Ride Tall, Hang High

by Chet Cunningham

  Chapter ONE

  Rock Springs, Wyoming: August 14, 1869

  The Professor looked at the five men sitting around the table at the Wild Card saloon in Rock Springs and laughed softly, his clean-shaven face serious for the moment.

  The man was dressed immaculately in black suit, red, white, and silver fancy vest with gold watch, chain and fob, and a set of spit-polished, 50-dollar cowboy boots.

  "Gentlemen, we can do it," the Professor said softly. The men had to lean to hear him over the chatter and clatter of the saloon. "This is the perfect spot. Rock Springs has been here for maybe two years. It was one of the towns the railroad had to spot along the tracks every fifty miles. Isn't this about the widest-open town we’ve been in for a long time?"

  The Professor looked around at the other men at the table. Eagle, a full-blooded Comanche Indian, had cut his long hair and wore standard cowboy clothes and hat in an attempt to pass as white. It usually worked. He shrugged at the question.

  Johnny Joe Williams worked a deck of cards in a riffle shuffle and began another hand of blackjack with himself. Johnny Joe was about five-eight, lean, with a plain buckskin vest.

  "Safe bet with me either way," he said.

  Juan Romero shook his head. "I don’t see how we can do it. Even if we wear masks they will re­member our size and how we were dressed. "

  Gunner Johnson, at six-four the biggest man in the group, saw the Professor look at him and shrugged. Gunner was tall and broad, made of solid muscle, but he was not a mental giant.

  Willy Boy, the sixth man at the table, had been grinning since the idea came forth.

  "Hell yes, let’s try it," he said. "For me it would be a real kick in the ass to rob the damned bank and walk around town calm as you please watching these jackasses try to figure out who did it and which way they rode out of town!"

  The Professor nodded and sat down at the table. "So, this is the last time we are seen together in public. Meet tonight at my room at seven o’clock and we’ll plan it out. " He looked at Willy Boy.

  "Sounds fine by me," Willy Boy said. "Now let’s scatter; two’s is fine, but no more. Today is Thurs­day. " He looked at the Professor. "You want to do a Friday afternoon kind of relief job on the bank?" He spoke in a low voice, the last line almost a whisper.

  The Professor grinned. "Don’t know yet. I’ll go get some change this afternoon and figure it out. Either way it’s gonna be as easy as skinning a fancy lady out of her underwear on a Saturday night. " Four of the men nodded and left the table. One stayed at the bar for another beer. Willy Boy and Gunner Johnson stayed at the table.

  "It’ll be all right. Gunner. The Professor knows what he’s doing. We’ll come out in fine shape. Had to let the boys blow off a little steam. Hell, we’re still a long ways from Boise and Idaho Territory. Our cash reserves are getting a mite low anyway, and we got nobody on our trail. "

  "Yeah, I understand, Willy Boy. Whatever you want is fine with me. "

  "Good, Gunner, good. I can always count on you. Why don’t you go over to the bar and get us a couple more of them cold beers?" He gave Gunner a dime. The big man heaved up from the chair, almost knocking it over, and strode to the bar. Soon he came back with two more beers.

  "Gunner, this is going to be wild, absolutely crazy good!" Willy Boy said in a voice so low Gunner had to lean close to hear it. "I ain’t never even heard of a gang robbing a bank and staying right in the same town. It’s wild, crazy, and just might work. If it don’t work, the Professor will have us do it the regular way and we’ll be out of town heading west before anybody knows the bank has been busted. " They sipped at their beers.

  Willy Boy was the leader of the Willy Boy Gang. They had formed when he fooled a jailer in Oak Park, Texas into opening his jail cell. He’d over­powered the man and shot him in the head. Willy Boy and the other five prisoners in the little jail escaped and formed a group to battle off the posse that chased after them. They shot up the posse twice and the sheriff gave up.

  A week later, the famous bounty hunter Michael Handshoe and his own gang of shooters pursued them. After three furious gun battles, Handshoe admitted he was beaten and rode away. He wasn’t used to going up against an organized gang of men who knew how to shoot.

  The Willy Boy Gang worked together like a well- oiled machine. Each man had a special role. They had come up this far on their way to Boise, in Idaho Territory. By now there also were wanted posters out on them with a value of $2,000 each. It was an attractive package for any man to try to collect. Since most cowhands worked for $25 a month and store clerks took in about $35 a month, $12,000 for the six of them was a fortune—more than 28 year’s pay at $420 a year. They had to keep up their guard all the time.

  Boise. The long trip to Idaho was for Eagle. He was tracking down Able troop of the Fourteenth Cavalry Regiment. The regiment had been assigned to Boise to help on the Indian wars.

  Eagle wasn’t a big talker. He did say that six years ago the Fourteenth had been stationed in Texas and Able company had been sent out to try to move a small band of Comanche into a reser­vation. The band, not more than 25 warriors, women, and children, had given up and were getting ready to take down their camp and move with the soldiers.

  Someone started shooting, and before anyone could stop it, the 45 troopers and officers had killed everyone in the camp, except for one 12-year-old boy. Eagle was then known as Brave Eagle. After his best friend had been killed, he was captured by Able company and its violence-prone leader, Cap­tain Two-Guns Riley. Eagle was sent to a Catholic boarding school, where he was taught to read and write English.

  Now he was a man of 18. He lived to find Able company and pay back in blood for the blood of his family and friends spilled that fateful day in Texas.

  Willy Boy pushed back from the table. "Gunner, looks like it’s near to supper time. How about you and me heading over to that little tent cafe we saw this morning?"

  They met at seven that evening in the Professor’s room at the Rock Springs Hotel. It was one of about 20 frame buildings in town. There were still 20 or 30 tents set up as businesses and homes. Lumber cost a lot of money. In time the tents would be replaced with frame buildings.

  The Professor was the best dresser of the group. He was also the oldest at 25. Willy Boy was still surprised that the man had gone through high school and had taken a whole year of college! He then taught school for two years before heading west.

  The Professor pushed his polished boot up on a chair and grinned. "Gentlemen, the Rock Springs Home Bank is made out of cardboard and cotton. It will be the easiest that I have ever attempted to relieve of its burden of cash.

  "This afternoon I visited the establishment. It has one teller, one bookkeeper, and an owner-president. Three men. Easy!

  "There is one door at the front and another leading to the alley.

  "I suggest we do our Friday-at-quitting-time ritual on these men, but add one wrinkle—we blindfold them as soon as we get them under control so they have less time to look at us.

  "You know the procedure. We all drop in to the bank three minutes before closing time with ‘business’ to transact. We help lock the door and pull the blinds. We tie, gag, and blindfold the three of them and any customers. Then we clean out the teller’s till and the vault. We leave the bankers and customers well tied and out of sight, and slip out the back door, with greenbacks and gold sticking out of our pockets.

  "I don’t expect a big strike here, but it will be worthwhile, with the railroad business and the gambling halls. Any questions?"

  "We wear neckerchief masks like before?" Eagle asked.

  "Right. As soon as the door is locked, we pull up the masks, tie up the men, then gag and blindfold them. "

  "We come back here to leave the money after the robbery?" Willy Boy asked. "Then at least nobody could catch us with it on us. "

  "Yes, good idea, Willy Boy. We’ll do that. If we take any bank bags, we have to keep them under our coats. Let’s not wear our long
coats this time. Too damn hot for them, and it would give us away. No shotguns. We won’t need them. I’ll find two or three paper or cloth sacks we can use to carry the loot in. "

  "Horses?" Johnny Joe asked.

  The Professor looked at Willy Boy.

  "We shouldn’t need them," Willy Boy said quickly. "But I’ve lived long enough to know that sometimes simple jobs like this can go wrong. We better be packed up for the trail, with the horses left along the street nearest the bank alley. We don’t want to get caught with no way to get out of town if we have to leave sudden-like. "

  The Professor looked at the men again. There were no more questions.

  "Guess that about does it," Willy Boy said. "I don’t want anybody getting passing-out, soused drunk tonight or wind up in jail. We have to be clear-eyed and ready for business tomorrow at 2:30. "

  They split up.

  Johnny Joe Williams went to the best gambling hall in town. It was a tent half a block from the tracks and had been there for over two years, set up when the tracks were about 20 miles east of the newly established town.

  Johnny Joe was the gambler in the group. He had been a lawman for a year when he was charged with murder while performing his duty. He had quietly left town one night, and then traveled half the west, spending a year on the Mississippi River gambling boats.

  Johnny Joe was the son of a Southern plantation owner who lost everything in the war, including his own life and the lives of most of his family. Johnny Joe was 17 when the war ended, living in New Orleans with an aunt. She had taught him how to play poker. She was an expert who had dealt cards for a while in a gambling hall. He had decided not to go back and try to claim the old homestead. Things were a lot different right after the war.

  Poker was his game. He never bet unless he knew he had a good chance of winning. He played the game by the odds and by his head, and almost always won more than he lost.

  Eagle went for a long walk into the prairie, looked for shooting stars, listened to the nighthawks, and watched the small night-feeding animals, who didn’t realize he was there. He loved to sit alone out there at night and get back to the essentials of life— wind, sky, the land, nature itself.

  The Professor went back to the Prairie West Saloon and lost five dollars at poker. Then he took one of the dance hall girls upstairs for a serious

  conversation and to investigate her inner self.

  Juan Romero was not welcome at most of the saloons and at none of the gambling halls. He bought a pint bottle of wine and went back to his room, where he wrote a long letter to his wife. He mailed it to his uncle in Oak Park, Texas who would forward it to Juan’s wife in Mexico, or take it to her.

  Gunner Johnson followed Willy Boy to the Blue Bottom Saloon and watched him play dime-limit poker. Willy Boy lost four dollars in four hours. They listened to a faded dove singing to an out-of­tune piano, then after three beers went back to the hotel and bed.

  Willy Boy Lambier was the leader of the gang both by design and default. He had pretended to hang himself in that jail cell back in Texas, then shot the deputy with his own gun when the foolish lawman charged into the cell to rescue Willy Boy.

  He was waiting trial on a murder charge and was sure to be convicted and hung. He had nothing to lose. Neither did three of the other men in the jail. Willy Boy forced them all to make the break with him. He convinced them they could stay free only if they bound themselves together in a gang to fight off the posse that would surely follow.

  The ploy had worked. They had stayed together, partly from loyalty, partly from fear, but mostly because each of them had a dream or a cause or revenge to carry out, and the gang was the best way to help them accomplish it.

  Willy Boy had a shot at avenging his father. Willy Boy had been orphaned at 14, when a bounty hunter charged into his father’s poor Missouri farmhouse and shotgunned him without a word. Only then did the bounty hunter realize he had the wrong man, so he tried to kill the only witness, too.

  But Willy Boy broke out a window and fled screaming and bleeding into the night as shotgun and pistol roared behind him. Since that day he had been living only to find the murdering bounty hunter, Deeds Conover, and torture him until he died.

  Willy Boy had grown up fast. He made his living by rolling drunks in saloons, picking their pockets as he helped them stagger to the outhouse.

  He was attacked by a man in Kansas City, had his horse and all his gear stolen. He was caught trying to pick another drunk’s pocket, and killed a man before he was finally captured and jailed. Soon after, he killed the guard and broke out of jail, heading for Texas, where Deeds Conover had gone.

  Willy Boy was 17 now, with more than a dozen notches on his gun, a growing hatred in his heart, and a surprising sense of loyalty to his gang. He still wanted Conover. He had two shots at killing him in Kansas but missed. Now it was Eagle’s turn to find the men who had killed his family.

  The wheel kept spinning. Willy Boy knew that sooner or later he would be face-to-face with Deeds Conover, and he damn well wouldn’t let the bastard get away again.

  Willy Boy turned it all over in his mind. He was surprised that he was going to all this trouble to help the Indian. He hardly knew the man, but now they were a team, a gang, a fighting unit that could handle almost any situation.

  He grinned in the darkness of the Rocky Springs Hotel. Tomorrow they’d rob the crackerbox of a bank and loaf around town two or three days, watching the natives try to catch the robbers. Then they would move northwest toward Pocatello in Idaho on the way to Boise.

  Willy Boy frowned for a minute. The other night around the campfire, Juan Romero had said he was getting a good feeling about their gang. He said that they trusted each other and worked together. He said it was almost the way he used to feel about his big family in Mexico.

  Willy Boy thought about that. A family. He’d never had a family feeling at all. Just him and his pa as long as he could remember. Yeah, it was something good. Better than he had ever known before. Goddamn, they had themselves a family here!

  Willy smiled softly and drifted off to sleep.

  About the Author

  Cunningham, who makes his home in San Diego, California, is a prolific writer of both novels and nonfiction books. He comes from a newspaper background so is geared to producing writing every day and not"when the muse moves me. " He said he doesn't believe in writer's block.

  In 1950, he was drafted in the Army. After nine months in Japan Cunningham went to the front lines of the war in Korea. He participated in two battles and numerous line-crossing and prisoner patrols. Assigned to a heavy weapons company he served as an 81 mm mortar gunner, squad leader, and section leader. His service earned him the Combat Infantryman's Badge. After two years of service he was discharged in the rank of sergeant.

  Cunningham was born in Nebraska, grew up in Oregon, worked in Michigan, and went to college in New York City. Now he lives in California. He works in an expanded den in his home and says he never gets to work late due to fog, rain or traffic jams. "Walk down the hall, turn left and I'm at work. "

  He graduated from Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon with a BA in journalism, and after his hitch in the Army he received his MS degree from the Columbia University Graduated School in Journalism in New York City in 1954.

  In 1994 he founded the non-profit corporation, San Diego Book Awards Association, to recognize local writers of books. A competition for the best book in 18 different categories is held yearly and $100 and certificates awarded to winners. From this has come the Read-4-Fun program aimed at 5th graders to encourage them to read more. Free books are given to students who do 200 pages of outside reading and turn in a book report. The Read-4-Fun committee now works with 15 schools and just over 2,000 students. Last year the group gave away more than 3,000 books. This year Cunningham originated a $2,000 grant for county novelists. The winner was selected from among 40 entries.

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