Till Death (A Herne the Hunter western. Book 15) Read online

  A cloud passed across his eyes and a wedge of pain forced itself into his brain.

  ‘Jed?’ Martha sat forward. ‘Somethin’ wrong?’

  Herne held up his hand, palm outwards. ‘Nothin’,’ he said, and she let it drop.

  ‘Was you ever married?’ asked Gus just a few moments later, one half of his mouth filled with cake.

  Herne nodded. ‘One time.’

  Inside, it was very quiet. She had . . .

  Gus coughed a few crumbs from his mouth and wiped the side of his hand across it; he was leaning forward across the table, waiting for Herne to say more, but Herne had said all he wanted.

  Martha Lenegan knew it, even if her husband didn’t.

  She stood up with the knife in her hand and bent over the cake. ‘’nother piece, Jed?’

  ‘No, thanks, ma’am. Sorry, Martha. I ate all I could. It was good, though, and I thank you for it. Sooner Tom gets home the better, seems to me. You can fatten him up an’ get him back strong better’n most.’

  Martha smiled and nodded. Herne stood up.

  ‘Sure you don’t want to stay the night?’ asked Gus. ‘We can break open a bottle, play some checkers. Talk.’

  ‘No, thanks. Some other time, maybe.’

  He reached across the table and clasped Gus’s hand. On an impulse, as he passed her, Martha caught hold of Herne’s arm, lifted up her face and kissed him on the cheek.

  ‘Thanks for what you did for Tom, Jed. We won’t forget it. None of us.’

  Herne waved and stepped outside. He untied his horse from the corral fence and climbed into the saddle. He’d be back in Tucson before the night was full dark.

  ~*~

  When next he saw Tom, the youngster was sitting up and taking a lot more notice. His cheeks showed some color and as soon as Herne came into the room he called out excitedly, ‘I heard from her. From Katie.’

  ‘You did? That’s fine. But how?’

  ‘She sent me a note. Yesterday.’

  ‘How did she manage that?’

  Tom shook his head. ‘I ain’t sure exactly. There’s a couple of hands work out at the spread an’ I guess she got one of them to bring it in when he come to town. Anyway, that don’t matter.’

  ‘She okay?’ Herne asked, sitting on the end of the bed.

  ‘Her father’s keepin’ her more or less a prisoner since he got back. Won’t let her out of the house. One of the brothers goes with her whenever she does.’

  ‘You still seem to be smilin’,’ said Herne. ‘How’s that?’

  Tom flushed a little. ‘Says she wants to marry me more than ever. Can’t wait to get away. She’s sad about her brother, about Hal, right enough. I mean, they was close kin, but that ain’t changed anything either.’

  Herne wondered if it would have had Tom killed Hal and not himself. He kept the thought quiet and waited for Tom to carry on.

  ‘She’s going to run off.’

  ‘How can she if she’s watched all the time?’

  Tom smiled. ‘She’ll wait till John’s the one lookin’ to her. He’s the youngest an’ he don’t hold with what his pa says, what he does. The way he treats Katie like she ain’t got no mind of her own. When she’s with him, she’ll get a horse and ride out to my folk’s place.’

  ‘Don’t you reckon,’ asked Herne, ‘that’ll be bringin’ your folks a parcel of trouble?’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘’cause if she runs off, Cyrus is goin’ to hear ’bout it afore long and he’s not going to be in any two minds ‘bout where to start lookin’.’

  Tom sat forward, wincing slightly with the movement. ‘Don’t worry ’bout that. We’ll get married right off and there won’t be anything Clayton can do about it. Once we’re man and wife he’ll have to accept it.’

  Herne couldn’t see that had to be the case at all; the expression on his face told Tom so.

  ‘Well, what else are we supposed to do? If I wait for Clayton to consent, I’ll be waitin’ till either I’m dead or he is.’

  ‘Then maybe you should marry the girl and take off for somewhere he can’t find you.’

  ‘Run, you mean?’

  Herne hesitated. ‘Sort of, I guess.’

  ‘I ain’t runnin’. That’s for certain.’

  Herne stood up, he turned away from the bed, went to the window and glanced down to the street, looked back at Tom once more. ‘What happens if you two stick an’ Clayton and his sons come after you? Your pa’ll feel he’s got to side with you even though he ain’t got but one arm to do it with. You’ll face up to the girl’s kin and then what happens if you come through? How’s she goin’ to feel if she’s seen you gun down her brothers, maybe her pa?’

  Tom avoided Herne’s stare. ‘She loves me,’ he said to the far wall.

  ‘Ever occur to you she might love them as well?’

  ‘The way they treat her?’ Tom blazed.

  ‘Sure. Takes an awful lot to stop folks lovin’ their kin. One hell of a lot.’

  Tom turned away again. ‘That may be. All I know is she loves me more.’

  ‘All right. But you think on what I said about bringin’ trouble on your own ma and pa.’ He pointed a finger at Tom’s face. ‘You give that some careful thought. You hear?’

  Tom nodded, almost imperceptibly, but he said nothing more. Herne shrugged and walked away, leaving the youngster to his own thoughts.

  ~*~

  His own thoughts. Herne went from saloon to saloon, talking to men at the bars, sitting in at five card draw or stud, drinking beer and whiskey and doing anything that would put off the time when he was going to be alone for the remainder of the night. That night. He knew his mind had gone so far along the line that it was impossible to draw back now.

  Out in the street with the sound of laughter still coming from the open windows and the batwing doors of saloons, with horses still tethered to hitching rails and men wandering aimlessly along, Herne stood absolutely still. He stared up at the fullness of the moon and felt a cold wind race through him as he saw its whiteness.

  The rising sun glistened off the slopes of white, making his eyes hurt.

  He took half a dozen paces north in the direction of the whorehouse, reasoning that a night bought there would keep it - keep her - from his mind. Almost as quickly as the idea came to him, he dismissed it. He wasn’t going to be able to forget Louise in the arms of a whore, no matter how beautiful or attentive she might be. He never had and he never would. Tonight, more than ever, it would be useless to try. Too much had happened to shut her out.

  Herne walked back on to the boardwalk, pushed back one section of the doors and went in amongst the smoke and noise. He paid over the counter for a bottle of best whiskey and stuffed that down into his coat pocket. Then he went back to his hotel room.

  He took the bottle from his pocket and sat it on the floor near the head of the bed, he hung his coat over the brass bed rail and sat down to pull off his boots. Herne un-stoppered the bottle and set it to his lips. He drank in short swallows, letting the whiskey hit the back of his throat and burn a little before taking more. The sounds of the Tucson night drifted around him and merged into something unidentifiable: he forgot about them. He put the bottle back on the floor.

  He remembered.

  The room was still and quiet. He lay there for a moment, on his back, trying to come to terms with the new day. Then he realized that there was a sound missing that should have been there. He couldn’t hear the breathing of his wife.

  Quickly he stretched out a hand, but the sheets were as cold as death, all the way clear across to the other side. He flung back the blankets, and the white expanse of the bed lay open before him, like a new land viewed from the peak of a high range of mountains.

  They were white and pure, except where Louise had lain.

  There the white was dappled and clotted with brown.

  Dark brown that was still red in places where the blood hadn’t quite dried.

  He was out of bed and into hi
s trousers, padding in bare feet across the room, easing the door open to the rest of the cabin, glancing around it, and instantly realizing that it too was empty. As he stepped across the floor, his feet touched a patch of something wet and sticky. Something that he hardly needed to touch with his finger to know that it was a small circle of blood, spreading out as though it had fallen from something moving.

  On the table, propped up against the coffee pot, there was a sheet of note paper as white as the sheets in the bed-room. As white as the snow that lay beyond the windows.

  And on the sheet, scrawled in his wife’s hand, was the single word ‘Jed’.

  Herne stood quite still and took three deep breaths. When his breathing had steadied, he picked up the flimsy sheet of paper, taking it to the front window, pulling back the curtain, holding the letter so that the pale light fell across it.

  ‘Dearest Jed,’ it began. ‘By the time you read this, I will be gone. What happened last night is too much for me ever to forget, and whatever you might think, it will always lie between us. What they did has killed everything, I was going to have another baby. Doc Newman reckoned that after last time it would be my last chance. But I know from the bleeding that they killed it, I wanted to have your son, my dear heart. Now I can’t give it to you, so there isn’t much point in anything. Help look after Becky, as I do not think that Bill is much good with her. Please believe that I have always loved you, my darling, and that you brought me happiness like I never thought I would see, What a pity it is that our time has been so short, but that is God’s will, and we must abide it. Well, darling, time is getting on, and I have things to do. The dress is lovely and will do for the funeral. Thank you for it. You always were thoughtful to me, Jed, Again, my dear, I am so sorry that all must end this way. Goodbye forever, until we meet again beyond. Your dearest Louise,’

  The writing was small and neat and Jed found some of it hard to decipher, tilting the paper to try and strain more light on to it. When he’d finished, he went out through the open front door, following the trail of footprints round the side of the cabin through the frozen mud,

  Towards the barn.

  The door stood open, and a light wind had sprung up, making it creak on its hinges. He paused at the entrance, turning and looking round at the land about their spread, knowing that he was seeing it for the last time with that special vision that his wife had brought him. The rising sun glistened off the slopes of white, making his eyes hurt.

  Inside, it was very quiet. She had climbed up on a box to do it and then merely stepped silently into eternity. The noose had dug into her neck, leaving an ugly burn, but apart from that she looked very peaceful, hands hanging limply at her sides, a shaft of light gleaming off the gold wedding ring.

  And the dress looked pretty. Dark green velvet, with white lace at collar and cuffs. Direct from Paris, France, like the book said.

  It was a very pretty dress.

  His wife had said it: the pity of their time being so short. Three years out of a lifetime – two lifetimes, his much longer than hers. And it had been cut short by seven men. Seven men who had tramped across the open land from the carriage of their snow-bound train, already drunk and rowdy and ripe for trouble. Seven men who had raped her horribly, hatefully. Seven of them.

  Herne had tracked them down. With some it had been easy, they had not been able to run too far, they hadn’t had sufficient time to cover their tracks. Others had both time and space – and, more important, money. They had not made Herne’s task of exacting vengeance easy. In a way that was good: he hadn’t wanted it to come easy. It needed to be hard and dangerous and it needed the greater satisfaction that would come after such a hunt.

  When all seven men were dead that should have been an end to it.

  Should have been.

  Herne had learned that no amount of killing would erase the memory of Louise from his mind: no amount of blood would wash away his memory of her racked body or her dismembered mind. A mind left with little save the gentleness that had formed the words of her final letter.

  He still knew each word, could see them on the page.

  He could conjure up each contour of Louise’s face and every fold of her body. Disturbed by dreams that moved through him like clouds scudding the sky, there were fleeting moments when he smelt her breath on his face and was conscious of the perfume of her skin, the soft touch of it on his shoulder. Then he would start awake and shake his head, blink both eyes away from sleep, and reach beside him in the bed.

  Exactly as he had that early March morning in ’82.

  Only this time there was no drying blood, there was no spreading stain of brown and red. If anyone lay there it was a girl he had bought and paid for the night before and whose back was now turned towards him and whose five dollars now lay lightly clenched in the small hand that rested at the edge of the pillow.

  At those times Herne would slide from the bed silently, throw water on his face and quickly dress, walking outside into the cold freshness of the morning air.

  Not now: Herne sat on the side of the bed and reached down for the bottle but it never came to his mouth. He simply set it back down again and thought about the first time he’d ever clapped eyes on Louise . . .

  Chapter Four

  It had been the summer of ‘78 and the Lincoln County Range War had just erupted to a new height of bloodletting. Jed Herne had been trapped in the McSween place, along with Billy Bonney, Charlie Bowdre, the McSweens themselves and nearly a dozen more. Outside there’d been the law Murphy and Dolan had bought to replace Sheriff Bill Brady, who had failed to survive an encounter with Bonney’s band of self-styled regulators. It wasn’t only the law, either, there was every gun that Murphy and Dolan could buy and press into service.

  In and around the McSween place, the fighting had gone on for three days and nights and a lot of men had lost their lives - some of them men whom Herne had been pleased to play a hand of cards with, share a drink or a joke or two.

  If a detachment of US Army hadn’t showed up they’d likely have stuck at it till there were more of them dead or wounded than anything else.

  As it was the Army had dragged them out and some kind of uneasy truce had existed ever since. So, on the first day that Herne rode into Lincoln itself after the McSween shoot-out, he did so with a lot of caution. He wasn’t going in alone, of course, nothing as foolhardy as that. Charlie Bowdre went along for the ride, as did a couple of the other boys, and all of them went well-armed and expecting trouble. But, as Jed had said, there wasn’t no way they were going to stay skulking around and hiding up forever. If you did that then it meant that Murphy and Dolan had won a whole lot more than they really had.

  They went in early in the morning, the sun angled sharply from the east and striking rooftops and flushing out the red in the adobe walls. Shadows were long and sharply etched.

  Herne’s eyes kept shifting this way and that, looking out for the first sign of one of the other side’s possemen with the black Stetsons that they favored. All he saw was a deputy sitting on a chair outside the sheriff’s office with a rifle across his lap and his hands folded over it. The deputy saw the four men come riding down the street and eased his hat brim down so as to get a more shaded look at them. But he never moved his hands nor made any attempt to bring the rifle into play. He even, as Herne and the others rode slowly past, gave them a curt nod before pushing back his hat brim and stretching his legs right out.

  Herne didn’t like that, either, didn’t trust it, but he couldn’t think of what to do about it - other than keep the leather thong clear of the hammer of his Colt and keep his eyes skinned.

  By the time they reached the eating house that the McSween men favored, no one who looked like trouble had appeared.

  ‘Don’t like it,’ said Bowdre, ‘t’ain’t natural.’

  Herne turned in his saddle and looked carefully up and down the street. As yet there were few folk about. ‘Me neither, Charlie, but what the hell?’

 
‘Yeah, Jed, let’s get somethin’ hot inside us, anyway.’

  The four men tied up their horses to the hitching rail and went inside. Three-quarters of an hour and four plates of ham and eggs and grits later, they stepped back out into strong sunlight. Men were moving with a sense of purpose along both sides of the street, crossing from one boardwalk to the other. A feed wagon was making slow progress towards the livery stable close by the western edge of town. Two scrawny dogs chased one another and yelped and yapped and turned tail and chased in the opposite direction. As they raced between the legs of one of the team drawing the wagon, the horse baulked and tossed its heavy head and the driver cursed and lashed out with his whip.

  Herne and Bowdre glanced up and down the street while the other two men untethered the horses.

  ‘Store?’ asked Bowdre.

  Herne nodded. ‘Sure.’

  Herne was ducking under the hitching post when he heard a quick scuffle from Bowdre’s boots at back of him and a yelled warning from Bowdre’s mouth.

  He grabbed at the post with his left hand, hauling himself through fast and reaching for the Colt .45 at his hip with the other. His fingers closed about the smooth butt as he heard Bowdre again and saw him pointing out into the street.

  Herne slid the Colt up and spun about, following the line of Bowdre’s arm.

  The feed wagon lurched back into motion and behind it Herne glimpsed a blur of black hat.

  ‘There!’ yelled Charlie, his own pistol now in his hand. ‘There. Look.’

  Herne thumbed the hammer smoothly back and waited -fractions of time only that passed with the slowness of the moon gliding down the sky.

  The man showed clear behind the wagon. Tall and thin, walking slow and with a pronounced stoop, the hat on his head black certainly but not the kind of Stetson that the possemen wore. This was much broader brimmed, so that the edges folded down in places, its crown was less full and flat at the top. It wasn’t a posseman’s hat: rather the hat of a preacher. The rest of the man’s clothes added to that impression. The suit he wore was also black, fraying at the cuffs and almost worn through at elbows and knees, as if he was a man who did an uncomfortable amount of praying.