Seven Days to Hell

by William W. Johnstone

  In Oklahoma, Kansas, and Arkansas, Johnny Cross had racked up further numerous charges for bank and mail robbery, pillaging weapons from government arsenals, robbery, and murder. That the “murders” were killings of troops and lawmen intent on killing him did nothing to lessen the charges against him.

  He’d fallen in with the Baker gang and for a time it had been a good fit. Moraine County’s Clinchfield and Halftown, base of operations for the Baker gang, were at the heart of Blacksnake River country and very welcome it had seemed to Johnny Cross at the time.

  Cullen Baker seemed designed by nature and inclination for outlawry. Of Herculean strength, he was a fast draw, a dead shot, vicious brawler, and tireless rider. He had raw, reckless courage and a criminal brain seething with schemes.

  Johnny got along well with Cullen Baker, no mean feat, for the bandit leader was too often ill tempered and suspicious. He could also be surprisingly generous when it came to distribution of loot.

  He was an incurable alcoholic whose vile temper when under the influence would prove to be his undoing time and again.

  Johnny got along well with Cullen Baker for most of their six months they rode together. Part of the reason was that Johnny could match Baker shot for shot, bottle for bottle, during their many prodigious drinking bouts. The hulking Baker marveled how Johnny, athletic but of medium height and compactly made, was able to match him despite his far lesser bulk.

  Johnny was careful never to outdo the bandit’s drinking during these contests. This was the key to getting along with Cullen Baker: never try to outdo him. Not that Johnny had any fear of Baker, knowing that if it came to a showdown, he had confidence in his own abilities to see him through. But he liked him well enough not to want to have to kill him.

  Johnny had shown no inclination or desire to challenge Cullen Baker’s leadership of the band. This was easy for Johnny to do because in truth he had no such aspirations. He was content at this stage of his career to remain in the background while letting others bask in the limelight. Experience had shown him that the limelight made one a better target.

  Cullen Baker had saved Johnny’s life at risk to his own more than once, exhibitions of raw nerve in the service of friendship that had ensured Johnny’s gratitude. Perhaps that was why Baker had performed them. There was no telling for sure. For all his elemental drives and sometimes crudeness, Cullen Baker was a deep one.

  Bill Longley was a wild youth in his midteens when he began riding with the gang. From the start he held his own and more than matched the performances of older, more veteran outlaws. Something in Bill’s nature and Johnny’s own clicked, causing them to string together at work and play. Bill’s prodigious, unquenchable thirst for alcohol excited Cullen Baker’s admiration as much as the teenager’s undoubted ability with a gun.

  Things went sour for the band in the end. A few big schemes came undone at the same time; bad luck caused the gang to ride into a deadly ambush that wiped their numbers in half. Some blamed Baker’s rampant drinking for their problems, but Johnny figured the doubters and naysayers to be soreheads looking for someone to blame . . . Cullen Baker consumed the same amount of redeye as he had when the gang’s luck had been good.

  But Johnny was disturbed by Baker’s fierce urge toward senseless violence. He killed to see men die. More victims began to fall to his guns not for what they did or didn’t do but for what they might do or simply because Baker didn’t like their looks.

  “I had a bad feeling about him” was Baker’s ever more frequent excuse for burning down a victim who was too slow in handing over his valuables, or unlocking a cash drawer or similar lapses that were normal reactions of men being robbed at gunpoint.

  Johnny had no stomach for killing unarmed men. He’d had more than enough of that with Quantrill. It was needless cruelty and to his way of thinking, smacked of something yellowbellies would do . . .

  A particularly relentless and efficient manhunt by the sheriff of neighboring Albedo County who had invaded Moraine County with a small army of well-armed deputies and auxiliaries served Johnny as a pretext for leaving the band. It was an illegal incursion, a charge that bothered the venturesome lawmen not at all. And an outlaw shot dead during an illegal incursion is just as dead as though the operation had been authorized by the highest law in the land.

  Ordinarily Cullen Baker viewed the departure of a gang member under any circumstance as akin to desertion, but the sheriff’s big-caliber cleanup left no alternative but to temporarily disband the gang. Riding en masse as a group was an invitation to detection and slaughter by the militant lawmen. Only by going it alone or in twos or threes could the outlaws hope to slip the ever-tightening dragnet blanketing Moraine County.

  Cullen Baker announced his intention of setting out for Deep Hollow, Moraine County’s ultimate backcountry swampland fugitive refuge. Even the river pirates, smugglers, gunrunners, and the like who thronged the county gave the Hollow a wide berth save as a last resort.

  Lawmen who entered Deep Hollow sometimes returned but never with the wanted men they originally sought. Baker would retreat into the backcountry. If the sheriff and his men followed him, well and good—they would be done for. If not, Baker would remain in hiding until the sheriff tired of the chase and returned to his home county, to emerge at the right time to assemble a newer, even more formidable gang.

  Johnny Cross decided to return home to Hangtree County. He invited Bill Longley to join him and try his luck on Johnny’s old stomping grounds but Bill declined, saying that he, Bill, intended to stick with Cullen Baker and attempt to shelter in Deep Hollow.

  So one rainy steamy morning Johnny Cross said so long to his fellow gang members and loaded a knapsack containing all his worldly goods in the bottom of a pirogue—a kind of lightweight shallow-draft dugout canoe ideal for traveling the narrow inlets and back channels of the swampland. Johnny set out to slip the iron ring of armed men encircling that stretch of the Blacksnake that includes Clinchfield and Halftown and win his way to dry land, escape, and the road to Hangtree.

  After countless perils and many wide-ranging detours taking him far afield from his intended goal, Johnny returned to the Cross Ranch, discovering that his family was dead, the ranch house a burned-out ruin, and the spread a scene of weed-grown desolation.

  He settled in and set out to rebuild his life. His quick gun, sharp wits, and raw nerve, and that most elusive but vital component of success called luck, had come together to win him an abundance of good fortune.

  When he now thought at all of those desperate days with the Cullen Baker gang in Moraine County on the Blacksnake—and he did so rarely, being inclined to look ahead, not back—he reflected with wry amusement that it was all to the best that Bill Longley had declined his invite to accompany him back to his hometown.

  Because given Bill’s nature, and the nature of Hangtree, the two would have mixed like oil and water, which is to say not at all.

  Given the fact that Bill was a killer and a drunkard, and given Johnny’s newfound feelings of responsibility toward the continued well-being of the people of Hangtree—well, most of them—it was not unreasonable to assume that Johnny Cross might someday find it necessary to kill Bill Longley. Which would be a shame for he genuinely liked Bill.

  So Johnny had mused idly and infrequently when the return of Bill Longley seemed an astronomical impossibility.

  The overwhelming likelihood was that Bill was dead or in jail. Dead, more likely, because a wild maverick like Bill Longley if jailed would soon manage to get himself killed, by his fellow inmates, his jailers, or possibly even by his own despairing hand.

  Johnny Cross now tried to put the puzzle together with the pieces he had, which were few, some of them at secondhand from the original source:

  Bill Longley was not dead, he was very much alive—shot up some, but alive. Shot by the command of that bad hombre Loman Vard, himself shot dead by Bill Longley.

  But what strange twist of fate could set Bill Longley and Lom
an Vard so much at odds as to want to do each other to death?

  More, who throws a rope with a loop so wide it snares not only Bill and Vard but even that most mysterious fellow himself, Sam Heller?

  Last night Sam had sent a rider from town out to the Cross Ranch with a note from Sam to Johnny.

  The note said simply that Bill Longley was in Hangtree with a message for Johnny, that Bill had been shot, his injuries serious but not critical, and that he was resting at the Golden Spur.

  Don’t know how much rest he’ll get there, Johnny thought sardonically, not with all those good-looking young whores and high-line whiskey on tap.

  Johnny Cross saddled a fast horse that same night and raced to town, going to the Golden Spur.

  Damon Bolt and Mrs. Frye were talking with crusty old Doc Ferguson when Johnny arrived. Doc Ferguson described Bill Longley’s wounds, saying that Bill was now resting and couldn’t be disturbed, a stiff dose of laudanum having put him into a deep, much-needed sleep.

  Johnny suggested that Bill should be put under guard in case new attempts be made to kill him; Damon Bolt said this had already been done.

  Johnny went to Sam Heller’s bungalow on the outskirts of town but Sam was not there. Johnny then went to see town marshal Mack Barton at his jail office; Barton was out and his assistant deputy Ellis was his usual clueless self and no help in filling in the background.

  Damon Bolt offered Johnny a free room at the Golden Spur, but Johnny declined with thanks. Too much temptation at the saloon. He took a room at the Cattleman Hotel, Hangtree’s best, where he had a troubled night’s sleep.

  Johnny put the time to good use by taking care of some banking business and other errands that required his presence in town.

  Mid-afternoon of the second day after Bill Longley’s arrival in Hangtree saw Johnny Cross’s return to the Golden Spur to see how Bill Longley was getting along.

  It was a slack time in the saloon’s working hours. The lunchtime beer-drinking crowd was long gone and the early evening drinkers had yet to arrive. The gaming room was quiet.

  A handful of solitary drinkers stood at the brass-railed long bar in the main room. Johnny Cross quietly took his place among them.

  Sipping his whiskey, he caught sight of his reflection in the wall-mounted mirror behind the bar. The image in the looking glass was that of a young man in his early twenties, medium height, compactly built. A handsome man with clean-cut features and a friendly face.

  There was something unusual about his being clean shaven in a frontier society where some sort of facial hair on males was almost universal.

  The years with Quantrill of living rough in the field, too often long haired, bearded, and filthy, going months between baths and a change in clean clothes, a condition too often repeated in the year and a half of being on the dodge after the war, had made Johnny hunger for a fastidious cleanliness in his later civilian life.

  He wore a dark flat-crowned hat, a jacket of such dark blue hue it seemed almost black, a slate-gray button-down shirt, black jeans, and boots. A low-slung gunbelt held twin holstered Colt .45s.

  He slapped a coin down on the counter, ordering a shot of whiskey and a beer. “Have one for yourself, Mr. Morrissey.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Cross,” the barkeep said, drawing Johnny’s order and setting it down on the bar, then drawing the same for himself. All customers were “Mister” to Morrissey whether they bought him a shot or not.

  Rumor had it that he was related to John Morrissey, New York City’s famed heavyweight boxing champion, a rumor the barkeep would neither confirm nor deny. In any case Morrissey was a one-punch knockout bartender, as more than a few abusive drunks had found out the hard way.

  A minority opinion of too-wise owls held that the barkeep was actually the real John Morrissey, who had faked his own death and gone west to thwart assassins from the Gangs of New York who had targeted him in a deadly vendetta.

  Johnny drank his shot-and-a-beer, tingling with its restorative warmth.

  “Himself would appreciate a word with you, Mr. Cross,” Morrissey said in a low voice for Johnny’s ears only. By “Himself” Morrissey was referring to saloon co-owner Damon Bolt.

  “I’ll see him now, if that’s convenient,” Johnny said.

  “He’s in the office,” Morrissey said.

  Johnny Cross went down the center aisle between the gaming room and the long bar main room, following it to a closed door in the rear wall under a flight of stairs. He knocked on the door panel.

  “Come in,” said a voice on the other side of the door.

  Johnny went in, closing the door behind him.

  The room was a combination office and study, well furnished. Within were Damon Bolt and Mrs. Frye, co-owners and proprietors of the Golden Spur. Johnny took off his hat and held it down by his side at the sight of Mrs. Frye.

  “Good afternoon, John,” Mrs. Frye said. She was serious faced, but her voice held purring warmth. She was the only one of Johnny Cross’s circle of friends and acquaintances to call him “John.” Perhaps that was why she did it.

  Mrs. Frye’s straight brick red hair was parted along the middle of her scalp and reached down to her strong jawline. Her body was long, sinewy, supple, and eel-like. She was doing her bookkeeping, poring over entries in the saloon’s ledger, steel-nibbed ink pen in hand. He had always found her subtly disconcerting to his well-balanced sensibilities. She had a presence, a sense of sensuous power held under restraint. A kind of confidence borne of her wide experience of the male animal in all the bizarre extremities of his unrestrained behavior. A longtime prostitute, procuress, and brothel keeper, she had insights into human nature best not inquired into too deeply. In matters of manners and deportment she was always impeccably correct.

  “Miz Frye,” he said, meeting her coolly appraising gaze and holding it for a few beats before breaking eye contact.

  “Damon,” Johnny said, turning his face to the gambler.

  Damon Bolt acknowledged the other’s greeting with a tight nod. “Johnny.”

  He sat behind a desk on the far side of the room, facing the door. Mrs. Frye sat at a corner table, examining the ledger. Windows were set in the short wall behind Damon Bolt, the curtains closed. A well-padded leather couch lay along one of the room’s long walls.

  The space was shadowy, the desk lamp already lit. Red candles burned in a bronze candelabra set on Mrs. Frye’s table.

  Damon Bolt was a gambler who looked like a Romantic poet. He had a high forehead, ravaged-looking face, and raven-black hair and mustache. His was the paleness characteristic of folk of the nighttime world such as card players, saloon girls, drunks, bartenders, and the like. He was thin, too thin.

  Damon Bolt was a professional gambler and celebrated duelist from New Orleans. A cut-glass decanter stood within Damon Bolt’s easy reach on a green baize desk blotter. His hand was wrapped around a tumbler the size of a water glass. It was half-filled with a liquid the color of mahogany wood; its reddish-brown contents were alive with fiery red glints.

  “Behold the awful truth, Johnny,” he said, holding the glass tumbler up to the lamp so its light shone through. “I play while Mrs. Frye handles such dreary chores as keeping the books.”

  “What’s a chore to others is a joy to me,” Mrs. Frye said, not looking up from her ledger.

  “Only as long as you stay in the black,” the gambler countered.

  “Yes, there’s that. Going into the red is not a happiness.”

  “No worries on that score while you’re keeping the books, my dear.”

  “Unless you drink up the profits . . . always a risk with you, Damon.”

  “You see how it is, Johnny? My vices keep our house suspended on a tightrope between prosperity or ruin,” Damon Bolt said. “Oh, well, as long as I’m going to imperil our enterprise, I might as well have help doing it. Sit down, please, and join me in a drink.”

  “Thanks, don’t mind if I do.” Johnny took a seat in a chair across the desk from
the gambler.

  Damon Bolt set a second water glass on the desk blotter and began filling it from the decanter. When the tumbler was half-filled Johnny said, “When.”

  The gambler kept pouring until Johnny said, “Whoa!”

  Damon Bolt paused, decanter at the ready. “It’s very good brandy,” he said.

  “I’ve got a busy day and night ahead,” Johnny said by way of explanation.

  “As the poet said, ‘Strong drink fortifies,’” the gambler insisted.

  “You’ve got the quote wrong,” Mrs. Frye said. “It goes, ‘Wine gladdens the heart, but strong drink is a mocker.’”

  “I like my version better, Mrs. Frye. Strong drink fortifies.”

  Johnny Cross was of the opinion that the gambler was already well fortified, fortified to a fault actually, but he wisely kept his opinion to himself.

  Mrs. Frye must have been of the same belief. “Stop trying to get John drunk. He’s concerned about his friend Bill and wants to see him.”

  “Yes, yes, of course, I forgot. Thoughtless of me.” Damon Bolt picked up the tumbler, reached across the desk, and set it down in front of Johnny.

  They drank. It was good brandy, Johnny thought, drinking deeply. Very good brandy. Damon Bolt’s glass was nearly drained at a gulp.

  Johnny Cross got down to business. “What about Bill Longley? How is he? Can I see him now?”

  “He’s all right, Doc Ferguson says he’s going to be okay. He’ll heal up fine,” Damon Bolt said.

  “He’s already healthy enough to go bothering my girls,” Mrs. Frye said.

  “That sounds like Bill, all right. A good sign, I reckon,” Johnny said. “But I’ll have a word with him, tell him to stop making a damned pest of himself.”

  Mrs. Frye laughed, waving the notion away. “Don’t worry about it. He’s not mended enough yet to be dangerous. Besides, the girls are after him as much as he’s after them, maybe more. He’s something of a handsome young devil at that.”

  “Don’t let him hear you say so; Bill’s already got a swelled head about himself where the ladies are concerned,” Johnny said.