The Black Widow by John J. McLaglen

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’
h ell
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
Hern e. ‘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.

Chapter Seven
    Outside their shelter, Herne could hear
Becky vomiting in the snow.
    Retching and crying at the same time,
coughing as she brought up the thick soup that she’d cooked for
them all with the makings Coburn had brought from the store. Inside
the shelter, Jed and Whitey crouched each side of the young gunman
they’d taken prisoner. He was tightly bound,