Gallows Express

by Peter Brandvold

  From behind the door, Hawk heard a gasp. There was the low squawk of a bedspring, a light tread on the floor. The lock clicked and the door opened a foot. A girl whose head came up to the center of Hawk’s chest stared up at him through the gap.

  “You’re him?” Her eyes were wide, eager, expectant. “Him?” She thrust an open magazine up against the gap in the door. “The Rogue Lawman who deals justice throughout the West with blood and thunder? Who stops thieves, killers, and rapists cold with hot lead fired from the barrels of his Colt .45s?”

  Hawk looked at the magazine, saw an inked sketch of a black-clad man on horseback wearing a flat-brimmed black hat very much like Hawk’s, firing a rifle from his shoulder at three ugly hombres firing back at him from behind rocks and a tree stump. The rider’s face was broad and determined, teeth gritted, while the men who were obviously owlhoots looked horrified and desperate.

  “Only one Colt,” Hawk said. “And it’s a .44, not a .45. The other’s a .44 Russian made by Smith & Wesson. I’ve always preferred a .44 to a .45 though the .45 sounds better to the penny-dreadful scribes, I reckon.”

  The petite blond girl, clad in a stained flannel housecoat and pink slippers, stared through the gap at him. “You are him.”

  “It’s him, Claire,” said Cassidy. “He’s gonna kick Brazos Tierney out with a shovel. Same with his old man and the whole rest of his gang. You got nothin’ to worry about, sister. Now, will you please go back to work?”

  “So you don’t get thrown out!” added Mrs. Ferrigno forcefully.

  Claire continued to stare up at Hawk in hushed awe.

  “You really think you can handle all them by yourself?” she asked.

  Hawk glanced at the illustrated magazine hanging limp now in her hand. “You’ve read of my exploits,” he growled, narrowing one eye with the steely menace of his magazine likeness. “What do you think?”

  Slowly, the girl’s lips spread. The smile grew until it reached her blue eyes, and they danced in the light from the hall’s two bracket lamps.

  She shuttled her gaze to Cassidy and Mrs. Ferrigno flanking Hawk. “I’ll come out when Hy Booker’s got him in a pine box and ready to plant. Anybody tries to enter this room till then”—she held up a pearl-gripped, .36-caliber pocket pistol with her other hand and narrowed her resolute eyes—“gets a gutful of this!”

  With that, she slammed the door. The locking bolt clicked home.

  “Goddamnit, Claire!” roared Mrs. Ferrigno.

  Hawk removed the cheroot from his teeth and turned to the madam. “Not to worry,” he said, shouldering his Henry. “I’ll have her out of there soon.”

  Both women stared up at Hawk with wide-eyed expectation.

  “You promise?” asked the madam.

  Hawk nodded and headed off toward the stairs.

  Mrs. Ferrigno called behind him. “You want a free poke?”

  Hawk stopped and glanced back.

  “Cassidy’s free at the moment,” the madam said.

  Cassidy flushed and crossed her arms on her low-cut corset.

  Hawk ran his eyes up and down the young girl’s exquisite frame. “Got a long night ahead,” he said, returning the cheroot to his mouth. “Maybe some other time.”

  Cassidy lifted her eyes to his, her thin brows beetled indignantly.

  Hawk headed on down the stairs.

  15.

  A VISIT WITH THE STANLEY FAMILY

  YOU had to walk up the side of a low, tabletop mesa to reach the cemetery sprawled amongst cedars and three tall firs lined up on the other side of a picket fence badly in need of fresh paint. Once inside the gate that hung askew from a single rusty hinge, it wasn’t hard to locate the Stanley family’s final resting place.

  They were the three freshest graves, mounded with iron-red dirt and chunks of sandstone to discourage predators. Two large mounds on either side of a smaller mound. The headstone announced STANLEY in a broad arc, with the names AARON, JANELLE, and LITTLE JAKE below. Their birth and death dates had also been chipped into the stone, the sheriff having died two days before his wife and their fifteen-month-old baby.

  Someone had ringed the Stanley family plot, which was fronted with rabbitbrush and a single mountain sage plant, with fist-sized rocks. Hawk stepped over this makeshift border to set a handful of paper flowers he’d purchased earlier from the Trinity Mercantile Company on the baby’s grave. He stepped back then and folded his hands across his cartridge belt, but he’d be damned, try as he might, if he could conjure a single prayer.

  Oh, the remembered words were there, but when he tried to bring them up from his chest they turned to a chalky powder on the back of his tongue. Staring down at Jake’s grave, he remembered his own boy. His heart swelled and a knot formed in his throat, but he bit back the emotion that threatened to overcome him, and set his hat on his head.

  “I’ll get ’em” were the only words he could find, and he was almost surprised to hear even those escape his lips as he turned away and adjusted his hat against the angle of the rising sun.

  It was a cold morning. His breath frosted in front of his face, lit by the golden light of late dawn.

  He spied movement out the corner of his right eye, and he turned to see a dark figure slumped beside a rock on the west side of the boneyard. A large, gnarled, pale hand reached out from under a ratty brown blanket for a whiskey bottle standing on a flat rock. Hawk couldn’t see the man’s face, but he saw that the gent was wearing black broadcloth trousers and side-button half boots. The trousers were of good quality, but they were stained and torn, revealing washworn, white balbriggans underneath.

  The man grunted and grumbled as the hand slid out to the edge of his reach, a good two feet from the bottle.

  Hawk walked across the graveyard, meandering around the rock-mounded graves and tufts of rabbitbrush until he stood over the tall, thin man sprawled on his side next to the boulder. The man’s knees were drawn partway up to his chest. He had a long, cadaverous face and mussed iron-gray hair and sideburns, and he was squeezing his eyes closed in frustration as he continued to reach for the bottle in his semi-sleep.

  Hawk squatted beside the man, grabbed the bottle off the rock, and sniffed the lip. He made a face as the stench of the coffin varnish, likely brewed behind one of Trinity’s less reputable saloons with a good dose of strychnine and rattlesnake venom, assaulted his nostrils and burned his lungs.

  “Here you go,” Hawk said, setting the bottle down beside the large hand whose blue veins bulged like knotted rivers on a relief map. “Nothing like a little hair of the dog.”

  The man grunted, turned his head slightly upward, and half opened one eye. “Who in the devil’s blue hell are you?”

  “Hawk. You stay out here all night, Reverend?” He saw the frayed, soiled paper collar around the man’s thin turkey neck, beneath the collar of a dark blue dress coat.

  The preacher looked around briefly, trying to open a second eye. Since the light was obviously too painful for his whiskey-battered brain, he gave up on the second eye and trained the half-open other one on Hawk, growling from deep in his rheumy chest, “What’s it to you?”

  “Seems to me it’d be warmer in the parsonage.”

  Hawk fished around in his brain for the man’s handle. Recalling the name and remembering seeing the sky pilot heading for the Venus the night before, on what was apparently one of a series of brothel rounds for the Lutheran minister, he added, “Don’t you think you’d be better off in your own bed, Pastor Hawthorne?”

  The reverend scowled at the interloper, rose onto an elbow, poked the lip of the bottle between his own lips, and took a long pull. The whiskey bubble jerked back and forth, making gurgling sounds.

  Lowering the bottle once more, the man gave a loud, liquid sigh and smacked his lips.

  “Whoever the hell you are, kindly vamoose and let a man sleep!” The man set the bottle down on the rock then rested his head on his arm and closed his eye, wriggling around as though to make himself more comf
ortable against the frosty earth.

  Hawk gave a fateful chuff as he straightened. When the man froze to death out here one of these nights, if he made sleeping in the graveyard a habit, the undertaker wouldn’t have far to carry him. Hawk moved off through the graves once more and headed on back down the side of the mesa via the unkempt, switchbacking trail.

  He was rounding a protruding shoulder of the formation when he saw Reb Winter straddling a sorrel gelding near where Hawk had tied his grulla to an aspen branch. The young man wore a scarf under a battered, floppy-brimmed hat, and a blue wool coat too tight across the chest and shoulders. The scarf covered his ears and was tied beneath his chin.

  An old Springfield rifle hung from his saddle horn by a braided rawhide lanyard. Lifting his eyes to Hawk, Reb ran a mittened hand across his nose and grinned sheepishly.

  The Rogue Lawman stopped. “What’re you doing here?”

  Reb reached down to pat the stock of the Springfield hanging down over his right stirrup fender. “I come heeled in order to give ye a hand, Gid.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Huh?”

  Hawk continued on down the side of the mesa. “Go on home, Reb. I appreciate the offer, but I ride alone.” He’d had Reb give him directions to the Two Troughs Ranch while enjoying flapjacks and ham in the Poudre River House’s dining room before sunup. “I done told you that already.”

  “Ah, come on, Gid. I’ll be your deputy!”

  Hawk grabbed his reins off the aspen and swung into the leather. “Like I said, boy—I appreciate the offer.” He gave the rawboned young man a hard, uncompromising look.

  “Ah, shit!” Reb punched his saddle horn. “You think I’m a dimwit, just like everyone else around Trinity. But just cause I can’t speak as good as most folks don’t mean I’m softheaded. With my daddy’s old Springfield, I can shoot the eye out of a runnin’ jack at a hundred yards!”

  It took nearly a full minute for Reb to get all that out, and he basted the mane of his sorrel with spittle while doing it.

  Finally, he punched his saddle horn once again and neck reined the horse around. “Everyone thinks ole Reb’s only good fer runnin’ groceries or splittin’ wood—that’s what they think of ole Reb!” he bellowed, booting the sorrel into a lunging lope toward Trinity bathed in westward-slanting shadows and sparkling morning sunshine, smoke from breakfast fires rising and flattening out over the rooftops.

  Hawk watched Reb’s broad back grow small as the younker loped angrily back to town, sulking. Hawk liked the kid, and he hadn’t meant to hurt his feelings, but he didn’t want to put him in harm’s way. It was a crazy, perilous trail the Rogue Lawman rode, and he could grab the cat’s wrong end just any old time. He didn’t want to take anyone else with him when he saddled that cloud.

  He reined the grulla around and clucked it east, tracing a broad circle around the outskirts of Trinity.

  The only person who knew that he was heading out to Two Troughs today was Reb, and the boy had vowed his silence. Hawk knew that Reb would keep his word in spite of his bluster. The ladies at the Venus knew that Hawk would be handling Tierney’s men soon, but they didn’t know exactly when. He didn’t want anyone who might be in league with the outlaws spilling the beans and alerting them to Hawk’s visit.

  He was only one man against a dozen or more seasoned killers, and he wanted the element of surprise on his side of the table. Of course, he wasn’t sure what he was going to do with it. He figured he’d come up with something by the time he’d reached the outlaw lair.

  He usually did.

  East of Trinity he branched northward on a secondary trail, mostly a horse trail with wagon furrows marking the brittle yellow grass and sage on either side of it. He rode up and over several ridges before, with the sun climbing and gaining intensity, he had to stop and remove his three-point capote, which he wrapped around the soogan he’d tied behind his saddle.

  He let the grulla drink at a narrow creek winding around the base of a high, rock-strewn ridge wall, and he himself sipped the tepid water from his canteen, then continued on into country gradually growing higher and more rugged, with deep canyons slashing the land and pine-covered mesas tilting toward him like giant, broken tables.

  Old snowdrifts still patched the north sides of slopes. In the brassy sunshine, he could hear the glassy murmur of melting water seeping downhill.

  Here and there he spied the pale blue of a crocus—the high country’s first spring wildflower—amidst the dull browns of bromegrass and needle grass. Robins flitted amongst cedars and pines. Squirrels chitted. Hawks gave their ratcheting cries.

  As Hawk rode up a mountain shoulder, he caught a whiff of wood smoke and checked the grulla down abruptly. From just beyond a rise about fifty yards ahead, at the edge of a fir forest, gray smoke unfurled skyward. Hawk slid the Henry from its saddle boot and heeled the grulla ahead, resting the rifle across his saddlebows and lifting his head to see over the rise as he approached it.

  When he’d ridden a ways up the incline, he checked the grulla down once more, and furled his brows, his green eyes going hard and dark as he raked his gaze across the small, makeshift day camp before him. Cursing to himself, he gigged the grulla up and over the rise and reined the horse to a halt near the cream stallion with charcoal markings on its rump tethered to a fir branch just beyond the fire.

  The horse’s fawn-colored saddle sat loosely on its back, the latigo strap dangling. The horse’s bridle bit was slipped so it could graze freely on the bluestem that was greening up around it.

  Hawk pointed the rifle out from his right thigh. “Funny how you always seem to know where I’m headed. Even funnier how you always seem to get there first.”

  “Coffee?” Saradee lifted the steaming tin cup in her gloved hand and grinned over the brim.

  “What’re you doing here?”

  The blonde leaned back against the deadfall fir behind her, drawing her shoulders in and pushing her breasts out until they audibly strained the rawhide drawstrings of the black leather vest she wore. It seemed to be all she wore on her high-busted torso. Her arms were long, slender, lightly muscled and slightly tanned, one wrist adorned with braided, henna-dyed leather.

  “Oh, I don’t know.” She sighed, poking her hat brim back off her forehead and blowing ripples on the surface of her coffee. “I guess I just had the urge to join you on a good, old-fashioned rapscallion hunt.”

  She folded her pink lips over the lip of the cup, drew a sip of the hot liquid into her mouth, and swallowed, canting her head to meet Hawk’s disapproving gaze.

  “I don’t need any help.”

  “I disagree, lover. If it’s Blue and Brazos Tierney you’re after, you’re probably gonna need a whole cavalry. You really oughta look a little more grateful that you at least have me on your side.” She hiked a shoulder. “I figure if we’re gonna die, we might as well die together.”

  She smiled, white teeth flashing in the sunshine.

  Hawk caressed the Henry’s trigger with his index finger. “Why do you taunt me like this?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like followin’ me around, showin’ up on my trail, showin’ up in my hotel rooms.” Hawk’s voice was the growl of an enraged, frustrated dog. “Christ, I had my fill of you in Arizona.”

  “Careful not to hurt my feelings, lover.”

  “What’s it gonna take to get shed of you once and for all?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Saradee said with her maddening insouciance. “If you’d hang around awhile, I’d probably get tired of you and ride off on my own, sooner or later. Maybe if you just professed your love for me . . .” Her eyes turned smoky and a slight flush rose in her exquisite, lightly tanned cheeks.

  The wind tusseled her hair, which hung straight down her shoulders to caress her breasts bulging at the outside edges of her vest. Hawk felt the old pull of her deep in his belly, and he turned away in the old, familiar revulsion, gritting his teeth.

  “Goddamn you,
Saradee.”

  “He’s already damned us both, lover.” She paused. When she spoke again, it was in a different tone altogether. “And you know what else?”

  Hawk turned his head to her, frowning curiously. She was staring over his right shoulder, beyond the valley directly behind him and into the next valley over, beyond a low, pine-stippled rimrock. “I think three of Tierney’s riders are slipping past you. Headin’ to town.”

  Hawk reined his horse around and reached into his saddlebags for his spyglass. Wrapping his reins around his saddle horn, he raised the telescoping glass and adjusted the focus.

  Gradually, three riders swam up out of the murk and into his sphere of magnified vision. He couldn’t see much, as the three were a long ways off, but he could see sunlight winking off spurs and hardware.

  His heart thudded in his temples.

  He was close to Two Troughs. Which meant those riders were likely Tierney’s men. Cold fingertips walked up and down the Rogue Lawman’s spine when he considered the possibility that one of those riders could be Brazos Tierney himself.

  And that all three could be the men he was hunting. . .. Heading for the Venus.

  “Shit!”

  At the same time that he reached back to drop the spyglass back into his saddlebag pouch, he rammed his heels into the grulla’s flanks, galloping back in the direction from which he’d come.

  “Hold on, lover,” Saradee yelled behind him, lurching to her feet and kicking dirt on her coffee fire. “You’re gonna need help! Wait for me!”

  16.

  “HOLD ON—I AIN’T FINISHED YET”

  HAWK saw black smoke rising from the center of town and unfurling above the rooftops bathed in midday sunshine, and his heart leapt into his throat.

  But then, as he continued urging the grulla ahead, he saw that no buildings were burning. The flames seemed isolated—maybe a large trash fire—though that didn’t mean they’d stay that way. He rode on into town, heading west along Wyoming Street where people stood on the boardwalks abutting both sides of the trace, switching their wary gazes from him to the gallows between the sheriff’s office and the Venus whorehouse, and back again.