White Death

by John J. McLaglen

  Bubbles of noxious, gassy air were beginning to rise from the disturbed vat of preserving fluid and mingled with the scent of the flowers in a sickening mixture. Herne locked the door behind them, leaving Sheldon to his three or four hours’ worth of thoughts in the padded silence and darkness, and also closed the front door firmly enough to snap the catch.

  ‘I reckon he’ll suffer enough, Bill. Those hours are going to seem like years to him. He’ll hear nothing but his own blood pounding in his ears. He’ll scream and scream, and nobody’ll hear a thing. Yeah. He’s going to suffer all right.’

  There was nobody out on the main street of Gila Bend as they waded through the thick dust, feeling the sun burning down on the backs of their necks after the scented coolness of the mortician’s back room.

  They found the assistant exactly where Sheldon had predicted they would, knocking back a long glass of foaming beer in the bar of the Earlham Hotel. Mr. Albrecht was a skinny blond boy of about nineteen, who looked as though a clump of tumbleweed might blow him over. They told him that his boss had done everything necessary and given them the message for Mr. Albrecht to take the afternoon off. The boy didn’t even query the message, so delighted was he at the prospect of an unexpected half-day.

  But he did raise one point. ‘Suppose that big coffin isn’t ready in time? What’ll Mr. Sheldon think?’

  Herne patted him gently on the shoulder. ‘Don’t worry, boy. That’s his funeral.’

  Chapter Six

  The trail to Fort Yuma lay through Sentinel, along the south bank of the Gila River, past the Mohawk range of mountains. One hundred and twenty miles of sun baked riding through the lands of the Apaches.

  First night out they camped away from the trail, in case a posse was sent out from Gila Bend. But either the corpse hadn’t been discovered or Pete Sheldon wasn’t popular or powerful enough to set folks riding off into the hills after the two men who murdered him. Fort Yuma was the home of the Reverend Chester Goldsmith. Number Three on their list.

  As they lay by their small fire, made with dry twigs to keep the smoke down, Yates sucked on a stogie and drained a third of whisky he’d been carrying with him.

  ‘What do you think of the way things are going, Jed?’ he asked.

  ‘I had a friend in Denver. Stayed in a big hotel there, ‘with a room on the top floor. Ten stories high. Got drunker ‘n a skunk one night and thought he was an eagle. Jumped clean out of his window. Folks all the way down heard him saying to himself: “So far so good. So far so good.” That’s about how I see it.’

  Next morning they were up early, watering the horses enough to last them through the heat of the day. Herne had wanted to travel mainly at night to keep themselves from the baking sun, but Yates was all for pressing on during the day. If the Apaches came after them, then at least they would have a chance of seeing them and outrunning their ponies. An Indian mount was unbeatable for sure-footedness and speed of turn, but a big stallion like Billy, or a rangy mare like Cleo, would run them off their feet over reasonable terrain.

  And the Indians were there. Twice during that morning Herne spotted them. Eight Apaches, dressed in cotton shirts and trousers, with high soft boots of leather, and a colored headband. Most of them carrying carbines. The 1876 lever action Winchesters. The .45/.60 repeaters.

  ‘Nahche’s boys at a guess. I met him years back, before he became hereditary chief of the Chiricahuas,’ said Herne, craning his neck to keep an eye on the band.

  ‘Ain’t he the son of that bastard Cochise? asked Bill Yates, swatting a fly from his neck.

  ‘Right. Met him too. And Geronimo. I’d back Geronimo and twenty of his best men against a whole company of the U.S. Cavalry any day of the week. Even with old Nathan Brittles leading the dog-soldiers.’

  For an hour or more the two white men rode along, with the Apaches a quarter mile off them. Yates became angry, wanting Herne to teach them a lesson with his Sharps, but Jed refused.

  ‘I know they’re like an itch you can’t scratch, Bill, but let them be. I’m not one to interfere in things that aren’t my business. Never have been and never will be. Before Louise came along, I looked after myself. If there was any care and worry left over, then it went for my friends. Tracker and hunter I knew back years ago, Whitey Coburn, taught me that. Could do with Whitey here now. Had eyes red as coals, and hair white as a wind-washed bone. Used to scare the Great Spirit himself out of the redskins.’

  Finally, in the early afternoon, the leader of the pack of Chiricahuas gave a whooping, shrill cry, and waved his rifle over his head. Both Yates and Herne automatically drew their Colts, but the Apaches simply set heels to their mounts all galloped off ahead of them, towards the west.

  ‘Where they goin’ in such an all-fired hurry?’ wondered Yates. ‘

  ‘I saw someone flashing a mirror up ahead. Among those rocks yonder. There must be a scout up there who’s seen something.’

  The rocks ahead rose in a tumbled heap for a mile or so, with the trail winding like a snake with a broken back among them in a maze of arroyos and blind canyons. A perfect place for an ambush, and Yates willingly agreed with Herne’s suggestion that they should detour around it and come down over the top on the side nearer to Fort Yuma.

  ‘We should be in Yuma by sundown, day after next,’ guessed Bill. ‘I can’t wait to get at another of them bastards. We gotta try and think up some new way of making this preacher suffer. Kind of take him out of town a spell and work on him. Use some of the tricks you used to talk about that the Arapaho squaws used to use.’

  Herne was slightly disgusted with Yates’s obvious delight and anticipation at the prospect of more killing and more suffering. Jed looked upon what they were doing as a mission of revenge. Just as he’d stamp on a poisonous snake and not think any more about it. And if he could throw in a spot of suffering as well, then that was fine. Divine retribution was down in the Bible, and he’d help things along. But it was becoming clear that his partner was beginning to enjoy the violent aspects of a life that he’d never really experienced before.

  His thoughts were interrupted by the sudden crackle of gunfire, coming from ahead of them, over the far side of the boulder-splashed plateau.

  ‘Winchesters. Lots of them. The Apaches must have found what they were looking for.’

  Herne reined in, scanning the rocks ahead. ‘Hold it, Bill. Might be a trap. We reckon to go galloping to the rescue, and they sit up there and pick us off.’

  ‘What the Hell do you want to do, Jed? Sit here on our asses while they massacre someone?’

  Easing the Sharps in its long holster by the saddle-horn, Herne swung down and led Billy forwards at a slow walk. Yates also got off Cleo, and followed him. Beyond the next ridge, the shooting was still going on.

  ‘Leave them here. Less they call and give us away,’ hissed Jed, tethering Billy to a boulder so carved by wind and rain A that it resembled an Indian wickiup. Yates tied Cleo to the same rock and they crept off, cautiously approaching the lip of the ravine. Herne carefully slid the barrel of the Sharps through a gap between two stones, easing himself up until he could just see over the edge to the bottom of the canyon beneath. The Chiricahuas they had seen had joined up with ten; or twelve others, and they were attacking a small train of three wagons, pulled by oxen. The Apaches were riding round the outside of the wagons, firing from low behind their, ponies’ necks.

  ‘They’re dead,’ he said quietly, as Yates flattened himself beside him. ‘If they’d got those wagons turned against the wall of the arroyo there, it would have given them something to shoot from. As it is, out there in the open, all apart from each other, they’re dead.’

  Even in the half minute the two men had been watching, all but one of the oxen had been shot by the Apaches, leaving the canvas-covered wagons as helpless as buffalos in a swamp of quicksand.

  ‘How many whites?’

  Jed tried to count, but the brightness of the sun concealed the muzzle flashes and he had to guess. ‘
Two or three in the lead wagon. One or two in the next. Maybe four in the last one. If they all make a run for it; try and climb that face over to the north, and strike for the Gila, then maybe some of them could make it.’

  Above the whooping of the Apaches, and the cracking and ricocheting of the bullets, they could hear a child crying, but it was impossible to make out where the noise was coming from. One of the Indians suddenly threw up his arms as a bullet hit him in the chest, blowing a hole out of the middle of his back big enough to put your fist in. He fell among some boulders and never moved.

  ‘That’s one on stony ground, like the preachers say,’ commented Herne. ‘

  ‘What we going to do, Jed?’ Yates had his rifle ready. He eased back the hammer, aiming at one of the Apaches as he rode by, a couple of hundred feet away.

  Herne reached out and pushed the barrel down. ‘No. Those people down there are doomed. No matter what we do. From up here we could pick off maybe five or six of the Indians. The rest would go behind those rocks and wait. More would circle behind us. When we move, they hit us. When they’ve hit us, then they come back and finish off those folks. They, Bill, are going nowhere. If we pull back quiet, and ride round to the west, along under the foothills of Coyote Peak, then we’ll make it all right.’

  ‘But …’

  Herne slowly turned his head to stare at his partner.

  Yates tried to meet his gaze, but the cold depths were too much for him and he blinked, and looked down.

  ‘I guess you know what you’re doing, Jed,’ he muttered, ‘But I reckon we should have done something for those poor souls.’

  ‘If it makes your conscience sit easier, then we’ll do something for them,’ said Herne as they wriggled back below the skyline.

  ‘What?’

  ‘We can pray for them.’

  Yates stood first guard.

  Herne slept, as always, easily and without dreaming, though he had thought for a long while about Louise, his mind going back to the good times they’d had over the last three years, and finding his fingernails biting into the pad of his hands as he remembered again how he’d found her swinging slowly in the cold barn, the new hemp rope creaking a little under her weight.

  There were two of her murderers dead already. And they would hunt down the other five in time. Herne knew well enough that the day might come when the bullet travelled the other way, and he was prepared for it. He reckoned that, without the help of his young wife, he would have been pushing up the flowers in some border town under an unmarked grave long ago. So those three years were like a bonus. A bonus that he was prepared to spend in avenging her death.

  As he slipped into the total blackness of sleep, Herne’s last thoughts were of Louise. How she had looked in her thin summer nightdress, and how he felt the heat of her body through the cotton, her breasts pressing insistently against his naked chest. Her fingers feeling for him, grasping the swelling of his body, pulling it towards her and rolling him on top, so that he could thrust into her.

  There’d been times in the past, when he’d been holed up somewhere for weeks on end, or in jail maybe, or in the stockade, when Jed had been without a woman. He was the sort of man who needed to use women. To seek out the relief that they could give him. It had already been near a month since the last time with Louise and his need was growing. Before he finally slept, he resorted to what the soldiers in the Civil War had christened the ‘five-fingered widow’.

  For Yates, the time passed slowly. They knew that there might be Apaches in the region, roaming about flushed with their successful attack on the wagons. So there was no fire, and their hard-tack and beans had been eaten cold. At least there had been the reserve –– and last –– bottle of liquor that he’d brought all the way from Phoenix in his saddle-bag, carefully wrapped in his cleanest dirty shirt.

  His thoughts too were travelling into the past. He briefly wondered how Rosie was, and whether she’d be able to keep that brat, Becky, off his neck for much longer. And he thought about Rachel, and as the whisky reached him, he wept a tear or two for her, and her lonely death. But his thoughts were more of what had happened since. Of the gun spurting bullets into the helpless figure of Nolan. The blood oozing through the white sheet draped over the corpse; the horror in Sheldon’s eyes as he finally realized what they intended to do to him. The satisfying thud that he’d almost felt as Jed’s boot cracked home in the pit of Sheldon’s stomach.

  And there was more to come. Five more of them to go.

  But next time he was going to run it, and not that old bastard Herne, spoiling all his fun. It was his wife that’d died and he was going to take it out on the remaining five men.

  Without his noticing it, Yates’s breath started to come a little faster as he thought about all the things that he could do. Things he’d always wanted to do, and had only ever been able to do to animals. He remembered a dog he’d been given as a boy, and what he’d done to that when it dared to snap at him for his tormenting. The thought was a good one, and his fingers slipped down into his lap, and he began to touch himself through the tight cloth at the crotch of his trousers.

  Faster, as his mind unlocked the secret door of the quadroon girl down in Baton Rouge, when he was supposed to be buying stock for the spread.

  Faster, as he recalled what he’d done to her. The eyes bulging over the thick gag. The point of the knife teasing between her thighs. The way her brown body had jerked and twisted.

  His hand moved faster, more insistently.

  Then the final plunging thrust, and then the red, spurting all over him. Dressing. Scrambling out of the window while they hammered on the door. Running. Galloping all through the night to get well away by dawn.

  A closed room in his past that he only ever opened when he was quite sure that he was alone.

  But he wasn’t.

  Just as he neared his lonely, vicious climax, he looked up. And nearly passed out from shock. Leaning against tree, smiling drunkenly at him, were two Apaches. The moonlight was strong enough for Yates to recognize them as Chiricahuas — almost certainly the victors from the raid they’d witnessed earlier in the day.

  One of them had a crude bandage high up on his left arm, the blood dried brown. Near black in the stark moonlight. The other wore a framed daguerreotype of a little girl, tied round his neck by a piece of ribbon, like some grotesque item of jewelry.

  Yates was petrified with fear and shock, sitting there staring up at the visions of horror. One waved what he at first thought was a tiny baby’s corpse at him, until he, realized that it was a child’s rag doll.

  ‘You play the big stick!’ croaked one of the Apaches, nudging the other, and pointing at the dark stain on the front of the white man’s trousers.

  Yates swallowed hard, realizing that he hadn’t breathed for nearly a minute. Only ten yards away, he knew that Herne would be asleep, and he wondered how he could wake him without getting shot in the belly by one of the Winchesters that the Indians carried.

  Both of them laughed heartily, grinning vacantly at Yates.

  ‘This good hair. You buy? Trade for whisky? Trade for guns?’

  In his hand the Apache held a bundle of scalps, dangling as casually as if they were a bunch of beaver pelts. Even in the white light of the moon, Yates could see that heavy clots of blood still hung from the heads of hair. And that some were fair and long. Like those of a white woman.

  Where the hell was Herne? They were making enough noise to waken a barracks full of drunk troopers, and still he hadn’t appeared. Or maybe he was already dead. That was a chilling thought for Yates, for he knew deep down how much he relied on the big man’s expertise.

  The two Indians were doing a shuffling dance, arm linked in arm. The taller of the two, the one who spoke the guttural English suddenly stopped, and pointed at Yates.

  ‘You not dance. Why?’

  With Apaches, Yates had heard from other men who’d encountered them, it was often possible to escape with your life if you ha
ppened to meet them when they were in the good mood. But that right mood could turn in the falling a leaf to terrifying anger.

  And it looked like that moment of change had just arrived.

  ’While the tall Apache glowered at Yates, the other one threw his head back and laughed, showing a gleaming row of teeth. The white man looked at him, wondering if he could draw and fire fast enough to kill them both, and deciding that he couldn’t. When he saw a very strange thing.

  The laughing Indian, on the left, put his head even further back, and Yates thought he saw the flash of a silver necklace round his throat. Even more bizarre than the angle of the man’s head was that he had two mouths. One a great dark slash across the front of his neck. That spouted blood, splattering on the dry ground immediately in front of Yates. The Apache reached up to his neck, as though he was trying to check an insect that had stung him, then he slumped forward as if every muscle in his body had stopped working at the same moment, and crashed down on the dirt.

  His companion glanced sideways, obviously thinking that the drink had finally caught up with his friend, then turning and looking more carefully, eyes opening wider as he saw the spreading pool of blood still gushing from the severed throat.

  While Yates drew his Colt, the Indian stared at him as though he was a great shaman who had killed his companion in total silence and without moving.

  ‘Don’t shoot,’ said Herne quietly, rising like a ghost from the scrub behind the Apache, the moonlight glinting silver on his graying hair. ‘Might be more.’

  Before the bemused Chiricahua could turn to face his new enemy, Jed plunged the bayonet in between the fourth and fifth ribs on the left-hand side, the point of the knife penetrating so deeply that it actually caused a small tear in the front of the cotton shirt.

  Mouth sagging open, the Indian was lowered carefully and silently to the earth, the Winchester clattering from his nerveless fingers.