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.
‘I’ll take the hero,’ said Coburn, standing up and drawing his Colt. There was no danger from frightened men on horseback, riding head down out of a trap.
Herne also stood, bracing his front foot against the side of the boulder in front of him, noticing that it was veined with a silvery metal. Pyrites, he guessed
The albino was like some terrifying avenging angel of death, the wind whipping his hair about his long white face, the Colt in his hand spitting lead at the oncoming horseman. Snow blew into Jed’s face and he blinked it away, taking careful aim at the horse’s chest as it came towards him. Squeezing the trigger three times. Actually seeing all the bullets hit home, bringing the poor beast foundering to its knees, throwing the rider clean over its near shoulder to land with a dreadful crack on the earth of the trail.
Whitey fired five times.
Aiming at the men rather than the mounts, using the most difficult and least-tried technique of the hired gun. Fanning the hammer of the Colt with the heel of his left hand, keeping the trigger depressed with the right forefinger. Although it was lightning fast, it also presented problems of accuracy. In a situation with men on horseback coming past at the gallop, it was a reasonable way of putting as much lead as possible into a small area in a short time.
Jed registered the shots, noting that even at the height of the battle that Whitey was still the careful professional. Only using five of the six bullets. Just in case.
Both men toppled off their mount, falling together on the snow-covered stone of the trail, tangling together in a jigsaw of arms and legs. The one who’d originally been wounded was clearly dead, half his head leaking blood and brains in the trampled whiteness. His companion, who’d tried to save his life was hit in stomach and left thigh, and was trapped by the corpse of his fellow gunman.
‘Help me, Mister! I never done nothing to you, whoever you are.’
He was very young, his pale face turned up to them showing the faintest beginnings of a fuzzy moustache. Ignoring him, Coburn started to reload his gun. Jed looked down at the boy, remembering back to times when he might have died like that. Gutshot and helpless. It was one Hell of a way to die.
‘Please, Mister. Don’t shoot me again. I’m hurtin’ real bad. Help me!’
‘We don’t have a lot of time, Jed. Waste him and let’s get to it.’
Whitey was right. They had to get the man who lay groaning and semi-conscious near them. The one whose horse had been shot from under him by Jed. He was what they needed to make the day a complete success. The other men from the house would have heard the burst of shooting. It wouldn’t be long before there were reinforcements on the way from Mount Abora.
‘Mister. I’m only twenty-one.’
He looked younger, vulnerable, and in pain.
Jed carefully took aim with the Colt and shot him between the eyes, watching the blood-rose flower in the center of the boy’s forehead. The body twitched once and then lay quite still in the snow.
There were two more shots from near the earth-slide as Coburn put the finishing touches to their ambush. With the one man who was now sitting up, watched by Herne, they had succeeded in wiping out half of the Stanwyck’s hired army of young killers in one simple attack. With no real way in or out of Mount Abora, the odds had come down in their favor.
‘What the fuckin’ hell happened?’ Jed stepped forward and tugged the holstered gun away from the gunman. Apart from a scalp wound that was bleeding profusely, he seemed unmarked.
‘You’re comin’ with us, friend,’ said Herne. ‘On your feet now and climb up there, behind those boulders. We got a mite of waitin’ to do.’
Unsteady on his feet, the boy got up and did what he was told, menaced by the two guns of the attackers. He was clearly terrified by the grim-faced men, especially so by the shocking appearance of the albino. The wind was rising as the afternoon faded away towards evening, and more snow filled the air with a downy, icy softness.
Coburn joined them on the narrow ledge and crouched down, checking his guns, waiting for the relief party from the house to arrive, glancing down at the carnage below, the bodies already starting to blur at the edges with the driving blizzard.
‘Good that. Real good, Jed.’
The prisoner looked up at the name.
‘Jed?’
‘That’s right, son. Jedediah Herne.’
‘Oh, God! Sweet Lord Jesus! Herne the Hunter.’ Turning to look at Coburn. ‘And you’re the bounty hunter we heard of. Whitey Coburn.’
Without changing his expression, Coburn swung an open-handed slap at the boy’s face, slamming him back against the rocks behind, nearly knocking him out.
‘Name’s Isaiah Coburn, boy. And you better not forget it again.’
‘I ... I didn’t ... Truly ... Truly ... They never told us that it’d be both of you ... We ... I swear to God we didn’t know ... Not like this.’
‘Hush up, boy. There’s goin’ to be some of your friends comin’ soon, to find out what’s happened to you. And I wouldn’t want them knowin’ we was up here. Jed here’s got a knife ... show it him, Jed... There. That’ll go through your throat like a trail-hand through a Denver whore. Not a word.’
They waited in the falling snow.
Coburn whispered to Herne. ‘That kid you shot through the head.’
‘Yeah.’ Herne didn’t particularly want to be reminded of it.
‘When he said he was twenty-one you should have told him that bit of poetry in Birch Wells. Remember? “This verse on your grave won’t be read by you. Your killings done, you’re twenty-one, you won’t see twenty-two.”’
Jed nodded. He remembered the verse. Even remembered the boy. Should have done. He’d put him in that graveyard.