The Hangings

by Bill Pronzini

  The levee road angled through the salt marshes for half a mile to Lakeville, where the creek began to straighten out for the last few miles of its route into San Pablo Bay. From there I could go in one of three directions—on south to Sonoma Landing at the mouth of the creek, back north toward Petaluma, or east to Stage Gulch and the road into the Valley of the Moon. If my luck continued to hold, somebody in or around Lakeville would be able to give me an idea of which direction my quarry had taken. Otherwise, I would have to make an arbitrary choice.

  It was coming on nine o'clock when I reached Lakeville. Once it had been part of General Vallejo's huge rancho, and had derived its name from a big pond, Laguna de Tolay, that had sat among the low hills nearby. In the years following the Bear Flag revolt, Vallejo had sold off all of this land; and in the sixties, a German immigrant named Bihler had drained the lagoon so he could plant acres of corn and potatoes. Nowadays there was not much to Lakeville other than the wharf Vallejo had built, a few houses, and Hobemeyer's General Store.

  Hobemeyer was open for business—would have been since eight, if I knew old Leo. His was the only store within several miles, and he liked the feel of money more than most. I tied Rowdy to the hitchrail in front, next to a farm wagon drawn by a slab-sided bay mare, and went on inside.

  Cluttered place, Hobemeyer's, with shadowy corners and overstocked shelves and overflowing tables and counters. Tools, coils of rope, and other items hung from the ceiling beams. A dozen different savors vied with each other for dominance: smoked bacon, coffee, dried onions, pepper, beeswax, strong tobacco, cloth and drygoods, boot and saddle and harness leather. Against one wall a fat-bodied stove glowed cherry red and gave off pulsing waves of heat.

  Old Leo Hobemeyer was nowhere in sight. Behind the main counter, Leo's chubby and pomaded son, Dolph, was waiting on a man I didn't know, a farmer in bib overalls and a straw hat. They both watched me as I approached the counter.

  "Well—Constable Evans," Dolph said in his sly way. He greeted most men as if they were a cut below his level of intelligence, which was not so high as far as I could tell; and most women as if they were simpletons and he was doing them a favor by waiting on them. Nobody liked him much, including his father. Old Leo would have thrown him out long ago, I suspected, if he didn't suffer from the gout and need someone to run the store for him. "To what do we owe the honor?"

  "Business matter, Dolph."

  "More calamity in Tule Bend? You look as if you've been fighting a fire."

  "Razor burn," I said shortly. He always did bring out the worst in me. "I'm looking for two men who rode through on the levee road sometime around four this morning."

  Dolph and the farmer exchanged looks. "Do tell," Dolph said to me, and smiled like a bratty kid with a secret.

  The farmer said, "Don't believe we've met, Mister. My name's Simon Fletcher. Bought a piece of land south of here last spring, moved my family up from the San Joaquin Val-ley."

  I introduced myself and we shook hands.

  "Say those men you're lookin' for was around here at four this morning?" Fletcher asked.

  "That's right."

  "Well, I was just tellin' Mr. Hobemeyer here, I heard shootin' around that time. Woke me and the wife up."

  "What kind of shooting?"

  "Pistol shots, sounded like. Half a dozen or more."

  "One man firing or two trading shots? Could you tell?"

  "Two different weapons, I'd say."

  "Could you pinpoint the location?"

  "South of my place, down toward Donahue Landing."

  "Perhaps it was ghosts," Dolph said, and laughed. He had the damnedest laugh for a big man, squeaky and flatulent at the same time, like a mouse passing wind. "Donahue is filled with them, you know."

  Fletcher didn't see the joke, such as it was. "No, sir," he said seriously, "that shootin' was real enough. Woke me and the missus up, like I say."

  I asked, "You hear anything else after it stopped?"

  He shook his head. "Last couple of shots sounded farther away, though."

  "As if whoever was doing the firing was on horseback?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Did you go out to investigate?"

  "I wanted to, but my old woman wouldn't hear of it."

  Dolph mouth-farted again. Neither Fletcher nor I paid him any attention.

  "What about this morning?" I asked. "Before you came here?"

  "Well, I took my wagon down that way, down to Donahue, but I didn't see anybody or anything."

  Dolph snapped one of his galluses—another of his nettling habits—and asked me, "What did they do, Constable? The men you're after?"

  I didn't answer him. Instead I nodded to Fletcher and turned for the door.

  Behind me Dolph said, "If you're going to Donahue, Con-stable, do watch out. The banshees are particularly fearsome this time of year."

  Silly damned jackass. I went out and slammed the door behind me.

  Mounted again, I rode on to the fork and took the road south toward Donahue Landing. Pistol shots in the marshes, pre-dawn . . . it had to be Bodeen and whoever the second rider was. Antagonists, that seemed certain now. No reason for the shooting, otherwise. But I still didn't know which was which, or why one had been following the other, or what the outcome of the gunplay had been, or where either or both men were now.

  It was only about a mile to Donahue Landing. Or what was left of it, and that was not much after ten years of abandonment. The remains lay rotting alongside the creek—a ghost in that respect, though there had never been any superstitious talk that I was aware of about the place being haunted. That was just more of Dolph's sly mouth-farting.

  The town had been built nearly twenty years ago by Peter Donahue, a business tycoon and the man responsible for installing the first street lights in San Francisco and for bringing decent short-line rail service to Sonoma County. He had built up the San Francisco & Northern Pacific, and planned originally to make Petaluma its northern terminus; but when city officials there refused him permission to run his railroad straight down Main Street, he had declared war on the town by laying track on the east side of the creek, south past Tule Bend to a new terminus below Lakeville—Donahue Landing, built from the ground up on cleared marshland and named after himself.

  For a few years the company town had flourished. There had been a long wharf at the water's edge, a roundhouse beyond that allowed his trains to pull out alongside docking steamers and his crews to transfer freight from the boats, most of which he also owned, onto the cars for shipment to rail points throughout the county. He had put up houses, stores, a firehouse, docks, a saloon, a combination stable and Saturday-night dancehall, even a forty-room hotel called the Sonoma House and a one-room schoolhouse that served farm children and the sons and daughters of his employees. Passenger trains ran through there, too, filled with folks taking day excursions up from San Francisco.

  Eventually, though, Peter Donahue healed his rift with the politicans in Petaluma, mainly because he kept on expanding his holdings by buying up other short-line roads, connecting them to the S.F. & N.P., and extending them into San Rafael and down to Point Tiburon. Passengers preferred the new, faster routes, and so did shippers; business at Donahue Landing fell off to almost nothing. So the old man, who had been about as sentimental as a wolf in a shearing pen, dismantled the town a building at a time and used barges to float the lumber and fixtures down to his new terminus at Tiburon. When he got done, there was nothing much left except the wharf, part of the dancehall, most of the roundhouse, a few abandoned homes, and a lot of bare foundations. That had been in 1882, ten years ago, and so far as I knew, nobody had ever tried to claim squatter's rights since. The only occupants of Donahue in all that time had been an occasional tramp and, likely, whole platoons of rats.

  The road wiggled its way along between marshland on the west and a mix of pastureland and low, wooded hills on the east. I met no one, saw nothing as I neared the ruins that testified to a recent gunfight. Ahead,
finally, I could see what was left of the crumbling right-of-way where the S.F. & N.P. spur had cut away in a long northward diagonal from the town. There was a screen of trees along the near side of the landing's wagon road, and when I came around them, onto the overgrown track, the old tycoon's leavings were visible.

  Storms and salt-erosion had knocked down all but one of the abandoned houses and two walls of the dancehall; the only building still standing whole was the heavy black-wood roundhouse, and it would not be for long: part of its roof sagged near collapse. Pigweed and salt grass and swamp oak grew over the site, reclaiming it for the marsh. Boggy backwaters clogged with tules and cattails had begun to encroach on the land as well.

  The long wharf and the remnants of the steamer docks were bent and broken jumbles of boards sinking into the ragged stands of tules along the shoreline. Southward over the creek a pelican flew screeching above a melon boat that was making its ponderous way downstream toward San Pablo Bay. Otherwise the sun-struck morning was still, wind-less, with no movement within the range of my vision.

  After fifty yards, marsh growth completely obliterated the track, so that I had to pick a random course toward the center of town. There were no signs of other recent passage through here, but a feeling of unease began to work inside me just the same. I loosened the Bisley in its holster, let my hand rest on the handle.

  Marsh sounds, faint but audible now—insects, a frog croaking, small-animal rustlings. From some hidden place near the creek, a wild mallard rose quacking. I stood up in the stirrups, trying to see farther ahead over the tall swamp growth. The roundhouse was a hundred yards away, at an angle to my right. I reined the chalk-eye over that way, around a mound of grass-covered rubble where a building had once stood.

  In that instant, something slashed the air a few inches from my right cheek. It caused me to jerk my head, then froze me for an instant—just long enough for a hollow echo to roll over the ruins like the crack of doom, and for me to realize that what had gone by was a bullet.

  Somebody was shooting at me with a rifle!

  Chapter 12

  ROWDY BALKED, DANCING SIDEWAYS—AND A SECOND bullet whipped past me at a lower angle and struck him somewhere on the hindquarters. He screamed, reared straight up on his back legs and then went over and down hard on his right side. The weight of him would have crushed my leg, and perhaps the rest of me when he flopped onto his back, except that I had long since thrown myself out of the saddle. Grass and pigweed and wet spongy earth cushioned my fall, so that I was able to roll clear of him fast when he went down. Noise seemed to swell in my ears like air pumping into a balloon—Rowdy's scream and the hammering echo of the second shot and the grunt and gasp of my breathing.

  I fetched up belly-flat in a matted tangle of tules and fumbled for the Bisley at my hip. It had not been jarred loose in the fall and roll; I yanked it free, thumbed the hammer back. Through a haze of sweat I saw that the chalk-eye was not badly hurt. He had got his legs under him, and when he was up, a few seconds later, he loped off the way we had come.

  There hadn't been any more firing, just those two rounds while I was up on Rowdy's back. The shots had come from somewhere in front and to one side of me . . . inside or near the roundhouse, I thought. Cautiously I raised up for a look in that direction, but from down on the ground like this I could see only the upper half of the building. There was nothing else to see, except for a cloud of blackbirds that had been scared up by the shots and were winging away over the creek.

  I lay still for a time, dry-mouthed, listening. Once the blackbirds were gone, there was utter silence. Even the insects were quiet now.

  The place where I lay was one of the swampy backwaters. The upper half of my body was on a pad of tules, the lower half in black mud that made little sucking sounds whenever I moved. Swamp flies and mosquitoes had begun to swarm around me, to bite at my face and neck. The bog smell in my nostrils was thick, fetid, like an outhouse on a hot day.

  At an angle to where I was, near where the remains of the long wharf were sinking into the creek, a weeping willow stood with its low-hanging branches brushing the ground. I dragged myself through the tules, out onto the firmer, drier earth, and began to crawl toward the willow, stopping every few feet to listen again. Once I thought I heard the faraway nicker of a horse that was not Rowdy, but the sound wasn't repeated.

  It took me the better part of ten minutes to get into the dappled shade under the willow. I stood up slow behind the bole, parted the branches just enough so I could peer out. From this vantage point I had a better look at the front and west sides of the roundhouse. One of the big engine doors was gone, the other standing closed; as far as I could tell, nothing moved in the murkiness inside. Nor was there movement outside anywhere. The creek was empty now, the melon boat and the pelican both gone.

  Between where I was and the roundhouse doors, the ground supported marshy growth and not much else. I judged the distance at about seventy-five yards. Hell of a long run in the face of a rifle; a man did not have to be a marksman to hit a running target on open ground like that. I worked some spit through the dryness in my mouth, trying to make up my mind. I could not stay here all day. And I was damned if I would go crawling back through the bog, hunt for the chalk-eye, and then ride off for help. Even if help were close by and easy to find, which it wasn't, it would be the same as running scared; and if there was one thing I was not, it was a coward. Besides, there was the fire of rage in me, the hot taste of it on the back of my tongue.

  I was still thinking about risking a zigzag run to the roundhouse when the horse and rider came plunging out of the shadows inside.

  The suddenness of it held me motionless for a couple of seconds, gawking. By the time I slapped through the clinging screen of branches, into the open where I could see more clearly, he was better than a hundred yards away on a course toward the road.

  Sorrel horse, and the man stretched out over the saddle with head tucked down and left arm flopping loose at his side, as if it might be broken or injured in some way: splotches of red-brown staining the shoulder and sleeve of his light-colored coat that might be blood. The horse looked like any sorrel, nothing distinctive about it from a distance; and I could not see the rider's face, or enough of him the way he was wrapped low around the animal's neck to even tell his size. Dark hair, denim trousers, tan coat with those red-brown splotches . . . those were the only things I could make out for sure.

  Hot temper and frustration sent me to one knee, led me to squeeze off two rounds from the Bisley even though he was well out of handgun range. The reports rolled over the marsh, faded, and when the afterechoes were gone all I could hear was the far-off muffled pound of the sorrel's hooves.

  The thought came to me then, belatedly, that I made a fine target kneeling out here in the open for anybody still forted up inside the roundhouse. I flattened out in the grass. Lay there for a time, feeling helpless and foolish, listening to the hoofbeats diminish to silence.

  Nobody else in the roundhouse, I thought. He would have fired on me long since if there was. Just the same, I raised up slow, watching that dark opening where the horse and rider had emerged.

  Nothing happened. Seemed certain now that nothing else was going to.

  On my feet again, I scanned the terrain to the north! No sign of the man on the sorrel. No sign of Rowdy, either. The chalk-eye would not have wandered far—he wasn't the kind of horse to bolt and run for home. But by the time I found him, it would be too late to have a hope of catching up to my would-be assassin. And what if Rowdy was hurt worse than I had thought? Hell! If I could pick up the man's trail at all, it would be cool or already cold.

  I kept looking at the roundhouse. One man, hurt, on a sorrel horse. Bodeen? But then where was his brother's roan? And where was the other man?

  I had a little debate with myself—find the chalk-eye first or investigate the roundhouse—and the roundhouse won. With the Bisley on cock, I walked over there at an angle to the rectangular opening whe
re the one engine door had been. When I got to the half that was still standing I eased along its warped boards, put my head around the edge and peered inside.

  Sections of the roof had collapsed and there was enough sunlight coming in through the gaps to dilute the gloom, crowd the shadows back into corners of the cavernous interior. Grass and weeds had grown up through the cinder- strewn flooring, in places obscuring the debris that littered it in pieces and mounds. Empty workbenches made bulky, skeletal shapes along the walls. The black engine pits yawned like doorways into Satan's lair.

  Soft-footed, I slid around the door and inside. Stood still for a minute—the rank-smelling space looked and felt empty—and then began to make my way forward. The turntable had been removed, I saw, although some of the machinery that had operated it was still there, pocked and corroded from the salt moisture. The engine pits were choked with the same sort of debris that cluttered the floor: chunks of roofing lathe and tarpaper, shattered timbers and loose boards, lengths of steel, rusting tackle, twisted things I couldn't name.

  At the rear were two windows, the glass long ago broken out, framing bright daylight beyond. I moved toward them, being careful of where I put my boots. I was closing on the nearest window when something red and green caught my eye atop one of the workbenches. I changed direction to see what it was.