Curse of Skull Canyon

by Peter Brandvold

  “Please forgive me, your honor,” the attorney said as the crowd settled down. “I was taking notes for the trial while I ate a sandwich, and the time simply got away from me.”

  Lonnie could tell the man was slurring some of his words as he nervously brushed crumbs and a few chunks of ham that clung to his gold watch chain sagging from his vest.

  “The perils of such dedication—eh, Vince?” Judge Peabody said from his bench, giving a caustic snort.

  He rapped his gavel down hard on his sound block. The laughing crowd fell silent.

  The judge gave Lonnie a grave glance and then swept his businesslike gaze across the small sea of fidgeting onlookers. “Now, let’s get down to brass tacks, and maybe we can get out of here by noon!”

  CHAPTER 40

  “The first and . . . um . . . the only witness I’d like to call today is none other than Sheriff Frank Halliday himself,” announced the tall, gray prosecutor, Archibald Fleischman, gripping the lapels of his claw hammer frock coat as though he were afraid the coat would blow away if he didn’t hold it down.

  As the sheriff rose and started toward the witness chair beneath the judge’s bench, Halliday stopped and turned to Lonnie. He wore a fresh bandage around the top of his head, as did Lonnie himself. Halliday’s bandage sported a small bloodstain where Lonnie had beaned the man with the shovel. As he stared at Lonnie, the sheriff turned his mouth corners down, gave a grim wag of his head, then continued walking over to the witness chair.

  He took a seat, fingering the bandage gently, making a show of the injury.

  Again, he shook his head, as though the tale he were about to tell was a grim one indeed, and not an easy one to relate.

  Lonnie snorted at that.

  The boy was not shocked to hear the sheriff tell the same story he’d related to Lonnie—about Lonnie throwing in with Kinch and his prison pal for a cut of the gold, and then, getting the drop on both the unwitting and unsuspecting Halliday and Appleyard—“Who’d think a boy so young capable of such savagery!”—opening up with the Winchester he managed to snap up off the ground before laying Halliday out cold with a shovel.

  The crowd of onlookers murmured and muttered as the sheriff told his tale. At one point, the judge had to interrupt Halliday and used his gavel to settle the crowd before nodding to the sheriff to continue.

  When the sheriff punctuated his tale with another disbelieving wag of his head, Lonnie couldn’t help but leaping to his feet and yelling, “If I’m such a hard-hearted, cold-blooded killer, why didn’t I cut you down with the rifle, too, Halliday, you fang-toothed liar?”

  Of course, that had been a grave misstep on Lonnie’s part.

  Everyone in the courtroom, including the six-man jury seated on the far side of the room, looked at him as though he were a lion on a dangerously long chain.

  “You’ll get a chance to tell your side of it, young man!” the judge scolded, hammering his gavel down on the sound block. “Till then, you hold your tongue or I’ll have you bound and gagged!”

  When the judge asked Briggs if he wanted to cross-examine the sheriff, Lonnie’s so-called attorney merely shook his head. The man no doubt wanted to get back to the free lunch counter as quickly as he could, Lonnie thought with another inward chuff.

  The prosecutor called Lonnie to the stand. The sheriff refused to remove the shackles on Lonnie’s ankles.

  “Can’t take a chance on him making a run for it, your honor,” Halliday said, shaking his head darkly.

  One of the female onlookers gave a quiet gasp at the prospect of the crazed young killer running wild throughout the town.

  The judge nodded his understanding to the sheriff.

  Lonnie traversed the space between the defense table and the witness chair awkwardly, chains rattling, boots scuffing on the courthouse’s worn puncheon floor. Prompted by the prosecutor, Lonnie told the true story of how Halliday shot Appleyard and then both of his prisoners, Kinch and Engstrom, while they lay handcuffed on the ground.

  The crowd gave a collective, incredulous murmur as Lonnie related the grisly events. Halliday sat on a front-row bench, scowling and shaking his head in disgust at the low morals of one so young.

  “Why didn’t he shoot you, then, too?” the prosecutor wanted to know.

  “Because he wanted me to bury the loot for him, so he could come back and dig it up later,” Lonnie said. “He would have killed me after I’d gotten the job done, too, if I hadn’t laid him out with the shovel!”

  Halliday looked around the room, pointing to the bloodstained bandage on his head. Several women gasped and shook their heads at the evidence of such violence in one so young . . .

  “I can prove my story is true, Judge,” Lonnie said. “Take me up into them mountains, and I’ll show you where the loot is buried, just waitin’ for Halliday to come retrieve it after he’s let things simmer down for a couple months.”

  “Why don’t you just tell us where it is?” asked the prosecutor, fists on his lapels, a knowing grin tugging at his mouth corners.

  “There’s no way I can tell it,” Lonnie said. “I can’t remember that clear. But I can show you, sure enough!”

  “Oh, certainly, certainly,” the prosecutor said, broadening his knowing smile as he looked around at the riveted crowd. “You’d love to be given a saddled horse, wouldn’t you? You’d love to be taken up into those mountains and given the opportunity to escape your grim fate . . . wouldn’t you, you cunning little devil?”

  The crowd erupted at that.

  “Why, I’ve never seen the like of such a young criminal as that!” bellowed a jowly old woman with small, round steel glasses beneath a gray, lace-edged poke bonnet. She had a thick Southern accent, as did most of the folks in and around the Never Summers.

  She’d lurched to her feet and was giving the judge a commanding glare. “We all know who his mother is. Why, she bore an outlaw’s child! This critter’s father was a no-good Yankee. And now he’s killed three more men. When will it stop, I ask? When will it stop?”

  “Sit down, sit down, Mrs. Harmony! If you erupt like that again, I’ll have you escorted to the door!” Peabody slammed his gavel down several times, the reports echoing like pistol fire. “Pipe down! Pipe down!” he admonished the loudly milling crowd.

  When the din had died, the judge turned to the prosecutor.

  “Any more questions, Mister Fleischman?”

  “None sir,” the prosecutor said, strolling leisurely back to his table. “None whatsoever. I think we’ve all heard quite enough!”

  “I know I have!” intoned Mrs. Harmony before giving the judge a sheepish glance.

  The judge asked Briggs if he wanted to call any other witnesses. Briggs merely opened his hands and shrugged as though to say, “Who is left to call?”

  It was Lonnie’s word against Halliday’s.

  The judge asked the jury for a show of hands for guilty or innocent. Lonnie’s wasn’t surprised when all six hands went up for guilty.

  Mrs. Harmony gave a quiet, satisfied chuff.

  The crowd murmured its approval.

  The judge turned to Lonnie, and said, “Young man, considering your youth and lack of adequate supervision as well as your heroic trek across the mountains last year to deliver stolen bank money to the deputy US marshal in Camp Collins, I’m going to show some mercy. Two years in the Long’s House for Wayward Boys in Denver!”

  The crowd erupted, shouting its approval.

  Lonnie heard Casey cry, “But he’s just a boy! You can’t hang a boy, Judge! You can’t!”

  Then the girl broke down in tears.

  Lonnie looked at her, befuddled. She sat holding a handkerchief to her nose, shoulders jerking as she cried.

  “But, Casey,” Lonnie said under his breath, “I’m not going to hang. Why, the judge said . . .”

  He let his voice trail off when he realized that his mind had played a cruel trick on him. He’d only imagined the light sentence. What the judge had really said was,
“Hang the boy and save havin’ to hang the man later!”

  And then he’d adjourned the trial and sat back in his chair, crossing his arms on his chest with satisfaction.

  CHAPTER 41

  Behind Lonnie, who remained sitting at the defendant’s table, the courthouse crowd was eagerly, loudly filing out into the street to enjoy the festivities over at the judge’s specially constructed, portable gallows.

  “On your feet, boy,” said Walleye Miller, aiming his twelve-gauge at Lonnie one-handed. His other arm was slung over his crutch. “You’re about to be the guest of honor at a little necktie party!”

  If he’d smiled any more brightly his eyes would have popped out of his head.

  “Let’s go, kid,” said Bohannon, waving his pistol.

  Lonnie rose to his shackled feet and looked at Sheriff Halliday, who was the only one in the courtroom still seated. He was staring at Lonnie, grinning around the cigar in his mouth, which he was puffing to life, the match flame flaring as he inhaled the smoke.

  Lonnie was too numb to be able to conjure any anger. Last night he’d feared that if he was sentenced to hang he might make a fool of himself by peeing down his leg, or breaking down bawling, which he knew from reading the occasional copy of Policeman’s Gazette was what often happened to even the most hardened outlaws in similar circumstances.

  But he felt nothing at all. He was numb.

  It was as though his body as well as his mind had turned to stone. Around him, everyone seemed to be moving very slowly. All sounds seemed to be emanating from the bottom of a very deep well. He couldn’t even work up any sadness or regret that he wouldn’t be able to say good-bye to his mother or his little half brother.

  He was going to die.

  And it no longer meant anything to him.

  “Look at him,” said Bohannon as he and Walleye began leading him down the aisle toward the open double doors. “Cold as ice.”

  “Hang the boy,” Halliday said, walking along behind them, “and save havin’ to hang the man.” He chuckled evilly at that.

  But even for the man about to cause him to die for crimes he had not committed, at the hands of the man who had committed them, Lonnie could work up no anger. As he shuffled along, his hands cuffed before him, his ankles bound by shackles, he only wished they’d get to it sooner rather than later.

  A preacher had materialized, and he was walking up beside Lonnie. Lonnie was not a churchgoer though he’d studied the Good Book some with his mother on long winter evenings when the snowbanks rose to the cabin’s windows. He did not know the sky pilot, as men of the cloth were cynically called. He was reading what Lonnie recognized in a vague sort of way, with no actual interest, as the Twenty-Third Psalm.

  The gallows lay at a wide spot in the main street of Arapaho Creek, on the far side of the narrow, twisting creek that ran almost directly down the street’s center. A cottonwood shaded it from the brassy, high-altitude sun.

  A crowd had gathered in a semicircle around the wheeled structure that sat on stout wagon wheels higher than Lonnie was tall. The upright from which the noose dangled, as well as a platform to which a total of eight steps led, was made to collapse into the wagon bed for easy traveling, when a team of two mules was hitched.

  Every inch of the combination gallows and wagon was painted red, earning it the nickname Hang-’em-high Hank’s Hell Wagon.

  Now the red upright stood tall over the red platform, a stout noose dangling from the crossbeam.

  The gallows was a frequent sight in mining camps around the mountains. Lonnie had always wondered how many men had died falling straight down through its single trapdoor. When he’d glimpsed the forbidding-looking structure being driven around the mountains by the judge’s teamster who doubled as his hangman, Nestor Polk, a chill had rippled along his spine.

  Now, he felt nothing. He might have been walking toward a simple, benign lumber dray parked before a mercantile, waiting to be loaded.

  Lonnie was prodded up into the wagon by Deputy Bohannon while the other two lawmen and the preacher waited below. Nestor Polk stood waiting atop the platform, beside the noose dangling down over the trapdoor. Lonnie stopped beside the grim, gray-bearded Polk, who wore a long, black, claw hammer coat, a bullet-crowned black hat, and a thick, black four-inhand tie. His long, curly side-whiskers blew in the wind.

  The hangman was legendary in these mountains. He was known to be a strange, silent, humorless man with frosty blue eyes set beneath silky white brows. Lonnie had never been this close to the executioner before. The man smelled like mules, sweat, chewing tobacco, and whiskey.

  The corked mouth of a brown bottle poked up out of a pocket of his black coat.

  “Want a bag?” Polk asked, holding what appeared to be a black feed sack in his hand. He spoke in a raspy whisper.

  Lonnie looked at the bag, puzzled. Then he remembered that men were often executed with bags over their heads.

  Lonnie shook his head. He didn’t want his last sight to be the darkness of a bag over his head.

  “He’s a cold one, Polk,” Halliday said from the street below.

  “Yeah, well, we’ll see how cold he is when the trapdoor falls away beneath his boots.” Polk looked at Bohannon and said loudly enough to be heard above the crowd’s expectant din, “Remove the cuffs and shackles!”

  Polk grinned, showing two slightly protruding, fang-like eyeteeth.

  “Oh, right.” Bohannon chuckled, and crouched to remove the shackles binding Lonnie’s ankles. “Wanna give ’em their money’s worth!”

  As Polk tightened the noose around Lonnie’s neck, the boy looked out over the crowd gathered before him. Men, women, children, and dogs had gathered for the occasion. Even a few cats rested on the second-story balcony rails of the brightly painted parlor houses. Scantily clad soiled doves milled on the balconies, smoking and staring toward the gallows. They likely appreciated a break in their work, which would likely start booming again in a few minutes.

  Two old women were selling sandwiches from a wicker basket, and several of the shopkeepers, Lonnie noticed, had moved their wares outside onto their boardwalks to take advantage of the potential customers gathered in the street.

  Lonnie peered around the crowd for Casey. He didn’t see her anywhere. That was good. She didn’t need to see this.

  The fancy Dan—Niles or Giles or whatever his name was—stood beside his father, old Gilpin, the banker, on the boardwalk fronting their bank. The young dandy and his bald-headed, slightly stoop-shouldered old father stared grimly toward Lonnie.

  The crowd quieted some as the preacher raised his voice to sermonize to the crowd. It was a long-winded speech and Lonnie was glad when Halliday broke in with: “All right, that’s enough, Reverend. Save it for Sunday. We’re gathered here for a hangin’ not a church service!”

  The crowd erupted.

  Kids danced around, chasing each other with sticks.

  Dogs barked.

  “You got anything to say?” Polk asked Lonnie, blowing his sour breath in Lonnie’s face.

  “Nope.”

  As calm as he was, Lonnie tensed himself for the drop.

  Polk’s cheek twitched as he threw the wooden lever. There was a raspy bark as the trapdoor gave beneath Lonnie’s boots. The boy fell straight down through the hole in the platform. There was a loud cracking sound, which must have been the breaking of his own neck as he continued to plunge down through the hole.

  But, wait—the rope hadn’t tightened yet.

  Now it drew taut. Lonnie’s body jerked upward. For a second, he thought the rope was going to rip his head off. His eyes bugged as he strangled, clawing at the rope and kicking.

  The crowd was roaring.

  Another cracking sound rose faintly beneath the cacophony. Lonnie’s belly lurched straight up into his throat as he continued dropping straight down over the side of the wagon. The rope around his neck eased its pressure.

  The clay-colored street darted toward Lonnie’s boots.
>
  He heard himself give a loud grunt of expelled air as his feet hit the dirt. He fell and rolled onto his side, stunned, automatically clawing at the noose that was pulled up around his jaws, raking his skin.

  He looked around. The crowd was screaming, dispersing. Dogs barked wildly.

  What the hell?

  Someone gave a loud, raking Rebel yell. The sound was strangely familiar to Lonnie’s shocked, dull brain. Guns crackled.

  Women screamed. Men shouted.

  Hooves thundered as two horses bounded toward Lonnie from beyond the crowd. The crowd thinned as it dispersed, women and children screaming, men shouting, Halliday yelling, “What in the hell?”

  The horses and one rider came racing through the quickly thinning crowd, the rider triggering a pistol above her blonde, tan-hatted head. One of the horses was the chestnut mare, Miss Abigail. The other was General Sherman.

  “Lonnie!” Casey screamed as she ran her horse into the lawmen. “Hop on—let’s fog it away from here!”

  Miss Abigail pitched, front hooves coming down on Walleye Miller’s wounded leg. The deputy screamed. Bohannon was already down, rolling in the dust.

  Lonnie looked up at the rope dangling from the gallows. Its end was ragged. Something had sliced it.

  The boy ripped the noose up over his head and tossed it away. His neck ached from that first, sudden jerk, but he’d live. As the General came up, dancing in place beside Lonnie and blocking the cursing Halliday, Lonnie threw himself at the horse. The General lunged off and Lonnie ran along beside him, pulling himself up by the saddle horn and hop-skipping as he tried to toe a stirrup.

  A pistol cracked behind Lonnie. He didn’t have to look back to know the shooter was the enraged Halliday.

  Lonnie shoved a toe through the stirrup, and swung up into the leather. Casey tossed him his reins, which he caught, frowning at her, not quite believing what had happened.

  Maybe he was still strangling beneath the gallows and his oxygen-starved brain was merely hallucinating all this?

  He glanced behind as the crowd ran every which way. Halliday ran along the street behind Lonnie, aiming his revolver out in front of him. The dog that had run wild in the courthouse ran up behind the lawman, now, believing the man was playing with it. The dog grabbed the lawman’s left pants cuff, and shook it.