The Black Widow

by John J. McLaglen

  The spring on the trap was the strongest that Herne had ever seen. Thicker than wolf-traps. Thicker even than the great clawing traps that the hunters of the north used to kill the giant grizzlies. It wasn’t meant for any animal, Herne guessed.

  Just for any man foolish enough to come scouting round the Stanwyck home.

  ‘They really reckon their home is a damned castle, don’t they?’ was Whitey’s comment, when he and Herne met again at the camp.

  Both were on time, much to the girl’s relief.

  ‘Why didn’t anyone hear the spring go off, Jed?’ asked Becky, picking a stringy hunk of gristle from between her teeth.

  ‘The house is so big, and the trees grow right up against it, so I guess it must have been muffled. But I could just see the nearest wing of the place from where I was, and I could have sworn I saw a face at the window on the top floor. A very pale face. A woman, I think. Looked to be dressed all in white. Stared at me for an age, then went away again. Couldn’t have seen me in the blackness under the trees.’

  Coburn stood up. ‘All that talkin’, I forgot what I got me back in the store. Just what we need.’

  ‘Eggs? Flour?’ asked the girl, watching the lean scarecrow figure stalk to his horse and bring back a burlap sack from the saddle-horn.

  ‘Not precisely, Becky Yates. Something better than that. We got us enough food and plenty of the produce of God’s own brewery, right up here. No. This is something to add a mite of spice to life.’

  Handling it carefully, shielding it from the fire with his back, he reached inside the sack and pulled out a small metal-bound box, the cracks in the wood sealed with tar. Using the point of his knife for a lever, the albino gently inched up the lid. Pulling aside a thick sheet of shiny brown paper, revealing what lay inside.

  Becky and Herne leaned forward to look. Jed sat back with a sigh of pleasure, but Becky was puzzled. The box was packed full with a coarse-grained gray powder. She reached out to touch it, rolling it in her fingers, finding it felt like thick dust.

  ‘What is it, Whitey?’

  ‘Take just a little pinch, like the amount of salt you’d sprinkle in oatmeal gruel and then throw it on the fire.’

  Already guessing what it must be, the girl did as he told her, taking a nip of the powder between her finger and thumb and flicking it at the fire. Not surprised by the puff of gray smoke and the flat crack it made.

  ‘It’s blasting powder, isn’t it? I remember that Pa used to keep some in the outhouse for breaking up big boulders.’

  Coburn nodded. ‘That’s what it is. The miners’ friend. And hopefully our friend too.’

  Herne looked at it, calculating. ‘Fuses?’

  ‘Twenty foot of five minute. Reckon that should be about enough.’

  ‘I guess so. What did you tell the folks down in the store?’

  ‘Told them we were thinkin’ of doing us some prospecting. They warned me off about goin’ anywheres near the Stanwyck spread. Seems a couple of kids went huntin’ up that way a year ago and never came back. They’re mighty free with their hardware up there.’

  ‘So they aren’t likely to tip them off about any strangers around?’

  Coburn shook his head. ‘Couldn’t say that. A few dollars can grease a lot of palms. Wouldn’t trust none of them. Though they warned me about the weather as well. Said that they reckoned there was a whole lot more snow to come. And if it does...’

  Becky shook her head. ‘I don’t understand. Why are you both pleased at the idea of more snow? Won’t it harm us more than them, safe in their house?’

  Herne grinned, looking younger than she’d seen him for an age. ‘We got our trail out, and either on foot or with the horses, we can get out. But over that side, you already seen how it catches most of the weather. So if their road out also got blocked...’

  ‘The blasting powder! That’s what it’s for. Once their road is gone, they can’t get in or out. We’ve got them!’

  Herne noticed the use of the word ‘we’ in the girl’s enthusiasm, but made no comment. ‘It won’t be that easy, Becky. Up here in the Sierras, you can often reckon to be shut in by snow for three to four months. They’ll be provisioned up. But us doing that’ll put a bit of pressure on them.’

  Coburn took him up. ‘And the trail getting blocked is going to bring some of them crawling out of their hole. What we’re really aiming at, Becky, is helping to swing the odds a mite more in our favor.’

  Jed nodded. ‘The only way in that I could see is the front door, and we don’t fancy that. But there may be another way in.’

  ‘I don’t understand. How will you be able to find that out?’

  Both men laughed and Coburn licking his bloodless lips with relish. ‘Best way to find a way into the house is to ask someone who lives there. And that’s what we aim to do.’

  Chapter Six

  In his high turreted room, from the barred window, Luke Stanwyck stared dreamily across the trees, and over the blue water of the freezing lake, up the ridge opposite which bristled with more sharp trees, out into the pale gray of the sky. He ran his fingers softly over the stone sill, admiring its rough texture, smiling to himself.

  Ruth had given him an extra treat that morning to make up for falling off that stupid sledge the previous day. Luke half-closed his eyes, remembering the warmth of the rush as the plunger went down on the new hypodermic needle. The strip of linen tight round his upper arm to bring put the thin veins. The almost sexual pleasure of the dissolved powder speeding through his body.

  He glanced down at the immaculate whiteness of his satin shirt, marred a little on the left forearm by a pearl of scarlet crusting into brown, where the injection had bled. Luke touched it, picking at it with his long fingernail. Hoping that his mother would be as generous for his birthday. That would be a real present.

  This morning, she had been so kind to him. Helping him dress, actually heating up the silver spoon for him. Resting her cheek on his inner thigh while he probed for the blood-gorged vein with the delicate point of the needle. Her fingers stroking him, absent-mindedly, as though she hadn’t realized what she was doing. It had been so good.

  The trees below his window were rooted in darkness, with only the pale light of the snow visible among them for a few yards. Nothing moved among them, though the rising wind was stirring their tops blowing loose occasional splatters of powdery snow.

  It had been strange that morning. Under the influence of his special medicine, Luke had sometimes seen things that he afterwards realized weren’t really there at all. And he guessed that the man must have been one. If there’d been a man outside the window, then either the traps or the guards would have caught him. Therefore there couldn’t have been a man at all. Last time anyone had come close enough for Luke to see had been a few months back. Maybe a year. Time was becoming harder for him to keep hold of. It somehow slipped through his fingers like sand.

  Then it had been those two young boys.

  Mark had enjoyed them more than he had. There had been times when he’d found the act pleasant, either with boys or with girls, but the medicine gradually eroded his interest, replacing carnal lusts with its own drives. He remembered how angry Mama had been when she heard about the two boys from Lone Pine. How Mark had found them with three of their guards, both caught in traps within a hundred yards of each other. One had actually lost his foot, all but for a few shreds of gristle and tendon, and the other had been caught just below the knee.

  It wasn’t really what Mark had been doing to them that upset Mama. More the risk that either of them might have ever escaped. The Stanwycks weren’t loved in that part of the Sierras.

  Luke coughed, feeling the pain in his chest. Wiped a few grains of dust from his fingers on to his jacket, looking with vague disinterest at the gray smudge on the white. The man he’d seen under the trees earlier vanished from his blurred memory, along with so many other specters of his past.

  ‘Ten minutes?’

  ‘Right.’
>
  ‘Loaded and ready?’

  ‘Whitey. You’re not dealing with your punk gang of snot-nose kids now.’

  ‘Sorry, Jed. It’s been a long time since I worked with anyone I could trust.’

  Although the irony of that passed the albino by, Herne grinned ruefully at it. Maybe they could trust each other now, but the moment Mark and Luke Stanwyck were dead, that trust wouldn’t be worth a flying damn.

  Coburn looked round, pausing, holding his breath and listening to make sure there was nobody on the way. But all they could hear was the whistle of the wind around the peaks, sighing among the pines, bringing the first taste of the new snows that the locals had prophesied.

  On the one side the trail dropped near three thousand feet sheer down a granite face, to another lake on the far side of the hogback ridge. A bend in the road hid the bulk of Mount Abora, a scant couple of hundred paces back.

  Above the trail, thousands of tons of bare rock hung over them, cutting them off from the sinking sun. The trail had been cut along a narrow strip of a ledge between the mountain and the precipice. Jed and Whitey reckoned that it wouldn’t take a load of help to push the two together and close the road for ever and a day.

  ‘Ready, Jed?’

  ‘As I’ll ever be. Let her go.’

  Whitey tugged out a box of lucifers from the inside pocket of his heavy jacket, stooping over the white tail of fuse that protruded from a crevice in the rock. A crevice that they’d carefully packed with the contents of the box of blasting powder from the general store.

  ‘Wish we’d got some of that new dynamite I seen up in the Yukon,’ said Coburn, cursing as the rising wind blew out his lucifer for the second time. ‘Easy as falling off a chair. Like candles, and all it needs is a spark to set it all off. Uses nitro. Ah, there!’

  The match finally caught the fast fuse, and a glowing worm of red fire spluttered towards the blackness of the hole. Coburn came scampering across the trail, towards the house, reaching up for a hand from Herne to help him up to their vantage point behind a tumbled group of massive rocks. His boots slipped in the snow and ice and he nearly fell back down on the trail, but Jed had him safe and he panted to his place, picking up his Winchester and levering a round into the breech.

  ‘Here we go, brother,’ he grinned. ‘The old team on the road again.’

  The fuse vanished inside the crack in the rock, its hissing inaudible at that distance. Both men crouched down behind their cover, waiting for the explosion. Herne hugged his long Sharps. Whitey had offered him one of the Winchesters from the young dead boys at the old camp, but Jed had shaken his head, refusing the offer.

  ‘I know this gun better than any. I’ll guarantee to kill my man and still have time to reload and pick off another.’

  ‘But this ain’t the best kind of fighting for that buffalo cannon. You want to keep it for the plains. I seen you hit a man at nigh a half mile.’

  ‘Old Reliable here can do better than that Why, I recall the time that...’

  Coburn held up his hand. ‘’Nother time, Jed. I make it about time for her to... Jesus H. Christ!!’

  The amount had been about right. Maybe even more than they needed. The explosion wasn’t all that loud, muffled by the rocks, but its effect was infinitely spectacular. Flame and smoke spurted from the crevice, followed by a fraction of a moment of absolute quiet.

  Herne held his breath, knowing that this one had to work. If it failed, then the men in Mount Abora would be alerted to no purpose.

  It didn’t fail.

  With majestic slowness, like watching a big bull elephant brain-shot, the side of the mountain began to slide, undercut by the explosion. Rumbling down with violence that made the boulders where the two men hid shake, showering a fountain of splinters and dust high in the air. The cloud of dust swept across the trail, and for a while it was impossible to see what the effect had been.

  As it slowly cleared they both stood up, leaning on top of the rocks around them, brushing gray dust from their hair and clothes. And looked at the trail.

  Or looked at where the trail had been. Like a primeval monster attacking a weaker creature, the slide had taken a massive bite from the road, cutting it quite in two, pushing most of it over the three thousand foot drop, where they could still hear the hollow rumbling of mighty stones cascading into the lake. The rest of the slide lay dormant across the trail, severing it, blocking it.

  Take a whole pile of your dynamite to shift a way through that,’ commented Herne quietly, flicking back the hammer of the Sharps.

  Coburn didn’t answer, simply sitting there, readying his Winchester and laying the fully-loaded Colt at its side.

  So far, the plan had gone exactly as they’d anticipated. Leaving Becky with the horses, the two men had sneaked their way through the snowfall, using it to cover them up through the trees, and past the flank of Mount Abora, until they were past the main gates and along by the trail. That was the most dangerous part. If anyone had come along there they’d have been trapped between them and the guns of the men at the house.

  Now all they could do was wait and see how many of the private army of gunmen came looking after the pall of smoke and dust of the explosion. They hoped for around three. Many more would be difficult and fewer would make the exercise less effective.

  ‘Here they come. Stupid bastards are coming out on horses.’

  Herne nodded. He’d heard the whinny from away round the bend, and the chink of steel shoes on frozen stone. By coming that way the guards were going to make an ambush that much easier.

  The men from the house must have thought that it was just an earth-slip, probably not hearing the original noise of the blasting-powder. So they rode easy, and careless. Six of them.

  They reined up almost as soon as they were in sight of the mound of fallen rocks, and Herne was glad to be with a partner who was a professional. A man who wouldn’t blow the whole thing by opening fire too soon, scaring the others off.

  ‘Come on you brainless sons of bitches. Come and look at what me and Jed got ready for you. Come on. That’s it boys. All the way up.’

  Whitey kept up the whispering as the six men heeled their horses forwards, past the two men on their ledge, to examine the extent of the damage. It was immediately obvious to anyone that the trail was wiped off the face of the earth, and that it was an impossible task to replace it, short of using a force of laborers. Two of them dismounted, walking over to the tangled mass of stone, clearly suspicious that maybe this hadn’t happened naturally.

  Herne shifted his aim from one of the men, knowing that the first shots would almost certainly spook the horses and leave anyone on foot helpless. The group was about sixty yards away, all looking towards the fall, with one of them edging his horse close to the edge of the drop to look at where the rocks had fallen.

  ‘He’s mine,’ whispered Herne, drawing a bead on the center of the man’s back. Never try for those pretty shots at the head. That had been the advice of Wyatt Earp. Good advice. The first thing to do was hit your man, and it didn’t matter that much, most times, where you hit him. Put him down and you had time to choose your second shot.

  He noticed that Coburn was lining up his sights on the man far to the side of the others. Right again. The ones in center were bunched and would find it that much harder to control their bucking mounts and get away.

  ‘Three... Two... One... Now!’

  The two shots boomed out as one.

  Herne saw his target throw up his arms and topple forwards. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Whitey’s man also go down. There was a shout from someone, and a scream, fading away. But Jed wasn’t concerned with that.

  He was busy reloading the heavy gun. He dropped the block and pushed the enormous cartridge, already prepared and to hand, along the wide breech-groove. The spent casing tinkled on the rocks at his side. The only drawback with the Sharps was the cloud of smoke sent out by the black powder. But it cleared in the rising wind, bringing with it yet
another flurry of snow. Big wet flakes that clung to your skin.

  As he looked up ready for his next shot he saw the reason for the peculiar scream, fading away to nothing. His first shot had hit home. Poised on the edge of the drop, the wounded man had involuntarily set his spurs to his horse, kicking it forwards over the snow-swirling void to crash to a mangling death a half mile straight down.

  Although Jed had been quick in reloading, Coburn had already fired twice more. Bringing down another man and a horse. The scene that Jed looked at was chaos. There was a squealing horse, lashing sparks from the stones with its flailing hooves. And a man staggering clear, holding a dangling arm, with blood pouring from the ends of his fingers.

  Two men lying still among the stones. Horses rearing and bucking, with the two men who had been foolish enough to dismount trying to mount again. Carefully, Herne adjusted his aim to center on the gunman who seemed to be most in control of his horse, and who had actually managed to get a snap-shot off at the hidden ambushers.

  Finger lying on the filed trigger, gentle as opening a virgin’s legs. Squeeze. The butt of the gun crunching into his shoulder with the satisfying kick of the powerful bullet. And the man disappearing from his horse, scarlet flowering from his throat.

  ‘High,’ muttered Coburn on his right

  ‘Still counts,’ he replied, laying down the rifle and picking up the Colt.

  The survivors were getting ready to make their break for safety, but it meant riding along a snowy trail, with visibility shrinking every second, past the men with the guns. But it was that or be gunned down like dogs against that barrier of stone.

  ‘Let them come, Whitey,’ said Herne, as Coburn sent another bullet from the Winchester cracking into the group, catching one of the riderless horses in the shoulder, toppling it helplessly on its side.

  One of the other horses galloped past them with its mane streaming. Eyes starting from its sockets with fear at the noise and smell of blood and death. There were now only two men left in one piece, plus the one with the broken arm. Herne nodded his approval as he saw one of the mounted men swing down an arm and heave the wounded man bodily into the saddle.