Gallows Express

by Peter Brandvold

  He met her soft gaze. A bittersweet smile quirked the corners of her long, ripe mouth that had turned redder with their lovemaking. Her hands were folded on her pale, flat belly, beneath her breasts that were lightly chafed from his hands and mustache.

  Hawk gave his own bittersweet smile, then leaned down and kissed her belly button, nuzzled her fingers before she lifted her hands and ran them brusquely through his still-damp hair.

  Hawk pushed away from her, kissed her hand once more. “You best head out the back stairs. You were here alone in the new sheriff’s room longer than what most would see as proper.”

  She nodded, curling the corners of her mouth down slightly, sadly, and nodded as though at what he hadn’t said as much as what he had.

  Hawk dressed, feeling her eyes on him as she lay on her side, head resting on the heel of her hand, though he didn’t look back at her. He couldn’t look at her. He felt a hard knot in the pit of his belly, knowing he would never be the man for her, beyond what they’d been for each other for a few hours this afternoon.

  She’d had a taste of him. He, of her. That had to be enough.

  He buckled his cartridge belt around his waist, donned his hat, and went to the door. He stopped, his hand on the handle, and looked over at her.

  “You didn’t eat your supper.” She lay on her back now, staring at the ceiling. In the dim room, her naked breasts rose and fell slowly.

  Hawk shook his head. “I’ll heat it up later, when I really need it.”

  He went out and took the stairs to the hotel lobby where Mrs. Lundy was checking in a well-dressed couple with luggage on the floor around their expensive shoes. The woman wore a long fur coat, and her picture hat was adorned with ostrich feathers. Stage passengers, likely. The stage was parked out front of the hotel.

  “That’s him, there,” said Mrs. Lundy to the man and the woman, both of whom swung around toward Hawk.

  “You’re the sheriff?” asked the bespectacled man in a new but dusty beaver hat. Fresh off the coach.

  Hawk paused, looked at the pair.

  “Do you know that the trail just outside of town is being haunted by ruffians?”

  Hawk studied them. Anger and fear shone in their eyes.

  “You don’t say.”

  He went on outside where the man who was obviously the stage driver was standing around with his shotgun messenger and five townsmen, just off the coach’s right front wheel. One of the townsmen indicated Hawk with a tilt of his head, and the shotgun messenger—a big man coated in dust from the crown of his battered yellow Stetson to the toes of his scuffed boots—turned to the new lawman of Trinity.

  “Badmen outside town, Sheriff. Blue Tierney.”

  “How far?”

  “A couple miles. They were millin’ around the trail as though they were waitin’ for us. I thought they’d rob us, as they’d robbed us before. Only, this time they had a warning. A warning to be delivered to you.”

  Hawk waited.

  “No one gets in or out of town until you’ve released Brazos Tierney. That goes for the train.”

  “That won’t do, Sheriff,” said a man dressed in the billed watch cap and blue jacket of a postal clerk. “The U.S. mail is due to arrive on train fifty-nine from Denver on Monday morning, and the mail must not be held up. I have several men awaiting tax receipts from cattle they sold in Chicago. Not to mention freight for the mercantile and the other businesses here on Wyoming Street.”

  Hawk raked his eyes across the men shrewdly. “What are you suggesting?”

  The men looked at each other.

  “That you release your prisoners,” said the postal clerk. “You’re only one man, for crying out loud! You know what he did to Sheriff Stanley and Deputy Freeman. The whole town is at risk here!”

  “And what about the next time Brazos comes to town to kill and beat up more whores?” Hawk waited. The men just stared at him, hard-eyed. “You mean, you’ll knuckle under? Let him do what he wants because you’re all afraid of him?”

  Hawk shook his head. “I suggest you men arm yourselves. When I hang Brazos Tierney Monday morning, you’re likely going to need a good rifle if you want to see that your homes and businesses don’t get burned. If you want the train to make it into town, you ride out there to where the tracks come in and make sure it does.”

  “What about you?” asked the stage driver, scowling with exasperation.

  “My priority is to see that Brazos and his partners hang, as Stanley intended. When and if Tierney shows himself again—which he hasn’t yet except trying to put the fear of god into a few sheep—I’ll move on him as best as one man can. Remember, though—this is your town. It’s up to you to stand up for it.”

  Hawk pinched his hat brim and stepped down off the boardwalk fronting the Poudre River House and began tramping eastward along Wyoming, along which flares and oil pots had been lit. There was only a little streak of green over the purple western ridges. Ahead, Reb was stepping out away from the jailhouse, his old rifle with its rope lanyard on his shoulder. A pink paper fluttered in his hand.

  “Everything all right?” Hawk felt chagrined at having left the kid alone so long. But he couldn’t have turned Regan away if the town had been burning around him.

  “It was, Gid.” The big younker was looking high over Hawk’s right shoulder, while absently extending the pink telegraph flimsy. “Till now, I reckon.”

  Hawk didn’t turn to look where Reb was looking, however. Something had caught his eye on a high, flattopped bluff northeast of town. The bluff was cloaked in purple shadows clearly showing a fire burning at the top of the formation, with the silhouettes of men milling around the flames. Hawk turned to peer in the direction Reb was still staring, and his eyes hooded darkly.

  On another formation—this one a broad mesa shelving downward on its north side, and called Trinity Ridge—another fire about the size of a bonfire burned. A couple of more man-shaped silhouettes were moving around the fire, tossing large branches on top of the leaping flames.

  Startled murmurs rose eastward along Wyoming Street. Others had seen the fires. Men were standing in the street, some with beer mugs in their fists and skeptical expressions on their faces, swinging their heads from southwest to northeast. Burning oil pots on the boardwalks fronting the saloons and the hotel limned their faces in eerie red light and shadows.

  “Tierney,” someone said. “Tryin’ to get our goats!”

  Hawk turned to Reb, who’d turned his own head to see what some of the others were gazing at in the northeast. He shoved his billed watch cap back on his sandy-haired head and whistled. “Well, now—w-would ya look at that!”

  Hawk read the flimsy, and his chest lightened with satisfaction. The hangman he’d cabled had agreed to come. He’d be here on Monday’s early train.

  Hawk let the breeze take the flimsy and started walking past the kid. “Fetch some bread and water for my prisoners—will you, son? We’re gonna have to keep ’em alive till Monday.” He flipped a ten-dollar gold piece in the air, and Reb wrapped a big hand around it. “Then get yourself a beer. You’ve earned it.”

  “Wow.” Reb stared down at the coin, for the moment distracted by the perplexing fires. “I do thank you, Gid.”

  “Like I said, boy—you earned it.”

  Hawk started up the jailhouse’s porch steps, glancing once more at the growing bonfire that he could see over the building’s shake-shingled roof.

  “What you suppose them fires is all about, Gid?” Reb asked behind him. “Just old Tierney tryin’ to bedevil us.”

  “Yep.” Hawk looked up and down Wyoming Street where more and more men were gathering. Even a few respectable women and whores. “Looks like he’s doin’ a pretty good job of it, too.”

  Hawk looked at the gallows between the jailhouse and the well-lit Venus brothel, glad to see that the carpenters had a good third of it erected. They’d likely finish easily by tomorrow noon. Come Monday, there’d be a hanging.

  And Sheriff
Stanley could rest a little easier.

  Hawk went into the jailhouse to see about his prisoners.

  21.

  “THAT SON OF A BITCH ANSWERED MY PLEAS AND LET ME LIVE”

  LATER, Hawk inspected the area around Regan’s house and the doctor’s frame house beside it. He wasn’t expecting to find Pastor Hawthorne lurking around out here tonight of all nights, but as he walked on down the center of the side street, a rustling sounded from the gap between the church and an old adobe-brick hovel, across the street from the teacher’s place.

  Hawk cocked the Henry and turned toward the dark gap, the half-ruined hovel and the roof of the white, steeple-fronted church glistening in the starlight. There was a coyote-like whoop from one of the ridges. Ahead of Hawk, a man gave a startled grunt.

  Hawk stopped. A dark figure moved in the shadows. Hawk pressed the butt of his rifle against his cartridge belt, aiming straight out from his right hip. If it had been Tierney’s men, he’d have seen a gun flash by now.

  “Hawthorne?”

  A rheumy chuckle. There was a gurgling sound, like that of a bottle being tipped, and then a man coughed.

  “Go on home, Reverend,” Hawk said, keeping his voice low. “Go home, get a hold of yourself. It’s Sunday tomorrow. Don’t you have a sermon to write?”

  The reverend’s tall, lean figure separated from the dense darkness of the gap between the buildings as the man stumbled slowly toward Hawk. The starlight flashed off the collar at the man’s neck, the bottle in his hand. Hawk could smell the rancid whiskey sweat on the man before he could see his eyes—two dark spheres above his aquiline nose.

  “You think I was gonna go try to see the teacher again, don’t you?” Hawthorne moved up to within three feet of Hawk.

  The Rogue Lawman’s eyes burned from the stench. “Wasn’t that where you were headed?”

  Hawthorne stared at Hawk, his eyes fierce in their deep sockets.

  “No.” The minister shook his head. “I was headed away from there. She’s retired, apparently, her windows dark. But why shouldn’t I look at her? She’s beautiful.”

  Suddenly, the man’s broad slash of a mouth showed the white teeth behind the lips. “You know she’s beautiful. I know where she was today—for nearly three hours this afternoon. I know what she was doing up there with you. If she hadn’t been sinning in unwedded bliss with the new sheriff of Trinity, she wouldn’t have had to leave by the back stairs.”

  “Go home, Reverend.”

  “How was it, Mr. Hawk? How was it, having such a beautiful, innocent creature writhing beneath you?”

  Hawk shook his head. “What the hell happened to you, Hawthorne?”

  “What do you mean—what happened? A man of the cloth begged for his life while others died.” With the same hand holding the bottle, he pointed toward the fire atop the northwestern ridge. “And that son of a bitch answered my pleas and let me live. He should have put a bullet in me!”

  Revulsion flowed through Hawk like a wave of black tar. Gritting his teeth, he lowered his rifle and grabbed the man’s collar with his free hand. He pulled Hawthorne up close to his own face despite the deathlike stench of his breath.

  “We all gotta save ourselves, Hawthorne. In our own way. Now, it’s your turn. In the meantime, stay away from Regan. The next time I see you out here, I won’t kill you, but I’ll have you prayin’ again right quick!”

  Hawthorne gritted his teeth as Hawk tightened his grip on the man’s shirt collar. He grunted and struggled, knees buckling. Still, he managed ribald laughter. “Come on, Hawk,” he hissed. “Tell me how she was! How did her breasts feel in your hands?”

  Hawk let the man sag to the ground. Hawthorne fell forward, dropping his bottle and cursing. Hawk moved back out of the mouth of the gap, and looked at Regan’s house on the far side of the street. Her place behind the white picket fence was dark, the leaded glass window inserts reflecting the stars and the orange fire on Trinity Ridge.

  Hawk glanced once more at Hawthorne, who had scrambled to a sitting position in the brushy, trash-strewn gap and was holding his bottle up to see how much whiskey remained. He was chuckling softly.

  “Remember what I told you, Reverend.” Hawk headed on out of the gap, turning toward Wyoming Street.

  Behind him, glass shattered. The preacher’s chuckles turned to desperate sobs. “Son of a bitch!”

  Ten minutes later, Hawk stopped near the new gallows, poked his hat brim off his forehead, and stared over the false facades along Wyoming Street’s south side. Last time Hawk had checked the time, it was one thirty a.m., nearly the darkest hour. The fire atop the shelving mesa still licked its flames at the sparkling, star-dusty sky.

  He turned to the north.

  The other fire burned, as well. Both were about the same size—large enough to roast a pig on. Occasionally over the course of the night, Tierney’s men had fired gunshots and howled like crazed coyotes. They hadn’t kept up the din, as they likely wanted to conserve their ammo as well as their voices, but they’d give a howl or trigger a shot at one of the rooftops of Trinity just to nudge awake those few in the town who were beginning to drift asleep.

  Terror tactics. Hawk remembered that both his own Union side as well as the Rebs had used them to great effect during the War Between the States.

  A rifle cracked.

  Hawk felt his own nerves tighten like drawn piano wire. Even his nerves that had become so accustomed to strain. He could imagine the effect that it had on the rest of the town—men and women lying awake in their beds, staring at the dark ceiling above their beds. Or, having given up on sleep, sipping coffee in their parlor chairs or at their kitchen tables.

  Bastards. Oh, well, they were just testing Trinity’s mettle. Hawk himself was curious about how hard the town would dig in when Tierney and his pack of hired gun wolves came calling. Which they would most certainly do sooner or later, either before Hawk hanged Brazos, Hostetler, and One-Eye, or later. Whenever they came, they’d be too many for Hawk to take down alone. He’d need help. And, like he’d told Pennybacker, a lawman was only as strong as the town he was sworn to protect.

  Hawk caressed his rifle’s hammer as he looked around.

  All the saloons were dark. Even the Venus had let its oil pots and flares burn out. No one was in the mood for drinking or patronizing the whores, it seemed.

  The last of the saloon patrons had stumbled off to the livery stables or flophouses several hours ago. Now, most of the town was dark, though on his rounds Hawk had seen a few dim lantern glows. Most of the citizens, like Regan, had darkened their windows to render their houses less compelling targets for Tierney’s potshooting cutthroats.

  The town was quiet, but it wasn’t a serene quiet. It was like the quiet Hawk remembered before the start of the skirmishing at Chancellorsville. A heavy, tarlike quiet. The silence that precedes and follows an explosion.

  He walked up the jailhouse steps, unlocked the office door, went in, and turned up the wick on the lantern he’d left burning on the same post that held the main key ring.

  “Hey, Hawk,” Brazos shouted from the cell block, his voice muffled by the stout door and heavy stone walls. “What’s it like out there. Them coyotes getting close?”

  Brazos laughed.

  Softly, One-Eye McGee started singing “Bringing in the Sheaves,” while Hostetler and Brazos snickered mockingly.

  “Better have a pot of coffee boiling for Pa!” he shouted after a while, as Hawk sat in his desk chair and slowly rolled a quirley. “He’s gonna be mad if you don’t have the coffee on when he comes.”

  More laughter. Hawk ignored it. They were wanting his goat. While they were annoying, and he’d like to indulge in a catnap, they were not accomplishing their task. The shooting from the ridges and the coyote-like howls strained his nerves momentarily, but mostly he was filled with a fateful calm.

  Whatever was going to come would come. He was ready. There was no point in whipping up fantasies of himself and Regan. What they c
ould have had together, they’d had in his room at the Poudre River House. No, he was no longer afraid of what would happen to him here in Trinity. He was just wondering how the rest of the town would meet it when it came.

  He got his answer the next morning, after Reb had spelled him in the jailhouse and he’d gone back to his hotel to wash up and grab a quick breakfast. He was sitting on the steps watching the carpenters dutifully putting the finishing touches on the gallows while casting him skeptical glances, when he saw Mayor Pennybacker and Councilmen Pike and Learner walking toward him from the direction of the hotel. The three looked grim.

  Hawk sucked a pungent lungful of tobacco smoke, then rose and flicked the stub into the street as the three men approached.

  “Gentlemen,” Hawk said. “You don’t look all that well rested.”

  Pennybacker said nothing. Neither did the other two until the rotund, olive-skinned Pike gritted his teeth and said, “Who could get any sleep with those wolves prowling the ridges!”

  Behind the three, a small group of other townsmen had gathered, all looking wary, tentative, expectant. Hawk saw Regan, as well, striding slowly up the south side of the street from the east. She wore a heavy cape over her dress; the soft morning light shone in her hair. She stopped at the front of the town’s drugstore and stared toward Hawk with an oblique expression.

  Hearing footsteps behind him, Hawk saw Carson Tarwater moving toward him from the west. Tarwater was flanked by Hy Booker and several other businessmen from that end of the town. Pastor Hawthorne came up from a gap between two buildings on the street’s north side to press his back to the side of a blacksmith shop, hands behind him, grinning fatefully.

  If it was possible, the preacher looked worse than he’d looked the night before. He’d likely spent the night in the cemetery again, after Hawk had kicked him off of Regan’s street.

  Tarwater limped up to the sheriff’s office and stopped at the bottom of the porch steps. His cheeks were flushed, his eyes fervent.

  “I just want you to know, Hawk—I’m against it. Dead set against it.”