Rachel Fairfax knocked quickly on the bedroom door and entered. Herne was sitting up in bed, restlessly leafing through an old mail-order catalogue that she had lent him. She was carrying clothes over one arm, boots in the other.
‘You’ll be needing these.’
He glanced at the clothes; looked harder at her face. ‘They’re your husband’s, ain’t they?’
She dropped the pile on the end of the bed. ‘They were. Ain’t no sense in keeping them till they fall to pieces. Locking away things like they was memories. It don’t do any good.’
Standing beside him, she reached out and touched his arm. ‘Who was Louise?’
Herne jumped, startled, as if someone had just walked over his grave. Her grave. ‘She was my wife.’
‘I thought so. When you were lying there, all in a fever those first days. You talked about her a lot.’ She moved her hand away. ‘Not that it made sense of course. It came out all jumbled up, the way things do when a person’s like that. But her name was clear enough. You kept on saying it again and again. You loved her a lot didn’t you?’
Herne nodded. ‘I guess I did.’
‘I know,’ she said, turning away towards the door. ‘I know.’
But Herne didn’t know if she was talking about him or about herself.
He pushed back the covers and swiveled round, setting his feet to the floor. After a few moments he stood up and reached among the clothes. Soon he was dressed in blue pants, a red shirt that was a mite tight round the shoulders, a leather waistcoat and a pair of boots that pinched slightly at the toes. He knotted a purple scarf about his neck and went out of the room.
At the bottom of the stairs she called to him and he went for the first time into the small room she kept for a parlor. It was what he would have expected: neat and clean but warm.
‘You’ll be needing these.’
She handed him a yellowing Stetson that fitted more or less exactly and then she pulled open a drawer and lifted out a gun belt. As he was strapping it on, she reached into another drawer and lifted up some linen and drew out the pistol which went with it.
In a sudden flash, he recalled the way Louise had made him set his gun aside when they had married.
‘Here.’
He took the Remington from her, automatically testing the balance in his hand. The barrel seemed a shade heavier than the Colt, likely due to the extra piece of metal slanting beneath it. The butt was smooth, its wood reddish and not seeming much handled. There were five shells in the chamber.
‘There isn’t any more ammunition, I’m afraid.’
‘That’s okay. I’ll buy some.’
She took a small wad of bills from behind her back and handed them to him.
‘I can’t.’
But she placed them in his left hand, smiling. ‘Yes, you can. You’ll pay me back some day.’
‘Okay.’
‘How’s your hand?’ she asked.
Herne glanced at it. ‘It’ll shape up. Another day or so an’ it should be workin’ like new.’
The dimple showed: ‘Take care till then.’
‘And after that?’
‘After that you’ll be all right. I can feel it.’
Herne nodded and said his thanks again. He had arranged to collect his horse from the livery stable and then meet Charlie on the outskirts of the town. They had plans to make, things to do: time was running out. For Nate and the rest of Drummond’s vigilantes.
They looked down at the shack and the stream that ran right past it, the trees that surrounded it on two sides. At the front the land led up to it evenly, hardly a slope. There was only one piece of high ground and that was the one they were on then, almost opposite the trees and a good quarter of a mile away.
‘You sure that feller in the store’ll lend me a Sharps?’ Herne asked.
‘That’s what he said.’
‘What d’you tell him you wanted it for?’
‘Day’s huntin’.’ Charlie grinned.
‘That’s about right,’ said Herne as he set his horse moving. ‘That’s about what it’ll be. We need to cut them down to size some an’ the best way is to pick a few of ’em off. This seems the perfect place to do it.’
They found a group of steers five miles south, nearer to the Circle D ranch. Rounding them up wasn’t any problem, maybe thirty head. They drove them hard, leaving lots of tracks and making sure they could be easily followed. There was plenty of good grazing land down by the shack and stream and they could keep the cattle there long enough.
Just until some of Drummond’s men picked up their trail and came riding in.
Herne and Charlie spent the night in the shack, huddled under old blankets. Every day now seemed darker than the one before it and it seemed for sure that snow was coming early that year. Herne kept thinking about the Taylor woman and wondering where she had gone. Rachel hadn’t any idea; no one had heard any news. If she’d had any sense she would have stayed in Powderville or gone on to some other town, maybe up the river to Fort Keogh. He just hoped she hadn’t been fool enough to ride back out to their ranch and try to stay here, just her and the child.
He thought about Rachel, too, about what she’d done for him and the fact that, almost blindly, he’d sought her out when he was in trouble.
‘What you thinkin’?’ Charlie would ask from time to time but Herne would always reply, ‘Nothin’.’ He didn’t want to start talking about it to Charlie or anybody else.
The morning was colder, the air raw. Herne got up to the hill early and set up watch, chewing on a piece of dried meat and occasionally sipping at the canteen he’d filled at the stream.
It was two hours before he saw them coming. A pall of dust that rose up into the overcast sky. A column of men riding in twos. He signaled down to Charlie and got himself ready. He wished that the Sharps was his own, just like he wished the pistol at his hip was his own Colt.
But they would have to do.
He traced the riders’ approach with pleasure, savoring every moment, every yard.
They stopped a mile back along the plain, their formation and appearance readily identifying them. The front pair split off and moved aside, while the following couple rode ahead to check things out. Herne held his breath, hoping that they would find nothing to make them suspicious, praying that they would not sense that anything was not as it appeared.
The men rode on until they were four hundred yards away from the shack. They stopped and talked, nodding and pointing. The steers bunched together, a few of them drifting towards the trees, others going down to the edge of the shallow stream. After a few minutes, the pair rode back.
Herne smiled grimly and waited for them to make their way in: eighteen men.
He sighted the Sharps on Nate, moving the long barrel slowly to the right. He could have blown him clear out of the saddle even from that range. But that wasn’t what he wanted. Not for Nate. It would have been too easy, to impersonal.
Next he lined up Jo-Bob, then Billy, then One-Eye. It wasn’t the time for them either. He’d given Charlie clear instructions about which men to leave alone if it were humanly possible.
For now it was to be men like Rob, Tom, Henry, Cole – riding with his wounded arm loose by his side.
They were almost at the shack, several of the riders with their Winchesters drawn from their scabbards. He heard Nate call out a warning and a couple of shots sank into the shack door. Herne started to squeeze back on the trigger. One of the riders threw up his arms, letting the rifle sail out of his hands. The sound of the Sharps brought heads round towards the hill.
Herne saw Rob lash out at his horse and begin to ride towards him. What he thought he could do at that distance Herne didn’t know. He doubted if he could even see the spot where he was aiming from, only the general direction.
He let him cover ten yards before he fired. For seconds nothing seemed to have happened but then Rob’s mount was galloping forward without a rider and Rob himself was on his back, fingers clutching at a gashed hole that drove down through his chest.
Herne heard Nate’s agitated, angry shout and a volley of rifle fire was directed at the hill, but for the Winchesters the range was too vast. Some of the riders turned their horses round and made for the trees behind, seeking shelter.
Herne grinned and waited. The first pair was close to the beginning of the thicket when Charlie’s Winchester rang out. He wasn’t as accurate as Herne but that didn’t matter. One of the men swung to the side, shot through the arm. The second man escaped unharmed but went wide to the left anyway.
Tom and Henry jumped down from their mounts and made a run for the shack. Herne dropped Henry, the nearest of them, with a shot through the right arm which carried on through his side and lodged up against the inside of his ribs.
Tom just got inside before Herne could push a fresh shell into the Sharps. All right. He was in – now he’d have to get out. Across the clearing Charlie was firing into the group of riders who milled around in front of the shack. Herne heard first Nate’s shrill shouts of command, then Billy’s bellow of frustrated rage. Shots were fired at both trees and hill but none of them seemed to be having any effect.
Herne shifted his position, moving low along the side of the hill. A horse went down, hit by one of Charlie’s stray shots and its rider was hurled headlong. He rolled over and over and finally picked himself up in time to hear Nate give the order to retreat. Desperately he jumped up on the back of someone else’s mount, clinging on to the man’s shoulder and the back of the saddle.
Herne knelt with the Sharps to his shoulder, biding his time. Waiting ... waiting ... waiting until the angle was exactly right.
He was certain the shot would find its target before it happened. He watched carefully as the rear man of the pair doubling up jolted forward and almost immediately bounced back, trying to hold on to the man in front for support. But the rider in the saddle was slipping forwards himself, struck by the same shell which had passed through back and chest and on into his own hip. As the first man came off the still galloping horse and crashed onto the hard ground, the second one clung desperately to the animal’s neck, almost losing balance completely but just managing to hold on.
As the other vigilantes galloped out of range, Herne looked back down at the hut. As far as he knew Tom was still holed up inside and unhurt.
It was likely that as soon as he got time to draw breath and think, Nate would be back – and this time he wouldn’t ride so hastily into a trap. Herne could only play the same trick once in the same place.
He set off down the side of the hill, scrambling from foothold to foothold, leaning his weight backwards with the gradient, keeping the Sharps tight in his right hand and using his left for support.
He was some distance down when he heard a shot from a Winchester and guessed that Charlie had got fed up with waiting and was trying to drive Tom out himself. Herne stopped on a piece of fairly level ground and sent a shot through the hole that served for a window. Encouraged by this Charlie began firing more or less at random.
When his volley finished, the door was thrown open and Tom leaped out. He fired twice, in rapid succession, in the direction of the trees and then turned and ran, heading for the side of the shack.
Herne ran down the hill as well as the uneven ground would let him. Below he could see that Charlie was leaving the cover of the trees and making a dash across the space between his position and the shack. Only with his injury not fully healed he wasn’t travelling all that fast.
Herne brought up the Sharps quickly and leaned back against the rough ground. He snapped off his shot too soon and the shell ripped through the boards at the side of the shack, missing Tom by a good couple of feet. But it was enough to make him think twice about going after Charlie. Instead he turned tail, ducked low and made a crab-like scuttle towards the stream and the supposed cover of the line of trees beside it.
Herne hesitated, then allowed himself a grim smile. Slow Charlie might be, but he wasn’t that slow. Tom got as far as mid-stream when Charlie let his Winchester fall and drew the double-action .44 from his hip. He raised his right arm at the moment that Tom glanced back over his shoulder.
Herne was close enough by now to be able to read the expression of fear and shock on Tom’s face and then Charlie fired. Tom was spun round by a bullet that hit him full in the shoulder, splintering the bone and making him drop his own gun. He was facing Charlie now and slowly going down onto his knees. He could have been begging for forgiveness, but more likely he just couldn’t support himself any longer.
Either way Charlie didn’t seem bothered. He let the Starr come up nice and easy, level with Tom’s chest and squeezed down on the trigger. The shot man’s arms spread wide and his head was jolted back as a blow like an invisible fist thudded into his breast bone. Something burst inside him and the next moment he was on his back in the water, arms still wide, blood beginning to stain the clear, cold water.
‘That ain’t bad, Charlie,’ said Herne walking across the flat ground towards him.
Charlie grinned behind the stubble of his beard. ‘Thanks, Jed.’ He chuckled. ‘But we got ’em good, didn’t we?’
‘It weren’t bad. We finished off five of ’em and winged two more. That leaves ’em with eleven fit men. It’s gettin’ better odds every minute.’
‘Sure! Long as we don’t come up agin ’em all face to face.’
Herne shook his head. ‘Not yet. They might be expectin’ us to do somethin’ as fool as that. Soon as they start to thinkin’ and work out just who it was today. Well, if they’re expectin’ us to ride in on ’em or chase ‘em out on the open range, they’re wrong.’
‘What we gonna do then, Jed?’
‘I reckon we’ll wait up a bit. It’ll be a while before Drummond can hire some more guns to make up for those we shot down. We’ll let ’em get jumpy. Wait till some of ’em come into town. Supplies, maybe. Hankerin’ after whiskey or a girl. They won’t be able to stay out of Powderville for long ... and when they do come we’ll make sure they get a real nice welcoming committee.’ Herne’s smile was bitter, deadly. ‘Real nice!’
Charlie holstered the pistol still in his hand and bent to pick up his Winchester. Tell you somethin’, Jed. Afore it happened I was wonderin’ what it’d feel like, shootin’ men you’d ridden with—’
‘And?’
Charlie shook his head. ‘It wasn’t like nothin’. Not the kind of men they were. They’d turned on me just the same as they did you. Any one of ‘em would have shot me in the back without givin’ it a thought.’ He spat. ‘You an’ me, Jed, we’re doin’ folk a favor gettin’ rid of ’em.
Herne nodded agreement and set off to fetch the horses. He had a lot more favors in mind.