The Hanging (Herne the Hunter Western Book #17) Read online

  The Home of Great Western Fiction!

  When bank robber George Wright decides to take advantage of his fleeting resemblance to Herne the Hunter by crediting his own crimes to the shootist, Herne becomes both hunter and hunted — he must track down Wright and his gang in order to acquit himself, and he must avoid a lynch mob of outraged citizens hell-bent on hanging him high.

  HERNE THE HUNTER 17: THE HANGING

  By John J. McLaglen

  First Published by Transworld Publishers in 1981

  Copyright © 1981, 2016 by John J. McLaglen

  First Smashwords Edition: October 2016

  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 Liz, with all of my love, because, after all, we’re more than friends. I guess we’re all gonna be what we’re gonna be!

  Pa.

  ‘The threat of capital punishment is often sufficient of a deterrent to persuade even the most hardened evil-doer that he would do well to consider mending his ways, lest the full majesty of the law fall upon him with dreadful power.’

  From: ‘Spare the Noose and Other Essays,’ by Trevor St John Newhey

  Published by Northern Authors, 1897.

  ‘I know but one truth about the hemp collar. No man I hanged ever came back to harm another soul.’

  From: ‘Tom Hoyle—Frontier Hangman,’

  Privately printed in New Rochdale, Nova Scotia, 1906.

  Chapter One

  The date was September 7. The place was Northfield, Minnesota. On Division Street stood the imposing facade of the First National Bank. Mid-afternoon.

  It was ten years to the very day that the bank had been robbed in one of the most famous raids in western history. September 7, 1876, in Northfield, Minnesota. A group of men in long linen duster coats, riding in from the south. Three men came cantering into town in the morning, hooves rattling and echoing over the iron bridge across the Cannon River. Two men on bays and one on a beautiful sorrel with white socks. Facing them, over the further side of Mill Square, was the two-storied Scriver Block. Among the stores there was a back door to the First National. The front door opened out around the corner, on Division.

  The three men ate a hearty meal of ham and four eggs apiece, while they waited for the day to drift along. They’d checked out the town for possible trouble-spots. Noting the lack of gun shops. The Dampier House hotel across from the bank. Later they stood outside the bank and waited, talking together like old friends. Which they were. But a less than casual onlooker might have noticed that there was a tight, nervous tension about the group.

  Suddenly, Northfield exploded into violent and bloody action. Three men came whooping across the bridge into the town. Two more appeared at the far end of Division Street, guns blazing, sending passers-by ducking for cover. Men shouted out, women screamed.

  They began their doomed attempt to rob the bank, but the good folks of the town were more than equal to them. Hastily arming themselves with scatterguns and light rifles they began to pour lead into the outlaws who waited outside the building.

  In less than fifteen minutes it was over. Three citizens were dead. The lawman, a cashier and an innocent onlooker, a Swede, were all gunned down. Two of the outlaws were also left behind in the dirt, dead. And most of the other bandits were sore wounded.

  Clell Miller and Bill Chadwell were the dead men. But, far better known were the wounded.

  Jim Younger, shot in the face, blood streaming over his mouth. Cole Younger with a bullet in his shoulder. Third brother, Bob, his elbow torn to bits by a load of buckshot, a second bullet in his leg. Frank James also with a shot in his leg. Almost the only man unwounded that day was their pale-faced leader, Jesse James.

  A few days later the Youngers and Charlie Pitts were captured after a savage gun-battle among clumps of willow trees near Madelia, only a few miles away from Northfield.

  Jesse lived another six years, but his power as a bandit leader was gone forever that bloody afternoon and his death at the cowardly hands of little Robert Ford was no more than an epilogue, out of time.

  That was September 7, 1876.

  Now it’s September 7, 1886.

  It’s still Northfield, Minnesota, and the small mill-town hasn’t seen a whole lot of changes since that fall afternoon, ten years back.

  There were five of them, the leader riding a tall black stallion. He was a middle-aged man, dressed in dark coat and pants, wearing a long duster coat, open at the front. His face was narrow, tight lines around mouth and nose. The eyes were blue, slitted into sockets that seemed to have been chiseled out of wind-washed bone. The hair at his temples was touched with grey.

  The others all rode bays. Two geldings and two mares. From the look of their matted coats the horses had been ridden long and hard. One of the group was black. Curly hair pasted flat to his skull with some kind of oil. He carried an old sword at his hip and when he spoke his voice was high and fluting, bizarre in such a strongly-made man.

  Two of the other riders were so identical that they had to be twins, though one had a fearsome scar drawn across below his mouth, as though half his chin had once been hacked away. They wore the same dusters as the others, and the one with the mutilated face had a long grey scarf wound about his neck, sitting low in the saddle with his head tucked down as if he wanted to hide the disfiguring wound.

  The last of the gang of men was short, slim-built, his coat flapping around his boot-heels as if it was several sizes too large. He carried a sawn-down shotgun, a small-gauge Meteor, in his arms. The collar on the duster was turned up so that his head rested in among its folds like a cabbage in a nest of tissue paper.

  They rode on in, past the shoe shop, across the same iron bridge. The girders that crisscrossed above it threw sharp-edged shadows across the trail. It was a little after noon.

  The Minnesota sun was strong in the autumn sky, warming the day, bringing out the folk of Northfield to stand and gossip on the corners of the main square. It had rained heavily three days before, bringing the level of the Cannon up by four or five feet. But the muddy waters had subsided and the puddles were gone from the rutted streets.

  Over by Wheeler & Blackman’s drug store a young deputy sheriff leaned against the wall and stroked at his flourishing walrus moustache, wondering vaguely whether he’d be able to save up enough to go and visit a high-yeller whore that he’d fallen in love with at Miss Scott’s sporting-house across the line at Ellsworth in Wisconsin. His name was Frank Heywood.

  The group of riders attracted his attention and he straightened up, squaring his shoulders under the dark blue jacket. Tightening his thigh muscles as he gazed out across the square, feeling the cord around his leg, holding down the holster on his pistol. A new Smith and Wesson Schofield forty-five. A handsome single-action gun with blued barrel.

  ‘Good day to you,’ he called out.

  ‘Howdy, marshal,’ replied the tall man on the black.

  ‘Name’s Heywood. Deputy round here. You passin’ on through?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Got business here in Northfield?’


  ‘Sure.’ The middle-aged man laughed, the corners of his mouth crinkling at his own joke. ‘Come to rob the bank over yonder.’

  Heywood grinned. Even though it wasn’t generally figured good taste in the town to jest about what had happened ten years back. Ten years to the very day, thought the deputy. Coincidence.

  ‘Like Jesse and them Younger boys did, huh?’

  The stranger nodded. ‘Same. Hope the First National’s well stocked with dollars.’

  ‘Should be.’

  The man gave a wave of the hand and beckoned the rest of the group forwards, heeling their horses on across the dusty square, reining in outside the bank. The deputy watched them, wondering vaguely whether he could go and take his lunch now, or whether he could wait an hour or so until that pretty waitress came on at the restaurant. If he waited, then she’d serve him. But if he waited, then there was a better than evens chance that all of the chicken-fried steak and onions that was his special favorite would have gone.

  It was a real problem.

  A small wind eased itself across the iron bridge, whipping up small whirling towers of dust that quickly collapsed in on themselves. It tugged at the striped awning over the dry goods store, and made the linen dusters worn by the five strangers flap and billow as the men dismounted outside the bank. The sun flickered off the tall, round-topped windows of the building, making Frank Heywood blink.

  The Negro remained outside, holding the bridles of the horses. Walking the animals around the corner and out of sight.

  Somewhere around the other side of Northfield a calliope was playing, the fluting, steam-powered motes rising into the mid-day sky. A tattered old man lurched by, stumbling and nearly falling. Muttering to himself in a heavy accent. Something about a missing son. Heywood took no notice of the crazy old-timer. He looked across the square, seeing a group of businessmen, absurdly attired in tight vests and knee-length pants, walking together, joshing and pushing. One carried a bat and another threw a white ball into the air, catching it in a large, padded glove.

  ‘Damned baseball,’ snorted the deputy. It seemed a fool’s game to him, and there were frequent rights over the matches with other local teams.

  There was a noise from the direction of the First National Bank. Something that might have been a cry. Or a scream.

  Frank Heywood stepped off the sidewalk and began to move fast towards the Scriver building. Reaching down and flicking the thong off the hammer of the pistol, ready to draw it. Not believing that he would. Heywood was basically a shy man and he hated having to draw a gun in public. Most times it wasn’t really necessary and he felt a fool having to slip the handgun shamefacedly back into the greased holster on his hip.

  None of the lunch-time idlers seemed to have heard anything, all busy with their own conversations, a few of them idly turning heads to watch the young lawman as he hurried across the dusty square towards the bank.

  The Negro appeared at the further corner, still leading the horses. He saw the deputy and stopped, as though he was going to make some kind of move. Then he froze where he was, watching. Heywood hardly saw him.

  It couldn’t be a robbery. After the James boys and the Youngers hit Northfield, ten long years back, there hadn’t been much trouble in the mill-town. Heywood still didn’t believe what was happening. Maybe somebody had dropped a ledger? Or, maybe someone had been refused a loan and had gotten himself upset.

  But the moment he burst through the double doors, into the shadowed quiet of the bank, Heywood knew that it was bad news.

  The worst.

  The four men were there. The brothers stood one each side of the counter-grill, hefting pistols. The tall, middle-aged leader was the other side, near the bank vault, holding a rifle on the clerks while they shoveled sacks of money into gunny bags. The shortest of the bandits was to the lawman’s right, the double-barreled Meteor steady at the waist.

  Heywood started to go for his pistol.

  ‘It’s the sheriff!’ yelled the nearest robber, in a high, frightened voice.

  ‘Bust him,’ said the man behind the counter.

  ‘Hold it right—’ began Heywood.

  The gun bloomed smoke and flame and the shot lifted him clean off his feet, throwing him against the front window. Which starred in under the power of the scattergun’s blast.

  The deputy lay sprawled on the floor, feeling only a great numbness at the centre of his chest. He glanced down once at the red ruin, seeing glimpses of white bone and looped intestine and he looked away again. Knowing it was over. Relieved that it didn’t hurt him. It was a moment that he’d played over in his mind hundreds of times, wondering how it would come.

  Now he knew and he was pleased to find that there wasn’t any pain.

  Just the numbness.

  He could feel that he’d lost control of his bladder, but the warm wetness in his groin didn’t bother him. The short bandit grinned down at him, thumbing another cartridge into the smoking gun.

  Behind the counter the leader of the gang smiled wolfishly at the terrified bank tellers. Gesturing for them to hurry up.

  ‘Or you’ll get what that dumb bastard got. Anyone gets that if they mess around with Jed Herne’s gang. Yeah, the boys of good old Herne the Hunter.’

  It was September 7, 1886.

  Northfield, Minnesota.

  Chapter Two

  October 8, 1886.

  Jedediah Travis Herne, called Herne the Hunter by enemies and friends alike, was in Pueblo, Colorado, hoping to get across the Rockies before the first snow of winter came blinding in and closed off all the passes to the west.

  Herne was forty-two years old. Six feet one and a half inches of lean muscle and controlled venom. The people who called him Herne the Hunter were mainly the curious and those who had some reason to dislike him. Jed didn’t have many friends. Which was one of the reasons that he’d survived as long as he had.

  He’d heard of Billy, gunned down in the blackness of Pete Maxwell’s bedroom at Fort Sumner by Pat Garrett, one of the few men he’d ever considered a friend. And Jesse James, standing on a chair in his own house, adjusting a sampler that read “God Bless Our Home”. Shot down in the back by pretty little Robert Ford. A man he’d thought he could trust.

  Herne didn’t know of anyone that he could trust now. Not now Whitey Coburn was years dead.

  ‘Another glass, mister?’

  Herne looked up at the bar-keep. Who stepped back as though he’d been threatened. Wishing that the tall stranger with the shoulder-length black hair, touched with grey at the temples, would up and ride on. There was something about him that scared the bar-tender. He’d seen killers before, but there was something deadly about this one. Something that lurked at the back of the eyes like a red fire that looks to be out. Then you catch the glow and know it’s just sleeping a while.

  ‘Yeah. One more.’

  ‘It’s on the house, mister.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I pay my way. There,’ throwing a handful of small coins on the table. Watching contemptuously as the man hastily picked them up.

  ‘Thanks. Thanks, mister. Anythin’ else? Food?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Wife does a fine stew. Keep out the fall chill, day like this.’

  ‘No. Nothing. Just one more drink.’

  ‘Girls? Got a pretty little girl. Sort of Indian, but a near-virgin.’

  ‘No.’ There was no hint in the word of the rising anger.

  ‘If’n you prefer someone … kind of more …’ he indicated with wide-spread hands what he meant. ‘The wife’d be obligin’ to a gentleman that knowed how …’

  ‘You got troubles with your hearin’?’ asked Herne, voice still controlled.

  ‘No, sir. I hear good.’

  Herne uncoiled himself from the chipped seat, right hand sliding down to the polished butt of the Peacemaker slung low on his hip. ‘Then listen to this.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t want gi
rls. Nor boys, nor animals. No food. Your wife. You. Just one drink. You bring that and you open your flappin’ mouth one time more and I’ll break every tooth in your jaw.’

  ‘I’m sorry, mister. Sure. Sure, I’ll …’

  He slipped and nearly fell, finding that the bones and ligaments in his knees had turned to water. He desperately wanted to go to the outside necessary, but he didn’t dare not serve the shootist. His hand shook as he poured out the whisky, slopping it on the counter. Picking it up as carefully as if it had been liquid dynamite. Placing it down in front of the gunman, taking care not to say anything that might upset him.

  ‘Bar-keep!’

  The voice made him start, gasping for breath. Feeling a familiar pain in his chest as if his heart had leaped and beat twice instead of once.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Sheriff’s office?’

  ‘Pat Ryman?’

  ‘If that’s the man’s name?’

  ‘Yes … Sheriff Patrick Michael Ryman. Been the law around Pueblo these ten … no, eleven years.’

  Herne drained the shot-glass in one gulp and stood up, looking down at the frightened bar-tender. ‘So. Where’s his office? By the jail?’

  ‘Cross the way. Down two blocks. On your right. Can’t miss it, Mister. Been new-painted. White with … ’

  His voice trailed away as the shootist brushed past him, out through the swinging doors, into the coolness of the Colorado afternoon. The bar-keep wasn’t normally a drinking man but he allowed himself an exception, sinking three tumblers of whiskey before the shakes went away.

  Sheriff Pat Ryman was a large man. He’d have called himself well-built but there were those in Pueblo who insisted privately that their duly elected lawman was actually fat. Ryman knew that his stomach now exceeded his chest by several inches, but he had a fine big grey mare and his clothes were cut for him in Denver. So he looked good in the saddle. Less imposing when he walked around town but he tended more and more to leave that to his deputies while he sat in the big rocker outside the office, thumbs hooked in his vest, polished silver star gleaming on his chest.