Shadow of the Vulture Read online

  ‘Some crazy bastard with a gun…’

  ‘Couldn’t someone get a doctor...?’

  ‘I only came here to meet a friend...’

  ‘Is somebody trying to hold up the train...?’

  ‘Why doesn’t someone do something...?’

  ‘Isn’t there a sheriff somewhere...?’

  ‘My God, she’s bleeding like a stuck pig...’

  ‘Can’t somebody get the man who done it...?’

  Herne heard them all. Listened. Watched. Waited. The man who had almost certainly shot the girl by mistake was barging his way through the crowd of people who were still massed on the platform. His gun was gripped firmly in his right hand and he wore an expression of grim determination on his face. His son, also armed, was pushing along after him, dragging his bad leg behind him.

  Of Pardoe there was still no sign. Herne wondered if he was keeping out of sight on the train, or whether he had jumped off on the other side and got away altogether?

  The question was soon to be answered.

  As the older man climbed up on to the train, a laced cuff emerged through one of the windows, fingers wrapped tight around a small gun. There was a shot like a whip crack and the swarthy man looked round, shaken but not hit. He was awkwardly placed for using his own gun, to get a good shot at the gambler. Not so his son. He was standing with clear space all around him and his weapon was already raised to take aim on the gambler.

  His shooting wasn’t as good as his situation. The bullet smashed into the window at a spot above where Pardoe had been a couple of seconds before.

  And then Pardoe appeared at the other end of the carriage; the end nearest to Herne himself.

  ‘Look! There he is!’ The shout turned the heads of all those still on the platform. It also allowed the son a second chance, This time he was more fortunate: perhaps Wayne Pardoe’s luck was on the turn.

  The slug entered the upper part of the gambler’s right arm, causing the pearl handled derringer to clatter down on to the wooden boards.

  A large space cleared around the men. Father and son, the one resting his gun arm on the rail of the train steps, the other grinning from ear to ear.

  ‘I got him, pa! I got him!’ he cried out excitedly.

  ‘You did well, boy. But there’s more to be done yet.’

  ‘Like gunning down a few more innocent women?’ asked Pardoe calmly. He sounded as if nothing untoward had happened, though it was evident from the blood which had already begun to stain the previously white shirt cuff that he was in considerable pain.

  ‘Don’t start blaming me for that,’ shouted the man on the steps. ‘How d’you know that wasn’t your work? Seems the sort of low-down thing you would do.’

  ‘Sorry to disoblige you, gentlemen,’ said Pardoe, ‘but I am not in the habit of shooting young women. Especially beautiful ones. Besides, a comparison of the bullet hole with my own gun and yours will soon show the truth of what happened.’

  The son interrupted. ‘Don’t let him babble on, pa. He’s just stallin’ for time. Let’s finish him now.’

  Of course, Herne realized, the young man with the limp was right. It was exactly what the gambler was doing. It was a gambler’s way out of the situation. The only way out. Keep a straight face and stay calm—on the surface.

  Even if there were a gunshot wound in your arm that was causing you merry hell and your weapon was down on the floor way out of reach. Even if you were staring at two guns that were aiming right at you. You still didn’t panic.

  It was like knowing that you were sitting facing a man holding all four aces. You just hung on in there and waited for a lucky break.

  Herne wondered where the gambler was going to get his joker from this time. Unless he had another of those tricky little weapons stashed away somewhere, he couldn’t see how he was going to get out of this one.

  A gambler trapped without an ace in the hole.

  Unless...

  Unless Jed Herne was just that ace.

  He didn’t know. It wasn’t his fight. Pardoe wasn’t even specially a friend. Besides which, he’d already helped him out once. He didn’t feel like making a habit of it. The last time, all he’d needed to do was draw his Colt and show it around. If he butted in on this one, he would have to do more. A whole lot more. Like face up to a couple of ready drawn guns and likely get to kill another man or two.

  But he was fairly certain that Wayne Pardoe wasn’t a cheat and that he’d won the money off these men fairly. Not only that, there was a young girl bleeding to death further up the platform and nobody paying a blind bit of attention to her. Almost certainly, her death would be due to the big rancher’s thoughtless haste to get his own back on the man who’d outsmarted him.

  ‘Come on, pa! Let’s finish him and get our money back.’

  ‘Don’t worry, boy. He isn’t about to go anywhere. In fact you could say that his ticket for this train was nothing more nor less than a waste of money.’

  Herne watched as two sets of eyes narrowed. He glanced quickly at Pardoe, anxious to see if he was about to make a second move.

  But there was no move for the man to make.

  Herne had figured that while the son was probably the faster shot, the father was likely to be the straighter. Which meant going for the slower man first. He’d have to let Pardoe figure out a way of taking care of the son.

  He was glad that it wasn’t his own life he was gambling with. But then, he doubted if he would have allowed himself to get into the situation where was staring down the barrels of two men’s guns without a weapon of his own.

  ‘Pa!’ shouted the son excitedly.

  ‘You’re plumb right, boy. Let’s finish him.’

  Herne went for his Colt fast, firing the first shot from the hip. He saw the big man wheel round on the steps clutching his left arm, dropping his gun as he did so. The other man had taken one shot at Pardoe, but, fortunately for the gambler, his anxiety to get rid of him had got the better of his aim. He didn’t get the chance to try again.

  Herne fired once more, catching the younger man between the right shoulder and the chest. Another weapon fell to the platform and slithered over the boards,

  Wayne Pardoe hurried forward and seized the nearest gun. ‘Thanks once again,’ he shouted back over his shoulder to Jed. ‘It seems I am to be permanently in your debt.’

  ‘That’s okay,’ returned Herne. ‘Maybe someday I’ll find a way of letting you repay me.’

  ‘What shall we do with these two?’ Pardoe asked, gesturing with the gun at the wounded men.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Herne. ‘I thought you’d have a few ideas about that.’

  ‘I have several ideas that I’d be only too happy to try out,’ admitted the gambler, ‘only I don’t think they’re particularly legal.’

  ‘Maybe that’s for me to decide.’

  All four men looked over towards the side of the platform. The man who had spoken wasn’t much older than twenty two or three. He had a neat brown moustache above his lip and high on his right cheekbone there was a round purple birth mark. He was wearing a black waistcoat, black shirt and black pants. In his hands there was a Remington 10 gauge shotgun with 28 inch double barrels. A belt that went diagonally across his chest held a Remington Frontier .44. At his hip, as if to prove that he wasn’t overly partisan in his choice of weapons, there was a Colt Peacemaker .45, complete with mother of pearl grip on which was depicted an eagle with a snake in its mouth.

  On the opposite side of his chest to the Remington pistol was a marshal’s star.

  Hell, thought Herne, he sure isn’t about to take any chances.

  The marshal jerked the shotgun in Herne’s direction. ‘Nice and easy, now. You slide that Colt of yours back into its holster. That’s the way. Now you…’He moved the gun round to Pardoe. ‘…drop that thing back where it was a moment ago, before you fellers started shooting one another up.’

  The wounded rancher on the steps interrupted him. ‘You mean you we
re here then and you let all this happen? You let that man gun me through the arm that way?’

  The marshal smiled, his moustache lifting higher at one side of his mouth than the other. ‘Never reckon to stop folks I don’t know killing themselves. Usually find they needed to die anyway and it saves me a lot of trouble. Not to mention shells. See, the town pays for the cartridges I use. They appreciate it if I let others do the shooting for me.’

  ‘But that man opened up on us for no reason. Our quarrel wasn’t with him.’

  The marshal moved the shotgun round towards the rancher on the train steps. ‘Seemed to me that you were about to let fly at a man who didn’t have a gun on him at all. That was all right by your reckoning, I suppose?’

  ‘That was different. He cheated us out of our money.’

  The marshal shrugged. ‘That’s as may be. I don’t see how it gives you the right to start a fight with guns here on the station with so many folk around. Looks like that young lady there might be dead already. That being so, you’re going to be hanging around here for longer than you might have expected.’ He chuckled boyishly. ‘We have our own way with killers round here. We take them out to a big old oak on the edge of town and organize a grand picnic. Town band gets to play, kids have their games and all–then as a sort of climax to the whole affair, why, we throw some rope over that old oak and watch you swing. Then everyone collects up their picnic things and goes home.’

  ‘Pa! Pa, d’you hear that? They’re aiming to hang us! Hang us for something we never rightly done! You ain’t gonna let them, are you?’

  ‘Seems to me that ain’t in your pa’s say so,’ said Herne.

  ‘Shut your mouth, mister!’ shouted the boy. ‘You done enough for one day.’

  Herne was about to say something else when he noticed that the older rancher had moved down off the train steps. More than that–while his son had been shouting at him, he had managed to get his own pistol back up off the floor.

  The marshal noticed Herne’s silence, then the gun in the swarthy man’s hand. He took a step forward, so that he could cover father and son at the same time.

  ‘What do you think you’re goin’ to do with that there thing you got in your hand?’

  ‘It’s going to get us out of here. We ain’t going to be hanged for something that wasn’t our fault.’

  He was sweating profusely and he lifted his wounded left arm across his forehead to stop it dripping down into his eyes. It could have been the moment for the marshal to have got him, Herne thought. But he was obviously going to try and talk him out of it first. He really meant what he had said about saving the town’s money on ammunition.

  ‘Look, mister, don’t go off plumb loco now. All I said was that if the girl dies and if it’s proved you shot her, then we’d hang you. But the way I read it, that’s two ifs this side of dyin’. If I were you, I’d want to hang on to them ifs.’ He chuckled out loud.

  The rancher didn’t seem to think it was funny. Not at all.

  ‘This gun’s enough to get us out of here. I’m telling you to back off from my boy there and put up that damned scatter gun of yours.’

  The marshal looked straight back at him. He may not be all that old, thought Herne, but he’s been in enough situations like this to know what to do. And he sure ain’t acting scared.

  ‘I’m telling you once more,’ threatened the rancher. ‘Then I’m goin’ to drop you where you stand.’

  The marshal didn’t waste any more breath. He pulled in on both triggers. The head of the rancher’s son was near enough taken off at the neck by the blast. Behind him, the rancher himself was flattened back against the steps at the end of the train carriage.

  Herne watched as the man’s body continued to jerk and shake for several moments as though trying to climb up on to the train of its own accord.

  Eventually it gave up and slid downwards over the edge of the platform, on to the track, and ended up nestled against one of the wheels of the train.

  Several feet to Herne’s left, Wayne Pardoe gave a low, appreciative whistle. The rest of the people on the platform were stunned into silence. The marshal hadn’t bothered to move from where he was standing. The shotgun remained in his left hand, while he drew the Remington pistol from the shoulder holster with his right.

  It was with this that he now covered Herne and Pardoe.

  ‘I guess I don’t need to say any more to make my point, do I?’ he asked them.

  Herne could not restrain himself from grinning. ‘Guess you just about said it all,’ he replied.

  At that point a woman started to cry loudly and conversation broke out in the crowd. The marshal turned on them angrily. ‘Will you move yourselves out of here! This train ain’t goin’ to be leaving for a while yet. Not till I’ve finished sorting things out.’

  The woman’s sobs continued.

  ‘One of you men, get that woman out of here! And someone else get the undertaker up here. Jackson, you and Porter get down on the track and lift that body up here. Just mind you don’t slip on anything. There’s a whole mess of brains all over this damned place.’

  Herne stood and watched the marshal. It was a sight that both impressed him and filled him for a moment with nostalgia for his own past. Something over ten years ago that could have been him standing there giving orders so confidently and having no doubts that they would be carried out. He wondered what would happen to the young marshal in the future. If he had a future. Soon the punk gunslingers looking to make their reputations would come flocking into town. Should they miss him here they would get him in the next place or the one after that.

  Unless he pulled out in time and found himself a good woman and settled down …like he had done himself. And what good had come of that?

  ‘How is she, doc?’ said the marshal to the man bending over the woman in a green suit, who was still lying at the far end of the platform.

  The man turned his head slowly. ‘She’s fading good and fast. It ain’t worth moving her,’ he said wearily.

  The marshal walked towards the huddled body, gesturing with his gun to Herne and Pardoe, indicating that they should keep ahead of him. The three of them stood around the young woman and the kneeling doctor. He had opened up the top of her green suit and had cut away a portion of the white blouse she had been wearing underneath it. He had exposed her breast.

  What had been her breast. Now it was little more than raw wound, through which blood continued to pulse despite the doctor’s attempts to stem the flow.

  As the men looked down on her, the girl opened her eyes. Somehow, even in those moments before death, she still managed to look beautiful.

  She opened her mouth in an attempt to speak. The words came haltingly. The doctor bent his head low over her lips and listened.

  When she had finished, he turned his head towards the standing men. ‘She asks if her fiancé is here? She was waiting for him off the train. He was bringing her a ring all the way from Denver.’

  Herne and Pardoe looked at the marshal who shook his head quickly. Pardoe pulled a diamond ring from his little finger and passed it over to the doctor. ‘Give her that,’ he whispered.

  The man accepted the ring and put it into the girl’s hand. She smiled and tried to lift it up to her face so that she could look at it, but the effort was too much for her. She contented herself with holding it tight in her palm.

  Then she tried to speak again. ‘She says for him to kiss her,’ the doctor reported.

  There was a slight pause. Then Wayne Pardoe went down on his knees and lowered his head to hers. He kissed her softly and as he did so the hand that held the ring opened and let it roll down on to the boards.

  The fingers were not to close again.

  When Pardoe lifted his head back up, there was blood upon his lips.

  The conversation between the marshal and Herne and Pardoe was brief and to the point. He checked out where they were from and where they were headed. Asked the gambler his version of the rancher’s sto
ry about the cheating and seemed to accept it. After that, there was little more to say.

  ‘One thing,’ said Herne, ‘I’d appreciate knowing your name.’

  ‘Sure,’ said the marshal. ‘It’s Dan. Dan Stewart.’

  ‘Hell!’ exclaimed Herne. ‘Your old man wasn’t John Stewart?’

  The marshal smiled and nodded his head. ‘He sure was. Still is. You knew him?’

  ‘Rightly did. We rode together a time or two back.’

  ‘What’s your handle then?’

  ‘Jed Herne.’

  ‘Herne the Hunter?’

  ‘So they say.’

  Now it was the young marshal’s turn to whistle. He scratched at the ground with the toe of his boot. ‘If I’d known that at the time, I might not have waved this here gun at you as lightly as I did.’

  Herne grinned. ‘I don’t know, Dan. I reckon you might have. I’m glad it didn’t come to the point where we had to put anything to the test.’

  ‘So am I! My old man would never forgive me, drawing on one of his old friends.’

  Herne’s mouth broke into a full smile. ‘He surely wouldn’t. Specially if you’d lost out!’

  ‘What you aimin’ on doing now?’

  ‘Catching that train if it’s still waiting.’

  ‘She’s there all right. You wouldn’t care for a drink first?’

  Herne and Pardoe exchanged glances. ‘No thanks. We’ve tried the beer once.’

  Marshal Dan Stewart laughed and held out his hand. Both men shook it warmly, then turned away and walked back to the station. The marshal watched them go, all the while thinking about what Herne had said and wondering, in spite of himself, who would have won if it had come to a showdown between them.

  As for Jed Herne, he didn’t give the matter more than a cursory thought. He was sure of the answer already. The day he wasn’t would be the day he stopped hanging out his gun for hire.

  But he was glad he had not had to shoot the son of an old friend like Long John Stewart. Long John, who had always claimed that he was born at one end of a rainbow in Omaha and would wind up being buried at the other. Long John who loved nothing better than to spend day after day up in the hills chasing down wild horses.