Death Rites

by John J. McLaglen

  The train had only just lurched out of El Paso, with a clattering of wheels and its whistle screaming, when Herne realized that someone was watching him. He propped open one eye and stared across the car.

  “Pardon me, sir,” said the stranger, “but I feel that I know you.”

  Jed shook his head. “Guess not.”

  The man opposite was around six feet tall, carrying better than two fifty pounds around with him, a lot of it bulging out over a massive leather belt. On each side of the belt hung a Colt .45. A matched pair with ivory handles, Herne noticed.

  Despite the guns, the stranger wore a tight suit of obviously Eastern cut, topped by a light brown derby hat two sizes too small. The face was round and honest. As far as you could tell. One of the most open-faced, likeable men that Jed Herne had ever met made a specialty of slitting the throats of young girls and drinking their blood!

  You could never go far by appearances.

  He was certainly persistent.

  “I’m sure I do know you. Have you ever been up in Montana?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then it was there.”

  “Guess not.”

  “Ogden, in Utah?”

  “Been there.”

  “Then it ...”

  “No.”

  The big man took off his hat and scratched his head, the movement opening his vest and revealing a small pistol in a holster under the left arm.

  “I still think I know you, Mister...? I guess I didn’t catch your name.”

  “That’s because I didn’t throw it your way.”

  “I hear you’re the man traveling with the little girl’s casket.”

  “You heard right.”

  “Kin?”

  “Kind of. Takin’ her back home to Tucson to be laid down with her folks.”

  The man nodded. Rubbing his hands together and blowing on them. “Damned cold! I’ll be glad when we get to the coast and I can get off and eat some good food and lay me between some warm blankets.”

  “You on business?” Despite himself, Herne found himself drawn to the fat man’s obvious good nature.

  “Surely am. You hear of the Pinkerton Agency?”

  “Eye that never sleeps? Sure.”

  “I’m with them. Agent Lovell. Harry L. Lovell. I’m pleased to meet you, Mister...? Still don’t seem to have your name.”

  “I’m Herne. Jedediah T. Herne.” He reached out to shake the agent’s hand, but Lovell sat still, lips set in a hard line.

  “Jed Herne?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You wouldn’t be the man they call “Herne the Hunter’, would you now?”

  “I’ve been called that.”

  Lovell leaned back, fingers unconsciously dropping to toy with the butt of the right-hand Colt. Biting his lip nervously, not sure where to look.

  “I heard a lot about you, Mr. Herne.”

  “That figures, Mr. Lovell. I heard plenty about me as well. Most of it lies.”

  “You were the best. Then you got killed, I heard. Then, year or so back, the word came that you were back on the bounty trail.”

  “I wouldn’t argue with that.”

  “Mind if I ask you what happened?”

  “I mind.”

  “Oh, I just wondered why you quit, and why you came back.”

  “Keep wonderin’, Mr. Lovell. Just you keep on with that wonderin’. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I could do with some sleep.”

  “You ... Pardon me for asking you this, but I wondered if you and me might even be on the same mission. That really would be something to tell the wife and kids when I get home to Tuscaloosa.”

  “When I work, Mr. Lovell, I keep that to myself. I seen men that talk a lot. Men with the brains of a fence post. Mostly dead men by now.”

  “Sure. Sure, Mr. Herne, I take your meaning there, indeed I do. Word to the wise, Mr. Herne.”

  The Pinkerton man was rubbing his nose and winking at Jed as if he was plagued with some kind of nervous tic. Leaning back in his seat, and easing his guts over his belt with a sigh of satisfaction.

  Herne closed his eyes and tried to sleep, ignoring the other man’s attempts to restart the conversation.

  Lovell finally lapsed back into a muttered monologue.

  “Herne the Hunter. God damn it, but that is really something to tell the boys. Herne. Knew Billy the Kid, they say. Best damned gun around. Damn it to Hell! Herne on this train with me.”

  The monologue faded away and Herne finally managed to sleep.

  When the train started to climb higher into the hills, halfway across the last leg of the long journey, Herne felt a hand tap his shoulder, and he woke to find the Pinkerton agent pointing out of the misted window.

  “What the ...?”

  “More snow. Don’t see that kind of weather much in these parts, ain’t that so, Mr. Herne?”

  “Jesus. You woke me up to tell me that it’s snowing! I don’t give a sweet damn about it. Just as long as I can get to Tucson. Then I start over.”

  “You never thought of joining up, Mr. Herne?”

  “Pinkerton’s?”

  “Surely. Regular money. Travel. Touch of excitement now and again.”

  “I get all of that when I want it. It’s not hard getting bounty work.”

  Lovell nodded furiously, his treble chins bobbing with his enthusiasm. “Bet you killed you a lot of men for money, Mr. Herne?”

  “Some. Most I killed ’cause it was the best way of stoppin’ them killin’ me.”

  Looking round the quiet car, Lovell leaned forwards, dropping his voice to a whisper.

  “Glad to have someone like you with me, in case things get tough.”

  Herne was puzzled. There had been no armed guards on the train, and the baggage car had been more or less empty. So what was the fat man guarding?

  “I guess I can trust you, Mr. Herne, you and me being in the same line of business.”

  Lovell was obviously bursting a gut to tell him his secret, and Herne couldn’t raise the energy to stop him. Not even to tell him that it was a whole lot safer to trust nobody.

  The line of the law was very thin, and out on the frontier it sometimes got so thin that it became invisible. Some of the biggest robberies in the last twenty years had been carried out by sheriffs, or deputies, or even by bounty hunters seeing a chance of better rewards by crossing over that thin red line.

  “Yes, sir. The old eye that never sleeps is on the watch over something pretty damned precious. Not like gold or jewels. No bigger than this ...” He held his hands a few inches apart. “But heavy. Real heavy.”

  Herne nodded. “Printing plates.”

  If Jed had pulled a copperhead snake down his nose Lovell couldn’t have looked more shocked.

  “Jesus! How did you know that it’s printing plates I’m guarding?” A sudden look of suspicion. “You sure you aren’t in some manner involved in this, Mr. Herne?”

  “Mr. Lovell,” replied Herne, wearily. “If I was on your side I wouldn’t be callin’ it out to the whole world and its neighbor. If I wasn’t on your side, then I’d have killed you by now.”

  “Then how did you ...?”

  “Not gold. Heavy. The size. Has to be something worth a dollar or two. Must be printing plates.”

  “Keep your voice lower, please, Mr. Herne.” Despite the cold, Lovell was sweating. He looked round the car again, checking out that nobody was near enough to hear them.

  Jed had already checked that out, as a matter of habit. There was a group of four men down the far end that interested him. The rest of the carriage was a scattering of ordinary-looking folks. Families. Children. Pair of women traveling together; probably a mother and daughter from their looks. A priest who had sat all the journey with his nose buried in a large Bible.

  Nothing to worry about.

  But those four men ...

  One looked Mexican, with a small moustache. Two others could have been cowhands, but you didn’t often see range boys carrying their
guns as low on the hip as they did. The fourth man was dressed in a black cutaway coat with pearl buttons.

  They didn’t talk much, but when they did it was with heads together. The Mexican kept wiping the steam off the window with his sleeve and staring out. Herne watched them, wondering what they were plotting.

  Wondering about those printing plates.

  “We have an agent in Tucson, Mr. Herne, and I have to check the plates with him when we get there. A Government official will look them over before I take them on the rest of the way to San Francisco. If they fell into the wrong hands, well, I just shudder to think …”

  And he did shudder, his broad shoulders quivering violently.

  The priest across the aisle looked up curiously at the juddering of the huge frame, then went back to his quiet meditations.

  The train rolled on westwards under gray skies, across a barren and empty land, riven with great hills.

  It became colder and colder.

  It was growing darker as well as colder, with night following the slow-moving train from the rear, closing in on it like a cloaked band of Apaches, bringing the conductor along the three carriages to light the small lamps. They gave off a smoky smell of oil which mingled with the damp, chilled air.

  The bottle was empty and all Herne wanted to do was sleep again. In the morning they would pull into the station at Tucson, and there would be a lot for him to do. He nodded a goodnight to the fat agent opposite him, also giving a half smile to the priest who was looking at him over the top of the Bible.

  Most of the passengers were sleeping or readying themselves for sleep, except for the group of four men at the far end of the car. They were playing a quiet game of poker, the money chinking on the seats as they placed their bets.

  “Goodnight to you, Mr. Herne,” said Lovell, stifling a belch with the back of his hand.

  Jed closed his eyes.

  “First person to move gets a bullet through the head.” The voice was quiet. Controlled. Only just loud enough to carry the length of the car. It woke Jed up and his hand was on its way after the Colt before he even opened his eyes, checking out what was going on.

  Three of the four men were standing near the end of the carriage, where they’d been playing cards. The fourth man had disappeared. All three men held pistols, covering everyone.

  There wasn’t a lot of fuss. One of the women gave out a half-scream, but the rest sat quiet and easy, cowed by the threat of the guns.

  Jed glanced behind him, wondering if he could make it to the door out to the baggage car. Deciding that they could gun him down before he was able to move three steps. Also deciding that it really wasn’t his fight. From what Lovell had been saying, Herne guessed that the bandits must be there for a purpose. And that the purpose might be connected with those valuable printing-plates.

  “Someone’s talked,” whispered the Pinkerton agent, his face taut with horror. Fingers working like he had something sticky on them, and couldn’t work out a way to get them clean. Rubbing, edging nearer the butts of the matched pair of pistols.

  Herne wondered if he really would have the nerve to make a play under the threat of the three guns. Eyes flicking around to see if there was any other way out. The priest saw him and shrugged helplessly, the Bible closed on his lap.

  “I can’t. Just can’t,” said Lovell. “You with me?”

  Herne didn’t reply.

  Didn’t have to.

  “Men up and let the guns go. Real slow and easy.”

  It was the tall man in black speaking, smiling over the barrel of the Colt in his right hand.

  Behind him the Mexican was still peering worriedly out of the window.

  “Cal? We gonna make it up the trail into Pinaleño Mountains in this weather?”

  “Shut up, Diego. We get to the trestle and then we can make it easy up to the north.”

  Herne listened, vaguely interested to hear them discussing a region he knew well. They were making for the Pinal range. There was only one trail off a trestle bridge, and it led to a disused mining camp. He kept that to himself, figuring they wouldn’t take kindly to anyone knowing exactly where they were headed.

  Seeing his one chance slipping away as the men were disarmed, Lovell made his move. Diving sideways with a surprising speed for a fat man, he drew both pistols, and rolled left behind the seats, close by the priest.

  Jed was puzzled when none of the bandits made a try for the agent, simply standing there as if they were waiting for something further to happen.

  The priest leaned forwards, touching the kneeling Lovell on the back with the Bible, in a strange gesture, almost of blessing.

  There was a muffled explosion, and the end of the gold-blocked book seemed to explode in a haze of black powder smoke. The fat man toppled forwards, and lay still, blood trickling from a hole just below his left shoulder. The cloth of his coat smoldered from the contact burn.

  Herne didn’t move, knowing that his own life hung by a thread. The priest looked at him and shrugged his shoulders again.

  “I guess that’s what they call a book of revelations, Reverend,” said Herne.

  Chapter Five

  The missing fourth bandit had worked his way along on the roof, reaching the cab of the locomotive and stopping it by the simple expedient of shooting the driver dead and pulling back on the main brake.

  As the train lurched to a halt, Herne squinted out of the side window and saw that they were stopped near the end of a trestle bridge.

  “Stand still,” snapped one of the robbers, menacing him with a gun. Herne’s own Colt lay with the rest of the passengers’ weapons, at the feet of the man in the black coat with the pearl buttons.

  The robber in priest’s clothing was kneeling by the side of the dead man, tugging off his gun belt and removing the derringer from its holster.

  Finally trying to close the staring eyes with his thumb and giving up when they persisted in springing open, to gaze sightlessly at the ceiling.

  “You know what he did for a living, mister?” asked the “priest’, looking up at Herne.

  There didn’t seem much point in pretending ignorance, so Jed nodded. “Sure. He was an agent for the Pinkerton Detective Agency.”

  “That explains it,” laughed the man.

  “What?”

  “Why I can’t shut his eyes. Even dead he’s still tryin’ to live up to the old "eye that never sleeps" motto.”

  The joke brought howls of laughter from the rest of the bandits, now herding their prisoners into the end of the carriage away from the pile of weapons.

  Herne had already decided that he was going to just stand there and let it happen. He had no interest in the Government plates. Certainly not enough to risk his life for them.

  But there was something about the robbery that made him uneasy. None of the robbers were making any effort to hide their identities. They used names casually as if they had no fears of any of the witnesses talking about them.

  There had to be a reason for that.

  A reason that Herne was suspecting when he saw the Mexican, Diego, looking down at the drop of three or four hundred feet to the dry river-bed beneath, and smile at one of his comrades, a wall-eyed man named George.

  Jed caught the phrase “fall like dry leaves”, and had a strong feeling that it was the train and the passengers that were being talked about. If they had dynamite to blow the door of the baggage car, it would be all too easy for them to use a little of it to blow the bridge.

  “You will all stay in this one carriage, folks,” said the leader of the robbers, Cal. “You’ll soon have company. Nobody tries anything and nobody finishes up getting hurt.”

  When Herne heard the boom of an explosion, he hoped that they hadn’t harmed Becky’s coffin.

  While they waited, night closed in around the train. There were twenty-seven adults and eight children in the carriage, guarded by the Mexican and by George. Cal, the priest, whose name was Luke, and Danny, the fifth member of the gang, wer
e all outside. At least one of them had gone to fetch hidden horses; Herne could hear them whinnying in the darkness.

  He suspected that it was Danny, as Cal and Luke had been in charge of the dynamite, handling the greasy yellow sticks with casual expertise. From the noise in the baggage car it appeared that they had been successful in blowing the door without wrecking the whole works. There was the noise of splintering wood as they systematically opened every box and case in the car, seeking what they wanted.

  Herne was prepared to bet any money that they would reappear with the printing plates.

  The door opened, and all eyes turned towards the man who entered. It was the bogus priest, Luke, and he was grinning from ear to ear.

  “Got them. They was in a box marked as engineering tools. Cal’s settin’ the charges outside. George, go out there and I’ll watch with Diego.”

  “It’s damned cold out,” moaned George.

  “I go,” said the Mexican, tipping his hat courteously to the ladies.

  “Right. Cal says not to bother with taking money or rings or nothing from these folks. We caused them enough trouble anyways.”

  George laughed. “Sure. Guess we don’t want to call them no more trouble. Not at all.”

  The broad wink that he gave the departing Mexican was enough to convince Herne that the plans of the bandits didn’t include leaving any witnesses alive to talk about them. They were going to blow the bridge as soon as they were off the train, sending all their hostages on the breathless fall to the bottom of the chasm.

  If it came to that Jed had already decided that he was going to risk a jump through one of the windows, hoping that he wouldn’t plunge clean over the side of the bridge. But that would still leave a whole lot of innocent folks to die for nothing.

  Maybe there would be a better plan turn up if he stood quiet and waited.

  “Mister?”

  The priest called out again. “Mister? You. The old guy who was talking to the Pinkerton man.”

  Herne realized the gun was pointing in his direction. “Who, me?”

  “Yeah. I feel I’ve seen your face before.”

  It was one of the problems of being Herne the Hunter. Wherever you went you were likely to run into someone who knew your face. Now he thought about it, Jed had the feeling that he knew Luke. Luke ...? Luke what? Then it came to him. Fort Laramie, where they’d been having some trouble with a few Arapaho bucks. Luke Barrell. That was it. Way back in about ’seventy. He’d been caught by a posse led by Herne on suspicion of running rifles to the Indians. Two of his accomplices had been hanged and he’d been lucky enough to get off, as there wasn’t sufficient evidence to convict him.