[Herne the Hunter 09] • Massacre!

Hunting down his quarry in Kansas brought back memories Jed Herne had kept locked away for more than twenty years.

Standing over a dying man those nightmares came flooding back. He’d seen a man he knew who’d ridden with Quantrill back in the bloody fighting against the Missouri Jayhawkers twenty years back, butchered by a man who’d used his three year old daughter as bait. Later that same day Herne had also seen William Quantrill hang both man and child from a branch of the same tree.

It had been a bad War. He’d been a young boy, full of gall, with his friend Whitey Coburn, dead for more than a year now. He had rode alongside the Younger and James brothers as part of Quantrill’s Raiders through Missouri and Kansas. They’d killed around a thousand folks that year of sixty-three.

On August 21 the Raiders launched a raid on Lawrence, Kansas. Their main target was Senator Jim Lane but the guerrillas killed men and boys before burning the town to the ground.

These were the memories Jed Herne had lived with. Now he had the chance to exorcise them…