Herne the Hunter 20

  CONTENTS

  About the Book

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Copyright

  The Series to date

  About the Author

  Jed Herne came to the rescue of Mary Anne Marie and her girls whilst on the trail of a gang of bank robbers who'd been posing as a minister and his two sons. Madam Mary Ann Marie offered Jed the job of bodyguard to her five 'soiled doves' and able to combine this new post with trailing the gang - Herne accepted. The gang are about to price a high price.

  For Jennifer: with thanks for Willa Cather, Elizabeth Madox Roberts and a host more.

  ‘I’ve been a miner for a heart of gold’ Neil Young

  One

  ‘And now, my friends, I ask you, no, I plead with you, no, I go down on my knees before you and pray that you join me in this righteous fight to drive the devil from our midst!’

  Preacher Kenton threw one arm high towards the sky, head back and eyes wide with fervor. A mighty shout rose towards heaven and, arm still raised, he sank to his knees before the congregation. The fifty or so gathered in the part-finished church gasped in unison as the preacher struck the platform with sufficient force to make it shake.

  Slowly the hand came down and joined the other in a gesture of prayer.

  Silence fell over the church.

  One minute, two, two and a half.

  Matthew Kenton opened one eye and squinted out.

  ‘Friends! Brothers and sisters in God! Rise up now while the Lord is full in your hearts and minds! Rise up and follow me and help me to drive the unclean from our community! Rise now and let us be as one in the Lord!’

  Kenton was tall on his feet, chest straining against the black cotton of his shirt, the black broadcloth of his coat. His hair was the white of snow and his eyebrows were thick and bushy and black. His mouth was red and dark and his eyes were impassioned and blue. The hands that reached out over the heads of the congregation were massive, lined -farmer’s hands, calloused and torn by the plough. Hands that remained a legacy of the first twenty-five years of Matthew Kenton’s life. The years, as he confided in his followers, before he saw the light.

  He stepped from the platform and strode down the central aisle, never looking aside. Two men stood in the doorway, guarding the empty frame, and they bowed their heads as Kenton came up to them, moving immediately in behind him. It was all that the few doubting members of the congregation needed. They pushed their way between the bench seats, eager to join the crusade.

  Out onto the street they went and turned with a swinging curve into the broad avenue that would lead them past the town’s hotel, past the general store and post office, past the sheriff’s office and the jail, along between the rival saloons that sat opposite each other, all the way to the far end of town. There they would find the ragged rows of tents, the ramshackle dwellings fashioned from pieces of lumber, flattened cans and stolen canvas-there they would find Mary Anne Maria Delaney’s house of ill repute. The home for soiled doves. The town whorehouse. The brothel.

  Painted women and infamy.

  Desire and disease.

  Preacher Kenton stepped aside from the procession and jumped up onto the sidewalk, nearly flattening two small boys who had been running hard and waving small flags.

  The churchgoers stumbled on for several uncertain yards, unsure of why they were being deflected from their purpose. Small farmers in their store-bought suits with collars fastened too tight and their tight, shrew-faced wives clasping their arms – new migrants whose voices still wore the accents of the old country as clearly as the labels that had hung from their necks or the lapels of their frayed and faded coats; spinsters and bachelors and family men and women-children wearing shoes for the only time that week, their hair flattened with a quick lick and a push of a mother’s hand - they all gathered around the preacher and gazed up at him, expectant.

  ‘My friends! Let us pause here and make our voices heard in the center of our community. Let us pray for the help and guidance of those of our citizens who have not yet seen fit to become one with us and with the Lord. Let us seek to persuade them to walk the path of the righteous and follow us as we seek to perform the work of the Lord!’

  ‘Hallelujah!’ cried one of the pair who had followed Kenton from the church first.

  ‘Hallelujah!’ cried the other.

  ‘Hallelujah!’ chorused the congregation.

  Both of Matthew Kenton’s sons turned their heads quickly aside to see if they had done enough, or whether their father wanted another quick round of rabble-rousing.

  It seemed that he did not. Both the preacher’s arms were angled out above the heads of his followers, his eyes were angled up towards the heavens and clenched so tightly shut that his dark, bushy brows knotted and tangled over the bridge of his oft-broken nose.

  ‘Lord! Give us strength and guidance in what we do!’

  Howie Kenton wiped the back of one hand across his thin lips and felt with some pleasure the thickening growth of his fair moustache. He gave several of his pimples a quick tweak and winked across at his elder brother. Stanley winked back and growled a little phlegm from the back of his throat onto the end of his tongue. He was just about to spit it to the street as anyone normally would, when he realized that such an act at such a moment might be taken by his father as some punishable form of sacrilege. Stanley had done sufficient in the past to incur his father’s wrath not to fall into danger again. He swallowed hard and the bitter ball slid back down his throat.

  ‘We beg the rest of the good citizens of this town to set aside whatever worldly matters detain you and march with us on this crusade for decency and morality, this fight against the Devil!’

  Stanley nudged his brother and whispered: ‘Last time I was down to Mary Anne Maria’s weren’t no devil I was tusslin’ with!’

  Howie, whose only two visits to the whorehouse had ended in shame and premature disaster, blushed and struggled to look superior.

  Above them, their father found time to scowl at the interruption and hiss for Stanley to be silent.

  Quite a fair-sized crowd was now thronging out into the street, leaving the saloons and standing looking on with glasses and cheap cigars still in their hands. Women and children had come from their houses or from the store. Members of the town council – those who were not already members of the congregation-hovered on the edge of things, wondering if matters were in danger of getting a little out of hand. Sheriff MacIntyre pushed a sliver of beef from between his blackening teeth and lifted the shotgun from its pegs on the wall behind the desk. He spat the meat into the palm of his left hand, examined it with interest and dropped it under his boot. By the time he got outside there were close on a hundred folk spread right across the width of the main street, which accounted for a sizeable proportion of the town.

  ‘You aimin’ to stop this?’ The leader of the town council was a couple of inches over five feet and spoke in a piping voice that was always on the edge of breaking into a squeak. Jeremiah Patterson had a controlling interest in the town bank, owned a spread of some two thousand acres north of the river, part owned the general store and held water-tight mortgages on the undertaker’s parlor, the barber shop, livery stable and Mrs Peacock’s Pumpkin Pie Dining Rooms and Restaurant.

  ‘I said, you aimin’—’ He nearly squeaked.

  ‘I heard you,’ replied the
sheriff with more than a trace of rancor in his voice, ‘you don’t have to say it twice.’

  He stood six three in his bare feet and he’d never got used to being given orders by a pint-sized official with a voice like a mouse caught in a cheese trap.

  ‘Well, are you or ain’t you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Going to stop this.’

  ‘You want it stopped?’

  Jeremiah Patterson turned aside and bit delicately down into his lower lip; he didn’t know. Not for sure. On one hand what the preacher was saying was right in a moral sense and if he wanted his town to have the kind of reputation that would draw good, solid citizens then the soiled doves would have to go. Against this, however, was the undeniable fact that the whorehouse drew people to the town and that while they were there they spent money in the store and the saloons and the town became richer. When the town became richer, Jeremiah became richer.

  He didn’t know.

  He was pondering this ethical point when the sheriff leaned over him and said, ‘Do you or don’t you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Want me to stop it?’

  Jeremiah fussed with his hands and his cheek quivered in and out like a balloon. ‘I want you to ... I think the best thing is ... I ...’

  ‘I’ll wander along with ’em when they move off, keep an eye on things - how’s that? Things start to get too far out of hand, I’ll make my own decisions. That suit you?’

  Jeremiah nodded and fiddled with the buttons of his vest. Sheriff MacIntyre sighed and leaned away from the pillar, setting his feet down onto the packed dirt of the street.

  The preacher seemed to be coming to the close of his oration and most of the folk listening were being swept along by his words, alternately listening attentively like he was delivering the ten commandments themselves, hot from the mountain, and whooping and hollering and singing out some of the most fervent amens since a week earlier when they’d been celebrating Jeremiah’s wedding.

  MacIntyre wondered what it was like, taking for your second wife a girl who weren’t no older than your youngest son.

  He didn’t think he’d ever get to find out – Maybelle having the strength and fortitude of a horse in fine fettle and showing every sign of outlasting him on this earth and coming to claim him in the next.

  The sheriff allowed himself a rare smile: he’d rather have Maybelle for a partner than any skimpy thing with a chest like a boy’s and an expression that suggested the first time you raised your voice to her, she’d bust into tears and go runnin’ out the back door. Whenever he raised his voice to Maybelle she gave as good as she got, better some times. Which was the way he liked it.

  ‘Forward!’

  The preacher bounded from the boardwalk and began to stride down the center of the street, his sons falling in his wake and the majority of the crowd clamoring behind.

  The sheriff stepped across to the opposite side of the street and kept pace with the leaders, glancing around to see how many of the men were carrying weapons other than the pistols the majority of them had tucked into their belts or sitting in holsters below their hips.

  It was then that he caught sight of the stranger.

  Not quite as tall as MacIntyre himself, he nevertheless stood near two inches over six foot and he was rangy and well-muscled both-the sheriff put him at close to two hundred pounds. His hair was lank and dark, hanging in a jagged, sometimes matted mass well past the top of his collarless green shirt. At the temples the hair was not dark, but grey. He had a stubbled beard as if his razor and him had parted company five or six days back and the beard was flecked with the same light grey as his hair.

  MacIntyre reckoned he was somewhere between thirty-five and forty: for the frontier no longer a young man.

  The only weapon he carried seemed to be the pistol at his right side, a Colt .45 with a wooden butt that had been polished smooth with a careful cloth – or by a lot of use.

  The sheriff lost sight of the man behind a bunch of others and then a shout from the front of the procession drew his attention.

  From somewhere, one of the preacher’s sons had pulled some kind of a torch and he was waving it above his head. Kerosene-soaked rags wrapped about the head of a length of timber and set alight, MacIntyre guessed.

  Behind the flame voices grew in volume.

  This was no longer a crowd, it was a mob.

  MacIntyre hefted his shotgun in his left hand and ran ahead, knowing the need to reach the end of town before they did.

  ~*~

  Mary Anne Marie Delaney sat on the steps at the back of the wagon and set her head to one side, holding it for a moment with the palm of her left hand. A thin cheroot smoked between the fingers of the right. Her medium-brown, medium length hair had been rolled in rag curlers the night before and now it twisted and turned and rested easy on her neck and shoulders.

  Behind her was the first of the two wagons which were the homes for herself and her four girls. Off to the side was the timber construction which served as a workplace for them all – a number of narrow cots raised off the ground on boxes and barrels and separated from each other by pieces of thin canvas that were hung from the flat ceiling. The girls had stopped counting the number of times the flimsy partitions had fallen down and sent the occupants of the various beds into a flurry of laughter and embarrassment.

  Mary Anne Marie had lost count of the number of times in the past few years she had been on the receiving end of some person or other’s righteousness.

  She drew hard on the cheroot and squinted up her eyes. The crowd welled across the street and now there was not much more than a hundred yards to go.

  She called over her shoulder to the girls, warning them that the trouble they’d been anticipating all day was about to erupt.

  She saw a man running on ahead and slipped her hand through the slit in the side of her dress, fingering the butt of the derringer she kept in a holster attached to her garter. Ten yards on, she recognized him for the sheriff and moved her hand away. MacIntyre owed her sufficient favors not to be hurrying like that to throw the first stone.

  Behind him she saw the smoke and smoldering flame of the lantern. She remembered a time back in Denver when they had been working in tents and the miners had come for them, stirred up by the accusations of one of their number who claimed he’d been robbed. The flames had been bright and quick and the girl with the bad hip – the one most of the men liked the best – had not been able to escape.

  ‘What in hell’s name you doin’ sittin’ there?’

  ‘What’s it look like, sheriff? Enjoyin’ a smoke, that’s what.’

  MacIntyre swung his arm towards the approaching mob. ‘There’ll be smoke enough when they get through.’

  ‘Not with you here to do your duty.’

  ‘Duty! Who’s to say what’s my duty?’

  Mary Anne Marie ground the cheroot end beneath her heel. ‘Not you, an’ that’s for sure.’

  MacIntyre flushed angrily. ‘Nor the likes of you neither.’

  The woman shrugged her shoulders and turned her head aside. The rest of the girls were peering through the canvas drawn across the fronts of the wagons.

  The preacher brought his following to a standstill no more than ten yards from the first wagon. His sons stood at either side of him and Stanley was holding the glimmering brand over his head like he couldn’t wait to rush forward and hurl it amidst the women and their possessions. Howie’s tongue was favoring the faint hairs of his moustache.

  ‘Sodom and Gomorrah!’ Preacher Kenton suddenly howled, feet set firmly apart, chest forward like a turkey cock dressed for a funeral. His arms stretched away at angles from his broad shoulders. ‘Sodom and Gomorrah! That is what we have here. That is where we are living. And you …’ He aimed his forefinger directly at the woman on the wagon steps. ‘You have done the Devil’s work here. You have brought sin amongst us. You are the instrument of evil!’

  Mary Anne Marie stood up, hands on hips, a
nd looked the preacher full in the face. Some of the crowd quietened their noise to hear what she was going to say. The preacher took a pace forward, one hand still pointing towards her.

  ‘If I’m doin’ the Devil’s work,’ she said, her voice cutting and assured, ‘I’ve sure been getting a lot of help from the good citizens of this town. My girls an’ me, we ain’t in business for nothin’. We only got business here on account of these good men, all dressed up in their Sunday-go-to-meetin’ clothes, sneakin’ out on their womenfolk at nights to spend a little time an’ money in the whorehouse!’

  Preacher Kenton roared, the men around him clamored and those most guilty shouted and stamped more than the rest.

  ‘The best way,’ Mary Anne Marie was saying through the din, ‘of drivin’ us out of town is for none of you to give us any custom. Then we’ll slip out in the night so quiet you won’t even notice we’ve gone.’

  Stanley waved the torch above his head and the sparks hissed and flew.

  His father’s hands were raised in an attitude of prayer. ‘If there are those amongst us who have gone astray, it is because you have done the Devil’s work, just as Eve did with Adam. These poor citizens have been led astray because they have had no one strong enough to help them withstand your wickedness!’

  Mary Anne Marie set her foot on the lower step and pointed towards Stanley. ‘If that’s true, how come that boy there’s been slippin’ down here nights? Ain’t all that hollerin’ and prayin’ of yours enough to keep him on the straight an’ narrow?’

  ‘You lie!’ roared the preacher.

  ‘Oh, no, I do not!’ the woman shouted back.

  Howie was looking at his older brother and snickering; Stanley did his best to cover up his blushes with a show of defiance that took the torch even closer to the first of the wagons.

  ‘Don’t listen to her lies, Pa. Let’s burn ’em out! That’s all they’re fit for – burnin’!’

  Some of the crowd shouted along with him, others were hesitant now that the moment was so close. Sheriff MacIntyre stepped between Stanley and the wagon.