White Death (A Herne the Hunter Western #1)

Gradually, the young girl’s finger rubbed a small circle in the ice that frosted the inside of the cabin window.

Her voice was sweet, bringing a smile to the lips of the woman with her. Although she had been married for very nearly three years, she was still not twenty. Only five years older than the girl.

Logs crackled in the small fireplace, sending a shower of sparks whirling up and out into the freezing air. Louise Herne hummed along with the girl while she worked at the dough, shaking her head as a ringlet of hair dropped over her blue eyes.

It had been much better weather when she and Jed had married on March 20th, 1879. The sun had shone on them, and it had made the bitter objections of her parents seem less oppressive. She smiled again to herself at the memory of that year. It was hard to blame her parents. She’d been Miss Louise Ann Harvey. Just sixteen and a shy young virgin.

He had been more than twice the age – thirty-five. But it hadn’t been the gap in their ages that had bothered her minister father and teacher mother. It had been Jed’s reputation.

As the girl at the window ended the verse of the great frontier hymn, Louise’s eye was caught by the firelight glinting off the polished brass of the rifle-stock. An old Sharps single-shot, hung up there over the hearth ever since they’d moved to the spread near Tucson shortly after their marriage.

Becky Yates, only child of their nearest neighbors, caught her looking at the gun and came and stood by her at the long, scrubbed pine table.

That had been the main objection of her parents. Jed, her husband. Jedediah Travis Herne. One of the deadliest gunmen that the West had ever known. Lethal with handgun, rifle or knife. A man who had lived all his life on or beyond the fringes of the law, but who had somehow escaped seeing his name heading a ‘Wanted’ flyer.

But that didn’t mean he wasn’t well enough known. There was hardly a man in the South-West who hadn’t heard of Herne.

‘Land’s sakes, Becky. You know I can’t abide to talk about the bad old days when Jed was a different man.’

The girl grinned impishly. ‘But he killed a powerful lot of men, in those days. My Pa says that Jed Herne was the most feared man west of the Pecos River. And east of it too.’

Louise knew it was true, and in an odd way it made her proud of her husband, to know that he was a man that other men would still step aside for. And to know that he had given it all up just for love of her.

At that thought, she felt the slightest movement in her stomach, and resisted a temptation to clasp her hands to it. But it was too soon. Too soon to be sure. There’d been two other times when she’d guessed that their dreams were going to be fulfilled. And each time there had come a rushing of blood while she was working with Jed in the fields of their small spread. And their hopes had been left a dried and shriveled hank of skin and flesh lying in the red dust

Becky went back to trying to see out through the window at the snowy prairie beyond. The bread was nearly ready, and Louise thought about baking an apple pie ready for when Jed returned from his shopping expedition in nearby Tucson. There was a basket of fine apples hanging up that she could use.

She raised her voice to join the girl on this one, just about her favorite hymn, and one of the religious songs that her mother had loved best. As she sang, she thought again of that feeling deep inside her. And she remembered what had happened last Fall. Working out until all hours, the swelling in her belly growing larger. The discomfort during the long warm nights, as she twisted and turned, trying to find a position to accommodate her bulk. Yet loving it, because she carried their child. She was sure that it would be a boy, and that he would be called Alexander, because she had always admired the great general in her school books.

But Doc Newman had come late, stinking of the cheap alcohol they sold in the ‘Mother Lode’ in Tucson. Although she tried to blame him for what happened, Louise knew well enough in that secret room at the back of her mind that drunk or sober it wouldn’t have made a spot of difference. The child had been born dead after a three day labor.

The cord had become tangled round its neck, and it’d strangled to death inside her, without ever having a chance of life.

She started out of her reverie, forcing a smile, feeling that this time it was going to be all right, and again it was going to be a boy.

‘Whether to do a big apple pie for Jed and your Pa, for the morrow. That is if’n they make it back through all this terrible weather. What’s it like out there?’

She joined Becky at the small window, peering out across the great white blanket that had fallen unexpectedly over the last two days. It had drifted seven feet thick round the back of the house, and across by the barn. More by good fortune than anything else, they still had a little of their winter feed stowed away in the loft, piled high in a great corner of dry sweet-smelling hay.

Using that, they’d been able to feed their stock and by using some of their reserve of kindling, Louise had managed to keep a good fire going and hold the chill at bay, though it was still cold enough near the door and the windows for your breath to mist in the air.

The wind had fallen away, and it had left a path exposed across the top of the ridge that separated the Herne spread from that of the Yates family a quarter mile away. Louise got nervous easily, and had been glad of the company of young Becky. Though she was a married woman, she found that she could talk more easily to Becky than she could to her plump, comfortable mother, Rachel Yates, who had come striding across with her daughter earlier that day, wrapped up to the eyes against the blizzard with a horse—blanket over her gown, and a slicker of her husband, William Butler, known as ‘Wild Bill’ after the lawman.

The Southern Pacific Railroad ran within a quarter mile of their little ranch, and it often brought a tinge of homesickness to Louise when she heard the low moan of the midnight special barreling over the plains, its headlight raking across the thin curtains of their bedroom; Some days she’d walk down the gentle slope towards the line when there was a passenger express due, and she’d stand and watch it roar past, feeling the wind tug at the hem of her printed cotton dress, catching a glimpse of the rich folk up there, traveling in style. Feeling the cool Arizona rain pattering on her bonnet, soaking through to her flesh, and trickling down the hollow between her breasts

But the train that had stood locked in by the snow on the shallow sweep of track before the line reaches Tucson was no ordinary express. Nor a freight. It only had two coaches, and the locomotive was smaller than usual. Rachel Yates had said that was why it hadn’t been able to get moving through the banks of driven snow. .She’d claimed it was a special, ordered by some rich young dude from back East for some of his gambling friends. But that was talk, and Rachel Yates loved to talk more than most.

There was something odd about it, that was for certain. There had been lights blazing on it all through the night, and Louise had heard singing and shouting. The noise of breaking glass, and several shots. She had slipped the bar across the front door that Jed had installed after some trouble when a few drunk bucks off the reservation had come whooping round one night in eighty-one.

‘Yes. At least it looks like the weather’s going to set in for a change. No snow for near three hours.’

Becky rubbed again at the window, trying to breathe on it to clear the ice off both inside and outside. Crystals formed in a diamond pattern, even while she tried to make out whether anything more was happening down by the railroad.

‘Getting dark, Louise. Looks like they’ve let the fire bank down on the train there. Must be getting powerful low on wood.’

For a moment, Louise opened the front door, and stepped out on the front porch, feeling the familiar squeak of the loose board to the right. She pulled a shawl round her shoulders, hunching up against the chilly wind that blew clean across the land from the High Sierras. She sniffed the air, trying to scent a change, but she was still a city girl, and the ways of the frontier weren’t yet open to her.

The girl laughed at the older woman’s caution. ‘I don’t guess that I’m going to take much harm from that little walk. Why, the snow didn’t even cover up my button boots on the way here, and the wind’s scoured the path clear since then.’

They both stepped back inside, glad of the warmth from the fire and the wave of heat when Louise opened the side oven. She glanced at a big carved clock on their side table, enjoying the slow rhythm of the brass pendulum, watching its reflections glimmering off the inside of the log walls of their cabin. It was a secure place, and it gave her pleasure to know that her son would be born here. Round about late Fall she guessed, as near as she could reckon. It almost seemed to her as though she knew the very night it had happened.

Jed had been out hunting with Wild Bill, and they’d come back very late. She’d got up and put a pot of coffee on the fire. Black, and strong enough to float a horseshoe on, was the way her man liked his coffee. He’d come in through that door, big and broad, with snow and ice dusting his beard and eyebrows, glistening in his mane of graying hair. And he’d held her and kissed her, his mouth tasting of the cold. Picked her up in her blue flannel nightdress, without even waiting for his coffee, and tumbled her on the bed. And she moaned and held him close, feeling the thawing snow dripping over her bare legs, and falling cold on her breasts.

It had been that night, she was sure of it. Jed had taken her and moaned and shuddered as he spent himself in her, lying close and squeezing her so hard afterwards that she’d found bruises on her ribs. He was a very powerful man. He’d whispered to her how much he loved her. How glad he was that he’d abandoned the futile life of a gunman for her.

‘I always knew that there was only one way it would end for me,’ he’d said. ‘If you hadn’t come along, Louise, I’d have gone on and on. Another town. Another killing. Another bounty. Gunning down some poor bastard, pardon me, dear. A boy maybe who’d taken a wrong step, and then I’d shoot him, and collect fifty dollars. There was always the punk kid with the shiny new Colt, itching to prove he was the best. Looking for the reputation as the man who gunned down Herne the Hunter.’

It had been true, she knew that. When she met him, back in 1878, he’d been a top gun in the Lincoln County range wars, riding with Garrett and Billy Bonney, the Kid. At thirty-four Jed Herne was old as gunmen went, and his age and survival was the best tribute he could have to his skill, when nearly all of his contemporaries were in Boot Hills from Butte to El Paso.

‘It’d happen one day. I’d ride into some small town, plumb in the middle of nowhere. Before my boot-heel was even out of the stirrup, there’d be a cold voice from out of the shadows, telling me to step down easy, and keep my hands well clear of the holster. And there he’d be. I don’t know who. Not Billy, or Wyatt, or Wes. Just a man with no face and no name. And I’d slap the rig fast as I knew how, but he’d be there before me. I tell you, Louise, that I wake at night feeling that bullet draining my life out of me. That’s what’d have happened to me without you coming along.’

Having delivered that speech, just about the longest she’d ever heard him make, Jed had fallen asleep, still in his hunting clothes. Still stretched out on top of her, and her with her nightdress all up round her hips in the most shameless manner.

Louise blushed at the memory, and hurried to get down the apples to cover her embarrassment. Close though she was to Becky, there were some things that a married woman just couldn’t rightly talk about to a girl whose breasts were only just beginning to form. Becky might be a beauty one day, but now she was a skinny, gawky girl, with deep-set serious eyes, and a fine wide mouth that only laughed when she thought something was really funny. A prominent jaw that promised trouble for some man someday.

‘Come on now, Becky Yates. What’ll your Ma think of me if’n I send you back home without a bite to eat inside of you?’

‘Well …. Here, have one of these apples. I declare that they’re some of the best I’ve managed to keep.’ She rummaged among them, looking for one without any blemish. Both of them jumped when the train trapped in the snow gave a sudden mournful blast on its siren, sending the echoes ringing across the valley, bouncing back off the low hills away to the east. They giggled like a couple of school-girls caught in some conspiracy at the way they’d leaped with shock. The snow had blanketed all noise for the last couple of days, giving the spread the strange and unreal atmosphere of a painting.

‘That one,’ said the young girl, picking out a line cherry pippin, rubbing it against the hem of her dress to wipe off the winter dust.

‘I’ll get you a glass of milk to wash it down, Becky, and then you really must be on your way.’ As she went to the crock to pour out a mug of the creamy liquid, Louise jumped again, unable to restrain a gasp.

‘What is it?’ asked Becky, the apple frozen halfway to her mouth. ‘Have you got the colic, Louise? Perhaps I should stay with you. I can easily go home and tell Ma and then come right on back.’

It was tempting. The wind howled around the roof, and the windows rattled, and the door sometimes shook and banged as if a bear was trying to force its way in.

Louise leaned forward over the table, her hands stirring up the flour. She dropped her voice to a more confidential whisper. ‘I’m going to have a baby.’

‘Oooh!’ Becky squealed with delight, clapping her hands, the apple rolling to the floor. ‘When? A boy? How soon?

‘Oh, Louise, I’m so gosh darned pleased I swear that I could blow up and burst.’

The older woman smiled at her exuberance. ‘It made me jump a little when I felt it move inside of me. I figure it’ll be round about October, near as I can reckon it. Maybe late in September. And of course it’ll be a boy. I can tell it will. That’s what Jed wants?

On an impulse, Becky ran round the table, and kissed Louise on the cheeks. ‘I’m so pleased. And now I have to stay with you!’

‘No. Your mother would want to know why, and I don’t want anyone to know until Jed. I aim to tell him on our third anniversary. It’s on Monday.’

‘I know. Ma and Pa have a little surprise tucked away for you, but I haven’t been able to find out what it is. What’s Jed giving you?’

With a small sigh, Louise bent down and picked up the discarded apple, wiping it absently between her fingers.

‘Well … don’t rightly know that I ought to tell you, seeing what a chatterbox you are.’ She saw the look of crushed disappointment on the girl’s face. ‘But seeing as how you’re just about my best friend…’

Becky took the apple back. ‘Hey! This is a really lovely pippin, you know. Sorry, I shouldn’t have interrupted you. Ma’s always telling me off for that. Go on.’

‘Well, you recall that pretty picture book of things you can buy in the big stores back east? Mail order things?’

‘Yes. Ma wanted Pa to order some chairs from it, but he said as how the ones we’ve got are fine and dandy as far I he’s concerned, and he wasn’t going to waste no precious dollars on that.’ .

‘Well, there’s the most beautiful dress in there. Dark green velvet, with white lace at the collar and round the cuffs. Direct from Paris, France, it said in the book. I sat there with that on my lap for night after night, sighing after it until I reckon he finally noticed it. One night I left it open on the table, while he stayed down honing that old knife of his. Next morning, when I came down early, I saw that it had been moved, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed and just hoping.’

Jed was a good husband. As a top gun he’d made big money, and he’d spent it too. When they talked about marriage, he’d told her all about his past. The killing and the blood and the running. And the money. And the way he’d spent it on cheap women and dear liquor. But there had been a little tucked away safely. What he’d called his ‘burial ‘ money’ and they’d bought the ranch with it. A couple of hundred acres of homestead with some stock, and a couple of horses and a mule. And things were going well.

The bad days were buried. The dust on the Sharps rifle and the locked drawer in the bureau where his Colt with the worn grips rested bore witness to that.

Smiling at her friend’s pleasure, Becky took a bite out of the apple, her even white teeth gnawing a lump from the very center of the fruit.

She gagged and nearly vomited, retching and heaving, spitting bits of apple on the board floor, throwing the rest down on the table.

‘What in … ?’ exclaimed Louise, staring in bewilderment at the coughing girl.

The apple lay rolling slightly from side to side on the pale wood of the table, finally settling with the bitten part uppermost. Louise picked it up, and then dropped it again with an expression of disgust.

Not just with a small bad patch to it, but rotten clean through. Amazingly, the skin was untouched and perfect, but the inside gave the lie to it. Soft and brown, with light green patches of fungus tainting it. And it was crawling with worms. Tiny, blind, white creatures that writhed and burrowed among the slimy pulp.

‘Oh, that’s terrible, Becky.’ She picked up the apple and opened the door, lobbing it out into the snow where it lay on top of the crisp layer of white. By morning it would have gone. The rats were a problem on the homestead.

Trembling from the unpleasant shock, Becky had another drink of milk before leaving for her home.

‘It wasn’t really the badness. It was coming across it in what seemed such a perfect fruit. That’s what made it worse. The shock.’

The clock chimed ten times, its small brass bell pealing out across the cabin. Louise started at the noise, and decided that she must have dropped asleep for a few minutes. The catalogue she’d been holding had fallen to the floor, and she picked it up and carefully opened it again at the picture of the green velvet dress.

‘That is the purtiest thing that I ever did see,’ she said to herself.

The log fire had fallen low, the embers glowing redly, casting deep pits of shadow into the corners of the room. She wondered whether or not to light the oil lamp, and finally decided that it wasn’t worth it. She normally retired to bed early, and what with Jed being away, and feeling more tired than usual, she felt it was about time to go into the other room and go to sleep.

The bedroom was freezing cold, sealed off in an attempt to keep the rest of the house warm. Louise opened the door, and then shuddered at the wave of icy air that fell out and wrapped itself round her. Although it seemed wicked to get undressed in front of the fire, it was preferable to slipping between freezing blankets in a chilled nightdress.

Moving quickly, she went into the bedroom, pulling the door shut behind her, reaching for her gown on top of the bed. It was a moonlight night outside, and the room was filled with a silver light. As her hand reached out for the nightdress, with its small flowers embroidered by herself, Louise’s eye was caught by a movement at the window. She looked that way, and barely stifled a scream.

Just for a fraction of a second there had been a man’s face pressed against the glass, flattened by the pressure, the nose white, and the eyes staring at her like pools of night. The mouth and chin were concealed by a long scarf, while the rest of the head was hidden under a brown Stetson, pulled down low over his forehead.

As soon as he saw that he’d been observed, the man vanished, and the woman heard steps crunching fast through the snow, away down the hill. She ran to the other room, and pulled back the curtain, wiping at the layer of frozen condensation on it. There he was! A dark figure, lurching unsteadily away towards the brightly lit train.

‘And good riddance,’ Louise said to herself, pretending not to notice how shaky her voice had gone.

She found she’d left her nightdress on the bed in the other room, so she repeated the trip, and this time brought out its comfortable flannel weight, laying it over the back of a chair to warm. The curtains were firmly pulled at the front of the cabin, but they were flimsy, and gave little protection, if anyone should chance to look in. However, it seemed as though the peeper had probably only been a solitary man, one of the train crew she guessed, since no gentleman would do a thing like that.

The thought reassured her, and Louise sat down, and kicked off her shoes, letting them clump on: the floor. In summer she wore no stockings, and the sudden cold snap hadn’t made her change her habit. The dress had buttons down the back, and hooks and eyes at the neck. With an effort she managed to undo them, surprised how her fingers all seemed to have become thumbs. ·

She stepped out of it, letting it fall about her with a whisper of clean cotton. Her shift was also of cotton. The in same pretty flowers that she’d sewn on· herself those long hours back home, when she wondered what her beau would be like. What sort of man would finally marry her and sweep her off and plunder her willing body with his hot embraces.

Before moving out to Tucson, Louise Herne had been an avid reader of the more sensational type of ladies’ romance book.

She wondered whether or not to keep on her shift, but Jed liked her naked under the nightdress when he came home, and there was always just the possibility that he and Wild Bill might come back that night, once the snow had eased a little. But, knowing Wild Bill Yates as she did, after three years of having him for a neighbor, she suspected that any chance of passing another night in Tucson, with its girl and lights and whisky and gambling, might prove too great a temptation for him.

Still, there was just the chance. So she pulled off her shift, stretching in front of the fire, the dying light throwing pools of shadow over her stomach, with just the suspicion of a swelling, and across her fine, firm breasts, the nipples standing out as she casually scratched at them, running a finger nail round each one for a moment of wicked pleasure.

Then the memory of that grinning, leering face at the window came slobbering back to her mind and she flushed in the red glow, and quickly tugged on her nightdress, tearing a seam under the right arm as she did so.

But that didn’t matter. She was warm and secure. The door was bolted, though she had left the heavy latch-bar off, in case Jed came home and couldn’t get in. The fire was now only a tiny red eye amid the ashes, the fresh tang of the smoke fading. Louise heard the noise of singing again from the railroad, and she shivered.

She paused at the door to the bedroom, listening to the rowdy, drunken voices, shaking her head as a trick of the wind seemed to be bringing them closer. Head on one side, Louise Herne listened harder.

It wasn’t a trick of the wind.

They were coming closer!

Feeling her heart pounding in her chest, the breath suddenly dried in her throat, the woman ran to the front of the house and peered from the darkened window down over the sheet of snow towards the train. And there, coming unsteadily towards her, was a group of men. One carried a lantern, and three of the others held bottles. All were singing and shouting. It was instantly obvious that they were drunk.

Even as she looked out, paralyzed with fear, she saw one of them fall over and slide a few yards backwards, feet stuck up in the air. Two others staggered back to help him, and all three collapsed in a tangle of limbs.

At any other time it might have been funny, the combination of the drink and the snow, but now it had a bizarre, terrifying menace. That men in that condition should bother to leave a warm train at this time of night, and climb a hill on deep snow, meant they must have some very powerful force to drive them on.

Louise remembered yet again that face at the window.

‘No! Please, God! No!’

The latch bar. That was the first thing to do. She picked up the heavy beam, dropping it in her haste, finally managing to lift it and slot it in place. It couldn’t stop a determined assault; she knew that. But it might delay them. Give her time to reason with them.

At the back of her mind there was the dim relief that Becky hadn’t stayed the night with her.

The singing was louder now. A voice called out: ‘Hey, lady! There’s a whole deck of fine fellows out here just eager to make your acquaintance.’

‘My husband’s asleep in the back,’ she said, voice shivering. ‘If you wake him he’ll come out and kill you all.’

There was bawdy laugher. She heard feet round the back, and a hand trying the rear door, but that was firmly bolted and barred and stayed that way for most of the year.

‘Lady. We been watchin’ and we know your old man and his friend are in Tucson. Just you and us, lady!’

‘Go away!’ she screamed, her nerve cracking. Unconsciously, her hands clasped over her breasts and stomach, where the new life was stirring.

‘Seven of us out here, ma’am. We’d take it right kindly if you’d let us in, without we have to do some harm to your pretty little cabin.’ A different voice. Southern, and more cultured.

They weren’t even making a pretence about what they’d come for. Her eyes flicked round, looking for some way of making them go away. And caught the gleam of the dying fire on the brass-bound stock of the Sharps rifle.

Jed had taught her how to use it, but it was far too much gun for her to handle with any kind of ease. She had seen her husband, when out hunting early in their marriage, bring down a deer at half a mile with the single shotgun, but it was too heavy and ponderous for her.

There was a note of anger in the voice outside. ‘If you don’t show us some hospitality, ma’am, then we might just have to invite ourselves in. And we wouldn’t take at all kindly to that.’

Louise could hear the noise of feet, moving away. She risked a glance through the side window, and was horrified to see three of the men, wrapped in parkas and heavy coats against the bitter cold, walking quickly towards the Yates spread across the ridge.

She dragged a chair through the darkness, wincing as its legs scraped on the floor. Then she was up on it, the seat feeling cold to her bare feet, straining, upwards to lift the gun off its pegs.

‘The bitch is up to something,’ shouted one of the men, and a hand fumbled at the handle of the front door.

‘I’m with child,’ she cried out, despair making her voice fill with tears.

‘If you ain’t now, then you sure as hell will be before this night’s out,’ called back one of the men, his sally being greeted with hoots of laughter and an echoing rebel yell.

Desperately, Louise was trying to handle the long gun, racking her brains to remember what Jed had told her. ‘Lever down on the trigger-guard and the breech drops open. Slide the cartridge into the chamber, and close her up again. Pull back the hammer, and you’re ready to fire.’

There was a small carved box of cartridges on the mantel, and she grabbed one out and followed the instructions. The cartridge nearly slipped from her fingers, but she finally rammed it home and cocked the gun, using both hands to pull back on the stiff hammer.

Meanwhile, the battering on the door had been getting louder. The shouts had stopped and the attackers were setting to it with deadly earnest. The bar was beginning to creak and crack with the pressure, and Louise realized that it couldn’t be long before it yielded.

‘I have a gun!’ She had to repeat it before anyone heard what she was saying. ‘We got a dozen, lady.’

‘I got me a barrel on mine that you won’t believe, ma’am.’

‘Mine’s a nine inch Colt, lady,’ called another.

‘When you see mine, you’ll reckon it’s your birthday. Open up and get ready for it!’ shouted a third.

There was an extra strong heave, and the bar split down the middle, splinters of wood flying around the darkened room. Mouth pulled open in a mute scream of terror, Louise pulled the trigger on the Sharps.

There was a loud explosion, and a flash from the muzzle.

A cry of pain.

Blackness.

Chapter One