by Lauran Paine
“Straight ahead,” the man beside Knight muttered. “Straight up to that big cottonwood yonder.” He emphasized his command with a rough shove.
Knight passed along. He offered no resistance until they laid hands upon him, turned him half about, and pushed and pulled until he was directly beneath a great shaggy lower limb.
Then he said to them what a calm man considers in the face of death. “I wouldn’t want what you’re doing on my conscience. I can prove I’m no gunfighter. But even if I was, fellows, I haven’t broken any laws in your town.”
A man expertly tossed the lariat over that burly limb. He worked grimly with the rope, never once looking at the others clustered there in the night.
The broken breathing of all of them lingered, loud in the hush of past midnight. Around them, Gunsight slept soundly. Not even a prowling alley cat saw what was going forward beneath Gunsight’s solitary big cottonwood tree. Store fronts, their squared windows of black glass reflecting the sullenness of a nearly moonless night, stared out where six men clustered. None speaking for a time. None looking at one another until the rope was in place.
“Gunfighter,” Hogan said finally, his voice barely loud enough to be heard, “you got half a minute to make a prayer.”
Knight stood like stone, sweat standing out upon his forehead, his upper lip. The hard-twisted rope was in place, its big knot lying casually across one shoulder.
“I’ve been praying,” he told them, his tone both hollow sounding and slightly hoarse. “Hobart didn’t send for me. I swear to you that’s the truth. Why can’t you wait another day just one more day and I’ll pay one of you to ride to Casper and send telegrams to prove I’m not what you think I am.”
It was a desperate and a futile plea. If Knight had reflected a moment, he would have known it was. They had murdered Mike Mulaney. The only witness besides those implicated was their prisoner. He had to die. If not for being what they believed him to be, then because he could name each of them. He had heard Mulaney identify each one.
Hogan jerked his head. “Fetch one of them benches,” he ordered. Then did not lower his eyes from Knight’s face until the bench was brought forth and put carefully into place. He then said to Knight: “Step up onto that bench.”
Knight looked around and down. Sweat glistened upon his face now.
“Come on,” Hogan said impatiently. “Get up there.”
They seized his bound arms and legs. They strained to raise him up onto the bench. Someone drew up all the rope’s slack. The knot was snugged beneath Knight’s right ear.
Knight made a desperate plea.
They did not let him finish it.
“Pull,” said Hogan. “Make it fast around the tree.” He indicated the rope with his pistol hand. “Now the bench.”
He watched his companions make the rope fast, then Hogan raised his left leg, put the foot strongly upon the bench, drew in a breath, and kicked. The bench went out from under Knight.
One of the masked men turned to lean upon the tree trunk, but only for a second, then sprang away with a little whimper.
Pete Knight’s fierce plungings and writhings reverberated, sending up faint rustlings among the leaves, and shudders downward into the great bole of Gunsight’s big cottonwood tree.
Hogan passed around behind the hanging man, saying swiftly to the others: “Never mind watching him. Listen to me now. Not a word to anyone. Forget this night ever passed. You hear me? Don’t even talk about it among yourselves. It never happened! Now go on home. Burn them masks, go to bed, and tomorrow act natural.”
As one, they lowered their eyes gradually, as Knight’s struggles diminished—as his relaxed and saclike dark silhouette turned slowly, then turned slowly back again, half around and half back around.
They continued to gaze upon Bob Hogan, saying nothing. Again, he repeated his instructions, enunciating very clearly. Then he holstered his pistol and inclined his head at them.
“Go on now. It had to be done. We did a good lick tonight for Gunsight. Hobart will know now we aren’t any bunch of lily livers. So go home now and remember not a word about this to anyone as long as you live.”
They began moving away in different directions. They were almost immediately lost in night’s darkness. They made no sound in their passing. Hogan, the last to leave, waited until he could no longer distinguish any of them, then he yanked off his mask to show a fiercely exulting expression when he turned for a final look at the dead man twisting gently behind him. Then, he too hastened away.
It was the last time all five of the lynchers stood together on earth.
Chapter Four
The body of Pete Knight was first discovered by Calvin Taylor, the day man at the livery barn. Taylor arose hours before sunup every day, went down to the barn, and relieved the night man. Invariably, he had to awaken the nighthawk; invariably too, they afterward had a cup of coffee together before the night man departed to sleep away the day.
Taylor plodded along through the cool darkness of before dawn, scarcely looking up at all. As usual, Gunsight was as still as death. The roadway was totally empty, and Cal Taylor’s footfalls sounded hollowly loud upon the plank walk. He turned in at the barn, went to the harness room, found the night hawk asleep as usual, shook him gently, and then passed over to the little iron stove to heat the coffee.
The night man groaned a little, turned up on his side upon the harness room’s only bunk, and resumed his snoring.
Taylor, finished at the stove, turned to look down.
“Hogan!” he called. “Come on. It’s near daybreak.”
The resting man did not move.
Taylor went across to him, grinning a little. He shook him again, harder this time.
“Hey, Bob. Time to go home. I put the coffee on.”
The night hawk sat up, gouged at both eyes with fisted hands, yawned prodigiously, explored his inner mouth with his tongue, and spat aside. “Sleepin’ like a baby,” he told the day man.
“You sure was.”
“The coffee ready?”
“Pretty soon. Anything new come in last night?”
“Naw,” said Hogan. “Quiet as a church yard around here last night.” He stood up, stretched from the waist, then shuffled over to the stove to peer into the coffee pot. “Not enough here for two cups,” he said to Taylor. “Fetch some more water, will you?”
Taylor left the harness room. He caught up a small bucket and passed through the barn’s wide front entrance. He halted where a hand pump of rusty iron stood at one end of the water trough that was out front. He hooked the bucket onto the pump’s upper prong, lifted the handle high, and started down with it, at the same time shooting a complacent gaze down the roadway.
His breath caught up. The hand on the pump handle froze. He stood there slightly bent forward from the waist with his eyes popped wide and staring. “Hell,” he breathed.
It was an eternity packed into ten seconds. Taylor let go the pump handle. Slowly he straightened up and turned stiffly to pass back into the barn. His face was the color of ashes.
“Bob? Hey, Bob?”
“Yeah?”
“Come out here.”
Hogan appeared in the harness room doorway. He cast a long look at Taylor before saying: “What’s wrong with you, Cal?”
“Come out here,” muttered Taylor, turning about, flat-footedly retracing his steps.
When they were standing together by the pump, Taylor raised an arm, pointing. “Look yonder hanging in the tree.”
Hogan looked. He grimaced and was silent before he finally said with difficulty: “Go fetch the sheriff.”
Then, as Calvin Taylor started forward, gradually increasing his pace until he was nearly running to Mike Mulaney’s jail house office, Bob Hogan’s lips drew back, and he threw a savage and mirthless smile at the hanging corpse of Pete Knight.
* * * * *
Gunsight learned in some mysterious manner, even before it was fully awake and stirring, that Mike Mulaney had been killed in his own office, and that his prisoner had been lynched.
It was as though a sigh of premonition, of shame and guilt and fear, had come with the first morning breeze to settle upon the town.
Pete Knight was cut down and placed beside Sheriff Mike in the embalming shed behind Doc Parmenter’s buggy shack. No one went to view either body, and because Doc Parmenter was out at one of the cow outfits, where he’d spent the night awaiting the culmination of a cowman’s wife’s labor pains—he did not know until early afternoon, when he returned to town, what had happened.
It was Dr. Parmenter who found in the lynched cowboy’s pocket a ragged old letter from a man whose signature was simply: Ben Knight. There was an address, indifferently scrawled, which Doc had trouble deciphering. But when he had it translated, he told no one. He simply wrote a formal letter of notification and regret, addressed it to US Deputy Marshal Ben Knight, Denver, Colorado, and mailed it. Then, still keeping his counsel, Doc Parmenter prepared both bodies for burial and saw them put into the ground at Gunsight’s cemetery, which was south of town a distance, encircled by a sturdy iron fence.
Doc Parmenter, an elderly man whose perpetually squinted, shrewd eyes had viewed a lot of living, then composed himself to wait. He had no family of his own and he made a habit of studying people, of gauging them. He had been both shocked and angered by the dual killings. He felt in his heart that if Hobart had bullied Gunsight, the townsmen in their way had brought much of it upon themselves. He had heard of Hobart’s threat. But he also knew that Diamond H’s antipathy toward Gunsighters was fully justified.
* * * * *
Days passed. Doc Parmenter went his rounds. He recognized the uneasiness of the townsmen. He even heard a few remarks that, if there might have been reason for lynching the man everyone still thought was a hired gunfighter, there was no reason at all for the killing of Mike Mulaney.
It was their sheriff’s murder, more than the grisly sight which had greeted their startled eyes the morning after Knight’s lynching, which contributed most to the townspeople’s subdued grimness now. If, they told one another, whoever had shot Sheriff Mike like that—at such close range his clothing had caught fire and partially burned—had been so unreasoning and savage as to murder a man who they knew had committed no crime—was it not entirely possible that the young cowboy they had also murdered was likewise guiltless?
It took slightly less than a week for the people of Gunsight to come entirely down from their antagonism toward Arthur Hobart’s Diamond H cow outfit and face this new situation. They had not bargained for anything like this. They had been angered by Hobart’s threat, and they would have met him openly with force if he had come into their town seeking trouble. But this—this wanton butchering of men, one of whom was known to be definitely their own friend, turned most of the people of Gunsight morose.
If they had known of Doc Parmenter’s letter they might also have felt apprehensive. But only Parmenter knew of this, and he said nothing. He kept quiet for the best of reasons too. One quiet stranger had ridden into Gunsight wearing a gun and he had been hanged within thirty-six hours of his arriving there. Doc thought, if Ben Knight came at all, he deserved a better chance for survival. He deserved the chance to live—which had been denied his brother. Doc was not a vindictive man, but he had lived a long time on the frontier. He believed unreservedly in fair play. This time he meant to see that a stranger riding into Gunsight got it.
No one was appointed by Gunsight’s town council to replace Sheriff Mike. Two local men were queried, but both declined. For the time being then, Gunsight was without a combination town marshal and county sheriff. The work piled up, the town councilmen did what of it they could—the paperwork anyway—and fortunately, in its depressed condition, Gunsight had no real trouble.
* * * * *
The second week after Mulaney’s killing, Arthur Hobart appeared in Gunsight with his foreman, Ace Dwinell, and the Diamond H ranch wagon. They put in at the hitch rail before Blakely’s Emporium, sought out Richard Blakely, and gave him their provisions list. Then, without speaking further with Blakely, Hobart and his foreman stalked to the northernmost extremity of Gunsight and entered the Cross Timbers Saloon.
The news of Hobart’s arrival in town spread swiftly, as it always did, but this time no cliques formed upon the plank walk to mutter against the Diamond H, and Mike Mulaney did not come out of his office to stare down potential troublemakers.
Gunsight was aware of Hobart’s grim presence, but it had something else on its mind—a general feeling of depression, of guilt and shame. It still did not like Diamond H and Arthur Hobart, but now it simply wanted him to quietly ride away. The townsmen had no stomach for fighting. Not right then.
Hobart and Dwinell did their silent drinking at the Cross Timbers, then went down to the Drovers’ and Cattlemen’s hash house and ate heartily, saying nothing to anyone. After eating they returned to Blakely’s store, viewed the mounds of supplies heaped in their ranch wagon, and, instead of leaving town, entered the Emporium. They walked directly up to Blakely, both smelling of Old Taylor and garlic, and halted.
“Blakely,” said Arthur Hobart, his dark and hawk-like countenance solemn, “you still a town councilman?”
“Yes,” the merchant responded, feeling uneasy.
“I got a message for you, then,” said the cowman, his hard eyes glinting with pleasure. “Find the men who pulled the rope to hang that young cowboy and drive them north out of town by sundown tonight—or face the consequences.”
Richard Blakely blanched. He was a thin and nervous man with a smile that came and went and meant nothing. Now he blinked, looked from Hobart to Dwinell, and made his inane smile.
“Listen, Mister Hobart,” he said weakly. “That’s past. We’re all awful sorry about that. And about Mike, too, but it’s past and you got no call to—”
“It’s not me,” Hobart said shortly. “This time it’s not Diamond H, Blakely. I don’t care what you do with those hang ropers. They’re Gunsighters, so I don’t personally give a damn what you do with ’em. You can shoot ’em or tar and feather ’em.”
“Then who, Mister Hobart?”
“A stranger who come down across the mountains on to my range about sunup this morning and rode into our foothill cow camp he sent you that word.”
“A stranger?”
“Yeah, a stranger,” grunted Hobart. “His name isn’t strange though it’s Knight. Ben Knight.” Hobart’s dully glistening stare sharpened.
Blakely went pale. He was staring at Hobart silently.
“I see you recollect the name, Blakely.” Hobart turned on his heel. “Better pass that message along to the town council. The stranger said have ’em herded out of town by sundown.”
Blakely called after the cowman in a weak tone. “Mister Hobart ?”
“Yeah.”
“Ask him to come here where we can explain about what happened.”
Hobart shook his head. “Can’t,” he said. “He only come down to my cow camp to have someone fetch you townsmen that message. Then he went back into the mountains.” Arthur Hobart paused. He smiled at the merchant, this time, because he was genuinely enjoying himself, and that amusement showed itself in Hobart’s smile. “You bunch of fools,” he said, around his grin. “I didn’t even know that cowboy’s name until after you’d hung him. I didn’t send for him. I haven’t sent for anyone yet.”
Hobart and Dwinell left the store.
Richard Blakely went to a counter and leaned there. He breathed shallowly. There was a constricting band squeezing his heart. With fumbling fingers, he removed his apron, placed it upon the counter, and beckoned forward a clerk.
“Mind the store,” he told his employee. “I have got to see th
e other councilmen.”
He left the store with uneven steps, paused just long enough to shoot a glance at the sun’s overhead position, then he scuttled through roadway dust toward Jacob Howell’s saddle shop.
He was with old Jacob only a few minutes, then he fled along the plank walk to the livery barn. There, he spoke swiftly to Gus Cawley, the owner, and afterward left Gus staring after him as he sped to the northernmost building in Gunsight, the Cross Timbers Saloon.
At the bar he fell into a chair to speak desperately to Morgan Hyatt, owner of the Cross Timbers. He had then carried Ben Knight’s message to each member of Gunsight’s Town Council.
* * * * *
The afternoon ran on. People went on about their business in their normal subdued way. For a while Gunsight seemed as usual. But then, very gradually, things changed.
Men stood upon the plank walk, speaking together, gazing both ways along the roadway, and from time to time eyeing the huge orange disc hanging up there in the summer sky. Womenfolk completed their shopping and left the town empty of their presences. Only an occasional child appeared, and after a time—by two o’clock in the afternoon—they too had disappeared.
Gunsight waited. It was without sounds at all. At Blackwell’s blacksmith shop the men sat in shade, some smoking, some simply gazing along the road. By three o’clock only a few very bold men were visible along the plank walks.
Gunsight was in appearance a ghost town.
Chapter Five
Doc Parmenter heard the soft roll of knuckles over his front door and moved leisurely in response. It had been a quiet day for the doctor—only a snakebitten child and a cowboy from south of town with a purple and swollen foot where a horse had stepped on him—had taken up his time. He had also napped—something he did not often have an opportunity to do. So, he felt mellow and genial as he opened the door and considered the tall, steady-eyed man who stood there with trail dust powdered upon his dark clothing. This stranger had a composed face. He seemed a thoughtful, reflective type man, Parmenter thought as he studied him. Then the big man spoke and Doc Parmenter’s mellowness dissolved.