Lantern light revealed that Cullen Baker was barefoot, a condition in which Hangman’s Row’s condemned were kept.
“We’re gonna have to get you some boots,” George St. George said.
“To hell with that! There’s only one thing I want—a gun!” Cullen Baker answered.
“What I figured,” Bill Longley said, handing the other a six-gun.
Baker’s big fist closed around the gun butt. “Ahh.” He sighed, like he was sinking into a luxuriant hot bath.
“Let’s get a move on, we got plenty more killing to do before first light,” Johnny urged.
“I know where to start,” Cullen Baker said, grim-faced, eyes alight with unholy joy.
* * *
Johnny Cross had put his head together earlier with George St. George, Belle Nyad, and the Tonkawa tribal elders who took the place of their fallen spokesman Gator Al Hutchins.
Forty swampers were recruited for the raid on Clinchfield Gaol. They came from George St. George’s Nightrunners, Belle’s River Rats gang, and the Tonkawa braves.
Forty guns: fifteen skirmishers, five blasters, twenty for the cavalry.
Niahll Sharkey decided to come in after the massacre of the Gun Dogs. He supplied dynamite and blasting powder.
The advance guard of skirmishers was a mixed band that included Johnny Cross and Bill Longley, George St. George, some smugglers, River Rats and Tonks, not least of whom was Roe Brand. Among them were several tough swampers who’d served time in Clinchfield Gaol and knew the layout inside out.
The forty guns massed outside the prison in the dead of night. They rode recently stolen horses, one of the easiest items to come by in the thieves’ market of Halftown. Their people had earlier stolen them from various horse thieves.
This advance guard went in first.
Tonkawa archers silently picked off the night guards patrolling the fortress’s rampart walls. Grappling hooks with lines attached were used to scale the walls.
The bowmen used fire arrows to set the guard barracks on fire. This resulted in flames, heat, smoke, and panicked guards, many of whom ran out into the yard unarmed and in their nightclothes.
The fire and shooting cued the blasters outside to do their work. They were headed by Niahll Sharkey, a dynamiter of no small expertise. Sharkey had done demolitions and explosives work for the Confederate Navy during the war.
He supervised four sidemen in rigging the barrels of black powder designed to demolish the main gates. When shooting started within the walls, he lit the fuse. The resultant blast blew the portals to pieces, making a massive breach in the enemy’s defenses.
The way cleared, a twenty-man cavalry force stormed the yard, riding and shooting.
At about the same time, Johnny Cross used a couple of bundles of dynamite to blow a hole in the front entrance of the prison’s main building. He and the skirmishers bulled their way inside, gunning down prison staffers and guards.
Johnny led half his force into the ground floor of the west wing, leaving the others behind to secure the main building and begin freeing the general prison population from their cells.
Helping to break the inmates out quickly was the fact that as soon as they were freed they were set to work performing the same service for their fellows still behind bars.
With all the blasting and shooting a number of fires broke out in the main building, adding urgency to the mission of freeing the prisoners.
Johnny and his band shot their way into the west wing, taking several guards and turnkeys alive. One turnkey was pressed into service at gunpoint into securing the keys for Hangman’s Row and using them to open its iron door and free the condemned men, Cullen Baker first and foremost . . .
* * *
Now Johnny Cross, Bill Longley, Cullen Baker, Roe Brand, and several others roamed the second floor of the main building, cleaning up on whatever prison personnel they found there. Dead bodies of guards and staff littered the stairs and landing and were scattered throughout the complex.
The raider band now padded stealthily down a long hall at the front of the building, a hall lined with closed doors behind which lay dark rooms. The skirmishers proceeded with guns in hand.
Night lamps were few and far between with frequent patches of black darkness. Johnny Cross kept hold of the hooded lantern in his left hand, using it to light the way, while his right hand fisted a gun.
“You know the way to the warden’s office, Cullen?” Bill Longley asked in a low voice.
“I should, I been in there enough times,” Cullen Baker rasped. “Munday liked to call me on the carpet so he could work the prod on me. Now I’ll call on him.”
“I know you got to do what you’re gonna do, Cullen,” Johnny began.
“I got to!”
“Well let’s make it fast.”
“The whole blamed shooting match is like to burn down around us!” said Roe Brand, eyeing the thickening smoke piling up on the ceiling.
They came to a closed door in the center of the hallway, a thin faint line of light leaking through the slitted gap at the bottom of the door.
Stenciled on the door in gilt letters several inches high was the legend OFFICE OF THE WARDEN.
Below that in smaller letters: KNOCK BEFORE ENTERING.
Cullen Baker raised a hand, motioning the others to halt. “This is my play, boys,” he whispered, “so whatever happens don’t interfere.”
“All right,” Johnny Cross said softly, hanging back with the others while Baker moved to the fore.
Standing well to one side of the door, back flattened to the wall, Cullen Baker reached out with his free hand to try the doorknob. The door was locked.
Baker rapped his knuckles smartly against the door panel, quickly pulling his hand clear.
“Warden Munday?” he called mockingly. “Oh, Warden, you in there—?”
From within the office a volley of bullets came in quick succession, ripping through the door panel at chest-height.
“Looks like he’s home.” Cullen Baker grinned. He shot the lock out of the door, straight-arming the door open while keeping himself under cover.
Another volley of shots came sizzling through the open doorway, cratering the wall on the far side of the corridor.
In the dimly lit sanctum of his spacious office, Warden Munday crouched behind a massive golden oak desk blasting away to no effect save to further impact the opposite wall. Several guns were laid out on his desktop, ready to hand.
Baker hunkered down, reaching around with the pistol to draw a bead on Munday. He fired, tagging the warden in the shoulder.
Munday grunted, shaken by the impact. He’d been hit high up on his gun arm, which now dropped to his side, useless. The gun slipped from his nerveless fingers.
Munday threw himself across the desktop, his other hand grabbing for one of the guns laid out there but clumsily knocking it out of reach instead.
Cullen Baker stepped into the room, gun pointed at Munday. Munday lurched upright, standing crouched, dead arm hanging at his side. His leaden-gray face was clammy with cold sweat. The enlarged pupils of his eyes looked like black buttons.
Cullen Baker spoke: “Like you said, Warden—you never know what’s going to happen until the trap’s sprung.”
He shot Munday twice in the belly.
“Owww!” Munday crumpled, trying to hold himself together with his good arm. He backpedaled into the wall, then slowly sank to the floor, sitting down on it. A smeary blood trail marked his downward path along the wall.
Cullen Baker circled around to the far side of the desk, never taking his smoking gun off Munday.
The warden’s eyes were glazing and his lips gummy. He began, “Listen, Baker—”
“Here it comes,” Cullen Baker said, rolling his eyes in disbelief.
“I’m valuable to you alive . . . hostage . . . bargaining chip . . .”
“You?—you’re nothing. What good is a jailer without a jail? Clinchfield Gaol is coming down around your ears,
Warden, or ain’t you noticed? But you’ll go before it.”
“Money, gold—I can get it . . .”
“Take it to hell with you.”
As if accepting his fate, Warden Munday gathered his last remaining reserves of strength and life, sneering. “You’ll never change, Baker . . . You’re an animal, a stupid brute animal with fast reflexes and no brain.”
“Maybe so, but I’m alive and you’re dead, just about. I was minded to do something fancy and cut up capers like hanging you on your own gallows, but we’re plumb out of time, so I’ll stick to what I know, something plain and simple,” Cullen Baker said.
With that, he aimed his gun again, and fired.
* * *
“I’m back,” Cullen Baker proudly announced.
Johnny Cross tied a bandana around his nose and mouth to protect against smoke, as did the others of the band. All but Cullen Baker who had no kerchief. He remedied the lack by tearing one long sleeve off his prison shirt and binding it across the lower half of his face.
They rushed onto the second-floor landing and started downstairs. Smoke was thick in the stairwell, the treads of the steps hot against Baker’s bare feet.
Reaching ground level they rushed out through the hole where the front doors had been before Johnny Cross blew them up earlier with dynamite. It was a relief indeed to stagger away from the smoky structure and breathe fresh air—as fresh as swamp air, thick, humid, and overlaid with the reek of rotting vegetation, ever gets.
The general prison population had all been set loose, the last of them streaming toward the gap in the main gates and outside.
Cullen Baker meant to set fire to the gallows but he was too late. It had already been put to the torch and was now burning brightly.
The raider band joined the mass exodus fleeing through the gap in the prison walls where the main gates had been.
Once outside, Bill Longley was drawn up short by the sound of baying somewhere in the brush, a distant rising chorus of howling. His face twisted into a mingled expression of fearful expectancy and disbelief.
“Something wrong, Bill?” Johnny Cross asked, frowning.
“Listen! You hear that?”
The sound of howling rose up again, ringing in triumph, stirring as the clarion call of a trumpeting band. Shivers ran along Bill’s spine.
“That? That’s nothing, just a pack of hunting dogs that treed a ’coon or something,” Johnny said dismissively.
“I reckon,” Bill said, not believing it.
“Come on, shake a leg and let’s get out of here, we still got plenty of work to do this night,” Johnny said.
He and Bill joined the flight from the burning wreck of Clinchfield Gaol.
A pack of hunting dogs? Bill Longley knew better.
He had heard the hellhounds.
TWENTY-EIGHT
“The Queen’s coming out!”
A different kind of uproar seized the Clinchfield docks later that same night, particularly at the wharf where the Sabine Queen, the Big White Boat, was moored.
On receipt of the startling intelligence that Clinchfield Gaol was under assault, Commander Barbaroux’s well-armed and heavily manned steamboat made ready to set forth and do battle.
Barbaroux had the vessel kept under steam day and night and so it was always ready for action. With news that Clinchfield Gaol was being attacked, fireboxes were heaped high with fresh kindling and paraffin sprayed on them to quickly goose the boilers up to full steam.
The boat’s permanent party fighting force armed themselves while civilians and all nonessential personnel made a mass exodus from boat to wharf.
The Queen disgorged several dozen devastatingly attractive sporting ladies in various stages of undress, but neither Flossie nor Jonquil was among them. Barbaroux’s favorite concubines would ride into battle with their master.
The wharf was thronged with cooks, pot scrubbers, musicians, maids and manservants, entertainers, gamblers, vendors, and a variety of hangers-on. Each one represented dragging weight, which must not be allowed to slow the Queen’s race to the assault.
It being the wee hours of the night, many of the discharged had been roused from their beds and swiftly herded along the ways and down the gangplanks to shore, adding to the air of dazed confusion that hung over the mass.
One who was not confused was Dean Valentine, who on hearing the alarm swiftly dressed and threw his most important valuables into a carpetbag. Here was a modest horde of recently acquired wealth, including the amassed weekly fees paid him in gold by Barbaroux for his role as in-house portraitist, along with whatever else he could win at the card tables, chisel from slower-witted passengers, or steal.
Not that Valentine feared their loss by their going down with the ship, for he held the well-nigh universal opinion on the Blacksnake, certainly among Barbaroux and his creatures, that the Sabine Queen was unbeatable and unsinkable.
No, Valentine rather feared the theft of his loot by some member of the steamboat’s crew, as piratical a bunch of rogues, cut-purses, and cutthroats as he had ever seen massed in one vicinity. If there’s one thing a thief hates most of all, it’s being stolen from.
Valentine stood on the wharf, gripping his carpetbag by the handle, dividing his focus between watching the Queen’s hurried preparations for departure and eyeing the array of lithe and lissome lovelies who had been summarily evicted from their cushy berths on the boat and herded on to the wharf.
Standing off to one side of the crowd, Valentine watched the steamboat get under way. Black smoke chuffed out of the tops of the Queen’s twin stacks, flames licking out from their mouths like muzzle flares. Mooring lines were cast off. Dual side-mounted paddle wheels began to turn and churn, beating up trails of white water on the river’s black surface.
The steamboat surged forward, moving away from the wharf, gathering speed and momentum as it plowed a course into the mid-Blacksnake. The multi-decked boat looked like a giant white wedding cake trimmed and frosted with strings of beaded lights as it powered into dark night and blacker waters.
“Impressive sight, no?”
Valentine gave a slight start as a familiar voice murmured behind him. He’d thought he was alone on this part of the wharf but apparently not. Glancing over his shoulder, he was not surprised to find Sexton Clarke behind him.
Clarke moved forward to stand alongside Valentine. The gunfighter’s round-topped, flat-brimmed preacher’s hat was perched on top of the back of his head at a tilted angle, giving it the appearance of a black halo. He held a traveling bag in one hand, the hand that was not his gun hand.
“You’ve a light foot, Clarke, I didn’t hear you come up.”
“A soft tread can be an asset in my profession, Valentine.”
“So?”
“So,” Clarke said. “A majestic sight, the Queen under way in dead of night. It must appeal to your artistic sensibilities.”
“More so if I hadn’t been so rudely roused from my bed. In any case, my landscapes, er, waterscapes here, are few and far between. I’m a portraitist,” Valentine said.
“Ah, even the painterly set is given to specialists. It’s much the same in the duelist’s trade.”
“No river battles for you, eh, Clarke?”
“Heavens, no!” Clarke said, giving a mock shudder. “Noisy and disagreeable, with the additional danger of drowning.”
“No swampers will ever sink that boat.”
“Still, a person might fall overboard.”
“It must be a sight to see—from safely on shore.”
“Strange things are in the air, Valentine. Less than a week ago, the Gun Dogs were wiped out. Tonight, Clinchfield Gaol is under siege, or so they say. Clinchfield Gaol, think of it! Who would be rash enough to assault that grotesque pile of stone?”
“Maybe the same ones who massacred the Dogs,” suggested Valentine.
“Perhaps. They won’t find it so amusing when the Queen opens fire with her cannons. Those big guns can reach far i
nland,” Clarke said.
Valentine nodded agreement.
“Yet it seems beyond doubt that our redoubtable Commander is experiencing considerable unrest in his vest-pocket kingdom.” Sexton Clarke smiled as if he found the thought not unpleasing. “What next, I wonder?”
* * *
Clinchfield Gaol and Clinchfield town were both sited on the east bank of Pirate’s Point, the famous peninsula extending from the north bank of the Blacksnake deep into the river. Clinchfield Gaol was set inland near the point’s southern tip, with the town laying a mile or two to the north.
When Clinchfield Gaol was cracked open, the liberated prisoners mostly fled riverward to the point’s east shore. Nothing but tangled overgrowth and boggy marshland lay in the opposite direction.
A dirt road ran along the eastern shoreline from its southern tip to Clinchfield town and beyond to where the point joined the embankment.
The mass of the freed prisoners fled to this shore road because it was the surest and easiest route to travel, especially by night. Many of the freed inmates were from Clinchfield and hoped to find aid and shelter there with family, friends, or sweethearts. A sizable minority of the inmates hailed originally from Halftown. They knew their only hope of reaching Halftown safely was by water. In Clinchfield were boats that could be stolen or stowed away on. These inmates, too, were impelled along Shoreline Road toward the town.
As for the rest of the prisoners who came from various sites along the river, they followed the others, hoping there was safety in numbers.
They moved on Clinchfield en masse, knowing it was where Barbaroux’s headquarters were sited, even though the Commander had put huge numbers of them in jail not for crimes of theft or violence but rather for anti-Barbaroux activities, organizing, or even remarks overheard in the wrong places.
Shoreline Road was also the most dangerous route because it would come right under the guns of the Sabine Queen. But the prisoners fled to the road, and east toward Clinchfield for a very good reason: They had no place else to go.
The forty Swamper raiders who’d busted Clinchfield Gaol wide open had had their numbers thinned by about a fourth during the storming of the fort. The survivors, too, headed for Shoreline Road but for a different reason than the newly liberated inmates: They had a rendezvous to keep there.
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