Herne the Hunter 24: The Last Hurrah

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Jedediah Travis Herne - the legendary Herne the Hunter - has become a man weary of traveling, of killing, of having no-one to call his own. when he comes to the aid of a beleaguered wagon train, his finds a reason for living - and for dying …

Could this be his last hurrah?

HERNE THE HUNTER 24:

HE LAST HURRAH

By John J. McLaglen

First Published by Transworld Publishers in 1983

Copyright © 1983, 2018 by John J. McLaglen

First Edition: September 2018

Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader.

Cover image © 2018 by Tony Masero

This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

Series Editor: Mike Stotter

Text © Piccadilly Publishing

Published by Arrangement with the Author.

This, belatedly, is for my children.

For David, for Cathy and for Matthew, as a small way of expressing my great pride in them.

With all of my love and all of my hopes that they may have the best and happiest of futures.

When it comes to the last line of type, I’d like folks to say that I did it pretty up and walkin’ good.

From Words Along The Wichita, by Larry James, published by Dower House Books, 1893

Keep your dreams as clean as silver, This may be the last hurrah.

John Stewart

Chapter One

There were a dozen wagons wheeled tight in a circle, their oxen tethered in their center.

Big Conestoga rigs, high-sided, each one with its canvas top in place, weathered and stained. They had already traveled over a thousand miles from Independence, Missouri, following a southern route that had now brought them into the baking deserts of the South-West. Fifty or sixty miles from the crossing of the Colorado River, summer-low. Not far from Vicksburg. They carried shoe-salesmen from New Jersey, chandlers from Boston, a whiskey-drummer from Kansas City, Kansas and a reformed whorehouse madam from Poughkeepsie. Altogether there were better than forty souls on the wagon train, every one of them from the East. All of them having sold up their homes and businesses, putting their trust in God and the wagon-master, heading westwards for a new life in California.

Twenty-five adults and seventeen children, including a babe at the breast, barely fourteen days old.

The train had been caught in a valley, close to a meandering strip of water called Drowned Squaw Creek, overlooked by the tortured shapes of buttes and mesas. The leader had immediately ordered them to pull into the traditional defensive circle, soon as he’d sighted the spiraling wraith of orange dust, moving fast in their direction. For a few moments there had been some indecision, but the first spitting volley of bullets had soon altered that, and now the wagons were a small fortress.

Patrick Smith was an unfrocked Jansenist priest from Pittsburgh. He had fallen from grace for entering into a liaison with a married woman and was heading for the golden state with that same woman, seeking fresh fields to plough. He pumped the action of the sixteen-shot Winchester Seventy-Three carbine, leveling it at one of the galloping, whooping figures that circled the wagons. He squeezed the trigger, but the thick red dust made shooting difficult and the shrieking horseman rode on unscathed.

‘Fuck,’ breathed the ex-priest, levering in another round.

Most of the women and children were cowering in the beds of the wagons. Some crying, some weeping. Some praying to the Almighty to rescue them from a fate that might be worse than death. Though on the frontier in the late eighteen hundreds it wasn’t the actual dying that was so bad. It was the manner of the dying.

If you were lucky it was fast and easy.

In Apache country it could be slow. Slow and very hard.

Teresa Harknett was a widow-woman, well past the first bloom of youth. She admitted coyly to being a little beyond thirty. Other women on the train whispered that she was at least thirty years past thirty, but that was not quite true. She was traveling westwards with a paid companion, Agatha Wells. A rosy-cheeked maiden lady with a fondness for the gin bottle. The intention was that they should go to San Francisco and open up a sophisticated gown shop, specializing in designs from Paris, France.

As bullets hissed through the torn canvas of the Conestogas, both women lay together, both shaking like aspen leaves in a hurricane. Teresa was mumbling a prayer, dredged from her Catholic childhood. Agatha was pattering the words of We Will Gather at the River, her eyes screwed tight shut, trying to ignore the evident fact that fear had caused her to lose control of her bladder.

‘The beautiful, the beautiful river …’

A carbine bullet smashed into the side of the wagon, tearing out a strip of white wood, less than a foot away from her shoulder. Outside, the world seemed to have become filled with madness. A swirling, screeching, exploding purgatory, where demons came swooping in from the tangling dust, intent on death.

‘ … That runs by the throne of God.’

Teresa was holding a little over-and-under derringer pistol in her clasped hands. Two forty-five bullets set, ready to fire. They had heard enough stories of what happened to white women who were unlucky enough to fall alive into the hands of the wicked red men. That was not going to happen to Agatha and herself.

The same thoughts were running through the minds of Bart Harvey and Jack Nolan, sharing the next wagon in line. They had become friends on the arduous trip west, each of them having a young wife. Young wives who were both around six months pregnant.

Bart and Jack had passed some hours together in the stops in small one-street towns, drinking warm beer and listening in awe and mounting fear to the tales spun by the local blowhards about the perils of the frontier.

‘It’s the women. Catch a white man and they gives him to the squaws. Handy with their needles. Sew patterns of beads all over a man. All over him. Slice off hunks of flesh with their little flensing knives. Cook ’em and feed ’em to the poor bastards. Blind you with white-hot steel. Break every finger and toe. Peel your lips and hack your nose off. Long augurs that go clean in one ear and out the other. Pull your tongue out so’s you can’t even beg the witches for death.’

Bart and Jack didn’t sleep easy for nights after that talk. And the locals also told them about the prospects for white women. They weren’t much better. Least they got to live.

‘Ifn you can call bein’ slave and whore to a whole tribe of stinkin’ braves livin’,’ they said.

Bart and Jack kept that side of things from their pretty young women. But each of them had sworn to the other that they would take care that a couple of rounds were saved for the last moments. Not for a minute ever thinking that it might come to that.

Disasters only happened to other folk.

Bart was firing a forty-five sixty Kennedy repeating rifle, punctuating each snap of the hammer with the names of the Apache tribes that he had learned, like a litany of nightmare horror.

‘Mescalero.’

White powder smoke bursting from the muzzle of the long gun.

‘Mimbreños.’

Another round whistling into the haze from the eight sided barrel.

‘Kiowa-Apache. White Mountain.’ Another bullet. ‘San Carlos. Jicarilla. Chiricahua.’

As soon as the cloud of dust had been spotted by the wagon-master, every man, woman and child had known that they were in for a bitter and bloody fight. There had been Indian raids on some of the outlying, isolated spreads around the region. Pillars of dark smoke coiling into the cloudless blue, over the horizons, telling their own tales of violence and savagery.

There were around fifteen in the attacking group, though a precise count wasn’t possible. They had come from the lowering hills with the sudden shock of a cold norther, galloping in and out of the maze of arroyos around the wagons. At any one moment not more than half of them were visible, firing from the backs of their horses, gradually working their way closer.

The wagon-master was tall and lean as whipcord. Nicholas Pilch, known as Austin Nick from his Texas birthplace. He had led several trains from the big river to the sea, and he had always managed to avoid serious Indian trouble. But this time was different.

He cradled his Winchester carbine to his shoulder, feeling the kick of each tightening of the trigger. He had enjoyed the satisfaction of seeing at least one of the attackers go rolling off the back of a grey mare, a red flower blossoming in the middle of the face.

‘How many rounds, Paddy?’ he bellowed. His ramrod was a diminutive Irish-German from Vermont, Paddy Neumann. He was outside the wagon, scurrying around the defensive circle, checking on any wounded, making sure that everyone was still firing.

‘Not enough, I fear. Not enough.’

‘Could we cut and run?’ asked Austin Nick, immediately answering his own question. ‘Nay. They’d hamstring the oxen before we had made a furlong. What of