Gallows Express

by Peter Brandvold

  Hawk stared over the snapping, crackling fire at the grulla. The horse had craned its neck to watch the three riders approach from up trail, which Hawk couldn’t see for the ridge wall to his left. Also, the men were moving up a rise from the canyon floor.

  He knew, though, when they were within view of the grulla, because the horse twitched its ears, widened its eyes slightly, and shook its head, at once expectant and apprehensive, though the horse, Hawk knew—he gave a bemused little snort at the reflection—was more interested in the strangers’ horses than in their human riders.

  He heard the clomps of the approaching horses’ hooves and the squawk of tack, and then the first man rode out from behind the ridge shoulder, followed by the other two. All three swung their heads around warily before the eyes of the leader found the fire and, a half second later, the tall, rugged, dark-haired man reclining on the other side of the dancing flames.

  The lead rider pulled his horse up in front of the fire, stopping about ten feet back from it. The two other men pulled their own mounts up beside his and stared over the thin tendrils of wood smoke at Hawk, whose own face was implacable as he ran his keen, green-eyed gaze across the strangers.

  Finally, the lead rider—a short, fat man of indeterminate age with a thick, blond beard covering his pale-complected face—canted his head to one side and curled his pug nose. “You know whose land you’re on?”

  “Nope,” Hawk grunted, his left wrist draped across his left upraised knee. “Don’t much care.”

  “Oh, you don’t, do you?”

  Hawk hiked a shoulder.

  “Well, you’re on Two Troughs range. And the Two Troughs owner, Mr. Blue Tierney, don’t care for strangers. So you best just keep on ridin’, bucko, if you know what’s good for you.”

  Hawk let his eyes drift casually from the lead rider to the other two men—hard, cow-eyed saddle trash in fur coats and shabby hats. The one in the middle had blond hair hanging down past his shoulders while the man on the left end of the group appeared to be a Mexican with a round face, large ears, and a brushy black mustache concealing his mouth.

  “Ain’t this the trail to Trinity Ridge?” Hawk asked.

  “It’s one of ’em,” said the lead rider. “There’s plenty of trails to Trinity.”

  “Let’s say you’re comin’ from Laramie,” Hawk said in a calm, conversational voice. “What would be the shortest route to Trinity?”

  The lead rider stared disdainfully across the fire at the brown-haired, green-eyed stranger, and narrowed one eye at him. “The trail you’re on would be the shortest. But, like I said, the trail you’re on crosses Two Troughs range. And, like I said, Two Troughs is off-limits to—”

  “What would the next-shortest route be?” Hawk cut in.

  The lead rider obviously didn’t like being interrupted. His pug nose turned brick red, and his lips tightened, his shoulders rising and falling heavily as he breathed. The other two men looked at him, the Mexican grinning, as though eager to see how he would handle this impertinent stranger.

  “The next-shortest route,” the lead rider said in a tone of strained tolerance, “would be straight south from Laramie to Snakehead Butte. From there”—he swung an arm out in a hooking motion—“you head west along Buffalo Creek to Coyote Creek, then over the divide to Trinity.”

  “Seems to me going that way would take a whole extra day. Maybe two days.”

  “Mister,” said the man with the long blond hair, “two extra days is a whole lot better than never makin’ it at all—now, isn’t it?”

  He jutted his chin at Hawk, his eyes dully belligerent.

  “If those were my choices.” Hawk stretched his legs out and crossed his arms on his chest. “Nah, I think I’ll just keep ridin’ the way I’ve been ridin’.”

  Suddenly, the cool benevolence left his eyes, and they darkened to spruce. The leathery skin of his face drew back hard against his high-tapering cheekbones—the Indian features he’d inherited from his father, a now-deceased Ute war chief. “And there’s not one goddamn thing you three mangy curs can do about it, less’n, of course, you wanna die hard.”

  The lead rider looked as though he’d been slapped across his cinnamon-bearded cheeks. He tipped his head back slightly, lifting his chin, and his eyes blazed brightly from their freckled sockets. The other two men set their jaws hard, and their own eyes turned to stone. The horse of the man with the long blond hair lowered his head, and shook it, rattling the bit in its teeth.

  The challenge was there in the air between the three strangers and Hawk. They hadn’t been expecting such a sudden, poker-like call, and they were all three ill prepared to discern if the man was bluffing or not. They didn’t know the man, after all. But, while he was not old even by frontier standards, he was not young. And he didn’t look foolhardy.

  There was no mistaking the dead seriousness in his dark green gaze.

  He was outnumbered three to one, and, while he had the brass-breeched Henry rifle leaning nearby and the bone grips of a Colt jutted up from the soft brown holster on his right hip, above the tucked-behind flap of his coat, he couldn’t possibly reach either weapon before the Two Troughs riders bore down on him.

  The question, however, was plain in the lead rider’s brown eyes:

  Could he?

  Apprehension pinched the skin above the bridge of the man’s nose and cut deep lines across his forehead. The other two men betrayed similar expressions, and first the long-haired man and then the Mex cut quick, curious glances at the lead rider. He fiddled with the bridle reins in his hands as he said, “Mister, I reckon there ain’t no point in chasin’ you out of here now, since you’re halfway to Trinity. But so help me god, we catch you out here again, you’re gonna be one goddamned sorry son of a bitch.”

  He glanced at the two other men, then reined his dun around quickly and angrily sunk his spurs into the horse’s flanks. The horse lunged off its rear hooves and bolted on down the trail, the other two men following suit while casting Hawk angry, anxious glances over their shoulders. Hawk and the grulla watched them leave, and when they were gone the grulla gave a parting whinny, which was answered in kind.

  The grulla swished its tail.

  Hawk waited to make sure they were gone, and then he leaned forward and dipped a hand into one of his saddlebag pouches lying beside the fire. He pulled out a black tin cup and a small rawhide swatch, and used the swatch to lift the pot from the fire and fill the cup with coffee.

  Returning the pot to the fire, he sank back against the rock once more and blew ripples on the coffee, on the surface of which several small white ashes floated.

  He smacked his lips. Nothing like a hot cup of black tar on a cold, late winter afternoon. He took another refreshing sip and narrowed one eye at the sky over the unmoving pine tops. He’d have to find somewhere to hole up in a couple of hours. Too early to stop yet. He still had a good day’s ride or so to Trinity. He’d probably roll in a little after noon of the next day.

  Switching the smoking cup to his right hand, he unbuttoned the top two buttons of his capote, drew the top flap down, and reached into his shirt pocket for the flier he’d picked up in Cheyenne a couple of weeks ago. He flipped it open and held it out before him, ran his eyes over the notice once more:WANTED

  TEMPORARY LAWMAN

  TRINITY, COLORADO TERRITORY

  INTERESTED AND QUALIFIED PARTIES

  SEND LETTER OF INQUIRY TO:

  MALCOLM K. PENNYBACKER,

  MAYOR, TRINITY, COLORADO TERRITORY

  BY MARCH 1, 1879

  “Temporary lawman,” Hawk muttered, lifting his cup to his lips for another sip.

  He’d known what the euphemism really stood for even before he’d sent the good Mayor Pennybacker his query letter and been rewarded with a letter back, vaguely sketching out the situation. A town tamer was what the mayor was looking for. Apparently, the sitting sheriff of Medicine Bow County had been “killed in the line of duty” and another lawman was needed to fill
his seat until another election was held. That was pretty much all that the letter had said, but something had told Hawk that the situation was dire.

  No, not something. A rumor that had made its way from Trinity to Cheyenne. A dark bit of news in addition to the reported killings of the sheriff and the sheriff’s deputy that had caused the citizens of Cheyenne to cluck and shake their heads but that had thrust a rusty dagger of remembered personal agony deep into the Rogue Lawman’s heart so that he’d felt sick to his belly for a time, and weak in the knees.

  Hawk glowered into the fire.

  After a time, the dancing flames reflected in his darkly brooding eyes, he held the notice out in front of him. He let it drop into the flames that plucked at it like thin red fingers until the sheet turned brown at the edges, then black. The growing, eager flames reached into the paper, tonguelike, consuming it. The paper shrunk and turned black as it dwindled against the burning wood.

  A few glowing, brown remnants reached up on the fire’s thermals and swirled into the air for a time before dropping into the snowy brush and dissolving. But Hawk’s own bitter memories did not die until, gritting his teeth, he ground a heel into the hard earth and kicked dirt and gravel onto the flames, knocking over the coffeepot.

  Heaving himself to his feet, he tossed the dregs of his coffee onto the steaming flames, then grabbed the pot and emptied that, too, on the fire. He swabbed the cup and pot out with handfuls of snow that he scooped off the top of the boulder, then returned both instruments to his saddlebags.

  He tossed the bags over the grulla’s back, the horse watching him now curiously, wary of the man’s suddenly sour countenance. The Rogue Lawman tightened the latigo strap, slipped the bit through the horse’s teeth, and mounted up. He swung the horse around and booted him on down the trail, heading west toward Trinity Ridge.

  He’d ridden only about an hour when he heard a distant pistol shot and a woman’s scream.

  4.

  “KILL ME AN’ GET IT OVER WITH, DAMN YOU”

  HAWK was following a horse trail hugging a tree-lined creek meandering along the bottom of a long, narrow canyon.

  A steep sandstone ridge shouldered on his right; a lower, less rocky ridge humped on his left. As he reined the grulla to a stop beneath some breeze-jostled cottonwoods whose leaves flashed gold in the dying light, he looked around to get his bearings.

  There was another shot. A man yelled. The commotion seemed to originate from a dark notch gouged out of the ridge wall to his right and about a hundred yards ahead. As the woman screamed again, Hawk spurred the grulla into a gallop, leaving the creek trail and following another, scruffier trace off to the right, heading toward the ridge.

  The sandstone wall, glowing like copper pennies now as the sun sank behind Hawk, towered over him, pocked and pitted and streaked with guano. As he and the grulla followed the trace into the fifty-yard gap in the stone wall, where shadows bled out from the ridges and large boulders strewn around him, he could hear the faint trickle of a stream. He saw a cabin ahead, abutting the box canyon’s rear ridge.

  Thin, gray smoke ribboned from the stone chimney climbing the cabin’s south wall.

  It was about a hundred yards away, so that the figures running through the scrub north of the cabin and the gray log barn looked little larger than fingers. But in the copperysalmon light, Hawk could see the glow of the white blouse and tan skirt and long, auburn hair of the woman who was running and, judging by her screams, trying to get away from the three men chasing her.

  She wasn’t having much luck, and the men knew it.

  They were yelling and laughing, and even from this distance Hawk recognized the three from his coffee camp earlier. The Mexican was just now catching up to the woman, grabbing her around the waist and, pivoting on his hips, lifting her high in the air. She gave another squeal, kicked at the man, and tried to club him with her fists.

  “She’s a spry one!” The Mexican laughed as the other two men—the tall man with the long blond hair, and the short, fat, bearded man—caught up to them.

  Hawk sighed. He racked a shell into the Henry’s chamber one-handed then set the rifle across his saddlebows as he urged the grulla ahead at a fast walk. The woman, still in the arms of the Mexican, flung one of her feet out and caught the fat man in the groin. The man jackknifed forward, yowling and crossing his hands over his balls.

  The man with the long blond hair laughed and jumped back away from the woman’s scissoring feet. The Mexican held her up tight against him, laughing and nuzzling her neck before wheeling and hauling her off toward the barn, both front doors of which stood wide.

  There were four horses in the pole corral off the barn’s far side, milling and swishing their tails, a couple watching the commotion with bland fascination.

  The Mexican carried the woman into the barn as the man with the blond hair followed, whooping and laughing, while the fat man limped a good ways behind them, crouched forward and jutting his chin like a wedge. Hawk, who continued riding toward the barn, heard the fat man’s angry, bellowing curses. As the Rogue Lawman drew closer, he could see the red rage leaching up from behind the man’s light-colored beard, and then the man ambled on into the barn’s dense, dark shadows.

  Hawk drew the grulla up to the right of the open doors and swung down from the saddle. He could hear the woman whimpering and sobbing inside the barn, could hear the men grunting and talking in low, harsh tones, breathless as they tried to take what the woman was not compelled to give.

  Holding his Henry repeater in both hands, Hawk strode through the barn doors, stepped to one side, putting the wall behind him so the light wouldn’t outline him, and looked around.

  As his eyes adjusted to the musty darkness, he saw shadows moving inside one of the stalls on the right side of the narrow runway. There was the sound of cloth being torn, and the woman cried, “Please . . . please, stop!”

  One of the men laughed and said, “Look out, Kimber, or she’ll sink one of them boots of hers in your oysters again!”

  There were shuffling sounds, the light crunching and rustling of displaced straw, and more rips of torn clothes.

  “There, now,” the Mexican said in his slightly accented, breathless voice, “hold her down. Pull her dress up! Mierda, she’s strong!”

  A belt buckle clanked. It was followed by the thud of a shell belt landing in hay. The woman continued to groan and pant, but the sounds were muffled now, as though she were being held facedown in the hay on the other side of the stall partition.

  Hawk’s eyes adjusted quickly, and the three jostling figures defined themselves as the Mexican dropped to the stable floor with the woman. The long-haired gent was down on his knees, apparently holding the woman’s head and arms down. Only his head was visible above the stall. He was facing Hawk but his chin was dipped, looking at the woman beneath him.

  The fat’s man’s thick back was facing Hawk; he’d removed his coat and he was now sliding his suspenders off his heavy, sloping shoulders.

  “Give it to the bitch, Rodriguez,” the fat man grunted. “Go ahead and give it to her, and then it’s my turn.”

  “No, it ain’t your turn, Kimber!” protested the long-haired man. “You drew the shortest straw, remember?”

  Hawk stepped forward. The long-haired man turned his head toward him, and he frowned as though he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The woman continued to sob and grunt and groan facedown in the straw.

  “Sorry to interrupt like this,” Hawk said raising the Henry to his shoulder and drawing the hammer back to full cock. “But I’m afraid I got some awful bad news.”

  The fat man wheeled, his bearded cheeks flushed with shock and fury.

  Hawk’s Henry leapt and roared, red-orange flames stabbing from the barrel. The .44 round smashed through the dead center of the man’s forehead, and he flew straight back against the barn’s outside wall as though he’d been lassoed from behind.

  “You all just died,” Hawk said calmly as he ejected
the spent cartridge over his right shoulder and levered a fresh one into the Henry’s chamber.

  “Holy shit!” screamed the long-haired gent, straightening so quickly he lost his footing and stumbled back against the stall partition behind him.

  He grabbed the Smith & Wesson positioned for the cross draw on his left hip, but his fingertips only grazed the handle before Hawk’s Henry roared again, punching a chunk of hot lead through the man’s chest, puffing dust from his heavy buffalo coat. The long-haired man turned a backward somersault over the stall partition and into the next stall beyond.

  As Hawk’s second ejected shell casing clanked onto the hard-packed runway floor behind him, he heard the Mexican curse but he couldn’t see the man. Not until he’d stepped forward and looked into the stall, where the woman lay with her skirts up around the small of her back, exposing her long, pale legs and floury-white rump. She held her arms up over her head.

  The Mexican was reaching over her for his holstered six-shooter but froze when Hawk said with menacing calmness, “Uh-uh.” He cursed to himself, wanting to take the shot and finish him here and now. But he might hit the woman.

  The Mexican froze on all fours over the woman, looking back at Hawk over his shoulder. His pants were down around his ankles. The man’s black eyes shone with rage. His hand rested over his holstered .45.

  Hawk kicked open the stall door, went inside, reached down, and jerked the man up by the back of his shirt collar. He rolled his eyes to the fat man who sat down against the outside wall as though he were napping except for the blood that trickled from the quarter-sized hole in his forehead, forming a large drip at the end of his freckled, pug nose.

  “If you’re gonna kill me, amigo,” the Mexican said through gritted teeth, “kill me an’ get it over with, damn you.”

  “In due time, amigo.” Hawk stepped back and shoved him with his rifle barrel into the runway. “Outside. Move!”

  The woman was shuffling around in the straw, shoving her skirts down her bare legs while looking up at Hawk in mute horror, tears and bits of straw flecking her pale, pink-mottled cheeks. Thick, disheveled tresses of chestnut hair hung down around her shoulders.