Herne the Hunter 19 Read online

  ‘How many of you there?’.

  ‘That’s hard to say. Lot of comin’ and goin’, if’n you take my meaning, Mr. Herne.’

  ‘Can’t say I do.’

  ‘Some arrives. Sent by other charities. But every now and again one of us gets us transmitted to the realms eternal.’

  ‘Oh. You mean there’s deaths.’

  Ben shook his head so hard that Herne feared for his health. ‘Not a word Miss Lily likes to hear. Makes it sound too overmuch like losin’.’

  ‘Losing?’

  ‘Al says that even losers get to be lucky some of the time,’ said the second of the old men, nodding as if he’d just delivered himself of one of the great truths of infinity.

  ‘Al sounds like some kind of a prophet,’ grinned Herne, relaxing. Even forgetting the pain in his jaw for a few moments.

  ‘Al’s a real dumb asshole,’ snapped the third of the oldsters.

  ‘Hey, now ... That ain’t rightly fair, Paddy, and you know it,’ retorted Ben.

  ‘No it ain’t. Half the time he doesn’t even know who he is. Forgets to go to the necessary and messes his breeches. And those lyin’ stories he makes about—’

  ‘Hush up!’ shouted Ben. ‘Or I’ll draw this here pistol and blow your brains out your neck.’

  ‘Ben’s right, Paddy,’ calmed the third man, whose name Jed hadn’t heard. ‘Al’s had him some bad times. We know that. And Mr. Herne here won’t want to hear about Al’s little tales. He just up and makes them to keep himself contented, Mister.’

  The shootist waved a hand. ‘I understand. Don’t worry none. Hey, this sure seems a nice place.’

  ‘It is. Sure is. Been some trouble with Indians, though.’

  ‘Chiricahua?’

  Ben nodded. ‘Bastards. I’d shoot every last mother-fuckin’ son down and leave ’em rot.’

  Herne sniffed. The pain was back. ‘Anyone in town pull teeth? A doctor?’

  Paddy looked at the other two. ‘No. Guess not. Had a doctor at the Home. Good man. Doc Howell. Hear he took the last train for the coast. Now there’s nobody. Matron says there’ll be someone along next month.’

  ‘Maybe.’ interrupted Ben.

  Yeah. Maybe. But Matron isn’t given to tellin’ anythin’ but the truth.’

  ‘So who’d . . .?’

  ‘Pull a tooth? We go to the smith. Big Jim Bisset. Does ’em sweet and easy and you get a slug of liquor on the house.’

  ‘Charges two bits for a straight tooth. Dollar if’n he has to dig it out.’

  ‘Sounds like my man. I thank you, gentlemen,’ said Herne, doffing his hat.

  ‘Good day to you, Mr. Herne.’

  ‘Yeah, good day.’

  ‘You take care how you go, now. Watch out for some of them young whippersnappers that hang around the Inside Straight saloon,’ warned Ben. ‘Uppity kids filled with gall and no backbone.’

  Paddy nodded his agreement. ‘Seamus Blackstone’s the worst. Red-haired boy. Watch for him. Figures all strangers are fair game for some sportin’.’

  ‘Appreciate the warning.’

  He heeled his horse on again, leaving the three old men behind. Pausing as he entered Stow Wells and looking back, seeing that the elderly trio was still where it had been. All three faces still turned to watch him go.

  ~*~

  Herne cantered along the main street of the small settlement - the only street - past a half-built church. It was odd how many settlements in the South-west had begun building the house of God in their midst and never somehow gotten around to completing it.

  Drapes twitched at windows and he saw shadowed faces behind shimmering glass. It was the usual reception to anyone new in a far-away place and it didn’t bother him. It would have bothered him more if folks hadn’t taken any notice at all of him.

  He passed the Sheriff’s Office, ignoring the lean man who was stretched back in a battered hickory rocking chair, whittling on a piece of wood. The Arizona sun flickered off the silver star that was pinned to the man’s vest. Herne was conscious of the attention he was receiving and it was no surprise when he glanced behind him and saw the chair was rocking gently on its own. And the door to the lawman’s office stood open. The sheriff would be inside, flicking through the latest pile of ‘Wanted’ flyers to see if there was anyone fitting the description of the shootist.

  Tall, broad in the shoulder. Aged around forty. Average weight. Hair long and graying at the temple. Dresses in ordinary clothes. No distinctive facial scars. Carries Colt Peacemaker and Sharps fifty caliber long gun.

  But there wouldn’t be any flyers out. Herne knew this. Sure there’d been times gone when he’d crossed that thin, invisible line that set the orderly apart from the lawless. But right now he wasn’t wanted in any state.

  The smithy was just ahead of him, right next to the livery stables. Even in the burning heat of the day Herne could make out the glowing fire near the door, and the enormous figure of what he guessed must be Big Jim Bisset, arms folded, looking out into the street. The gnawing agony of the bad tooth seemed to suddenly ease away to nothing now he had reached the moment of having it actually drawn. But he was still going to go through with it.

  When he caught the sound of horses behind him. And a rig, moving fast.

  Someone yelling.

  A scream.

  Pounding hooves on the trail. And more shouting. The words inaudible.

  The blacksmith came out into the light, blinking and shading his eyes with his sinewy, spark-scorched fingers. Herne swung in the saddle and looked back along the street.

  Doors were opening, people stepping out on the high boardwalk, all eyes turned to look to the west. Wrapped in a soaring veil of reddish dust Herne could make out the lines of a Concord coach, rattling and pitching as the team of four horses pulled it at a frantic gallop.

  And there was nobody up on the box.

  The lean man that Herne had taken to be the law around Stow Wells ran out into the street, waving his hat and yelling to try and check the stampeding team. But they were on their way through, spooked beyond the furthest edge of panic, and it was going to take a lot to stop them. They slowed a mite and swerved around the sheriff, but their progress was hardly impeded at all.

  ‘Halt them! For Christ’s sake hold them!!’ came the yell and Herne saw the blacksmith take a few steps forward, then think better of it and stay where he was. Four galloping horses and a runaway stagecoach weren’t going to be halted by one man with his bare hands.

  Jed patted the neck of his own horse, gentling it and keeping it quiet among the building chaos. He reached down and thumbed the leather thong off the hammer of the pistol, so that it was free to draw.

  ‘Stop them, mister!’ shouted the lawman, standing helplessly in the street as the team charged by him.

  ‘Sure,’ said Herne.

  The single action pistol slid easily into Jed’s hand, feeling just like an extension of his right arm. It was totally automatic to cock the gun with his thumb, index finger moving to the narrow trigger.

  The first bullet hit the offside leader through the chest, followed a fraction of frozen time later by a similar shot through the throat of the nearside animal. Herne could easily have shot the galloping horses through the head and brought them down instantly, but that would have produced a bloody shambles of an accident that would have turned the Concord and wrecked it. Killing anyone there might be left alive inside.

  By shooting them in the body he’d slowed them immediately and brought them to a canter. Two more bullets and the coach was creaking to a halt. The two wounded animals were both crying out in shock and pain, whinnying high and clear through the bright sunlight.

  A hundred paces down the trail, at the further edge of Stow Wells, and they had both stopped. One sinking to its knees with vivid blood pattering softly in the dust from neck and chest. The other still standing patiently in the traces, eyes rolling, sweat lathering its flanks and mingling pink with the dashed blood from its lungs.
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br />   Behind him Herne could hear cries and shouting, some sounding angry. Mostly upset and frightened. The lawman was running towards the stranded stage, pistol out in his hand.

  ‘Mite late for the gun, Sheriff!’ called the shootist, digging his short spurs into the stallion, walking it towards the coach.

  It seemed as though most of the rest of Stow Wells was out in the street.

  Jed swung himself down from the saddle, letting the reins dangle. Standing a moment and looking up at the dusty Concord. Noting the smears of fresh blood on the edge of the driver’s seat. A scattergun still bucketed on the far side. A palm-print dabbed crimson on the near door. Several bullet-holes dotted the rear and the heavy oilcloth flap that was normally tied down over passengers’ luggage had been slashed to ribbons.

  The calling had died away behind Herne and all he could hear was the crunching of feet and the faint sound of a light wind rattling a loose shingle on the nearest frame house.

  ‘Anyone livin’, mister?’ called the sheriff.

  Herne stepped in closer and reached for the handle of the coach, feeling it sticky to the touch. Turning it and pulling the door open.

  There was nobody living.

  All he saw was a scalped and eyeless head, rolling gently on the floor of the stage.

  No body.

  Just the head.

  Three

  ‘Course it was damned Indians!’

  ‘I’m just sayin’, Sheriff, that it could be renegades or a bunch of breeds. Even a gang of Mex bandits from south ‘cross the River.’

  The law in Stow Wells, Arizona Territory, was a young-looking forty-year-old; Sheriff Clifford V. Williamson. Son of a local rancher, he’d been the law for close on twenty years. The settlement was generally quiet and the slaughter of the coach’s passengers, driver and shotgun had left him shocked and angry.

  ‘Indians,’ repeated Williamson, stubbornly. ‘Scalpin’ and butcherin’ like that. Chiricahua. Under Mendez. Small sub-tribe.’

  ‘Not normally the Apache way … taking a stage like that.’

  ‘Happened before. Month back. Same way. Goin’ to be hard to get driver and guard next time on.’

  Herne sniffed, leaning back in the chair in the Sheriff’s office, looking around. Thinking that lawmen’s rooms were the same all over. Board with some flyblown notices pinned crookedly to them. Back door through to the cells. Rack of Winchesters and Meteors, chained together. Desk and a couple of seats. Iron round-bellied stove with some of last winter’s ash still cluttering up its base.

  And the same kind of lawman.

  There were easy towns and hard towns and Herne had known plenty of both. Stow Wells was an easy one. You could tell that by watching Sheriff Clifford V. Williamson.

  The most trouble he’d normally get to see would be a couple of cowboys getting themselves drunk and raising some kind of hell with the girls from the Inside Straight across the street.

  Williamson had the stamp of a man who’d lived too easy for too long. Now there were hard times poking their noses over the hills around him and he wasn’t rightly ready for them.

  During the silence Herne stood up and walked to a small table near the barred and shuttered window that opened on the street. Pouring himself a cup of coffee that a rosy-cheeked woman had carried over for them both from the eating-house across the way. It was good coffee, hot and black and strong enough to float a marble clock.

  ‘I heard plenty of you, Herne,’ said Williamson, breaking the silence.

  ‘I heard nothing ’bout you,’ replied Jed, wiping his lips on his sleeve.

  ‘Heard years back you’d gotten married. And then that you was dead.’

  ‘Part true.’

  ‘Yeah. You surely are kind of a legend.’

  ‘I know it. And it don’t do a damned thing for the way I live, Sheriff.’

  ‘Take care of one of our colts here in town.’

  ‘Blackstone.’

  ‘Hell!’ The sheriff couldn’t hide his surprise, his boot-heels slipping off the edge of the desk so he nearly fell.

  ‘Seamus Blackstone. Red-headed kid.’

  ‘Now how the . . .? You just rode in here. I know for a fact you can’t have been through Stow Wells in the eighteen years and . . .’ he paused, calculating on his fingers. ‘In the eighteen years and seven months that I’ve been the law here. So how come you’ve heard about Seamus?’

  ‘I hear things.’

  ‘Oh, sure.’ Williamson continued to look puzzled, but wasn’t prepared to push it. You’ve not been this way before?’

  ‘No. Not through this place in the daylight. Camped close by once.’

  ‘You get to see most places, I guess.’

  ‘Yeah. And they all look just around the same, Sheriff.’

  Herne’s reputation as a gunman and shootist had ridden well before him. For years now he’d hardly ever met a lawman who hadn’t been nervous, seeing his presence in a town as a signal that some general massacre was about to begin.

  Sometimes they were correct.

  'You was born up in the Sierras, weren’t you?’

  Herne was surprised at that one. Not many lawmen knew that much about him.

  'Yes. Who told you that?’

  ‘I think it was one of the old-timers from the Home. Yeah, it was. Don’t recall which one. All them skinny old bastards looks ’bout the same.’

  ‘Who runs that Home?’

  Miss Lily Abernathy. Widow of the old Colonel. Mighty handsome woman. Her daughter, Andreanna, is … what do they call …? Yeah. The Matron. Matron of the Home. And she’s an even more handsome piece of womanhood.’

  ‘How old are they?’

  Williamson crinkled his eyes. ‘Miss Lily was a whole mile younger than Colonel Abernathy. Used to be somethin’ on the stage back East. She’d be around forty. Ladiest lady I ever seen.’

  ‘The daughter?’

  ‘Andreanna’s twenty-three next month.’

  The speed and accuracy of the reply indicated that Sheriff Clifford V. Williamson might have more than just a passing interest in Miss Andreanna Abernathy.

  ‘How many men there?’

  ‘Twenty, give or take who died this morning. All between sixty and eighty-five. Hardly any of them more than ten cents in the dollar.’

  Herne nodded. Though the three he’d met earlier hadn’t seemed too far gone.

  Williamson reached in a drawer of his desk, fishing out a half-empty bottle of bourbon. Offering it to Herne who silently shook his head. The lawman drew the cork with his teeth and put away a couple of sizable belts of the liquor.

  ‘Better. My Pa always did says he’d never end up in the Home. He died three years back. Your Pa still livin’, Herne?’

  The instinctive answer was ‘No’, but the shootist hesitated. It wouldn’t have been strictly true.

  ‘I don’t know, Williamson.’

  ‘You don’t know. Now that’s interesting.’

  Herne waited for him to go on, but he stayed quiet.

  ‘Yeah,’ continued Jed. ‘I was born up in the Sierras. February twenty ninth, ’forty-four. Pa was A.J. Herne, a cartographer with the Fremont expedition.’

  ‘What in hell’s a cart … whatever you said?’

  ‘Mapmaker. Pa was good. Ma was with him, as they was supposed to be in and out of the high country before the weather broke. Didn’t turn out that way.’

  ‘Snow came.’

  Herne nodded. ‘Yeah. My Ma’s name was Elizabeth. Elizabeth Julia Herne. I saw pictures of her. Hair looked blacker than a raven’s wings at midnight. That’s what my Aunt Rosemary said.’

  Williamson took another pull at the bottle. And Herne took some more coffee. Wincing at the pain as the scalding liquid touched on his raw-nerved tooth. Remembering that his next call had to be on the smith. Bisset. Jim Bisset.

  ‘The snows came up on Carson Pass.’

  ‘I been up that way once. Damn it! It was colder’n a well-digger’s ass.’

  ‘So Ma
had me in a camp. No doctor, nor nurse. No other women. I lived and she didn’t. Pa took it real hard. Blamed himself for it. When the snows went he took me out East. Had an unmarried sister, Rosemary, in Boston. Big house up on Beacon Hill.’

  ‘She raised you?’ asked the sheriff.

  ‘Tried to. She was powerful fond of French brandy. She was mild and gentle and I walked all over her once I was grown. Left her before I was thirteen.’

  ‘And your father?’

  It occurred to Herne that it was a little curious this lawman showing so much interest in his parents, but he was content to talk. Postponing the moment when he had to go and face the blacksmith.

  ‘He left,’ he answered, shortly.

  ‘Up and walked?’

  ‘Yes. Vanished into Indian country in the summer of ’forty-four.’ He saw the next question already appearing in the lawman’s mind and answered it. ‘Sure I searched. But he’d gone and that was that. Guess he changed his name. Couldn’t live with what happened. Figured maybe that I was kind of to blame as well, just for bein’ born. I never saw him again. Never heard a word at all.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Rumors. I followed out West when I was in my teens. That was when I was riding with Bill Cody out of Fort Bridger with the Pony Express. And I heard a word here and there. Man on his own. Talked a lot to himself. But nothing you could hang a hat on. And that, Sheriff, was that.’

  Clifford sniffed, jamming the cork back in the bottle and sliding the remains of his liquor into the desk drawer again. ‘That’s real interesting Herne. And now … What are your plans? Moving on?’

  ‘I just got here. I aim to move on when I’m ready to move on. Not a whole lot sooner.’

  ‘Your teeth painin’ you?’ the lawman asked, leaning forward in his chair and staring intently at Herne, as though he’d been studying his face.

  ‘Yeah. I hear the smith’ll help.’

  ‘Big Jim? Sure will. Gentle as a mother sucklin’ her baby. One jerk and all your troubles are over.’

  Herne stood up and began to move towards the door when the Sheriff also stood and called across the room.

  ‘Wait on now.’