Like well-trained puppets, all five of the boys looked dutifully at where he pointed. It took them around a half second to realize they’d been taken.
And that half second was far too long for them to try and make up against Whitey Coburn and Herne the Hunter.
It was as though there’d never been the years apart for the two men. It worked like they’d talked it through, agreeing in those short few words who would try and take which of the boys.
The first shot was from Coburn, straight through the middle of the German’s chest, sending the scatter-gun spinning uselessly from his hands. By then Jed had snatched his own gun from the belt, feeling the grips chillingly cold to his fingers. Cocking it and snapping off the first of his shots at the fatter figure of Jason, hitting him in the stomach, doubling him up like a kick, swinging to aim next at the two Winchesters.
They were just beginning to react to what was happening, and one of them had started to duck away, opening his mouth to scream a warning. It was the Mexican, and Jed’s second bullet hit him high at the angle of the jawbone, just under the left ear. Cutting off the cry in a splatter of bone splinters and choking blood, the heavy slug ricocheting on and upwards, behind the nose, popping the left eye neatly from its socket and finally exploding out from the top of the man’s head. But its force was spent and it didn’t quite tear through the Mexican’s hat, merely raising a lump that became instantly soggy with brains and blood.
The eye hung from the raw socket by a tangle of tissue and nerve endings, and the man’s hand groped at it even as he fell dead in the snow, a river of scarlet washing from his open mouth, dotted with fragments of broken teeth.
But Herne wasn’t concerned with the corpse. His worry was about the living. Out of the corner of his eye as he moved to the right, thumb cocking the hammer of the Colt for the third shot, he saw Whitey’s second bullet hit Babe Wood in the shoulder, spinning him against a tree, where he fumbled with his left hand, tugging feebly with the glove, to get off a shot
For a moment Herne hesitated, wondering whether to go for the injured man, or for Pete Austin who’d moved faster than any of them, out of the line of Whitey’s sight, ducking and sprinting for the trees, firing off a snap shot at Herne as he ran.
The bullet was way off target, probably at least a yard he decided, hearing it tear into a tree a dozen paces behind him. He quickly straddled his legs, giving himself a firmer base, holding his right wrist in his left hand, and squeezed the slim trigger of the Colt. Felt the kick of the recoil, and saw Austin slide forwards on his face through the snow, the gun arcing from his left hand to fall through the lower branches of a nearby pine, scattering the body with powdery snow.
Immediately after his third shot, like an echo, he heard the boom of Coburn’s gun, and a groan from Babe Wood. He didn’t look round, seeing that Janson had clawed his way up off the ground to his knees. His left hand folded across his body as though he was trying to hold his stomach together, the right hand desperately trying to level his gun at Herne. Jed cocked and fired almost without thinking, so fast was his reaction. The bullet hit the fat youth in the chest, knocking him over in a flailing tangle of limbs, arms and legs kicking and scrabbling in reflex actions.
There was a man moaning, and the harsh stench of cordite hanging in the air of the clearing. And the scorched smell of what remained of Coburn’s gloves, still smoldering in the center of the fire. Drawing a deep breath, Herne straightened up and looked round.
Rivera, undoubtedly dead. One.
Janson; he walked over to the body, but the blank eyes, already coated with a film of moisture, told their own undeniable story. Two.
Pete Austin, the stain darker on his dark coat, just under the left shoulder-blade. Herne rolled him over with a boot in the ribs and saw the teeth pulled back from the lips in a last snarl of defiance. Three.
Netzen, the German, his body propped against the bole of a tree, hands pressed to a wound in the middle of his chest. As Herne reached out and touched him the hands dropped to his sides and the body fell over. Four.
Herne walked over and stood by Whitey, who was already methodically levering out the spent cartridges, letting them drop to the earth, and inserting fresh rounds. Looking down wordlessly at the boy named Wood. His groans were getting weaker.
He lay on his back, wrapped in so many layers of warm clothing that he looked like a beetle that had been turned over and couldn’t right itself again. He was bleeding copiously from the shoulder, and from a hole in the neck. Every time he breathed, head lifting with the effort, blood bubbled from his throat. A bright, shocking red. And each time that happened, he groaned.
‘Lungs?’ said Herne.
Coburn nodded.
‘Help me,’ pleaded Wood, face wrinkling with the pain of each breath.
‘Nothing we can do, boy. You done made your bed when you threw in with the others. I’m sorry, boy. Never did enjoy killing young folks.’
‘I’m not goin’ to die?’
Coburn slipped his gun back in its greased holster, stooping to tug a pair of gloves from the dead German’s hands before he replied. ‘No point in lyin’ to you, son. I seen men throat-shot like you before, and none of them lived above a few minutes. If’n you got any prayers, or messages, I’d do my best to see they got through for you, Babe.’
‘Name’s not Babe, you bastard. It’s Abilene.’
The boy tried to raise himself, but the effort brought a fountain of blood to his mouth. He made one attempt to spit it out but it choked him, and he slumped back dead.
Jed stepped away from the bodies, reloading his Colt. Looking up at the sky, trying to gauge the weather. It seemed a little warmer, which probably meant a heavy fall of the snow was imminent. There was a thud in the tree close by his head, and his bayonet stuck there, quivering and humming. Without turning round he tugged it free and slid it into the sheath in his boot. Settled the gun in its holster, straightened, and sighed.
‘Now, Whitey?’
‘Turn round, Jed. Don’t do to talk to an old friend with your back turned away.’
Herne turned slow and easy, feeling the cold gripping his fingers, remembering that Coburn had picked up another pair of gloves. Recalling how wearing gloves had slowed down the gunmen.
His old friend stood facing him, around twelve paces away, hand down by his side. Palm forwards. Wearing the gloves of the dead German.
‘Here, Jed?’
‘No. One day, I guess, Whitey. But if you can wait a while, then so can I.’
‘Get this sorted out, then we’ll come back to it.’
‘Right.’ Jed grinned, feeling a sudden rush of pleasure at being with a friend again. ‘Best get back to the girl.’
As they walked together away from the shambles of death, the snow that Herne had suspected began to fall in earnest.
Chapter Four
Alone with the two horses, higher up the side of the valley, Becky had waited for Jed to return. Every now and again she looked across through the snow flurries at Mount Abora, hanging on the edge of the mountain like a flying buttress on a cathedral wall. Wondering where Jed was and what he was doing.
She found it hard to consider the possibility - the probability - that the house beyond the lake was the home of the last two members of that snowbound train. The last two men who’d done that thing to her mother. And then killed her. She thought for a moment about what it was they’d actually done. Becky was old enough, and had lived on a homestead long enough, to have a fair idea of the basic facts of life. But she found it almost impossible to reconcile the idea of a stallion or a bull, servicing their mates, with the fading memory of her parents. And the idea of vengeance for something that had happened nearly a year ago still seemed strange.
Yet the idea of the killing was oddly exciting. She had always been frightened of Jedediah Herne, seeing him as a mystic figure. A man whose name had once been on everyone’s lips and whose guns once lay wrapped in oiled cloths in the locked drawers of a burea
u. Now she rode alongside him, and helped him. And watched him kill.
Becky was conscious of a peculiar fluttering at the pit of her stomach, and she pressed her hand through the layers of warming cloth. Squeezing her firm young thighs together.
Smoke from the small fire drifted around her and she coughed, looking up at the heavy sky, wondering what she should do if it started to snow and it made the fire smoke even more. Jed hadn’t told her.
Then she heard shooting. Muffled and dim as distant drums, but shooting. She’d heard enough in the last few months to never ever mistake it again for anything else. She stood up and ran to the edge of the bluff, shading her hand against the whiteness, staring towards the house. It seemed still and quiet, and, in fact, she could have sworn that the noise of the gunfire had come from the nearer side of the lake.
How many shots had there been? Becky tried to remember, still listening for a clue as to what might be happening, the warmth in her stomach turning to a chill of bitter fear. It had sounded like three or four, but close together, as though there had been an ambush. And after that, silence. So if there had been an ambush then it had been successful.
‘Coburn!’ she breathed.
The memory of that lean hank of wind-washed bone with his sunken red eyes and his silky white hair had stayed with her ever since she first saw him, clouding her waking hours and haunting her nights. When she woke sweating, fingernails dug into her palms from the nightmare, it was Isaiah Coburn who peopled her dark world.
Only the previous night she had been shaken awake by Jed, shocked by the cold of the night air, eyes staring at him as though she had never seen him before. He told her she’d been starting to cry out. She hadn’t told him why. The nightmare was too present to talk it away.
There’d been a vast, rambling mansion, like ones she’d seen in engravings in books, with long dusty corridors, lined with dark oil paintings. She’d been in a white dress, speckled with the webs of spiders, and she’d been running. Running as if her life depended on it, along corners, past guttering lamps. Then she’d been at the top of a flight of wide stairs, with moldering banisters along a landing. She’d paused and had looked down over the balustrade, and had seen the thing that pursued her.
It was tall, wrapped in a long gown, with a hood that covered its face, drowning the features in a pool of black shadow. Becky remembered trying to flee, but her feet wouldn’t function properly, and she had struggled on as though she was trapped in a river of molasses, while the creature glided easily up the stairs after her.
By turning her head to one side she was able to watch it between the banisters, its face still hidden. Her heel had caught in a loop of the rotting carpet and she had fallen full-length, in a dreadful slow-motion flailing, ending up with her face pressed close to the bars of the staircase, only inches away from her pursuer.
Slowly, like a dry leaf caught over a campfire, it moved towards her. Its hand, with long yellow fingernails, went to the front of the hood, and in a sudden sharp movement, tugged it off. The memory, even in the cold gray light of the fall afternoon, made Becky draw her breath.
A face stripped of solid flesh, just covered in white parchment skin. The eyes set in hollows of fire, blazing at her with a blind hatred. The mouth a scar torn in the face, the teeth stained fangs of jagged bone. Hollow caverns of nostrils, enveloping her with the heavy odor of a charnel-house.
And the hair!
Spinning and tumbling around that midnight face like a halo of silver wire, moving with a strange life of its own.
Becky shuddered. The face had been that of Whitey Coburn. Once Jed’s closest friend, now his sworn enemy.
Minutes passed and there was still no sound from deeper in the valley forest. No more shots. No shouts. A vast silence, shrouded by the snow that was now falling with real purpose, spitting on the sticks of the fire, and coating her clothes in a dappled covering.
For the first time, the young girl tried to imagine what would happen to her if Jed never returned. It had always been a possibility. She knew that, though he had never ever mentioned it to her. She somehow felt that he thought that to admit the chance of death was in some way to increase the chances of it happening.
Perhaps she could find a position teaching school in some growing border township. Or maybe a job in a saloon. The idea of wearing those silk dresses and flouncy underskirts, net stockings and red garters, excited her, and she almost forgot what such a prospect might really mean.
The wind was rising, and it began to howl among the tops of the trees, showering snow in her face, bringing her back to the reality of her present situation, to the terror of being alone among the high Sierras; the only man who’d ever seemed to care for her gone. Vanished. Lost somewhere in the swirling blizzard in the valley.
There was a gun in the saddle-bags on her mare. A little pocket derringer. Becky decided that if nobody came in two or three minutes, then she’d have to go and look for Jed. The idea frightened her.
But when those minutes had slipped emptily by, the fear didn’t stop her.
The fire was gone, already buried under an inch of snow. Becky was used to snow, remembering the deep falls that closed them in back at Tucson, but she’d never come across the speed and violence of this sort of blizzard. She could hear the horses snickering, and she stumbled towards them, hands stretched out against the skimming flakes of snow.
She guessed she was nearby where they’d tethered them, when something caught her hands, pulling her forwards so that she lost her balance and nearly fell. The girl opened her mouth to scream in terror at her unseen attacker when a hand went across her mouth, clamping the cry dead in her throat.
‘Hold still, little girl.’ The voice was soft. The words clear in her ears despite the storm.
The hands tugged her into the lee of the forest, where the snow was less violent, and she was able to wriggle her head round and see who’d caught her. At that moment he reached up and tugged his hat loose, revealing his face.
Becky looked in disbelief.
And fainted.
It was the face of her nightmare. Dead-white face, with glowing coals set in the eye-sockets, above cheeks chiseled from ivory, and teeth bared in a sinister smile. Topped by the mane of white hair, floating about the broad shoulders like a spectral veil.
Whitey Coburn.
‘I was only going to tell you Jed was close behind me and for you not to take fright. Didn’t do too well at that, I guess.’
Coburn laughed, and Becky huddled deeper in her clothes, trying not to show the fear she still felt for the albino. As soon as Jed had appeared, Whitey had handed her over to him, bundled up in his arms like a bag of dirty laundry. She had blushed to the roots of her hair with shame at the way Coburn treated her like a little girl, and she now sat silent while the two men talked.
Although the earth was hard as stone, Herne and Whitey had succeeded in gouging out enough for a primitive wickiup, along similar lines to the one used by the Apaches. Setting the shelter against the bole of the largest tree and tethering the horses by it. Coburn’s own stallion was still down near the lake, in a small cave that they’d found. There was little point in trying to move in the present weather conditions, and they had decided to stay put until the next day.
The hut, of stone and branches, was surprisingly snug, and Becky actually felt warm for the first time in days. The fire blazed away in the entrance, safely shielded from any prying eyes across the valley. Not that anyone would be fool enough to be out in the blizzard. Coburn had brought up more jerky and their food supply, unappetizing though it was, was now ample for the next few days.
‘Guess the boys down there won’t be needing any of this,’ was the albino’s only comment.
Jed had told the girl the story of what had happened, omitting nothing. Letting her know just what the position was between Coburn and himself.
‘Whitey’s got his job to do, same as I have. And you to help me. I see that, and I don’t hold it against him.
Time’ll come, if’n we both get through this, when he and me are going to have to face up to it, and there’s goin’ to be but one of us rides on.’
Coburn nodded, the firelight catching his eyes, making them even redder. ‘That’s right, Rebecca. Me and Jedediah both play the same games, and we play the same sort of rules. When we’re for each other, then there’s nothing we wouldn’t do for each other. When we’re out huntin’, like I’m after him, then there isn’t nothin’ at all we wouldn’t do against each other. You see that?’
She nodded. ‘Yes. I think so, Mister Coburn. But why are you going to help him now?’
‘Well. That’s a real fair question. I’m hired out to take Jed in. And that’s still what I aim to do. But he’s got him a plateful of trouble with these Stanwycks, and when I took on this job I didn’t rightly know what lay back of it. Now I know, and it makes me sick to my guts that I’m on the wrong side. So I aim to help old Jed out, and try and get us a couple of brothers. That’ll finish his contract, if that’s what you like to call it. And then he and me’ll carry on our own private argument.’
‘You can’t just forget what this Senator Nolan’s paying you and help us and then all ride away friends ?’
‘No, little lady. That’s not the way it goes, is it, Jed?’
Herne looked up. ‘No. That’s right, Whitey.’
Coburn leaned nearer to Becky who steeled herself not to recoil from him. It almost seemed as though he was aware of that and he smiled at her.
‘Things like this are for menfolk, Rebecca, and me and Jed wouldn’t rightly expect a woman to understand that.’
She sniffed. She understood a lot more than they might think. Content with this thought, Becky prepared to wrap herself in a couple of blankets and get to sleep. The wind seemed to be dropping and she guessed that the men might want to make a good early start in the morning. The girl now saw herself with the responsibilities of having two men to look after.
‘Bed down, Becky. Whitey and me’ll be doing some talking for a while yet. Shouldn’t concern you.’
The Black Widow Page 4