Good Day For A Hangin' (Remington Book 2)

by Robert Vaughan

  Ned Remington moved along the board sidewalk, heading for Judge Barnstall's office. Though he was a big man, he was light on his feet and the boards made little noise as he passed along the street, now illuminated by a golden spill of light from a window or door, now practically invisible in the shadows of darkness. A cacophony of sound washed through the night: half a dozen pianos and as many different songs, a man’s loud voice, a woman’s shrill laughter, the hollow clop of horses’ hooves on the dirt street, the happy shout of kids playing kick the can. It was a town vital and alive...and, for the most part, law-abiding.

  Ned passed, the gallows, standing dark and silent now that it had done its gruesome duty. When he reached the courthouse he climbed the steps to Judge Barnstall’s second-floor office, then knocked on the door.

  “Come on in, Ned,” Barnstall called.

  Ned pushed the door open and stepped inside. There were several papers spread out on Barnstall’s desk, three open books, and a full inkwell. Barnstall put down his pen and pointed to the liquor cabinet, on which stood two glasses and a bottle. Ned pulled the cork and poured a drink for each of them.

  “Working late,” he said.

  “It’s the way of things,” Barnstall replied. “We’ll be working six days a week—Sundays off if the outlaws let us take off—from nine in the morning until whenever I bang my gavel at the end of the day.”

  Ned looked around the judge’s office. It was small, neat, lined with bookshelves chock-full of law books. On one wall was a map of the western United States, and another, on parchment, of the Indian Nations. There was a framed law degree from Harvard, a globe on a walnut stand, leather chairs, the mahogany liquor cabinet, with, in addition to the bottle of bourbon Ned had poured the drink from, a brandy decanter and a set of snifters. On the desk where the judge had been working, there was a stack of foolscap next to the wooden pen he had been using. The judge’s name was etched on a wooden plaque, and on another the legend Ignorantia legis neminem excusat.

  Judge Barnstall held his glass toward Ned, not in a toast as such, but rather as a quiet salute. He tossed the drink down, then picked up the bottle Ned had put on the desk and poured himself another one.

  “We got us a problem here, Ned,” he said. He tossed a sheaf of warrants in the marshal’s lap. “Four men waylaid a farmer and his family south of here, raped and killed the women, slit the farmer’s throat. Only a boy got away, and he positively identified the assailants, who will hereafter be referred to as scum.”

  Ned looked over the warrants.

  “I don’t see any problem here. These men all live in Kirbyville or Hollister. They took a fair amount of cash as well as some goods. Looks like the local sheriff could handle it.”

  “They killed the Hollister constable when he tried to serve a local warrant.” He paused as Ned flipped papers. “Next page, paragraph six, in the addenda.”

  “How did this land in your court’s jurisdiction?”

  “The farmer was from Reeds Spring. He sold his stock at the auction in Springfield, was moving down to the White River valley when they jumped him. Look at the victims’ names again.”

  “Jefferson Parkhurst, deceased; Marilyn Louise Parkhurst, deceased, wife of Jefferson; and Cathryn Parkhurst, daughter of...” Ned stopped reading and sucked in a breath. He looked at the judge with stone-gray eyes. “Why, isn’t this...?”

  “My dear departed uncle, Ned. Jeff Parkhurst was my mother’s brother, dearly beloved of her, and I want those scum up here before my bench so I can make the sweat stream off their balls before I sentence them to the gallows.”

  “You pushed a lot for this one, Judge. I don’t see any federal laws—”

  “There’s plenty of law here to back this up, dammit. Kidnapping, child molesting, crossing state lines in the commission of a crime. Let me worry about the law.”

  “Says here they were killed south of Kirbyville at a place called Murderer’s Rocks. That’s in Missouri.”

  “Just barely. Another five or six miles and they’d have been in Arkansas. Maybe they took my cousin Cathryn down there to...” The judge’s jaw clenched and his eyes sparked blue fire as he curled a fist around the shot glass in his hand.

  “The boy a good witness?”

  “Jedediah is at my home.”

  “Christ, Sam, you’re really stretching things here.”

  “Ned, just bring those bat-toothed, bowlegged, gaul fisted, suck-egg sons of bitches in to my court.” Ned downed his drink, then stood up, his fingers working the brim of his hat.

  “No problem, Sam.”

  “Yes, Ned, there is a problem. These scum, Jacob Newsome, Ephraim Flatt, Thomas Gerner, and William Kimmons, are all ex-border guerrillas. They fought with Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson, rode with Alf Bolin and some others. They know the country. They’re crack shots, and each one of ’em’s meaner than a snake-bit mule.”

  “I’ll take care of it personally, then.”

  “Don’t try and do it by yourself. Take some of your deputies with you.”

  “I will,” Ned said.

  “How soon do you plan to get started?”

  “I’ll get started first thing tomorrow. I, uh, may send Jim Early to round up a couple of the deputies for me. I want to pay a little visit to someone first.” Barnstall looked at his marshal for a moment, then stroked his chin.

  “Yes,” he said, “I guess this does sort of remind you of your own case, doesn’t it? You understand, then, why I want these men?”

  “Yeah,” Ned said quietly. “I understand.”

  Later that same night, Jim Early, a small, wiry man who was leather-tough and whipcord fast, rode into a clearing in the Ozark woods. Jim was Ned’s most reliable deputy, and when Ned asked him to round up a couple of the men Jim didn’t even ask who he was to get. He knew that Ned had full trust and confidence in him to take care of the situation. He didn’t ask Ned where he would be, either. He knew the answer to that question too.

  Jim stopped his horse just inside the clearing and patted the animal’s neck. He called out to the log cabin set back a-ways in the clearing. A man appeared out of the shadows and told Jim to light down from his horse. From the man’s sudden appearance Jim knew that his approach hadn’t been a secret, though he had ridden as quietly as he could.

  “Been a time,” Tom Beck said.

  “Can we go inside?”

  “Afraid of wolves, Jim?”

  “Got something for you to read.”

  The short, harsh laugh was not lost on Early.

  Inside the tiny cabin, by the light of a dingy oil lamp, Beck looked at the papers. He could read, but just barely. It took him a long time to sort it out. Early said nothing. It was just too painful to watch the ex-muleskinner, trapper, buffalo-skinner, ex-hardcase, go over the official papers. Beck had steely blue eyes, hair straight as straw with a tinge of red, a sharp, hooked nose. There wasn’t an ounce of fat on his lean, spare frame. He was short, but he took advantage of that in a fight, and many a big man had gone down under his flailing fists or boots. He didn’t know what wasn’t fair in a fight, but he had a solid rule: Hit first, hit hard, and keep hitting until the opponent gave up or his lamp went out. Remington had found him in Taos, working as a deputy sheriff, learned he had done the same at Tombstone, Dodge, Ellsworth. The man was a tracker and he didn’t give up. He had endeared himself to sheriffs because he didn’t back down and he didn’t mind going on long hard trails by himself.

  “I knowed one of these Arkies,” Beck said finally. “Bill Kimmons. And I seen Jake Newsome in a knife fight down to Fort Smith once. He come out on top. What’d they do?”

  Early told him.

  “You goin’?”

  “No. Ned’s takin’ this one himself. I won’t be goin’ along.”

  “Where’s Ned at now?”

  “He had a call to make,” Early said without elaboration. “I want you to get McKirk in on this.”

  “Reckon that Scottie will ride with us?”


  “You tell him Ned wants him.”

  “Yeah,” Beck said. “Reckon just about any of us would go if Ned said he wanted us. How come you ain’t goin’?”

  “Ned wants me to stay aroun’ ’case Barnstall needs anything.”

  “That who I’m workin’ for?”

  “Ned works for him. You and me, we’re workin’ for Ned. Stand up, Tom.”

  “What for?”

  “I’m going to deputize you.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned. A U.S. marshal.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” Jim said wryly as he began to swear in Tom Beck. “If this ain’t quite official, I guess Ned can make it so when you start out.” Jim started for the door. “You get the Scot... I’ll go back and tell Ned his deputies will be ready by tomorrow.”

  “I’ll get him come sunup,” Tom said. “I don’t cotton to goin’ up to his place in the middle of the night.”

  Jim smiled. “Can’t say as I blame you any,” he agreed.

  John Angus McKirk worked as a shotgun for the local freight outfits that drove from Springfield to Harrison, Arkansas. When he felt like it. The rest of the time he fished and hunted in the Ozark woods. He played the bagpipes when he was going through one of his periodic episodes of melancholy, but few knew that. He lived alone, in the backwoods near the White River as it wandered along the border, and few had been there. He had worked as a U.S. marshal before, but had resigned after one of his partners committed suicide when they were pinned down by Comanches. It had left him badly rattled, but he had managed to shoot his way out. Few would work with him after that. He was taciturn as stone, cold as cave ice, mean as a timber rattler shedding its skin. He was sensitive about his broad burr and hid a lot of his feelings behind a reddish beard that gave him the look of an enraged Moses when his cobalt-blue eyes flashed in anger.

  He was tall, thin, angular, fond of wearing a dark waistcoat and knee-high black boots. He wore a double-rig six-gun harness and was plumb-center good with either hand. Some said he kept a girl at his place to cook his meals for him, but no one ever saw her. If he had one, she was as shy as a whippoorwill.

  Tom Beck called from the crest of the wagon road about a quarter mile from the cabin.

  “Ho, John Angus, it’s Tom Beck.”

  Tom sat his Indian pony and waited. He peered hard at the cabin below, hoping to catch a glimpse of the girl he’d heard tell about. He’d been here a half dozen times and never seen her, but he still looked. The cabin was shut up tight as a widow’s purse, and there was no smoke from its chimney. A pair of kid goats chewed at an old horsehair rope, and he heard the squawk of a chicken from the henhouse. It sounded like someone drawing a knife blade over slate. A small creek meandered back of the cabin, and there was a line of clothes, all male duds, fluttering between two willow trees.

  Ten minutes later, the cabin door opened a crack and McKirk stepped out, shading his eyes from the sun, which was just above the eastern horizon, behind Beck’s back. He wore the dark waistcoat, was hatless. Although he couldn’t have been much more than thirty or so, his pate was bald except for the flanking rust hair that was curly as a wolf’s mane. He wore a bright red flannel shirt under the dark coat, and Tom saw the twin butts of his ugly Colt’s hoglegs flaring against the lining.

  “Wha’ in the name of the eternal Christ do ye want wi’ a mon at thus vurry earrly hour, Tom Beck?”

  “U.S. business, John Angus. Ned Remington sent me, said for you to come. You can read these papers whilst you go for your horse. Bring some grub. We may be a while.”

  John Angus fixed Beck with a fierce scowling look as he stepped close and snatched the papers out of his hand. He nodded toward the cabin, and the other man understood. McKirk wasn’t going to walk back down there with his back to the man, no matter what. Beck knew McKirk, didn’t like to be around him. He made a man spooky. Too moody, Tom said when others asked him, but that wasn’t it. McKirk seldom said what was on his mind, and when he did it never was what anyone expected. He kept his thoughts to himself, and it was sometimes nerve- racking.

  “Set on that kindling stump. Be wi’ ye by and by.”

  When the Scotsman joined Beck, mounted on a rangy Tennessee roan, a brace of extra pistols dangling from his saddle horn, Tom tossed him a shiny object.

  “Wha’ ye...”

  “I’ll swear you in as we ride, John Angus. Tell you like Jim Early told me. If this ain’t official, I reckon Ned can make it right.”

  John Angus regarded the badge with a baleful eye, pinned it on his coat reluctantly.

  As the two men topped the rise Beck looked back at the clothes still hanging on the line.

  “Forgot to ask if you wanted to take your clothes down before we left, John Angus. Might not be there when you get back.”

  “Aye, dinna fret yoursel’ abbot thut, Tom. If the goats don’t eat them, they’ll be taken keer of, laddie.”

  Beck suppressed a smile as the two of them rode over the hill, three days’ rations in their saddlebags, bedrolls tied behind their cantles, and guns loaded, spare ammunition in their pockets.

  Chapter 3

  Jim Early dismounted outside the walls of the convent, tied his horse at the hitching rail, then pulled on the rope that hung alongside the gate. He heard the bell ring, and a few moments later the gate was opened by a young nun. She smiled when she recognized Jim.

  “Deputy Early,” she said. “How nice to see you.”

  “Hello, Sister Angela,” Jim said. “How is your Mother Superior?”

  “She is well, thank you.”

  “I wonder if I could speak with her.”

  “Of course. She will be very pleased to see you,” Sister Angela said. “Won’t you come this way?”

  Jim followed the nun through the garden of the convent. It was well shaded and alive with flowering plants of all descriptions. A fountain bubbled in the middle of the garden pool, and birds, instinctively knowing this was a sanctuary, flitted from branch to statue to birdbath. A well-worn path of stone led from the garden to Mother Superior’s office.

  Mother Superior was a robust and healthy-looking seventy-year-old. She got up from her desk and shuffled around quickly to greet Jim. A broad smile spread across her face.

  “James!” she said. “It is so good to see you.”

  Jim stuck his hand in his inside jacket pocket and pulled out a small package.

  “I brought something for you.”

  “Licorice! How nice!”

  “How do you know it’s licorice?”

  Mother Superior smiled. “Because you know I have a taste for the confection,” she said. “And you’ve not yet learned that you don’t have to come bearing gifts. You are welcome here anytime, James.”

  “I know I don’t have to come bearing gifts, Mother Superior,” Jim said. “But when Ned Remington brought me here, shot to pieces...nearly dead, you took me in and treated me as if I were one of you.”

  “You are one of us, James. We’re all God’s children,” Mother Superior said.

  “I’ll never forget you for your kindness to me...or to Ned’s Katy.”

  A shadow passed across Mother Superior’s eyes. “Ah, the poor girl,” she said. “I’m afraid she has wounds that all the medicinal skills of the world can’t heal. Even a father’s love can’t make her well again.”

  “Has there been no change at all?”

  “I’m afraid not,” Mother Superior said. “Bless her heart, she just sits there in that shell of hers, staring out at the world through those terrible, tortured eyes. She speaks to no one, not even her father. I don’t think she knows who he is. Sometimes I think the poor girl doesn’t even know who she is.”

  “I don’t know where Ned would be without you and the sisters to look out for her,” Jim said.

  “We do what we can, but it’s too little, I’m afraid. My only hope now is that we don’t lose Marshal Remington as well.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Sometimes when he is here visiting his d
aughter, I look in the room and see the two of them there. They each seem to be lost in their own world. The poor girl, bless her, has eyes which are tortured. But the eyes of the father...they are cold and dangerous, James. Oh, I don’t mean to me or to any of the sisters. There’s never been a man who could be more gentle than Ned Remington, to his daughter or to us, you know that. Why, you remember that after he brought you here, Marshal Remington came every day until you were out of danger.”

  “Yeah,” Jim said. “I know.” He recalled those times when he would surface from his wound-induced deep sleep to see Ned standing over his bed. He couldn’t hold on to consciousness for any period of time, and for a while he didn’t know if Ned was really there or if he was merely a hallucination.

  “Those same eyes which fill me with such foreboding on some occasions are full of love and compassion when he’s looking at his daughter, or some other poor soul in need of comfort. But”—Mother Superior shivered involuntarily— “though he doesn’t speak of it, I know that his heart is consumed by a terrible passion to kill other fellow human beings...the man, or men, who did that awful thing to Katy and his wife.”

  “Can you blame him, Mother Superior? Someone raped and killed Ned’s wife, then raped Katy and left her for dead. He left her worse than dead, for Katy is now a living dead. She doesn’t speak, laugh, cry...she doesn’t even recognize Ned. When Ned came back and found what had happened to his wife...his daughter, if nearly killed him.”

  “I agree,” Mother Superior said. “It is an awful thing for a man to live with. I sometimes don’t know what has kept him going.”

  “I’ll tell you what’s kept him going,” Jim said. “It’s the thought of finding out who it was and bringing him to justice.”

  “But he mustn’t dwell on that,” Mother Superior said. “That lust for revenge is contrary to God’s law. ‘Vengeance is mine,’ said the Lord,” Mother Superior said.

  “Not vengeance, Mother Superior…justice. There is a difference. And in the Stone County Federal District, we have another law. ‘Justice is mine,’ saith Judge Samuel Parkhurst Barnstall,” Jim replied.