Geronimo! (Herne the Hunter Western

by John J. McLaglen

  The Home of Great Western Fiction!

  Herne made a deal with journalist Thaddeus Ray to help him get some pictures of Geronimo, the famous Apache war-chief. It would have been a well-paid, easy scouting job if the US Cavalry hadn’t been searching for the Apache too. But when Thaddeus and his brother Isaac were captured and brutally tortured by the vicious Mexican dwarf, Jesus Maria Garcia, Herne, left alone with Thaddeus’s wife Carola, knew he was going to have to try and rescue both brothers – against lethal odds.

  HERNE THE HUNTER 16: GERONIMO!

  By John J. McLaglen

  First Published by Transworld Publishers in 1981

  Copyright © 1981, 2016 by John J. McLaglen

  First Smashwords Edition: July 2016

  Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader.

  Cover image © 2016 by Tony Masero

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Series Editor: Mike Stotter * Text © Piccadilly Publishing

  Published by Arrangement with the Author.

  This is for Cynthia, who’s a writer and a friend. Every day in every way she’s getting better and better.

  “On April 2nd, 1886, Brigadier General Nelson A. Miles was appointed to succeed Crook with orders from General Sheridan to finish the job post-haste. Miles was assigned two thousand additional troops, bringing the force under his command to five thousand men. Their objective: to bring in thirty-six Apache men, women and children.”

  ‘The Apache Scouts Who Won The War’, by D. Harper Simms, from Great Western Indian Fights, by Members of the Potomac Corral of the Westerners, published by the University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln.

  Chapter One

  ‘Please, Jed.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘Please. Do it again for me.’

  ‘I need to sleep.’

  ‘Just once,’ pleading with the tall man at her side. Turning to look at him, feeling her desire growing at the sight of the lean body, the sheet pulled low down over the flat, muscular stomach.

  It was late afternoon, the Tucson sun scorching down from a pale spring sky, cutting deep shadows across the dusty street. Outside the bedroom in the cheap hotel they could hear the town going about its business. A drunk was singing his love for a lady called Goldenhair and there was a travelling quack doctor bawling out the wonders of his snake oil. Swearing that it would cure everything from ingrown toenails to failure of the male member.

  ‘Your passion never fails, does it, Jed?’ asked the woman, reaching down and touching him. Cradling his softness in her hand, sliding down the bed so that she could use her lips on him. Feeling the immediate response. ‘A fourth time, my cold-eyed shootist,’ she whispered. ‘Let me ...’

  Her voice was muffled as he lost patience and grabbed her by the long, tangled brown hair, gripping so hard that it hurt her. Forcing her mouth on to him, pursing his own lips as her teeth grated along the length of his penis. But he pushed his hips against her face, driving himself deep into her throat so that she gagged and nearly choked, fighting to pull back. But Herne wouldn’t let her, locking his fingers like steel bands at the nape of her neck.

  ‘Suck it. You wanted it, lady, and you got it.’

  Despite her discomfort the woman found herself trembling on the brink of another orgasm at the rough and shameful treatment she was suffering. She had never known a man like Jedediah Herne. Herne the Hunter, men called him around Tucson. She had heard them, and it was what they said of the gunman that had attracted her to him in the first place.

  Adeline Fuller was thirty-one years old and she had been married for thirteen years. And each year seemed twice the length of the weary one before it. Up at Fort Fetterman with the Second, and the Sioux singing their war-chants, ready to sweep over the grasslands against the soldiers. Three years after her wedding the news came through that Yellowhair Custer had finally made his last wrong decision up on the Little Big Horn.

  The man she had married was seven years older than Adeline. And when they had met he had been a bright and ambitious young Captain, eager for promotion. But even then there had been too great a fondness for the bottle that was thickening the bags under his eyes and breaking the tiny thread-like veins across the cheeks.

  Now it was 1886 and Albert Fuller was still a Captain in the United States Cavalry, with not the faintest hope of ever becoming promoted and the single bottle having become two on a good day and three when life weighed too hard with him. Their marriage had become more and more of a façade over the years and Adeline had been happy only when her husband was off on duty. As he was that day.

  First had been a younger officer up in Montana who had flattered her and encouraged her to drink some imported French wine. Though the illicit affair had excited Adeline, it hadn’t been truly what she wanted. She knew, in the barred chamber at the back of her mind, that she yearned to be possessed by a brutal man or men who would force her to unspeakable acts.

  It had been a farrier at Fort Buford who had opened-the door of that long-closed room for her. She had taken a mare to him, late one evening. Dragging him from his supper, ignoring his surly complaints. Adeline had been tipsy with sherry and Albert was out on patrol and it had been so easy for her to play games with the soldier. He’d been a huge, ugly, brute of a man, with a scarred face from being trapped in a burning wagon and his body stank of raw sweat. His hands were dirty, scorched by the fires of the smithy.

  He’d closed the doors of the forge to keep out the winter chill, slipping the bolt across as an afterthought when he finally realized that the lady was there for his taking.

  She’d protested, but it had been in a quiet voice, and both of them had known it was a play. The farrier had ripped her dress from her shoulders, slapping her back in the dirt and straw and horse droppings, tugging her clothes up over her head so she could hardly breathe. And he’d used her, taking her three times, each time using a different tender orifice of her body. She’d cried out then, until he’d kneed her in the stomach to quieten her moans, forcing her on to her knees for the third and most degrading coupling.

  Adeline had loved it.

  Loved every humiliating, hurtful moment, cherishing the pain in her memory. But even then she still retained enough shreds of control to know that she must never ever use the same man twice for her perversions. It would be too dangerous. It had to be casual coupling with others; preferably strangers who would not even know her name.

  She took to going away from the forts where her husband was serving out his time, claiming she was visiting various distant relations in far-off cities such as Buffalo, or New Orleans or Duluth or Spokane. And Albert didn’t concern himself with her going, or with her eventual returning. She was simply there to cook and sew and on occasions when drink gave him an unreliable potency for him to lie with. And Adeline’s contributions to his domestic life were so minimal that he hardly noticed whether she was there or not. The Cavalry provided adequate food and he could cobble up tears and rips himself. And for sex he could always rely on the five-fingered widow for a dubious satisfaction.

  Mrs. Adeline Fuller took to haunting low bars and waterfront taverns, dressing herself like a fifty-cent whore, picking up the kind of men she knew would give her the kind of time she desired. Tough men, with hard eyes, who would show her no affection and simply use her as a vessel for them to pour their lust into. She would enco
urage them to beat her by insulting them, while she took a fierce delight in the danger of the sport.

  Twice she finished up in hospital, once with a broken jaw and once with smashed ribs and cuts across her breasts where a skinny Lascar seaman in Portland had bound her to a bed and kicked her unconscious, decorating her naked, helpless body with his flensing knife.

  As she grew-older the hunger grew more powerful, yet she grew’ more careful, learning from the Lascar that there were men who might kill her. And that was something that lay there as a fantasy, but one that she had no desire to fulfill. She used younger men, trying to find something different, seeking out shootists because of the shadow of danger and death that sat constantly at their shoulders.

  And now, in Tucson, she had found Herne the Hunter.

  ~*~

  In New York, sweltering in a brownstone hotel on the lower west side, were Thaddeus Ray and his wife, Carola. Sitting in bed, the window open as far as it would go, only a single sheet covering their nakedness.

  Arguing bitterly.

  ‘I say we should never have left England,’ complained Carola, in a voice that betrayed her British upper-class heritage.

  ‘They didn’t want to offer me work there. Called me a greedy Yank and cut me deader than last month’s salami. We had to come back here.’

  ‘Naturally your dear brother, Isaac, had to come and join us.’

  Thaddeus shook his head, tugging nervously at a full moustache that drooped wearily from either side of his fleshy nose. ‘Quiet, dearest. He’s only in the next room and he might—’

  ‘I don’t care if he does hear us. Him and his wretched camera. Must we take him with us? It’ll be hot enough cantering around the Territory of Arizona as it is without Isaac and his precious equipment.’ Carola Ray succeeded in imbuing the word ‘equipment’ with as much hatred and loathing as if it was some nameless atrocity.

  ‘Ike’ll be just fine and dandy, little dear one,’ said her husband, trying to mollify her. ‘The papers are going to pay us well. We can get ’em three ways comin’ and goin’ so they don’t know how many dollars are slidin’ our way.’

  ‘I know. You’ve told me,’ she replied, flapping the sheet up and down to try and generate an illusion of coolness.

  ‘Your tales of the English lady in desperate climes. Ike’s pictures of the hideous atrocities of the heathens and the bandits. And my stories of the real hard times the soldiers are having, mingled with genuine interviews with characters of the frontiers. Dearest, we just can’t lose, can we?’

  ‘Very well, Thaddeus, but woe betide you if this goes awry. I have put up with your bungling and your ill-laid plans for far too long.’

  He reached across to try and kiss her on the cheeks, but she turned away. ‘It is much too hot for that sort of thing, Thaddeus—’

  ‘If it isn’t the heat it’s one of your damned headaches, Carola,’ he sulked.

  ‘Language, husband. Language.’

  ‘Well, there’s my conjugal rights, ain’t there?’ he moaned, aware that he sounded more like a spoiled schoolboy than a wronged husband.

  ‘Not when it is as hot as this, or when we are about to sail off on this hare-brained venture.’

  ‘We ain’t sailin’, little dear one. It’ll be train west and then wagons south. Down towards Tucson.’

  He tried again to touch her, his hands actually reaching the sweat-slick curve of her breast, but she slapped his fingers away as if they were errant mosquitoes. ‘No, Thaddeus. I mean it.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘If you wish to take some comfort, then I suggest you go and take up the offers of those fallen flowers that decorate Seventh Avenue.’

  ‘I wouldn’t—’

  ‘Yes, you would. I declare that there have been times when I have known you take some succor there, Thaddeus. Go, if you wish. And take that dreadful Isaac with you, if you please.’

  Ray pushed back the sheet and padded barefoot across the bedroom, trying to hold in his stomach in front of his wife. Hearing the constant hubbub of the New York traffic outside with whistles blowing and cabbies cursing each other.

  ‘Sure guess it’ll be a mite quieter than this out in Arizona.’

  Carola didn’t bother to reply, taking a damp cloth from a dish at the head of the bed and dabbing it on her forehead and between her breasts. ‘I wish we were going to try and speak to a tribe of placid Esquimaux rather than these Indians.’

  ‘They are Apaches, my heart. Chiricahua Apaches, if one is to be accurate, and as representatives of the great fourth estate of journal writers we must hope for such accuracy.’

  ‘And what is the name of this villain?’

  ‘Their leader?’

  ‘Yes. The one who has yielded and is being led in chains to a durance vile.’

  Ray paused in getting himself dressed, rummaging through a pile of paper on the dresser. ‘They say he is to be taken to San Carlos by General Crook.’

  ‘Then I imagine he will be safe. And Isaac can have his beloved portraits and we shall have our stories for the papers.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘And what is their chieftain’s name?’

  Thaddeus picked up the paper again. ‘Says here that he’s called Geronimo.’

  ~*~

  In 1829, near the headwaters of the Gila River, a baby was born to a Chiricahua squaw. Following the custom of the tribe, the woman acting as midwife took the afterbirth that the mother had shrouded in a blanket. The same piece of cloth on which she’d knelt to give birth. The package was placed carefully, high in the branches of a nearby tree with the exhortation that the life of the child would be renewed each year as the tree came into fruit. And forever after that tree would be sacred to the child and to its family.

  That boy rose to become a great warrior and leader of the Apaches, during the long wars against the whites of the sixties and seventies. Through his youth he passed many tests to prove his ability as a warrior member of his people. He would dodge thrown stones and aimed arrows, and would run four miles through the desert heat carrying a mouthful of water without spilling or swallowing a single drop.

  Now his men had mainly gone and he was left with a small group of women and children with only nineteen warriors, heading north from Mexico under military escort.

  His name was Geronimo.

  ~*~

  Adeline Fuller lay back, glancing from narrowed eyes at the man who dozed at her side. Looking at the dusting of grey across the temples, the rest of the hair long, spilling over the bolster. There were lines hollowed out around the nose and the mouth, furrowing the forehead, and the lips were thin and cruel. Herne was tall, around two inches over six feet, with broad shoulders and narrow hips. Even when they were making love he had made sure that his forty-five Colt hung at the top of the bed.

  She thought about some of the stories that the manager of the Tucson hotel had told her. And every one made her want Jedediah Herne as much as she’d ever wanted any man. The most ruthless and skilful killer in the country, able to butcher an enemy with pistol, Sharps rifle, knife or with his bare hands. Now past forty, but leaner than whipcord, fitter than most men half his age.

  ‘Rode with Cody back in the fifties for the Pony Express. Killed hisself a dozen Paiutes in a single day up in the Sierra snows,’ the man had said. ‘Knows all the best. Fought in the Lincoln County affair with Billy Bonny. Married. Gave up his guns and then his wife got raped and killed so he went off back on the death trail. Still on it. Always will be. Only damned life Herne knows.’

  She’d never met a man so self-contained. He’d made love to her, if that was what it could be called, with a chilling efficiency, taking his own pleasure and doing little to help her. But he refused to mistreat her, ignoring her whimpering to be beaten.

  ‘Not my way,’ was all he said.

  The hotel was small, with only a dozen rooms, and several times during their coupling he caught the sound of steps in the corridor outside the room. And each time he’d
pause and she’d watch his eyes go to the smooth butt of the Colt. His body would tighten like a spring, and then he would relax again. Though she was confident that her husband, Captain Albert Fuller, was out on patrol for at least the next three days, there was always that exciting frisson of quite delicious terror feat one day he might come back unexpectedly early and catch her with one of her chain of lovers.

  Adeline tried to get Herne to talk, but he wasn’t interested in conversation. There’d been the tale that Herne had actually ridden wife Bloody Quantrill and his butchering raiders during fee War, taking part in the massacre at Lawrence, Kansas in sixty-three. She’d mentioned it and he’d stayed silent for a while.

  Then: ‘I saw it.’

  That was all.

  The only piece of information that he’d volunteered to her was that he’d just finished going after some runaway children further north and was currently heading south, towards the border. There was word of a bounty on some Mexican bandits, though he was concerned at whispers that Geronimo was going to run for it from the custody of the Cavalry.

  ~*~

  Isaac Ray fell asleep the moment that they boarded the train in New York, his head lolling on one side, his beloved camera and equipment scattered about his feet making him look like a Latvian refugee arriving bemusedly at Ellis Island. There was the scent of beer about him, sweating out of every pore, the remnants of the last glass still white on the shaggy moustache that he affected.

  Carola tutted disgustedly at the sight, wondering for the hundredth time whether it was such a good idea to go chasing off across two thousand miles just to interview some painted savage. Though the signed contracts that Thaddeus had in his valise were for figures that filled her mind with the prospect of a decent house and some new clothes.

  She ran her white-gloved finger around the inside of the collar of her straw-yellow dress, looking with distaste at the smear of grime on her hand.

  ‘This heat and dirt is intolerable, husband,’ she snapped.