Gallows Express
Page 21
His chest rose once more, heavily. It fell once more and lay still.
Regan lowered the smoking Colt. Her lips were cracked and puffy, one eye badly bruised. Tierney’s men had done a job on her, before she’d gotten the upper hand and taken several of them out. Apparently, in the dustup, someone had knocked over a lantern. Now Regan stepped over the legs of one of the dead men and started on down the last stretch of stairs. Hawk followed her through the foyer and out onto the porch. As she continued down the porch, Hawk stopped there and looked around.
Saradee had Brazos Tierney and One-Eye McGee on their knees before the Venus, their hands behind their heads. Tears dribbled down McGee’s cheeks, and he ground his jaws painfully as blood oozed from bullet wounds in his shoulder and upper left thigh. Brazos Tierney stared blankly at the brothel, the second story of which was now almost completely engulfed by flames. The fire shone in his strange, now-blind gray eyes.
Behind Saradee and the outlaws, the doves who’d survived the Tierney gang’s occupation stood around, arm in arm, some sobbing, some staring in shock at the burning building before them. Cassidy knelt over Claire’s naked, bloody body.
Behind them, the gallows stood dark and silent. Waiting . . .
Hawk walked down the porch steps and into the street. He stopped before the two remaining Tierney riders.
“What’re you gonna do with ’em?” Saradee glanced at the two men—both of whom looked as bewildered as the young whores—she held one of her cocked .45s on.
Hawk looked over at Claire. Then he looked at Cassidy, who returned his gaze.
“Gonna hang ’em.” Hawk cleared the emotion from his throat, wedged his Remy behind his cartridge belt. “Just like Sheriff Stanley intended.”
He turned toward where he’d last seen Regan. She was walking away from the burning brothel, moving with her head down through the sparse crowd of onlookers and men running around to begin forming a bucket brigade. Regan had dropped her gun in the dirt and was heading toward a gap between two buildings that would lead her back to her house.
“Regan?”
Hawk took one step toward her and stopped. She did not look back. Her slender, pale, dirty figure in the torn camisole turned into the dark gap between the buildings and disappeared like a figure in a dream.
Hawk groaned and expelled a long, held breath. “I’m sorry, Regan.”
He turned to Saradee. She was watching him expectantly, a faint smile lifting one side of her upper lip.
“You wanna hang ’em now?” she asked, gesturing at Tierney and McGee with her pistol. “Then you and me light a shuck out of here and get a decent drink somewhere?” Her lip rose a little higher. “A decent bed?”
Hawk slipped his gun out behind his cartridge belt and cocked it as he aimed it at his prisoners. “Back to jail, fellers.”
“Like hell,” One-Eye growled.
Hawk triggered a slug into the dirt at his knee, blowing dust up over his thigh. McGee jerked back with a start then, staring warily up at Hawk, slowly gained his feet. Hobbling on his bad leg, he turned and headed across the street toward the jailhouse.
“You, too, Brazos,” Hawk ordered.
“I’m blind,” Brazos sobbed. “Bitch blinded me!”
“Get movin’, or I’ll gut shoot you.”
Still sobbing, Brazos gained his feet. Hawk prodded him with his pistol barrel toward McGee’s limping, diminishing form. Saradee watched all three men climb the porch steps and head on into the jailhouse where a light soon shone in a window.
She shook her head, glanced once more at the burning brothel. “Well, I need a drink.”
She pushed through the growing crowd of scurrying, bucket-bearing men and headed toward the Four Aces.
Epilogue
YEP, MIGHT JUST MARRY THE GIRL . . .
HAWK set one lilac-blue crocus atop each of the three graves fronting the granite headstone chiseled STANLEY, then stepped back, doffed his hat, and hooked a thumb behind his cartridge belt. The paper flowers he’d laid atop the baby’s grave had blown away, but someone had planted a four-foot ponderosa pine sapling a few feet beyond the headstone. A bowl had been dug around the evergreen, and the freshly churned soil in the bowl was still dark from a recent watering.
Whoever had planted the tree obviously intended to care for it.
Who?
Hawk looked around as if the planter might still be around or had left some sign of his identity. There were only the stone and wood markers slanting shade as the morning sun continued to kite above the eastern horizon. The ground was still damp from the night’s frost, and the air smelled clean and fresh. Robins flitted, and meadowlarks cooed. Mountain bluebirds were vibrant and fleeting splashes of periwinkle blue against the dun grass still matted and torn from the winter snows.
Spring was coming to Trinity.
Hawk returned his gaze to the Stanley graves. He studied each cold, rocky mound until his eyes came to a rest on the sheriff’s. Holding his hat in his hand across his belly, he drew a deep breath and fingered the bandage the doctor had wrapped around his head late last night, after Hawk had jailed his prisoners and the fire had been contained by the bucket brigade. Laudanum had done wonders to quell the pain in his head and arm, but it made him foggy-headed and weak-kneed.
Not too foggy-headed to feel some satisfaction for what he had done, however.
“Your prisoners are due to be hanged, Sheriff.” Hawk drew another breath, ran his tongue across his upper lip. “Hangman came in on the morning train. He’s outfitting the gallows now, rigging the nooses and adjusting the sandbags. You can rest easy.” He ran his gaze across the other two mounds humped with red stones of all shapes and sizes. “You can all rest easy.”
Hawk donned his hat and turned away from the graves.
He walked out through the cemetery’s dilapidated gate and started down the hill toward the town over which a blue morning smoke haze hung. He could see between the roof of the jailhouse on one side of the street and the black mound of what remained of the Venus on the other side that a small crowd had gathered around the gallows. Hawk’s prisoners were on the platform while Reb Winter and Alvin Gault held shotguns on them from behind.
Hawk stopped suddenly as he drew his eyes to a wagon parked at the foot of the cemetery, on the narrow horse trail that wound down the shoulder of the hill and on into the town. Saradee sat in the driver’s boot, the reins of the big mule in her hands. Both her cream stallion and Hawk’s grulla were tied to the wagon’s tailgate. Neither was saddled, only bridled.
Buffalo robes had been laid across the floor of the box, making a bed between the heaped mounds of saddles, saddlebags, and other sundry trail provisions including burlap bundles of food.
Saradee narrowed an eye at him hopefully. “Where to?”
Hawk stared back at her for a time, trying to draw some shred of strength up from the bottom of his soul, enough with which he could resist her. Her golden hair fluttered about her shoulders, and her teeth were white between her red, fleshy lips.
And he couldn’t find a single strand of fiber with which to stand against her.
He gave a dry chuckle and looked into the distant hills rolling out away from Trinity, wheat blond with grass and mint green with sage and rabbitbrush as they climbed toward high, purple ridges mantled with the grays of old winter snows.
“I think I’d like to head back Nebraska way.”
“Got a couple graves of your own to tend there, eh, Hawk?”
“Somethin’ like that.”
Hawk eased his battered body onto the tailgate and scooted himself up onto the robes Saradee had laid out for him. Damn, he should give second thought to shooting the girl and think hard on marrying her. . ..
“Maybe I’ll take up farming.”
Saradee chuckled. “Plenty of whiskey back there. Doc gave me extra laudanum, too, for all your sundry scrapes and scratches. Some salted beef and sausage. Help yourself.”
“Don’t mind if I do,” Hawk c
huckled, leaning back against the head of the box and squinting up at the buttery sun, enjoying the warmth on his face and the deep hides beneath his weary ass and legs. “Don’t mind if I do. . . .”
Yep, might just marry the girl.
He stretched his arms out across the top of the panel behind him and stared out over the tailgate as Saradee clucked the big mule on down the hill and into the town, swinging east when she hit Wyoming Street. The wagon rattled and swayed. Hawk’s grulla and Saradee’s cream clomped along behind, heads down.
The jailhouse passed on Hawk’s right. The gallows appeared on his left, a small gathering of townsfolk gathered around it, including Mayor Pennybacker and councilmen Learner and Pike. All three glanced at Hawk quickly, then looked away, faces flushing slightly with chagrin.
Cassidy was there, too, with several other doves, all wrapped in blankets.
Regan was nowhere in sight. Hawk hadn’t expected to see her here.
Reb Winter and Alvin Gault stood behind the hooded, doomed men standing atop the trapdoor, nooses just now being tightened by the hangman who’d come in from Laramie on train seventy-nine before dawn. The sheriff’s and deputy sheriff’s badges glinted on Reb’s and Alvin’s chests, respectively, and for only a second Reb switched his expression of serious, official duty to grin and wave at Hawk before adjusting his grip on the big shotgun in his hands and returning his hard-eyed sheriff’s stare at the back of Brazos Tierney’s hooded head.
Hawk saluted Trinity’s new sheriff before his gaze caught on the black-clad, white-collared minister standing on the ground, facing the gallows and reading from the Good Book open in his large, pale hands. Reverend Hawthorne’s blue-gray hair was slicked back, still showing the marks from a recent combing, and his dark broadcloth coat and trousers were new and crisp. His jaws had been scraped of their steely stubble.
As he read a prayer to the doomed prisoners, the reverend glanced at Hawk over his shoulder, gave a cordial nod, then returned his eyes to the open tome and to Tierney and McGee standing in grim silence above and before him.
Hawk reached inside his sheepskin vest to dig a cheroot out of his shirt pocket. “Well, I’ll be damned.”
Hawk and Saradee were a block beyond the gallows when the reverend closed his book and lowered his head. The hangman lowered his own head somberly as he pushed forward the brake-like handle bristling from the side of the gallows. Brazos Tierney’s last scream echoed shrilly as the doors beneath the gallows opened, and he and McGee dropped straight down and started dancing the short-lived dance of the hanged.
The crowd clapped and cheered.
Saradee clucked to the mule, picking up the pace.
The wagon rattled and squawked. Soon, they were in the countryside, Trinity under its cap of wood smoke growing small behind.
“How you doin’ back there, Hawk?” Saradee asked.
Hawk bit off the end of the cigar. “Me?”
Hawk pushed Regan out of his mind and fired a match on his shell belt.
“Hell, I’m fine,” he said, puffing smoke and looking around. “Nice day for a ride. Damn nice day.”
Peter Brandvold was born and raised in North Dakota. He’s lived in Montana, Minnesota, Arizona, and Colorado. A full-time RVer, he writes Westerns under his own name as well as his pen name Frank Leslie, spending his summers in the mountains of western Colorado and his winters traveling around the Southwestern deserts. Send him an email at peterbrandvold@gmail.com.
Berkley titles by Peter Brandvold
The Rogue Lawman Series
GALLOWS EXPRESS
BORDER SNAKES
BULLETS OVER BEDLAM
COLD CORPSE, HOT TRAIL
DEADLY PREY
ROGUE LAWMAN
The Bounty Hunter Lou Prophet Series
THE DEVIL’S WINCHESTER
HELLDORADO
THE GRAVES AT SEVEN DEVILS
THE DEVIL’S LAIR
STARING DOWN THE DEVIL
THE DEVIL GETS HIS DUE
RIDING WITH THE DEVIL’S MISTRESS
DEALT THE DEVIL’S HAND
THE DEVIL AND LOU PROPHET
The Sheriff Ben Stillman Series
HELL ON WHEELS
ONCE LATE WITH A .38
ONCE UPON A DEAD MAN
ONCE A RENEGADE
ONCE HELL FREEZES OVER
ONCE A LAWMAN
ONCE MORE WITH A .44
ONCE A MARSHAL
The .45-Caliber Series
.45-CALIBER FIREBRAND
.45-CALIBER WIDOW MAKER
.45-CALIBER DEATHTRAP
.45-CALIBER MANHUNT
.45-CALIBER FURY
.45-CALIBER REVENGE
Other titles
BLOOD MOUNTAIN