Death Rites Read online

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  Herne didn’t reckon it was any of his business when Cal Ryder’s men stole the U.S. Government’s printing plates. He wasn’t looking for trouble—only wanted to carry out the sad task of laying Becky to rest for the last time. But trouble hovered around Herne like a vulture, and when he discovered that the gang had rifled Becky’s coffin and stolen the pendent given her by his dead wife Louise, Herne knew that he’d have to take action. Knew that the earth would soon be soaked with blood—blood the color of the pendant’s rubies.

  DEATH RITES

  HERNE THE HUNTER 7

  By John J. McLaglen

  First published in the U.K. by Corgi Books in 1978

  Copyright © 1978, 2013 by John J. McLaglen

  Published by Piccadilly Publishing at Smashwords: March 2014

  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 © 2013 by Tony Masero

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Series Editor: Mike Stotter

  Published by Arrangement with the Author.

  This is for Mike Tarrant and Don Day who make such a great job of riding shotgun on the Mother Lode. With sincere thanks.

  Chapter One

  The sails of the ship fluttered like so many giant birds as they were reefed ready for coming into harbor.

  Jed Herne hunched his shoulders against the cold and pulled the hat down over his face. He leaned back against the wall at the end of the dock, keeping well clear of the other people who also waited for their relatives and friends newly returned from Europe.

  Soon the ship was close enough for him to pick out the name written about the prow, to see the slight figure of a girl straining over the deck rail as though she could scarcely wait for the ship to dock.

  Herne glanced upwards as thick flakes of snow began suddenly to tumble down from out of the gray sky. He looked at the pale, searching face of the girl.

  Winter had come.

  And so had Becky.

  “Cold as damned charity!”

  “Colder’n a grizzly’s asshole!”

  The third man in the group added nothing to the conversation. Unsurprisingly, because he was a mute, his tongue having been ripped from his mouth in a bitter waterfront brawl some eight years back,

  They stood a few paces behind Jedediah Herne, watching the docking of the big sailing-ship. Occasionally one of them would gob into the iron-gray waters of the Hudson River or point at one of the little oyster boats that darted in between the berthing vessel and the wharves. An unsavory trio and obviously up to no good.

  Herne had noticed them, as he noticed everything that went on around him. In a couple of months he would be celebrating his fortieth birthday. Most of his life he had spent with a gun on his hip, and the knowledge that he had the ability to use it fast and deadly. You didn’t even live to be twenty if you didn’t learn early to watch everything going on.

  Few gunmen lived to be thirty.

  Jed didn’t know anyone else who’d got as close to forty as he had.

  Then again, Jed Herne — Herne the Hunter — was someone very special.

  The girl on the deck waved down to him, and he waved back, the movement lifting the tails of his coat, revealing the heavy leather belt.

  “Money-belt,” hissed one of the trio of wharf rats, pointing to it. His two comrades nodded their agreement, and looked more carefully at the man in front of them.

  Graying hair, under the hat. Westerner, they guessed, grinning inwardly as they thought how easy it was going to be to take the rube for what he’d got. Tall and broad. Couple of inches over six feet, and something around the two hundred pound mark.

  That was what they saw.

  They didn’t see the Colt with the polished grips, settling snug in the greased holster, tied to the top of the right thigh. Nor did they see the honed bayonet, a memento of the Civil War.

  “Take him after she’s docked. On the way out. Looks like all he’s waitin’ for’s that little girl with the white face up yonder.”

  It was going to be so easy.

  There were three of them to one of him.

  All of them had knives, and wicked little leather pouches filled with lead shot that could sink into a man’s skull as gentle as winking.

  They relaxed, drawing up the collars of their jackets against the pattering bolts of hail which were hissing off the Hudson, and waited.

  Having noted their presence, Jed chose to ignore them and concentrated once more on the girl. On Becky.

  It was nearly two years since the night that had changed his life and left him with sole responsibility for the young girl. She’d been fourteen then. A solitary child with a stubborn jaw and deep-set, serious eyes. Living with her parents, Rachel and Bill Yates, on the spread right next to the one outside Tucson where Jed lived with his young wife, Louise.

  Friday, March 20th, 1879.

  That had been the date. After that night Jed had lost his wife, and Rebecca Yates had lost her mother. With the passing of Louise, Jed also lost the only person who had been able to check his killing progress. A progress that he had known would finally end with a bullet in the back and a dusty plot on Boot Hill. Marrying Louise had changed all that. The Colt had been wrapped in an oiled cloth and stashed away in a drawer. The fifty-five Sharps rifle had been hung on the wall.

  Then it was over.

  Disappeared in a welter of blood and screaming violence. The killings had only begun with Louise and Rachel Yates. Soon after that, Becky’s father had ridden that one-way path.

  After the men who had wrecked his life were all cleansed from the earth, Jed started looking around him.

  Seeing the young girl who depended on him for her education. For everything. He had sent her to Europe to be educated away from the slaughter that followed him across America. Financing her fancy schooling by killing men. Too many men.

  Now she was coming home again, presenting him with a whole set of problems. Where to live? How to live?

  And there was another problem. One that Jed Herne only ever set his mind to in the waking hours of the early morning, when the body sweats and thoughts rove freely. Becky was now sixteen. Just the age that Louise had been when she had married the infamous Herne the Hunter. And Becky was just as pretty ...

  Life was going to be hard.

  Damned hard.

  It took a little over an hour to get the girl through the formalities. There was the usual delay over documentation, and the light was beginning to fade across the murky expanse of the Hudson when Jed Herne finally saw the slight figure coming off the ship, resting her hand on the rail of the gangplank. Halfway down she stopped, and he thought that she was going to fall, but she paused and recovered. He guessed that she must be suffering from the rigors of the long sea crossing.

  Becky had never been the strongest of girls, liable to catch a cold on the least excuse. He well remembered the winter evenings on their homestead near Tucson when Becky would come and sit with Louise, their heads close together while they giggled over some joke. He would be resting, with maybe a book open on his lap. Another habit that he had caught from his young wife. There had been the bursts of coughing that had sometimes been severe enough to make Becky weep, her eyes starting from her head with the strain, while Louise had taken her hand to try and comfort her.

  But the weather in Europe must have been kinder than the winters
in Arizona.

  “Jed!”

  “Becky!”

  There was fog rolling in off the East River shore, slowly, slowly covering the city. Masking the filth that lay all about their feet on the dock, softening the harsh lines of the wet warehouse roofs. Dulling the stench of the Hudson that rolled by a few yards from where they met.

  Her face was hidden in a poke bonnet of dark blue, and Jed wasn’t able to see her. But she had grown taller, and there was more than the suggestion of a womanish figure blooming where there had once been only the gawky bones of a coltish girl.

  “Oh, Jed, I’m so ...” and she started to cough, so that he reached out for her, wanting to swing her up in his arms and hold her to him, but knowing that she was too tall and grown for that.

  He clasped her, and was hard put to suppress a gasp of shock and dismay at her lightness. It was like holding a frail little bird to him, and he could feel her heart pounding through the thick layers of cloak that enveloped her.

  “Becky!”

  “I’ll... Oh, my goodness ... It’s this goshdarned fog that bites so ...”

  He held her to him, not wanting to squeeze her too hard in case he crushed her brittle ribs that he could feel against his chest. Waiting for the paroxysm to pass so that he could lead her from the deserted wharf and into a cab and to the warmth of the hotel.

  Few folks made the trip across the Atlantic at that time of year unless they had to, and already the officials had made their way off. Leaving the dock to Jed and Becky. And behind them, dim shadows against the gray darkness, skulked the three wharf rats.

  Waiting.

  “Becky. I’m real pleased to see you again. We got loads to talk about.”

  Now that she was here, Jed felt strangely cold towards her. A distant formality seemed to have his body in its grip, so that he found himself making polite conversation, as if they had just been introduced at a Boston social.

  Still she coughed, her chest heaving, clinging to him. In the evening cold he held her hand, unable to understand how her fingers could be so thin, like reeds, the nails rimmed with blue. She turned her face up to look at him, and he was unable to stop his jaw gaping at the sight.

  The round face of the young girl was gone forever. She had been pretty before. Now she was beautiful. But it was a strange, burning beauty. Her cheeks were pale, almost white, with two spots of hectic red heightening her cheekbones. The eyes glowed with a desperate intensity, like pits of fire glimpsed at a great distance.

  “I’m ill, Jed.”

  “You’ll get well again, Becky. It must have been the journey over. By God, but I recall being sick as a dyin’ dog on a raft on the Colorado, never mind crossin’ all that way across the sea.”

  She shook her head, ringlets of dark hair blowing from under the fringe of her bonnet.

  “No. I’ve had this cough ever since last spring. Most times it’s gone in the summer, but it kind of lingered on. Now it’s worse, and sometimes when I start to cough, it’s like I can’t stop.”

  She was near tears, and Jedediah decided that she must be tired. The sooner they got out of the cold and damp of the wharf the better.

  Slowly, with his arm close about her, Becky began to walk along the shadow of the line of towering buildings, aware of the slapping of the river at her side, the rough boards creaking beneath her feet.

  “I’m so glad to be home again, Jed. It wasn’t that awful, but I did miss you terribly. And this cough and cold seemed as if they would go on forever.” She squeezed his arm in her hand. “I feel so much better already, Jed. Much, much better.”

  Despite the biting wind, Becky had pulled the front of her cloak open, and Jed saw the dying red light of the New York evening flashing on the pendant that Louise had given the girl. Only a small trinket, but it had been the property of his wife’s grandparents. It was filigree silver, with a heart of tiny rubies set at its centre.

  He was glad to see that she still wore it. Apart from a host of memories, that pendant was about the only thing he had with which to recall Louise. It wasn’t a lot to bring back the three best years of his life.

  “Come on. Not far to go. Sweet Jesus, Becky, but that wind is keener than a Comanche skinning knife.”

  Together after the year apart, Jed Herne and Becky Yates walked in the solitary darkness towards the gates of the wharf. Their linked shadows followed them.

  A few paces behind them, closing quickly, came three more shadows.

  Very close.

  Chapter Two

  Jed’s ears were filled with the harsh rasping of the girl’s breath, so that he never heard the faint scrape of a boot on a fallen link of heavy chain.

  It was Becky who heard it.

  Half-turned.

  Screamed.

  Herne was hampered by the girl hanging on his arm. Desperately, he threw her away from him, seeing her sprawl out in a tangle of white legs, the scream dying away in a choking cough. One of the attackers kicked out at her as he closed in, and Jed heard the sickening thud of the foot making contact.

  But there was no time to worry about Becky. He backed away from the assailants, fumbling under his coat for the Colt Peacemaker, unable to free the thong across the top of the hammer that held it secure.

  A knife hissed through the air, plucking at the hem of his coat. Herne swung a left-hand punch to hold the man off.

  There were three of them. Two tall and skinny, and the third hunched over and weaving in and out like a snake. All three wore a ragged collection of gray and black clothes, making it hard to pick them out against the bleak, rain-swept background.

  All of them had knives, the points flickering in and out at him. He stood back against a wall, balanced on the balls of his feet, trying to counter their moves.

  “Come on, cowboy,” grinned one of his attackers, panting with the effort of keeping Herne pinned back.

  “Yeah. Give up, country boy. Just stand still and let us take what we went. Maybe you won’t get hurt too much.”

  “And the little lady’ll be safe as houses.”

  “Sure — Bawdy houses!” yelped the other.

  The third of them, bent to barely half the height of the others, barked his laughter, his voice gobbling in his throat like it was bubbling up through a cauldron of boiling phlegm.

  Herne was like a dancer, trying to threaten the three dock-rats, even though he wasn’t able to get at any of his weapons. The bayonet was snug in its holster in his right boot. To bend down for it would have been to invite a knife in the belly.

  So it had to be the gun.

  “You spoil our fun, rube, and we gonna cut you up real bad,” panted the leader of the attackers.

  “Yeah. Cut us some of that tender meat I see lyin’ still and waitin’ for it, skirt up round her ass like she’s waitin’ just for us.”

  “Peckerwood bastard!” snapped the first of them, beginning to lose patience.

  Herne feinted an attack, forcing them all back a couple of steps, using the fraction of bought time to tear his coat open, the buttons popping across the wharf, flicking the retaining leather cord from the gun, feeling the cold of the walnut grips against his hand.

  “Christ Almighty!” screeched one of the men as he saw the Colt spring into the cowboy’s hand as if propelled there by a secret spring.

  Jedediah Herne was faster than anything that they’d ever seen. Faster than anyone they were ever going to see.

  The forty-five was in his hand, thumb pulling back the hammer with the triple click, revolving the chamber, so that the cartridge nestled ready.

  As the fog closed in, the harbor was filling with the deep, mournful tones of sirens, all the ships giving warning of their positions. The noise drowned the first shot, the boom flat and muffled by the surrounding warehouses.

  The bullet hit the leader of the three killers plumb in the centre of the chest, the impact of the heavy slug throwing him back on his heels. The knife tinkling on the wooden planks. Jed knew well the old gunfighter’s
saying: “Never use one bullet when two’ll do.”

  He squeezed the thin trigger, filed down for speed of firing, seeing the flash of the muzzle bright in the failing light. Already rocked off balance, the impact of the second shot, high in the throat, toppled the attacker several steps backwards, his boots catching on the edge of the dock. He fell head over heels and landed with a faint splash in the freezing water.

  Already dying, the would-be murderer wasn’t able to kick his way to the surface. Before he could drown, the two bullets killed him, and he died feeling a bitter anger that he had failed against a western hick in a big hat.

  By the time that his body hit the water, Jed had fired three more shots. Two of them smacking into the other tall man, doubling him up, sending him staggering from side to side, hands jammed against his stomach, trying to hold back the pain, moaning aloud. The third of the trio saw a half-chance and darted in, using his dying partner for cover. Jed snapped off a quick shot at him.

  But he was unlucky. The bullet ripped into the top of the other man’s head, exploding his skull into shards of splintered bone, pulverizing his brain into a ragged mess of pink and gray.

  The mute hurdled the corpse, diving in at Herne, knife outstretched in his hand, a strangled yell bursting from his open mouth.

  Two attackers down and dead with five bullets would have been good shooting at any time. But in the treacherous light, and the swirling mist, it was excellent. Yet with a third man leaping in at him, and one bullet left, Herne wished it could have been just that fraction better.

  The acrid smell of the black powder smoke tugged at his nostrils as he dodged the attack, hearing the point of the knife grate on the wall immediately behind him. Reaching out with his left hand and tugging the smaller man by the collar, smothering his assault, making it hard for him to use the blade at such close quarters.

  Pressing the muzzle of the pistol hard against the killer’s stomach, feeling the roughness of the man’s coat against the back of his knuckles.

  Squeezing the trigger a sixth time.