Herne the Hunter 21

by John J. McLaglen

  The older man saw it, realizing that he wasn’t going to be fast enough. Throwing off his gloves in a blind rage, screaming out a curse at the boy and turning away. Sprinting towards the further end of the alley, dodging round a pile of garbage.

  The light went off and the alley was suddenly dark again, Bible-black. Jed snapped off three shots at where he had last seen Corleon. There was a yelp of pain and another curse. Herne was about to follow on when the end of the narrow lane exploded into fire, bullets whining out, cracking into the walls of the rooming house.

  Jed flung himself down, gun out in his right hand, probing at the blackness. The flashes of the muzzles of the Patersons had temporarily blinded him and if Corleon had been able or aware, he could have come walking along and killed the teenager with no more trouble than swatting a sleepy fly.

  ‘I’ll get you, Herne! I’ll fuckin’ tear your fuckin’ face off of your fuckin’ skull!’

  Feet running away, the noise drowned by doors and windows opening. Voices calling out to know what was going on. What was the disturbance? Anyone dead?

  Herne wasn’t about to follow Ethan Corleon into that stygian wilderness of brush and gullies and abandoned buildings that lay behind the main street of the township. He got up and started to sprint along the street, in the direction where he’d heard the running feet. When something caught his attention and he stopped dead, the beginning of a wolfish smile creeping onto his lips.

  The piano in the main saloon had ceased its jangling. The music halting as though all its strings had been cut at once. The laughter, the singing, the women’s voices, all stopped at the same moment. Seconds drifted by, slow as feathers in a still room, and then the place came back to life. Music, conversation, and a woman’s voice, high and unnatural, laughing.

  Laughing at something that didn’t sound particularly humorous.

  Like, maybe a man stumbling in from the cold. Bleeding, perhaps. Waving a pair of pistols, scaring the heart out of every man and woman in the saloon. Bringing death in with him, naked, raw head and bloody bones, for all the world to see.

  That was where Ethan Corleon was.

  In the saloon where Charley Howell waited for his friend. Where Angus Wellbeloved minced behind the bar.

  In the Palace of Hearts.

  ~*~

  Pools of light came spilling out from the front of the place, giving Jed sufficient illumination to reload the three chambers of the Colt Navy. Concentrating on doing it right. Spinning the cylinder, making sure every percussion cap was in place.

  Keeping it cocked in his right hand.

  If Ethan was inside, cowering somewhere, maybe wounded, he might have a bead drawn on anyone walking in. On impulse, Jed moved around to the left of the saloon, coming in through the kitchen. Brushing back two chattering Chinese men, ignoring them. Through a swinging door and into a short corridor that led to the main part of the bar. There was a half-door there and he paused by it, able to look out without being seen.

  The Palace Of Hearts was crowded, as it was most nights. Giving the men somewhere to go away from the cold and loneliness of their rented rooms. But it wasn’t like any ordinary evening. The groups of players at the tables didn’t seem interested in the cards that fluttered in front of them, and the line of drinkers at the long bar weren’t giving Angus Wellbeloved much trade. Girls flounced around in their short satin skirts, but it was all done with no effort. Even the piano player, a middle-aged man called “Cricket”, was glancing over his shoulder as he rippled his fingers over the chipped and scarred ivories.

  People moved around, shiftily, and Herne noticed an odd thing. Men were being careful where they stepped. As they walked from table to bar and back again they were avoiding a strip of floor. Jed stared at it, concentrating. The wooden planking was scuffed and dirty, but that narrow corridor where nobody set their feet seemed to have a pattern to it. Small random spots that glistened in the light of the oil-lamps and seemed sticky.

  When Herne stepped through the door into the saloon it was some moments before anyone noticed him. Then every single head in the place turned towards him. Eyes flicked back from the front of the building, to the solitary figure of the teenager. Cricket missed a couple of notes and then shook his head. Starting again with a rambling version of “Bringing In The Sheaves”.

  Charley Howell was with a group of other young men. Propping up the bar, close by Wellbeloved. When he saw Jed he gaped, then looked away quickly as if he hoped not to be recognized. Realized the futility of that and half-waved a tentative hand.

  The balcony hung over Herne’s head and he stayed beneath it as he walked around the saloon, the Colt still drawn in his hand, finger on the trigger. He reached the bar and grinned at Charley with a coolness that he didn’t truly feel.

  ‘Hi,’ he said.

  ‘Good to see you, Jed,’ said Howell, voice cracking. Coughing as though some of his liquor had slipped down the wrong way.

  ‘Anyone been in lately?’

  ‘Lately?’ The place was brimming with silence. A whore sitting on the lap of an old man near the bar made to get up, but he clamped a hand around her wrist and held her tight and still.

  ‘Sure. Last few minutes. Maybe a coyote?’

  ‘No animals allowed in here, Mr. Herne,’ interrupted the barkeep.

  ‘You sure, Angus? Hot in here, isn’t it? I see you’re sweatin’ like you was inside a stove.’

  ‘You after a coyote, then, Jed?’ asked Howell.

  There was a faint creaking from the balcony above their heads that might have been timbers expanding in the night. Or it might not have been. From where he was Jed could see the spots on the floor more clearly. They were blood. A lot of blood.

  ‘Sure. One snapped at me down the street a ways. I shot at it. Maybe hit it. And I figured it might have come in here.’

  Charley seemed to have something wrong with his face. There was a nervous tic that jerked uncontrollably at his mouth and at the corners of his eyes. And he kept twitching his head upwards, as though there was a mosquito bothering him.

  A large glass of beer stood at the elbow of the man next to Charley Howell. Untouched. The man was called Harry Hawks and he came from out Rio Bravo way.

  The main stairs were over to the right, opening up on a wide landing with the rooms of the whores off it on three sides of the building. If Corleon was somewhere up above, it was going to be suicidal to move for the stairs and go after him.

  In the stillness there was a peculiar noise. A plopping sound, like a leaking water butt. Jed looked at the bar-counter, staring at the beer glass. The clear amber liquid was sullied. Something had fallen into it from the landing above them. Even as Herne watched it happened again. A large drop of blood in the beer. Spreading out, a misty crimson cloud.

  Charley Howell also saw it and swallowed hard. ‘Jed. Jed, he’s …’ Pointing upwards with his index finger.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Herne. Firing three quick rounds from his pistol, aiming at the bloody stain on the plaster of the ceiling. Putting all three bullets in a space the size of a playing card.

  There was a piercing scream and the thump of someone falling. Then a dragging sound as if a man was struggling to crawl along over their heads.

  ‘He came in, Jed. Threatened … Up there!’ yelped Howell.

  But Herne wasn’t waiting. The hunting instinct was racing through him, now he knew that the chase was nearly done. But even as he sprinted for the stairs his mind was filled with the knowledge that the most dangerous of animals is the one that is cornered.

  The Palace Of Hearts was in turmoil. Women screaming and tables and chairs crashing over. Glasses splintering on the floor as everyone battled to get out of the doors and away from any flying lead.

  The landing was empty. But several of the doors stood open, with girls standing in them in a variety of clothes. Two or three with no clothes on at all. When they saw Herne raging towards them with a smoking pistol in his right hand most of them cried and drew the door
s shut. Some watched him with an incurious boredom that hinted at more than a passing interest in the lure of opium.

  Ethan Corleon wasn’t there. But where he had been standing, waiting to gun Herne down from cover, there was a large pool of fresh blood. And another splattering of crimson near where three splintered holes showed the effect of Jed’s quick thinking.

  More blood was smeared along the landing, past several of the doors, going towards the furthest room on the right. It didn’t need any tracking skill to know where Corleon had gone. Or to be certain that he was running no further.

  ‘He went in with the little Mex bitch,’ said one of the whores. A tall blonde wearing a black corset and silk stockings. Highly-polished boots with tinkling spurs in Mexican silver. Holding a riding crop in her gloved right hand. Through the open doorway Herne caught a glimpse of a naked man, back criss-crossed with bright weals, tied spread to the bottom of a huge brass bed.

  ‘Thanks, ma’am.’

  She smiled. ‘Any time. Any time, just come along.’

  ‘I’ll think on it.’

  The end door was closed tight.

  Herne walked steadily towards it. When he saw the handle turn, slowly, he froze. Steadying his wrist with his left hand, finger tight on the trigger. A man came out, backwards, hands extended towards the bedroom as if he was trying to fend off some horror.

  He was immensely fat. Acres of bare, pink flesh shimmering with terror.

  ‘Please, mister … Please don’t…’

  There was the sharp crack of a handgun from inside the room. Twice. The fat man staggered backwards as though he’d been kicked by an invisible mule, collapsing in a heap against the further wall. Hands feebly pawing at two dark holes in his sagging belly. He was crying.

  Herne stood where he was, hearing a muffled yell. Like a girl screaming with her face in a pillow.

  Feet moving inside the room, out of his line of sight. A child appearing, with a man close behind her. The girl looking about twelve years of age, with beautiful black hair, long and shining, hanging clear below her buttocks.

  The man wore a heavy maroon coat and he held an arm around the whore’s throat, pressing himself against her back. A Colt Paterson in his other hand, pointing down the corridor towards Herne. Blood was everywhere. Slobbered across the girl’s body in glistening streaks. Wiped over Corleon’s face, dripping in a steady trickle from a bullet wound high inside the left thigh.

  Ethan was bareheaded, his thinning hair straggling over his bloodied scalp. The scar on his cheek was obscured by more blood. It was a miracle that the man was still upright.

  The eyes of the Mexican girl were wide and a thread of spittle hung from her slack lips. While Herne stood looking at the tableau there was a gushing sound as the whore had lost control of her bladder with fear. The fat man whimpered, unmoving.

  ‘Last train for the coast time, Herne, you murderin’ bastard,’ said Corleon, trying to steady his gun on the teenager.

  There wasn’t much of him for Jed to aim at, without the risk of hitting the girl.

  But in a couple of heartbeats Corleon was going to win himself a free shot at Herne.

  It wasn’t a difficult decision.

  There were three balls left in the elegant Colt Navy .36 caliber. Herne fired two of them.

  The first one, carefully aimed, went below the girl’s arm, hitting Corleon in the side of the chest, sending him backwards, letting go the whore. Who started to break away from the man.

  Unfortunately taking Herne’s second bullet through the middle of the forehead, blowing her fragile skull apart like a hammered watermelon.

  Blood and brains sprayed everywhere, blinding Ethan Corleon, who had staggered against the wall, nearly tripping over the bleeding hulk of the naked man.

  Jed had a single bullet left.

  He aimed quickly and fired, the corridor filling with powder smoke. The ball struck his enemy in the throat, just above the collar of the red coat. It drove through and punched into the spine, disintegrating and slicing away the side of the neck, opening up the big artery under the man’s left ear.

  The galloper tried to speak, but blood filled his throat and choked him. He coughed once, struggling to raise himself on one arm, but he was too weakened and he lay own. Lay down and died.

  ~*~

  The atmosphere in the Palace Of Hearts that night was like a wedding. Or a popular Presidential victory. Nobody had liked Ethan Corleon and his death brought a feeling of universal relief. The body of the Pony Express rider had been hauled off in the same wagon as the dead Mexican whore, a couple of stained blankets flung over the corpses. The fat man, gut-shot, had been carried away by his wife, going home to live with increasing pain until infection took his life eleven days later.

  Everyone wanted to buy a drink for the young man, and Cricket pounded out some stirring martial music. Charley finally managed to get Jed away from the back-slappers into a quiet corner, where they shared the better part of a bottle of Angus Wellbeloved’s best drinking whiskey.

  ‘Damned good, friend. Damned, damned good. Best thing anyone ever did. We sure showed them.’

  Jed was a little puzzled by that we that had crept unbidden into Charley Howell’s comments, but he allowed it to pass.

  ‘You stayin’ with the Pony, Jed?’

  ‘Few weeks more.’

  ‘We make a good team, Jed.’

  ‘I promised Whitey Coburn that I’d meet up with him in the spring. In Richmond.’

  ‘That white-head, red-eyed …’ seeing the look on Herne’s face and stopping.

  ‘I’ll ride a whiles more. Like I said. Then it’s over.’

  ‘I could come with you to Richmond, Jed,’ suggested Charley Howell.

  ‘Guess not.’

  ‘But we get on good.’

  ‘No. You and me… Hell, I don’t want to fight with you, Charley. But, no.’

  ‘Just recall you owe me.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘I told you where Ethan was.’

  Herne smiled, pouring himself another shot-glass of liquor. ‘I saw the blood, Charley.’

  ‘But I did tell you.’

  ‘Yeah. Guess you did at that.’

  ‘I’d have done it faster. You bet I would, Jed. Bu Ethan came in, all bloody, waving those pistols of his an’ threatenin’ any man or woman that told where he was hid. But I damned told you.’

  ~*~

  The idea that he had saved the life of Jedediah Herne was a seed that Charley Howell planted himself. An assiduously watered and cultivated. Every time after the death of Corleon that their paths crossed, Charley would call out a cheerful greeting and remind Jed of the deal that he claimed he owed him.

  By a month after Christmas Herne was beginning to dread meeting the other rider. Howell had a pleasant roguish personality, except when he was in drink. But as the weeks came by there was an element of surly ill temper, and Herne caught a whisper of Howell being involved in a nasty rape of a half-breed girl from the Wind River Shoshone.

  They parted, eventually, in late February, on a cold clear day. Without even a handshake. The last words c Charley Howell were entirely predictable.

  ‘We’ll meet again, one of them days, Jed. Maybe that’s when you’ll settle what you owe me.’

  Sixteen

  Morning.

  The body of Kid lying still where he’d died, by the gray ashes of the cold fire. The sun was rising with the promise of a bright new day.

  During the last couple of hours Jed’s mind had been running back over the years. Back to the days with the Pony Express. He had gone to Richmond and met Whitey Coburn. There had been the War. The Pony had folded after only eighteen months of exciting and heady life. There were some political reasons for its demise, but ultimately it was very simple economics.

  Each piece of mail that they carried in the soft leather mochilas cost its sender around five dollars. But it cost the company around sixteen dollars to transport it.

  And so
the gallopers of the Pony Express rode forever from the pages of history, into the pages of legend.

  Herne never forgot those days. Days that he later realized had, in so many ways, turned him from a boy into a man.

  Now, still hiding behind his tree, was this living reminder of those days.

  Charley Howell, liar, drunk, rapist, thief and violent murderer. Every now and again as the night wore on he would call out to Jed, trying to persuade him to leave the chase and let him free. Recalling the debt that he claimed le owed.

  Now, it was full morning.

  And Howell stood up, rubbing his legs as if the damp lad gotten into them. Deliberately exposing himself to Jed and the gaping muzzle of the Sharps rifle. Holding out his hands from his sides to show that he wasn’t trying to pull a trick with a concealed pistol.

  ‘This is it, old friend. I’m callin’ you. I got a pair of deuces. I figure you got a straight flush. But I also figure you won’t shoot down an old friend. You’ll give me a chance to ride away free.’

  Herne didn’t reply, the butt of the buffalo rifle pressed to his shoulder, finger light on the trigger.

  Charley Howell was clear in the open, facing Jedediah. ‘Herne the Hunter! I’m goin’ now. I’m goin’ to turn my back on you. Wouldn’t shoot me like that.’ He tried to tuck his shirt into his breeches, holding in his spread beer-gut. ‘You think on what I done, Jed. Think on that debt you owe me. Now I’m collectin’ the debt.’

  Turning, waving a hand, starting to walk slowly and steadily towards where his horse was tethered.

  ‘I don’t owe you, Charley. Never did. Still don’t. Since we met last you had around thirty years of livin’, and I guess most of that bad. I owe you nothing.’

  After he’d squeezed the trigger he never even bothered to look down the slope at the twitching corpse of Charles Howell. A .55 caliber bullet from a Sharps through the back of the head is very final.

  Herne rode away to collect the bounty, leaving the bodies where they were. They didn’t concern him. It was just another part of the past.

  Not even worth forgetting.