The Branch and the Scaffold

by The Branch

  His name appeared in none of the rip-roaring dime novels of the age, and when pictures learned to move, with jerks and false starts like a child’s, he would not be among the first ten chosen for dramatization, nor as the medium strode, ran, and found the power of speech, the first fifty, nor yet the first five hundred. Yet in his time everyone who read newspapers and many who could not knew his reputation. He was among the best and bravest ever to grapple with the challenges of the late frontier, and in a hundred years no star has replaced his in the firmament.

  He was born January 6, 1850, in Oxford, near Atlanta, the youngest of twelve children, and roughhouse was his birthright. At age twelve he’d ridden dispatch for the Army of the Confederacy, and in his twenties he’d been shot in the face by a member of the Sam Bass gang during a train robbery in Hutchins, Texas; the scar was still visible after more than ten years. This incident had decided him to bring the fight to the enemy, and he’d joined the Texas Rangers and then the Fort Worth Stock Association as a detective, slaying two fugitives before throwing in with the marshal’s office in Arkansas.

  His name was Henry Andrew Thomas, but he seldom answered to it. His friends and even Judge Parker called him Heck.

  NINE

  Heck Thomas accepted bonuses and rewards. He had a wife and children to support, even if he never saw them, and for all its hard work and risk, hunting men paid poorer than clerking. After the doctor in Hutchings dug the bullet out of his face, making more of a mess than it had going in, the superintendent of the railroad line had paid him two hundred dollars; which decision Heck laid more to the twenty thousand dollars he’d managed to hide from the bandits than for the sacrifice of his youthful good looks.

  He cashed the bank draught and went looking for employment that didn’t involve swaying soporific over the rails in a windowless express car, half hoping for an attempt at robbery just for the variety, then getting his wish and a pistol round in the face and a recovery fee of one percent, which was what the banks were paying for the privilege of investing what a man earned by the sweat of his brow. Mostly it was the close spaces he objected to; he’d had his fill of that sleeping three to a bed at home and sharing a one-holer outhouse with his parents and eleven older siblings.

  He found such a posting, all open air and a fighting chance, with the Texas Rangers. He answered to Captain Lee Hall, a man of few words and most of them profane, whose actions against the vigilantes in Goliad and against the bushwhackers who had fled Missouri to continue their war against the Union by way of banks and trains spoke louder than words. Many were in shackles and shallow holes, and the doors of Huntsville had clanged shut on John Wesley Hardin, whose career as a marauder had been largely responsible for reforming the Rangers, who had disbanded after the Comanches surrendered at Adobe Walls. Heck had learned most of what he knew about tracking desperate men from Hall, and all of what he knew about the finer details of detective work; the captain had been one of the first peace officers to compile and consult a criminal book, with likenesses, descriptions, and personal histories of fugitives in hiding, and his lessons had taught Heck to pay attention to such things as tracks left by horseshoes recently repaired, a man’s preference for ready-made cigarettes over those rolled by hand, and the difficulty of disguising the shape of one’s ears or the distance between one’s eyes when whiskers and windowpane spectacles altered everything else.

  Of chief importance, Heck had acquired the wisdom of shooting first and shooting to kill. Most of the things that stopped a man when he was stopped were placed conveniently in the middle. It was an easy mark to hit, and the shooter’s best insurance against getting shot himself.

  He’d never warmed to taking orders, however, not even as a yonker riding for the CSA, and in time Hall’s general lack of diplomacy in his dealings with subordinates wore thin. Heck took a handsome offer to work as a detective for the Fort Worth Stock Association, with steady pay, a free hand, and liberty to collect rewards. It came with an office, which appealed to Isabelle, his wife; she’d been riding him for a long time about his absences from home, and thought a fixed place of business meant a family reunited around the supper table every night.

  It was that way for a time. In his sun-hammered room overlooking the cattle pens he kept track of known rustlers with pieces of colored ribbon pinned to a large-scale map of four counties tacked to the wall behind his desk, smoking the pipe of a settled man and moving the pins according to the latest communications made by wire and by drifters he struck up conversations with in the Alamo Sample Room; but when the pins drew near Fort Smith, he saddled up and rode out, often leaving word only with an acquaintance to tell Isabelle he’d be late for supper for a week or two.

  He’d been gone longer than that, and closer to a month, when the episode took place that would bring him to the attention of Judge Parker’s court. He’d picked up Jim Taylor, a friend from his express-messenger days who now rode for Parker in the Chickasaw Nation, and together they tracked Jim and Pink Lee, the notorious rustlers and road agents, to a house near Gainesveille, where Heck applied what he’d learned during his apprenticeship with the Rangers. When he and Taylor finished shooting, Jim and Pink Lee were dead. The sheriff in Gainesville saw the corpses laid neatly side by side on his porch, wrote out a receipt for the thousand-dollar reward, and handed it to Heck.

  The Lees were killers, feared throughout central Texas and as far as the Nations. Heck was asked to run for sheriff of Tarrant County and offered a lieutenancy in the Rangers by Governor John Ireland, but he turned down both opportunities and asked Jim Taylor to put in a good word for him with the U.S. marshal in Fort Smith; Isabelle, left alone with the children for weeks at a time with no close neighbors, had wearied of Texas, and expressed the first of many veiled threats to find a better place, even if it meant excluding their father. (In time the veil would be lifted, replaced by an ultimatum.) Taylor said, “Christ, Heck, you don’t need an introduction from me. Jim and Pink already took care of that.”

  Taylor was not a man to exaggerate. Heck submitted his application to the United States marshal’s office in Arkansas, where such requests poured over the transom, scribbled by the sort of man who read pulp novels until his lips wore out, looking for the adventurous life of the Western lawman, and received a positive reply within a week. He and Isabelle made arrangements to send the bulk of their belongings to the Hotel Le Flore, packed bags and children aboard the Katy Flyer, and rented a house in Fort Smith, where Heck took the oath of office and received his first assignment, to accompany the tumbleweed wagon through the Nations, serving whiskey warrants and collecting army deserters and suspicious persons officially christened John Doe until they could be processed at the jail. He broke a chilly silent fast with his wife the following morning and followed the Arkansas into the Cherokee Nation.

  His restless nature nettled him. In time, he grew weary of escorting the slow-moving prison van, palavering with storekeeps and paid informers, and rousting jail fodder out of low brothels, dugout saloons, and opium dens, and ferrying them back to civilization; his postman period, soul-destroying and Sisyphean in its monotony. Stagnating in Fort Smith following his testimony against a defendant in Parker’s court, he presented himself to the marshal and asked for a crack at Ned Christie.

  John Carroll, Thomas Boles’s successor, was another grayhead who could tuck his beard into his belt, but he was of a more suspicious mien. Ambition put him on his guard; he owed his appointment to patience and loyalty to the Republican platform and equated impatience with arrogance. He interrupted Heck’s carefully rehearsed request with a palm.

  “Men more tested than you have taken a licking from Christie and his gang,” he said. “What can you bring to the case that they have not?”

  “I don’t know Christie.”

  “You plead ignorance as a virtue?”

  Heck said, “I’ve studied the record, and it seems to me they’ve all gone in with some notion that Christie’s a civilized Indian, who if he won’t l
isten to reason will at least defer to greater numbers and surrender. They don’t take into account the fact that he’s been on the scout for years, and thinks more like a cornered grizzly than a man of learning. I intend to do all my palavering with three good men and a wagonload of ammunition.”

  “Is it your aim to murder him as you did Jim and Pink Lee?”

  “It will be no more murder than to hang him from Parker’s tears.”

  “Judge Parker will debate you on that, and at length.”

  “I’d as lief rather debate it with Christie, after I’ve put a bullet in him.”

  Carroll had a leather portfolio flayed open on his desk. In it, Heck noted, as the marshal leafed through the contents, was a carte-de-visite of Christie, armed to the hair and daring anyone who regarded the image to try its subject. At length the marshal excavated a sheet of onionskin paper, upon which Heck could have read the iron-gall notation in hand backwards if he thought the effort worth it. In places the writer had torn the paper, so hard had he borne down upon the nib.

  “That’s Boles’s recommendation, subtracting the legal fustian,” Carroll said. “It’s the official policy, though you wouldn’t know it by the pattern of the investigations each time Christie’s struck.”

  “They’re all good men. It’s hard to make the best choice when you’ve broken bread with the man you’re sent to kill.”

  The marshal slapped shut the portfolio; Christie’s picture escaped on a volume of air and drifted to the floor, from which he stared up mockingly. Heck—who was not a fanciful man—took it as a personal challenge.

  Carroll sat back and laced his fingers across the base of his whiskers. “The farther east you go, the nobler Christie gets. I advise you not to read a word in any of the muckraking journals before you head out to Rabbit Trap. You can amuse yourself with them once he’s dead or in custody.”

  Thomas nodded. He had not failed to note the order of his choices.

  Heck hunted Christie off and on for three months. It seemed the outlaw had trained the owls and crickets to report on the deputy’s progress in bucket-brigade fashion, for he was never at home, despite the evidence of recent repairs about the place that suggested a man in residence. Finally Heck let his beard grow out, trimmed it into a fussy Vandyke, put on his Sunday suit, and entered Tahlequah under cover of darkness. There he sought out a boardinghouse where he was unknown and introduced himself to the matron as a surveyor for the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas Railroad. He’d taken the trouble to secure a legitimate business card, but that effort was wasted because the woman was illiterate. He selected a room on the second floor back, as far away from her bedroom and parlor as the house permitted, paid cash, and met there after midnight with deputies Rusk, Salmon, and Isbell, who rode in from Vinita, tied their horses out back, and crept up the back stairs with their boots in their hands. Although none of them could know it, the scene was eerily reminiscent of Christie’s meeting with his father four years earlier, with a lamp burning low on the floor to keep from throwing their shadows onto the window shade. The war had turned on its head, with the fugitive roaming free and in the open and the manhunters forted up indoors.

  “I feel like we’re plotting to raid a bank.” Isbell, a fellow veteran of the tumbleweed wagon patrol, popped a plug into his mouth and used his foot to drag over a white enamel chamber pot for a spitoon.

  “It’ll get more skulksome yet,” Heck said. “This time we’re going in afoot.”

  Rusk, a former working cowhand, registered his disapproval. “I didn’t put in for this job to be no dadburn farmer.”

  “How are you at crawling on your belly?”

  “I’m a fair hand. I’m married.”

  Isbell and Salmon responded, but were cut off in mid-cackle by Heck’s hiss. “This whole nation is Christie’s ear trumpet. We’re wasting our time if we don’t catch him with his pants down.”

  Salmon said, “I was wondering about them banker’s whiskers. I thought maybe this was a retirement party.”

  He stroked them. “I figure this is my last shot at that renegade. I been back here so many times my face is getting to be better known than Lydia Pinkham’s. One more trip and he’ll be in Texas while my feet are still wet from the Arkansas.”

  “Well, we can’t have that,” Rusk said. “Texas has got bad men enough without importing more. Give me a cut off that plug, Izz. If I’m going to crawl on my belly, I need something to spit in a copperhead’s eye.”

  Isbell cut three pieces and handed them all around. “Let’s concentrate on spitting in Ned’s.”

  Which turned out to be a prophetic thing to say.

  They tethered their horses to scrub in the hills with plenty of forage in reach, walked into Rabbit Trap on the far blind side of Christie’s cabin, and camped cold in the brush for three days, drinking from canteens and tearing off jerked beef and venison with their teeth. By daylight, when the frogs and crickets were silent and sound didn’t carry, they moved toward the cabin, crawling sometimes, scrambling hunchback like crabs other times with carbines portaged on their shoulders. When mourning doves hooted and songbirds trilled, they listened for a human echo and decided the calls were not manmade. An hour before the sun came up on the fourth day, they closed in.

  Christie had assembled nearly as many dogs as weapons. They all caught the scent at the same time and exploded into barking.

  Heck raised his voice above the yammer. “Make a rush for it!”

  Each took a side of the cabin and drew down on a window. Heck raised his voice again. “Christie, we’re U.S. marshals, and there are too many of us to fight! Surrender!”

  A plank flew out of a gable in the loft. A barrel poked out and sent a hunk of lead chugging into the earth at Heck’s feet. Christie levered in a fresh round and fired right behind it even as every carbine on the ground slanted upward. The deputies’ guns went off almost simultaneously, a prolonged roar like a freight train hurtling through a tunnel. Glass panes shattered, pieces of bark flew off logs, bullets gonged against pots and skillets and the iron stove inside. Heck cried for them to hold their fire.

  “If you intend to fight, send out your woman!”

  Six shots flew in rapid succession from the gable. Heck dove for cover. As the deputies returned fire, he scuttled behind a lean-to attached to the cabin, open to the rear with cords of firewood stacked inside. Heck erected a pile of kindling using sheets of loose bark, crumpled some John Doe warrants he carried from habit, and burned through three matches before getting it all to catch. When he had a strong flame, he fanned it with his hat until it spread to the wall of the structure and fled behind a hickory tree, bullets from the gable chewing up ground at his heels.

  Fire from the ground trickled to silence as the deputies waited and watched the flames. The wind caught smoke as thick as cotton batting and slung it against the gable.

  Christie had a coughing fit. Isbell, backing away from the cabin’s deep shade to draw a bead on the gap where Christie had knocked out the plank, spun on one ankle and fell, a slug in his shoulder.

  The cabin was burning merrily now. A figure leaped out the shot-away door. Rusk and Salmon opened up on it as it zigzagged into the tangled brush that encircled the clearing.

  “Not Christie!” Heck bellowed. He’d recognized Ned’s son, Arch. The youth was nearly grown and resembled his father, but was several inches shorter. Heck’s cry went unheeded at first, and bullets tore at leaves and branches in Arch’s wake.

  In the loft, Christie rubbed the sting from his eyes, but the bandanna he’d soaked from a canteen and tied around his nose and mouth kept most of the smoke from his lungs; he’d coughed merely to draw a marshal from cover, and when Isbell stepped into the early light to see if Christie would poke his head out to breathe, Christie had taken swift aim, felt the Winchester push against his shoulder, and knew before the ball found its mark that it would shatter bone and reduce the odds against him by one. But as he fired, Heck Thomas glimpsed his profile against the lighteni
ng sky and squeezed off a shot that smashed the bridge of Christie’s nose and tore out his right eye.

  He lay for a long time in a swoon, with smoke filling the loft and flames snapping at the underside of the floor, which seemed to be sweating beneath him as the pitch boiled to the surface. He felt hands pulling at him and grasped for his weapon, but they were friendly hands, taking advantage of the smoke and Arch’s diversion to rescue him. He was borne down the ladder, blind in both eyes from the blood leaking out the empty socket, carried on the run by his legs and shoulders, and dumped without gentleness into the bed of a wagon. Someone climbed in with him, embracing him; he smelled his wife. He held tight to her with one arm and with his other hand clutched at a sideboard to keep from bouncing out when the horses were whipped into a gallop. His pain was white and red and green. Belated reports crackled, a slug struck an iron staple on the side of the wagon and sang away. Whoever was on the spring seat knew the narrow passages through the thorns and brambles like a river pilot who had memorized all the snags in the current. His passenger felt as if he were being borne to safety in the talons of an eagle.

  When an account of the fight reached Parker’s desk, he put his head in his hands and asked Marshal Carroll if they were to settle for taking Ned Christie a piece at a time.