Herne the Hunter 21

by John J. McLaglen

  The Home of Great Western Fiction!

  CONTENTS

  About Pony Express

  Dedication

  Historical Notes

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Copyright

  The Series So Far....

  Jed Herne, riding the vengeance trail, is hunting down Charley Howell, a former galloper with the Pony Express – the legendary mail service that had turned Jed from a callow boy into a man.

  Charley Howell: liar, drunk, rapist, thief and violent murderer and Kid, a cold-eyed teenage killer, had raped and murdered a banker’s daughter in Wyoming. The banker hired Herne the Hunter to get them both for her brutal and blood-soaked death.

  This is for Patrick; a good editor and friend. Every now and again our trails cross in some small border town, then we part again. But we always manage to meet up a little further down the line. With thanks.

  ‘Missouri to California in ten short days, with never a piece of mail lost. A tribute to the sterling qualities of the men, nay, boys, who rode for the Pony Express in those heady eighteen months of 1860-1. To the men, their fine horses and the masterful organization that made it possible.’

  From ‘Hurrah for the Central Route!’ by A.P.F. Birch, published by the Radlett Press, 1894.

  ‘If’n you stopped movin’, you gotten dead.’

  Charley Cliff, Pony Express rider, 1861

  One

  ‘They pushed a bottle clean up inside her, Mr. Herne. My little girl, and … and then they broke it by beatin’ and kickin’ her.’

  Eliza Newbridge had been seventeen years and some months old. Not a specially well-favored child when it came to looks. Not if the small, gilt-framed painting on the wall of the house was to be believed. Mousey hair, plaited to her narrow shoulders, and wire-rimmed spectacles. A dress in striped cotton that hung upon her like it was out to dry on a porch.

  Casper, Wyoming Territory and the summer sun blazing down like it meant business. There had been little rain for over six weeks, through July into August of 1888.

  Jedediah Herne had been moving north through the summer, picking up what bounty work he could find. But money was tight around Nebraska and westward had seemed a better idea. That was where he’d run into Josh Newbridge. A banker, in his fiftieth year. Only six years older than the shootist, yet showing his years. The receding hair, the sagging belly, and the watery eyes all telling their own tale of too much food and too many glasses of brandy.

  ‘You want to see the body, Mr. Herne?’

  ‘How long since they killed her, Mr. Newbridge? You said three days back?’

  ‘Yeah. Today’s Sunday. I was riding out to the east of town, on business. Left her on her own. She was never too … a mite feeble-minded, she was. Her mother died having her and she was never strong.’

  ‘Three days.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Herne shook his head, tiredly. Rape and violence rode together in that part of the frontier, and could strike almost as easily at the plain daughter of a local banker as at some poxed soiled dove in one of the saloons along Main Street.

  ‘Three days in this heat and your girl’s goin’ to be beggin’ to get put beneath the ground, Mr. Newbridge. And that’s the truth.’

  ‘I wanted her laid to rest beside her mother. So they could be …’ He pulled out a large linen handkerchief, with a discreet swallow’s eye pattern in one corner, and blew his nose with great vigor. Sniffing and then looking defiantly at the gunfighter.

  ‘I want them dead, Mr. Herne. Both of them. Both dead as dead.’

  ‘That’s what I figured. How’s about if’n I bring them back to Casper for a fair trial?’

  ‘Some milk-mouthed lawyer might spring them free. No, Mr. Herne. Dead.’

  ‘My word good enough?’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  The shootist walked across the neat parlor and moved the drape, peering out across the quiet street. Lace twitched at a couple of houses across the way where neighbors wondered who the tall man with graying hair was that had come calling on the bereaved father. They’d have seen the fine horse, a bay mare, that he rode.

  They’d have noticed his broad shoulders, and the easy way he carried his six feet one and a half inches. Maybe spotted the .45 Colt strapped to his thigh, a leather thong across the hammer to hold it in place. Jed Herne’s other main weapon was the .55 caliber Sharps buffalo gun, bucketed at the side of the saddle. One of the finest rifles ever made, the long Sharps was accurate to upwards of a half mile. Jed used to boast that what he could see he could hit.

  What the prying eyes across the street wouldn’t have seen was the last of Herne’s weapons. The honed Civil War bayonet that he carried in a special sheath, tucked inside his right boot.

  ‘I asked you whether my word on their killing was enough?’

  ‘Oh.’ The banker was hopelessly out of his depths. He’d once been involved in a robbery at work, where less than two hundred dollars had been taken by a one-eyed Paiute Indian, armed with a rusting scattergun. Newbridge’s only personal loss had been the new pair of his trousers that he’d thrown away and burned after the raid. When terror had made him totally lose control of his bowels.

  Then, to come home three days ago, and find…

  The door open, the bolt dangling loose, scuff marks on the white wood showing where it had been kicked open. A long-case clock had been knocked over in the hallway, and the long runner was crumpled at one end, near the kitchen door. Joshua had felt the short hairs at the nape of his neck bristling at the stillness.

  ‘Where are you, dear? Eliza?’ he’d called. Stopping, wishing that he had purchased a pistol to keep in the house.

  There had been no reply. No sound, except for a faint rapping that seemed to come from one of the rooms on the first floor. Perhaps from his daughter’s bedroom.

  One of her shoes was on the stairs, close to the top. Joshua Newbridge had picked it up, holding it in his hand. On the landing lay a length of crumpled red ribbon. At the far end of the landing, outside Eliza’s room, he had seen a torn strip of white material.

  And still that faint rapping.

  Taking a deep breath the banker had reached out and grasped the handle of the door. Finding it sticky to the touch. Sticky with drying blood.

  Finally he’d opened the door.

  ‘Do you want any kind of proof that I’ve carried out the bounty for you?’ asked Herne, beginning to grow impatient.

  ‘Yes. Otherwise, you might just lie to me.’

  ‘I might. I might grip you by the throat and strangle you into blackness and steal your damned money, Mr. Newbridge.’

  The older man winced at the chilling anger in the voice of the shootist. After finding his daughter’s dead and mutilated body he’d been stricken for two days, sedated by the local doctor. The law in Casper was naturally concerned, but the sheriff was down with dysentery and both his deputies were out after a couple of drunk Cheyenne bucks.

  So the news that there was a famous gunman in town looking for hiring was like a message direct from the Almighty. Joshua had never heard of the name of Herne the Hunter, but he saw the reverence it inspired in some of the folk around. So he’d called him over to the house and given him a halting, stammering explanation of what had happened and what he wanted him to do. That, at least, he was clear on.

  ‘But what proof might—?’

  ‘Heads.’


  ‘Their heads! Oh, sweet Jesus on the Cross, what have I done to find myself in this business?’

  Herne smiled. A thin smile that barely touched his lips and came nowhere near his melt-ice eye. ‘You want revenge, Banker. I don’t blame you. But it costs money to buy death.’

  ‘You said three hundred dollars.’

  ‘Sure. Two for the older man and one for the kid.’

  The rapists had been seen. The twitching curtains across the way hid at least three widow-women, each one eager to describe the two men they’d watched go in the house during the afternoon. And seen come out, laughing together, an hour or more later.

  One of them around Herne’s age, in his middle forties. Stout, with a straggling moustache. Plaid shirt with a tear across the stomach. Carrying two pistols, slung low like a professional shootist. Wearing a wide-brimmed Mexican hat with a silver belt around it.

  The other killer was variously described as being fifteen, seventeen and fourteen. Skinny, in a white shirt and light grey pants. A bandolier across his chest and carrying a carbine. Hair long and yellow as summer corn.

  ‘Three hundred dollars for their deaths.’

  Herne nodded. ‘That’s the price. You can pay less, and you’ll get less.’

  The banker had asked around. And found that the reputation of the middle-aged gunfighter was high. So high that it verged on fable.

  If he had done everything that bar-talk said, then he was better even than legend. Masterson, the Earps, Clantons, Whitey Coburn, Quantrill, Mickey Free, Edge, Hickok, Pony Express with Cody, Crow, Quanah Parker, Crazy Horse. The names snaked off the tongue and into the ears of the banker. Herne was a man who’d known them all. Who had married and who had hung up his guns. Then some personal tragedy had made him take down the pistol and oil it. Riding the vengeance trail. Building his reputation as a violent man in a violent land. Now one of the best hired shootists about.

  Maybe the best.

  ‘I don’t want their heads, Mr. Herne. Truly, I do not. Your word—’

  ‘Some want more. Heads. Ears, sometimes. Hair.’

  Joshua Newbridge was floundering. His life had always revolved around safe things. Mortgages and foreclosures and debits and credits. Checks and balances. Now he was like a man who had walked into the gentle edges of a clear river and found himself wallowing in foul quicksand. The more he struggled, the worse it became.

  ‘You take hair. Scalps! Like the heathen Indians do.’

  ‘Our game first, Banker. We taught the heathen Indians about taking scalps. They learned good.’

  ‘No. No, I wish nothing but their deaths. You come back and tell me that they are dead and I will pay you what we agreed.’

  Herne looked away from the banker’s nervous face. Smelling brandy on the man’s breath. Guessing that Newbridge would probably drink himself to death within six months. A man on his own, wife gone, losing his only child the way that the banker had was likely to fall apart. Most gave up.

  ‘I’ll be back within two weeks.’

  ‘Should I pay you something …?’

  ‘On account? No. Just give me ten dollars for some bullets for the Sharps and for a little food. That’s all.’

  ‘Very well, sir. Very well.’ His mouth worked with tension. The shock of discovering his daughter’s body still filtering its way through.

  It hadn’t been so much the finding of Eliza, it had been the manner of it.

  Opening the door, slowly. Light from the room coming out in golden spears across the landing.

  The clicking.

  The window at the back of the house, Eliza’s bedroom, overlooked a neat garden, planted with some fruit trees and a bank of flowers. It had been one of the joys of the girl’s day to sit by her window and look out at the view, perhaps with a slim volume of verse open on her lap, or working at her sewing.

  The window was open. Had been opened with such force that one of the panes of glass was cracked right across. And a light wind came in, moving the drapes.

  Clicking.

  The men had hanged her. After they’d finished doing everything they’d wanted they had bound her hands behind her with a stocking. Hoisted her with a length of torn sheet around her slender neck. Knotted one end to the white-painted beam that ran the length of the house. And slowly lowered her.

  ‘To strangle, Mr. Herne! Not even allowing her the dubious dignity of a swift passing. They throttled Eliza, so that her end was filled with suffering.’

  Eyes protruding from their sockets. Tongue black, swollen to twice its usual size. Blood streaking down over her naked body, across the sunken ribs. Blood running from her mouth and nose. And blood across her bare thighs. Blood clotted around her sparse hair.

  ‘They burned my little girl. Used my best Havana cigars and drank my French brandy while they were doin’ … doin’ it with Eliza. Burning her like she was some cheap whore. And beatin’ her while she was tied.’

  One of her shoes had remained on, and it was the heel of that shoe, hanging loose from her bare foot, that scraped and clicked across the blood-matted rug and floor. Clicked every time the wind came through the open window and tugged and pushed the dangling corpse on the end of its makeshift noose.

  ‘The men drink in the saloon? Any of them in the town? Or go with the prostitutes?’

  The banker paused. They were standing on the porch, overlooking Casper. The sun was still blazing hot, a light wind raising tiny dust-devils that skittered across the street, making Jed’s mare spook and rear.

  ‘Why do you want to know that?’

  ‘Time’s wasting, Mr. Newbridge. Your little girl should be snug underground, stones a’top the grave to keep out coyotes. See to that and answer what I asked.’

  ‘I don’t rightly know.’

  ‘Names’d be good. Got their descriptions, like they were off a Pinkerton flyer. But names …’

  ‘No. I’m sorry.’

  Jed turned away without another word, slapping the horse on the neck to quiet her. Not heading west where the killers had gone, but back towards town. Seeking a piece in the jigsaw.

  Finding that piece in a run-down saloon, called ‘The Lamb at Slaughter.’

  The barkeep was a cripple, bent and stooped, neck crook’d on one side. Herne guessed that some kind of brain stroke had hit him, as the corners of the man’s mouth were pulled down and his speech was slurred. But his memory was untouched.

  ‘One called “Kid”. Round sixteen summers. Face like he sung in a choir in a cathedral in paradise. Sweet voice, too. Eyes like frozen piss. No warmth to ’em. Cold as cold. Way he talked I’d figure him from over the Dakotas. Long yeller hair.’

  ‘White shirt and grey breeches, they said. Real skinny.’

  The barkeep poured another shot of liquor for the tall stranger. ‘Yeah. Skinny like a fence-post. Sort of kid that needs to run around in the rain to get hisself wet.’

  ‘Guns?’

  The man shook his head. Trying to smile, but his lopsided mouth found it hard and it came out like a sneer. ‘I ain’t no good with guns, mister. Carbine. Didn’t see no pistol. Maybe a hideaway. Knife in his belt. Skinning knife. Wore a belt of bullets across his chest.’

  ‘Kid.’ It wasn’t a lot to go on, but the confirmation of the description was good.

  ‘The older man? One in the plaid shirt? He have a name?’

  ‘Mean son of a bitch, him. Old. Old as you. Maybe older. Called me a wall-eyed mongrel and said if he had a dog looked like me he’d either charge a nickel for folk to come and throw stones or he’d put a bullet through my

  head.’

  ‘He have a name?’ asked Herne again.

  ‘Sure. The kid called him Charley. Charley Howell.’

  Herne straightened from the bar and took a deep breath. ‘Charley Howell. By God, friend, but that name rakes over some long-cold ashes.’

  Two

  Three days had slipped by since the banker had found the raped and mutilated corpse of his daughter. Three long days
for Kid and Charley Howell to push their way in any direction. They’d been seen heading west out of Casper towards the Rockies. Maybe going for South Pass and California beyond. Once out of the high country Herne knew that his quarry would be almost impossible to track down.

  But it was the best part of one hundred and fifty miles to South Pass. Unless the murderers expected to be pursued they would probably not push on too hard. They’d watch town and see that no posse came after them. Knowing that the law wasn’t in any position to follow them.

  Before leaving Casper, Jed Herne had done an odd thing. Going out once more to the banker’s quiet house, ignoring the loosened collar and the glazed eyes. The flushed cheeks and the unsteady gait.

  ‘Why the …? How come you ‘aven’t gone after those bastards, Herne?’

  ‘I want more money… Wait,’ holding up a hand. ‘For expenses.’

  ‘What exps … esp … expenses?’

  ‘Horses. I’m not goin’ to get to South Pass if that’s the way they’re bound. And I figure they are. I once knew Charley Howell and he came from some place north of San Francisco. So, my only chance is to get horses and ride hard and long.’

  ‘How many horses?’

  ‘I’ll leave my mare here. Buy an animal and then trade along the trail.’

  ‘It’s about two hundred miles from here to South Pass.’

  ‘Less.’

  ‘They can be there today.’

  ‘I figure tomorrow, Banker. Maybe close by tomorrow sunset.’

  ‘And through the Pass the day after.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘How can …? I mean, when can you be there? Not until the evening of that second day.’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  The banker laughed. A harsh, torn sound that rang broken and ugly in the still house.

  ‘Near two hundred miles in a mite over twenty-four hours, Herne! You’re real crazy. I’ve given my bounty to a madman.’

  ‘I rode with the Pony Express. Good animals and a mite of luck, you could manage up to fifteen miles in an hour. Every hour, Mr. Newbridge. Keep it up.’