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The sun was getting well up, and its warmth was melting the snow fast. Its rays broke through the open doorway, striking across towards Louise, and as she moved through them, Jed saw her face properly for the first time.
It took all his self-discipline to stop himself jumping up and grabbing her. There was a great bruise under her right eye, and her nose had been bleeding. A thread of black blood crept drily from the corner of her mouth, down across her chin, on her neck. And there were deep scratches around her throat.
He realized that Yates had also seen it at the same moment, hearing the strangled gasp, and feeling the man’s body tense in the chair beside him, ready to leap up. Herne reached across and seized his arm, squeezing it with all his strength …
WHITE DEATH
Herne the Hunter #1
Copyright © John J. McLaglen 1976
Cover image © 2012 by Westworld Designs
This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book
Published by Piccadilly Publishing at Smashwords: July 2012
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. If you’re reading the book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Published by Arrangement with Elizabeth James.
This is for Patrick. One of the boys in the backroom; and a friend. Thanks.
Chapter One
Gradually, the young girl’s finger rubbed a small circle in the ice that frosted the inside of the cabin window.
‘We’ll all gather at the river …’
Her voice was sweet, bringing a smile to the lips of the woman with her. Although she had been married for very nearly three years, she was still not twenty. Only five years older than the girl.
‘The beautiful, the beautiful river …’
Logs crackled in the small fireplace, sending a shower of sparks whirling up and out into the freezing air. Louise Herne hummed along with the girl while she worked at the dough, shaking her head as a ringlet of hair dropped over her blue eyes.
‘We’ll all gather at the river …’
It had been much better weather when she and Jed had married on March 20th, 1879. The sun had shone on them, and it had made the bitter objections of her parents seem less oppressive. She smiled again to herself at the memory of that year. It was hard to blame her parents. She’d been Miss Louise Ann Harvey. Just sixteen and a shy young virgin.
He had been more than twice the age – thirty-five. But it hadn’t been the gap in their ages that had bothered her minister father and teacher mother. It had been Jed’s reputation.
‘That flows by the throne of God.’
As the girl at the window ended the verse of the great frontier hymn, Louise’s eye was caught by the firelight glinting off the polished brass of the rifle-stock. An old Sharps single-shot, hung up there over the hearth ever since they’d moved to the spread near Tucson shortly after their marriage.
Becky Yates, only child of their nearest neighbors, caught her looking at the gun and came and stood by her at the long, scrubbed pine table.
‘How many men did Jed kill with that?’ she asked.
That had been the main objection of her parents. Jed, her husband. Jedediah Travis Herne. One of the deadliest gunmen that the West had ever known. Lethal with handgun, rifle or knife. A man who had lived all his life on or beyond the fringes of the law, but who had somehow escaped seeing his name heading a ‘Wanted’ flyer.
But that didn’t mean he wasn’t well enough known. There was hardly a man in the South-West who hadn’t heard of Herne.
Herne the Hunter!
‘Land’s sakes, Becky. You know I can’t abide to talk about the bad old days when Jed was a different man.’
The girl grinned impishly. ‘But he killed a powerful lot of men, in those days. My Pa says that Jed Herne was the most feared man west of the Pecos River. And east of it too.’
Louise knew it was true, and in an odd way it made her proud of her husband, to know that he was a man that other men would still step aside for. And to know that he had given it all up just for love of her.
At that thought, she felt the slightest movement in her stomach, and resisted a temptation to clasp her hands to it. But it was too soon. Too soon to be sure. There’d been two other times when she’d guessed that their dreams were going to be fulfilled. And each time there had come a rushing of blood while she was working with Jed in the fields of their small spread. And their hopes had been left a dried and shriveled hank of skin and flesh lying in the red dust
Becky went back to trying to see out through the window at the snowy prairie beyond. The bread was nearly ready, and Louise thought about baking an apple pie ready for when Jed returned from his shopping expedition in nearby Tucson. There was a basket of fine apples hanging up that she could use.
‘Bringing in the sheaves …’
She raised her voice to join the girl on this one, just about her favorite hymn, and one of the religious songs that her mother had loved best. As she sang, she thought again of that feeling deep inside her. And she remembered what had happened last Fall. Working out until all hours, the swelling in her belly growing larger. The discomfort during the long warm nights, as she twisted and turned, trying to find a position to accommodate her bulk. Yet loving it, because she carried their child. She was sure that it would be a boy, and that he would be called Alexander, because she had always admired the great general in her school books.
But Doc Newman had come late, stinking of the cheap alcohol they sold in the ‘Mother Lode’ in Tucson. Although she tried to blame him for what happened, Louise knew well enough in that secret room at the back of her mind that drunk or sober it wouldn’t have made a spot of difference. The child had been born dead after a three day labor.
The cord had become tangled round its neck, and it’d strangled to death inside her, without ever having a chance of life.
It had been a boy child.
‘What you thinking ’bout, Louise?’
She started out of her reverie, forcing a smile, feeling that this time it was going to be all right, and again it was going to be a boy.
‘Whether to do a big apple pie for Jed and your Pa, for the morrow. That is if’n they make it back through all this terrible weather. What’s it like out there?’
She joined Becky at the small window, peering out across the great white blanket that had fallen unexpectedly over the last two days. It had drifted seven feet thick round the back of the house, and across by the barn. More by good fortune than anything else, they still had a little of their winter feed stowed away in the loft, piled high in a great corner of dry sweet-smelling hay.
Using that, they’d been able to feed their stock and by using some of their reserve of kindling, Louise had managed to keep a good fire going and hold the chill at bay, though it was still cold enough near the door and the windows for your breath to mist in the air.
The wind had fallen away, and it had left a path exposed across the top of the ridge that separated the Herne spread from that of the Yates family a quarter mile away. Louise got nervous easily, and had been glad of the company of young Becky. Though she was a married woman, she found that she could talk more easily to Becky than she could to her plump, comfortable mother, Rachel Yates, who had com
e striding across with her daughter earlier that day, wrapped up to the eyes against the blizzard with a horse—blanket over her gown, and a slicker of her husband, William Butler, known as ‘Wild Bill’ after the lawman.
‘Train’s still there.’
The Southern Pacific Railroad ran within a quarter mile of their little ranch, and it often brought a tinge of homesickness to Louise when she heard the low moan of the midnight special barreling over the plains, its headlight raking across the thin curtains of their bedroom; Some days she’d walk down the gentle slope towards the line when there was a passenger express due, and she’d stand and watch it roar past, feeling the wind tug at the hem of her printed cotton dress, catching a glimpse of the rich folk up there, traveling in style. Feeling the cool Arizona rain pattering on her bonnet, soaking through to her flesh, and trickling down the hollow between her breasts
But the train that had stood locked in by the snow on the shallow sweep of track before the line reaches Tucson was no ordinary express. Nor a freight. It only had two coaches, and the locomotive was smaller than usual. Rachel Yates had said that was why it hadn’t been able to get moving through the banks of driven snow. .She’d claimed it was a special, ordered by some rich young dude from back East for some of his gambling friends. But that was talk, and Rachel Yates loved to talk more than most.
There was something odd about it, that was for certain. There had been lights blazing on it all through the night, and Louise had heard singing and shouting. The noise of breaking glass, and several shots. She had slipped the bar across the front door that Jed had installed after some trouble when a few drunk bucks off the reservation had come whooping round one night in eighty-one.
‘Yes. At least it looks like the weather’s going to set in for a change. No snow for near three hours.’
Becky rubbed again at the window, trying to breathe on it to clear the ice off both inside and outside. Crystals formed in a diamond pattern, even while she tried to make out whether anything more was happening down by the railroad.
‘Getting dark, Louise. Looks like they’ve let the fire bank down on the train there. Must be getting powerful low on wood.’
For a moment, Louise opened the front door, and stepped out on the front porch, feeling the familiar squeak of the loose board to the right. She pulled a shawl round her shoulders, hunching up against the chilly wind that blew clean across the land from the High Sierras. She sniffed the air, trying to scent a change, but she was still a city girl, and the ways of the frontier weren’t yet open to her.
‘Time you was going off to your Ma, Becky. Afore night comes up on you.’
The girl laughed at the older woman’s caution. ‘I don’t guess that I’m going to take much harm from that little walk. Why, the snow didn’t even cover up my button boots on the way here, and the wind’s scoured the path clear since then.’
They both stepped back inside, glad of the warmth from the fire and the wave of heat when Louise opened the side oven. She glanced at a big carved clock on their side table, enjoying the slow rhythm of the brass pendulum, watching its reflections glimmering off the inside of the log walls of their cabin. It was a secure place, and it gave her pleasure to know that her son would be born here. Round about late Fall she guessed, as near as she could reckon. It almost seemed to her as though she knew the very night it had happened.
Jed had been out hunting with Wild Bill, and they’d come back very late. She’d got up and put a pot of coffee on the fire. Black, and strong enough to float a horseshoe on, was the way her man liked his coffee. He’d come in through that door, big and broad, with snow and ice dusting his beard and eyebrows, glistening in his mane of graying hair. And he’d held her and kissed her, his mouth tasting of the cold. Picked her up in her blue flannel nightdress, without even waiting for his coffee, and tumbled her on the bed. And she moaned and held him close, feeling the thawing snow dripping over her bare legs, and falling cold on her breasts.
It had been that night, she was sure of it. Jed had taken her and moaned and shuddered as he spent himself in her, lying close and squeezing her so hard afterwards that she’d found bruises on her ribs. He was a very powerful man. He’d whispered to her how much he loved her. How glad he was that he’d abandoned the futile life of a gunman for her.
‘I always knew that there was only one way it would end for me,’ he’d said. ‘If you hadn’t come along, Louise, I’d have gone on and on. Another town. Another killing. Another bounty. Gunning down some poor bastard, pardon me, dear. A boy maybe who’d taken a wrong step, and then I’d shoot him, and collect fifty dollars. There was always the punk kid with the shiny new Colt, itching to prove he was the best. Looking for the reputation as the man who gunned down Herne the Hunter.’
It had been true, she knew that. When she met him, back in 1878, he’d been a top gun in the Lincoln County range wars, riding with Garrett and Billy Bonney, the Kid. At thirty-four Jed Herne was old as gunmen went, and his age and survival was the best tribute he could have to his skill, when nearly all of his contemporaries were in Boot Hills from Butte to El Paso.
‘It’d happen one day. I’d ride into some small town, plumb in the middle of nowhere. Before my boot-heel was even out of the stirrup, there’d be a cold voice from out of the shadows, telling me to step down easy, and keep my hands well clear of the holster. And there he’d be. I don’t know who. Not Billy, or Wyatt, or Wes. Just a man with no face and no name. And I’d slap the rig fast as I knew how, but he’d be there before me. I tell you, Louise, that I wake at night feeling that bullet draining my life out of me. That’s what’d have happened to me without you coming along.’
Having delivered that speech, just about the longest she’d ever heard him make, Jed had fallen asleep, still in his hunting clothes. Still stretched out on top of her, and her with her nightdress all up round her hips in the most shameless manner.
Louise blushed at the memory, and hurried to get down the apples to cover her embarrassment. Close though she was to Becky, there were some things that a married woman just couldn’t rightly talk about to a girl whose breasts were only just beginning to form. Becky might be a beauty one day, but now she was a skinny, gawky girl, with deep-set serious eyes, and a fine wide mouth that only laughed when she thought something was really funny. A prominent jaw that promised trouble for some man someday.
‘Come on now, Becky Yates. What’ll your Ma think of me if’n I send you back home without a bite to eat inside of you?’
‘I’m not hungry, Louise. Truly, I’m not.’
‘Well …. Here, have one of these apples. I declare that they’re some of the best I’ve managed to keep.’ She rummaged among them, looking for one without any blemish. Both of them jumped when the train trapped in the snow gave a sudden mournful blast on its siren, sending the echoes ringing across the valley, bouncing back off the low hills away to the east. They giggled like a couple of school-girls caught in some conspiracy at the way they’d leaped with shock. The snow had blanketed all noise for the last couple of days, giving the spread the strange and unreal atmosphere of a painting.
‘That one,’ said the young girl, picking out a line cherry pippin, rubbing it against the hem of her dress to wipe off the winter dust.
‘I’ll get you a glass of milk to wash it down, Becky, and then you really must be on your way.’ As she went to the crock to pour out a mug of the creamy liquid, Louise jumped again, unable to restrain a gasp.
‘What is it?’ asked Becky, the apple frozen halfway to her mouth. ‘Have you got the colic, Louise? Perhaps I should stay with you. I can easily go home and tell Ma and then come right on back.’
It was tempting. The wind howled around the roof, and the windows rattled, and the door sometimes shook and banged as if a bear was trying to force its way in.
‘No. It was just a … Will you keep a secret if I tell it you?’
Becky nodded, eyes sparkling. ‘Yes, of course I will, Louise.’
‘Even from your Ma?�
��
‘Yes. Gross my heart and hope to die.’
Louise leaned forward over the table, her hands stirring up the flour. She dropped her voice to a more confidential whisper. ‘I’m going to have a baby.’
‘Oooh!’ Becky squealed with delight, clapping her hands, the apple rolling to the floor. ‘When? A boy? How soon?
‘Oh, Louise, I’m so gosh darned pleased I swear that I could blow up and burst.’
The older woman smiled at her exuberance. ‘It made me jump a little when I felt it move inside of me. I figure it’ll be round about October, near as I can reckon it. Maybe late in September. And of course it’ll be a boy. I can tell it will. That’s what Jed wants?
On an impulse, Becky ran round the table, and kissed Louise on the cheeks. ‘I’m so pleased. And now I have to stay with you!’
‘No. Your mother would want to know why, and I don’t want anyone to know until Jed. I aim to tell him on our third anniversary. It’s on Monday.’
‘I know. Ma and Pa have a little surprise tucked away for you, but I haven’t been able to find out what it is. What’s Jed giving you?’
With a small sigh, Louise bent down and picked up the discarded apple, wiping it absently between her fingers.
‘Well … don’t rightly know that I ought to tell you, seeing what a chatterbox you are.’ She saw the look of crushed disappointment on the girl’s face. ‘But seeing as how you’re just about my best friend…’
Becky took the apple back. ‘Hey! This is a really lovely pippin, you know. Sorry, I shouldn’t have interrupted you. Ma’s always telling me off for that. Go on.’
‘Well, you recall that pretty picture book of things you can buy in the big stores back east? Mail order things?’
‘Yes. Ma wanted Pa to order some chairs from it, but he said as how the ones we’ve got are fine and dandy as far I he’s concerned, and he wasn’t going to waste no precious dollars on that.’ .
‘Well, there’s the most beautiful dress in there. Dark green velvet, with white lace at the collar and round the cuffs. Direct from Paris, France, it said in the book. I sat there with that on my lap for night after night, sighing after it until I reckon he finally noticed it. One night I left it open on the table, while he stayed down honing that old knife of his. Next morning, when I came down early, I saw that it had been moved, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed and just hoping.’
White Death Page 1