There was something about the eyes. Like standing outside a large house that wore shutters over every window. It was impossible to tell whether it was tenanted and no way of knowing what manner of person might be inside. Jedediah Herne was pushing on into his forties, roughly the same age as Thaddeus Ray, but there was a tight, coiled quality to his body that the journalist had only ever seen in top athletes and prize-fighters.
Ray knew that Herne was the kind of man who would kill without the least compunction if the clicking wheels in his brain told him that it was in his own best interest to do so.
‘I’m sorry, Mr. Herne.’
‘For what?’
‘For treading in here without a thought for what you might think.’
The shootist sipped at his drink, putting down the empty glass. Staring at the New Yorker without a trace of expression. Waiting to see what Ray was going to say. Knowing with a total certainty that the reporter had more to talk about.
‘I didn’t mean to upset you, and here’s my hand on it,’ said Thaddeus Ray, offering his bloodied palm to Herne to shake.
‘If’n you mean it, then there’s no call to shake on it. If’n you don’t, then I guess there’s still no call for it.’
The journalist had always believed that one of the strongest weapons in his armory of tricks was the sincere apology and it was something of a shock to realize that the cold-eyed man had seen through the falsehood.
‘Sure,’ he replied, uncertainly. ‘Sure, that’s right. Sure is.’
‘You goin’ or stayin’?’
‘I was. There’s somethin’ I wanted to talk to you about.’
‘Not portraits nor killings.’
‘No.’ Ray tried a laugh that somehow didn’t make it all the way and ended dribbling lamely off the edges of his lips.
‘Then what? You want me for a job?’
‘Yeah. Let me buy you another drink?’
Herne nodded. ‘Tequila.’
Ray held up his hand, showing two fingers to the skinny boy behind the bar, who shuffled across with more tumblers of the straw-colored liquor, the glasses rimmed with salt, a couple of slices of lemon in a dirty saucer at the side.
‘Here’s to you, Mr. Herne,’ said Ray, raising the glass and sipping at the tequila, coughing at the fiery power of the drink.
‘Not like that. All in one. Here,’ said Herne, throwing back his head, draining the tumbler in one draught, immediately biting into the lemon, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
‘My sweet Lord, but that is good stuff,’ hissed Ray, drawing in breath in a whistle of appreciation. ‘Hot enough to roast the gizzard of Satan himself.’
‘Now?’
‘What?’
‘We’ve taken the drink, Mr. Ray, and you said there was a matter you wanted to talk on.’
‘Yeah. You’ve heard of Geronimo?’ The moment he’d said it Ray realized what a damn-fool question that was to someone like Herne.
‘Guess the name might be familiar. Some kind of an Indian, isn’t he? Sioux? One of the Hunkpapa?’ There was the ghost of a smile on Herne’s narrow lips, though the eyes were unchanging.
‘Sorry again. Mean it. Fuckin’ stupid. You heard he was off on the run?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Somewheres round these parts.’
Herne shook his head. ‘You’re from way East, and I figure you’ve never been west of the Pecos.’
‘Not even the Mississippi.’
The truth was that he’d scarcely ever been west of the Hudson River in New York.
‘Geronimo’s one of the names you hear once round the South and it sticks like carpenter’s glue. Geronimo. Cochise. Mangas Colorado, Cuchillo Oro. And that’s just the Apaches. Gall, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Sitting Bear, Black Kettle. More Indian names than you’ve had hot dinners, Mr. Ray. More tribes. Cheyenne, Kiowa, Arapaho, Shoshone, Mimbrenos … and on and on.’
‘I know that Geronimo is the great chief of the Chiricahua Apaches’ interrupted Thaddeus Ray, eager to show that he wasn’t a complete ignoramus about the man he wanted to talk to and photograph.
‘No, he’s not.’
‘I was told that—’
‘Then you were told wrong. Geronimo isn’t a true chief of his people. He’s a war-leader. Great fighter. Cunning old bastard with a mind like a trap. Look inside his head and you see a whole lot of mirrors, dazzling you so you don’t know what to do next. Ill-tempered son of a bitch, too. But not a chief.’
‘Then why have warriors followed him?’
‘Indians aren’t like whites, Mr. Ray. They don’t think like we do. Don’t have the same …what’s the words I want? Don’t have the same morals as we do. Nor the same values. They’re different.’
‘Not so good, huh?’
‘I didn’t say that,’ replied Herne quietly, shaking his head. ‘They aren’t worse than us. Lots of ways they’re better.’
‘I can’t hardly allow that—’
‘Couldn’t give a drownin’ damn for you or what you think. I’m tellin’ you. Take men like Custer and Crazy Horse. Both much of an age. Both rose fast in the ways of fighting. Autie Custer got bolder and more and more powerful and arrogant ’til he died believin’ that he was next best thing to God. Crazy Horse got quieter and more modest the more he won victories. He gave away his horses and his prizes of war and dressed more modestly than any other warrior. Now they’re both dead. Ten long years dead, Mr. Ray. I’m not about to try and tell you who was the better man, but I sure as Hell know which I’d rather have had at my back in a last stand.’
It was a long speech and Ray had enough sense to let Herne talk on, trying to store up some of the sentiments in his memory, knowing that to drag out a notebook and pencil would mar the flow of words.
‘You met Geronimo?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What did—’ began Ray.
‘I’m not about to give a story ‘bout Geronimo. You want to know about him, then you go and track him down and ask him yourself.’
‘Ah. That’s what I wanted to ask you, Mr. Herne,’ said Thaddeus, excitedly. ‘That’s the nub of it.’
Jed Herne had been given enough contracts of different kinds in his career as bounty-hunter and hired gun to have an idea about what was being offered. Ray was going to ask him to try and find Geronimo.
‘The Army should get there first,’ he said.
‘How the—? How d’you know what I was goin’ to ask about? That’s ...’
Herne didn’t reply to the question. ‘If Geronimo’s gone with a couple of dozen men, women and brats, then it might take ten years to find him.’
‘There’s thousands of Cavalry out after him,’ protested the reporter.
‘I’m good at what I do. Good at tracking. Good at keeping out of the way when I want to. I’m not given to boasting, Mr. Ray, but there’s barely five white men in this country as good as me. Only one could be better is Crow, and folks say he might be part Indian himself. But Geronimo’s a whole lot better. If he wants to he can let them hunt him with fifty thousand soldiers and they’d never get near.’
Ray was dejected. The contracts he carried with him in a small traveling case would be worthless. Others had said it would be hard to find Geronimo. But now this Herne the Hunter was as good as saying it was impossible.
‘Then it’s impossible?’
‘Not what I said. Said that fifty thousand soldiers galloping here and there would never get a smell at the old fox. Didn’t say that a half dozen men might not catch him. If’n I was General Miles I’d use Apache scouts and small groups of experienced Troopers. Wear him down in the end.’
Thaddeus Ray waved towards the barkeep, sitting silent until another round of tequilas was brought. Downing his in one gulp, almost forgetting the lemon and blinking away the tears.
‘Then it can be done! If’n you scouted for us we might get to him?’
Herne nodded. Weighing up odds in his mind. ‘Might do it.’
‘Pay w
ell.’
‘How much?’
Ray grinned, stroking his moustache. ‘Guess it’ll be enough.’
Herne leaned slightly forward, and the journalist recoiled as though he was being threatened.
‘Never enough, Mr. Ray. Never in the whole world is there enough.’
‘Two hundred dollars?’ offered with his head on one side.
‘What for? Gettin’ my ass in the saddle and buyin’ a few shells?’
‘How much?’
‘Twenty-five a day plus food and bullets. After the first week goes to forty a day. After the second week fifty. If’n we haven’t gotten close after three weeks then we’ll never find him.’
Thaddeus nodded. ‘It’s a deal, Mr. Herne. Jed, isn’t it?’
‘It is. But it isn’t a deal.’
‘But we agreed …’
‘We agreed that if I go that’s how much you’ll pay me. When do you pay?’
‘When we get paid.’
Herne stood up, stretching high above the little New Yorker. ‘Good to meet you, Mr. Ray. And I’m obliged to you for the drink.’
‘Just a damned minute, Herne ...’
‘Jed. Or Mr. Herne. Not just Herne.’
Ray stood up, holding out his hands in an ingratiating gesture like a market huckster caught selling shoddy goods. ‘Fine. Fine. I’m sorry. But what else is there to talk about? Apart from money?’
‘Tomorrow’s money ain’t worth a dry shit, Mr. Ray. Worth a gambler’s promise or a whore’s love.’
‘I don’t have the money. Truly, Jed. We sold up our place east to come here. Living on that. But if we can get a picture of Geronimo and some of the other notables down here, with some good stories, then the dollars’ll come rolling in like it’s Saint Patrick’s night in Paddy Feenan’s bar.’
‘I get paid in money up front, Mr. Ray.’
‘Tell you what, Jed. I’ll do a deal’
‘Takes two,’ said the shootist, quietly.
‘Sure. But I’ll promise you a full ha ... third of what we finally make from the journals. And we’ll pay you a flat ten a day all found.’
Herne looked round the cantina. Killing the Mexicans had been easy. But the taste of death sometimes lay flat on his tongue. It would be good to scout for a couple of weeks. Not that he honestly believed they would have a lot of chance of catching up with Geronimo. It had been long years since Herne had met the stocky Chiricahua leader, under circumstances that were, even now, painful to recall. He wondered whether the Apache would remember the tall white man who had .... but that was in another place and at another time.
And the woman was dead.
‘All right, Mr. Ray.’
‘Thaddeus, Jed. Call me Thaddeus.’
‘You and me and your brother. That it?’
‘And my wife, Carola.’
‘No. No women.’
‘She has to come, Jed.’
‘Then I don’t. Not into Apache country with a woman. Bad enough havin’ to carry you and your brother. Couple of damned Easterners not knowin’ how to ride. Wantin’ a drink of water every few miles. Complainin’ all … No. Not a woman.’
‘She’s English,’ muttered Thaddeus Ray, as if that explained everything.
‘Sorry. Like to help but—’
‘She’s part of the writing deal. Kind of British Lady On The Wild Frontier story.’ He managed to indicate the presence of the capital letters in the title. ‘So it has to be her or nothing.’
‘Positively not.’
‘Will you meet her? At least do that, Jed.’
~*~
One of the children had died during the day and the mother had been weeping. Another of the squaws—a fat, slit-nosed woman—had tried to console her, but she kept on crying into the hours of darkness. It wasn’t a loud noise. Just a keening moan that barely even rose and fell, hanging around the small camp like the scent of failure.
She only stopped when Geronimo himself came and knelt beside her, his figure a dimly-seen silhouette in the desert blackness.
‘The little one is with the spirits now, woman,’ he said. ‘On the next day he will fly above us like a hawk, watching and guiding us away from the whites. The soldiers of the town will see him and they will be without power. By his help and the spirits, their long guns will smoke with no fire.’
‘But he has gone,’ she said, finally choking on her tears, touching her hand to his for a fleeting moment.
‘Yes! So we will all. Perhaps the morrow will be the day. It will be a good day to die, sister. A good day to die.’
Chapter Four
Carola Ray was one of the most remarkable women that Jed Herne had ever met. Whitey Coburn had once described a notorious madame of a Dallas sporting-house as being the ladiest lady he’d ever met. He’d been joking as Big Janey Holtom had weighed in at three hundred and fifty pounds and stood four inches over six feet. Having once won instant fame by felling two Swedish sailors with simultaneous punches from her left and right fists.
But Carola Ray was really a lady.
Herne had been concerned about riding with Thaddeus Ray and his brother Isaac, who was a hard-drinking man if Herne had ever seen one. But the woman eased some of his worries. Though her blatant sexuality made him cautiously aware of potential difficulties. Her eyes challenged him and the fact that they both knew she was naked beneath a thin robe didn’t jar her self-possession.
Thaddeus was delighted at Herne’s agreement to lead them after the Apaches, vanishing with Isaac to search out some horses. Four to ride and four to pack were Jed’s orders, with the instructions not to clinch any deal until he’d examined the animals for himself. One bad purchase and they would all be put at risk.
Carola sat down in a chair, her long hair soaking wet from the bath, crossing one leg over the other with a fine disregard to the amount of pale thigh that she revealed, waving for Jed to sit opposite her.
‘You are a killer, Jed, are you not? I could tell it from your face, even without knowing it from my husband. There is an unmistakable cut to your jib.’
‘You got any man’s clothes? This isn’t goin’ to be a church social.’
‘I can ride as well as any man. Better than Thaddeus or his brother.’
‘You mean a canter down Rotten Row?’ he sneered, parodying her English, clipped accent. ‘That the name of the place in your London park?’
‘I have ridden there. I have also hunted with the Quom, Mr. Herne.’
‘What’s that?’
‘The finest hunt in England, and been complimented by the Master for my dash and verve.’
‘Hunting what? Tame deer?’
‘Foxes.’
Herne laughed, a short barking sound that filled the hot bedroom. ‘Foxes? By God, Ma’am, but that must be mighty dangerous sport.’
‘They are—’ she began.
‘Must be barely fifty of you after them, all well horsed. And you have dogs too. Guess you have to have slaves with scatter-guns to make sure one of the bushy-tailed bastards don’t leap up an’ bite you on the foot.’
‘You are most amusing, Mr. Herne. I am sorry to see that you share Thaddeus’s quaint Yankee humor, if that is what it is.’ Her eyes were angry and the knuckles on the arm of the chair white Herne was momentarily glad she hadn’t got a riding crop to hand as he had no doubt she would have used it on him.
Then he would have been forced to punch her senseless to the floor.
And that would have been the end of the job.
She made a great effort to be nice. Since they’d been in the hot, stinking border township, it had quickly become obvious that their task of finding the Indian chief was not going to be so easy as it had appeared from the safety of New York. There wasn’t a soul in Nogales who had even thought they had an outside chance of coming up on Geronimo. But the man who ran their rooming-house had told them of the stranger in town. Herne the Hunter.
‘If there’s a man in the whole country who can bring you up to old Geronimo, t
hen it’s Jed Herne. And that’s if you believe one tale in ten about him. Just one in ten.’
Now that she saw him Carola Ray could believe that. There was an almost visible aura about the tall, middle-aged shootist. A hardness that went far below the skin into the core of the man, unlike anything that she’d ever encountered before. And it excited her.
‘I have no wish to quarrel with you, Jedediah. You have no objection to my calling you Jedediah?’
‘Jed’s shorter.’
‘And I am Carola. You have agreed terms with my husband for this scouting?’
‘Sure.’ Herne sniffed, seeing that the loose gown had fallen even further open, revealing the darkness of her body, deep in the shadowed canyon between her thighs. The memory of Adeline Fuller was still too fresh for him to do more than consider the availability of this lady and file the fact away for the future.
‘You think we will find Geronimo?’
The shootist shook his head. ‘No. I don’t guess we will. Oh, we can try. Maybe we can come close. But we need a whole lot of luck if’n we’re going to manage it.’
Carola nearly told him that they faced financial ruin if they didn’t deliver the stories and pictures they’d signed up for, but held back. She had learned early in life that it was a sorry error to lay too many of one’s cards on the green baize.
‘We can do it, Jed. I’m sure of it.’
‘Glad you are, Carola. But there’s other Apaches round abouts here. Plenty of mean bastards with white skins too. And there’s word of a gang of Mex bandits, breeds and renegades close the border. Led by a killer called Jesus Maria Diego. Called El Poco. Means the Little One. Diego’s a bare five feet tall. Been thievin’ and butcherin’ around southern Arizona, northern Sonora, for better’n four years. Had the Cavalry after him. And the federales and rurales. Word is he pays off the Mexican soldiers. Maybe even the blue-bellies. Been riding free too long.’
‘And we might find ourselves falling a victim to this El Loco?’
Geronimo! (Herne the Hunter Western Page 3