The Branch and the Scaffold

by The Branch

  Burns had shot and crippled the horse thief Orpheus McGee during an attempt at freedom, but that was all in his capacity and was scarcely worth remarking upon. Smoking his pipe near the door to the outside, he’d been surprised to see John Childers, the murderer, approach the barred window dripping wet from the river, which he’d swum across to meet the terms of his bond, and had had to argue with him to get him to report to Story’s clerk instead of just bunking inside; what’d he think Burns was running, a shelter for tramps? Childers had complied and commenced his incarceration with all the paperwork completed.

  And the jailer had been present that legendary day when lightning struck the great scaffold at the instant Childers shot through the trap. A Negro woman in the crowd had fallen to her knees, crying: “John Childers’ soul has gone to hell; I done heerd de chains clankin’.” Well, he’d worn them on his ankles and wrists, so there was nothing to that, but a man of no more than normal superstition could not help but mark that it was the gallows’ first attempt at its purpose, and that a bolt singling it out at that moment was no ordinary stray. It was a moment Burns returned to often, never without a shudder and a glance skyward at the source of the shaft and another at his feet to make sure the earth hadn’t opened up to offer him a glimpse of the damned man’s charred shade.

  He’d seen his due share of the elephant, right enough, but nothing to give him a worse turn than the sudden appearance at his post of a lady of fine breeding, done up in the height of Fort Smith fashion, with one arm through the bail of a covered basket and a bunch of cut flowers cradled in the other.

  “Mr. Burns, I think? Mrs. Isaac Parker. I’m here to see William Leach.”

  Leach was devilish bad on a scale that ran considerably higher than the eight-foot ceiling of the jail. He’d backshot a neighbor who had just left the hospitality of the prisoner’s house in the Cherokee, attempted to burn the remains, and been apprehended while trying to sell a pair of boots that had belonged to his victim, well-cobbled boots being a popular article of commerce throughout the discalced Nations (Burns himself never ventured into the territory with anything on his feet but a pair of down-at-heels brogans, coveted by none). Leach was one of six scheduled for hanging the following April; the Eastern press had begun to circle.

  Mrs. Parker was a large woman of the Irish type, pale-skinned, auburn hair pinned up beneath her hat, with eyes of the judge’s same frank blue. She was not a pretty woman but a handsome one, and if the rank smell that permeated the granite foundation of the courthouse and hung like a miasma to a distance of ten feet around the perimeter caused her distress, she didn’t show it. It was particularly ripe, too, with the stinkpot stove in each of the two long sections burning against the February damp, drawing the stench steaming from the prisoners’ rags and the piss and shit that embedded the stones. Burns had known male lawyers accustomed to every description of prison, once they stepped across that invisible line, to bury their noses in handkerchiefs soaked in Bay Rum. The jailer himself, on days like this and in summer when the air squatted on its haunches like a Kansas City mule, jacketed himself against the olfactory assault with apple-scented smoke from his pipe.

  “No visitors without a pass signed by the judge, ma’am.” He gripped the cherrywood bowl between thumb and forefinger and puffed the exhaust out the corner of his mouth.

  Shifting the flowers from one arm to the other, she untied a reticule from her wrist, opened it, and withdrew a sheet of foolscap with a slender hand in an oyster-colored leather glove. Burns accepted the sheet through the bars and unfolded it. He recognized the judge’s hand, as jagged as his lectures to the condemned. He grunted and turned a heavy key in the lock. When she placed a foot on the threshold, he blocked the entrance with his body.

  “You read the letter,” she said.

  “Ma’am, I did. It don’t say you can see Leach. This is no place for a gentlewoman. Not all the prisoners wear irons, and they won’t run rusty to use you for their freedom. It places the guards in hazard too.”

  Fine Irish color climbed her cheeks; but she did not press the matter. She drew the checked cloth from the basket. The warm sweet odor of the fresh-baked cake inside found his nostrils through the jail’s eternal fug. “Please take this and the flowers to Mr. Leach. I’ll be back with more for the men who were sentenced with him.”

  “It ain’t my place to say, ma’am, but it’s too good for his like.”

  “That’s my husband’s view, but as you can see from the pass I’m a lawyer’s wife. The wretch is forced to sit and listen to the fall of the trap every day. No Christian would deny him one moment of repose.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He took the basket and flowers.

  “Don’t take a crumb for yourself. The jailers’ rations are more than sufficient.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  Outside, Maledon’s apparatus squealed and thumped.

  “That man is fond of his work,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am. He took to it right off.”

  She turned up the collar of her cape and withdrew.

  He shut the door, drew a finger through the frosting, and tasted. Leach was unworthy, but Burns’s rebellion stopped there. The forces in opposition were too great.

  FOUR

  “Judge; a word with you after the services?”

  Parker, seated next to Mary and little Charlie in their pew in the First Methodist Church, looked up at the man standing over him in the aisle. He was young, fair, and abundantly freckled, but he wore heavy handlebars and with his hat in his hands the bones of his skull showed through a haircut as severe as any in the military. The six-pointed nickelplate star of a deputy U.S. marshal rode high on his waistcoat.

  “Wilkinson, isn’t it?” Parker asked.

  “Yes, sir. I took the oath last month.”

  “You can have five minutes. My family and I are attending Catholic services later.”

  Wilkinson registered no reaction to this evidence of marital diplomacy. Following the sermon, collection, and announcements of community activities, they reconvened on the steps of the church while Mrs. Parker, Charlie’s shoulders in her iron grip, engaged the minister’s wife in conversation. The judge looked tired; older than his thirty-eight years, with silver streaks in his beard and dark thumbprints under his eyes. He’d recently presided at his second multiple hanging—only five this time, after President Grant had without explanation commuted the sentence of a savage killer named Osee Sanders—and the press from the States had professed shock and disapproval as always, while sending correspondents in number to record every grisly detail.

  “It’s this man Diggs, who split a drover’s head with an axe in the Cherokee three years ago,” Wilkinson said, without preamble. “I’ve been reviewing his case. He was held in jail for a spell, and when no witnesses came forward they sprung him. Story was in charge. I’d like a crack at him.”

  The corners of Parker’s mouth twitched. “If it’s idleness you despise, I’ve a drawer full of warrants for murders more recent.”

  “I’ve a line on where he is, and the names of some witnesses. If you’ll renew his warrant and draw up summonses, I’d bet my badge the outcome this time will be different.”

  “Don’t bet what you’ve yet to earn.”

  “Earning it is just what I’m fixing to do.”

  Parker concentrated on getting his cigar lit evenly, then blew smoke at the steeple. “I’ll review the case tonight. Come to my chambers tomorrow morning before the session and if everything is as you say I’ll have Wheeler give you what you need.”

  “Thanks, Judge.”

  “Thank me after you’ve come back with your man, and without a load of buckshot in your kidneys.”

  “Isaac!” Mary Parker clamped her hands over Charlie’s ears.

  “I’m sorry, my dear. I didn’t realize my voice carried.”

  “You should. You’ve been preaching to the back of the gallery for more than a year.”

  The next morning, Wilkinson close
ted himself with Parker for fifteen minutes, waited in the hallway outside for another hour while Stephen Wheeler prepared the necessary documents and the judge signed them, and with the papers in his wallet went out to assemble provisions and supplies and redeem his horse from the livery. He made his last stop at the post office, where he dispatched telegrams to peace officers in Kansas, Missouri, and various parts of the Nations, and as far away as Ohio and Michigan. In the three years since the murder, many of those who could offer evidence against Diggs had scattered, including Hiram Mann, who had been struck with the same axe as had J.C. Gould, a companion on the cattle drive, and spent months in recovery before decamping to Detroit. Wilkinson instructed his informants to address their replies to Marshal Fagan.

  He swam his horse across the Arkansas to the train station, where he loaded the animal aboard a stock car and boarded a sweatbox day coach for the three-hour run up the Santa Fe line to Springdale. Soaked and enervated, he considered a bath house, a saloon, and a room for the night, but the experience he’d brought to his new job warned him that when the hunt was on the hunted grew wary, and that there was no time to lose. Diggs had left two fellow cattle drovers lying in a pool of blood over a matter of twenty-seven dollars in cash belonging to the man who had died. He had friends in the Nations who considered it a reasonable transaction, and neighbors who had little cause to place more trust in Fort Smith than in men whose faces were familiar; once in flight, the desperate man had a broad choice of barns, corn ricks, root cellars, and empty cisterns to fort up in, living on provisions smuggled in to him while armies of federal men combed the hills and haystacks and thousands of square miles of tangled wilderness. Surprise was more than half the fight, and Wilkinson pocketed his star and wore the kit of a cowhand looking for cattle to start his own outfit.

  The deputy had been less than straight when he’d pled his case with Parker. He’d bet his badge of office with confidence as to finding the witnesses to the atrocity, but the rumor that its perpetrator was still in the Nations was smoky at best. It didn’t bear following into that alien country, where every man’s hand seemed to be raised against him. Better to confirm it by way of the invisible telegraph line that ran through the nomadic bands of cowboys who rode the trails from Texas to Kansas.

  In Baxter Springs, across the Kansas line, he wet his whistle at last in a bar long enough to hang a month’s wash and struck up friendly conversations with others dressed as he, hands just in from the first spring drives. He asked each if he knew J. C. Gould, an old pard of his who might be persuaded to go in with him on his enterprise.

  The pickings were slim. A lot of heads shook, and he wasted time and expense money buying whiskey for a jabbery waddy who turned out to know the wrong Gould. That first session wore him out worse than the train and the horseback ride combined. He camped out north of town to relieve stress on the U.S. Treasury and took up his post the next day in a different saloon, with antlers on the walls. He didn’t want to raise the suspicions of a bartender about a saddle tramp with too much time on his hands and too much silver to spread around. Barmen soaked up gossip like slops and wrung it out with both hands.

  There he dipped his bucket into the same dry well for hours. Gould seemed to have been one of those faceless men who drifted from camp to camp making no friends and no impression. Wilkinson began to wonder if he’d exhaust every watering hole in town, and what the clerk back in Fort Smith would tell the judge when he saw all those drinks in the column. But along toward evening, when the place began to fill up with unwashed bodies and coal-oil smoke, Wilkinson found a man who informed him of his friend’s sad fate at the hands of a companion.

  “They hang the son of a bitch?” the deputy asked.

  The man, a Texas drover with handlebars more swooping than his own and a little paintbrush of a beard, splattered a brown ribbon into a cuspidor and drew a sleeve across his lips. “No, he got carpetbagger justice. They rubbed his kinky head for luck and set him loose.”

  “This Diggs is a nigger?”

  “Hell yes. I rode with damn fine folk blacker’n him on the outside, but his goes clean through. It’s a piece of good fortune they didn’t elect him governor.”

  “How long ago was this?” He always sprinkled his interviews with queries he knew the answers to. It kept him from appearing eager.

  “Three years, maybe more. I ride drag when I pass through the Nations and thank Christ for every mouthful of dust I swallow, on account of I know no bastard’s lurking behind to crack my skull for what’s in my poke.”

  “I hear things are different in Fort Smith now.”

  “Not so’s you’d notice. They’re hanging Christian white men while that murdering trash is drinking corn liquor on Spring Crick in front of God, the devil, and U. S. goddamn Grant.”

  This was new information, and Wilkinson looked down quickly at the glass he’d nursed down to plain water to dissemble his excitement. The suggestion that Diggs was living almost on top of the scene of his crime was bold even for a man who thought he’d beaten the scaffold. “What’s on Spring Creek?”

  “A Cherokee squaw and forty acres her pa left her. They say the son of a bitch watches her plow all day and brags all night on killing a white man and making away with it. John Wilkes Booth should of busted a cap on that carpetbagging Lincoln before he freed his first nigger.”

  “Who says this?”

  The drover’s brows shot up. “Well, everybody in Texas.”

  “Not about Lincoln. About Diggs farming on Spring Creek.”

  “Who the hell knows? You hear talk.” He leaned over the cuspidor and pursed his lips, but this time he didn’t spit. He swallowed and fixed Wilkinson with mud-colored eyes swimming in blood. “Why do you want to know? What outfit did you say you was with before you went maverick?”

  “The Double D.”

  “I know that spread. You know George Slaughter?”

  Sensing a trap, Wilkinson ordered another round apiece and turned the conversation toward the drover’s opinion of the quality of beef to be found in the Nations. Half an hour later, when the other left the bar to weave his way toward the outhouse, the deputy left. He was pretty sure he wouldn’t be missed in the rapidly increasing population of the saloon, but on his way to camp stopped his horse often to listen for pursuers. A man who got to thinking he’d said too much to the wrong man was a contrary creature.

  The next day, Wilkinson wired the headquarters of the Cherokee police in Tahlequah to confirm the presence of James Diggs, Negro, on or near Spring Creek. The tribal elders had no love for outside killers, and by that afternoon he had his reply. He took on fresh grain for his horse and crossed into the Nations at Quapaw. He wore matched Colt Peacemakers in suspender holsters crossed at his back and carried a brass-receiver Winchester that fired the same caliber and a Stevens ten-gauge shotgun with both barrels cut back to street-sweeper length in scabbards slung from his saddle, with a stubby British Bulldog in a pocket for a hole card. He shipped his ammunition in gun-nysacks, rifle and revolver cartridges in one, shotgun shells in the other, and all five Bulldog rounds in the cylinder of the pocket gun. Two canteens, jerked venison, and pemmican cakes answered for his provisions; he intended to keep a cold camp, with no smoke or smell of boiling coffee to draw attention to where he stopped. Tobacco for chewing only, to dampen his craving for cigarettes and his pipe. He was new to the marshal’s service, but not to the business of tracking men. In the wild they acquired animal instincts on top of their natural human shrewdness and were more to be feared than grizzlies. Poor Bill Spivey’s picture hung prominently in Fagan’s office for a reason.

  A spring drizzle stood sentry square at the border and stayed with him all the way along the Neosho River and after it bent west and away, water pouring from the curl of his hat brim as from a gutter and sliding in sheets off his oilcloth slicker. Both items of gear failed to keep him from being soaked through; no matter how reliable a man’s umbrella, when it rained he got wet. At times he seemed to be
hauling the downpour with him, as if it came from a nozzle that followed his progress, a moving spout surrounded by dry. When he camped he made a shelter of the slicker with cottonwood branches, wrung out his socks, and slept until he was awakened by his own misery. It was Ozark country, carved by glaciers and sandblasted from solid rock by a billion years of dust and wind and hollowed out by the relentless rain. He picked his way down draws, leaning back on the reins, and when the path became nearly perpendicular he dismounted and led his horse, his feet squishing in his boots.

  His sore luck held when the sun mocked him by breaking out bright as fool’s gold just as he entered Tahlequah and the promise of a sound roof and a change of clothes. He seemed to have spent all his good fortune in the saloon in Baxter Springs. In front of Cherokee police headquarters he left his horse standing in mud fetlock deep, went inside to show his star and his warrant, and got an updated description of Diggs printed neatly by a big Remington type-writing machine, the polished pride of the office. His man had picked up a scar on his neck since his first visit to Fort Smith; Wilkinson wondered if there was another dead man in that. He shook hands with the officer, a broad-faced full-blood with short hair and his badge, a star in a circle, pinned to blue flannel, and went out to serve his warrant, wet clothes and all. One man knowing he was in town was one too many; you never knew where personal loyalties lay.

  He reached Spring Creek by nightfall and crossed at a shallow spot onto Diggs’s farm, which consisted of a slant-roofed barn and house, both unpainted, some chickens, a milch-cow lowing in its stall, and rows of planted vegetables with wooden stakes at the ends. A subsistence place, supporting itself and barely; God help the odd transient with evidence of prosperity. The deputy tethered his horse to a cedarbrake and sat down with his back against one of the scrubby trees in the line to wait for full dark. He watched the dying of the light and then the orange glow of a lamp drawing on in a window. The last bird sang its sweet challenge to bash in the heads of interlopers and the first cricket struck up the band. An owl fluted. Wilkinson sniffed and wiped his nose and chewed tobacco and shifted his weight from time to time to pluck his damp trousers away from a fine case of red-ass.