Gallows Express

by Peter Brandvold

  He’d offered to sleep in the barn, but she’d said—and they were the first words she’d spoken after realizing who he was from the magazine and newspaper articles she’d read—“Don’t be silly. There’s a warm fire in here, nothing but the late winter chill out in the barn.”

  He hadn’t protested. In spite of her disapproval of him, he liked being around her, smelling her, seeing the light shine in her hair. He was a man, after all. He still loved Linda, but she was dead. Sometimes his involuntary cravings for a woman were all he had to remind himself that he was still alive.

  He smoked the cigarette and listened to the coyotes. The stars sparkled more and more brightly as he watched them. The cold pressed against him.

  When he’d finished the smoke and figured he’d given the woman enough time to crawl into her nightclothes, he field stripped the cigarette stub, raised his collar against the chill, evacuated his bladder, and headed back to the cabin. He opened the door slowly, then, seeing the long hump on the cot against the cabin’s far wall, stepped in and closed the door quietly behind him, easing the locking bar into its steel brackets.

  The lamp on the table was turned low, so most of the light came from the leaping flames in the hearth against the wall to Hawk’s left. Like tiny, orange fingers, the evanescence danced in Regan’s hair that spilled across the saddlebag pouch that she used for a pillow. She lay facing the wall, two wool quilts drawn up to her neck.

  She spoke suddenly in a beguiling, strangely intimate tone: “There’s wash water on the table. I heated it fresh, Mr. Hawk.”

  A battered fry pan sat atop the table, curls of steam rising from the dark water inside.

  “Much obliged.”

  Hawk doffed his hat and removed his coat, placing both on the wall pegs. Removing his neckerchief then rolling up his shirtsleeves, he moved to the table and stopped suddenly, frowning deeply.

  Regan turned her head to speak over her left shoulder. “I found the horse on the floor. It must have fallen from your saddlebags.”

  Hawk reached out and plucked the wooden carving off the table. It was the black stallion that Jubal had carved a few days before the boy had been murdered by “Three-Fingers” Ned. From an oval-shaped base against which its rear feet were set, as though atop a rocky ridge, the horse flung it front legs high in the air, hooves clawing at the sky. The lantern light rippled off the jet-black mane and expanding nostrils. The black eyes shone with wild vigor.

  “A very accomplished piece,” said the woman, still glancing at him over her shoulder. Her tone was faintly inquisitive.

  Hawk caressed the horse with his thumb. “My boy.”

  Regan said nothing but only lay staring at him over her shoulder. At length, she turned her head back toward the wall, and the cot creaked beneath her shifting weight.

  Hawk ran his thumb across the carving once more. “Here you go, Pa,” the boy had said when he’d finished the piece after working on for it for nearly seven nights in a row, after his homework had been completed. “What do you think?”

  Hawk had been amazed, of course. As Regan had said, it was an accomplished piece of art. It was even more amazing, given Jubal’s trouble with school and the agonized hours that he and Linda had spent on his homework. Try as he might, the boy had only managed to make Cs and Ds. But give him a piece of wood, and he could turn it into a living, breathing horse, bear, or wildcat in a matter of days, sometimes only a few hours. A poet in wood, Linda had remarked to Hawk as they both sat watching the boy work at the kitchen table of their little, frame house in Valoria.

  A tear had dribbled down along the sides of her long, fine nose. Hawk had reached over and, smiling tenderly, wiped the tear away with his thumb. Now Hawk felt a tear slither out of his right eye and make a cool wetness on his cheek.

  He closed his hand over the horse, giving it a gentle squeeze, then reached down for his saddlebags, set them on the chair he’d sat in earlier, and returned the horse to a pouch.

  “I’m sorry about your wife and child, Mr. Hawk.”

  Her soft, consoling voice, barely audible above the popping, crackling fire, caused another couple of tears to roll down Hawk’s cheeks. He nodded quickly, silently, as he dragged a towel and a sliver of soap out from inside his saddlebags, then set to work briskly washing his face and the back of his neck and scrubbing the trail dirt from his hands.

  When he was finished, he stripped down to his longhandles, draping his clothes over the back of a kitchen chair, then climbed into the cot abutting the front wall, across the sleeping area from Regan Mitchell. He glanced at her as he arranged his blanket roll at the head of his cot for a pillow.

  He glanced across the room.

  Her long body lay still beneath her blankets, the firelight continuing to glisten in her rich, curling hair that hung down over the side of the cot to nearly the floor. He couldn’t tell if she was awake. He couldn’t see her eyes. Her shoulders rose and fell slowly.

  “I suppose we might as well ride on to Trinity together,” she said suddenly, startling him. “Since we’re both heading the same direction, I mean.”

  Hawk lay his head back against the blanket roll and crossed his arms on his chest. “Don’t see why not.”

  He felt his mouth corners rise. He liked the woman. No man could be blamed for wanting to spend time with her.

  “All right, then. Good night, Mr. Hawk.”

  “You might as well call me Gideon.”

  “Good night, Mr. Hawk,” she said with mild reproof.

  Hawk sighed. “Good night, Miss Mitchell.”

  He closed his eyes, and for a time he fought the remembered nightmare images from his past. But he’d become a good warrior, and after twenty minutes or so, the snapping of the flames, the quiet moans and sighs of the night breeze, and the sporadic yips of coyotes lulled him into a deep, dark sleep.

  Hawk rose early the next morning, while Regan still slept, and went out to feed and water the horses. When he returned to the cabin, she was up, had the fire stoked, and was warming what remained of last night’s stew for breakfast.

  They ate and then cleaned up and put their gear together in silence. It was almost, Hawk thought, as though they’d slept together the night before. A shy awkwardness lingered between them.

  He found, however, that he couldn’t keep his eyes off of her. At least, he couldn’t help stealing glances at her whenever he thought she wouldn’t notice. The morning light shone brilliantly in her hair, revealing red and copper highlights. It bathed the smooth skin of her cheeks and neck so that it glowed like ivory.

  Her brown eyes were bold and frank, he noticed in this new light. Sultry and beguiling beneath stern, brown brows. While her body and attire bespoke a conservative young frontier woman, her expressions were rife with a tomboy’s spirit. He liked that. It was like the spirit of a wild mare. While he’d been attracted to her from the first moment he’d set eyes on her, now he was doubly so.

  And he didn’t like it. No, he didn’t like it at all.

  She had her mind made up about him, and she wasn’t the kind of woman whose convictions were easily swayed. That was all right with Hawk. He had no time for her. For any woman, for that matter.

  Oh, he enjoyed a bedroom frolic from time to time, as did any man, even a man devoted to the memory of his dead wife. But Regan Mitchell was not the kind of woman a man took to bed for a single night’s pleasure. Even if he did manage to bed her, he thought with another devilish snort, it would come at a hefty price.

  “What was that, Mr. Hawk?”

  Hawk looked at her as he finished buttoning his three-point capote over the sheepskin vest he wore with the leather side out. His ear tips warmed. Had he snorted aloud that time?

  “Huh?”

  “I thought you said something,” she said from her cot, where she was gathering the last of her gear into her saddlebags. She had her wool coat on, the collar raised to her neck, and she’d donned her man’s tobacco-brown, broad-brimmed felt hat. Her hair tumbled down ov
er her back almost to her rump.

  “Nope.” Hawk set his rifle on his shoulder, draped his saddlebags and war sack over his other shoulder, kicked the door wide, and headed out. “Gettin’ late, Miss Mitchell. Let’s get a move on.”

  He tramped over to the corral, and Regan Mitchell was close behind him, ready to go. She saddled her horse with the expertise Hawk would have expected of a girl who’d been raised on a wild horse ranch. She was gentle, but her movements were fluidly assured and she did not pull her punch when her white-stockinged roan drew a lungful of air as Regan was about to tighten the latigo straps.

  Hawk watched the beautiful, self-assured, though somewhat haughty, woman out the corner of his eye. He didn’t realize, however, that she was tossing inquisitive, faintly incredulous glances his way, as well.

  When they both had their horses rigged, Hawk opened the gate, and they led the mounts outside. He left the gate open so that the dead riders’ mounts could leave or stay as they pleased—other Two Troughs riders would likely pick them up—and then he and Regan swung up into their saddles, and Hawk let the young woman lead the way out of the canyon and westward toward Trinity.

  They rode in silence, crossing several jogs of hills and traversing a shallow canyon. The ground was dusted here and there with a recent snow, and crusty snowdrifts clung to the north sides of hillocks and ridges and stream banks. The sun was so bright that it was hard to look at the sky, which was as blue as a summer lake, but the air was cool. Probably not very far above freezing, Hawk figured, judging by the ice-fringed springs they passed.

  “Mr. Hawk,” Regan called unexpectedly as they started into broken country, sandstone ridges towering around them.

  “Yes, Miss Mitchell?”

  She reined the roan to a halt suddenly atop a barren bench angling from the base of a rocky ridge, curveted the mount on the trail, and regarded Hawk seriously.

  Hawk checked the grulla down about twenty yards behind her, at the base of the bench, and waited.

  She jerked the roan’s head up with one hand on her reins. “Nothing’s going to bring them back, you know?”

  Hawk returned her gaze, his brows lifting a straight ridge over his eyes. “I know that, Miss Mitchell.”

  She reined the horse around and galloped off down the other side of the bench.

  It wasn’t much later, when they were traversing a narrow canyon, that Hawk spied a flickering shadow along the ridge to his right. Regan had stopped her horse to inspect the bottom of the canyon, as though not quite remembering how she’d crossed it before. Hawk turned his attention to the ridge, his right hand automatically falling across the brass-plated butt of his Henry repeater, which jutted up from its boot under his right thigh.

  “This is always a little confusing,” Regan was saying to his left and at a slightly lower elevation. “There are two old horse trails through here, and I can’t remember . . .”

  She let her voice trail off. Hawk wasn’t listening, anyway. He was running his gaze along the ridgeline, where the shadow flicked again suddenly and he caught a glimpse of two silhouetted legs and a hat before the man dropped into a nest of some rocks about a hundred feet above him and Regan.

  A second later, the sun glinted off the end of a rifle barrel as the maw angled downward and slanted back in Hawk’s direction.

  “It’s the right one there,” Regan said suddenly, pointing.

  Smoke puffed from the rifle’s maw. At the same time that the thundering report reached Hawk’s ears, the slug tore into a stony thumb jutting out from the ridge wall just above his head, peppering him and the grulla with rock dust.

  Regan gasped.

  There was the distance-muffled rasp of a shell being levered quickly into a rifle breech. Hawk knew he didn’t have time for the Henry, so he left the rifle in its boot, kicked his boots out of his stirrups, and, twisting around to his left, heaved himself out of his saddle and directly into Regan.

  The woman groaned as Hawk’s much larger, heavier body bulled her out of her saddle. She grunted when they hit the ground together, Hawk managing to maneuver his body beneath hers to cushion her fall. His own impact with the ground, however, set up a clanging in his ears, and he saw four horses instead of two lunge up trail and away from him just as he heard another echoing rifle blast.

  Strands of Regan’s hair screened his face, slipped between his lips. She pushed up on an elbow, looking around, dazed, stretching her lips back from her teeth in pain.

  “Get down!” he rasped, feeling the bullet singe the side of his boot before tearing into the ground beside it.

  8.

  RANCE HARVIN

  HAWK shoved the woman down the steep grade toward the rocky canyon floor as the rifle barked three more times in quick succession.

  The Rogue Lawman winced, expecting the bullets to hammer the ground around him or into him, but a quick glance up the rocky ridge told him the bushwhacker was trying to shoot his and Regan’s horses. Vaguely relieved that he heard no screams as both mounts galloped around a bend in the canyon wall and out of sight—and likely beyond the reach of the shooter’s rifle—Hawk turned to see Regan glancing back at him from behind a low upthrust of rock down the incline about twenty yards away.

  “Come!” she called, stretching an open hand toward him. “What’re you doing? Hurry!”

  As he heard another shell being racked into the shooter’s rifle breech, Hawk rolled off his right elbow and, grinding his boot heels into the gravel, heaved himself down the grade. He scampered on all fours, then rolled three times.

  The ground was churned up behind him by another bullet, and the rifle report flatted out around the canyon, but now Hawk was below the brow of the incline. Wincing at the aches in his back and rib cage, he twisted around behind the scarp while at the same time grabbing Regan and giving the woman an unceremonious pull across his own body to his right side.

  “I said keep your damn head down!”

  “Goddamn you!” she barked.

  Another bullet smacked the side of the scarp a few inches above Hawk’s face, and as the rifle’s report thundered over the canyon, Hawk snapped his own head back behind cover, brushing painful rocks shards from his cheeks.

  “You’re one to talk,” the woman snapped at him, crouched beside him on her hands and knees, hair dusty and disheveled, her cheeks coated with grit. “Who the hell is up there, anyway? More Two Troughs men?”

  Hawk slipped both pistols from their holsters and thumbed back the hammers. “How the hell should I know?”

  “My god—they probably found the bodies you left in the ravine.”

  “Lady,” Hawk said, grinding his teeth as he returned her acrimonious gaze, “I’m beginning to wish I’d let them roll you into that ravine.”

  She shook her head and edged a peek around Hawk and the scarp, trying to get a look up the ridge. “My rifle’s with my horse. I suppose you left yours in your scabbard, as well.”

  “Sorry—I reckon in the heat of the moment I decided that getting you out of the line of fire was more important than having my rifle.” Hawk laughed once without humor and pressed his shoulders back against the scarp, turning his head to survey the ridge.

  Two more bullets thundered into the other side of the upthrusting rock. Shards flew in all directions, some arcing up and over the formation and raining down on Hawk’s and Regan’s hats. The explosions of the rifle followed on the heels of the bullets.

  “Henry repeater, I’ll bet,” Hawk mused aloud, running his tongue across his chapped lower lip. “Just like the one I left on the grulla. What I wouldn’t do to get my hands on a long gun now.”

  “He’s certainly out for blood.”

  “Whatever gave you that idea?”

  “What’re we going to do?” Regan looked down the grade and into the rocky-floored canyon beyond. “I suppose we could make a run for it.”

  “He’d ride us down. Besides, I don’t run from dry-gulchers. I run to them.”

  “Jesus!” she swore, sur
prising him again with her blue tongue. He didn’t think she’d uttered foul language even when she’d been in the goatish clutches of the three Two Troughs men. “I certainly wouldn’t want to offend your sense of male honor and bravery. You know—it never ceases to amaze me how simply stupid men are. And we women must rely on you!” She gave a loud groan of hopeless frustration, balling both of her small hands into fists.

  Hawk poked his head out from behind the scarp. When he drew no fire, he jerked his Colt up and triggered two shots toward the hollow in the rocks about ten feet down from the ridge, where he’d seen the shooter settle. He balled a cheek in dismay when he saw his slugs spike up dust from rocks a good fifteen yards short of his target.

  He drew back as the rifleman triggered two more quick shots, and then one more.

  “You can’t be serious,” Regan exclaimed. “You don’t actually think you’re going to be able to hit him way up there with a short gun, do you?”

  “I just thought I’d give it a shot,” Hawk said, suddenly weary of the woman’s presence. Beautiful, she might be. But he was realizing what an authentic pain in the ass she was. He ground his teeth as he said, “I don’t think I could hit him with a rock from this distance, either.”

  Silence descended over the canyon and the jutting outcroppings that shone like old pennies in the crystalline, late morning sunlight. Hawk pressed the back of his head against the scarp, sizing up the situation while ignoring the burn in his right calf, where the shooter’s bullet had grazed him, and the blood he could feel dribbling down inside his boot.

  “If we’re not going to make a run for it,” Regan said tensely, “what do you propose doing, Mr. Hawk?”

  He slipped his Russian .44 from the cross-draw holster on his right hip, flipped it, and extended it to her butt first. “Take that in case he comes down here, but don’t waste any shots on him.”