Bounty Hunter

Chapter 3

“I should be back in a couple of days, Lawson,” Tone told the desk clerk.

The man smiled. “I will see that your room is undisturbed.”

Tone nodded, picked up his key and climbed the stairs to the second floor. His room lay at the end of the hallway and he unlocked the door and stepped inside.

After throwing a few items of clothing in a carpetbag, Tone opened a dresser drawer and removed a .44- 40 Colt with a seven-and-a-half-inch barrel. It had once been a match for the revolver he wore in the shoulder holster under his coat, but he’d had the barrel of his hideout gun shortened to three inches and the ejector and front sight had been removed. It was a weapon modified for close-up, personal work, but he might also need the long-barreled Colt’s longer reach.

Tone tossed the Colt into the bag, removed his gray top hat and checked himself in the mirror. Staring back at him was a handsome, black-haired young man with a long, faintly melancholy face and eyes the color of ice in a mountain crevasse. His mouth under the sweeping dragoon mustache was wide and generous and had once, in another time and place, been quick to smile.

Tone dropped his hands from his cravat and gazed at his reflection, unsettled by the coldness of his eyes. He detected no hint of humanity, no songs still to be sung. Rather he saw the eyes of a predatory animal, ruthless, merciless and calculating.

Women looked at him, he knew, and their bold stares lingered, wondering. And so did men. But most would glance away quickly, not liking what they saw.

The others, the ones who would meet his eyes and not look away, were men like himself, wolves among sheep, those who lived by the Colt and had long since accepted the hard lessons it taught and its violent tyranny.

Tone continued to stare into the mirror, like a man in a deep trance. He remembered another face, not unlike the one in his reflection, but twenty years younger and much less hard and uncompromising. And he recalled a voice, the good-natured bellow of big, laughing Michael O’Rourke.

Suddenly he was in another time and in a more ancient, greener place . . .

“Ah, my lad, ’tis a wonderful tenor voice you have and no mistake,” O’Rourke said, slapping seventeen-year-old John Tone on the back. “You must turn the angels sick with envy.”

“Sing us another, John,” a man yelled from the bar.

The pub in the village of Ballenlake, deep in the Wicklow Mountains, was crowded that day in the bitter winter of 1867, as Ireland licked her wounds and nursed her festering grievances. With great brutality, the British had crushed the Éirí Amach na bhFiann, the Irish Fenian revolt, a few months before, and many of Erin’s heroes had danced their last jig at the end of a hangman’s noose.

The men present, and the few crooning grannies huddled by the fire, took whatever solace they could find in whiskey and the auld music. As it had been for hundreds of years, the British would write the history of the ’67 revolt and the Irish would write the songs.

“Give us ‘The Old Fenian Gun,’ John,” the man at the bar called out, to an instant chorus of approval.

“Sing, is it?” young Tone asked. “And with me pipes as dry as sticks.”

The man at the bar yelled, “Hey, Molly, get the boy a pint of porter.”

“He can have a glass of cider,” Molly O’Hara said, tossing her glossy black mane of hair. “John is too young to be drinking porter and ale with the rest of you sots.”

“Ho, John, when you marry Molly, she’ll put a ring through your nose and lead you around like Tom Flaherty’s bull.” The man laughed.

Molly was the pub landlord’s daughter, a quick, lively girl who was the same age as John. They had been walking out together for a year, and everyone expected their nuptials to be announced soon, this despite her being the daughter of a wealthy pub owner and John the poor son of a poorer widow.

John adored Molly with the hot, ardent fervor known only to the very young and, as far as he was aware, she returned his love in equal measure.

The girl set the glass of cider on the table before John and flashed him a dazzling smile that was both warm and affectionate.

Then, from the bar: “Come now, John. ‘The Old Fenian Gun,’ it is.”

Molly rounded on the man. “He won’t be singing that rebel song, Tom Doyle! If the British hear him he’ll be hung. They’re hanging men and women for less these days.”

“Aye, what you say is true, Molly O’Hara,” the man called Doyle said. “And, by Christ, more will swing before these troubles are over.”

“That will do, Tom,” said a small man dressed in black, a clerical collar at his neck. “ ’Tis a mortal sin to take the Lord’s name in vain.”

“And indeed it was not a curse, Father,” Doyle said. “I used the Lord’s holy name as a prayer for all the poor martyrs the English government will hang this winter.”

A gloom settled over the bar as the banshee wind howled outside and rain hammered against the pub windows.

“I don’t fear the English,” Tone said with a youngster’s reckless bravado. “I’ll sing the song for you, Tom Doyle.”

“Good lad,” Doyle yelled, and the others cheered.

Tone threw back his head and in a fine tenor voice began the old rebel song, written to commemorate failed rebellion.

It hung above the kitchen fire, its barrel long and brown, And one day with a boy’s desire, I climbed and took it down.

Me father’s eyes in anger flashed. He cried, “What have you done?

“I wish you’d left it where it was, that’s my old Fenian gun.”

I fondled it with love and pride, I looked it o’er and o’er.

I placed it on my shoulder, and I marched across the floor.

My father’s anger softened, and as he shared my boyish fun,

“Ah, well,” he said, “ ’tis in your breed, that old Fenian gun.”

I remember—

The pub door crashed open and four British soldiers swaggered inside, led by a huge, burly sergeant, his veined face the color of fired brick. Dripping rain, the men strode to the bar and the sergeant slammed the palm of a beefy hand on the polished mahogany.

“Four pints of porter, and be quick about it,” he demanded.

James O’Hara, as big as the sergeant and angry, slapped away the man’s hand. “We serve no redcoats here, so be off with you.”

“You serve no redcoats ’ere, is it? You’ll be serving us or I’ll burn this place down around your bleedin’ ears.”

“You’ll get no porter in my pub. Now be off with you or I’ll report you to your officer.”

“Like he cares?” The soldiers around the sergeant laughed. Suddenly the man reached out, grabbed O’Hara by the shirtfront and slammed his ham of a right fist into the landlord’s face. The blow shook O’Hara and he would have fallen had not the soldier kept him on his feet. The sergeant hit him again, and everyone in the bar heard the bones of his nose shatter.

Suddenly Molly was on the Englishman like a tigress, screaming her rage as her small fists hammered into his face and head. “Leave my father alone, you bastard!” she yelled.

The big soldier ducked his head against the blows raining down on him. He tried to push Molly away. “Get off me, you papist bitch!”

John sprang to his feet, but immediately two of the privates leveled their Enfield rifle muskets at his chest.

Opposite Tone, Michael O’Rourke, who had fought in the recent rebellion, also rose, but he laid a restraining hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Not yet, John,” he whispered. “They’ll kill you. Not yet, lad.”

O’Rourke, a left-handed man, was furtively reaching into the pocket of his coat.

Then Tone saw Molly O’Hara die.

The big sergeant had grabbed the girl by the shoulders, and his bearded, open mouth sought hers. “Give us a kiss, darlin’,” he said with a grin. “I’ll wager you’ve already been done enough times that you won’t miss it.”

Molly spat in the man’s face and her fingernails taloned his cheek, drawing blood as scarlet as his coat.

The sergeant cursed and backhanded a vicious slap across the girl’s face. She stumbled away from him and fell, the back of her neck slamming into the corner of a heavy oak table on the way down.

Later, men said Molly O’Hara must have been dead when she hit the floor.

O’Rourke roared in fury and pulled a .442 Tranter revolver from his pocket. If the British soldiers had been militia, recruited for the duration of the rebellion, the big Irishman might have stood a chance. But they were regulars and well trained.

Before he could even level the Tranter two heavy balls crashed into O’Rourke’s chest. The big man yelled, “They’ve killed me, lads,” then dropped, the revolver falling from his suddenly nerveless fingers.

The gun thudded onto the table and without a thought, Tone picked it up. The soldiers who had shot O’Rourke were reloading, and the boy ignored them. The third private had been pinned between his sergeant and the bar and was trying to extricate himself. The man wriggled free and his rifle came up fast.

Tone fired. Hit hard, the soldier slammed against the bar and slid to the floor. The sergeant turned, his face shocked and Tone shot him.

He did not wait to see the effect of his bullet on the man, but fired at the two privates who had reloaded and were bringing their rifles to bear. Both men were hit, one discharging his rifle into the ceiling as he fell.

The huge sergeant, his face a mask of fury, had not been carrying a rifle, but he’d drawn the bayonet from the frog at his side and was advancing on Tone, cursing. This time the boy took careful aim, holding the big Tranter at eye level in both hands. The bullet hit just under the polished brim of the man’s shako, driving into the bridge of his nose.

The sergeant screamed, staggered, then crashed facedown onto the pine floor.

Through a thick gray mist of powder smoke Tone jumped over the fallen soldier and ran to Molly’s side. The faces of the old women kneeling beside the girl told him all he needed to know. Death shadows had already gathered in the girl’s face and her half-open eyes were staring into her eternity.

Racking sobs shook the boy’s slender frame as he bent over Molly’s still body, but the luxury of grief was not for John Tone that day.

Strong hands were pulling him to his feet and James O’Hara’s bloody face swam into his view. The big man’s expression of sorrow and shock had been carved into his features like lines on granite and they would remain there for the rest of his life.

O’Hara pressed notes into Tone’s hand. “That’s forty English pounds there, John. Use it to get out of Ireland. Go to America, lad, where the British can’t reach you.” The man’s blue eyes bored into his own. “Now get ye gone into the hills or you’ll hang at Dublin Castle before the week is out. There are informers all around us who would sell their own mothers for ten shillings.”

Behind him, Tone heard a gurgling shriek as a wounded soldier’s throat was cut. He shoved the money into the pocket of his pants as O’Hara’s words finally got through to him.

“Molly . . . ,” he said.

“She knows what’s happening, John,” O’Hara said. “Trust me, she knows. Now go before it’s too late.”

John Tone blinked, the face in the mirror again his own, older, harder. Lines of time and life and the living of it had engraved the corners of his eyes and mouth. It was a face from which all the songs had fled. Since that day in the pub at Ballenlake he had never sung another.

He turned away, a small grief in him for youth’s lost innocence and his love for a girl whose face he could no longer remember.