Gallows Express

by Peter Brandvold

  Hawk checked his grulla down and stared hard-jawed at the gallows cloaked in a shimmering veil of orange, leaping flames. As he gigged the reluctant horse ahead, he could feel the flames and hear the resin popping and sizzling in the green lumber, hear the frenetic sounds of the hungry fire eating away at the wood. Black smoke rose and whipped like flags in a heavy wind. Horses tethered at the hitch racks fronting the Venus sidestepped and jerked against their reins, casting fearful glances at the burning platform behind them.

  Hawk saw Mayor Pennybacker and Councilman Learner standing on a nearby street corner, both men looking grim. The Rogue Lawman rode over, shucked his repeater from his rifle boot, and snarled, “What the hell are you standing there for? Have a bucket brigade ready in case that fire spreads.”

  He swung down from his saddle and dropped his reins in the street. Fast hooves thudded, and he turned to see Saradee trotting up behind him, her white stallion fighting the bit and tossing its head at the conflagration. Her eyes bored into the fire and danced with glee. She shook her head like a hot-blooded filly looking for a fight, and chuckled.

  “You really can’t blame them, can you? I’m sure the sight of that hangin’ platform brought back many unpleasant memories.”

  “You still here?” Hawk racked a live round into the Henry’s chamber and strode on up the steps of the Venus’s front porch. He pushed inside and stopped in the dingy foyer as Mrs. Ferrigno moved down the stairs ahead of him, grunting and muttering, her eyes bright with fear and fury. In her arms was Cassidy, head lolling from side to side. The brunette had a split lip and a cut above her right eye, which was swelling up and turning purple.

  The rotund madam in a sloppy, pink dress dropped down into the foyer, and her jaws were hard as, sidling past Hawk, her eyes bored into him. “I thought you was gonna take that killer down, Mr. Hawk. Your promise to Claire was as empty as a tin rain barrel in the Arizona desert.”

  She spat the last two words at him harshly then continued out the door. Saradee held the door for the woman. When Mrs. Ferrigno was gone, likely heading for the doctor’s, the blond pistolera came in and stood behind Hawk. The Rogue Lawman had stopped at a doorway in the foyer’s right wall. In the papered room beyond, five men sat around a round table.

  Four of the men Hawk did not recognize, but one was Reverend Hawthorne, who’d apparently roused himself from the cemetery for a card game in the whorehouse. Two of the other four fit the descriptions of “One-Eye” Willie McGee and J. T. Hostetler. Willie McGee, who wore a black eye patch and needed a shave, plucked a brown paper cigarette from his snaggly teeth to bark, “Reverend, if you got that ace o’ diamonds I been lookin’ for, I’m gonna be one piss-burned son of a bitch!”

  “Maybe won’t toss anymore donations into the collection plate, eh, Willie?” said the man sitting to McGee’s right with a laugh, his back to Hawk, a battered black hat tipped back on his thin, sandy hair. He wore leggings and two bowie knives and two holstered pistols visible from the Rogue Lawman’s angle.

  Reverend Hawthorne studied his cards and moved his lips as though oblivious to the high jinx of the two hard cases. The other two cardplayers, townsmen by their grooming and dress, fidgeted nervously in their chairs and laughed along with the Two Troughs riders though their hearts obviously weren’t in the joking.

  Hawk glanced at Saradee. “Keep those two here. Don’t kill ’em.”

  “But they need it so bad,” she complained, staring at the two in question.

  Hefting his Henry, Hawk took the stairs two steps at a time to the second story and lightened his stride as he moved down the hall, looking around, half expecting to see Claire out here somewhere, dead. The hall was empty, however, and flooded with shadows in spite of the window at the far end. No candles were lit.

  Hawk heard a man grunting, saw Claire’s door standing partway open, the lock torn out of the frame from which splinters hung. The door itself was cracked down the middle and showed the indentation of a man’s spurred boot heel.

  The grunts continued, as did the squawks of rusty bedsprings, the thrashing of a cornhusk mattress. A girl sobbed. Hawk used the barrel of his Henry to nudge the door open wider and stepped into the room.

  The bed was against the right wall. A naked man was on the bed, toiling away between a naked girl’s spread knees. Hawk couldn’t see either of their faces, but he knew who they were.

  Moving closer, Hawk saw Claire lying with her head back against her pillow, squeezing her eyes closed against the pain of the man’s savage hip thrusts. Like Cassidy, the girl had a split lip, and both her eyes were turning a sickly yellow-purple. She was naked except for a camisole bunched around her waist beneath her pale breasts.

  Brazos Tierney’s fringed, deerskin breeches were bunched down around his boots, the steel-tipped toes of which hung over the end of the bed as the man thrust his hips against the sobbing, moaning girl.

  Suddenly, Tierney stopped thrusting. He stared down at Claire. He was a big, savage-looking man with knife scars on his pasty white back and thick shoulders. His short, brown hair was sweat-matted close to his skull, showing the lines of his funnel-brimmed hat, which was on the floor near Hawk’s feet.

  Brazos turned his broad, square head toward Hawk. Long sideburns ran down nearly to his mouth corners. His eyes were even more savage than the rest of him. They were the eyes of a soulless, murdering brute. His fat upper lip curled in a sneer, and then the gray-yellow eyes moved to the rifle in Hawk’s hands.

  Hawk stared grimly down at the man, flexing his fingers against the Henry’s fore- and rear stocks. It took a lot of control not to turn the barrel toward the man’s face and pull the trigger. Brazos seemed about to say something, but then the sneer dwindled from his chapped, wet lips as his eyes met Hawk’s and apparently read the bitterness there—the raw red rage and barely bridled fury.

  “Hold on.” Brazos swallowed, gestured at the girl lying beneath him and now staring up at Hawk, as well, beseeching in her pain-racked eyes. “I ain’t finished yet.”

  Hawk took one lunging step toward the bed, dropping the Henry’s rear stock and gritting his teeth savagely as he swung the stock’s brass butt plate up until it smacked resolutely against the underside of Brazos’s chin. The outlaw’s jaws snapped together violently, making a sound like a branch being broken over a knee, and there followed the thuds of the man’s muscular body bouncing off the wall on the other side of the bed and then dropping to the floor at the base of it, out of sight.

  Hawk glanced at Claire. She was up on her elbows, curling one knee over her other leg and looking down at Brazos, still sobbing—worried, frightened. Her tangled hair obscured her face, blood trickling from her lip and down her chin.

  Hawk ran a hand down his face in frustration. “Claire, I’m sorry.”

  The girl closed her hand over her mouth then turned onto her side, away from Hawk, and drew her knees toward her bare breasts. Hawk drew the quilts and sheets up to her shoulders. He’d heard heavy footsteps in the hall, and he turned now to see Reb Winter looking shyly in at him, the boy’s watch cap in his hands.

  Softly, he said, “Hiya, Gid . . .”

  Hawk tossed his head toward the wall to his left. “Can you get someone to haul him over to the jail? Don’t worry about clothing him first.” He glanced over his shoulder at Claire, recrimination racking him for not being here when Brazos rode into town and sparing the girl the outlaw’s abuse.

  Biting back a curse, he added to Reb, “It’s a warm day.”

  “I’ll get him over there, Gid.”

  Hawk left the room and went downstairs, hearing a man’s groans and angry curses emanating from the side of the house in which the other two hard cases had been playing cards. He walked past three frightened-looking, scantily clad whores who hurried up the stairs behind him to see to Claire.

  Hawk looked into the room that served as a formal parlor and gambling den, where Saradee was bent over the outlaw J. T. Hostetler. She was on one knee, wrapping a velvet cur
tain tieback around the outlaw’s wrists, which he held behind his back while pressing his belly to the floor.

  He held his head up, and blood ran down from a nasty gash in his temple.

  “You bitch, oh, you fuckin’ bitch!” he howled. “You’re gonna live to regret this—I promise you!”

  The reverend and the other card players stood on the far side of the table, loose-jawed with shock as they watched the beautiful blonde in the rough men’s trail garb expertly tethering Hostetler’s wrists together. The other Two Troughs rider, “One-Eye” Willie McGee, was down on his knees a few feet away, hands crossed over his crotch and bobbing his head and shoulders as though doing Eastern prostrations though it was obvious the man was in dire pain.

  Between grunts and groans, he muttered as though in near-silent prayer. Finally, he fell slowly sideways onto his shoulder and drew his knees to his chest, whimpering and clutching his balls.

  “Bitch,” he grunted, stretching his lips back from chipped, crooked, black-edged teeth. “Ah, Jesus . . . where the blue-blazin’ hell’d . . . she come from . . . ?”

  “You’re close,” Hawk told him.

  Seeing that Saradee had set the men’s guns and knives atop a piano bench that stood against the far wall, under an oval-framed photograph of a young Mrs. Ferrigno and a well-dressed man, Hawk looked out one of the front windows. A dozen or so men stood around the burning gallows with water buckets. They swung their heads this way and that to see which way the sparks were drifting. A couple had moved up in front of the brothel and were tossing their bucketfuls of water onto the porch, which meant the wind must be from the north.

  A few women had gathered there, as well, having been drawn to the fire, which was always a real threat in a town built from mostly wood that had dried out in the hot sun and arid wind. One of the women was Regan Mitchell. The schoolteacher stood near Mayor Pennybacker and Learner, who’d been joined by Carson Tarwater wearing a green apron over his suit vest. More men came up from the direction of the town’s well a block east of the Venus, water sloshing over the rims of the wooden buckets in their hands.

  Hawk returned his gaze to Regan. She was staring back at him through the warped window glass. She seemed to have something on her mind.

  Hawk turned away from the window. Saradee had one of her pearl-gripped .45s out and was ordering Hostetler to his feet. She’d also tied McGee’s hands behind his back, and she ordered him up, too, though he was on his knees again and grinding his forehead into the floor, cursing so loudly that his voice broke on the high notes.

  “Don’t be a crybaby,” Saradee said. “It was a love tap.”

  McGee lifted his head, and his ruddy face was swollen with red fury in sharp contrast to the black patch over his left eye. “That was no love tap, sugar!”

  “Maybe not, but I bet you’ll never ogle a girl’s tits again so freely.”

  “I was admirin’ ’em!”

  Hawk stepped around behind McGee and began hauling him up by his tethered wrists. “Stand up.”

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  “New law in town.”

  “Who’s she?” Hostetler wanted to know.

  “My next fever dream!” quipped one of the townsmen who’d been playing cards. He’d retaken his seat with the reverend and the other man, all three of whom now seemed to be enjoying the show before them, the reverend hastily refilling each of their whiskey glasses.

  Saradee cowed the man with a look, and Hawk gave One-Eye McGee a shove toward the doorway opening onto the foyer, McGee still groaning and sucking air through his teeth. There were many loud thumps from the hall before him—the sounds of two men carrying something heavy down the creaky stairway. A few seconds later, Hawk saw big Reb Winter backing through the foyer, heading toward the front door, his arms hooked under Brazos Tierney’s bare shoulders.

  Reb gave Hawk one of his ludicrous grins as he continued shuffling backward, Brazos batting his eyes and spitting bits of broken teeth along with blood over his lips and down his chin and neck and onto the rough wooden floor. When Reb had disappeared from Hawk’s view, the man at Brazos’s other end appeared—an Indian even bigger than Reb and with a long braid hanging down the back of his striped blanket coat.

  He had his hands wrapped around the semiconscious hard case’s ankles. He did not turn his head toward Hawk before he passed the doorway and continued on out to the whorehouse’s front porch, the screen door slapping shut behind him.

  “Holy shit in the nun’s privy,” remarked One-Eye McGee in a pinched voice. “When Brazos realizes what you done to him, and when his old man Blue Tierney realizes what you done, Mr. Lawdog sir, you’re gonna be one sorry badgetotin’ son of a bitch!”

  Hawk rammed his rifle butt against the hard case’s back, shoving him out into the foyer before prodding him out the front door. Saradee hazed Hostetler along behind Hawk. As the Rogue Lawman followed the two men carrying Brazos at an angle across the street and around the burning gallows, heading for the jailhouse, the flame-engulfed platform gave a loud belching sound, and then it suddenly collapsed in on itself.

  The crowd that had gathered around it, water buckets ready, lurched backward. The fire gained intensity as it swallowed up the last of its fuel. Quickly, however, it lost that intensity, and the roar of the blaze dropped several octaves though the green wood continued to pop and snap, sometimes sounding nearly as loud as pistol shots.

  Grateful the fire was dying without having involved any of the structures around it, the crowd seemed to give a collective sigh of relief. Hawk nudged One-Eye on ahead, tracing a broad arc around the east side of the fire, but he stopped again when he saw Regan standing a few feet to his right. The teacher had her arms crossed on her breasts, and she switched her troubled, vaguely curious gaze from Hawk to Saradee behind him, and back to Hawk again.

  “I was coming to see you, Sheriff,” she said tonelessly. “I have something to discuss.” She glanced at Brazos Tierney’s naked, bloody form being carried on around the gallows by Reb and the Indian, and said crisply, “I see you’re indisposed at the moment. It can wait.”

  Hawk stared at the woman, who now stared back at him. He was aware of Saradee behind him, and having the two women here together made him feel like he had a sticky coating of wheat chaff under his shirt, though he wasn’t sure why.

  He nodded to the teacher and continued prodding One-Eye around the burning gallows, through the crowd that opened to let Reb and the Indian pass. Hawk glanced behind to see Saradee exchange oblique, vaguely challenging gazes with the teacher, and that itch under Hawk’s shirt got worse.

  17.

  “DANGEROUS DOINGS, MR. HAWK”

  HAWK opened the door to the cell block, then stepped back as Reb and the Indian started through the door with Brazos Tierney, who glanced up at Hawk, his mouth and chin bloody, furling his thin, light-brown brows over his deep-set, bleary eyes.

  “Hey,” he drawled, his words distorted by the blood and broken teeth, lifting a heavy hand to point accusingly at the Rogue Lawman. “You . . . you’re the bastard that busted my chops!”

  As Reb and the Indian carried him off, his voice echoed around the cavernous, stone-walled cell block. “You just wait till my pa, Ole Blue, hears about this!”

  “Yeah,” One-Eye McGee said as Hawk shoved him through the door behind Saradee and Hostetler. “You just wait!”

  When Hawk had the three men locked up in the same cell nearest the cell block door, Reb and the Indian slouched on out of the jailhouse to go see about the burning gallows. Hawk locked the cell block door. Saradee doffed her hat and ran a gloved hand through her thick, blond hair, tossing it back off her shoulders. “You’re gonna need a jailer, lover. Maybe I’d better stick around awhile. Think you can keep your hands off me an’ act professional . . . while we’re on duty?”

  “Don’t do me any favors.” He walked over to the open front door to see how the fire was doing. “But if I told you to stay, you’d go, and the other way around.”


  “Who is she?”

  Arching a brow, Hawk turned to Saradee sitting on a corner of the cluttered desk.

  “You know,” Saradee said, lifting her chin to indicate the street, then setting her hat back on her head carefully with both hands. “The chestnut-haired beauty who was comin’ to pay you a visit.” Her blue eyes shone deviously above her long, straight nose.

  Hawk turned away from her. “The schoolteacher.”

  Pretending as though mention of Regan had only just now reminded him that she’d wanted to speak with him, though the teacher had been on his mind since he’d seen her out by the burning gallows, Hawk set his rifle on his shoulder and headed on out the door. “I best see what she wanted. Might be important.”

  “It might at that,” Saradee said in a light mocking tone, adding from the doorway, where she leaned a shoulder against the frame and crossed her arms on her breasts, “Might be real important. But don’t you expect me to hold the fort down all day, now—you hear me, Hawk?”

  He walked on into the street, looking for Regan amongst the slowly dispersing crowd. Most of the men who’d filled water buckets were now emptying the buckets on the gallows, which had burned down now to a modest-sized bonfire. Mayor Pennybacker broke away from the crowd to approach Hawk, who continued glancing around for the teacher.

  “Dangerous doings, Mr. Hawk,” the mayor said darkly.

  He was flanked by Ben Learner and Romeo Pike. Pike was in sleeve garters and wearing a green visor on his nearly bald head. The Poudre River Transport proprietor looked no happier than the other two councilmen. Carson Tarwater stood a ways off, nearer the gallows, with two empty buckets in his hands as he stood gazing toward Hawk and the other councilmen, a dubious smile jerking at his mouth.

  “I’m doing the job you hired me to do, Mr. Mayor,” Hawk said. “Too late for cold feet.”