Seven Days to Hell

by William W. Johnstone

  It was done, leaving Sexton Clarke undisputed master of the field. Three robbers lay dead, while Clarke was untouched.

  After a stunned pause, the crowd broke into raucous clapping, cheering, and whistling.

  Barbaroux cheered louder than anyone, whooping in triumph. After all it was his champion who had won, and in such devastating fashion.

  Clarke acknowledged the acclaim, lowering his head in a solemn bow to his patron, a furiously clapping Barbaroux.

  Mindful that it never hurts to play up to the crowd, Clarke also acknowledged their acclaim with several head-bobbing bows in their direction.

  After which he turned to face his dead foes, taking off his round-brimmed preacher’s hat in a gesture of respect—or was it contempt? Or both?

  Only Clarke knew.

  He put his hat back on, went to the black-welled alcove that hid the portside door by which he’d first entered, and exited the same way.

  Public worker crewmen appeared to take away the bodies. Spivey signaled them to stop. They stood waiting.

  “Avast, mates. Not yet, not yet. Wait till I tell you,” Spivey said.

  With loving care Barbaroux returned violin and bow to their case, closing it. Tanya scooted out to take the instrument, Barbaroux descending several platform steps to hand it into her thin upraised arms where she stood on the floor.

  Aarn Bildad hurried over to him, identifying Tom Ingster as the man who laughed.

  Barbaroux climbed back to the top of the platform and stood there looking out into the crowd, scanning its ranks. He unbuttoned the flap of his holstered pistol, hand resting on the gun butt.

  Knowing what was about to happen, the spectators near Tom Ingster surged away from him, leaving him isolated and alone.

  Barbaroux’s icy blue eyes locked with Ingster’s, the offender who had laughed so rudely while he was playing.

  Ingster raised his arms palms-out, as if in appeal. “W-wait a minute, I didn’t mean nothing by it—don’t!”

  Barbaroux drew and fired, tagging Ingster in the middle. He methodically squeezed slug after slug into Ingster’s midsection, shooting it to pieces. Ingster was dead before he hit the floor.

  The shooting won a fresh round of cheers from the crowd, which Barbaroux happily accepted, soaking them up. They didn’t know about music but they knew what they liked. It showed that despite his highfalutin airs, the Commander at heart was a regular fellow, as much as the least of them.

  So they thought, and it served Barbaroux’s purpose for them to think so. “The common touch,” for so he thought of it, was another tool in the art of command.

  When the tumult died down, Barbaroux delivered Ingster’s epitaph: “Some people just don’t appreciate good music!”

  That drew laughter and cheers, even as those cheering hoped that they had heard the last of Barbaroux’s music for some time.

  The Commander delivered one last parting salutation, savoring another triumph: “Remember! Cullen Baker hangs in Clinchfield Gaol in eight days! Eight days! Don’t miss it, be there!”

  Barbaroux made his exit trailing cheers.

  “That’s the last of them for now,” Spivey told the cleaning crew, indicating Ingster. “Take him away with the others.”

  Barbaroux went off to look for Sexton Clarke. He had a gift of gold for him, a bonus for his fine work. Barbaroux also appreciated Clarke’s tact in quickly leaving the scene so he, Barbaroux, could occupy center stage in dispatching Ingster, the swine.

  He shook his head in wonderment, marveling at Clarke’s speed and accuracy with a gun. The pistol fighter had more than lived up to his reputation.

  “And Clarke’s working for me, my own private gunfighter!” Barbaroux said to himself, exulting. “Nobody can beat him! Who is faster?!”

  TWENTY

  Seven days until Cullen Baker was hanged. Seven days to hell!

  Johnny Cross and Bill Longley came to the Torrent, that narrow swift-running river at the southwest corner of Albedo County in East Texas. The site held a lot of memories for Bill. It was where he had helped Cullen Baker run his barge, where Cullen and Julie made their home with Bill bunking in a nearby shack.

  Memories. Hard work, good times . . .

  Johnny and Bill were on the far side of the watercourse, on horseback, trailing downstream. It was early morning but already the air was thick, close, stifling. It would only get hotter and more oppressive as the day wore on and the sun rose high.

  Swarms of insects buzzed the riders. Insects were the plague of the swamps. One of them.

  Riding alongside the Torrent helped. There was something clean about its racing waters that seemed to clear the air around it. A fine misty spray arose from its surface.

  “I hate the swamp,” Johnny said.

  Bill kept himself from smiling.

  Johnny Cross was a man who could endure hardship as few men could and generally he was the last to utter a complaint. Bill knew that, he had ridden with Johnny before.

  But Johnny made no secret then and now that he was no friend of the Blacksnake River swampland, declaring that the time he’d spent there in the early months after war’s end was one of the most miserable times of his life, because of the locale.

  Johnny had been on the dodge then, running both from blue-clad Federal troops and local lawmen, and Moraine County was a good place for wanted men to lay low and hide out. That’s when he was riding with Cullen Baker, also wanted, as was the very young Bill Longley, then in his midteens but still a blooded Yankee-killer.

  “Bet you never thought you’d be coming back to the Blacksnake,” Bill said.

  “Never. Only saving the life of a man who saved mine—more than once—could bring me back,” Johnny said.

  They’d come a long way in a short time. Johnny had spent the better part of a week in Hangtree waiting for Bill to recover so they could set out on their desperate trek. Bill healed fast but you couldn’t rush these things. The trek was desperate because they were racing to save Cullen Baker from hanging. Execution Day was set for the first of the month.

  Johnny had spent the time wisely by readying for the trip. One of his hardest and least pleasant tasks was convincing Luke Pettigrew not to come along. Luke was his longtime best friend and now partner of the Crossbow Ranch, formerly the Cross Ranch but renamed to reflect its changed status. He and Luke had pooled their resources and gone into cattle ranching in a big way. The boom for Texas cattle was on and growing daily.

  The hell of it for Johnny was his fear that Luke would think he was being cut out of the play because he was missing one leg, his left leg having been taken off below the knee by a Yankee cannonball during the war. The charge was baseless. Johnny and Luke had shared many death-defying adventures together since they had returned home from the war. There was no one Johnny trusted more to side him than Luke.

  But this go-round was different. It stretched back to a time Johnny wasn’t very proud of, when he’d ridden with the Cullen Baker gang in Moraine County after the war. Hunted, starved, and pushed to the edge, Johnny had hit back hard whenever he could. He’d killed a lot of men in that time and some of them hadn’t deserved it. He didn’t want Luke to know the truth of that. Luke had a rough idea of what it was like for Johnny at that time, a very rough idea, but the devil was in the details. And how! Johnny wanted to keep such knowledge from Luke, for it shamed him.

  They’d had different wars, Johnny and Luke. Luke had been in the regular Confederate Army, wearing the uniform and serving with Hood’s Texans. He’d fought in some of the most hellacious battles of the war, experiencing fear, privation, and the grisly horrors of combat. After losing his leg he’d survived the hell of a Yankee prison camp.

  But Johnny Cross had ridden with Quantrill in the Border States. Here was guerrilla war at its most bitter and horrendous. When they spoke of a war that set brother killing brother, the Kansas-Missouri war was the one they meant. It was a dirty sneaking war where each side sought to outdo each other in atrocity. Joh
nny had seen the massacre of unarmed men, had taken part in such massacres, rationalizing it then as paying the Yankees back in kind for their war crimes.

  Then came the sack of Lawrence, Kansas, a Yankee abolitionist center that had been a thorn in the side of Missouri slaveholders for a long time. Quantrill’s raiders had hit that town like Huns, shooting down unarmed men and boys by the score, plundering, robbing, raping, burning. This wasn’t war; it was crime, land piracy. Johnny had kept out of the worst that day and done what he could to mitigate the horror but it was little enough compared to the grand scale of the bloodletting. That lifted the scales from Johnny’s eyes and he knew that for him a change was going to come, had to come.

  Quantrill’s band had come apart toward the end, with Bloody Bill Anderson and several others splitting off to form their own ever more murderous, monstrous outfits. Johnny stuck with Quantrill almost to the finish and barely missed being encompassed by the guerrilla leader’s doom on his last flailing raid. War’s end brought no peace to the survivors of the band. No amnesty for them, the Union declared.

  Johnny took it on the run, shooting his way south across the map. He’d been alone, friendless, starved, and hunted by bounty men, Home Guards, and vigilantes of all kinds when he surfaced on the Blacksnake in Moraine County. He was at the end of his rope when a chance encounter threw him in with Cullen Baker. He’d found a friend in Baker and a home of sorts riding with the gang. It was good to have allies to side you and back you with their guns and their lives knowing you’d do the same for them. Too bad it had no higher goal than robbing and killing.

  Johnny had gotten out but he had no illusions. You could like Cullen Baker, ride with him, have some laughs, and get drunk with him. Especially that last. The gang leader had a prodigious thirst for alcohol and a prodigious capacity for it.

  There was no hiding the fact, though, that Cullen Baker was a stone-cold killer. He had a mean streak and when he got drunk, which was almost all of the time, someone was likely to die. Cullen wouldn’t and didn’t think twice about burning down an unarmed man. That went against Johnny’s grain. He’d killed unarmed men during the war until after Lawrenceville, when he swore there would be no more of it. Nothing more yellowbelly than shooting an unarmed man, by his lights.

  Cullen Baker was a killer and Bill Longley, too. Johnny liked them both in many ways, but he had no illusions about them. He was unsure whether saving Cullen Baker’s neck this time was a good thing or a bad thing, but he knew he had to try. He owed Cullen a debt for the times he had saved Johnny’s life. This would even up things and then Johnny could call it quits.

  But there was no way in hell he was drawing Luke Pettigrew into this go-round. Luke was clean and Johnny had no intention of getting him dirty with mud from a part of his, Johnny’s, life that he’d hoped was dead and buried. This was all about Johnny’s past sins catching up with him, and the burden was his alone.

  There was more. This year the railroad would reach Abilene, a cowtown a-building that spring of 1867. The Crossbow Ranch had plans, big plans, to make a cattle drive to Abilene come summer, sell the herd for top dollar to the big-time beef merchants who planned to ship the cattle east by rail to the ever-hungry markets of the North.

  There were things to be done: preparations made, cowhands hired, cattle rounded up and branded, and countless other items big and small in readiness for the big drive north. The ranch at this critical time could get along without Johnny or Luke but not without both. One of them was needed to be on site ramrodding the enterprise, and since this was Johnny’s mess it was his call to clean it up.

  “If something happens to me the ranch will still go on as long as you’re here, Luke. But if something happens to both of us the ranch is finished and that can’t be, we’ve got too many folks depending on us,” Johnny had argued. He’d won the argument because he was right, but that didn’t make Luke any happier. Or Johnny, either.

  “Besides, it’d be a good thing to have one of us who’s not tangled up in law,” Johnny added.

  “You’re not tangled up in law. You’re a free man, you got a pardon,” Luke countered.

  “I’d like to keep it, too, and I’ll do my best, but on a venture like this there’s no telling what might happen. I need you here on the outside, where you can hire lawyers and whatnot if I need them.”

  “Dang that Bill Longley! I almost wish he hadn’t made it to Hangtree,” Luke said bitterly.

  “But he did, so it must be that that’s the way it was meant to be,” Johnny said. There were times he felt the same way though, that it would have been better all around if Bill had fallen short of his goal and Cullen Baker was hanged on schedule without Johnny being any the wiser.

  Thinking like that wasn’t getting him anywhere. He had a job to do and he’d best set his mind on doing it—and quick!

  Adding to Johnny’s miseries was the fact that the one man Johnny really wanted to talk to had dropped out of sight. Sam Heller had gone for parts unknown and Johnny Cross couldn’t get a line on him, not past a certain point.

  Damon Bolt knew some things and Hangtree town marshal Mack Barton knew some, too, and between them Johnny was able to put together a partial chronology of Sam Heller’s comings and goings:

  On the same night Sam brought Bill Longley to town, he rode out to Fort Pardee, a cavalry post thirty to forty miles northwest of Johnny’s ranch, itself a good half-day’s ride west of Hangtree. The fort was on the far side of the Broken Hills range, also known as the Breaks. It was sited on the eastern edge of the Llano Estacado, the Staked Plains, where it guarded the trails from Comanche raiders.

  Captain Ted Harrison, commander of the post, was a good friend of Sam’s. The captain had worked with him to get Johnny his pardon.

  Fort Pardee was where Malvina the Gypsy, working as a cook in the mess hall, had poisoned over a hundred troopers dead as part of a plot to sack Hangtree town and county. The Army wanted Malvina bad. So did Sam Heller. He’d lost a lot of friends and acquaintances to the mass poisoning.

  Bill Longley said Malvina was now associated with Commander Rufus Barbaroux in Moraine County. Bill had talked about Malvina during his fever dreams and Sam Heller had heard.

  Sam had spent a day and a night at the fort before returning to Hangtree. He hadn’t been in town long, and while he was there Johnny missed him. Sam had told the owner of the small bungalow in town that he rented that he was going away on a trip. He paid three months’ rent in advance and said that if he hadn’t returned within that time the owner was free to rent it out.

  A curious fact: Hobbs the livery stable owner said that during the short time Sam was in town, he, Hobbs, had seen him riding a roan horse. Hobbs and Johnny both knew that Sam was greatly attached to his gray steel-dust horse Dusty. Johnny reckoned that Sam had boarded the animal at Fort Pardee and gotten the roan there, too. Was he going somewhere where he couldn’t or didn’t want to take the gray? Where?

  Johnny had a pretty good guess on that score, but he kept it to himself.

  Sam Heller rode east out of town. There the trail vanished. Sam started out on the road to Weatherford but he hadn’t gone through it, there being no reports of a one-man tornedo making a return visit to that town. He must have detoured around the town entirely. Johnny and Bill had later done the same, not having the time to waste taking the town apart. Pity.

  “What’s that Sam Heller all about?” Bill Longley asked. “He’s got a strange way of operating for a bounty hunter. He left a lot of beef on the hoof behind at the dry lake. Vard had to have a price on his head, and some of them other boys must have been worth money, too.”

  “Sam doesn’t walk away from money lightly. If he did he must have had a good reason,” Johnny said. He didn’t tell Bill much of what he knew about Sam and more of what he suspected. That was none of Bill’s business.

  “I’ll tell you this: Sam Heller is a most mysterious fellow, and no mistake,” Johnny Cross was content to say.

  “Not a bad fello
w at that, for a Northerner. He sure saved my bacon,” Bill said.

  “He does that sometimes, gets those impulses, whims. Another day he might have left you on your own to sink or swim.”

  “I could almost like him if he wasn’t a Yankee.”

  “He’s a good man to have on your side in a fight,” Johnny said.

  Johnny Cross and Bill Longley were now traveling light, having sold the string of fast horses they’d used to race cross-country from Hangtree to the marshy lowlands of the Sabine River. They’d sold the animals well outside Moraine County limits for a fair price.

  “No sense selling them on the Blacksnake, too many horse thieves there to make a square deal,” Bill had said at the time.

  Yes, they were traveling light now to quicken the pace, but not so light that Johnny had shed the several bags of gold coins he’d brought from home. They were wrapped in cloth to muffle their telltale jingle stowed away in Johnny’s saddlebags.

  Johnny had learned early on that gold was just as much a weapon of war as guns and bullets and sometimes more effective.

  Johnny and Bill would have made a strange sight to those uninitiated in the ways of the swamp. They’d smeared a thin coating of mustard-yellow clay on their faces, necks, and forearms, the exposed parts of their bodies. Found locally, the clay offered some protection against the noxious hordes of mosquitoes and other insect pests. It was an old swampland remedy.

  But the two had left their hands below the wrists bare of clay except for the very thinnest of coatings on the backs of their hands, to avoid interfering with the speed of their gunwork—a gunman’s remedy.

  They made an eerie sight, those two, a pair of yellow-faced phantoms flitting through the shadowy trail along the south bank of the Torrent.

  They were in Albedo County but still in the territory Barbaroux had staked out for his own. They had not yet come across any sign of Combine presence yet.

  “We’re almost there,” Bill said. “The crossing is just yonder.”

  Ahead, the river vanished around a bend. Johnny and Bill rounded the curve, coming into a fresh view. They reined to a halt, sizing up the scene.