Fort Buzzard, page 27
The fact that this man no longer wore a hood—if, in fact, he ever had—and was still here on the gallows a week later could mean only one thing.
Whoever had strung him up wanted folks to be able to see him. Wanted to send a message with that grisly sight.
Stallings couldn’t keep from talking for very long. He had been that way ever since Luke had captured him. He said, “This is sure making me nervous.”
“No reason for it to. You’re just a con artist, Stallings. You’re not a killer or a rustler or a horse thief. The chances of you winding up on a gallows are pretty slim. You’ll just spend the next few years behind bars, that’s all.”
Stallings muttered something Luke couldn’t make out, then said in a louder, more excited voice, “Look! Somebody’s coming.”
The town of Hannigan’s Hill was about half a mile away, a decent-sized settlement with a main street three blocks long lined by businesses and close to a hundred houses total on the side streets. The railroad hadn’t come through here, but as Luke had mentioned, there was a telegraph line. East, south, and north—the direction he and Stallings had come from—lay rangeland. Some low but rugged mountains bulked to the west. The town owed its existence mostly to the ranches that surrounded it on three sides, but Luke knew there was some mining in the mountains, too.
A group of riders had just left the settlement and were heading toward the hill. Bunched up the way they were, Luke couldn’t tell exactly how many. Six or eight, he estimated. They moved at a brisk pace as if they didn’t want to waste any time.
On a raw, bleak day like today, nobody could blame them for feeling that way.
Something about one of them struck Luke as odd, and as they came closer, he figured out what it was. Two men rode slightly ahead of the others, and one of them had his arms pulled behind him. His hands had to be tied together behind his back. His head hung forward as he rode as if he lacked the strength or the spirit to lift it.
Stallings had seen the same thing. “Oh, hell,” the confidence man said. His voice held a hollow note. “They’re bringing somebody else up here to hang him.”
That certainly appeared to be the case. Luke spotted a badge pinned to the shirt of the other man in the lead, under his open coat. More than likely, that was the local sheriff or marshal.
“Whatever they’re doing, it’s none of our business,” Luke said.
“They shouldn’t have left that other fella dangling there like that. It . . . it’s inhumane!”
Luke couldn’t argue with that sentiment, but again, it was none of his affair how they handled their lawbreakers here in Hannigan’s Hill. Or Hangman’s Hill, as some people called it, he reminded himself.
“You don’t have to worry about that,” he told Stallings again. “All I’m going to do is lock you up and send a wire to Senator Creed to find out what he wants me to do with you. I expect he’ll tell me to take you on to Laramie or Cheyenne and turn you over to the law there. Eventually, you’ll wind up on a train back to Ohio to stand trial for swindling the senator, and you’ll go to jail. It’s not the end of the world.”
“For you it’s not.”
The riders were a couple of hundred yards away now. The lawman in the lead made a curt motion with his hand. Two of the other men spurred their horses ahead, swung around the lawman and the prisoner, and headed toward Luke and Stallings at a faster pace.
“They’ve seen us,” Stallings said.
“Take it easy. We haven’t done anything wrong. Well, I haven’t, anyway. You’re the one who decided it would be a good idea to swindle a United States Senator out of ten thousand dollars.”
The two riders pounded up the slope and reined in about twenty feet away. They looked hard at Luke and Stallings, and one of them asked in a harsh voice, “What’s your business here?”
Luke had been a bounty hunter for a lot of years. He recognized hardcases when he saw them. But these two men wore deputy badges. That wasn’t all that unusual. This was the frontier. Plenty of lawmen had ridden the owlhoot trail at one time or another in their lives. The reverse was true, too.
Luke turned his head and gestured toward Stallings with his chin. “Got a prisoner back there, and I’m looking for a place to lock him up, probably for no more than a day or two. That’s my only business here, friend.”
“I don’t see no badge. You a bounty hunter?”
“That’s right. Name’s Jensen.”
The name didn’t appear to mean anything to the men. If Luke had said that his brother was Smoke Jensen, the famous gunfighter who was now a successful rancher down in Colorado, that would have drawn more notice. Most folks west of the Mississippi had heard of Smoke. Plenty east of the big river had, too. But Luke never traded on family connections. In fact, for a lot of years, for a variety of reasons, he had called himself Luke Smith instead of using the Jensen name.
The two deputies still seemed suspicious. “You don’t know that hombre Marshal Bowen is bringin’ up here?”
“I don’t even know Marshal Bowen,” Luke answered honestly. “I never set eyes on any of you boys until today.”
“The marshal told us to make sure you wasn’t plannin’ on interferin’. This here is a legal hangin’ we’re fixin’ to carry out.”
Luke gave a little wave of his left hand. “Go right ahead. I always cooperate with the law.”
That wasn’t strictly true—he’d been known to bend the law from time to time when he thought it was the right thing to do—but these deputies didn’t need to know that.
The other deputy spoke up for the first time. “Who’s your prisoner?”
“Name’s Ethan Stallings. Strictly small-time. Nobody who’d interest you fellas.”
“That’s right,” Stallings muttered. “I’m nobody.”
The rest of the group was close now. The marshal raised his left hand in a signal for them to stop. As they reined in, Luke looked the men over and judged them to be cut from the same cloth as the first two deputies. They wore law badges, but they were no better than they had to be.
The prisoner was young, maybe twenty-five, a stocky redhead who wore range clothes. He didn’t look like a forty-a-month-and-found puncher. Maybe a little better than that. He might own a small spread of his own, a greasy sack outfit he worked with little or no help.
When he finally raised his head, he looked absolutely terrified, too. He looked straight at Luke and said, “For God’s sake, mister, you’ve got to help me. They’re gonna hang me, and I didn’t do anything wrong. I swear it!”
CHAPTER 2
The marshal turned in his saddle, leaned over, and swung a backhanded blow that cracked viciously across the prisoner’s face. The man might have toppled off his horse if one of the other deputies hadn’t ridden up beside him and grasped his arm to steady him.
“Shut up, Crawford,” the lawman said. “Nobody wants to listen to your lies. Take what you’ve got coming and leave these strangers out of it.”
The prisoner’s face flamed red where the marshal had struck it. He started to cry, letting out wrenching sobs full of terror and desperation.
Even without knowing the facts of the case, Luke felt a pang of sympathy for the young man. He didn’t particularly want to, but he felt it anyway.
“I’m Verne Bowen. Marshal of Hannigan’s Hill. We’re about to carry out a legally rendered sentence on this man. You have any objection?”
Luke shook his head. “Like I told your deputies, Marshal, this is none of my business, and I don’t have the faintest idea what’s going on here. So I’m not going to interfere.”
Bowen jerked his head in a nod and said, “Good.”
He was about the same age as Luke, a thick-bodied man with graying fair hair under a pushed-back brown hat. He had a drooping mustache and a close-cropped beard. He wore a brown suit over a fancy vest and a butternut shirt with no cravat. A pair of walnut-butted revolvers rode in holsters on his hips. He looked plenty tough and probably was.
Bowen waved a hand at the deputies and ordered, “Get on with it.”
Two of them dismounted and moved in on either side of the prisoner, Crawford. He continued to sob as they pulled him off his horse and marched him toward the gallows steps, one on either side of him.
“Just out of curiosity,” Luke asked, “what did this hombre do?”
Bowen glared at him. “You said that was none of your business.”
“And it’s not. Just curious, that’s all.”
“It doesn’t pay to be too curious around here, mister . . . ?”
“Jensen. Luke Jensen.”
Bowen nodded toward Stallings. “I see you have a prisoner, too. You a bounty hunter?”
“That’s right. I was hoping you’d allow me to stash him in your jail for a day or two.”
“Badman, is he?”
“A foolish man,” Luke said, “who made some bad choices. But he didn’t do anything around here.” Luke allowed his voice to harden slightly. “Not in your jurisdiction.”
Bowen looked levelly at him for a couple of seconds then nodded. “Fair enough.”
By now the deputies were forcing Crawford up the steps. He twisted and jerked and writhed, but their grips were too strong for him to pull free. It wouldn’t have done him any good if he had. He would have just fallen down the steps and they would have picked him up again.
Bowen said, “I don’t suppose it’ll hurt anything to satisfy your curiosity, Jensen. Just don’t get in the habit of poking your nose in where it’s not wanted. Crawford there is a murderer. He got drunk and killed a soiled dove.”
“That’s not true!” Crawford cried. “I never hurt that girl. Somebody slipped me something that knocked me out. I never even laid eyes on the girl until I came to in her room and she was . . . was layin’ there with her eyes bugged out and her tongue sticking out and those terrible bruises on her throat—”
“Choked her to death, the little weasel did,” Bowen interrupted. “Claims he doesn’t remember it, but he’s a lying, no-account killer.”
The deputies and the prisoner had reached the top of the steps. The deputies wrestled Crawford out onto the platform. Another star packer trotted up the steps after them, moving with a jaunty bounce, and pulled a knife from a sheath at his waist. He reached out, grasped the dead man’s belt, and pulled him close enough that he could reach up and cut the rope. When he let go, the body fell through the open trap and landed with a soggy thud on the ground below. Even from where Luke was, he could smell the stench that rose from it. He didn’t envy whoever got the job of burying the man.
“How about him? What did he do?”
“A thief,” Bowen said. “Embezzled some money from the man he worked for, one of our leading citizens.”
Luke frowned. “You hang a man for embezzlement around here?”
“When he was caught, he went loco and tried to shoot his way out of it,” Bowen replied with a shrug. “He could have killed somebody. That’s attempted murder. The judge decided to make an example of him. I don’t hand down the sentences, Jensen. I just carry ’em out.”
“I suppose leaving him up here to rot was part of making an example.”
Bowen leaned forward, glared, and said, “For somebody who keeps claiming this is none of his business, you are taking an almighty keen interest in all of this, mister. You might want to take your prisoner and ride on down to town. Ask anybody, they can tell you where my office and the jail are. I’ll be down directly, and we can lock that fella up.” The marshal paused, then added, “Got a good bounty on him, does he?”
“Good enough,” Luke said. He was beginning to get the impression that instead of waiting, he ought to ride on with Stallings and not stop over in Hannigan’s Hill at all. Bowen and those hardcase deputies might have their eyes on the reward Senator Jonas Creed had offered for Stallings’ capture.
But their horses were just about played out and really needed a night’s rest. They were low on provisions, too. It would be difficult to push on to Laramie without replenishing their supplies here.
As soon as he had Stallings locked up, he would send a wire to Senator Creed. Once he’d established that he was the one who had captured the fugitive, Bowen wouldn’t be able to claim the reward for himself. Luke figured he could stay alive long enough to do that.
He sure as blazes wasn’t going to let his guard down while he was in these parts, though.
He reached back to tug on the lead rope attached to Stallings’ horse. “Come on.”
The deputies had closed the trapdoor on the gallows and positioned Crawford on it. One of them tossed a new hangrope over the crossbar. Another deputy caught it and closed in to fit the noose over the prisoner’s head.
“Reckon we ought to tie his feet together?” one of the men asked.
“Naw,” another answered with a grin. “If it so happens that his neck don’t break right off, it’ll be a heap more entertainin’ if he can kick good while he’s chokin’ to death.”
“Please, mister, please!” Crawford cried. “Don’t just ride off and let them do this to me! I never killed that whore. They did it and framed me for it! They’re only doing this because Ezra Hannigan wants my ranch!”
That claim made Luke pause. Bowen must have noticed Luke’s reaction because he snapped at the deputies, “Shut him up. I’m not gonna stand by and let him spew those filthy lies about Mr. Hannigan.”
“Please—” Crawford started to shriek, but then one of the deputies stepped behind him and slammed a gun butt against the back of his head. Crawford sagged forward, only half-conscious as the other deputies held him up by the arms.
Luke glanced at the four deputies who were still mounted nearby. Each rested a hand on the butt of a holstered revolver. Luke knew gun-wolves like that wouldn’t hesitate to yank their hoglegs out and start blasting. He had faced long odds plenty of times in his life and wasn’t afraid, but he didn’t feel like getting shot to doll rags today, either, and likely that was what would happen if he tried to interfere.
With a sour taste in his mouth, he lifted his reins, nudged the buckskin into motion, and turned the horse to ride around the group of lawmen toward the settlement. He heard the prisoner groan from the gallows, but Crawford had been knocked too senseless to protest coherently anymore.
A moment later, with an unmistakable sound, the trapdoor dropped and so did the prisoner. In the thin, cold air, Luke distinctly heard the crack of Crawford’s neck breaking.
He wasn’t looking back, but Stallings must have been. The confidence man cursed and then said, “They didn’t even put a hood over his head before they hung him! That’s just indecent, Jensen.”
“I’m not arguing with you.”
“And you know good and well he was innocent. He was telling the truth about them framing him for that dove’s murder.”
“You don’t have any way of knowing that,” Luke pointed out. “We don’t know anything about these people.”
“Who’s Ezra Hannigan?”
Luke took a deep breath. “Well, considering that the town’s called Hannigan’s Hill, I expect he’s an important man around here. Probably owns some of the businesses. Maybe most of them. Maybe a big ranch outside of town. I think I’ve heard the name before, but I can’t recall for sure.”
“The fella who was hanging there when we rode up, the one they cut down, that marshal said he stole money from one of the leading citizens. You want to bet it was Ezra Hannigan he stole from?”
“I don’t want to bet with you about anything, Stallings. I just want to get you where you’re going and collect my money. Whatever’s going on in this town, I don’t want any part of it.”
Stallings was silent for a moment, then said, “I suppose there wouldn’t be anything you could do, anyway. Not against a marshal and that many deputies, and all of them looking like they know how to handle a gun. Funny that a town this size would need that many deputies, though . . . unless their actual job isn’t keeping the peace but doing whatever Ezra Hannigan wants done. Like hanging the owner of a spread Hannigan’s got his eye on.”
“You’ve flapped that jaw enough,” Luke told him. “I don’t want to hear any more out of you.”
“Whether you hear it or not won’t change the truth of the matter.”
Stallings couldn’t see it, but Luke grimaced. He knew that Stallings was likely right about what was happening around here. Luke had seen it more than once: some rich man ruling a town and the surrounding area with an iron fist, bringing in hired guns, running roughshod over anybody who dared to stand up to him. It was a common story on the frontier.
But it wasn’t his job to set things right in Hannigan’s Hill, even assuming that Stallings was right about Ezra Hannigan. Smoke might not stand for such things, but Smoke had a reckless streak in him sometimes. Luke’s hard life had made him more practical. He would have wound up dead if he had tried to interfere with that hanging. Bowen would have been more than happy to seize the excuse to kill him and claim his prisoner and the reward.
Luke knew all that, knew it good and well, but as he and Stallings reached the edge of town, something made him turn his head and look back anyway. Some unwanted force drew his gaze like a magnet to the top of the nearby hill. Bowen and the deputies had started riding back toward the settlement, leaving the young man called Crawford dangling limp and lifeless from that hangrope. Leaving him there to rot . . .
“Well,” a female voice broke sharply into Luke’s thoughts, “I hope you’re proud of yourself.”
William W. Johnstone is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of over three hundred books, including the bestselling series Smoke Jensen: The Mountain Man, Preacher: The First Mountain Man, Flintlock, MacCallister, and Will Tanner: Deputy U.S. Marshal, and the stand-alone thrillers Black Friday, Tyranny, and Stand Your Ground.
Being the all-around assistant, typist, researcher, and fact-checker to one of the most popular Western authors of all time, J.A. Johnstone learned from the master, Uncle William W. Johnstone.
