Gallows Express

by Peter Brandvold

  The small, wild-haired man dressed in a vanilla-colored hat and suit tossed a beringed hand toward the gallows and then toward the jailhouse behind Hawk, where Saradee still stood nicely decorating the doorframe, smiling and pushing her breasts out.

  “This worries me, however. I mean Brazos and his men so brazenly entering town just a few weeks after killing the sheriff and his deputy, not to mention the executioner, and terrorizing poor Hawthorne!”

  He shook his head wearily. “Of course, we expected them back. But this . . . their burning the gallows, abusing whores . . .” He shook his head. “Maybe we should at least pass a law against citizens carrying guns in our fair town. Maybe that would deter them.”

  He, Pike, and Learner eyed Hawk hopefully.

  Hawk stopped looking around for Regan, who’d apparently left the street. He frowned at the three men before him and snorted. “You’re saying you wanna pass a law, disarming the citizens of Trinity?”

  “Well, of course, it wouldn’t really affect the law-abiding citizens, Mr. Hawk,” said Pike. “But any man who enters our town would have to check his weapons with you or be jailed.”

  “Yeah,” said Learner, nodding forcefully. “Stop the crime before it even gets started.”

  Hawk scowled at the three men. “You got enough laws, gentlemen. If you pass any more, I think you oughta pass one making it illegal for Trinity’s fair citizens to walk around unarmed.”

  The trio frowned in unison, and dangled their jaws, aghast.

  “Otherwise,” Hawk added, beginning to step away to continue searching for Regan, “it’ll only be men like Brazos who are armed, and Trinity’s citizens will be harmless as sheep in a den of wolves.” He turned back to the mayor. “One more thing, Pennybacker. Send over some carpenters to start rebuilding those gallows. Sheriff Stanley wanted a hanging, and he’s gonna get one.”

  With that, he strode away, leaving the three councilmen frowning incredulously after him.

  Finding Regan nowhere around Wyoming Street, Hawk headed for her small, neat frame house on the southern side street that intersected Wyoming near the Poudre River House. As he started down the side street, he met the Venus’s madam, Mrs. Ferrigno, and a gruff-looking, gray-haired gent in a tan suit and slouch hat carrying a black accordion medical kit. The madam gave Hawk a hard look as she elbowed the doctor and said, “That’s him,” in a taut, clipped tone.

  Then the odd-looking pair continued past Hawk and around the corner behind him, while he continued to the house he knew to be Regan Mitchell’s. He pushed through the gate in the crisp, white picket fence and mounted the front stoop.

  There was a screen door behind which was a storm door with a glass upper panel. Rose-patterned curtains were drawn across the door. Similar curtains were drawn across the two large bay windows to Hawk’s right, though they’d been pulled behind a potted plant perched on an ornate wooden stand so the plant could bask in the southern sunshine.

  Hawk opened the screen door, the springs whining, and tapped on the varnished-oak inside door, making the pane rattle faintly. To his right, the bay window curtains moved, as though someone had parted them to see out, and then he heard a light tread that grew louder until the locking bolt clicked and the door opened.

  Regan frowned. “The new sheriff makes house calls?”

  Hawk shrugged. “I thought you might be in school.”

  “It’s Saturday.”

  Her probing eyes made him uncomfortable.

  “You gonna invite me in?”

  She dropped her eyes quickly, as though considering the question. Then she drew the door wide and stepped back. “Would you like a cup of tea? I just started a pot for myself.” She looked up at him, her eyes still looking mildly stricken, as they had back on Wyoming Street. “Seeing the burning gallows was . . . rather chilling. I saw what Brazos Tierney did to that sporting girl.”

  “Well, he’s under lock and key now.”

  Regan turned the corners of her mouth down, then abruptly turned away. Hawk doffed his hat and closed the door as she moved into the kitchen on the foyer’s left side. “That tea sounds good.”

  His hat in his hands, he glanced to his right, into a neat little living room, simply but nicely furnished, with stairs running up the near wall into the second half story. There was a sofa, a fainting couch, a few small tables with plants on them, the plant stand fronting the bay windows, and two brocade-covered armchairs. Two braided rugs on the floor. A black piano abutted the far wall, between two windows. It was old and worn but glistened with nourishing oil. Probably a family heirloom.

  “Nice house you have here.”

  From the kitchen, where she was scooping tea from a tin can, Regan said, “Please . . . go in and sit down. I’m afraid what I have to discuss with you was more troubling before I watched the gallows burn.”

  Hawk glanced at her, but she stood at an angle that made seeing her face impossible. Her chestnut hair tumbled in swirls down her slender back. She wore a dark red ribbon in it. The ribbon matched the slightly lighter red of her casual but conservative basque, though no dress, however conservative, could conceal the ripeness of the woman’s figure.

  Curious, Hawk went on into the parlor and sank down in one of the armchairs.

  He hiked a boot on a knee and hooked his hat on his other knee, looking around at the house’s well cared-for appointments including framed tintypes and daguerreotypes on the walls, a woven tapestry portraying a bucolic scene with farm workers and hay shocks.

  Hawk sank back in the chair, feeling somehow at home here in this house, half consciously finding solace in the sounds of stove lids being manipulated in the kitchen, of china cups being set into saucers and then the cups rattling on the saucers as both were set down on a serving tray.

  An icebox door opened with a squawk, then closed with a thud and the click of a latch. A stopper was removed from the lip of a bottle—a milk bottle, probably—making another soft squeaking sound. Hawk did not have to reflect on such sounds to be at home with them, and for them to conjure in him a heartrending homesickness. A longing for that which would never come again. At least, not the home and the domestic life he had once known with Linda and Jubal.

  Could another, similar life be waiting for him somewhere, sometime? Was that even possible for the man he had become?

  Regan came into the room with a tea service and set the tray on a coffee table fronting the sofa against the room’s left wall, under an oil painting of an alpine scene with mountain goats.

  “Milk and sugar?”

  “Please.”

  She poured milk into both teacups and followed it up with teaspoons of sugar from a china bowl. Hawk rose and scooped his cup off the table, holding the saucer in one hand and staring down at the woman as he lifted the cup in the other. The curved handle was too small for his index finger so he wrapped his entire hand around the cup and sipped.

  He let his gaze trail down from her hair with its streaks of copper fire to her long, smooth neck, on over the curve of her shoulder and long, slender arm to her wrist and pale hand with long, unpainted fingers and a single, understated ring. He could see the outline of her legs beneath the dress—they were long and willowy, and they kindled a fire down deep beneath his belly as he grappled with the fanciful image of them bare and clamped tightly about his ribs.

  She glanced up at him as she sat back on the fainting couch with her teacup and saucer on a knee, and he realized he was staring at her. His sudden, inexplicable yearning for her must have been obvious; her eyes acquired a faint incredulity as she dropped them again to her steaming cup, lifting the tea to rich lips, which darkened as her cheeks flushed.

  He swallowed the hot, sweet liquid, feeling his ear tips warm with chagrin.

  “I’m not usually a tea drinker, but it’s right good. Thanks.”

  Turning away from her, he went back and sat down in his chair, feeling awkward in this house that looked so neat and scrubbed, and here he was in his trail-dusty, mudsplashed d
uds that probably still had the smell of gun smoke and death on them. The teacup and saucer resembled small, delicate jewels in his brown, leathery hands.

  He composed himself quickly, reaching up to loosen the bandanna knotted around his neck, and said with a businesslike sigh, “Now, then, Miss Mitchell—what was it you wanted to see me about?”

  “I’m afraid it’s rather embarrassing, Mr. Hawk.” She lifted her teacup and sipped, keeping her gaze down.

  “Your cat stuck in a tree?” He grinned.

  He’d meant it as a joke to lighten the mood and to assuage his own discomfort and goatish lust for the civilized woman, but the only effect it seemed to have on her was to dig three vertical lines into the skin above the bridge of her pretty nose.

  She pinned her eyes to him, and he suddenly felt like one of her male students she’d caught neglecting his homework. “It’s the Reverend Hawthorne. I’ve caught him skulking around outside my windows three nights in a row, Sheriff. Caught him out there last week, lurking about my garden. I’d thought he was scrounging for root vegetables, and I let it go, but last night I saw his face in that window right there”—she pointed to the window on the far side of the piano—“and the lamp there lit it unmistakably.”

  Hawk frowned, remembering the pathetic creature he’d discovered curled up in the cemetery earlier that morning. “Hawthorne?”

  “I feel terrible about the man. What they did to him. In some ways it would have been better if they’d killed him as they did the two lawmen and the hangman.” Regan shook her head darkly and sipped her tea as if to relieve the troubling reverie. “A man of the cloth, begging for his life while others die around him . . . God, how terrible.”

  She lifted her eyes to Hawk’s once more. “Look, I know he’s not right in his head, Sheriff. I know the man that he was a month ago would not be skulking around a woman’s windows at night, trying to get a glimpse of her bathing. But he’s no longer that man, and frankly, I’m a little afraid of what he might do if he’s not warned away from my house.”

  “I just saw him over at the Venus,” Hawk said. “He’s probably still there.”

  “I hear he spends most of his time there these days.” She took another sip of her tea, then looked at the curtained bay windows flanking Hawk, narrowing her eyes with worry. “I just hope no other innocent people suffer before this thing is over.”

  “You mean . . . ?”

  “Yes, Mr. Hawk,” Regan said, returning her resolute, defiant gaze to his. “Until the Tierneys are either dead or behind bars and you are gone. That you are indeed a vigilante was quite obvious by the condition Brazos was in when Reb and Alvin Gault hauled him out of the brothel.”

  “Do you know what he did in there?”

  “It doesn’t matter what he did in there. At least, it shouldn’t matter to you. Or to me. Only to a judge and a legally seated jury. You see, Mr. Hawk, I firmly believe that’s the only way to bring civilized society to the frontier. What you did was illegal. Every bit as illegal as what Brazos himself did.”

  “He beat and raped Claire Lang.” Hawk felt his heart beating more insistently as his temper began running out to the end of its leash. “Only after he’d beaten and likely raped Claire’s friend, Cassidy. She’s at the doc’s now.”

  “Was he threatening you when you shattered his teeth?”

  Hawk only stared at her.

  Regan lowered her eyes to her teacup, her cheeks paling slightly. “Like I said, it shouldn’t matter what he did. Your abusing him in the guise of a bona fide lawman only sanctions the man’s own lawless ways, and, indeed, those of his father and every owlhoot who rides through this town.”

  Hawk opened his mouth to speak, but she jerked her head up at him again, the angry flush returning to her face, the fiery anger igniting in her eyes. “Oh, I heard what you did to the bank robbers. Wonderful, Sheriff Hawk. Brilliant performance. Thank you for disposing of such brigands, and bringing the law to Trinity!”

  “I don’t understand you, Miss Mitchell,” Hawk growled, feeling his nostrils flare with fury. “You grew up out here. You know how it is. Or did you forget when you went back East to school?”

  “I didn’t go that far east to school, Mr. Hawk. Only as far as Omaha, Nebraska. But I did learn something about the law . . . something I learned on top of the experience of watching my father be lynched by hooded vigilantes!”

  Her eyes were hard, but tears varnished them. Her lips formed a straight line, but the upper one trembled as the teacup she was holding clattered in its saucer.

  Hawk stared down at his own cup.

  Regan said, “He was mistaken for a horse thief on his own claim. Riders from a neighboring ranch found us when we were building a wild horse trap across the entrance to a box canyon. Rustlers had recently passed through the area, judging by the fresh tracks the ranch hands were following, and one of the horses had gotten away from the rustlers and slipped into our remuda.”

  “I’m sorry,” Hawk said, continuing to stare down at his nearly empty cup.

  “I’m not finished.” Her voice was hard and cold, and it trembled now with fury as well as bereavement. “The men from the ranch had suffered the loss of much of their riding stock, and because the local law couldn’t do much about the rustling, they took matters into their own hands. It was easy to mistake my father and me for rustlers, since they considered us ‘nesters’ on Platte River Range, anyway, and were eager to see us gone. Before either my father or I really knew what was happening, they’d hogtied me and manhandled Pa onto a horse with a noose around his neck.”

  Regan dropped her pain-racked eyes and sniffed, brushing tears from her cheek with the back of her hand. “I remember the uncomprehending, last look he gave me before they slapped the horse out from under him.”

  She shook her head as if in a vain effort to rid the image from her mind. “Then they rode away as a wild pack of wolves on the blood scent, and left me to struggle desperately against the ropes while I watched my father dance in the air before me and, finally, die.”

  “Christ,” Hawk hissed.

  He heaved himself to his feet, set his teacup and saucer down and sat beside her on the fainting couch. He set her cup and saucer on the tray, then drew her into his arms. She did not resist him but threw her own arms around his neck and sobbed against his bandanna-ringed neck.

  “That was neither the beginning or the end to what those men did out there, Mr. Hawk,” she said when her shoulders had stopped jerking, continuing to keep her arms wrapped tightly about his neck, clinging to him as though in fear of being thrown from a boat and into a dark, storm-tossed sea. “In the end, eight men were hanged.”

  “Were they all innocent?”

  “Three of the eight were, including my father.” She drew her head back to stare up at him grimly. “But don’t you see—what they did was worse even than what they accused the men they murdered of!”

  “I do see that,” Hawk said, pressing his hands against her sides, feeling her ribs expand and contract beneath his palms as she breathed. “A vigilante gang is an ugly thing. But I’m not a gang, Regan. I am not blinded by passion. I am a reasoning lawman who knows badmen when I see them and who knows from his own personal experience that the laws often only serve the lawless, not the lawful.”

  Regan shook her head slowly, then reached up and placed her hands on his broad, high-tapering cheeks, her thumbs brushing the ends of his mustache. “God, the pain you must feel, Gideon. Don’t you see? I understand it. But we must stand strong against it.”

  “That’s what I’ve done.”

  He wrapped his hands around her wrists, gently lowered her hands from his face. He was about to rise and grab his hat and leave, but her eyes held him. So did the warmth of her flesh against his. And her sorrow, the intensity of which nearly matched his own. Suddenly, he pulled her against him once more, found her mouth with his own, pressed his lips to hers.

  He was surprised to feel her returning the kiss, tilting her head slig
htly, parting her lips. She pressed her hands against his back and a barely audible groan of passion welled up from deep in her chest.

  Her lips were warm, fleshy, pliant. . ..

  Hawk kissed her harder, drew her even closer until her breasts flattened against his chest. She groaned once more. Her breasts swelled. But then she wriggled away from him, breaking off the kiss and pressing her hands against his shoulders. Sucking her upper lip, she turned away, shaking her head.

  “No . . .”

  “I could love you, Regan.”

  She’d swung her head back to him before he’d even realized he’d said it. She studied him, her eyes probing, and he wondered what she saw there because he wasn’t certain of his own heart. He suddenly felt like a drowning man flailing for a life raft, only the current was too strong, the stormy ocean swells to steep and violent . . .

  “Oh, Gideon.” Her voice was soft, breathless, hushed. She seemed to be staring right through him, and he hated the sympathy he saw in her eyes.

  The pity . . .

  “Thanks for the tea.” Hawk stood. He grabbed his hat off the floor by the chair he’d been sitting in and donned it on his way into the foyer. The back of his neck was warm with embarrassment. “I’ll talk to the reverend.”

  He went out. Just before he’d closed the door behind him, he heard her call his name.

  He did not turn back. He walked out through the gate in the picket fence and lengthened his stride for Wyoming Street. Turning west on the main drag, he saw only a small handful of men standing around the gallows now, pouring water on the steaming, blackened ruins. He was about to head on up to the jailhouse’s stoop when he saw Saradee on the street ahead of him.

  The pretty blond renegade sat her big white stallion, facing away from Hawk. She was at the edge of town and heading west at a spanking trot. She kicked the stallion into a lope, and the rolling hills absorbed her.

  Relief loosened Hawk’s shoulders. He was glad to be rid of her.

  He glanced eastward, automatically looking to see if Blue Tierney was anywhere near, knowing the man and his desperado band would be coming soon. Nothing that way but several wary-looking locals standing around with empty water buckets, peering toward the jailhouse.