Herne the Hunter 19

  The Home of Great Western Fiction!

  CONTENTS

  About the Book

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Copyright

  The Series

  About the Author

  Passing through Stow Wells, top shootist Jed Herne needs a tooth pulled. Instead, he walks into a whole lotta bloodshed. When he outdraws and kills a kid out to prove himself, instead of arresting him, the sheriff makes Jed an offer to ride shotgun on a stagecoach laden with silver. Herne accepts and when the stage is attacked he finds himself using his famous guns to deadly effect once again. Then the Abernathy Home for Distressed Gentlemen comes under attack by the Apache Chief Mendez, not only does Herne the Hunter face that challenge and come face to face with a deadly enemy but also a man who claims to be his father!

  HERNE THE HUNTER 19: BLOODLINE

  By John J. McLaglen

  First Published by Transworld Publishers in 1981

  Copyright © 1981, 2017 by John J. McLaglen

  First Smashwords Edition: April 2017

  Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader.

  Cover image © 2016 by Tony Masero

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Series Editor: Mike Stotter

  Text © Piccadilly Publishing

  Published by Arrangement with the Author.

  This is for Clare, who makes beautiful things in glass and who vanished for entirely too long. I hope she doesn’t disappear again. With love and all good things for the future.

  “More often than not the old are uncontrollable. It is their tempers that make them so difficult to deal with.”

  Euripides

  One

  Jed Herne couldn’t remember being in so much damned pain.

  In his forty-three years of living there was hardly a part of his body that had escaped injury. He’d been stabbed with knives and war lances. Shot at and occasionally hit with guns of every caliber known to man. Punched and kicked by a variety of people, running from a twelve-year-old whore in Juarez one rainy Easter-time to a ninety-three-year-old Episcopalian bishop in Seattle. Admittedly the bishop had been defrocked for more than thirty-five years at the time of the incident.

  Jed had come close to being burned alive and frozen and drowned. Once all on the same day.

  It had been up in Montana. Eight or nine years back. A bitter January day with the cold so intense that a man’s spittle sang in the air, ice before it hit the snow. Jed had been holed up in a small cabin used by line riders, waiting out a blizzard. There’d been trouble in the nearby town of Wolf’s Jaw, with a man shot in the shoulder and another clubbed unconscious. The fight hadn’t been any of Herne’s choosing, but the name of Herne the Hunter had traveled wide and the local good old boys had taken it into their heads to try and teach the stranger a lesson.

  They weren’t fast enough.

  Not by a country mile.

  Jed had been feeling generous and didn’t kill any of them. But afterwards he’d regretted it. If you have a man down, then keep them down. Was it Josiah Hedges who’d said that?

  It didn’t much matter.

  What mattered was that they’d come out after him. Their pride so badly hurt that they’d braved the cold and the snow to ride out to the cabin. Opening fire with a fusillade of bullets that tore strips off the logs and shattered the window that looked out across the open ground.

  There was a second window round back, opening out on the banks of the frozen river. There’d been a thaw a few days previously and the ice was opaque, pale blue, barely thick enough to carry a starving dog. The locals knew that whatever else happened Herne surely wasn’t going to leave that way.

  He held them off until dusk came creeping in across the frozen land, bringing with it a shimmering mist that made it hard for them to make out what was happening. Two of them tried to rush the front door under cover of that ghostly fog, but Herne could see out a whole lot better than they could see in and both of them died within seconds of each other. One with a fifty-caliber ball through the brain and the other with a thirty-six through the throat, sending him kicking in the trampled snow that quickly turned scarlet.

  While the rest of them waited in an angry silence, Jed made his move. Creeping away from the front of the cabin, towards the rear window.

  But they still nearly caught him.

  One of them took a chance and dashed in low, stumbling and nearly dropping the can of lamp oil that he gripped in his gloved right hand. Lying panting beneath one of the windows, his breath pluming around his face. Splashing the oil over the logs, then rolling away and flicking a lighted match.

  There was a dull whooshing sound that carried to Herne’s ears and he returned to the front to see a wall of fire shooting up, blinding the window. Two of the other local men saw their chance and ran in with more of the pungent liquid, throwing it over the door, up high on the sod roof.

  The flames licked eagerly at the new supply of oil and Herne could see nothing but bright fire. Breathe choking smoke that billowed in through the broken glass and around the ill-fitting door. Within five or ten minutes the whole place would be ablaze, the door gone, the roof catching. He already knew that there were around eight or nine guns still alive out in the cold snow.

  ‘You got no chance and a slim chance, then you take the slim one.’ That had been one of his old friend’s sayings. Whitey Coburn, the tall, skinny albino who’d shared so many of the best and worst times with Jedediah.

  ‘Come out you bastard so we can hang you!’

  ‘Cut his son-of-a-bitchin’ cock off!’ came another voice.

  Bullets hissed through the flames, shattering a small mirror on the far wall of the cabin. It was beginning to get warm. Herne crawled back away from the front of the little building, keeping low. Cautiously lifting his head and peering through the broken window that overlooked the frozen stream.

  ‘Slim,’ he said quietly to himself.

  There was so much smoke around that he knew the hunters outside couldn’t possibly see him. He eased the latch on the window and opened it. Standing and holstering his pistol. Checking the retaining thong was over the top of the spurred hammer to keep it in place.

  He remembered how he’d taken the heavy Sharps rifle and hurled it across the ice, as far as he could. Seeing it land half in and half out of the river, on its further bank.

  No point in waiting. Already fire was snaking across the dry boards of the floor, lapping at the heels of his boots.

  Minutes had become seconds.

  Herne climbed on the dusty sill and dived clumsily out in a half crouch. Hoping that the ice might bear his weight if he rolled as he hit it.

  It didn’t.

  There was a moment of resistance that jarred his shoulder and then a whispering crackle. Then the ice opened around him and he slid beneath the water as easily as a seal escaping from a polar bear.

  The melt-water was going to be cold; he’d known that. But not such a biting, savage cold that it took every vestige of breath from his body and he gulped in a great mouthful of the surging stream. It was running fast - one of the re
asons that the ice wasn’t thicker, and he felt himself bowled along, tumbling against sharp boulders on the bed of the stream.

  If he didn’t get air fast then it was going to be over. He pushed upwards, lungs tight with pain. Feeling the ice with outstretched fingers that were already becoming numb.

  He had edged himself sideways, towards the further bank, trying to reach up and break his way clear through the shuttering ice. But the current still moved him and he wasn’t able to bring any pressure to bear. Twice he tried to punch through the dark barrier and twice his fist slid away. Though the ice wasn’t strong enough to bear the weight of a man, it was too strong for Herne to batter his way through.

  In a quieter part of the water he brought his face up close to the ice, chest straining with the effort not to open his mouth and inhale more water. But the pain was swelling and he knew that he was as close to death as he would ever be; ever could be.

  ‘Air,’ he panted, suddenly finding that there was a slim gap between the water and the bottom of the ice. Barely an inch and a half, it was enough for him to lift his head and draw in a partial breath, easing the pressure on his lungs.

  But it would only be a temporary respite. The water was so cold that already his limbs were weakening. He had to break through. Had to.

  There was only one hope, though the odds were against it. He reached down, still trying to kick his legs and keep himself afloat, face grazing the rough ice. Tugging off the leather thong and drawing the Colt Navy. His fingers were now frozen and he couldn’t properly feel the familiar shape of the polished butt. But it was there, gripped tight.

  If he dropped it . . .

  His mind was going, sliding into blackness. There was a pushing behind the eyes and his stomach was tight with tension. Had he thumbed back the hammer? He couldn’t tell. Couldn’t feel the hammer.

  The trigger.

  Squeezed it.

  Nothing. No noise. No concussion.

  Nothing.

  He’d sealed off the charges with grease, like he always did. And each ball fitted so tight that a tiny crescent sliver of lead was always peeled off as he rammed it home. The caps were tight-fitted.

  The hammer … trigger ... again.

  His ears hurt at the shock of the explosion, only inches away from his face. Fighting to stay in the same position he pulled the trigger again, pressing the muzzle against the underside of the dark, slick ice.

  A second time the gun misfired.

  And a third.

  That was about it. With a last, despairing effort Herne punched up with the pistol, hitting the ice. Feeling it give, weakened by the single bullet. He lashed put once more and his head was in the fresh night air.

  Clawing out, hanging on the edge of the frozen river with his arms, drawing in great gulps of oxygen.

  Herne had drifted around fifty yards downstream, and he could see the cabin, still blazing brightly, the roof well alight. A couple of shadows moved dimly around it and he ducked below the water. Taking a deep breath and then powering himself up and to the side, feeling the ice creak as he stretched across it.

  A few moments later he’d been safe.

  He’d crawled back upstream in the cover of the brush, retrieving the Sharps. Shivering with the cold, knowing that death could still take him.

  Ironically it had been the same fire that his would-be killers had set that saved him. Thinking that he must be dead they’d ridden triumphantly away, leaving the flames still high and red.

  Hot enough for Herne to dry himself out and get good and warm for the long walk back into town. Where he’d stolen a horse and killed two of the men who’d hunted him.

  ~*~

  But that had been times past, hardly worth the forgetting.

  The new pain was something else. It had been settled in his jaw for weeks now.

  There’d been a traveling quack with a medicine show a few days back who’d offered to draw it for him. But the man had been so far gone in liquor that he’d looked at Herne through glazed eyes and asked him whether it was him or his twin brother who wanted the offending molar pulling.

  By now Jed had decided that the bad tooth was maybe one of the big wisdom teeth at the back, top, right. His face was slightly swollen and he found that he could no longer chew jerky on that side of his face. If he could have reached it he’d have pulled it himself, but each time he tried his fingers slipped off the smooth tooth and it just hurt more.

  Maybe there’d be someone to pull the tooth for him in the next township along the line. It was around a half mile to Stow Wells. A small community on the banks of the San Simeon Creek, an offshoot of the bigger Gila River. In the centre of the Arizona Territory. From what Herne recalled of Stow Wells it had been a pretty community, well irrigated and green among the rolling orange wilderness all around it.

  The summer sun floated serene and untroubled almost immediately overhead, sending most living things scuttling for the portions of shade beneath rocks. Herne reined in the big stallion and reached for the canteen. Tugging the cork out between finger and thumb and taking a single swig of the warm, brackish water, rolling it around his mouth and spitting it out where it vanished in the red dust. Drawing in one more mouthful and swallowing it, then replacing the cork and hanging the canteen back on the side of the saddle. Heeling the horse slowly onwards again.

  He came over a low ridge and saw the settlement laid out beneath him, neat and pretty. The row of houses and stores in the main street as he remembered it. But there was a new farm out yonder. A mile or so to the north of Stow Wells, on a clearly marked side-trail. But it wasn’t a farm. There was little sign of stock. No more than a dozen head of cattle. Three or four horses. Just a patchwork of trim paths that wound among some green lawns, with a large, rectangular white building, single-storied, at its center.

  It looked more like a private house on a grand scale. Jed shaded his eyes with the flat of his hand, peering out and down, making out a few figures moving slowly around the grounds. But not able to see who they were or what they were doing.

  ‘Guess I’ll have to wait to find out,’ he said to himself.

  ~*~

  A couple of hundreds yards further on and Herne was riding slowly along the flat part of the trail, the houses of Stow Wells shimmering through the heat-haze. To one side of the rutted roadway he saw three figures. Hunched and bent, each one dressed in dark blue pants and a cream shirt with loose sleeves. As he closed on them the shootist saw that they were all old men. Faces turning blankly towards the sound of his horse’s hooves.

  ‘Howdy.’ said Jed, tipping his hat.

  ‘Fuck you, stranger,’ replied the nearest, drawing a battered Walker Colt from the back of his pants and cocking it. Aiming at Herne.

  Two

  Herne’s first reaction was to slide down from the saddle, drawing his own Peacemaker and putting a forty-five ball between the murderous old man’s eyes. That would have been safest and easiest and Jed usually tried to follow those twin paths.

  But he noticed that the barrel of the rusty pistol was shaking like a willow in a cyclone. And the other two old-timers were nudging each other and grinning.

  Slowly a narrow, cold smile eased its way onto Herne’s lips and he sat back calmly, rubbing his fingers inside his kerchief. Fixing his deep-set eyes on the face of the man with the gun.

  ‘You put that handgun away, now.’

  ‘What’s that, stranger?’

  ‘Yeah. Got to speak up, son. Ben here ain’t so good at hearin’ as he was.’

  ‘That’s a damned fact, mister,’ added the third.

  ‘I said to put the gun up,’ said Herne, raising his voice a little. Eyes never leaving the face of the first of the ancient trio.

  ‘Why don’t you make me, cowboy?’ was the cackling reply. Delivered to the accompaniment of a thread of dark brown spittle that inched from the corner of the slack lips.

  ‘I’m takin’ it slow, old-timer. Fact is that I’m minded ... truly minded to get down and
take that heap of shit you’re holdin’ and ram it clean up your ass.’

  There was a chilling intensity to the words that penetrated to all three of the old men and they stood, shocked into silence. Watching the stranger, realizing that they’d surely picked on a loser for their joshing.

  ‘We didn’t mean nothin’, mister,’ mumbled the one called Ben, holstering the pistol.

  ‘Cemeteries full of mindless bastards that didn’t mean nothing,’ said Herne.

  ‘His pistol ain’t even loaded, stranger,’ said the second of the old-timers, reaching down nervously and scratching at his stomach. His voice was shaking with shock.

  ‘I don’t give a sweet damn ’bout that,’ replied Jed. ‘Times past I’d have killed him just for lookin’ like he was goin’ to draw on me. He’s lucky.’

  ‘Hang on there a moment. Guess we owe you a sorry, mister … What’s your name?’

  ‘Herne. Jedediah Herne.’

  The name got a reaction. He was used to that. But it wasn’t the reaction that he expected. There was something else there. Not shock or fear. More an oddly coy interest.

  ‘Herne the Hunter?’

  Overlapped with: ‘Jedediah Travis Herne?’

  ‘That’s what they call me.’

  ‘Top shootist?’

  Herne nodded. ‘What’s it to you?’

  They all shook their heads like a row of toy owls, nudging each other as though they shared some private joke. ‘Nothin’, Mr. Herne. Nothin’ in this wide, wide world. Nothin’.’

  ‘Wait until Al hears ’bout—’ began one of them, only to be shushed into silence by the other two.

  ‘Al. Who’s Al?’ asked the shootist.

  ‘Al? He ain’t nobody. Just one of us from the Home.’

  ‘Home?’

  ‘Sure. The Colonel Roderick Abernathy Home for Distressed Gentlemen,’ replied Ben. ‘Kind of a decent place.’

  ‘The big white house to the north of town?’

  ‘That’s it. Colonel Abernathy’s widow, Miss Lily, built it like he wanted from his money.’