Herne the Hunter 18 Read online

  Herne put on his coat and then his leather gloves. He had a last look back at the fire, the grave. For the first time that morning the pain at the base of his tooth gave a little leap. He flicked the reins and set the gelding moving, east towards Cimaron Falls.

  Chapter Three

  The good people of Cimaron Falls had not wasted much time in appointing a new peace officer after their dismissal of Herne as a likely candidate. No more than a couple of hours after Herne had quit the town, Dan Yester had introduced himself to the populace by shooting dead a runaway horse plumb in the middle of main street. Yester had only arrived five minutes before and was in the act of tethering his own mount to the bowed hitching rail outside the Imperial Palace Hotel, when a woman’s scream attracted his attention. Yester swung under the rail and took a couple of paces out into the wide, dusty street. He saw a black mare bolting towards him, a boy of not more than seven or eight balancing precariously in the saddle.

  Yester wasted no time; he drew his Colt .44 and extended his right arm. Easing the hammer back he squinted along the barrel and fired twice in rapid succession. Both shots crashed into the animal’s head, bursting apart the front of the skull and emblazoning with deep red the dark hair. The mare continued to charge another fifteen yards before her front legs slewed sideways, her belly dipped and the terrified boy was hurled from the saddle. He landed quite heavily but rolled sideways, arms spread about his head. Dan Yester hurried to the spot where he came to rest and bent over him. He was reassuring the boy when the mother came rushing up, lifting her skirts above the dust of the street, tears of relief and gratitude streaming down her cheeks.

  She kissed her son, examined him to find out that he was suffering from nothing more than shock and a few cuts and bruises. Thereupon she showed her thanks to Yester by flinging herself upon him and covering as much of his face as she could with kisses. By the time the newcomer had managed to extricate himself from her thankful embrace, news had traveled fast. A couple of men dragged the horse off the street in the direction of the dining room kitchens and Albert Cohen, the leader of the town council, tapped Dan Yester on the shoulder and offered to buy him a drink. No, two drinks. Men crowded round and surveyed the stranger from the other side of the bar room. It was the fastest and most accurate shooting they’d seen in Cimaron Falls, they all decided, since the day Johnny Ringo had killed three men out there in front of the Union Bank with only two bullets. Those who had seen neither event were the loudest in their certainty.

  ‘Now that’s the sort of man we ought to elect sheriff,’ said one, his observation greeted by a chorus of loud agreement.

  ‘Just the man to take Sheriff Tozcek’s place,’ added another. ‘Man who can shoot like that.’

  Someone else interrupted the acclaim to point out that the only gunplay the late sheriff had indulged in in the past year had been shooting himself in the foot, but that was thought of as unsporting.

  Over at the table situated beneath a decorated mirror which had been imported at great expense from Chicago, Albert Cohen was persuading Dan Yester of the attractions of his fine community and the vast rewards to be gained from accepting the badge which would publically designate him as the peace officer of the community.

  ‘Young feller like yourself, could earn himself, say thirty dollars a week.’

  Yester was indeed young – three days short of his twenty-first birthday – but he was not wet behind the ears. ‘Thirty?’ he queried.

  Cohen rubbed his hands. ‘We might manage thirty-five.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ answered Yester and helped himself to the town council leader’s bottle of whiskey.

  Albert Cohen made a few instant and troubled calculations. ‘In an exceptional circumstance, we might arrive at the sum of forty dollars.’

  Yester hiccoughed into his glass. ‘A month in advance?’

  Cohen sighed. ‘If you insist …’

  Yester nodded, knowing that he had to get what advantages he could while the memory of his shooting was still fresh in the man’s mind.

  ‘All right,’ Cohen agreed, rather doubtfully.

  Yester smiled and downed the contents of the glass. ‘And all found.’

  ‘There’s a bed in the office, another couple in the jail’

  ‘Ammunition?’

  Albert Cohen realized he had a meeting to attend to. He got up and waved his arms uncertainly. ‘I’m sure you can work out something with Bart Feeney, he runs the general store.’ He reached down and plucked up the bottle.

  ‘Is that all I have to do?’ Yester asked.

  Cohen was backing away. ‘There’s the agreement of the rest of the council, but that won’t present any difficulties. Why don’t you look around the town, get to know it? Meet me in the sheriff’s office in an hour and we’ll give you a badge.’

  ‘And my first month’s wages,’ Yester called after him, but Cohen was already out of earshot of things he didn’t want to hear.

  Dan Yester stayed where he was long enough to be certain that it was all happening just the way it seemed; then he got up and walked through the still admiring citizens to survey the town of which he was peace officer. For a young man whose previous working experience had involved such tasks as farming, cleaning out stables, serving behind the counter in a haberdashery store and assisting a printer in setting up type for wanted posters, advertisements and a weekly newssheet, he had not done badly.

  Yester had left home when he was sixteen, forced to do so by his parents’ inability to provide for all of their seven children from the small farm they worked all the hours of daylight the Good Lord sent. Dan was the oldest so it was right and natural that he was the first to go and seek his fortune. His father sent him off with a few stern words of advice which Dan swiftly saw to forgetting and the ability to fire a sixgun accurately, a talent he did everything to improve.

  For the first year, Dan had sent the occasional letter home, printing painstakingly the lettering his mother had taught him, hour after hour under the dull light of the oil lamp until her patience broke and his fingers were numb.

  After that he sort of forgot. Besides, there was little good news to tell. Almost all of the jobs he had were boring and writing about them only made them seem more so. He drifted all across Colorado, stopping no more than a few months in any one place. He’d ridden into Cimaron Falls on a broken-down horse that was limping from a cracked shoe he couldn’t afford to get fixed. He had exactly one dollar and forty cents in his pockets and half a dozen spare cartridges in his belt. He had told himself that if he didn’t get a job and some money honestly by nightfall, he’d hold up the store and take what he wanted at gunpoint.

  The irony of being appointed sheriff almost as soon as he arrived had not escaped him.

  ~*~

  Herne rode slowly past the hillside cemetery, casting no more than a cursory glance at the ragged lines of graves, carved headboards leaning this way and that, according to the slope of the land and the irregular buffetings of the wind. A near-empty vase stood before a freshly dug grave, one solitary yellow-headed flower remaining. The rest of the blooms were scattered here and there, one of them somehow pinioned on top of the railing close to the small wicket gate.

  The main street wound its way towards a water tower and a windmill, both of which were taller than any other building in town. Even the hotel, which sprawled over some considerable space, was no more than a single story. There were a few folk sitting on either side of the broad street, leaning back on plain wooden chairs, their shoulders resting on the clapboard walls of stores or houses. A wagon, partly loaded, stood outside the general store, a grizzled old timer seated up front, chewing on tobacco. As Herne passed him, the old man turned his head slowly and nodded a greeting. Herne acknowledged him and the old man issued a stream of black liquid from his mouth which slid snake-like into the dirt. Edwards had said his wife could be found at the dining rooms, but Herne had other things to attend to first. He wanted to get some food and water for the geld
ing and then find himself a decent bed for the night – as decent as Cimaron Falls could provide and he could hope to pay for. There was an unspent fifty dollars in his pocket.

  The man in the livery stable limped away from the game of checkers he’d been losing and lifted his hand. ‘Back pretty soon, huh?’

  Herne grunted agreement and climbed down from the saddle.

  ‘Forgit somethin’?’ asked the man.

  Herne, unfastening the saddlebags, shook his head.

  ‘Decided you like the place, huh?’

  ‘No.’ Saddle bags freed, he set to work on freeing the girth.

  ‘Got business here, I reckon?’

  Herne shrugged and took a dollar from his pocket. He slipped it down into the pocket at the front of the man’s checked shirt. ‘Guess that’ll hold her till the morning.’

  ‘Sure. You leavin’ then?’

  ‘Could be. You’ll see me if I am.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’

  Herne hefted the bags onto his shoulder and gripped the long-barreled Sharps in his left hand. The liveryman led the gelding towards one of the stalls, mumbling to himself about folk who didn’t have the manners to pass the time of day decently.

  The Imperial Palace looked the most comfortable place in town and likely the most expensive, so Herne headed for an establishment advertised as Mrs Ruggles’ Rooming House. Mrs Ruggles was a widow woman in her fifties who wore pince-nez spectacles and a flowered apron from when she rose in the morning until she said her prayers by her bedside each night. She looked at Herne doubtfully, but when he convinced her that he was only a moderate man when it came to drink and offered the price of his bed in advance, all of her scruples caved in.

  Herne hooked his saddlebags over the brass bedpost at the foot of the bed and sat down on the thin mattress, making the springs squeak. He figured on refreshing himself with a glass or two of beer, but reckoned that it would pay him to get his business attended to first. Once he’d delivered the letter to Edwards’ wife, he could relax. After a decent night’s sleep he’d treat himself to a bath and consider risking the town barber after all; the stubble round his chin was beginning to itch with the dirt and sweat that had collected there and his shaving razor was so blunt it would raise more cuts than if he got into a brawl in the saloon.

  Herne made sure the letter was still folded down into his back pocket, thought about changing his soiled shirt for a slightly cleaner one, but decided against it. He nodded to Mrs Ruggles as she straightened one of the antimacassars in her parlor, and let himself out of the house. He walked briskly back towards the center of town and as he went past the Union Bank its stout doors opened and Albert Cohen came out onto the boardwalk. The two men hesitated, stared at one another, and then continued on their way. Before Herne had reached the dining rooms, the slightly out of breath figure of the town councilor was standing in front of the new sheriff’s desk.

  Dan Yester smiled up at Cohen, wondering what had brought him back so soon. The lawman’s badge was bright on Yester’s blue shirt and he had lit a thin cigar which he now took from his mouth and rested on the corner of the desk. Most of the desk surface was covered with old handbills and reward notices which Yester had been leafing through out of curiosity. By chance, the flier face up when Cohen entered was that of Waco Johnny Young, offering a reward of five hundred for his capture, dead or alive. The charges against him ran from US Mail robbery and train robbery to the murder of a law officer in Indian Territory. The face which looked up from the penciled drawing seemed too smooth, too good-humored to belong to an outlaw who had committed those crimes. The eyes were pictured as light, the mouth as wide, topped by a handsome mustache. Whoever the artist had been, he had pictured Young as a good-looking man, a ladies’ man.

  Yester looked up at Cohen and grinned. ‘I don’t suppose you hurried over to tell me this one’s just ridden into town?’

  Cohen blustered away the suggestion as foolish.

  ‘What is the trouble?’ Yester asked.

  ‘Feller in town, asked for your job a couple of days back. Course, we sent him on his way. Not the kind of man for a growing community like ours at all. One of these no-goods who never stick at one honest job of work, wandering from place to place and scrounging whatever they can.’

  Yester didn’t appear to be impressed. ‘If he’s that kind, what’s all the worry?’

  ‘No worry, save I don’t like him riding back into town. Not after we told him the job wasn’t his. He just might have taken it into his head to turn mean, come back fixing to cause trouble.’

  ‘He up to anythin’ when you run into him?’

  ‘Well, no. But that don’t mean nothin’.’

  Yester sighed and stuck his cigar back between his lips. ‘What you figurin’ on my doing? Man takes it into his head to stick around, as long as he’s peaceable, I don’t see ...’

  Cohen leaned forward, rubbing the fist of his right hand into the palm of his left. ‘This man’s a drifter, the sort of trash Cimaron Falls can do without.’

  ‘I dare say, only—’

  ‘You keep a careful watch on him, that’s all I’m saying. Otherwise, there’ll be trouble, you mark my words.’

  Yester exhaled a fine line of smoke towards the low ceiling. ‘Anything you say. I’ll take a walk down town and see if I can’t pick him out. If—’

  ‘He’s easy to spot. Greasy hair down to his shoulders, a thick wool coat, brown pants.’

  ‘He packing a gun?’

  Cohen stared back at him, surprised. ‘Course he’s wearing a gun. Why else d’you think I came in here to you?’

  Dan Yester nodded and watched the older man walk back out of the office. He hoped Cohen wasn’t going to be pestering him to chase every no-good and drunk outside the town limits, that way he’d have let himself in for more than he’d bargained for. He smoked his cigar down an inch more, idly looking at the picture of Waco John Young. If Young were really to turn up in town, he wondered what’d he do. He certainly couldn’t imagine himself hurrying out into the street flashing his badge, ready for a standoff. Waco Johnny wasn’t a man you took lightly.

  That admitted, it would be a fine opportunity to make a real name for himself. If he could make himself the town talking point and ten minutes hero by shooting down a runaway horse, what wouldn’t be done by taking Young and the reward to boot?

  The idea was fine, but carrying it out worried him more than a little. He stood up, thinking that he’d start off on lesser things, slower men. Maybe he’d make a beginning to his career as sheriff by taking away this greasy-haired stranger’s gun and throwing him in jail. That wouldn’t bring him any grief and it would at least make a start and keep Cohen happy.

  Dan Yester was smiling as he stepped out of his office and onto the street.

  Inside the dining rooms, Jed Herne was feeling rather less happy. He’d quickly ascertained that the waitress working that evening was far from being Edwards’ wife. For one thing she didn’t answer the description and for another, she was one-third Cheyenne, with jet-black hair and an olive skin.

  ‘No one else work tables here?’ he’d asked.

  She’d given him a look that was a long way this side of friendly and told him she was the only one, save for later in the night when Mrs Dawson came out from the kitchen to lend a hand. Herne had thanked her and ordered a steak with potatoes and greens, apple pie to follow. He forgot about the letter for a while, enjoying the food.

  When both plates were cleared and he’d sampled the coffee, he got up and wandered down to the back. The flat of his hand pushed open the swing door and he was in the kitchen. A mousy-haired woman was bending over a large, blackened oven, testing a row of meat pies with a knife. There were two large scrubbed tables at right angles in the center of the room, one stacked high with unwashed plates from earlier in the day, the other piled with clean ones ready for use. There was a sink at the right-hand wall with a long metal draining board and a bald man no more than five feet four inches
stood with his arms up to his elbows in greasy water.

  Both the man and the woman turned their heads to look at Herne, glanced at one another and then said, simultaneously, ‘Customers at the front.’

  ‘Sure.’ said Herne, raising a hand towards them, ‘I just wanted to ask a question.’

  ‘You have to come through here to do it?’ snapped Mrs Dawson, pushing the shelf back into the oven, a thick cloth wrapped around her hand.

  Herne nodded backwards. ‘Didn’t figure you’d hear me too well through the door.’

  Mrs Dawson glanced back at the small man, who gave a quick shrug and reimmersed his hands in water. ‘Out with it, then,’ she said grudgingly, ‘what do you want to know?’

  ‘Woman worked here.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Name of Nadine.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Got something for her.’

  ‘Such as what?’

  ‘Maybe that’s her business.’

  The woman moved away from the oven and stood behind the piles of crockery. ‘And maybe it’s mine. I’m the one who’s being asked.’

  Herne tapped his back pants pocket. ‘Got a letter for her.’

  ‘What kind of letter?’

  ‘From her husband.’

  The woman held her breath a moment and then broke into a cackling laugh; there was a splash from the sink as a dish slipped through the bald man’s hands.

  ‘Married!’ exclaimed Mrs Dawson. ‘Nadine! If that don’t beat them all.’

  ‘You mean she weren’t?’

  ‘If she was, she was sure keeping it quiet from the folk in town.’