Till Death (A Herne the Hunter western. Book 15)

by John J. McLaglen

  Both men grunted with effort; sweat glistened on their heads and strain showed in their eyes.

  Tom levered the arm higher, higher. The Apache screamed and bucked and Tom was cast up but managed to keep his hold. As he fell to the ground, all of his weight set into his two-handed grip, he heard the Indian’s arm crack as clearly as a man stepping on a grayed, brittle twig.

  The knife slid away to the ground.

  Red-shirt’s right arm hung useless and bent.

  Tom wiped his hand across his forehead and his eyes, clearing the smarting sweat and dust. When he could see clearly once more he saw that the Apache was moving towards his pistol.

  Tom sprang up and ran, wordless rage loud on his lips. He drove his left knee into the crouching Indian’s jaw and the sound was like that when he had broken his arm, but hollower, somehow louder. Tom’s fingers scooped the gun awkwardly from the ground and his thumb fumbled with the hammer.

  He couldn’t remember whether there were any shells remaining in the chamber.

  Tom’s chest was on fire. He felt without looking; looked: the front of his shirt was wet with blood, matted against his chest hair, stuck to his skin. Blood and sweat. Blood. Tom’s hand touched the center of the fire and he winced and his eyes closed.

  They didn’t open.

  Seconds.

  Sound forced the eyelids up.

  Red-shirt was close upon him, that arm still hanging, bent, like a careless child’s discarded toy. The hate in the Indian’s eyes drove into his own, sharper even than the blade of his knife. Tom’s finger no longer seemed connected to him; just something which lay against the trigger of the gun. Bullets. No bullets. He smelt the stink of the Apache’s body and breath and jabbed the barrel of the pistol upwards and his finger, for some reason of its own, squeezed back against the guard.

  The explosion welded the two men together.

  Tom felt the Apache shudder against him but by now his own eyes were closed fast and he didn’t think they would reopen.

  They fell together and the sun beat down.

  For seconds – minutes – Tom Lenegan’s mind struggled to retain consciousness. He was aware of the grease of the Apache’s hair and body and the smell of blood and excrement and several times the Indian’s hard form shuddered against him.

  Tom stopped struggling: the first black bird glistened down through the air.

  In his dream Katie’s arm wound around his neck and held him close. She was crying. Her tears ran on to his chest and his shirt was wet with them. Tom told her to stop crying - in his dream. He pressed his body against her.

  He gradually came to and when he did he saw the Apache. For what seemed longer than the seconds it was, he could not remember what had happened. Only Katie and then he knew that had been a dream. He slid, slowly, from under the Apache’s left arm and it fell lifeless to the ground. A spiral of dust rose up and Tom coughed. Christ! The coughing tore his chest apart!

  He looked down and then he did remember. All of it. He wanted to prize the shirt away and see how deep the wound was. The flap of wings distracted him. He turned his head and saw half a dozen birds of prey in an ungainly maneuver around the dead Indian pony. Further off, two birds sat on top of one of the Apaches, ugly heads dipping, rising, dipping, rising. Every few moments one or other of the birds would flap its wings and lift off into the air, circle and return.

  The rage and hatred he had seen on the Indian’s face was still there in death; lines carved into a mask, only the eyes might once have been real.

  Tom felt his head going forward and he knew that he must stop it. He pushed down with his hands and tried to straighten his arms. Flap of wings. Only in the act of waking did he realize that he’d lost consciousness again. He had no idea for how long. The sun was as strong; still high in the sky. Tom tried to get to his hands and knees and his thigh sang out and immediately he dropped back to the ground and rolled over on to his back. His eyes swam. Tom turned on to his stomach. No! On to his back, head lolling. He blinked. Through a stubborn haze shapes moved off the desert horizon and separated out. Men and horses. Tom’s pulse quickened. He tried to count: one … two … three … four … five ... his eyes flickered and shut. Mouth open, his head dropped sideways on to the dust.

  Chapter Two

  Jed Herne reined in the gelding he was riding and un-looped the canteen from the pommel of his saddle. He unstoppered it and set the round lip of the canteen to his mouth. The water was warm and brackish but at least it broke his thirst. Nothing much else was likely to do that this side of Tucson.

  Jed’s eyes scanned the terrain. A reddish-grey jumble of rock that was scattered with grey-green brush and occasional flowers which bloomed the brightest of yellows, blues and whites. Ahead the canyon trail went down steeply and leveled out more than four hundred feet below. It twisted, snake-like, between steep enclosing sides before disappearing from sight.

  Herne knew what followed.

  He knew the trail climbed more slowly until it shifted westward across the last range of hills before the desert. The San Pedro River was behind him and the streams and creeks that ran in profusion down from the high land to the north were more scattered here. Few and drying.

  Herne unknotted his bandanna and set the canteen against it, tipping the canteen so that water ran out into the brown cotton without being wasted. He stoppered the canteen and hung it back over the pommel; wiped the bandanna across his forehead and his eyes, then tied it back about his neck.

  He knew the territory right enough. He’d lived in it for three years. Three years almost to the day. And that was over three years ago and he’d not ridden back this way since. Didn’t think he ever would. Yet something inside had driven him, made him make his way back to this section of southern Arizona like he knew in his gut that if he didn’t do it then he’d never be able to live with himself deep inside.

  … following the trail of footprints round the side of the cabin through the frozen mud.

  Herne’s mind locked the memory back out. He wasn’t ready for it. Not yet. The night he’d come back from Tucson with supplies. So close to the third anniversary of his wedding to Louise.

  Towards the barn.

  ‘No!’

  The gelding lifted its head, startled at the sudden shout. Herne breathed air deep, surprised himself that he should have called aloud. He flicked the reins and set the horse in motion down the trail into the canyon. He watched the sides and left the gelding to watch the path. They’d told him at Fort Grant that two bands of Apaches had jumped the reservation and were causing havoc over an area bordered by Wharton City to the north-west and San Pedro to the south-east. One bunch of them had been rumored within a dozen miles of Tucson.

  Herne wasn’t the kind of man to take chances. Not riding into a canyon like this. Not anywhere. That was how he’d lived to the wrong side of forty.

  He sat tall in the saddle, an inch and a half over six foot. He weighed a few pounds above two hundred and his shoulders testified to the fact that aging on the frontier had robbed him of neither his suppleness nor strength. Maybe there were a few things he couldn’t do as well as he could fifteen, even ten years earlier, but that was the same for all men. The experience he’d accumulated more than made up for that.

  Besides, Herne reckoned he could still slug it out with the roughest round-house brawler he’d likely meet up with in a saloon. He could ride day and night without sleep if he had to. Most important, neither eye nor hand had failed him. If it was necessary he could pull that Colt .45 from its greased holster quicker than anyone he’d had to face: and that meant the quickest all across the south and the mid-west. Montana to the Mexican border and beyond.

  Herne’s hair hung long, touching his dark green wool shirt past the collar. It was lank and black, graying at the temples - graying more every season that came and went. And the rest of his hair too was flecked through with grey. Even the stubble of his beard, three days unshaven, was freckled with it.

  Herne click
ed his tongue against the roof of his mouth and the gelding responded to that and a slight increase in the pressure of Herne’s knees. The horse trotted down the track, Herne looking high, left and right, left and …

  ‘Whoa!’

  He hauled in on the rein with his left hand, right going across to the smooth stock of the single-shot .55 Sharps that he always carried as a saddle gun.

  There was a movement between sections of rough reddish rock, barely discernible yet ... he shaded his eyes from the sun with a scooped hand and waited. Yes, again. The slightest of signs but he was sure.

  Herne drew the Sharps and waited, the curved end of the stock set against his shoulder, eye squinting along the long barrel. Herne’s finger was easy on the trigger. He was relaxed, no way tense. The movement came and the finger began to squeeze back.

  Herne shifted the rifle away from his body and laughed so that the gelding again looked round, bemused.

  It was a wild bear, browny-black, moving slowly along a narrow crevice of rock. Herne watched the animal for several moments before sliding the Sharps back into its scabbard and setting the gelding in motion once again.

  The sky over the crested tops of the hills was pale blue with white clouds, flat and narrow, stranded across it. There was little wind and the sun’s heat oppressive. Lower down the canyon the shadow of the jagged sides provided some shelter and Herne removed his stained, curved-brim Stetson and wiped his fingers around the inside, smearing the sweat away on the leg of his pants. The pants were blue cotton, faded down the front of both legs and one knee worn almost through; his shirt was an uneven red and his hat, originally a light tan, now darkened with grease and fingering and time.

  The rest of his belongings were stuffed into the two saddle bags that sat behind him, or rolled inside the slicker that was strapped atop the bags.

  Everything he owned - it wasn’t much for more than forty years of a life.

  Herne looked round as a lone bird swept down the canyon, gliding along on the dipping current of air and then soaring away.

  Not much more, Herne thought to himself, than that old bear up there. Not much to show except that I’m still alive while so many ... so many I knew are nothing more than mounds of earth pushing up from so many hillside cemeteries all over the frontier.

  The door stood open, and a light wind had sprung up> making it creak on its hinges. He paused at the entrance, turning and looking round at the land about their spread, knowing that he was seeing it for the last time with that special vision that his wife had brought him.

  There had been a time when Jed Herne had had more than the few things he carried with him from settlement to settlement, from town to town and ferry crossing to watering hole. Almost three whole years in which he had had a wife and land and a place he’d built with his own two hands. Almost three years. Almost, for Louise and himself, a child.

  Almost.

  Hell, thought Herne. I’d as leif it was never as almost!

  As soon as the thought crossed his mind, Jed Herne knew that it wasn’t true. He wanted nothing to take those three years from him. All he wanted to be rid of was the way of their ending.

  The rising sun glistened off the slopes of white, making his eyes hurt.

  Herne set one hand to his face to wipe away the lines of sweat that were running from his forehead down either side of his nose and towards his mouth. He blinked away the sweat about his eyes and doing that he almost missed the movement ahead on the trail. A sudden blur from right to left that made Herne blink again and reach once more for the Sharps.

  He had no clear idea what it had been. Certainly nothing as bulky and cumbersome as another bear. Bigger than a coyote. A white-tailed deer? An Apache?

  Herne waited for minutes, listening acutely, watching.

  Nothing.

  Gently he touched his spurs to the gelding’s flanks and went forward, down on the canyon bed now and the sides picking up the sound of his mount’s hoofs and echoing them from side to side until they faded finally upwards into the warm air.

  For fifteen minutes Herne made slow progress through the canyon and at the far side he reined in, stood in the stirrups and swiveled round. Rock upon rock, harsh scrub and pieces of whitish stone that reflected the sun. Nothing stirred, least of all now the wind.

  Jed Herne unfastened his canteen from the saddle and swallowed a mouthful of the warm water. He hesitated, then swung down to the ground. He removed his Stetson and upturned it in his left hand, tipping the canteen over it until water covered the bottom and then some more. Quickly he set the canteen down and held the hat under the gelding’s head. The animal drank quickly, greedily, and when it was all gone looked at Herne for more. There was no more – not then.

  Herne put the wet hat back on his head and got back up into the saddle. Still nothing moved, neither in front nor behind. He began to climb the gradual slope, out of the canyon.

  ~*~

  It had taken Cyrus Clayton more than words to get his daughter to talk. As he had wielded the strap he had told himself that had he done so more often in the past few years then the present trouble would have been avoided. But bringing up a daughter without a woman in the house was not an easy task for a man with a ranch to run and four sons to raise, so perhaps Katie had suffered from neglect.

  He did not neglect her then.

  Only when she was sobbing so that it sounded as if she must choke on her own tears, did Cyrus lay the strap aside. And then she had told him what he wanted to know - what he had already more or less guessed but wanted to hear from his daughter’s own lips.

  The name of Tom Lenegan.

  Cyrus Clayton had gone to fetch his sons: Hal, Jack, Stewart and John. Horses and rifles. Ammunition. Water and supplies. Rope. He wasn’t sure how far Tom Lenegan would have got, nor if he would try to run when he got wind that the Claytons were after him.

  But, whatever he did, old Cyrus was determined to catch him and mete out the proper justice. Young tearaways with little prospect of ever amounting to anything did not go courting his daughter without his permission and get away with it. A lesson had to be taught here. To Katie as well as to anyone else who might consider his pretty young daughter easy pickings.

  Seventeen.

  Cyrus Clayton hawked a ball of phlegm into his mouth and turned his head to one side and spat. He had never guessed that picking up the Lenegan boy’s trail would be so easy - nor that when they found him it would be as it was.

  They rode in until they were sure of what they saw. Cyrus was never a tall man and now that he was tending towards fat he looked almost squat. His face was round, with a small mouth which grew a meager moustache along its upper lip-both mouth and moustache looking adrift. His dark hair was cut short and mostly hidden beneath the peaked Stetson that he mostly wore.

  All of his sons had inherited their father’s stocky body and roundness of face; all except the youngest, John. He was the only one who resembled his mother. Lean, thin, high cheekbones and skin that was fair even after the hottest sun. The youngster’s hair had been close to pure white when a kid; now it was the color of ripening corn. His father’s affections for him varied between an irrational loving and a hatred that was so intense that Cyrus wanted to strike him from his sight. Both because of the way in which John reminded Cyrus of his wife.

  ‘That’s him, all right, Pa,’ called Hal, wiping the sleeve of his plaid shirt along one side of his jaw. ‘That’s Lenegan.’

  Cyrus nodded and pulled out his saddle gun and levered a shell into the chamber.

  ‘You think there’s more Apache around, Pa?’ asked Jack.

  Cyrus looked at him as though he were a fool. ‘I do not.’

  ‘That for Lenegan?’ asked Stewart, patting the neck of the black mare he was astride.

  ‘Could be we’re too late for that,’ cut in Hal. ‘Looks like them Apache did for him first.’

  ‘Tom Lenegan really see to all them Indians by hisself, Pa?’ asked Stewart. ‘Don’t see how he could hav
e done that.’

  ‘Me neither,’ agreed Jack.

  Cyrus spat and the yellow-green ball rolled a few inches through the dust until it was choked to a stop. ‘Best we stop chawin’ and get to him an’ see. But keep your eyes skinned. I ain’t trusting nothin’ here till we get a better look.’

  The birds of prey rose up reluctantly with slow, half-sated flapping of wings. The Claytons went from one Apache to another, shaking their heads in wonder. All save Cyrus-he rode direct to Tom Lenegan and pointed his rifle down at him and waited for the least sign of movement. He was still waiting when his sons gathered round.

  ‘He dead, Pa?’

  ‘Sure he’s dead.’

  ‘An’ no good riddance.’

  Cyrus pointed to his eldest son. ‘Get down there.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Get down an’ see if he’s breathin’.’

  Hal climbed from the saddle and went, bow-legged, to where Tom Lenegan was on his back, close by the red-shirted Apache whose guts were half-spilled out, half torn away by some bird’s bloodied beak.

  ‘Jesus, Pa! It stinks down here like—’

  ‘Just get it done.’ There was a finality in his father’s voice that didn’t encourage delay.

  Hal held his head above Tom’s chest, trying to make sure that his face didn’t touch the blood-soaked shirt. He couldn’t register anything at all.