Herne the Hunter 24 Page 7

  Like everything else about the renegade patrol, what they left behind wasn’t what it seemed.

  Jed didn’t bother to look at the other bodies. He knew what they’d look like.

  There were arrows all over the place, fired indiscriminately, feathered in the ground. Apache arrows. At least Darke got some of the more important details right.

  And to someone arriving and expecting to find that it was the local Apaches responsible for the massacre, there would be more than enough to satisfy them. Providing they looked with their eyes half-open and their minds full-closed.

  Jed stood, brooding among the smoldering ruins, trying to decide whether to ride into Abner’s Crossing and warn the folks there about the deserters. It was odd that nobody had yet ridden out to investigate the smoke. Everyone in the region would have seen it a good hour ago, yet the town couldn’t be more than fifteen minutes away at a fast canter.

  The decision was taken for him when his keen hearing caught the distant sound of hooves, pounding along the hard-beaten trail. He looked around and saw the dust rising, with a dozen or so men at its center, pushing hard towards him.

  In less than five minutes they were there, dismounted, clustered around the shootist, eager for word of what had happened.

  ‘You see it. How come you folks took so long speedin’ to the rescue?’

  They were led by an old man, with a grizzled beard and white hair to the shoulder. He wore the oldest and most battered Colt Navy that Jed had seen in a month of Sundays. There was something familiar about him, but Herne had met thousands like him in a hundred small towns.

  ‘I know you, mister,’ the old-timer croaked. ‘Unless these old eyes is playin’ up, you’re Jed Herne. Herne the Hunter. Ain’t you?’

  ‘Yeah. Can’t say I recall who you are, mister.’

  There was a momentary hurt in the faded blue eyes. ‘Guess you don’t … I’m Luther Cash. I was with you when you was in the Lincoln County trouble. And we met up in Abilene, around five … mebbe ten … years back.’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘Remember me?’

  Herne nodded. ‘Sure.’

  A fat, sweating man in a suit a size and a half too tight for him called out from by the corral. ‘Luther! For Christ’s sake leave all that old-time crap alone and get on the job.’

  ‘I’m marshal of Abner’s Crossing,’ whispered the old man. Half proud, half embarrassed. ‘Dollar a day and found.

  ‘Sounds fine. Want me to tell you ’bout this?’

  ‘I figure there’s not—’

  ‘Luther!’ bellowed the fat man.

  ‘Comin’, Mr. Loppinger. Comin’.’ In an aside to Herne. ‘Sure riles hisself into a tangle.’

  ‘He does,’ agreed Jed.

  ‘Come and put this poor beast out of its misery, Luther.’

  ‘Yeah. Them ’pache bastards left it to suffer.’

  The old man nodded, turning away from Herne. Who reached out and touched him on the arm. ‘You ever seen an Apache torture an animal?’

  The lined face crinkled with bewilderment. ‘Can’t say I have, Jed. Don’t mind me callin’ you Jed, do you? Huh?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I recall when me and Sundance was with Panama Red down near Pete Maxwell’s place. He says to me to—’

  ‘You fuckin’ old bastard, Cash. Come and do the job you get paid for and leave that drifter be.’

  Luther turned back to face Jed. Who saw the mix of anger and confusion and shame, and understood. He patted the old-timer on the shoulder. ‘Let it lie. I wouldn’t want you losin’ your crib on my account. He isn’t worth a bullet in the ass.’

  ‘Thanks. Thanks, Jed.’

  ‘Kindly let our peace-officer be about his business, there’s a good fellow,’ shouted Loppinger, wiping the perspiration from his jowls with a large silk kerchief.

  ‘I call that mighty big talk from a pig-faced fat man,’ muttered Herne, just loudly enough for Luther Cash to hear.

  It was just like he’d feared.

  Watching the posse blundering angrily about their business, Jed came to realize the cunning of the green-eyed, rosy-cheeked officer. It was obvious to his own brief investigation that the attack had been carried out by white men. But the men from Abner’s Crossing had come panting out to the spread, after a convenient wait for the enemy to have ridden away, with their anticipation fulfilled. There were arrows. Torture. Rape and arson. Total, absolute destruction.

  Who could it possibly be but the Apaches?

  It took a half hour and a deal of spluttering about revenge, before the posse were satisfied. Luther Cash was called here and there, staring at shafts, tracks, the fires, more tracks, more arrows and the woman. Herne noticed that the dead woman with her spread thighs, seemed to be attracting more attention from the men than anything else around. ‘Jed.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What you said about the horse.’

  The wretched animal had been dispatched by the lawman with a thirty-six ball through the head, sending it crashing to its knees, before it rolled twitching and kicking on its side and finally died.

  ‘I said Apaches didn’t do that kind of thing.’

  The old man was confused, taking off a battered Stetson and scratching at his balding head.

  ‘But you ain’t say in’ it ain’t Indians? Are you? Everyone here figures it for Apaches.’

  ‘Everyone here’s wrong.’

  ‘I can’t say that. Can’t go ’gainst all these folks. They pay me, Jed.’ His voice had slipped down the scale towards a whine. Herne was tired of it all. Wanting only to get away. ‘You pay your price, Luther, and then you live with it.’

  ‘Sure. But it seems like ’paches to me.’

  ‘No, it don’t.’

  ‘It could be.’

  Herne shook his head. ‘They sure puddled your brains, old man. You can see it. Mebbe you and me are the only ones that can see it. It’s like a kid puttin’ on his pa’s clothes and pretending to be somethin’ he’s not. This is white men pretending to be Apaches.’

  ‘White men surely …’

  ‘Damn it!’ Herne’s hair-trigger temper reached breaking-point. ‘I’ve seen them, Luther. Deserters. Dressed just like they were the real thing. Carrying the guidon and all in pairs. Sergeant to keep ’em in check and a smiling officer. They’d convince most men. But I have seen them and I know them for what they are. Can’t you convince these good folks with you on that?’

  Luther Cash shuffled his worn boots in the dust and looked away. Past Herne, past the destruction, away to the distant peaks.

  ‘They want it to be Indians. They want me to up and lead ’em away on a chase after ’em.’

  ‘Then do it. That’s what they want, then you better jump to it.’

  Luther shook his head again. ‘It’s not easy. You’re not much past forty, Jed. Still hale and full of fire and venom.’

  ‘Not some days, Luther,’ grinned Herne, the flash of anger easing away.

  ‘No. But least for some of the time. That’s not how it is with—’

  ‘Luther!’

  ‘Yeah, Mr. Loppinger?’

  ‘We’re aimin’ to brew us some coffee on the embers of this fire. Wait a half hour. Then set off after the red murderers. So, make sure you’re ready.’

  ‘I’ll be ready,’ called the old-timer.

  ‘You go after those soldiers, and they’ll likely wait and cut you apart.’

  ‘We don’t have money. Nothin’ they’d want.’

  ‘Guess that’s so. But from what I seen of them, they aren’t the sort of hombres that need much excuse to do some killing.’

  Luther Cash sighed. ‘Hell, I don’t … Maybe, but we’re ready and armed.’

  ‘You see a patrol of soldiers, riding fast at you, then you can almost hear the fifes and the bugles and drums. Men singin’ out with: She wears a yellow ribbon, in the springtime and the merry month of May. And by the time you realize they aren’t what they seem, then it’s too
damned late. There you are, lookin’ at the sky from flat on your back, wonderin’ what the fuck the pain in your chest can be.’

  Beyond where they stood, the other members of the posse were clustering together around a coffee pot. Talking quietly, occasionally glancing over at Herne and the old lawman. It was obvious that Cash had finally told them who Jed was, and the usual awe, mixed with fear and distaste, had set in.

  ‘You stay for a mug?’ asked Luther.

  ‘Should be movin’ on.’

  ‘Take it kindly if you could mebbe sit a whiles with me.’

  Again the tone in the voice that bordered on plaintive. Herne wasn’t in that much of a hurry. His own plans had been laid and there wasn’t much more he could do.

  So, surrounded by the mutilated corpses and the stench of the burned buildings, he sat a spell with the old man.

  Chapter Eleven

  Luther and Jed sat away from the other men, facing each other, squatting cross-legged on the ground. Sipping at the poor, weak coffee that had been brewed up.

  And they talked.

  Mostly, Luther talked, while Herne listened, nodding occasionally. Every now and again adding a memory of his own.

  ‘I come in after the Fetterman massacre. Up in … Wyoming. Must have been in sixty-five.’

  ‘Six,’ said Herne. ‘I met Fetterman once. Round a year before the killings. Seemed to be a damned fool.’

  ‘Yeah. You set eyes on Mickey Free, these last years?’ Herne shook his head. ‘That one-eyed breed son of a bitch sure caused some sadness.’

  They mused in silence for a time on the odd, long-haired boy, once kidnapped by the Indians.

  ‘I heard you once faced down Crow,’ said Luther, wiping his nose, spitting in the dirt to clear his throat.

  ‘No. Sure, I met him. Never faced him. You know better than that, Luther.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Me and Edge was once together. Odd tale, that. Guess folks don’t know of it. Figure it won’t ever get told. But you know how top guns never come against each other.’

  Luther grinned, showing an assortment of yellowing teeth, seeming to jostle each other for comfort. ‘Sure. Maybe one gets killed, but it’s likely that the other shootist’ll get hisself gunned down as well.’

  ‘You ever come against anyone?’ asked Jed.

  Luther sat and thought about that one, scratching his head. ‘I once knocked Pat Garrett out with a bottle. Saloon in Nogales. Over a Mex whore. Pretty little child, she was. Pat was mean-drunk, so I hit him from behind.’

  ‘Ain’t that just like a friend?’ smiled Herne.

  ‘Whores ... You ever fell in love, Jed? You gotten married, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘She died.’

  Luther realized that he was treading on the thinnest of ice and he remained silent for a while. Looking up at the way the light wind was tearing at the grey smoke that still coiled up from the ashes of the farm.

  ‘I don’t recall gettin’ myself wed,’ he said, after a long pause. ‘There was a widder-woman, somewhere in the Mogollons. I don’t recall. Mind ain’t what it was, you know.’

  ‘Sure do know it, Luther. Guess it’s just a part of growin’ old.’

  ‘There was a whore in Dallas. Ended in a fight. I kept on and on askin’ her. Jesus, but she was a beauty, Jed. Hair like a raven’s wing. Eyes green as ... as green. Body made you want to stay under the blanket the rest of your life.’

  ‘You seen her again?’

  Luther shook his head so vigorously that the straggly hair whipped around his skull, making him look like an animated corpse. ‘No. I drifted after that. She turned my last proposal down. She … Hell, she wanted to carry on bein’ a girl around town, I guess. And I couldn’t offer her no security. Just a shootist with ten rounds of thirty-six and one pair of boots.’

  ‘Maybe she was right, old-timer,’ said Herne, quietly. Tipping the dregs of the coffee in the sand, watching it disappear in the heat.

  ‘Could be, Jed. Sure could be. After I left Dallas I kind of … drifted. Got a job pushin’ a broom for a dollar a week and food and a room. Room! Hell, if me and the rats all stood up together we bumped heads.’

  Jed saw that the rest of the men in the posse were readying themselves to go. One of them had walked away and unbuttoned his breeches, pissing in a long, steady stream against the chimney of the bunkhouse.

  Being with Luther Cash had somehow crystallized his own depression. Making him see his own future. Luther wasn’t that much older than he was, though time had taken its toll with him. Jed had once seen a top gun, Mike Howell, picking dimes out of a brimming spittoon in a bar near Abilene. His mind had gone completely, and he was everybody’s joke. He’d tried to speak to Mike, but the old man’s brain wasn’t functioning properly, and the words had run away into the gutter.

  ‘It’d be rightly a shame, Luther, if you went with these mean-spirited bastards and got bushwhacked by Captain Darke and his killers.’

  ‘They pay me, Jed. I have to go along.’ He smiled again. ‘Where the Hell else is there to go, huh? You get to my age, Jed, and you find the trails gettin’ shorter and a damned sight steeper.’

  Herne stood up, brushing dust off his pants. Setting his hat straight. ‘Guess you got to go, then. I wish you well, old-timer.’

  ‘We all got to end somewheres. Billy down at the Fort. I seen more graves than most morticians. Wichita, Denver, Flagstaff, San Antone, Coffeyville, Billings, Cheyenne … on and on.’

  ‘You ready, Sheriff Cash?’ called Loppinger, his voice a sight more respectful now he knew who the other older man was.

  ‘Sure. I’m near ready.’

  ‘Ride careful.’

  ‘Sure, Jed. Some days I ride like I was eighteen again, and the sun’s warm and I could outdraw any son of a bitch ever drew breath. Other days I’m ridin’ stone blind and a ten year old breed kid could take me with a blunt cleaver.’

  They shook hands, and Jed felt the frailty of the old man’s grip. The bones seemed too near the skin, and he was afraid to squeeze hard in case he caused harm to Luther.

  Having rested a safe period, the posse set off after the Indians they still believed had raided the homestead. Luther Cash at their head, a turkey feather stuck jauntily in his battered hat. They were following the trail of the attackers, towards where they disappeared in a snaking ravine, several miles to the north-west.

  Jed watched them go, with a grim sense of foreboding. A sense of anticipation of death.

  The chill seemed to have driven itself clear into the center of his bones, and the shootist found he couldn’t shake it off.

  Chapter Twelve

  Herne couldn’t make his mind up what to do. In the meeting with Luther Cash he had glimpsed what he’d once heard someone describe as the ‘skull beneath the skin’. An unwelcome peek into what waited around the corner. But despite that he had no wish to see the old man butchered by James Darke and his renegades.

  ‘Maybe I’m wrong,’ he said to, himself, as he stooped to check his saddle. Maybe the deserters would be long gone. Maybe they weren’t even going to threaten the wagon train. Maybe all the business with the Chiricahua was a waste of time.

  Maybe.

  He rode a half mile away from the ranch, considering whether he might go into Abner’s Grossing for a meal. But he still had some jerky and a few biscuits. And right at that moment he didn’t much cotton to the idea of spending hours with strangers.

  He started to remember the good times that he and Whitey Coburn had enjoyed over the long years of their friendship, before death had cut the cord. But it was a morbid thought, like so many of the last few weeks, and he consciously repelled it.

  Getting down off the stallion, and sitting to eat a hasty meal, idly throwing stones at a sun-warmed lizard that was basking twenty or so paces away. His fourth shot hit the creature as it darted for cover, breaking one of its delicate back legs, leaving it wriggling and helpl
ess.

  ‘Damn,’ said the shootist, wearily. Clambering to his feet, walking to the base of the big saguaro. Lifting his foot over the injured lizard, hesitating. Then bringing it down with firm decision. Crushing the animal beneath his heel.

  The high walls of carved red stone wound high above him as he followed the trail of the posse. Luther had been leading them along at a fair pace, pushing after the ghostly Apaches faster than some of them might have wished.

  Herne was going at a steady canter.

  If the soldiers had come out in the open, they might not know that Luther had been warned. It was possible that the posse might have had a chance of putting up some sort of a fight. Or Darke might simply have positioned his men along the top of the deep arroyo and given the word to wipe the town’s-folk off their horses from the safety of cover.

  Or it was possible that the patrol had kept on moving, far out of reach of Luther Cash and his employers.

  It was less than an hour before Jed Herne found out which of the limitless possibilities had actually come to pass.

  The noise of the fight must have been muffled by the steep sides.

  What concerned Herne most was the fact that Darke had actually left his dead behind. Not making any effort to conceal the fact that the fight had been between two parties of whites. There were no arrows, feathered in the earth. No attempt to mutilate the corpses.

  It looked like the ex-officer knew that his stratagem was running out of steam. It was obvious that, sooner or later, someone was going to stumble on the deception. And once that happened, the game was over.

  It now seemed likely that Darke would head for the wagon train. It was common knowledge that many of the settlers carried heavy, hidden bankrolls. So the train of Austin Nick could be the next - and last - target for the renegades.

  There was little point in staying in the shambles. A half mile further along the trail forked. Herne knew that from previous time in the region. If his deductions were correct, then he would find that the survivors of the Cavalry patrol had wheeled back southwards, on a path that would bring them towards the wagons.