Seven Days to Hell

by William W. Johnstone

  So within those limits Warden Munday went to work on Cullen Baker, continually taunting him, baiting him, orchestrating a host of indignities and torments to increase his sufferings. Munday wanted him broken to the point that Baker showed a yellow streak when he went to swing by a rope and dance on air.

  Munday knew Barbaroux would be pleased by such an outcome. The Commander tended to express such pleasure by a bonus in gold. Trouble was, Cullen Baker didn’t break easy, he was a hard nut to crack. And highly dangerous.

  Early on during his stay at Clinchfield Gaol a couple of guards had gotten too close to Baker while trying to give him a beating. Instead they had gotten the beating, Baker busting them up so bad they had to be hospitalized in the infirmary. One guard, Hankus, had only come back on shift three days ago and still walked with a limp. The other had yet to return, quite possibly never would.

  Others who had been on-scene said Baker would have beaten the two to death if not for reinforcements clubbing him into insensibility.

  That was Cullen Baker: natural-born killer.

  Now Munday waited, as Baker watched the drop test. The moment of truth was near.

  The scaffold was a ten-foot-high wooden deck centered by a hinged trapdoor. Beside and above the trap loomed the actual gallows itself, an inverted U-shaped topbar—from whose center hung a length of yellow hempen rope stretching down to what would roughly be the height of the condemned man standing atop the closed trapdoor.

  The executioner’s assistant supervised the detail while three guards did the donkey work. The trio manhandled a two-hundred-pound heavy-duty canvas sandbag into place, setting it upright on its base on the trap below the dangling noose. The sandbag was a stand-in for the condemned man.

  The executioner’s assistant hooked up the noose to the upright sandbag, cinching it tightly about a foot below the top, making sure it was secure.

  He took up a stance beside a vertical metal lever handle protruding up through the wooden deck adjacent to the trap. The lever controlled the trapdoor through a series of metal rods, pins, and joins running beneath the deck.

  The guards stepped back moving well clear of the trapdoor.

  There was a pause, the guards glancing up at the barred window behind which Cullen Baker stood. They well knew that cell and its occupant.

  The executioner’s assistant threw the lever, triggering the spring-catch mechanism holding the trapdoor hatch in place. It made a sound like a giant mousetrap being sprung.

  The hinged square hatch opened swinging downward. The heavy sandbag dropped through the now-open hatchway, plummeting earthward. Its speedy descent abruptly ended when it reached the end of its rope.

  It jerked to a halt a few feet above the ground with a deep-booming Whomp! that was the signature of a resounding impact shivering gallows and scaffold, a loud booming noise that was as much felt as heard even in the depths of the prison.

  Rare indeed was the inmate behind those walls who could hear that sound without shuddering.

  Yet Cullen Baker was such a one. No slightest flinch or wince did he betray, to the infinite disappointment of Warden Munday.

  The dangling sandbag hung swaying pendulum-like, its taut hempen rope creaking.

  The warden held himself too well under control to show any sign of disappointment or annoyance that his ploy had once again failed. Yet the taste of such failure was bitter gall and wormwood to him.

  The exercise was over.

  The guards went down the scaffold staircase and under the deck, hefting the sandbag and wrestling the noose clear of its top. The executioner’s assistant hauled the rope up through the trapdoor, then closed the hatch and locked it in place, resetting the mechanism.

  The three guards had more donkey work to do. The sandbag could not be left outside overnight, for fear of damage by the elements. Warden Munday was a real stickler about the proper care and maintenance of Clinchfield Gaol property, as he was about every other single rule and regulation concerning the operation of that tightly run prison.

  The guards lifted the heavy sandbag onto a four-wheeled handcart and push-pulled it across the yard.

  Cullen Baker laughed loudly, a harsh cawing sound. “Work, you sons, work!” he shouted down to the guards below.

  The guards grinned up at him.

  “Does me good to see y’all doing some honest work for a change,” Baker called.

  “I’m looking forward to hauling away your dead carcass come tomorrow,” a guard replied. “That won’t be work . . . it’ll be a pleasure!”

  Baker’s laughter cawed again, harsh and mocking. The guards worked the cart through the door and inside. The turnkey slammed the door shut and locked it.

  “Still the tough man, eh, Baker,” Warden Munday said to the inmate’s back. It was not a question.

  Cullen Baker turned, facing the other. Mindful of the dangers of a sudden lunge by the prisoner, Munday quickly stepped back from the cage.

  Baker took note of that and grinned. The warden hated him more than ever before but didn’t let his feelings show, smirking instead.

  Cullen Baker folded his arms across his chest and leaned back against the wall as if to demonstrate there was no threat to the warden from him. Munday wasn’t buying and continued to keep his distance from the cage.

  “Starting to sweat yet, Baker? Your time is almost done,” he taunted.

  “It’ll be a pleasure to get out of this hole,” Baker said.

  “You’ll be trading it for a hole in the ground, an unmarked grave in the prison burying ground.”

  “I’ll save a space beside me for you, Warden.”

  The warden ignored that. “Not very pleasant, hanging. I’ve seen even the toughest cry for their momma when the hangman tightens the noose around his neck. I wonder how you’ll hold up, Baker?”

  “Wait and see, Warden.”

  “Take it from one who knows, hanging’s a chancy thing, Baker. You never know what’s going to happen until the trap’s sprung. It seems straightforward enough: The rope goes around your neck, a relatively quick and clean death compared to some. Nothing compared to some of those lawmen you gut-shot.”

  “Lawmen, hell! They was crooks with badges—Combine crooks. They’d have done the same to me or worse if they could.”

  “So you said at the trial, but a jury of twelve good men said different and found you guilty of murder many times over.”

  “That was no trial, that was a trained dog act. Everyone on the jury was a hand-picked Combine man or one of their friends or kin.”

  “Why tell me, Baker? This is no appeals court. You hang tomorrow. Appeal your way out of that,” Warden Munday said.

  Munday continued his taunting. “By the way, don’t be too sure about hanging being a quick death,” Munday added. “Things happen sometimes, strange things. If the hangman doesn’t set the noose just right, you slowly strangle to death instead of a swift death from a broken neck. Very very slowly. I’ve seen them take five, even ten minutes a-dying when that happens. A tough man like you might take a very long time, eh, Baker?”

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Warden?”

  “Nonsense, it’s a matter of no difference to me.”

  “We both know better.”

  “Tomorrow noon we’ll find out what’s true and what’s not. I’m looking forward to it,” Munday said.

  Cullen Baker shrugged, he was through talking.

  Munday took a different tack. “This being Execution Eve you get the customary last meal of the condemned man. What’ll you have?”

  “A big fat juicy steak, fried potatoes, some cut-up tomatoes, corn bread—”

  “You’ll get fried chicken and like it, Baker.”

  “How about a bottle of something with a kick to it?”

  “I know your reputation as a drunkard and bar fly, Baker. This past month must have been mighty thirsty for you. Too bad! No alcoholic spirits allowed inside Clinchfield Gaol. You can have milk or water.”

  “Mighty
cold comfort, Warden. You must be trying to kill me off before the hanging.”

  “Wouldn’t think of it. I want you cold sober when you go to be hanged. I don’t want you to fall down the stairs to the gallows and hurt yourself.”

  Munday made ready to leave. “Eat hearty, Baker. You’ve got to keep your strength up for your appointment with the hangman.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Cullen Baker hadn’t slept well or easily any night since his capture, and tonight, his last night, was certainly no exception. He spent a lot of time standing at the window watching the stars come out and the rising moon climb into the night sky.

  He now lay awake on his back on his bunk watching a patch of moonlight creep slowly across the ceiling. The hour was late; the moon was declining in the western half of the sky and the stars shone through scudding clouds and mists rising off the river.

  Cullen Baker was not one to regret the deeds of a misspent life. Indeed he held his span to be far from misspent. He reveled in it. He’d lived hard, raw and hell-bent for leather and he meant to go out the same way.

  Often he thought of Julie. There’d been other women, lots of them, other wives even, but Julie rose foremost in his mind.

  “’Tain’t likely I’ll see her where I’m going,” he said to himself with a quirked smile.

  More time passed, physical and emotional fatigue, boredom and lack of stimulation taking its toll. Cullen Baker drifted in and out of a light troubled sleep. He passed from wakefulness to slumber and back again. Perhaps he only dreamed that he was awake.

  Whatever they were, his dreams were not pleasant, if the expressions crossing his sleep-dulled features were any indication. There were frowns, grimaces, sneers, tooth-gnashing snarls, and such.

  One dream took on a vivid immediacy.

  * * *

  Back in the war for a time he rode with the Independent Rangers of the Arkansas Confederate Home Guard—that’s what they called themselves but in reality they were one more of the many ragtag, bobtailed bands of marauding bandits preying on the folk of the region be their loyalties Union or Southron.

  One day near war’s end the band came across a group of several dozen refugees, men and some women, trying to flee Perry County for points west.

  Most likely they were in search of some place where they could find something to eat—“good luck on that”—but there was no luck to be had for the hapless fugitives when the Home Guard came across them trying to cross the Sabine River.

  They were trying to flee . . . flight meant disloyalty to the Cause, disloyalty meant death.

  The Independent Rangers caught the refugees right in the middle of a river crossing when they were most vulnerable.

  “They’s goin’ over to the Yanks!” one of the band shouted. That’s all it took to spur the Home Guard into opening fire, cutting the hapless fugitives down, men and women alike, no mercy.

  Cullen Baker had been in the thick of it that day as always, doing his share of the killing and more, and now it seemed that he was there again, reliving the experience with a sensation of stark reality.

  Crackling waves of gunfire, screams of dying men and women, river water splashing, spraying, the river turning red, guns going bang bang bang!—

  * * *

  Cullen Baker came awake—

  Or had he?

  He was lost in confusion for a moment. He knew he was awake on his bunk in his death cell in Clinchfield Gaol, no doubt about it. But the racketing gunfire from his massacre dream continued to sound unabated.

  “That’s no dream!” he said out loud. “Awake or asleep, I know gunfire when I hear it and I’m hearing it now, plenty of it—!”

  Hangman’s Row was in tumult, awake and riotous. Inmates were shouting, screaming, beating against the bars of their cages with fists and feet.

  Cullen Baker jumped to his feet and stood at the window.

  Fire!

  The guards’ barracks was ablaze, a sight to gladden any inmate’s heart.

  “It’s a breakout!” shouted one of the condemned men on the row.

  Cullen Baker knew the man was wrong; it was a break-in.

  Gun battles raged all over the prison yard, a yard already littered with dead bodies. There was shooting and furtive movements on the battlements, too.

  Suddenly a volcano seemed to erupt at the main gate, secured by a pair of massive ironbound oaken doors. Those impregnable doors ceased to exist, disintegrating into glare, pressure, fragments, noise.

  A tremendous blast or rather series of blasts made rolling thunder to herald the explosion of the main gates.

  Sunfire at night blossomed into white-hot fury where the gates had been, so bright that Cullen Baker had to look away to keep from being dazzled by the glare.

  Clinchfield Gaol shook from the blast like an earthquake. Dust shaken from the stones rained down from the ceiling of Hangman’s Row. Echoes resounded across the Point and over the waters. The blast cloud rose to the heavens, blotting out the stars. A rain of debris fell, throwing down crushed rocks, pulverized portals, twisted iron bars, and dust.

  “Hot damn! Somebody just blew the gates!” shouted a denizen of the Row, exulting.

  The block guard was so scared he didn’t know what to do. He was as jumpy as a frog in a pot of boiling water. The iron access door was locked from outside and he lacked the key, sealing him in on Hangman’s Row.

  The smoke cleared, revealing a hole in the wall where the main gate had been.

  A band of mounted men, several dozen of them, armed and shooting, came pouring through the gap into the yard.

  “Who are they?” one of the condemned cried.

  “Whoever they be they’s no friends of Clinchfield Gaol!” crowed another.

  That was certain. The invaders poured in, shooting down guards on sight, trampling them under horses’ hooves, even cutting them down with cavalry sabers. The guards downed some of the invaders but not enough.

  The riders were the second wave of the invasion. The first wave, the advance guard of skirmishers, had made their entrance earlier. They had come quietly, covertly, secretly. That’s why the fighting had begun not outside but inside the gates.

  The skirmishers had fired the barracks. Now they were inside the prison, having secured a beachhead within the main building. Shots and screams sounded somewhere deep within the structure.

  The condemned men of Hangman’s Row reacted to the onslaught:

  “Shoot-a-mile! Kill ’em, burn ’em down, the dirty dogs!”

  “Oh, what I wouldn’t give to be down there, in on the killing!”

  “Lord, we gone burn alive!”

  “Grow a pair, yellowbelly—we’s doomed to die so at worst we lose nothing and take our enemies with us!”

  “But I don’t want to burn—”

  The shooting sounded closer now, nearing if not yet actually inside the west wing.

  “Sounds like they’s on the ground floor!”

  Finally there came what Cullen Baker had been listening for though he dared not hope: the racket of oncoming attackers below, rising up the stairwell to the second floor. Steady sustained bursts of gunfire drew ever nearer.

  Outside the iron door came the muffled rattle of a key ring, the sound of a long-handled key being thrust into the lock, its bolts being thrown.

  The iron door flung open. A handful of armed men came bustling in, hustling a captive turnkey into the central aisle with them.

  One of them shot down the block guard who had fled to the corridor’s end and stood cowering with his back to the far wall.

  Another held in one hand a hooded lantern throwing a tight beam of light, and in the other a gun held pressed against the turnkey’s head.

  “Take us to him or I’ll blow your brains out!” the gunman commanded.

  “That’s it! This is his cell!” croaked the turnkey in a fear-choked voice.

  The intruders clustered in front of Cullen Baker’s cage. They were a fearsome-looking bunch, faces blackened wit
h soot to blend in with the darkness of night, devil masks with slitted eyes and grim mouths.

  The turnkey fumbled with the key ring, trembling fingers sorting through the keys in search of one that would open the Hangman’s Row cages.

  “Open it up, damn you,” a second raider menaced, prodding the turnkey with a gun.

  “He’s stalling,” said another. “Kill him and try the keys yourself.”

  “No, wait! Here’s the key, and it opens all the cells in the row,” the turnkey cried.

  “Don’t kill him till we’re damned sure it’s the right key,” a second raider said.

  The key rattled in the lock, unsealing it.

  “That’s it!”

  “Don’t kill him,” said the raider holding the lantern and a gun. “Let him unlock the rest of the cells. He can do it faster than we can. A couple of y’all go with him.”

  “Right!” a third raider said, grabbing the turnkey by the scruff of the collar and hustling him to the next cell in line. A fourth raider went with them.

  The lantern holder worked the beam so that it fell on the cell’s occupant, revealing Cullen Baker. “Let there be light,” he said.

  “Get that out of my eyes,” Cullen Baker barked, squinting against the glare.

  “Sweet natured as ever,” the second raider said, chuckling.

  “Must be him,” said the lantern holder, “ain’t nobody else that ugly!”

  Cullen Baker squinted against the lantern’s glare. “By the Lord, is that young Bill Longley I hear?”

  “You’re not just whistling Dixie,” said Bill Longley. “What, did you think I wasn’t coming?”

  “I never doubted it,” Baker said.

  “I brung a few friends along—”

  “So I see.”

  “Including one you might remember.”

  The lantern holder held the lamp under his face, under-lighting it to reveal his features.

  “Johnny Cross!” Cullen Baker shouted.

  “Howdy, hoss,” Johnny said.

  “You never looked better.”

  “Wish I could say the same about you. You don’t smell so good, neither. Best save the handshakes and backslapping for later, though, we ain’t clear of ol’ Clinchfield Gaol yet.”