Adam Steele 35, page 9
There was no tone of accusation in the banker’s voice and Steele cared not enough about it to glance at the round, red face to read its expression. Continued to watch impassively as the blindfolded, hatless Marty Cooper was steered toward the hanging tree. His wrists were tied at his back and his two escorts urged him across the grassy area with a hand clasped firmly to each upper arm. Harv Devlin was on Cooper’s right and Nathanial Curtis was to his left, the farmers looking as awed about what was happening as did their prisoner.
‘So they returned to the farm, meaning to kill the Boones, steal all the money they could find and resume their trip to Abilene – certain that blame for the killings would attach to you. But when Wellman discovered you had ridden back toward Braddock, he fastened upon a different scheme that would make doubly certain of the finger of guilt being pointed at you. Which was to follow you, kill you and thus be proclaimed heroes for what they had done. But Ralph Peabody spoiled the plan. One of the horses in his livery is sick and he rose early to administer a treatment to the animal. Saw Wellman and Cooper as they were about to enter his stable, and thus were they no longer able to kill you in cold blood while you slept.’
Devlin and Curtis had brought the condemned man to stand immediately under the noosed rope suspended from the branch of the oak tree. And now three other men appeared, moving into view from the blind side of the church. One was the very old preacher who was attired in all his vestments and walked with his hands clasped at his chest and his head bowed. To one side of him was Judge Coles who looked even more elderly than the preacher, his left arm held across his chest by a sling and a heavy coat worn cape-fashion over his shoulders. On the other side of the praying man was the skinny, long-legged youngster Steele had last seen in the Judge’s bullet-riddled hallway. He was leading an unsaddled horse by the bridle.
Like he had been sunk deep into a private world of grim and secret thought that barred all outside influence, and now was jerked out of it at some signal only he recognized, Cooper’s mouth gaped wide and he vented a powerful scream of terror. And tried to tear himself free of the two men who held him.
The children in the schoolhouse sang louder, the venerable preacher began to speak the words of his prayer in a funereal and surprisingly forceful tone of voice, the gravediggers went faster at their chore, Devlin and Curtis needed to use both hands to restrain the hysterical condemned man, the Judge spoke to the kid who nodded without enthusiasm in acknowledgement of the instructions, the crowd on the intersection remained silent and unmoving and Byron Nolan spoke even faster to finish in time.
‘And there is little more to tell, Mr. Steele. Between them, Wellman and Cooper proved to have in excess of a thousand dollars cash between them and the surviving member of the partnership admitted that almost half of this was stolen from the Boones after they returned to the farm. And so there could be no other verdict than a guilty one. No other sentence, but death. Three people have been murdered, valuable livestock was stolen and fraudulently sold, money was taken, and the Judge was injured during the dastardly attempt to divert blame to you. I think you must agree, Mr. Steele, that this is the right and proper conclusion to such a series of events as has happened hereabouts since last evening? That although our methods of dealing with law-breaking may be termed unorthodox, they are fair?’
‘I’ve got no complaints about it, Mr. Nolan,’ Steele answered.
While the banker was anxiously seeking to justify the swiftness of justice in Braddock, the helpless Cooper became calm in the face of the inevitability of his doom. He ended the shrill cry of terror and perhaps listened to what the preacher was saying on his behalf. But when the Judge tried to speak to him, the flabby-faced young man with the moles standing out so prominently against his fear-paled skin began to rasp out a stream of obscenities, which he curtailed when Coles abandoned what he was saying. Then, like he was anxious for the ordeal to be ended after all hope was gone, Cooper cooperated with the two farmers in getting astride the bare back of the gelding – and pushed his head through the noose. But the fit was not snug enough and the ladder that had been used to reach the branch and tie the hanging rope in place was now needed once more. Devlin held it steady while Curtis climbed it and adjusted the running knot. The short, pale-faced farmer came down the ladder a great deal quicker than he had mounted it. Then, after directing quizzical glances at the Judge, both he and the gray-bearded Devlin hurried off the grassy area to join the crowd of watchers. Next, after he took hold of the horse’s bridle, the Judge said something to the skinny youngster, who was as eager as the farmers to leave the vicinity of the hanging – dragged the ladder instead of carrying it to the stable in back of the corral.
‘All right, Reverend?’ Coles asked in a commanding tone of voice that sounded to Steele like it was loud enough to carry to every part of Texas. But then nothing had seemed quite real to him since he reached the point from where he could see the place of execution. And in his mind’s eye he vividly watched another hanging. In a town called Golden Hill. A long way from Braddock, but not very far in the past. When he had not been in a position to see what was happening at the time and was too deliriously sick to fully comprehend his part in it.
‘May God have mercy on your soul, my son,’ the preacher intoned, and made the sign of the cross toward the doomed man before he turned and raised the skirt of his cassock so that he could walk faster back toward his church.
The gravediggers climbed out of the hole and the children reached the end of the hymn they had been singing. The Judge gently coaxed the gelding around so that he was facing the open country with the scattered farms to the west of Braddock; then let go of the bridle and shuffled to the rear of the animal.
‘Luke, you bastard!’ Cooper roared, his Adam’s apple bobbing against the constriction of the rope and a blue vein standing out like an ugly growth on the side of his brow.
‘Bad company, boy!’ the Judge become an executioner said, and landed a sharp, flat-of-the-hand blow on the rump of the gelding.
In Golden Hill, the chestnut mare had lunged forward from just such a blow and …
The gray gelding snorted and sprang into a gallop. Marty Cooper began a scream, but it sounded for just a split second before the noose choked it into silence. Then the support of the horse was gone from beneath him and he fell toward the lush green grass – until the rope jerked taut and his neck broke with the arid sound of a snapped twig. His shocked nervous system forced his limbs and torso into performing the macabre dance of death for stretched seconds. Then he was totally limp, rotating with almost graceful lethargy in the raw, still air of the Texas morning. This while the gelding slowed his pace but continued to head away from town, and the crowd of people on the intersection allowed the pent-up breath of tension to escape from their lungs. And the Virginian needed to struggle hard against the threat of nausea – the churning in his stomach caused not by the actual hanging he had just witnessed: instead by the vivid memory the death of Cooper had invoked of the close call with death by lynching that had taken place at Golden Hill.
Then, the silence that was kept from being absolute only by the receding sound of the galloping horse was filled with the talk and movement of the people dispersing from the intersection to go about their normal daily business. And Steele became aware of being watched in much the same way as many of these same people had looked at him in the wake of Pardo’s killing just down the street from here last night. And as he left the ill-at-ease Byron Nolan standing at the side of the street to cross toward the Corner Livery, he saw there were almost as many different kinds of expressions on the cold pinched faces as there were people. But just beneath the surface of each of them there was a common denominator – that signaled all were of the opinion that the stranger in town was the root cause of this latest tragedy to strike Braddock.
Then he pushed open the door and entered the stable. Busied himself with preparing the three stallions for a trip as the noise level from outside fell in the wake of the farming people leaving town in the saddle and aboard wagons. And when he next thought about how he had almost got sick to his stomach, the uneasiness was no more than a faint memory of tasting bile in his throat. Then, when he was back outside, fully dressed for the cold with the collar of the sheepskin coat turned up to brush the underside of his Stetson brim, and with the black stallion saddled and the two white ones attached by lead lines to the horn, he was able to look at the corpse hanging from the oak tree without experiencing any compulsion to superimpose upon the scene an image of how he must have looked in the moments before he was due to die by the lynch rope at Golden Hill.
‘Byron Nolan told you about the way we run law business in Braddock, son?’
Steele had shifted his unblinking eyes from the corpse to the skinny kid in the oversize shirt who was hurrying in the wake of the runaway horse, hampered by a heavy saddle he was half carrying, half dragging. And now he looked at the gaunt, pain-drained face of Harrison T. Coles as the old man with a coat draped around his shoulders straightened up from the side wall of the livery stable, a match flaring in his free hand.
‘He told me the local doctor said you should rest for a week or so, Judge.’
The old man touched the flame of the match to the cigar angled from a side of his thin-lipped mouth. ‘And I respect the opinion of a professional man who knows his job. But I like to see a chore through to the end.’
‘You going to help with the burial as well?’ Steele asked, swinging up into his saddle as the two gravediggers and a man who looked like he could be the local mortician moved toward the hanging corpse.
‘No, son. Way I see it, I have to consider it my duty to advise you to leave town. In the event Byron Nolan didn’t get around to saying it to you.’
One of the gravediggers had shinned up the tree and now he crawled out along the branch to cut the rope; and the corpse of Martin Cooper was lowered with as much dignity as possible in the circumstances. Unless there were hidden witnesses, the Virginian and the Judge were the only ones who watched this tableau.
‘But I see you’re all ready to do that anyway, son?’
‘Right, Judge,’ Steele answered and glanced down at the old man who seemed to be troubled by more than the pain of his bullet wound.
‘I’m not attaching any blame to you,’ Coles said sullenly, almost blurting it.
‘Fine.’
‘The guilty ones paid! How we do law business here, it works!’ The old man who had looked somehow shrunken while he was dressed only in his Long Johns as he dodged death in the bullet-ravaged hallway of his house now appeared almost shriveled as he stepped in front of the black horse Steele had turned around. The cigar had been bobbing up and down at the side of his mouth as he spoke. Now he tore it away, like he thought its presence in his face detracted from the determination he wanted so desperately to display. ‘What the hell, stranger!’ he snarled. ‘This used to be a quiet and peaceful town until you came here! We never had one single killing in Braddock before! But since you showed up, it’s suddenly not difficult for men to die! The hard way!’
Coles glowered up at Steele, anger seeming to emanate like palpable but invisible beads of sweat from every pore in his anguished face. But he was unable to convince the Virginian that the highly-charged emotion was truly directed at him.
‘Yeah, I noticed that,’ Steele responded evenly as he glanced across his left shoulder, along the side street to where the almost leafless oak tree stood in inanimate innocence now it had been stripped of the corpse. And he gingerly massaged his throat as if he had a pain of his own when he added: ‘Easy as falling off a horse.’
Chapter Nine
COLES CLAMPED THE cigar between his teeth again and growled bitterly around it as he turned to stride toward his house: ‘I bet that damn banker didn’t tell it the way it should have been said!’
Then the Virginian set his horses moving slowly up the main street of Braddock and once more became conscious of the now familiar resentment hovering heavily in the cold and gray air around him. And this sense of being watched by many pairs of grudge-filled eyes remained with him until he was in the cover of the expansive area of timber to the north of town. Then, from time to time, he found himself prodded by his subconscious into thoughts about the people of Braddock and their bad feelings for him, until he was far enough out along the Abilene trail for the neat fields and no longer immaculately tidy house of the Boone place to be in back of him.
Hard working and clean-living people, most or maybe every last one of them. Needing to struggle a good deal of the time to put food on the table and to keep clothes on their backs. Wishing for a better quality of life but never expecting much improvement in their lot and seldom inclining toward dishonesty as a shameful means to a better end. All of them different, of course, as every human being is different from the others. The gamut of their individuality running from the fastidiously correct Byron Nolan to the idiosyncratic Harrison T. Coles, from the family-orientated Tuckers to the loneliness-soured Boones. Different in a thousand and one ways and yet the same in so many others. Needing to share common characteristics because this was the only way such a large number of people were able to live in a close-knit community with any degree of harmony. Those who refused to conform had no place in such a society. Those who for whatever reason conformed under protest were allowed to stay, so long as they performed a useful purpose – and did not voice their criticisms of the system to passing-through strangers in such a way that others overheard the implied complaints.
But what did all that matter to him? Steele concluded as he rode on by the Boone place and into another stand of mixed timber. The rules, both written or simply taken as read, that were applied in Braddock were much the same as those that enabled every group of people who lived in close proximity to each other to do so without anarchy taking possession. Whether the group be a single family on an isolated property a hundred miles from the nearest neighbor or upwards of a million individuals who elected to herd themselves together in a sprawling city. He had come up against this before – ever since the death of his father, had come to accept that he would always be an outsider in every community he came to along the endless trails he rode.
Braddock was no different to all those other places along the way where he was always made to feel the stranger. Except, maybe, in that it was the town where his determination to end his drifting existence had set more rock-solid than it ever had before – and that included another Texas town to which he had come with a new wife. But he had tried to settle in White Rock – to force himself into the constrictions of the mold that was subtly but insistently demanded by the other townspeople. Who included his wife.
But now he had no intention of living in Braddock or any town like it. realized that in bringing his ways as a drifter along the endless trails to a full stop, he did not also have to become a herd animal. He could continue to be his own man, far removed from the influences of others who inevitably sought to accept some odd brand of tacit challenge he exuded and to change him.
Then, as if some kind of benign guiding influence was setting a seal of approval on this new line of thinking and the decision so reached, he emerged with his horses from the stand of timber and started out across a piece of country that was the most rugged he had encountered since long before he reached El Paso. A wilderness of bizarre rock outcrops and grotesque sand ridges, clumps of stunted, windblown trees and scant patches of brown grass and thorny bush. A riverless expanse of broken ground over which the trail rose and fell as it veered first one way and then another, with hardly a flat stretch or a straightaway that extended more than a few hundred feet. A hostile but wildly beautiful badlands kind of country. Less than five miles removed from the husbanded fields and pastures around Braddock and yet seeming to be a part of a different world. And a different world removed by many miles from his fellow man was just what Adam Steele was going to search for now.
Then he heard hoofbeats on the trail behind him and he allowed a taut smile to draw back his lips from his teeth as he reined in his mount and the two animals on the lead lines came to an obedient stop – eyed him with an expression in their soft brown eyes that it was easy to interpret as equine censure when he peered between them at the desolate landscape on which nothing was seen to move.
‘Yeah, I know, fellers,’ he told the animals evenly. ‘You’ll need company and better country than this to feed off. It’s just the way some of we crazy two-legged animals think around things sometimes.’
The sky was as low and blackish-gray as it had been all morning and the light acted to subdue the colors of the land while the total absence of the sun meant there was no haze. Thus it was possible to see clearly to every horizon, but the kind of terrain on all sides allowed sound to travel further than the eye could see and for perhaps a full minute Steele watched and listened; heard the hooves of a single horse thudding on the hard-packed dirt of the trail but saw just an occasional cloud of dust rising above intervening ground against a backdrop of even higher ground. Sometimes in a direct line with his back trail for as far as he could see, and sometimes to the left or right of it as the galloping horse made consistently fast speed toward him. The animal in the control of a rider, he was certain.
Then, after this minute was gone and the pair of white Arabs began to express – to his way of thinking – a look of long-suffering impatience, he swung down from his saddle, sliding the Colt Hartford from the boot as a part of the dismounting act. Led the black stallion with the two white ones in tow off the clearly defined trail and into the cover of a crumbling rocky outcrop with clumps of rugged brush clinging to pockets of arid dirt. Took the three horses far enough off the trail so that they and he would be concealed from the approaching rider until the man in a hurry was level with the hiding place. There, he hitched the reins of his mount to one of the clumps of brush and unhooked a canteen to take a mouthful of water. Which he spat out along with the dust he had collected during the long ride, and the last vestiges of the bad taste that still remained from events in Braddock. Then he took a short drink of water and hung the re-corked canteen back on the saddle. Knew it was probably after midday but felt no need of food: was still replete from the good breakfast Oates had cooked for him at the Alamo Saloon. He did relish the prospect of washing-up and shaving – for his rude awakening and the violence that followed it had this morning caused him to neglect his daily ritual that he intended to make habitual again now he was changing his ways.
