Sixkiller, U.S. Marshal

by William W. Johnstone

  “Before this trial even starts, let me tell you what argument I will not hear for the defense,” Abell said. “I will not hear, as argument for the defense, that we have no right to try these men.”

  “But, Your Honor, without that, the defense has no case,” Gilmore said.

  “You are an intelligent man, Mr. Gilmore. Come up with a defense,” Abell ordered.

  Larry Nickel, the citizen selected as the prosecutor, presented a strong case which included the tearful testimony of the two Roach sisters, Betsy and Carol. Ed Roach, the girls’ father and owner of the boardinghouse, made just as powerful a presentation as he sat in the witness chair with his head in bandages from the pistol-whipping he had suffered at the hands of the five men who were being tried.

  For the defense, Gilmore argued that the man who had actually done the pistol-whipping was Percy Martin, and that Martin had avoided capture. And when the girls said that they had kept their eyes closed during the assaults on them, Gilmore suggested that they could not positively connect the individual defendants with a specific rape. He was willing to concede, however, that Percy Martin, the man who escaped, and Harry Evers, the man Martin had killed, probably were guilty of rape.

  “And, it would be easy to see how these poor young women, so brutalized and degraded, might be led into thinking that all the men took part in the rape, when only two were guilty—the two who are not present today.”

  Abell congratulated Gilmore for his “valiant effort,” then charged the jury with finding a verdict.

  The jury reached the verdict in less than five minutes, and Abell sentenced the five men to be hanged by the neck until dead.

  “You got no right to do this!” Tinker shouted. “This ain’t no real court!”

  “It’s as close to a court as you men are going to get,” Abell said.

  “Hey, Abell, where are we goin’ to keep these men till we can get us a gallows built?” someone asked.

  “We don’t need a gallows,” Abell said.

  “How are we goin’ to hang ’em, if we don’t have a gallows?”

  “The hackberry tree just south of town,” Abell said. “It’s got one long, strong limb that reaches out. All we have to do is trim away a few of the smaller branches from that limb, and we can use it. And what makes it so perfect is it is long enough to hang all five of ’em at the same time.”

  Chapter Twenty-two

  John Henry had been sent to Ladore by Marshal Sarber to look into the trouble between the railroads.

  “In what was either a brilliant move, or something incredibly stupid, the federal government has said that only one railroad could enter The Nations, and that prize was to go to the first railroad to reach the border,” Sarber had told him. “As I’m sure you can well imagine, that competition has caused all kinds of trouble.”

  “Between the railroads?”

  “You guessed it. They are not only doing everything they can to be there first, they are doing whatever they can to see that their competition doesn’t make it. That’s where you come in.”

  “I understand. You want me to see that the competition between the railroads is fairly contested.”

  “That is exactly what I want,” Marshal Sarber had told him

  And, with that charge, John Henry Sixkiller left Fort Smith to look into the situation.

  Even before John Henry reached the town of Ladore that afternoon, he saw the frenzied activity of buzzards ahead. There were too many of them for it to be something small. He might have thought they were gathering around a dead horse or cow, except for the way they were behaving. These buzzards were flying in circles, only rarely committing to a diving attack to whatever it was that had drawn them.

  John Henry knew, even before he reached the town, that the buzzards were circling a human corpse. The fact that buzzards were frightened of men, even when they were dead, caused them to be somewhat hesitant. He knew also, though, that once they got over their initial fear, they would make fairly quick work of the corpse.

  As he came farther into town he saw what had attracted the buzzards. Stopping, he sub-consciously ran his finger down the lightning bolt flash of the scar on his face, and studied the scene before him. It wasn’t just one corpse that had attracted the buzzards, for there in front of him, suspended from a long, and solid branch of a hackberry tree, were five men. They were hanging by their necks, their heads crooked to one side in the way that was peculiar to a hanged man.

  There had been nothing in Sarber’s instructions that mentioned a lynching. Also, these corpses were still fresh. Neither buzzard attacks nor decomposition had yet sullied the corpses, so John Henry knew that this had to be something that had just happened.

  As he rode by the dangling men, he saw that a sign had been pinned to one of them.

  THESE FIVE MEN WERE

  MURDERERS AND RAPISTS.

  HANGING WAS TOO GOOD

  FOR THEM.

  Technically, Ladore was not a town, in that it had not been incorporated. And because it was not a town, it had neither law, nor a court, therefore it appeared to John Henry that the five men had been lynched. His first thought was that their deaths were somehow connected with the competition between the railroads to be first to reach the border of the Indian Territory. But that would not explain the sign that referred to them as “murderers and rapists.”

  When someone saw John Henry paying attention to the five suspended corpses, he rode out to meet him. That was when he saw the badge on John Henry’s chest.

  “I see by the badge on your chest that you are the law. May I inquire as to what branch of law you represent?”

  “I am John Henry Sixkiller, United States Marshal. And you are?”

  “My name is Jim Abell, sir,” Abell replied. “I must say, I thought what we did might attract the law, but I didn’t expect anyone to come this quickly.”

  “Oh?”

  “No, sir, I did not. Seeing as we only strung these men up this very morning.”

  “They do look fresh,” John Henry admitted.

  “How did you find out about it?”

  “I saw them hanging here.”

  “No, I mean, how did you hear about them?” Abell took in the five hanging men with a motion of his hand.

  “I didn’t hear about them. I knew nothing about them until I saw them hanging here.”

  “This isn’t what brought you here?”

  “No.”

  “I see. Well, seeing as you are a U.S. Marshal and all, I figured you were here because of this. Does this mean you aren’t planning to look in to it?”

  “You aren’t going to try and say they were legally hanged, are you?”

  “As legal you can get in Ladore, seeing as we have no law.”

  “Lynching is never legal.”

  “They weren’t exactly lynched. We gave them a trial of sorts. It was a people’s court, you might say.”

  “What did they do?”

  “They commenced yesterday by beating up and robbing several of our townspeople. Seven of ’em, there were then. But that wasn’t enough for them. No, sir. They topped it off last night by nearly pistol-whipping to death Ed Roach, one of our citizens. Then, with poor old Mr. Roach lyin’ near to dead on the floor, they took his two girls with ’em out into the woods. What they did to those two poor, innocent girls isn’t even fit to talk about.”

  “How did you catch them?” John Henry asked.

  “Ha, that wasn’t hard at all. They got drunk and passed out and the girls escaped. Soon as we found out about it, we just went out to the little patch of woods where the girls said it happened and, sure enough, there they were, drunk as skunks. All we had to do was pick them up.”

  “But you said you had a trial.”

  “We did have a trial, right back there in the saloon. Mr. Roach, even though his head is all wrapped up in bandages, came over to testify, and he identified them. His two girls did, too. And they also told us what all these men did to them. It was something terrible
to hear, I tell you.”

  “Tell me more about the trial? Did you have a judge, jury? Did you have lawyers for the prosecution and defense?”

  “Yes, sir, we did. And the two men we had be the defense and prosecuting attorneys both have college educations, too.”

  “You said there were seven of them, but there are only five here. Where are the other two?”

  “There’s only one more of ’em. One of them got himself killed, and we have his body down at the lumberyard where the coffins are being built. We’ll be burying him alongside these. The one that killed him was a man by the name of Percy Martin. Martin is the one that got away.”

  “I see.”

  “Look here, Marshal, if you didn’t come here to look into this—legal—hanging, what did you come here for?”

  “The federal court has taken an interest in the competition between the two railroads,” John Henry said.

  “Oh. Well, then in that case, I expect you’ll want to talk to either Colonel Stevens, or Mr. Gunn, or Mr. Scullin, but none of them are here. If you want to talk to them, you’ll have to go up to Emporia. But if you’d like, I can get you on the next train that will be goin’ back for supplies. That’ll be about an hour from now, and it’ll have you in Emporia by supper time.

  “What about my horse?”

  “You can board him here, if you want. Curly Lathom runs the livery, he’ll take good care of him.”

  “All right, thanks, I may do that.”

  “The lynching?” Abell said.

  “If you are telling the truth, Mr. Abell, the entire town was in on it.”

  “Yes, sir, like I said, we had a trial and everything.”

  “How many people live here in Ladore?”

  “We’ve never taken an actual count, but we figure it has to be somewhere between two and three hundred people.”

  “I can’t very well arrest two hundred people for lynching now, can I?” John Henry asked. “And the only difference between two hundred people here holding a trial, and two hundred people in an incorporated town holding the trial, would be some paperwork. Sometimes looking the other way, Mr. Abell, may be the wisest part of discretion.”

  “Yes, sir,” Abell replied as a big relieved smile spread across his face. “I’ve always said that same thing.”

  “I would not recommend you hold any more trials before you get yourself incorporated.”

  “Yes, sir, I think that is a very good suggestion, and I can tell you that it is highly unlikely that such a thing would ever happen again.”

  “Where is the livery?”

  “Right up ahead, on your right. You can’t miss it,” Abell promised.

  John Henry rode down to the livery, made arrangements for his horse, then walked down to the railroad office, which was a railcar sitting at an end of track.

  “Yes, sir, Marshal Sixkiller,” a man said as he greeted him. “Mr. Abell said you would be taking our next work train back up to Emporia. If you’ll just have a seat and make yourself comfortable here, I’ll make all the arrangements.”

  “Thank you,” John Henry said.

  As John Henry Sixkiller waited for his train at Ladore, ten miles to the west, Matt Dixon rode into Baxter Springs. Baxter Springs was at the end of track of the Border Tier Railroad. It was a “hell on wheels,” with enough cafés, saloons, and bawdy houses to take care of the men who were building the railroad. Its population was growing almost daily as people flocked into the town to take advantage of the prosperity the railroad promised.

  As Dixon rode in, he made a studied perusal of the town. It consisted of a combination of whipsawed lumber shacks with unpainted, still-green wood, and tents. Dixon rode up to the hitch rail in front of the End of Track saloon, dismounted, and patted his tan duster a few times, sending up puffs of gray-white dust, then walked inside. The saloon was busy, but Dixon found a quiet place by the end of the bar.

  Dixon was a small, thin man with a hawk nose, dark, beady eyes, and pockmarked skin.

  When the bartender moved over to him, Dixon ordered a beer.

  At the opposite end of the bar from Dixon, a dark-haired, dark-eyed man tossed his whiskey down, then ran his finger across the full mustache that curved around his mouth like the horns on a Texas steer. Dixon hadn’t noticed him, but the mustachioed man had noticed Dixon. The man with the mustache was Angus Luber. Angus Luber was a bounty hunter, and because of that, he recognized Dixon as someone who had a bounty on his head.

  “Dixon,” Luber called.

  Dixon didn’t look up from his beer.

  “Dixon!” Luber called again. “I’m talking to you, Mister.”

  There was a clear challenge in Luber’s voice, and all other conversations ceased, and the drinkers at the bar backed away so that there was nothing but clear space between Dixon and Luber. Even the bartender left his position behind the bar.

  “I think you’ve made a mistake,” Dixon said.

  “No, Dixon, you did. You made a mistake when you came in here.”

  Dixon looked up from his beer. “Did I now?”

  “You sure as hell did. Your name is Dixon, isn’t it? Matt Dixon?”

  “You’re mistaken, Mister. My name is John Smith.”

  “No, I don’t think so,” Luber said, confidently. “I’ve seen paper on you. You are a low-life bank-robbin’, murderin’ son of a bitch. And I’m callin’ you out.”

  “Who are you, to call me out? I don’t see any badge.”

  “You might say that I’m a man who takes advantage of opportunities when they are presented,” Luber said. “For example, if I happen to see someone that the law wants—say, someone like you, who has a price on his head—well, that’s just too good an opportunity to let pass.”

  “And just how do you intend to take advantage of that opportunity?” Dixon asked, lifting his mug for another drink.

  “By takin’ you down to the sheriff’s office.”

  “And if I choose not to go with you?”

  “Oh, you’re goin’ with me all right,” Luber said.

  “Well now, is that a fact?” Dixon asked. He wiped the foam from his lips with the back of his hand. “And how do you propose to get me there?”

  “I propose to kill you,” Luber said, easily. There was a collective gasp from those who were watching, intently, the real-life drama that was playing out before their very eyes.

  Dixon set his beer mug down, then stepped away from the bar. He flipped his duster back so that his gun was exposed. He was wearing it low, and kicked out, the way a man wears a gun when he knows how to use it.

  “You’ve been doin’ lots of talkin’, Mister,” Dixon said. “Seems to me like it’s about time you showed us whether or not you can back up that talk.”

  Luber stepped away from the bar as well, and like Dixon, Luber was wearing his gun low, and kicked out. “Oh, I can back it up, all right.”

  “Is that so? And, just what might your name be, Mister?” Dixon asked.

  “Luber. Angus Luber.”

  There was a collective gasp of surprise from the others who were in the saloon at the time, for all of them had heard of Angus Luber, the famous gunfighter. There were tales about Luber and his life on both sides of the law. The story was that the last judge he went before gave him a choice. He could either go to prison, or turn his prowess with a gun into a more productive pursuit, by apprehending wanted men. Luber chose the latter.

  “So you are Angus Luber.”

  “I am. I see that you’ve heard of me.”

  “I’ve heard of you.”

  Among the outlaws, Angus Luber had the reputation of being someone that you didn’t want to tangle with. But Matt Dixon had just the opposite reaction when he heard the name. He wanted to run into Angus Luber. He knew that if he became known as the man who shot Angus Luber, he would be able to sell his gun for a lot higher price.

  “I can see that I’m not welcome here, so I reckon I’ll just be goin’ on,” Dixon said. He had no intention of going on,
but he thought if he could give the idea that he was afraid of Luber, then Luber might get a little cocky. And that would give Dixon a slight edge.

  Edge, Dixon thought. That’s what every gunfight came down to. Who had the edge—and how did he use that edge?

  Luber smiled, a cold, evil smile. “No,” he said. “You won’t be goin’ on, Dixon. You’re either goin’ to walk down to the sheriff’s office with me, or I’m going to kill you here and now, and have your dead carcass carried down there. Which will it be?”

  Now it was Dixon’s time to smile, his smile just as cold and just as evil. “I reckon we’re just goin’ to have to dance, you and me.”

  Luber had been in several shoot-outs during his career as a bounty hunter, and he was fast. Without another word he made his move, pulling his pistol in the blink of an eye. But Dixon had anticipated Luber’s move and had his own pistol out just a split-second faster, pulling the hammer back and firing in one fluid motion. In the close confines of the barroom, the gunshot sounded like a clap of thunder.

  Luber’s eyes grew wide with surprise at how fast Dixon had his gun up and firing. He tried hard to beat the bullet with his own draw, but he couldn’t do it. Dixon’s shot caught Luber in the chest and he fell back against the bar, then slid down to the floor. His gun arm was thrown to one side and the still unfired pistol was in his hand. He looked up at Dixon, who was still standing there holding the smoking pistol.

  “How did you . . . ?” he tried to ask, but that was as far as he got before his head fell to one side.

  There was a moment of stunned silence. Then one of the patrons nearest the bar walked over to examine Luber, who was still sitting on the floor, his body propped up by the bar. The customer called out to the others in the saloon.

  “He’s dead, folks. He’s deader than a doornail.”

  “Bartender,” Dixon said.

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Dixon?”