Then Marshal Soriano had asked him to stay on, at least for the time being, and Matt’s heart had swelled with pride, even though he’d be working for a Mex. They had themselves a Mex lawman over in Socorro County, that fella Elfego Baca, and he seemed to be doing pretty well in the job . . . so Matt was pretty content for a change.
He opened the back door of the marshal’s office, went through the storeroom, and strolled into the office itself, carrying the partially used mail order catalog he had taken to the outhouse with him. He stopped short as he saw two men with drawn guns standing just outside the cell block door.
They saw him at the same time and one of them cried out profanity. They swung their guns toward him and flames spouted from the muzzles as he clawed at the weapon on his hip.
He never got his gun drawn before hammer blows smashed into his chest and knocked him backwards into oblivion.
The shots erupted just as Deputy Boulden clicked the lock over on the cell block door and pulled the key out. He tried to turn and draw his gun, hoping that Severs would be distracted by the unexpected commotion, but the gunman acted instinctively. His taut-drawn nerves made him pull the trigger, slamming a shot into Boulden’s back and driving the deputy against the door, which flew open and narrowly missed Larry Dunn, who jumped back out of its way.
Boulden stumbled forward, blood welling from the wound where the bullet had torn through his gut and burst out the front of his belly. With the last of his strength, something possessed him to flick the ring of keys toward the cell’s lone window. They missed the bars and flew through one of the narrow openings, disappearing into the darkness outside the jail.
Boulden pitched forward on his face to die a miserable death.
Severs’s heart hammered in his chest and thoughts whirled madly inside his brain. The keys were gone, and by the time he could get outside and find them in the dark, Marshal Soriano would be hurrying back to the jail in response to the shots. Other townspeople would show up, and the inevitable result would be a gun battle that might cost him and his friends their lives.
Fate had turned against them.
With nothing they could do about it except get out of there while they still had the chance, Severs yelled at his friends as he grabbed Dunn’s arm and practically threw the man out of the cell. “Go! Get to the horses!”
Across the aisle, Pete McLaren gripped the bars of his cell and stared in wide-eyed disbelief. “Perry!” he cried. “You gotta get me out of here!”
“Sorry, Pete. We tried, but it’s all shot to hell.” Severs pounded after the others already fleeing from the building.
“Damn you!” McLaren screamed after them. “You can’t leave me here to hang! Damn you!”
None of the others even slowed down.
* * *
Ace was still about twenty feet from the door of the marshal’s office when the shooting started. He knew that if he rushed in blindly, he might not accomplish anything except to get himself killed.
As the Colt seemed to leap into his hand with blinding speed, he darted to his right, toward a water barrel at the corner of a nearby building. He had just dropped to one knee behind it when the door of the marshal’s office flew open and several men rushed out.
As they turned toward Ace, he heard horses stamping somewhere close by and realized it was an escape attempt. The fleeing men were heading for saddled mounts they had ready.
“Hold it!” he shouted.
The fugitives slowed down, but only for a split second, then Colt flame bloomed in the shadows and Ace heard the wind-rip of bullets as they passed by his head. He leveled his revolver and triggered three swift rounds toward the gunmen.
One of the men staggered and fell. Another stumbled but stayed on his feet, evidently hit but not bad enough to put him down. The others kept shooting. Bullets plunked into the water barrel but didn’t penetrate to the other side. A few of the slugs struck the top of the barrel and chewed splinters from it that showered down on Ace’s hat. He leaned out and pumped two more shots at the fugitives. A second man spun off his feet.
Shots blasted from out in the street. Ace glanced in that direction and saw Miguel Soriano angling toward the jail. Orange flame geysered from the gun in his fist. A third man went down.
But the fourth one had disappeared. Ace knelt behind the barrel and thumbed fresh rounds into his Colt as he listened for the telltale sounds of flight. As he snapped the revolver’s loading gate shut, he heard a swift rataplan of hoofbeats. The fourth man had reached the horses and was getting away.
So the marshal wouldn’t shoot him, Ace sprang to his feet and called, “Miguel, it’s me!” then dashed into the mouth of an alley. A dark shape bulked against the starlight at the far end of the passage. Ace recognized it as a man mounted on horseback and smoothly brought up his gun. The weapon roared as he squeezed off three rounds.
The shape broke into two as the fleeing man tumbled out of his saddle.
Miguel ran up beside Ace. “Did you get him?”
“I think so. We’ll have to check to be sure.”
“Careful. We don’t want to waltz right into a bullet.”
Ace couldn’t have agreed more with that sentiment. He and Miguel moved along the alley, staying on opposite sides of the passage until they reached the far end. Their eyes had adjusted to the darkness for them to make out the sprawled figure on the ground. The man groaned but didn’t move.
Miguel moved forward and kept his gun trained on the fallen man until he hooked a toe under his shoulder and rolled him onto his back. By then, Ace had fished a lucifer from his shirt pocket. He snapped it to life with his thumbnail, squinting against the glare. The flame’s garish light fell across the pain-wracked face of Perry Severs.
The front of Severs’s shirt was sodden with blood where Ace’s bullets had ripped all the way through his body. He coughed, and more crimson welled from his mouth. Clearly, he had only moments to live.
Severs blinked his eyes open, looked up at Ace and Miguel, and rasped, “I . . . I never wanted . . . to be in charge . . . anyway.”
The grotesque rattle in his throat that followed the words testified that he was gone.
“We’d better see about the others,” Miguel said. “Severs isn’t going anywhere until the undertaker gets here.”
Neither were the other three, as it turned out. Chance, Hank Muller, Crackerjack Sawyer, and several other men armed with rifles or shotguns were standing over the bodies, but they didn’t need any guarding. Dunn, Merritt, and Russell were every bit as dead as Severs.
Chance shook his head disgustedly. “I sit down for a nice friendly game of poker and all hell breaks loose. What happened here?”
“These bastards must’ve tried to break McLaren out of jail,” Miguel said.
“Where is McLaren?” Chance asked.
Without answering, Miguel hurried toward the open office door with Ace and Chance right behind him.
Miguel stopped short and cursed bitterly at the sight of one of his new deputies crumpled in a bloody heap in a corner. They went into the cell block and found the other deputy lying facedown in the cell where Larry Dunn had been held until his escape.
Pete McLaren was still in his cell, holding on to the bars as he looked out bleakly.
Miguel turned toward him, the gun in his hand coming up. McLaren didn’t move, just stared defiantly as Miguel lined the muzzle between his eyes.
“Miguel . . .” Ace said quietly.
Miguel ignored him and addressed McLaren. “You son of a bitch. This is all your fault. Three good men are dead because of you, and all four of your friends. They’re no great loss, but Ed and Matt are.”
“Why don’t you go ahead and shoot me, then?” McLaren said, his voice as tight with strain as Miguel’s. “Pull the trigger, greaser.”
“Miguel, don’t listen to him,” Chance said. “You know if McLaren wants you to do it, it’s not the right thing.”
“He deserves to die! He’s brought nothing but
trouble to this town!”
“He’ll die,” Ace said. “He’ll be executed for his crimes less than twelve hours from now. There’s nobody and nothing left to save him.”
McLaren started to laugh. Miguel’s face twisted even more at that, and the gun in his hand trembled from the depth of the rage he was feeling.
“You just go on believing that, you stupid sons of bitches,” McLaren said as he paused in his laughter. “You just keep thinkin’ you’re really gonna hang me.” He turned his back on Miguel in contemptuous dismissal.
Slowly, Miguel lowered the gun and drew in a deep breath. He let down the hammer, slipped the gun back into its holster, and turned to Ace and Chance. “You’re right. He’ll hang in the morning, and justice will be done.”
Somehow, the words sounded hollow in the death-haunted cell block.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
After the carnage of the night before, morning dawned gloomy and overcast with thunder rumbling in the distance over the mountains. Those peaks loomed darkly, like humpbacked monsters surrounding the town.
Ace and Chance had spent the night in the marshal’s office with Miguel. They’d taken turns dozing on the old sofa. It seemed like the threat was over, with all four of McLaren’s friends being dead, but after everything that had happened, no one wanted to take a chance.
McLaren’s arrogant insistence that he would never hang was disconcerting, too. Ace marked it up to sheer bravado, but just in case he was wrong, he’d thought he and Chance ought to be on hand to help out.
For his part, McLaren seemed to sleep peacefully. Ace didn’t see how that was possible unless McLaren really was confident that he was safe from execution.
As the sky lightened from black to gray, Lars Hilfstrom and one of his daughters brought four breakfast trays to the marshal’s office. Ace carried one of the trays into the cell block while Chance followed with a shotgun tucked under his arm.
“Time for breakfast, McLaren,” Ace said.
McLaren sat up and looked confused, as if he were surprised to find himself still locked up. He shook his head and then swung his legs off the bunk. “It’s morning?”
“Yeah. Thursday morning.” Ace’s voice held a tone of grim finality.
McLaren stood up, stumbled over to the cell door, and took the tray Ace passed through the slot. He looked down at it for a moment, then abruptly twisted around and threw the tray against the wall, shattering crockery and splattering food and coffee over the stone. He lurched against the bars, gripped them with maniacal strength, and howled, “Lemme outta here! Damn you, lemme out!”
“You’re not going anywhere until it’s time, McLaren.” Chance raised his eyebrows at the mess. “And I don’t reckon there’s any law that says you have to have a last meal.”
McLaren started tugging frantically at the bars as if he were trying to shake the door down, but of course it didn’t budge. A stream of profanities and threats spewed from his mouth. He was still ranting when the Jensen brothers left the cell block.
“The prisoner doesn’t sound happy,” Miguel commented when they returned to the office.
“He’s starting to figure out that nobody’s going to save him after all,” Ace said.
Miguel rubbed his chin and then said with a worried frown, “I hope you’re right.”
“Who’s left to help him?” Chance asked.
“We don’t know that his brother hasn’t found out about it somehow.”
“The dreaded Otis McLaren?” Chance said. “Wouldn’t he have been here by now if he was coming?”
Ace said, “That depends on where he was when he heard about Pete being locked up. Without knowing that, we don’t know how long it would take him to get here.”
Miguel nodded. “That’s just what I was thinking. I passed the word to some of the men in town and asked them to be armed when they come to the hanging, just in case someone tries to interrupt it.”
That air of tension hung over the office as the three men ate their breakfast. They had just finished when a knock sounded on the barred front door.
Miguel opened one of the shutters over the window just enough see who was there then he opened the door to admit Timothy Buchanan and Judge Alfred Ordway. Buchanan was carrying a Winchester.
“It’s almost time,” Ordway said as he looked at a big turnip watch he pulled from his pocket. “A crowd’s gathering already. I must say, it always puts a bit of a bad taste in my mouth when people act like an execution is an excuse for a holiday.”
“You can’t blame them for feeling that way, especially this execution,” Buchanan said. “There’s probably not a person in this town who hasn’t been afraid of Pete McLaren at one time or another. Having him in our midst has been like living with a rabid dog. You never knew who or when he was going to attack.”
“That’s true.” Ordway took a thin black cigar from his vest pocket and clamped one end of it between his teeth, leaving it unlit. “I still find this simply a necessity, not a cause for celebration.”
“I just want to get it over with,” Miguel said.
“Then get your hat and let’s get on with it. The hour is at hand.”
McLaren’s tirade had run out of steam by the time Ace, Chance, and Miguel entered the cell block. The prisoner was slumped on the bunk, head down, breathing heavily.
“Come on, McLaren,” Miguel said. “It’s time.”
McLaren slowly shook his head, but other than that, he didn’t budge.
“You might as well cooperate. You know we’ll just come in there and drag you out if you don’t.”
“You can’t do this,” McLaren mumbled. “You just can’t.”
“The law says we can. The law that you flouted for years. It’s caught up to you at last.”
A shudder went through McLaren. He covered his face with his hands for a moment. When he lowered them and looked up at the three men outside the cell, his features were hard as stone. He stood up and walked to the door. “Do it and be damned to you,” he said in a voice like ice.
Pete McLaren might be an utterly sorry human being, Ace thought, but he had a thread of steel inside him, and he had found it at the moment of impending death. Whether it would last all the way to the top of the gallows, only the next few minutes would tell.
While Ace and Chance covered the prisoner, Miguel unlocked the door, swung it open, and stepped back. He drew his revolver as McLaren emerged from the cell.
“I’d be obliged if you didn’t shackle my legs,” the condemned man said. “I’d rather walk free.”
“You know we’ll cut you down if you try to run.”
“I know.” A faint smile touched McLaren’s face. “You don’t think I’d deprive the town of its show, do you?”
“Put your hands behind your back.” Miguel cuffed him, and they went out into the office.
Buchanan and Ordway were waiting with solemn expressions on their faces. The group moved out to the street, where the overcast morning perfectly suited the mood.
As the procession started toward the gallows, a few cheers went up from the assembled crowd, but they died out quickly and a hush fell over Lone Pine. More thunder, like the sound of distant drums, disturbed the silence. Fingers of lightning clawed at the sky over the mountains, and the air was still and heavy. It was dry country for the most part, but a storm was building.
Miguel led the way. McLaren was behind him with Ace and Chance on either side, and Buchanan and Ordway brought up the rear. McLaren’s steps didn’t falter as they walked along.
Closer to the gallows, Ace saw Colonel Howden, Crackerjack Sawyer, Hank Muller, and several other men among the crowd, all of them holding either rifles or shotguns. Lee Emory was there, too, but apparently not armed. Neither were his sister or Fontana Dupree. Meredith looked pale and drawn. Fontana appeared to be more accepting of what was about to happen. Of course, Dolly had been her friend, and she knew justice being done.
The undertaker’s wagon was parked near the gallows, with its
owner waiting on the seat along with Doc Bellem. The padre from the local mission stood on the platform. The town had no official hangman, so Miguel would perform that duty. Reaching the steps leading up, he stood aside so McLaren could go first.
For the first time since leaving the jail, McLaren hesitated. He shuddered again then mounted the first step. Then another and another until all thirteen were behind him and he was at the top. Miguel followed, then Ace, then Chance.
Ace’s guts tightened as he climbed the steps. He had never participated in an execution . . . and he hoped he never had to again.
“It’s funny,” Chance murmured quietly that only Ace could hear. “I always figured it would be one of us getting a rope necktie.”
Ace didn’t respond, but the same thought had occurred to him.
They moved to either side of the platform to flank the trapdoor. Miguel took hold of McLaren’s arm and steered the prisoner into position. The padre move up and started to mumble the last rites.
McLaren said, “I ain’t a Catholic.”
“You never said one way or the other,” Miguel told him. “I didn’t know.”
“No need for a sky pilot of any sort to waste his breath prayin’ over me. It wouldn’t take.”
“That’s your decision, I reckon.” Miguel nodded to the priest, signifying that it was all right for him to step back. and went on to McLaren. “If you’d like to say anything . . .”
“Last words, you mean?” McLaren’s mouth quirked bitterly. He looked out over the crowd. “You’re all a bunch of damned sheep. If I’ve got to be hanged for bein’ a wolf, then so be it. I reckon it’s my nature. But when I’m dead and gone, don’t start feelin’ like you’re safe. You’ll still be a bunch of damn sheep . . . and there’ll always be more wolves in the world.” His jaw tightened and he looked over at Miguel. “Get it over with.”
Miguel picked up the black hood draped over the railing and placed it over McLaren’s head, shutting off the killer’s view and hiding his face from the crowd. Miguel took hold of the rope and put it over McLaren’s head, as well. Never having done it before the marshal was nervous. He wanted to get it right. Nothing was more gruesome or grotesque than a botched hanging.
Twelve Dead Men Page 20