Vigilante! Read online

  Herne drank what was left of his beer and coughed sharply into the back of his hand. The two newcomers looked over at him from the bar and exchanged words; they called the thin barkeep over and asked him a couple of questions.

  Herne looked in front, able to see them from the corner of his eye. He wondered why they were so anxious about strangers; what, if anything, they had to be frightened of.

  Herne had a little of his whiskey left and he sipped at it, reluctant to finish it and go in search of a bed. Riding alone, a man got lonely and craved comfort, a warm belly to fold your arms around, lay your head against. Even though it didn’t appear that The Cattleman’s House offered any such ladies, there was doubtless some establishment in town that did.

  Herne laughed at himself, thinking what comfort he would be able to buy for fifteen cents.

  The fat barkeep wobbled over to his table and cleared away his plate and empty beer glass. ‘Anything else?’

  Herne shook his head and sat back, letting the chair go up onto its rear legs. For a moment, the man seemed as if he were about to say something else, but he thought better of it.

  So Herne sat there, nursing his almost empty glass while men came and went, the overall number scarcely changing during the best part of an hour.

  The couple by the bar didn’t move far; they appeared to be drinking steadily, their voices getting louder and louder. Herne could pick up the odd word, the alternation between anger and amusement, but little more. It didn’t seem to be of any special interest. If the sandy one hadn’t looked at him so keenly when he’d come in, he wouldn’t have given them a second thought. If –

  The bat-wing doors swung open fast and stayed that way as a group of half a dozen men came slowly in. Herne allowed his chair to ease back down until all four legs were on the ground. As he did so, his right hand let go of the whiskey glass and started to slide cautiously towards the edge of the table.

  This time the silence in the room was total.

  The men were standing in a loose group between the doors and the first batch of tables. Five of them were wearing the high-peaked Montana hats; the sixth was tapping his against his leg with the left hand. The long coats hid any handguns they might have been wearing, but four of them carried rifles, the metallic gleam of the Winchesters taking a reflection from the two large kerosene lanterns at the center of the room.

  The two who lacked rifles had coils of rope hanging from their shoulders.

  Herne glanced in the direction the men were now looking – the pair standing at the bar had straightened up; Sandy’s face was showing the same tenseness Herne had noticed earlier.

  ‘Matthews!’

  ‘What you want with us?’ Sandy’s reply was meant to be hard and uncaring but his voice sounded hollow in the stillness of the saloon.

  ‘You know damn well what we want! You bin warned more times than enough!’

  ‘Hell, you say!’

  Sandy’s companion tried to calm him down; he put his hand to Sandy’s arm but it was shrugged off.

  ‘Should have listened when you was told.’ The speaker was still tapping his hat against his leg and continued to do so as he freed the coil of rope from round his other arm and flung it forward. The rope hit the top of an empty table and bounced onto the boards in front of the cowboys’ feet.

  ‘Jesus!’ called Sandy’s companion. ‘You ain’t?’

  The man who had thrown the rope laughed out loud; it was a laugh that ran through Herne’s body, keening and off-key. It made it clear that what was going to happen was going to be enjoyed. By the owner of the laugh at least.

  Herne let his hand move halfway off the table and a pair of rifles lifted towards him. Nothing definite, simply a warning. Herne let the hand rest where it was: this was no play of his. Not as long as he was left alone.

  The laughing man glanced over his shoulder. ‘Get ’em, boys!’

  As soon as the men began to move, the cowboy beside Sandy made a dash for it. He knew there was no way in which he could make it to the doors so he ran at the first window. A rifle came to a shoulder but no shot was fired. Herne watched as the cowboy ducked his head down and thrust up his arms, aiming to dive headlong through the plate glass and make his escape.

  He was five feet away and his feet had left the floor at the start of his desperate leap when the blast roared out. Both barrels of a shotgun from the other side of the window, from someone who had been standing guard in the street.

  Already airborne, the cowboy’s body was lifted higher, hurled up and back and seeming for a couple of seconds to be suspended; finally it crashed down on a chair, splintering the seat and snapping off two of the legs. The dead man’s arms were stretched wide, one leg twisted sideways underneath the other, the upper one twitching several times before it was still.

  The pellets had ripped the cowboy’s face and chest to pieces. Lines were torn bloodily across his face which with each succeeding moment became less recognizable as anything that had been human and had contained human features.

  The flesh at the front of his body was shredded through, lines of red and pink merging with traces of the dark blue of his shirt and the brown of his coat.

  Once again it was silent inside the saloon.

  Herne watched as Sandy made the beginnings of a move towards the gun at his hip; at least three rifles would have blown his life away before he could have got the weapon leveled.

  Herne finished his whiskey.

  ‘Pick up the rope!’

  Sandy blinked, took a couple of uncertain paces forward, clearly scared that he would be cut down as soon as he moved, then bent to the floor and lifted up the coil of rope.

  The spokesman for the group of armed men laughed; the same weird, keening laugh as before. Herne looked at him more closely. Around six foot, his body was wiry, maybe a hundred and forty – fifty pounds. His face was thin with high cheekbones that pressed against the skin and left a reddish blemish where they touched. The nose was prominent, hooked at the center and slightly twisted, like as if it had been broken when he was younger.

  When he spoke, it was from the left side of his mouth. ‘Bring it over here!’

  Two of the riflemen moved sideways to cover Sandy’s progress forward. He got as far as the table in front of the leading rifleman and stopped. The rope was in his right hand.

  His right boot was less than six inches away from the blood that curled from his dead partner’s head. He stood there for a moment and then looked down at the shattered body. His head jerked forward and his body seemed to buck at the center. The hand holding the rope went to his mouth and the other hand clutched the heaving stomach.

  ‘Christ! He’s gonna throw-up!’

  ‘Chicken-livered bastard!’

  Sandy’s right arm straightened like a whip and the coil of rope slashed into the laughing man’s face and sent him staggering back with a yelp of surprise. At the same time, Sandy kicked out at the table and drove it into the nearest two men. He feinted to run forwards then dropped.

  A rifle shot sang out and the shell ripped into the wall not too far down from where Herne was sitting.

  Sandy came up in a crouch and he had his gun in his hand faster than Herne might have figured. He snapped off a shot that didn’t seem to hit anyone particular and tried for the door.

  Automatically two of the men swung aside, letting him past.

  ‘Stop the bastard!’

  Sandy was less than six feet away from the bat-wing doors when a Winchester slug made a hole right through the calf of his left leg and sent him crashing into the wall alongside the door.

  He winced and cursed and brought up his gun arm and fired at the same time that a second shell struck home, this one entering his right side low down and deflecting upwards off a couple of ribs, exiting just beneath the shoulder blade.

  The pistol in his right hand toppled forward and hung there, reversed, from his index finger.

  Back and forth, back and forth, back ...

  The g
un bounced up from his knee and finally slid several feet along the boards. Sandy’s head fell forward and sideways, mouth open.

  ‘See if he’s alive.’

  No one moved fast enough.

  ‘I said, see if he’s alive!’ The voice was near screaming-pitch now.

  One of the men lifted Sandy’s head and pulled back an eye-lid, then put a hand over his heart.

  ‘Yeah, he’s okay.’

  The laugh was close to a coyote’s howl when it smells the meat of a prey.

  ‘That’s fine. Just so’s he’s live enough for us to take him out and hang him!’

  Herne felt something go cold at the back of his neck; a wave of disgust washed through his stomach. Whatever the man had done ... but like before, it still wasn’t any of his damned business.

  You don’t step into somebody else’s shit when you can step around it. Not when it meant facing up to six guns at least ... and not when the only money you had left in the world was fifteen cents.

  Chapter Three

  The thin strand of light that filtered through the gap between the heavy curtains slanted at an angle across the bed. Over the patchwork cover, the yellow blanket, the skin of Herne’s muscular forearm, the bristle of his cheek, his left eye-lid.

  His eye opened: blinked. Herne’s left hand reached towards it, the end of his finger probing the sleep from its corner. He rolled slowly onto his back and did the same for the other eye.

  Beside him, where he had not lain, the mattress was cold.

  Outside the room everything was quiet.

  Herne pushed back the bedding and swung his feet round and down to the floor. That was cold, too. He stood up and pulled one of the curtains aside. The sun didn’t appear to have risen above the horizon, yet the sky had started to lighten to the east.

  He let the curtain fall back and poured cold water from the jug on the floor into a chipped bowl. He washed face and hands, between his legs and under his arms as quickly as possible, wiping himself dry on one of the blankets. He pulled on his long Johns, pushing his big toe through the same damned hole and making it bigger than ever. He cursed and made a sour face and reached for his two pairs of socks. The pants he wore were dark brown wool, his shirt and vest woolen also, both faded red. He slipped on a tight leather waistcoat and did up two of the buttons.

  His gun belt was hanging from the bedpost with the butt of the Colt close to where his right hand had lain. He reached across for it, buckling it fast and then tying the leather thong to his leg. He lifted the gun from its holster and balanced it in his hand, spinning it round on his index finger a few times, whirling the chamber against the palm of his left hand and enjoying the click of the action.

  He dropped the Colt down into the holster again and looped the narrow piece of leather over the hammer.

  Herne moved the chair away from the door, where he had set it before going to sleep, jammed up under the handle. He opened the door and stepped out onto the landing. Whoever was occupying the other three rooms didn’t appear to be stirring. Downstairs there wasn’t any sign of life either. The small dining room was laid up for breakfast but food was obviously going to be some time.

  Herne went out into the street.

  The sun had made its first movement up the side of the sky. The east burned with a dull orange glow and high around that there was a spreading whiteness. The air was chilled and the wind whipped it across the main street, cutting into Herne’s face as he walked.

  Down the street dogs were barking and there were lights to be seen behind a number of upstairs windows. Somewhere a cock crowed. Herne stepped off the boardwalk and set off for the livery stable. A hundred yards off, he stopped. Something beyond it had caught his attention. At the furthest edge of town, raised up over the last single storey buildings.

  Something that was hanging from the lowest of the windmill’s sails.

  Herne walked on more quickly, eyes fixed on the object; he was yet some way off when he recognized what it was.

  What, not who.

  Though he could guess that.

  The rope had been run through the space between sail frame and sail proper and there it had been knotted fast. There was only a short section between knot and knot: between sail and neck. Sandy’s body hung down, arms at its sides, both hands curved inwards with palms together and fingers bent. Herne guessed that the body had been there long enough for it to stiffen; the only way anyone would straighten out those fingers would be to break them. Like twigs.

  Fingers, face, every part of visible flesh had started to turn purple, a vivid blotched purple shot through here and there with high yellow. Blood caked one side of his pants, one side of his coat and shirt where the rifle wounds had bled and bled again. It had dried brown on the cloth, brown and ridged.

  There was deeper brown about the crotch of the pants.

  The face was to one side, as it had been in the saloon. The sandy hair seemed somehow to have lost much of its brightness of color – perhaps it was the early light. He seemed even younger now, little more than a boy.

  But not a boy in the way he had tried to escape, closer to becoming a man. As close as he was ever to get. For a second Herne was taunted by the thought that he should have taken a hand in the play and helped him. But the answer came back the same: and what would have been the point in his getting taken as well? Likely shot. Or stretched at the end of a rope.

  Herne glanced up at the three sails which were free of any extra burden. Any one of those would have done for him. Without thinking what he was doing, Herne felt the skin of his own neck. More than any other way of dying, it was lynching that he feared the most.

  Whenever he thought about it – whensoever he considered death at all.

  Strange that, but this fortieth year, the thought had crossed his mind more and more frequently. Swung, unbidden, across it.

  There was a notice pinned to the front of Sandy’s shirt. A single sheet of paper with thick penciled writing made by a hand that didn’t take to writing too easily. Even so, it was possible to read what it said.

  WARNING! THIS IS WHAT ANY GODDAM RUSTLER KIN EXPECT

  Herne’s eyes moved back up to the youth’s face and looked more closely. A small train of red ants had somehow climbed to his face and were journeying busily, hungrily into the bare, bloodied socket of his left eye.

  The eye itself had long since been taken, pecked out by the same bird which had left a long, black feather laced through his pale red hair.

  Flies were buzzing about the gashed entry wounds in his body and along the rough surface of the rope where it had torn the skin from the neck immediately underneath the chin.

  Herne rubbed his hands together and wished that he’d worn his coat. The day seemed to be getting colder instead of warmer and the wind was biting more deeply. Soon it would be strong enough to shift the heavy sails of the windmill, shift and turn them, hoisting their macabre warning high over the town.

  Over and over: round and round.

  Herne hawked up phlegm and spat onto the hard ground. He turned away from the corpse and walked back to the main street.

  The old timer was out front of the livery stable and said something that Herne didn’t rightly hear. Herne waved a hand and kept on walking. At that moment he didn’t feel any too much like talking – especially to some garrulous old man.

  He walked around the boardwalk outside The Cattleman’s House, avoiding the stream of soapy water that the fat bar-keep had thrown over it for the thin one to scrub clean.

  On up the street to the rooming house, where there were a couple of men sitting at separate tables in the dining room. Herne hesitated, not feeling like food at all. Half way up the stairs his common sense got the better of him. The breakfast was paid for and he wasn’t in any position to be able to let it go to waste.

  Herne took a seat opposite the door, his left side close to a window. That way he could see both anyone who came into the room as well as anybody who approached the house. Not that he was ex
pecting anything particular to happen, it was simply a matter of careful habit.

  The other two men in the dining room were both ten or so years younger than Herne. The one in the corner, wearing a neat brown suit with high, winged lapels and pants that had obviously been pressed flat under the mattress all night, appeared to be some kind of travelling salesman. Likely a whiskey drummer. His face was bright and alert, the eyes blue and with a shine in them as they returned Herne’s gaze.

  ‘Morning,’ the man said immediately. ‘Not the best of mornings, I fear.’

  Herne nodded agreement and looked away, not wanting to get drawn into conversation, certainly not with someone who did it for a living.

  The second man was reading a tattered copy of a newspaper which looked as if it had been read and reread many times. Herne caught sight of the words ‘St Louis’ along the top of the folded page.

  The man realized that Herne was looking at him and peered over the edge of the paper, hastily disappearing behind it once more. Herne had a glimpse of bushy eyebrows and large, brown eyes; the beginnings of a bulbous nose – nothing more. He was wearing a dark blue coat and gray pants over expensive looking boots which he had taken the trouble to shine. If it hadn’t been for his manner, Herne would have put him down for a salesman, too.

  ‘It’s ham an’ eggs, fresh bread an’ coffee,’ explained the woman from the doorway. ‘Least,’ she added with a quick smile, ‘that’s what it usually is.’

  Herne’s stomach gave a half-turn. ‘Hold the eggs,’ he said with a grimace.

  ‘Stomach ain’t co-operatin’, eh?’ she grinned, showing a dimple in her right cheek. ‘Too much drinkin’ down at The Cattleman’s House, I reckon.’

  ‘Too much of somethin’ down there,’ Herne replied quietly. ‘But it weren’t drink.’

  The woman tucked the empty tray under one arm and looked at him thoughtfully; the drummer was staring openly; the newspaper had been lowered fractionally and a pair of worried brown eyes peered from under bushy eyebrows.

  Finally, the woman turned away. ‘I’ll let a slice more ham fall into the pan. Make up for the eggs.’