Herne the Hunter 24 Read online

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  Jedediah Travis Herne - the legendary Herne the Hunter - has become a man weary of traveling, of killing, of having no-one to call his own. when he comes to the aid of a beleaguered wagon train, his finds a reason for living - and for dying …

  Could this be his last hurrah?

  HERNE THE HUNTER 24:

  HE LAST HURRAH

  By John J. McLaglen

  First Published by Transworld Publishers in 1983

  Copyright © 1983, 2018 by John J. McLaglen

  First Edition: September 2018

  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 © 2018 by Tony Masero

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Series Editor: Mike Stotter

  Text © Piccadilly Publishing

  Published by Arrangement with the Author.

  This, belatedly, is for my children.

  For David, for Cathy and for Matthew, as a small way of expressing my great pride in them.

  With all of my love and all of my hopes that they may have the best and happiest of futures.

  “When it comes to the last line of type, I’d like folks to say that I did it pretty up and walkin’ good.”

  From Words Along The Wichita, by Larry James, published by Dower House Books, 1893

  “Keep your dreams as clean as silver, This may be the last hurrah.”

  John Stewart

  Chapter One

  There were a dozen wagons wheeled tight in a circle, their oxen tethered in their center.

  Big Conestoga rigs, high-sided, each one with its canvas top in place, weathered and stained. They had already traveled over a thousand miles from Independence, Missouri, following a southern route that had now brought them into the baking deserts of the South-West. Fifty or sixty miles from the crossing of the Colorado River, summer-low. Not far from Vicksburg. They carried shoe-salesmen from New Jersey, chandlers from Boston, a whiskey-drummer from Kansas City, Kansas and a reformed whorehouse madam from Poughkeepsie. Altogether there were better than forty souls on the wagon train, every one of them from the East. All of them having sold up their homes and businesses, putting their trust in God and the wagon-master, heading westwards for a new life in California.

  Twenty-five adults and seventeen children, including a babe at the breast, barely fourteen days old.

  The train had been caught in a valley, close to a meandering strip of water called Drowned Squaw Creek, overlooked by the tortured shapes of buttes and mesas. The leader had immediately ordered them to pull into the traditional defensive circle, soon as he’d sighted the spiraling wraith of orange dust, moving fast in their direction. For a few moments there had been some indecision, but the first spitting volley of bullets had soon altered that, and now the wagons were a small fortress.

  Patrick Smith was an unfrocked Jansenist priest from Pittsburgh. He had fallen from grace for entering into a liaison with a married woman and was heading for the golden state with that same woman, seeking fresh fields to plough. He pumped the action of the sixteen-shot Winchester Seventy-Three carbine, leveling it at one of the galloping, whooping figures that circled the wagons. He squeezed the trigger, but the thick red dust made shooting difficult and the shrieking horseman rode on unscathed.

  ‘Fuck,’ breathed the ex-priest, levering in another round.

  Most of the women and children were cowering in the beds of the wagons. Some crying, some weeping. Some praying to the Almighty to rescue them from a fate that might be worse than death. Though on the frontier in the late eighteen hundreds it wasn’t the actual dying that was so bad. It was the manner of the dying.

  If you were lucky it was fast and easy.

  In Apache country it could be slow. Slow and very hard.

  Teresa Harknett was a widow-woman, well past the first bloom of youth. She admitted coyly to being “a little beyond thirty.” Other women on the train whispered that she was at least thirty years past thirty, but that was not quite true. She was traveling westwards with a paid companion, Agatha Wells. A rosy-cheeked maiden lady with a fondness for the gin bottle. The intention was that they should go to San Francisco and open up a sophisticated gown shop, specializing in designs from Paris, France.

  As bullets hissed through the torn canvas of the Conestogas, both women lay together, both shaking like aspen leaves in a hurricane. Teresa was mumbling a prayer, dredged from her Catholic childhood. Agatha was pattering the words of We Will Gather at the River, her eyes screwed tight shut, trying to ignore the evident fact that fear had caused her to lose control of her bladder.

  ‘The beautiful, the beautiful river …’

  A carbine bullet smashed into the side of the wagon, tearing out a strip of white wood, less than a foot away from her shoulder. Outside, the world seemed to have become filled with madness. A swirling, screeching, exploding purgatory, where demons came swooping in from the tangling dust, intent on death.

  ‘ … That runs by the throne of God.’

  Teresa was holding a little over-and-under derringer pistol in her clasped hands. Two forty-five bullets set, ready to fire. They had heard enough stories of what happened to white women who were unlucky enough to fall alive into the hands of the wicked red men. That was not going to happen to Agatha and herself.

  The same thoughts were running through the minds of Bart Harvey and Jack Nolan, sharing the next wagon in line. They had become friends on the arduous trip west, each of them having a young wife. Young wives who were both around six months pregnant.

  Bart and Jack had passed some hours together in the stops in small one-street towns, drinking warm beer and listening in awe and mounting fear to the tales spun by the local blowhards about the perils of the frontier.

  ‘It’s the women. Catch a white man and they gives him to the squaws. Handy with their needles. Sew patterns of beads all over a man. All over him. Slice off hunks of flesh with their little flensing knives. Cook ’em and feed ’em to the poor bastards. Blind you with white-hot steel. Break every finger and toe. Peel your lips and hack your nose off. Long augurs that go clean in one ear and out the other. Pull your tongue out so’s you can’t even beg the witches for death.’

  Bart and Jack didn’t sleep easy for nights after that talk. And the locals also told them about the prospects for white women. They weren’t much better. Least they got to live.

  ‘Ifn you can call bein’ slave and whore to a whole tribe of stinkin’ braves livin’,’ they said.

  Bart and Jack kept that side of things from their pretty young women. But each of them had sworn to the other that they would take care that a couple of rounds were saved for the last moments. Not for a minute ever thinking that it might come to that.

  Disasters only happened to other folk.

  Bart was firing a forty-five sixty Kennedy repeating rifle, punctuating each snap of the hammer with the names of the Apache tribes that he had learned, like a litany of nightmare horror.

  ‘Mescalero.’

  White powder smoke bursting from the muzzle of the long gun.

  ‘Mimbreños.’

  Another round whistling into the haze from the eight sided barrel.

  ‘Kiowa-Apache. White Mountain.’ Another bullet. ‘San Carlos. Jicarilla. Chiricahua.’

  As soon as the cloud of dust had been spotted by the wagon-master, every man, woman and child had known that th
ey were in for a bitter and bloody fight. There had been Indian raids on some of the outlying, isolated spreads around the region. Pillars of dark smoke coiling into the cloudless blue, over the horizons, telling their own tales of violence and savagery.

  There were around fifteen in the attacking group, though a precise count wasn’t possible. They had come from the lowering hills with the sudden shock of a cold norther, galloping in and out of the maze of arroyos around the wagons. At any one moment not more than half of them were visible, firing from the backs of their horses, gradually working their way closer.

  The wagon-master was tall and lean as whipcord. Nicholas Pilch, known as Austin Nick from his Texas birthplace. He had led several trains from the big river to the sea, and he had always managed to avoid serious Indian trouble. But this time was different.

  He cradled his Winchester carbine to his shoulder, feeling the kick of each tightening of the trigger. He had enjoyed the satisfaction of seeing at least one of the attackers go rolling off the back of a grey mare, a red flower blossoming in the middle of the face.

  ‘How many rounds, Paddy?’ he bellowed. His ramrod was a diminutive Irish-German from Vermont, Paddy Neumann. He was outside the wagon, scurrying around the defensive circle, checking on any wounded, making sure that everyone was still firing.

  ‘Not enough, I fear. Not enough.’

  ‘Could we cut and run?’ asked Austin Nick, immediately answering his own question. ‘Nay. They’d hamstring the oxen before we had made a furlong. What of any wounded?’

  ‘Five of the beasts are struck, but only one is sore. Mistress Burton has a ball through her shoulder but is in scant danger of death. One of the Ethell children has a hole clean in and out the upper arm.’

  ‘Ammunition?’

  There was a hesitation from Neumann. ‘I fear me there is but a hundred rounds for long guns and less than half for our pistols.’

  ‘We had hoped to charge our supplies at Phoenix, but that damned storm threw out all our schemes.’

  ‘I have told them to take care and pick their targets, but …’

  There was no need for the ‘but’. Nick Pilch had seen travelers before, faced with some real or imagined threat. They would pour out the lead in a withering hail, with no care for where it went. And in five minutes their hammers would be clicking on spent cases and empty chambers.

  ‘We must wait. Tell all to hold their fire. Lure those bastards in and then hope to hit them as they come in at us.’ It was a faint hope but the best that he could muster. From what he had already seen the attackers knew their bloody trade.

  The silence crept across the land.

  As word spread through the defenders, the firing slipped away, gradually, until there was no further resistance from the wagons. Every soul there gripped his or her weapon, hearts beating, mouths dry, the palms of the hands slippery with the sweat of fear.

  Waiting.

  The horsemen also stopped their firing, reining in at a shout from their leader. Holding their mounts still, the dust slowly settling like a blanket, so that the scene cleared. For a few moments it was like a tableau, modeled for children.

  Then, many things seemed to happen, all at once.

  The attackers began to move again, slowly closing in on their prey.

  Austin Nick took a deep breath. ‘Wait until they are close,’ he called.

  Knowing that they had but a few volleys left. Then it would be hand to hand, and then the ending would be near.

  When a bugle sounded.

  Teresa Harknett had the derringer ready cocked, lips moving to a prayer. ‘I lift up mine eyes to the hills, from whence cometh …’

  And there they were.

  As though the bugle had been a signal, the doomed members of the train looked up to the scraped edge of a mesa, a quarter mile to the east, and saw that it was suddenly lined with the silhouettes of riders.

  ‘Saved, God damn it,’ whooped Bart Harvey.

  ‘Oh, sweet Jesus,’ sighed the ex-priest, laying his gun down, swallowing hard, realizing that life still held a future for him.

  The raiders also saw the horsemen, and they stopped their advance. Stopped barely fifty paces from the nearest of the rigs.

  It was a classic scene from the annals of the west. The beleaguered travelers, surrounded by their hostile attackers, and the rescuers, looming over the skyline.

  But this time there was a difference.

  The circling killers wore the blue of the United States Cavalry. White men, well-mounted and armed.

  The relief party rode ponies, barebacked, carrying a variety of weapons. Small, stocky men, in cotton breeches tucked into soft boots. Loose shirts and bright head-bands to hold back their flowing hair.

  Apaches.

  Chiricahua, led by a tall white man with graying hair. His name was Jedediah Travis Herne.

  Better known as Herne the Hunter.

  Chapter Two

  It had begun several weeks ago.

  Jed Herne had ridden into the small township of Bulmer’s Wells, thirty miles from Phoenix. There was one trail through the settlement, and if you dozed on the back of your horse, then you could easily miss it. There were twenty-seven houses, one cat-house, four saloons, two livery stables and one wall of a school.

  Frontier towns always got their priorities right.

  There was the usual row of drifters sitting back on the shaded walkway along the fronts of the buildings, spitting at flies, waiting for something to happen. Most days in Bulmer’s Wells nothing much did.

  So the appearance of a stranger, heeling a big stallion along from the east, was something to make them sit up. Maybe it was a gunfighter, on the run from bounty-hunters? Or a lawman, looking for some runner. Ready to be that cold voice from the shadows that was often the last thing a man ever heard. But as the rider drew nearer, looming from his own cloud of orange dust, the drifters relaxed, going back to their spitting and their whittling. Whoever the stranger was, he didn’t look like he was anyone to signify.

  He was tall, broad in the shoulder, narrowing at the hip. But he was old. Hair powdered with the sand of the desert trail, showing grey-streaked at the temples, under a battered hat. He looked like he was tired, slumped in the saddle, one hand loosely holding the rein, letting the mount find its own way. On the side of the worn saddle the watching group of town’s folk could make out he carried a long gun. Looked like a fifty caliber Sharps buffalo rifle, bucketed ready for the right hand. And the stranger also wore a hand-gun. Tied low on the hip, like some top shootists, a thin leather thong keeping it in place around the thigh. Another loop of cord slipped over the hammer of a workmanlike Colt Peacemaker, preventing it from jolting loose on the trail.

  ‘Looks like a store-keeper ridin’ after his runaway wife,’ grinned Jabez Webb, a great bearded mountain of a man.

  ‘She went after some skinny kid in tight breeches,’ cackled his neighbor, Marvin Ettinger.

  ‘Old man here don’t look like he’s got no powder in his muzzle, no more,’ agreed Webb.

  The stranger ignored their laughter, riding in and tugging the stallion to a halt outside the Paradise Gate saloon. It was the fanciest joint in the township, run at an extravagant loss by its owner, Big Mike Cimino. The man dismounted and vanished inside, the batwing doors hissing shut behind him.

  The eyes turned away from him, back to the empty street and the blank desert and hills beyond. Nothing much would happen now for the rest of the day. Apart from the arrival of the afternoon stage from Lordsburg. If the drifters were real lucky, maybe one of the whores might hang a pair of drawers out over the front balcony of the bawdyhouse next to the Paradise Gate.

  The saloon was half-empty. A pale-faced little man with an English accent was drinking quietly by himself in the corner by the silent pianola. Three hunters, in stinking skins, sat together at a table, playing a noisy game of poker. The barkeep was a huge Irishman with a spreading beer-gut, leaning against the chipped top of the bar, moodily wiping a glass wi
th a filthy cloth.

  Herne took a bottle of whiskey and a shot-glass and sat down on his own, in a corner of the room. By habit. Too many men in his profession got careless and gotten themselves back shot. Jed Herne hadn’t reached middle-age by being careless.

  ‘Come far?’ asked one of a group of locals at the bar.

  ‘Some,’ he replied, gesturing eastwards with his thumb.

  ‘Goin’ far?’ asked another.

  ‘Some,’ Jed said, quietly, this time using the same thumb to indicate westwards.

  ‘Don’t talk much, do you?’

  ‘No. Not less’n I got something to say.’

  One of the group was a lad, barely out of his teens. Skinny as a beanpole, hair the color of Kansas wheat. Local girls figured that Micah Abernathy was the handsomest thing for a hundred miles around, and most of them would have given good silver dollars to have their cherries plucked by Micah. Ignoring the low forehead, and the nests of cratered pimples that flocked around his thin lips. His father was manager of the local Cattleman’s Association Bank. A man to be reckoned with in and around Bulmer’s Wells.

  ‘We didn’t catch your name, old man,’ sneered Micah, the stranger’s grey hairs and shabby clothes giving him added courage.

  ‘Didn’t throw it, sonny,’ replied Herne, never lifting his eyes from the shot-glass.

  ‘You dirty …’ began the boy, knocking over his beer with his elbow as he turned to face the stranger. His hand dropped towards the butt of a polished Colt Navy, the brass glittering in the dim light. Herne had already noticed every man in the saloon and what kind of gun they were carrying. The boy wore his pistol tied low on his thigh. Exaggeratedly low.

  Jed had noticed that.

  One of the problems of being a top shootist, with a name and a reputation, was that young punk kids in frontier towns from Laredo to Billings wanted to earn themselves fast glory. For being the one that gunned down Billy Bonney or Jesse or Wyatt or John Wesley. Or Jed Herne.