Shawn O'Brien Town Tamer # 1

by W. , Johnstone, William

  The Greener leveled on Shawn and to the blacksmith Shannon said, “Put the irons on him. Try any fancy moves, O’Brien, and I’ll cut you in half.”

  Shawn’s puzzled expression framed the question he was about to ask. “What’s in this for you, Shannon? And what’s a human outhouse like Hank Cobb doing here?”

  “We got religion,” Shannon said. “Now shut your damned trap or I’ll shut it permanently with two barrels of buckshot.”

  The blacksmith, clanking the wrist and ankle shackles on Sedley, said nothing, his rugged, bearded face like stone.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  It’s hard for any man to be brave when he faces death by execution.

  Still, most try, and many succeed.

  But the freckled, eighteen-year-old cowboy called Sandy Worth didn’t try.

  He died like a dog.

  And watching him, Shawn O’Brien died a small death of his own.

  Screaming, the young puncher was tied facedown onto a timber bench. A couple of Cobb’s men in robes pushed the bench forward until Worth’s neck was in line with the guillotine and grinned at the cowboy’s wild shrieks for mercy.

  Cobb held the knotted end of the rope that was threaded through a pulley on the crossbeam of the frame to keep the triangular blade, black with a honed steel edge, in place. He wore a bright scarlet mask with devil horns that covered his head and eyes and thick leather gloves.

  Shawn’s shackles clanked as he looked around him.

  Of the hundred-strong crowd, more than half looked on eagerly at the proceedings, their eyes aglow and lips wet, hungry for blood. Some had children in their arms and held them high to watch the fun. But others, especially a knot of dignified businessmen in broadcloth, stood expressionless and showed no emotion.

  Did they disapprove?

  Shawn couldn’t tell. It sure didn’t look like it.

  But he made up his mind right there and then that this hell town needed to die . . . and its inhabitants with it.

  Cobb’s voice rose in song and the crowd enthusiastically joined him.

  “Shall we gather at the river,

  Where bright angel feet have trod,

  With its crystal tide forever

  Flowing by the throne of God?”

  The cowboy screamed for mercy and called loudly for his mother to help him.

  “Yes, we’ll gather at the river,

  The beautiful, the beautiful river.

  Gather with the saints at the river

  That flows by the throne of God.”

  As though suddenly bored by the proceedings, Cobb abruptly stopped singing and let go of the rope.

  The heavy, angled blade fell with such speed that Shawn later realized that if he’d blinked he would’ve missed the decapitation.

  The guillotine cut clean and, since there was no basket, the cowboy’s head flew onto the timber boards of the platform and bounced once before landing on its side, the blue eyes wide open.

  To Shawn’s horror, the eyes looked right at him, blinked, once, twice, three times, and the lips stretched in a grimace. He estimated that after his head was struck off, Sandy Worth was conscious for three or four seconds before merciful death finally took him.

  Cobb stepped through a spreading pool of blood and lifted the head by its shock of corn-silk yellow hair. He grinned and held his gory burden high, skeletal fingers of scarlet trickling down his forearm, and the townspeople of Holy Rood cheered.

  Beside Shawn, Hamp Sedley’s face sharpened and a hot red flush burned across his cheekbones. “That’s a hell of a way to kill a man,” he whispered.

  Shawn was numb. Unable to speak. He felt like a man who goes to sleep in his own bed at night and wakes up in an insane asylum.

  A woman with the glowing amber eyes of a snake smiled at him and said, “What a lark.”

  Beyond her, the molelike man who’d brought the water into the cell stared at the cowboy’s dripping head as it was plunged into a cauldron of boiling water to separate flesh and brain from the bones.

  “No!” he yelled. “Not right!”

  He pushed his way through the crowd toward the bubbling pot.

  “Stop that idiot!” Shannon yelled, up on tiptoe to see the man better.

  “Not right!” the mole said, shoving irritated gawkers aside.

  Cobb said, “You men there, get him.”

  A big-bellied man wearing black broadcloth stepped into the mole’s path and crashed a huge, meaty fist into his face.

  The retarded man went down as though pole-axed . . . and then the boots started to go in.

  Half a dozen men surrounded the mole, kicking him so hard Shawn heard the thud . . . thud . . . thud of leather on ribs.

  After a while Cobb grinned and said, “That’s enough. Don’t kill him. He makes me laugh.”

  The mole’s tormentors stepped back, their faces flushed, and behind him Shawn heard a grinning Shannon say, “Show’s over, O’Brien. Back to your cell.”

  Shawn wanted to cry out, tell Cobb that he planned to kill him. Warn the citizens of Holy Rood that he’d burn down their damned town about their ears.

  But he’d be like a mariner shouting into a nor’easter, mouthing empty noise.

  A shackled, unarmed man does not make threats. At least threats that people heed.

  Shawn and Hamp Sedley clanked to their cell and the iron door slammed shut behind them.

  Neither of them felt like talking and they sat in silence on their bunks and stared down at their hands.

  In the distance, coyotes yipped and a rising wind rustled restlessly around the jail and sang through the frame of the guillotine.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The day had shaded into night and the cell was shadowed by darkness when the cell door opened and Shel Shannon and another robed man stepped inside.

  Both carried shotguns, but Shannon held a cast-iron skillet in his right hand and the second man an oil lamp.

  “Grub,” Shannon said.

  “Get these chains off us, Shannon,” Shawn said.

  “Sure, when Brother Matthias gives the word.”

  The gunman handed the skillet to Shawn, two spoons crossed on top of the food.

  “Share,” he said. “If you don’t want the grub, I’ll throw it to the hogs.”

  To Shawn’s surprise, the skillet was almost filled to the brim with half a dozen fried eggs, bacon, chunks of sausage and cubed pieces of yellow cornbread.

  “Cobb always feed his prisoners this good?” he said.

  “Yeah, he does. Says it’s his Christian duty.”

  “Pious of him,” Sedley said.

  “So eat. When you’ve finished, Brother Bernard will take the skillet and eating irons away.” Then, almost as an afterthought, Shannon said, “He’ll also be on guard on t’other side of the door tonight, and he’s not a man to mess with. He won’t take sass, understand?”

  Despite the events of the day, Shawn rediscovered his appetite. He and Sedley spooned food into their mouths, and the gambler said, egg yolk clinging to his mustache, “Who were you, Brother Bernard, before you got religion?”

  “Ah, maybe it’s just as well you asked that, keep you honest, like,” Shannon said. “You recollect Crazy Clay Trevett an’ that hard crowd?”

  “From the San Bernardino country down Arizona way,” Sedley said.

  “As ever was,” Shannon said, “except when Brother Bernard ran with Crazy Clay he called himself Jack Fendy.” Shannon turned his head. “Didn’t you, Jackie, boy?”

  “I’m not your boy, Shannon,” Fendy said. “And don’t call me Jackie.”

  He was a man of medium height with cold, dead eyes and he wore two guns, butt forward in plain, black holsters.

  Shawn dismissed Fendy as just another Bill Hickok wannabe, but Sedley seemed fascinated by the man.

  “Here, were you in on the Silver Lode massacree, back in the summer of ’84, Jack, huh?” he asked.

  Fendy spat and said nothing.

  “You bet he was,�
� Shannon said. “He helped wipe out that whole town. Ol’ Crazy Clay offered a bonus of ten dollars for every ear his men brung in, and Jack laid ten pair at his feet. Ain’t that so, Jack?”

  Fendy spat again, then said, his strange, high-pitched voice echoing in the barren cell, “They was all cut from men, not from women and children like some I could mention done.”

  “Yeah, you done good, Jack,” Shannon said. “Only men it was, gambling man, you can lay to that.”

  “Hank Cobb was there and he done more than his share o’ cuttin’,” Fendy said. “You know that, Shannon, without me needin’ to tell you. It was him that collected High Timber Tess McNeil’s ears, her that owned the Pink Pussy cathouse in Silver Lode.”

  “I mind her fine,” Shannon said. “That gal must’ve stood six foot tall, if she stood an inch.”

  “I heard eighty people died in that massacree, men, women and children,” Sedley said. “And all because Clay Trevett spent three days in the town jail for vagrancy the year before.”

  “That’s a damned lie,” Fendy said. “And the man saying it is a damned liar.”

  “It’s nothing personal, Jack,” Sedley said.

  As though he hadn’t heard, Fendy said, “Clay hoorawed that town because them respectable citizens hung his brother on Christmas Eve the year afore. An’ we kilt five score, not eighty.”

  “Sorry, Jack, my mistake,” Sedley said. “I guess I didn’t study up my ciphers enough.”

  “An’ hung the mayor and his fat wife and then the town marshal,” Fendy said. “By God, we done it right, we did.”

  “You’re a hard, unforgiving man, ain’t you, Brother Bernard?” Shannon said.

  “Kiss my ass,” Fendy said.

  Shannon grinned. “As you can tell, Brother Bernard is a mighty fierce man. You wouldn’t want him to step in here and see you doing anything but sleeping in your bunks.”

  The gunman slapped his hands together. “Now for some good news, boys—your date with the Grand Council has been postponed for a couple of days. It means two extry days of life fer you fellers.”

  “Thank Brother Matthias fer that,” Shannon said. “Tomorrow bein’ the Sabbath, we got the tithes to collect and it’s always a chore to wring money out of folks that don’t want to part with it.”

  Shannon beamed as though a thought had just pleased him.

  “On Monday we’re burning the witch, and the day after is when you’ll be questioned by the Council,” he said. “Brother Matthias penciled in your executions for Tuesday.”

  “If you got any more good news, Cobb, keep it to yourself,” Sedley said.

  “Why are you killing the girl?” Shawn said. “She didn’t do anything.”

  “Didn’t I just tell you? She’s a witch. The women found a cat-shaped mole on her left shoulder an’ that’s a sure sign of witchcraft, they say. She’ll burn in the evening. Fire looks better in the dark, like.”

  Shannon smiled. “Next week’s tithe will be increased threefold, since Brother Matthias, in addition to all his other parochial duties, must protect the town from the witches who’ll surely come seeking terrible revenge.”

  Those last sounded like Cobb’s words and Shannon was obviously repeating them by rote.

  Overcoming a feeling of utter helplessness, Shawn sought to give death a human face and a name he would remember. “What does the girl call herself?” he said.

  “Name’s Sally Bailey, or so she claims. But she’s probably called fer a witch of some kind.”

  “Like Hecate, maybe,” Shawn said.

  “Huh?”

  “Hecate was the Greek goddess of witchcraft, magic, the night and the moon,” Shawn said. “But an ignoramus like you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you, Shannon?”

  Realizing that Shawn was making fun of him, Shannon’s face stiffened and he said, “Maybe I don’t have book learnin’ or a rich pa, but I know this, O’Brien. I’ll be standing in the crowd the day your head rolls. Now give me the skillet back. You two have eaten enough.”

  He turned to Fendy. “Jack, these two get up to any fancy moves or give you back talk, shoot them in the belly.”

  “Depend on it,” Fendy said.

  In the lamp-streaked darkness the gunman looked like a grinning reptile.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  A north wind that smelled of rain sighed like a spurned lover around the eaves of the jailhouse and tugged at the roof, sending down drifts of dust that dropped silently to the floor. From beyond the cell doors a railroad clock ticked slow, stately seconds into the quiet.

  Wandering, drowsy, in that misty, opalescent twilight between wakefulness and sleep, Shawn O’Brien returned to another time and place and again looked out on the terrible moor that surrounded Lovell Manor. . . .

  Built in 1550 by the then lord of the manor, Sir Henry Lovell, the house had been set down in the midst of the moor, as though to defy the devil and his pack of red-eyed hounds that were said to stalk the place and haul the unwary, screaming, into Hades.

  Dartmoor was a twenty-by-thirty mile wasteland, dominated by dizzying cliffs and bare flat-topped hills of raw granite called tors that rose out of the ground like columns holding up the roof of hell.

  The brutal moor was unfit for human habitation, a land of treacherous swamps surrounding rocky islands of gorse and heather, and its harsh, chaotic weather spawned bitingly cold winds and ghostly fogs.

  Dartmoor crouched like a dark, savage beast among the fair, green fields and peacefully grazing cattle of southern Devon, England, a wild, harsh and haunted spot to be avoided at all costs.

  Nevertheless Shawn tolerated the moor, but only because his wife loved it with a passion.

  Lady Judith Lovell’s smile made Dartmoor a less somber, less godforsaken place, and she moved through the gloom of the manor like a candle flame, shedding her inner light into the darkest corners.

  And then, suddenly, violently, all that died.

  Shawn saw again . . . the day . . . the hoarfrost on the hawthorn tree . . . the red, jolly face of Inspector Giles Fortescue of Scotland Yard, his breath smoking in the December air.

  “I fear she’s been taken by the escaped convicts, like the girls from the village,” the big detective said, his face turned away as he stared out at the low mist clinging to the moor. “We found her horse, but not milady.”

  Sir James Lovell, Judith’s father, said, “You’ve made a search, inspector?”

  “Not an adequate one, I’m afraid, Sir James. I’ve asked for an ’undred mounted policemen and they should be here within a couple of days.”

  His skin crawling with anxiety, Shawn said, “Damn it, man, a couple of days could be too late.”

  Fortescue jumped like a jovial Santa Claus pricked with a pin.

  “I’m doing my best, sir,” he said, his tone defensive. “The moor is a big place and exceedingly dangerous and at the moment I only have half a dozen officers.”

  Sir James turned to his son-in-law. He was obviously trying to hide his worry, but the lines had deepened in his face and his lips were bloodless.

  “Shawn, Judith has been gone only since this morning,” he said. “Her horse may have thrown her and she could be making her way home this very minute.”

  “Then I’m going to search for her,” Shawn said.

  “Oh, please, sir, there is a fog on the moor and night is coming down,” Fortescue said, his concerned face topped by a bowler hat and framed by huge muttonchop whiskers. “You may perish out there yourself.”

  Realizing he’d made a mistake, the inspector quickly added, “I mean—”

  “I know what you mean,” Shawn said. “And that’s why I aim to find my wife before it’s too late.”

  Fortescue shook his head. “Mr. O’Brien, she’s been taken. I’m sure of it. And by the same three men who took the girls from the village and they’re probably armed. What you plan, though of the greatest moment, is a singularly dangerous undertaking. Wait until the horsemen arrive.”


  “He’s right you know, Shawn. . . .”

  The mist parted and his older brother, Patrick O’Brien, booted, spurred, wearing shotgun chaps and a sheepskin coat, stepped under the frosted hawthorn tree.

  He pushed his glasses higher on his nose and smiled. “You must get away from here, Shawn. The Roman soldiers used the hawthorn tree to make the crown of thorns for the crucified Christ. It is an unlucky tree. . . .”

  “Indeed,” Inspector Fortescue said, shaking his head, “the hawthorn is a harbinger of doom. It has always been thus, Mr. O’Brien.”

  “And never, I charge you, bring a hawthorn branch into the house, Shawn,” Sir James said. “It is damned bad luck.”

  “Bad luck . . . bad luck . . .” Shawn said. “It’s bad luck . . . damned . . . damned . . .”

  “For God’s sake wake up, O’Brien,” Hamp Sedley said in a hoarse whisper as he shook Shawn by the shoulders. “You’ll bring Jack Fendy in here and he’ll come a-shooting.”

  Shawn blinked, then focused on Sedley’s face. “I . . . I was dreaming,” he said. “And my brother was there . . . but he wasn’t there when Judith was taken . . . and he stood under the hawthorn tree and told me about the Crown of Thorns and the crucified Christ and then Detective Inspector Fortescue said—”

  “Damn it, O’Brien, come back from where you’re at!” Sedley said, shaking Shawn by the shoulders so hard his chains clanked. “Leave that damned awful place and return to one that’s just as bad, but quieter!”

  Shawn looked into the gambler’s eyes that gleamed like chipped flints in the darkness.

  He shook his head. “I’m back, Hamp. I know where I am.” Then, after a pause he reached out and grabbed Sedley by the front of his coat. “Am I losing my mind? Sometimes my brother Jake does that, goes away into a dark place and maybe one day he won’t come back from it.”

  “No, you’re not losing your mind,” the gambler said. “Men deal with grief in different ways. There’s no telling how a man will handle his hurt.”

  “It was all so real, Hamp. It all came back to me, like I was living it again.”