The Branch and the Scaffold

by The Branch

  Campbell Eoff—“Oaf” to his intimates, a garrulous Scot with a heavy burr, altogether too foreign for popularity—worked the day side in Murderers’ Row, a lower tier that discouraged suicidal leaps. He presided over the evening lockdown, securing the cell doors with a set of keys on a ring the size of a croquet ball preparatory to throwing the brake. In deference to the Caribbean heat of Arkansas in July, the hour had been pushed back from 6:00 to 7:00 P.M., and with old Larry Keating keeping pace outside the bars that lined the corridor, Eoff unbuckled and hung up his gun belt and let himself inside with his ring of keys. Keating’s shift would begin when this ritual was completed.

  Cherokee Bill occupied Cell No. 20, third from the far end of the corridor. Bill rested against the door with his hands through the bars and smoke scrawling from the end of a hand-rolled cigarette between his fingers. Next to him in 19, Dennis Davis, a Negro sharecropper who had shot a neighbor to death in the Creek Nation in a dispute over shares, lay on his cot singing a tune with neither lyrics nor melody. Four court-appointed attorneys had sought to have him declared not guilty on the grounds of insanity, but he’d been convicted and consigned to the scaffold.

  Eoff stood before the door to Davis’ cell. He turned his head to call over his shoulder to Keating. “There’s something wrong here.”

  Keating stepped up to the bars that separated him from the corridor. Eoff was struggling with the key to No. 19, which was stuck fast in the lock.

  The door to No. 20 swung around on its pivot and crashed against the bars of Davis’ cell. Bill stepped into the corridor, leveled a revolver at Keating’s face, and rolled back the hammer. “Throw up and give me that pistol!”

  Keating jerked his sidearm from its scabbard. Bill fired twice. The guard staggered back.

  The unarmed Eoff swung about and ran toward the opposite end of the row of cells, leaving his keys dangling from the lock, which had been stuffed with a wad of paper. A bullet struck sparks off a bar to his right; another went between the bars at the end of the corridor and spanked the brick wall beyond.

  Eoff reached the end, grasped the bars in both hands, and rattled them. “Jesus, let me out!”

  Cherokee Bill’s cigarette smoldered in the corner of his mouth, stinging his eyes. He spat it out and drew careful aim between the guard’s shoulder blades.

  Someone jostled him hard from behind; he almost fired wide. George Pearce, a murderer awaiting execution and Bill’s nearest neighbor to the gate on that end, charged out carrying a bludgeon fashioned from a table leg in his cell and advanced upon Eoff, blocking Bill’s line of fire.

  “Step aside, George!” Bill called out.

  “Keys!”

  “They’re stuck in the goddamn door!”

  The door in the wall beyond Eoff’s end burst open and four officers came through with pistols. One was Deputy Marshal Lawson, who had taken Bill off Ike Rogers’ hands and lent the prisoner a Winchester in order to have his picture taken with Cherokee Bill. The first thing he saw was Larry Keating, swinging around the corner of the cage with one hand supporting himself on a bar and the other holding his revolver. The front of his uniform was soaked and slick. Eoff was spread-eagled on the end gate, banging it in its hinges and shrieking to Jesus. Ignoring the new arrivals, Keating raised his weapon to aim between the bars at the man standing with gun leveled at the far end of the inside corridor. He hesitated; Pearce had stopped halfway down holding his useless club, blocking the guard’s target. The revolver was slippery in his hand; he had no strength to grip it. It fell. He felt himself sinking. His knees were bending on their own. “I’m killed,” he said.

  Lawson aimed between the bars and fired at Pearce. The bullet rang off steel and Pearce flattened himself against the line of cells on the left side. Billy McConnell, one of the guards who’d entered with Lawson, shot at Cherokee Bill, who returned fire twice, snapped the hammer on an empty shell, gobbled like a turkey, and scrambled back inside his cell as the officers assembled opened a fusillade. Bullets twanged off brick and steel, spent themselves, and rattled on the floor like shelled corn. A cell door halfway down the row swung open, drawing a volley of lead and spitting sparks where it hit; the prisoner inside stayed put. Bill had thrown the lever on his end, hoping for cover when the men poured out. But they appeared contented to wait instead for the rope.

  There was a lull while McConnell tried to revive Keating. Bill had shot his wad, and the officers spread out to cover his cell from all sides. Then three rapid shots fanned out from inside and they ducked for cover; he had reloads.

  Now the area outside the cage filled with armed men summoned by the sound of gunfire. Deputy Marshal Heck Bruner emptied the barrel of a shotgun, the characteristic boom followed by the skittering sound of falling buckshot. The air was a blue haze.

  An unspoken truce was declared while the smoke cleared.

  “Hey! Hey, goddamnit!”

  This was a new voice, coming from a cell near the far end from Bill’s.

  Bruner poked a new shell into his empty barrel and slammed shut the breech. “That you, Henry Starr?”

  “Who in hell else would it be, Heck? You’re the son of a bitch dropped the lid on me.”

  “I just thought you was a gallows grape by now.”

  “I’m waiting on my appeal.”

  “Well, good luck with that.”

  “What if I brung you Bill’s pistol?”

  Bruner remembered he had a cud in his cheek. He shifted it to the other side. “I don’t draw no water in Washington, Henry. I couldn’t promise a thing.”

  “All I ask’s a word on my part.”

  The deputy raised his voice. “How’s that set with you, Bill?”

  Cell No. 20 was silent while chambers were reloaded all around. Then: “How many’s out there?”

  “Right around twenty.”

  “Start Henry, then.”

  “It’s your funeral, Henry,” Bruner said. “I’ll say a kind word to the judge or at your graveside, one or the other.”

  Bruner’s ears rang. He strained for the reply.

  “Is it true Maledon’s quit?” Starr asked then.

  “Hanging and storekeeping. I hear he’s put his hand to busting sod. The new man’s okay, but he’s been known to strangle one from time to time.”

  “All right, then. Bill, you go to shoot me, you make it clean, you hear?”

  “Sure thing, Henry,” Cherokee Bill said. “That damn wash line’s took too many good men.”

  “Don’t shoot,” Starr said, and crept out into the corridor, hands above his head.

  Bruner told the officers to hold their fire.

  Starr walked slowly. When he passed George Pearce halfway down, words were spoken, too low for anyone to overhear. Starr walked on without pausing.

  He stopped in front of Cell 20 and lowered his hands. The men watching strained to listen, but only a stray word or two of Cherokee reached them. Starr stepped inside; they braced themselves to fire. When he turned back toward the corridor, his hands were raised again, and a heavy Colt dangled by its trigger guard from his left index finger. He went across and eased it between the bars into the hand of an officer.

  Keating was dead. His body was carried out gently, and no more words were spoken until after the cage was opened by a spare set of keys, letting out a lank and spent Campbell Eoff. Cherokee Bill was in manacles, and his cell was searched for contraband beyond the handful of loose cartridges they found on the cot. They discovered the broken brick, and space behind it for two pistols, including the one Bill had put in the bucket for the guards to find when they went through the prison after Ben Howell’s escape. Bruner split Bill’s cheek with the butt of his shotgun, and still nothing was said. The officers were saving their words for when their kids asked the old man about the time the great Henry Starr set out to disarm Cherokee Bill.

  A hundred shots had been fired, one man slain, and none wounded, which was considered some kind of record. The noise had emptied the shops, homes, a
nd streets of Fort Smith. By the time Bill’s irons were in place, the crowd outside the prison was larger than any that had gathered there since the order had come down to restrict the audience for hangings. Larry Keating’s fate was common knowledge before it went out over the wires to Judge Parker in St. Louis; within thirty minutes of the shooting, all the old man’s faults had been eradicated from memory and he was reckoned to have been the best Christian the community had ever known outside of the judge himself. His best friends would fill the county fair. It was hot as hell and lynch fever spread like diphtheria.

  Parker was livid. He went straight to the courthouse from the train station, leaving Mary in the carriage to go home and unpack.

  He found Colonel Crump in the same humor. The mob had been broken up, and at his request the city police were enforcing the curfew an hour early to prevent unhealthy gatherings. Crawford Goldsby was confined to his cell, shackled hand and foot, with turnkeys keeping watch on him in round-the-clock shifts.

  “Those last three measures should have been taken when the gun was found in his cell,” Parker said. He sat facing the marshal’s desk, still in his traveling cape and hat.

  “I asked Jailer Berry why they weren’t. He said it made the prisoners unruly in the heat. The truth is he assumed the crisis was passed when the gun was found.”

  “That’s just what Goldsby counted on. Who smuggled it in to him?”

  “Berry questioned all the trustees at the time and took away their privileges. Much good that did him.”

  “Lynch talk, and in Fort Smith! This is what comes of meddling in Washington. The citizens have a keen sense of justice, if they know nothing of statutes and precedents. When I came here I promised it to them, and I kept my word, in the face of a firestorm from Washington and brickbats from the press. This fellow Reed and his tribe have managed to tear down in less than seven years what it took me fourteen to build. And now here’s a good man slaughtered and a peaceful population determined to string his slayer to the nearest branch while a proper scaffold gathers dust.”

  Crump smoothed his beard and weighed suggesting another of Parker’s popular open letters when his secretary knocked, entered, and told him his presence was requested at the jail.

  “Berry?” barked the judge.

  The secretary hesitated. “Yes, sir. Your Honor.”

  Parker waggled a finger at the marshal. “Either he’s gotten to the bottom of the business or he’s written a letter of resignation. Accept nothing in between.” He left while Crump was lifting his hat off the peg.

  They reconvened in chambers. Parker had removed his hat and cloak and looked up over the tops of his spectacles from the portfolio he had flayed open on his desk.

  “He didn’t resign.” Crump’s face was flushed, either from the heat or from some other stimulant.

  “Indeed.”

  “Goldsby’s a coward once his fangs are drawn. He knows now there’s nothing between him and a steep drop but that letter to the Supreme Court.”

  “As of Friday night it’s a penny wasted.”

  “Even so he’s a penitent. He’s prepared to swear out an affidavit identifying Ben Howell as the man who smuggled in both weapons, the decoy included. Goldsby claims that idea as his own. It was pretty smart at that.”

  “Refresh my memory.”

  “There’s no reason you’d place Howell. You gave him three months for pilfering tins and such from a store in the Cherokee. He walked away from a work detail two weeks ago; there’s a warrant out on him next time someone spots him from a prison wagon. We’ll raise the ante on that. As I see it, he let himself get caught just to ferry those guns in to Goldsby. Berry fired the turnkey who was supposed to search him directly he found out.”

  “The man should be up on charges.”

  “Berry thinks he was careless and that’s all there was to it. It was a ninety-day bit.”

  “Still too long for Howell; but I imagine he had money waiting for him. Who made the arrangements?”

  “Goldsby isn’t saying.”

  “Give me the benefit of your professional experience.”

  Crump brushed again at his beard; heat and moisture were making it curl. “Who else? His sweet, sickly mother.”

  Judge Parker spread out his sheets of foolscap and smoothed them in that pernickety way that had caused Cherokee Bill to mistake him for something less than Lucifer. He was a full minute at it, and Bill suspected he’d read his thoughts on the matter and was bound to twist the knife once or twice more before shoving it home. At last he rested his pink, naked hands on the bench and looked at the man who stood before him, with irons on his wrists and ankles and two feet of chain linking both sets. Then he folded his spectacles and recited the long text from memory. His blue eyes were glacial and no mercy lived in them.

  “You have taken the life of a good man,” he said, “who never harmed you; of a faithful citizen, a kind father, and a true husband. Your wicked act has taken from a home its head, from a family its support. You have made a weeping widow; your murderous bullet has made four little sorrowing and helpless orphans. But you are the man of crime, and you heed not the wails and shrieks of a sorrowing and mourning wife no more than you do the cries for a dead father of the poor orphans. Surely this is a case where all who are not criminals or sympathizers with crime should approve the swift and certain justice that has overtaken you.

  “All that you have done has been done by you in the interest of crime, in furtherance of a wicked criminal purpose. The jury in your case has properly convicted you; they are to be commended for it, and for the promptness with which they did it. You have had a fair trial, notwithstanding the howls and shrieks to the contrary. Your case is one where justice should not walk with leaden feet. It should be swift. It should be certain. As far as this court is concerned it shall be.”

  The harsh voice stopped. A throat caught in Beauties’ Row with a faint mew. Parker made no sign he heard it. Now he shuffled his pages, bringing one to the top, and placed the steel-rimmed spectacles astride his nose.

  “You will listen to the sentence of the law, which is that you, Crawford Goldsby, alias Cherokee Bill, for the crime of murder committed by you, by your willfully and with malice aforethought taking the life of Lawrence Keating in the United States jail in Fort Smith, be hanged by the neck until you are dead; and that the marshal of the Western District of Arkansas, by himself or deputy or deputies, cause execution to be done in the premises upon you on Tuesday, September tenth, eighteen ninety-five, between the hours of nine o’clock in the forenoon and five o’clock in the afternoon of the same day.

  “May God whose laws you have broken and before whose tribunal you must then appear, have mercy on your soul.” Parker flicked his gavel and turned away.

  The sharp crack broke the string that had bound the assembly into a taut bale. A woman sobbed openly, and a capacity crowd exhaled as one. Pencils scratched paper in the press section. Even the big electric fan overhead seemed to resume its slow swoop after a breathless pause. Colonel Crump stood two rows behind the defense table, near enough to hear the wet trickle when Cherokee Bill opened his throat to swallow saliva. Apart from that he showed no reaction to the damnedest example of oratory the marshal had ever witnessed, in and out of war and politics.

  He watched two of his deputies conduct the man in chains out of the courtroom and opened his watch, marking the time without quite believing it. The judge had spoken exactly twice as long as J. Warren Reed had taken in summing up the case for the defense, yet that earlier address had seemed fusty and long-winded by comparison; the peacock had commenced to molt. Trust Old Thunder to use the machinery of judgment to dispatch another of his infernal open letters and save himself a penny.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  In 1896, following the snail’s progress of appeal, and after standing idle for more than a year, the great scaffold in Fort Smith claimed the lives of nine men between the middle of March and the end of July. Not since 1876, when only God and the
president had the power to challenge Parker’s will, had so many capital sentences been carried out in that jurisdiction, and no other year came close. A black cloud of despair descended over Murderers’ Row; it seemed to the condemned, and indeed to the nearly half million people in the Eighth District, that Washington had broken itself at last on Parker’s granite shore.

  The high board fence that had been erected around the place of execution strained against the turnout for each event. Colonel Crump, anticipating an escalated demand among federal employees, local luminaries, the press, and ordinary citizens for the final disposition of a case involving the murder of an officer of the court and a popular neighbor, had tripled his standard print order for passes to the hanging of Cherokee Bill; these were exhausted quickly, and he handwrote more on government stationery for late applicants who could not be turned away. Come the day, people began streaming into the compound two hours before the time appointed. By the time Deputy Lawson and Campbell Eoff, whom Goldsby had tried to kill, escorted the prisoner up the steps, the sea of hats, caps, and bonnets awakened memories of the public executions of the early years when anarchy ruled in the Nations.