Herne saw the sheriff once more that evening; it was in a small saloon towards the cemetery end of town and Herne was sitting over his third glass of luke-warm beer, watching a man in a raccoon hat win close on seventy dollars in a game of five-card stud. The sheriff pushed open the batwing doors and stood just inside for a few minutes, letting his presence get felt. Then he wandered over to the bar, taking his time, letting folk get a good look at him. Herne, too, had watched and admired the young lawman’s poise and balls, if nothing else. Yester ordered a whiskey and chatted with the barkeep for a while, before leaning his back against the edge of the counter and surveying the remainder of the occupants. He spotted Herne glancing in his direction and acknowledged him with a brief dip of the head. Five minutes later he was gone and the men inside the saloon got to talking about him, recounting the tale of the runaway horse and making up a handful of new exploits for the youngster which made him a cross between Billy the Kid and John Wesley Hardin.
‘Heard of a feller one time,’ said the man in the raccoon hat, ‘faster with a pistol than any of them fancy names as get ’emselves writ up in print. Nothin’ fancy, just quick. Mean an’ quick.’
‘Who’s that, then?’
‘Name was Herne – Herne the Hunter.’
The men around the card table looked at him and shook their heads.
‘Yeah,’ said one of them after a few moments’ thought. ‘I did hear the name once, but he wasn’t from these parts. He was down in the southwest. I’m sure of that.’
A bystander leaned over and nodded. ‘That’s right. Down near the Rio Grande. That’s where he hung out.’
‘No more?’ asked raccoon hat.
‘No,’ with a slow sideways shake of the head. ‘He stopped a bullet a long time back.’
‘Poor bastard!’ said the card player. ‘I guess if you live by the gun that’s the way you’ve got to expect to go.’ There was a murmuring of agreement. ‘Now, me...’
Herne swallowed almost the last of his beer, leaving the dregs floating in a quarter inch at the bottom of the glass. He set it down and stood up, lifting his hat from the back of his chair and jamming it down onto his head. He walked between the tables and chairs and loafing men and pushed open the swinging doors. Not one man as much as turned a head to watch him go.
Herne looked up at the sky, bible black, stars set into it bright, clear and unmoving. The moon was a slim crescent, a silver bracelet for a woman’s arm. For a few seconds he was thinking about Nadine, silver skin and fancy hair and a face that folk would want to paint and set in books. He wondered what she had looked like when Jamie Edwards had married her, if she had been beautiful then, or whether she had grown into her beauty as she became older and more self-assured.
Thinking such thoughts, he began to wander back towards the center of town and the rooming house where he had left his things. His mind dwelled for a brief while on the prospect of a comfortable bed and real sheets, but the earlier thought kept invading. Would Nadine have been as young and lovely as his Louise had been when they had met and married? And would she have grown away from him, supposing she’d been granted the time to live. Live long enough to leave him.
Herne’s face darkened. How could he have expected to keep her, no matter how much he had loved her? They were too far apart, too different; he was older, coarser, she would have tired of him and one day she would have met someone younger with a spark that caught her eye and then ...
Then what? He would be as alone as now, but at least there would have been a few more years to remember. Not the return home through the snow, Louise’s blank, unexplaining face – later the slight sway of the body in the barn, swinging from the central rafters.
He stopped short, hearing a sound off to his left. A muffled shout from the darkness. A narrow alleyway between two buildings. Herne moved a few paces closer, his thumb pushing the safety thong clear of the hammer of his Colt.
He stood still, listening. There was a scrabbling of feet and then the sound once again, the word: ‘Help!’ muffled as if a hand had been thrown over someone’s mouth and then a hard thump of a blow from a hard implement.
The cry for help broke out sharper still.
Herne glanced quickly up and down the street. There was a man leading his horse in the opposite direction, almost out of hailing; another, drunk or asleep or both, rested up against the sidewalk across the way, his body slumped sideways, one arm cradling his head.
Where the Hell was that damned sheriff when he was needed?
No shouts now, only the sound of blows being struck.
Herne drew his pistol and was across the boards at the edge of the street, ducking into the dark of the alley. He saw vague shapes moving close together deeper down, a whirling of arms and something like a piece of plank being raised high.
‘Hold it!’ Herne’s voice broke the scuffle apart.
He moved a couple of paces further in, trying to make faces from the dim forms ahead of him. One of them moved sideways and Herne raised his Colt, thinking the man was going for a hidden gun. As he did so he was aware of a slight, almost silent movement at back of him. A word half-formed on his lips as his head jerked round, his own body half-turning. Something blunt and heavy smashed down into the side of his face, landing across the eye, the cheek, one corner of his mouth. Herne went backwards and his shoulder struck the wall awkwardly; the Colt was jarred loose from his hand and he made a grab towards it as it fell.
His vision was suddenly filled by the second swing of the club and at the last moment he tried to swerve his head away from it. The force of the blow was taken by his left arm instead, a few inches above the elbow. A jarring, numbing pain, filled that side of his body and he heard the Colt strike the dirt at the foot of the alley. A hand grabbed at him and tried to haul him round. The section of plank was being wielded again, but this time he was the intended victim. He thrust up his right hand to ward it off and the wood hammered down against his knuckles, skinning them instantly.
Herne roared in anger and kicked out hard, enjoying the satisfaction of feeling the underside of his boot connect with something solid that shuddered backwards and emitted a high shriek of pain. He pushed himself away from the wall and started throwing punches, at least one of them landing on unprotected flesh. Blows were raining in on him, though, three or four attacking him at once and the narrowness of the alley made it difficult for him to evade them for long. He grabbed hold of one of the men and whirled him around, hurling him back against the wall He flung his right arm round in an arc and felt his elbow connect with someone’s face. The numbness was disappearing from his other arm and he tested it with a punch into the darting shape close to his left. Quickly, he bent low, reaching for the bayonet blade snug inside his boot. As he did so the plank was driven hard between his legs from the rear. Herne gasped and his eyes watered involuntarily; he made an instinctive grab between his legs as he doubled over. As his chin lowered towards the ground the toe of a boot came up fast to meet it. His teeth were rammed together and at once he tasted blood. The club thudded against the side of his head and he flailed out with both arms but now they were kicking and punching down into him and there were too many of them to prevent himself from being driven to the ground.
Herne tried to roll one way but the wall stopped him. He was pushing back in the opposite direction when a heavy blow seemed to break his face apart. Patterns curlicued in front of his eyes and yet he knew that they were shut. He was conscious of more blows, but they seemed duller, further away. After a short time, he wasn’t conscious of anything other than a constant but distant sensation of pain: and then not even that.
Herne came to with a start, for several seconds not knowing where he was. Then he remembered in a flash of recall the alley, the dark, the sudden attack, his body being hammered to the ground. Herne blinked and stared around and realized that somehow he was in his bed at the rooming house. Every part of him seemed to ache, but some parts ached more than others. Between his legs, all down his left arm – his face and left temple. Herne groaned and rolled a little onto his side, reaching his right ...
Jesus Christ!
His right arm refused to move. He swiveled his head, staring up along the bed. His wrist was handcuffed to the bedhead, locked around the brass end rail. Herne struggled and shook and tried for some moments to prize the metal back. Eventually, he lay on his back and yelled. It took him close to five minutes to raise anyone at all and then it was only Mrs Ruggles, who came in wiping flour from her hands onto her blue and green flowered apron. She smiled at Herne at first and then, as if realizing that he was for whatever reason a prisoner within her house, she gave him a frosty stare and reached inside the front pocket of her apron for her spectacles. When the pince-nez were perched precariously on the end of her nose and she was satisfied that Herne was neither miraculously free nor in imminent danger of dying, she asked him what he wanted.
‘What the Hell’s the meaning of these cuffs?’ he shouted.
Mrs Ruggles retreated a couple of paces and covered her ears with her still floury hands. ‘There’s no need to shout, none whatsoever. I may be in need of artificial means of aiding my sight, but I am far from being deaf. I assure you I shall hear you perfectly well if you—’
‘For God’s sake what am I doin’ locked up here?’
‘Nor is there a necessity for using profane language. It is doubtful if the Almighty ...’ And here she glanced up at the ceiling, as if, indeed, He might be listening at that precise moment. ‘… will be so concerned with your fate that any amount of shouting at him will persuade him to intervene on your behalf.’
Herne swallowed several mouthfuls of rage and waited for her to stop talking. Then, as gently as he could, using the voice he normally reserved for his infrequent conversations with the very young or the alarmingly old, he asked Mrs Ruggles to explain how he came to be chained up to her bed in that manner.
She sighed and heaved her insignificant bosom and told Herne how he’d been found by the sheriff and brought to her place, that the doctor had fixed up his cuts and bruises and while he was still no more than fading into and out of consciousness the new young sheriff had handcuffed him to the bed and impressed upon her the importance of calling him the moment the prisoner woke up.
Herne shook his head angrily and almost immediately regretted it. Pain vibrated from ear to ear. ‘Have you got a drink?’ he asked.
‘There’s water,’ she said hopefully.
‘Coffee?’ he asked.
‘Well, I don’t know ...’
‘Get me some coffee,’ he asked. ‘Please. And then maybe you’d best do what the sheriff said and let him know I’m come round. He just better have a good explanation for what I’m doing like this.’
Herne rattled the cuff against the bedpost as Mrs Ruggles tut-tutted her way out of the room. Herne went over the previous night’s events in his mind – at least, he assumed it was only the previous night and that he hadn’t been unconscious for any longer. He wondered who had suckered him into the alley and as soon as that thought entered his mind it was followed by another: there had been three or four of them, probably the latter, and that meant it could have been the four from back along the trail. Their faces shifted across the front of Herne’s memory – Zac Peters, P.J., Savannah and Tex. He winced as one of his bruises reminded him of the plank of wood that had been hammered into him. He was still vowing all kinds of revenge when the coffee and the sheriff arrived at more or less the same time.
‘Okay,’ said Yester, taking the cup. ‘I’ll see to it.’
‘Would you appreciate a cup, Sheriff?’ asked the woman.
Yester shook his head. ‘It’s all right, Mrs Ruggles. This’ll suit me fine.’
He sniffed at the contents of the cup and began to drink.
‘But that’s for ...’
Yester pushed her out of the door and shut it fast. He stared down at the glaring Herne and grinned; then he drank some more of the coffee and pronounced it fair. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘let’s see what we’ve got here.’
Herne stared back up at him. ‘You get me out of this damned cuff an’ we’ll see – till then there ain’t nothin’ doin’.’
But the sheriff was still grinning. ‘From where I’m standing,’ he said, ‘you ain’t in no position to be telling me one damn thing. I see your hand an’ there ain’t a single ace stuck in it.’
‘Wait till I get—’
‘But ain’t that the point? Until I say so you won’t be getting anywhere.’
Anger showed in Herne’s eyes, on the set of his face. ‘For a snot nosed kid, you got a lot of sand.’
Yester stopped grinning. ‘Mister, my ma stopped havin’ to wipe my nose for me a long time back. I been wearin’ long pants for some time, too, an’ in case you failed to notice, I got a Colt here that handles pretty good.’
Herne snorted. ‘What I heard, all you shot was a fool horse that spooked in the street. Do that in a one-eyed hole like this and suddenly you’re a big hero.’
Yester rattled the end of the bed. ‘Now you wouldn’t be sore on account of them pickin’ me over you for this star, would you?’
‘You can take that piece of tin an’ ram it up your ass!’
The sheriff made a pretty fair show of being shocked and tut-tutted a little. ‘Now you let Mrs Ruggles hear you talkin’ like that, she’s like to turn you out of house an’ home.’
‘Which wouldn’t be none too soon,’ retorted Herne.
‘Yeah, but the only place you’d be goin’ is the jail. You wouldn’t be here now if it wasn’t for the doc havin’ to tend to those cuts an’ stuff you got.’
Herne shook his head and looked back at him; right then there didn’t appear to be a whole lot to say.
Yester moved to the side of the bed, being careful not to get close enough so that Herne could take a kick at him and try to use fads free hand to get hold of his gun. After all, this was the new sheriff’s first prisoner and he was being awful careful not to lose him.
‘You want to tell me what happened?’ Yester asked mildly.
Herne said, ‘I was wonderin’ when you’d get round to that. I was headin’ here when I heard someone shoutin’ for help down this alley, sounded like they was bein’ beaten pretty bad. I started down towards whatever was goin’ on an’ got suckered from behind. Next thing I knew there was a bunch of ’em, four maybe, all gettin’ into me at once. They knew what they was doin’,’ he finished ruefully.
‘And you didn’t?’ snapped Yester.
‘Meanin’?’
‘Meanin’ no wonder they didn’t give you the sheriff’s job – getting tricked like that and then beaten up. What kind of a lawman’s fall for a cheap shot like that?’
‘I suppose you’ve kept out?’
‘I’d have had them comin’ out into the light to me.’
‘By which time whoever was being clubbed might have been dead.’
‘And you’d have still been alive with your gun in your hand.’
‘Is that what matters?’
‘To me it does.’
Herne shook his head. ‘Then God help anyone who gets in a fix in this town because while you’re busy working out how not to get into danger they’re likely ending’ up six foot under.’
Yester cleared his throat. ‘You ain’t in no position to be givin’ me advice. Not beat up an’ locked up the way you are.’
‘You can easy sort that out,’ said Herne. ‘Part of it anyhow, just get that key out of your pocket and take off this cuff.’
Yester was grinning again. ‘When you told me what happened.’
Herne punched his left fist down into the mattress and the springs creaked and complained. ‘Damn it, I told you!’
‘Uh-uh. You told me how you got beat up. That’s pretty interesting, I guess, but not what I want to hear ’bout most.’
‘Okay. Then what is?’
Yester leaned back against the bedpost and fixed Herne with a look. ‘What I want to hear about is the woman.’
‘What the Hell you talkin’ about? What woman?’
Yester held his breath, making Herne wait for it. Then, in a quiet voice that sounded awful loud in the room, he said: ‘The one you killed.’
At first Herne didn’t understand what the lawman had said; then, when he was certain he’d got the words right, he failed to make sense of them. What the Hell was he talking about? What woman? What killing? He looked hard at Dan Yester and asked exactly those questions.
All Yester did was laugh. ‘You mean you can’t recall?’
‘Recall what? I don’t know—’
‘You mean it isn’t an out of the way thing for you, murdering a ...’
Herne grabbed for him, but the sheriff was quick and was on his feet, the Colt coming out of his holster quick enough to give Herne pause for thought. In the moment of silence that followed, the triple click of the hammer was clear and unmistakable.
‘One more time,’ said Yester, ‘and you’re a dead man.’
Herne’s breath came hard; he would have taken Yester apart with his bare hands if one of them hadn’t been cuffed to the bedpost.
He waited until he was breathing more easily and then asked, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, so tell me – who’s the woman I’m supposed to have killed?’
Yester still thought Herne was stalling, but decided to play along – for a while anyway. ‘You do remember the woman at the hotel?’ he asked.
‘The Edwards woman? Sure.’
‘Okay,’ said Yester, ‘that’s good, ’cause—’
‘You ain’t tellin’ me she’s dead?’ queried Herne, amazed. ‘Because an hour or so before I went into that alley she was about as alive as any woman I’ve seen.’
Yester nodded: ‘We’re agreed on that.’
‘Then what happened?’
‘She was found out back of the hotel, propped up against the wall. The cook found her. Saw her there and at first she thought she was ill, drunk, whatever. Got hold of her by the shoulder and give her a shake. When her hand come away the fingers were sticky and wet. She opened the back door to get a better look an’ that was when she saw it was blood.’
‘Jesus Christ!’ hissed Herne with a sharp intake of breath.
‘Throat had been cut. From under her right ear to a few inches past her gullet. Like a man had done it with a single slash.’
Herne looked at him. ‘What sort of blade?’
Yester shrugged. ‘Big. Hefty. One of them Indian knives. Bayonet, even. Somethin’ like that.’
Herne looked past Yester towards the window. His mind was racing ahead, thinking about the bayonet stashed inside his right boot, the blade as well honed as a barber’s razor.
‘You wouldn’t know anythin’ about such a knife, I guess?’
‘Uh-uh.’ Herne shook his head.
‘No kind of bayonet, for instance?’
The expression on Herne’s face was blank; he was certain now that the peace officer had found the weapon already, he was simply teasing him along. Herne wanted to look around the room to see where his boots were but he restrained himself. He guessed it would have been the sheriff or the doctor who jerked his boots off in the first place and if that were the case the long blade would have been spotted for sure.
‘I didn’t have no call to kill her,’ said Herne. ‘Besides, you know where I was after I left the hotel.’
Yester shook his head. ‘I seen you for maybe ten minutes in a saloon. There was an hour either side of that before you got what was comin’ to you. It don’t but take a second to cut a woman’s throat.’
‘Why the Hell should I do that?’
Dan Yester smiled. ‘You tell me.’
Herne bunched his fists and glared. ‘All I did was bring her a letter from her husband, nothin’ more.’
‘An’ what was in the letter?’
‘Like I told her, I never read it.’
‘You carried a letter worth fifty dollars and never opened it?’
‘Why should I?’
‘But the man who gave it to you, he was dying, wasn’t he? He must have told you something.’
‘He just gave me the letter. And how come you know so much about what went on?’
‘You weren’t quiet in that office.’
‘You mean Bennett was spyin’ outside.’
Yester shrugged.
‘Where was he while this was goin’ on?’ asked Herne.
‘Bennett? He was enjoyin’ her in his bed every night. What did he want to kill her for?’
‘Don’t ask me. But I reckon what was in the letter could have had somethin’ to do with it.’
‘Well,’ said Yester, finally releasing the hammer of his gun and sliding the Colt back into his holster, ‘since we don’t know what was in the letter, there ain’t no sayin’.’
‘She didn’t tell Bennett?’ asked Herne.
Yester shook his head from side to side. ‘And if you don’t know, there’s nothin’ else I can do. Soon as the doc reckons you’re patched up fit enough to move, we’ll get you over to the jail and see about sendin’ for the circuit judge. Reckon a good hangin’ will pick the town up a bit.’
Yester grinned and turned towards the door. When he was half way onto the landing Herne called him back. ‘I guess the prospector – if that’s what he was this Edwards anyway – I guess he did say somethin’ about that letter.’
Yester’s grin grew into a broad smile and he came back to the end of the bed. Herne looked at his fool face and wanted to lift his leg high enough to plant the underside of his boot smack in it. But he was inches too far away.
‘I’m waiting,’ Yester said.
‘This Edwards, he said there was silver buried. Said it was for her. His wife. The letter said where it was.’
‘Where?’ pounced Yester.
‘I don’t know.’
‘You said—’
‘I said Edwards told me what the letter was about. He wasn’t fool enough to tell me where the silver was.’
‘He gave you the letter.’
‘He had to take that chance.’
The sheriff considered it for a few moments. If what Herne was saying was true then the woman might have been running out on Bennett and if the hotel man had been as stuck on her as it appeared then he could have lost his temper enough to ...
No: it didn’t make sense. Even if Bennett had lied about her not telling him what was in the letter.
‘Them as got me in the alley,’ said Herne, interrupting the sheriff’s thoughts. ‘I think they were the same four who went after Edwards. They shot him and somehow he shook ’em off. When I was planting him, they made a show of facin’ me down, but pulled off. They could’ve followed me here.’
‘For what?’
‘Same as they tried to get Edwards for – the details about where the silver was.’
Yester backed off from the bed rail. ‘You believe all this?’ he asked. ‘This silver business.’
Herne shook his head. ‘Didn’t at first, got to admit that. Thought the feller was carryin’ on about it on account of them slugs in him. Now, though, I ain’t so sure. If them four are willin’ to go as far as they have—’
‘Hold on!’ Yester stopped him with a shake of the head. ‘You’re saying that they beat you up to get the letter?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And when they didn’t get it, they killed the woman for it?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Then how come that she was more or less certain killed before you stepped into that alleyway?’
Herne just looked back at him: he didn’t know.
‘The letter,’ he asked after a few moments, ‘was it on her?’
The sheriff shook his head.
‘Okay, then whoever—’
‘Cut her throat took the letter, yeah, that looks likely.’
‘So uncuff me fast,’ snapped Herne.
‘How come?’
‘Why the Hell should I kill a woman to get back what I’d already had on me for two days anyway?’
Yester held his breath and then released it slow; he hadn’t been clear enough to figure out what Herne had just said but now the words had come out they sounded real clear and sensible. He didn’t like having his case knocked out from under him, though, not just like that.
‘What about that bayonet as was stashed in your boot?’ he asked.
‘What about it? You find any sign of blood on it?’
‘No, but that don’t prove a thing, you’d have washed it off, wiped it clean, somethin’ like that.’
‘Sure. But you don’t know for certain what kind of blade it was. You fixin’ to arrest everyone in town with a knife bigger’n eight inches?’
Dan Yester was beginning to feel decidedly less self-assured than he had been a little while back when he’d been bragging to Cohen and Bennett and a few others from the town council as to how he’d got the murder all sewn up and over. He looked at his prisoner on the bed and regretted his doubts; arrogant old man – what right had he got to tell him what he was doing wrong?
Herne shook his right arm. The cuffs jangled. ‘You unlock these, Sheriff. I don’t see as you’ve got evidence to hold me. Unless it’s a crime to get beaten up in this town.’
Yester hesitated.
‘Look, son …’ Herne began, but it was the wrong word, the wrong tone.
‘Okay, mister,’ said the sheriff fast, ‘I told you before to quit bearin’ down on me about bein’ wet behind the ears. Now listen good. I’ll shift you across to the jail an’ the doc can look at you there. You can spend the day in jail and after that maybe the town can decide what to do with you.’
‘The town!’ Herne scoffed. ‘I thought you was the one in charge of law and order round here?’
Yester answered him by drawing his gun and then pulling open the bedroom door. He called for Mrs Ruggles and supervised her, as with shaking hands she unfastened the cuff from the bed and linked Herne’s arms together behind his back. Then she pulled his boots on for him and waited to see if he wanted some assistance getting to his feet. He didn’t, but his body ached a whole lot more than it should have done.
‘Move it!’
Herne stared with real enmity at the sheriff but he wasn’t about to argue with a cocked pistol – not when it was being handled by an angry young man who was capable of dropping a galloping horse going at full stretch.
There were a good few folk waiting in the street to watch Herne walk slowly and at gunpoint towards the jailhouse and none of them was even a mite friendly.