River of Blood Read online

  The oak door closed behind them and cut off Mark’s reply. Outside, the snow continued to fall across the valley.

  As it fell on the crenellated towers of Mount Abora, so it fell all along the spine of the Sierras. Dappling the trees and the peaks, falling silently in the streams and rivers of Yosemite. Coating the mighty trees of the mountains.

  Freezing.

  ‘Jed. I’m freezing!’

  ‘You and me both, Becky. I guess it’s so long since I been up in the tops when the frosts came that I clean forgot just how damned keen it bites. Here. I’ll put a few more pieces of wood on the fire. Daren’t let it blaze up too much.’ He squinted through the drifting whiteness across the valley, to where they could just see tiny pinpoints of light. ‘I guess we’re less’n a mile from Mount Abora.’

  ‘And the end of the killing.’ said Becky flatly, trying to cut up slices of jerky with Herne’s belt-knife. The honed Civil War bayonet remained safely in his boot. That wasn’t for meat, only for fighting.

  ‘Yes.’

  Herne let his mind wander back in the silence, his eyes fixed on the tumbling flames of the small fire, the driven flakes falling on the embers with the faintest hiss.

  Seven men had taken part in the brutal rape of his wife back in March. The rape that had culminated in the murder of his neighbor, Rachel. The mother of fifteen-year-old Rebecca. .

  Five of the seven men had died on the vengeance trail, and there had been other deaths. Becky’s father had been gunned down in a saloon, and Jed Herne was now her only guardian. A load that weighed on him with increasing gravity. Much as he liked the girl, and that was as far as his mind would allow the thought to spread, she was still a dreadful liability in the game he played.

  A game that wouldn’t end with the deaths of the last two men. Because Herne was the hunter and the hunted. The first man to die had been the spoilt son of the influential Senator Nolan, from the west coast. Enraged at the murder of his only child, the old man had sought out the best gunman around and set him off to claim a massive bounty for Jed Herne. Dead or alive.

  Before he had married, Herne had been one of the top guns in the South-West. And that meant the top gun anywhere. He’d met the best. Some he’d killed. Some he’d ended up liking and respecting. And the one he liked best was the tall, lean albino, Isaiah Coburn. The one they called behind his back, ‘Whitey’.

  Jed and Whitey had ridden together in the Civil War under Quantrill, and then fought alongside Garrett and Bonny in the Lincoln County Range War. Jed always reckoned that Whitey was the only man who might — just might — have the edge on him.

  The man that Senator Nolan had hired was Whitey Coburn.

  Jed knew well enough that a contract was a contract, and that their long friendship would mean nothing when it came to the confrontation. Already there’d been a couple of attempts. But Coburn was handicapped with the other members of his unofficial posse that Nolan had saddled him with. Nolan mistrusted Coburn, feeling that he might betray him for the sake of an old friendship.

  But there’d be other attempts.

  And maybe on the girl as well. Something had to be done about Becky. That would come after the last two killings. If they were the last . . .

  Herne looked up from the fire, aware that the snow had eased. It was getting late and far across the giant scar of the valley the pinpoints of light at Mount Abora were going out.

  ‘Time for sleep,’ he said.

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