rag mat that had been laid across the floor and the room was filling with smoke. The sacking was ablaze in the doorway and would very soon offer neither protection nor cover. What had been safe seconds before was now a trap.
‘What d’you want?’ shouted Kenton, thumbin
g fresh shells into the chamber of his gun.
‘Why don’t you come out an’ see?’ Herne shouted back.
Kenton nodded at his eldest son, pointed at the door. ‘I’ll cover you,’ he said quietly, urgently.
‘I ain’t—’
‘When you’re through we’ve got him from two angles. He’s good as dead.’
‘How d’you know it’s only one, Pa?’ asked Howie.
‘Hold your tongue!’
‘How ’bout it, Kenton?’ yelled Herne. ‘Or d’you want to fry in there?’
‘Now, Stanley!’ The preacher caught hold of his son’s arm and propelled him hard towards the blazing piece of sacking. ‘Now!’
The boy looked at his father’s face and thought that whatever wrath lay outside it could hardly be greater. He held his breath and charged through the smoke-wreathed doorway, falling to his side and rolling over as soon as he pitched onto the dirt.
Herne jumped to his right to cover the move and brought round his gun arm as Stanley tried to push himself up onto his knees. He could see clearly the pistol in the youth’s hand. From the corner of his eye he could see a larger movement bulking behind the sacking.
Stanley lifted the pistol and Herne deliberately shot him through the fleshy part of the shoulder, close by the arm pit. He ducked low and fired through the smoke into the burning room.
The slug missed the preacher by no more than a couple of inches; it flew past him and tore into Howie’s already horror-struck face. It gouged through the soft flesh of his left cheek just above the faint down of fair stubble. The end of the bullet flattened against the bone at the rear of the skull and deflected upwards, bursting a hole the size of a young girl’s fist through the top of his head. Blood vomited onto the ceiling, the side wall, onto the preacher’s black broadcloth coat.
Kenton stared at the dismembered face of his dead son.
He roared a wordless cry and plunged both hands down into the morass of gore and brain and splintered bone that had been Howie’s head. He turned and seized the sawn-off shotgun from the mattress.
Outside Herne stood his ground waiting for him to emerge.
Men stood watching all around the compound, a few of them, like the man whose nose Herne had busted, hoping to hell that the preacher blasted him apart. Most of them didn’t care. None of them was about to interfere.
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