Savage Guns

by William W. Johnstone

  “Come in, dear boy,” she said. “We’ll have a little tête-à-tête.”

  This was making me plain itchy. I didn’t dare ask what them words meant.

  She motioned me toward the bed, where I sat down real gingerly. She sure was pretty, all soft and gentle, with a brightness in her eyes. I’d never seen a lady in a white wrapper before. My ma, she pined for a white wrapper all her life. Pa got her a gray flannel one with purple petunias on it, and I never knew that wrappers came in other colors until I was off on my own. This white wrapper flowed over the Widow Gladstone in a way that didn’t quite hide much.

  But I couldn’t think of a blasted thing to say, and if I tried I’d just babble out a mess of words, so I swallowed real hard and settled on the bed and tried to make sense of this.

  “Now then, we’ll just talk a little. I might have some information for you. I know you’re looking into that whole tragedy. You’ve been asking questions. I’m hoping you’ll save the dear boy. I’m very fond of him.”

  The way she said that sure stirred up stuff in my head.

  She waited a moment, while I studied her white wrapper. I couldn’t keep my eyes off that white wrapper. That wasn’t much under there. Her dress and all that other stuff, all them thingamabobs women wear, she had folded them all into a stack sitting on my dresser. So I was stuck with staring at her wrapper, because I didn’t know what else to do.

  “My information might lead you to the truth about King, and might free him from the awful fate that awaits him,” she said.

  “Well, what is it, ma’am?”

  “Oh, I’m not going to tell you. Not unless I have my way with you.”

  This sure was getting peculiar. I tried to run that through my head, and it kept bucking like Critter in a bad mood.

  “Mind you, what I know might not change anything. I know nothing about what happened next door, after King left along with Mr. Parsons.”

  “Well, seems to me if you’re keepin’ stuff from me, then you’re going against the laws,” I said. “Someone told me that once. You’ve got to fess up all you know.”

  “Well, that’s for you to decide,” she said. “I have a price.”

  She had a price, all right. That there white wrapper was just the butcher paper on the package.

  “We would have a lovely time,” she said softly. “I am an experienced woman.”

  Well, I sure didn’t have a clue about what to do.

  “You got to tell me what you know, how you know it, and why you’re telling me,” I said, trying not to look at that wrapper, which was sort of sliding down her shoulders a little.

  “Just say Open Sesame, and magic will happen,” she said.

  “Now what’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Ah, dear boy, I’m looking forward to teaching you.”

  She sure was pretty. She might be older, but she was just fine, sitting there, smiling, looking like an angel in the dawn light, making life sweet in the town of Doubtful, Wyoming Territory. I sort of figured she was trying to save King Bragg’s life, and maybe she’d worn that white wrapper with King Bragg as her company. Who could say? She was like some loving angel lookin’ down on us poor mortals.

  “Ma’am,” I said, real firm. “I’ve got a headache.”

  “That’s very familiar,” she said. “You may turn your back.”

  I did, and when she told me I could turn around, she was dressed, with a small sad smile on her lips. She leaned forward and kissed me softly, and left my boardinghouse room.

  My ma always told me I’m a little slow.

  NINETEEN

  That timber cutter Lemuel Clegg and his boys were waiting for me when I got to the office. I sort of halfway knew what they would tell me even as DeGraff let me in. I motioned them three to follow, and closed and locked the door behind me.

  The county hired Lem Clegg to build the gallows. He had a mill up in the forest out of Doubtful, where he cut posts and planks and such. When it came to hiring someone to build the gallows, I told the county supervisors, Reggie Thimble and Ziggy Camp, I didn’t have no money in the budget for it. They said, hell, man, hang King Bragg from the nearest cottonwood limb. They thought that was pretty funny until Judge Nippers had a fit, and told the county to have a proper gallows and pay for it. So one way or another, the Cleggs got hired to do the job. I knew they were out there cutting timbers and squaring them up, and getting plank lined up, and such. And now, with a week left before the big event, I knew they’d be putting it up on the courthouse square, and we’d soon be seeing a proper gallows.

  “You met my boys? This here is Barter and this other is Wage. I give ’em names to set them in the right direction when they get growed up some.”

  “Oh, I got a miserable name hung on me too,” I said. “I never did cotton to Cotton, but I got stuck.”

  Lemuel pursed his lips some, not caring for that. He had a scraggly gray beard and his lips were a little orange purse in the middle of it.

  “Sheriff, we got robbed. Highwaymen. We was driving the first of the timbers into Doubtful, and half a dozen masked men surrounded us and all we saw was the muzzles of big revolvers.”

  “What did they want?”

  “Not my purse. They didn’t even ask for my purse.” Lem pulled it from his pocket and dangled it before me so I could see it was fat with bills and coins. “It was the wood they wanted. They plumb stole every stick off our wagon, carried it over to their own, and sent us on our way.”

  “You know who?”

  “Sure I do. I’d recognize that blooded stock anywhere. That gang was Anchor Ranch or I’ll eat my shirt.”

  From the looks of his shirt, I thought he’d be eating a lot of grease and slobber and road dirt if it came do that.

  “You say they were masked?”

  “Yep, every last one. But if you put all them Anchor Ranch men in a line, I’d be able to finger a bunch. I think I saw Spitting Sam, Big Nose George, and Smiley Thistlethwaite, but I wouldn’t make a bet on it.”

  “What was the lumber?”

  “The uprights, the crossbeam, four angle braces, and some two-by-fours to start framing the platform. I’d say a hundred dollars of good wood. I gotta tell you, Sheriff, we’d put our best into it. The uprights, they were ten-inch-square posts of lodgepole pine, planed smooth and no knots. The crosspiece was ten-inch-square Colorado spruce, finest we could buy, full of resin to give it plenty of bounce. Why, you could drop a four-hundred-pound fat lady from the Barnum and Bailey Circus from it, and it wouldn’t even shiver. You can drop a hundred people from that spruce, and it wouldn’t hurt the spruce a bit. Why, you could drop a thousand and it’d not show a sign of wear. When Lemuel Clegg builds something, he builds it to last a century. That’s me. We’ll build a gallows for that Puma County Square that’ll last long after our grandchildren have come and gone. The county can put that gallows in a warehouse and bring her out and put her up any time, and it’ll be just as good as the day we built it. Yep, at least a hundred dollars of fine wood in there.”

  “The good wood’s not why they stole it,” I said.

  “No, I guess it ain’t. Looks like we’ll have to cut some more and get us an armed guard to bring it in.”

  “Can you put up the gallows in time?”

  Lem sighed. “I suppose so, if we work night and day, and we don’t get any more wood stole from us. But it’ll be cheaper wood. Lodgepole planes faster than spruce, so the whole thing will be lodgepole, which isn’t the best wood for this sort of thing. A good gallows should be made to hang people for a century or two.”

  “I know a hundred or so fellers deserve a hanging,” I said. “One long-life gallows might save the county a pile of money.”

  “Well, you can start with that fiend King Bragg,” Lem said. “If he’d been out cutting trees like my boys, he wouldn’t have gone bad.”

  I got more details, time and place, descriptions, anything that Lem and his boys could think of, and then they hightailed out. There sure was s
ome question whether Puma County would have a proper gallows up and ready for the day of the hanging.

  “All right, you go cut some more wood, and next time let me know before you bring it in, and I’ll make sure you’ve got a guard,” I said.

  They took off.

  DeGraff eyed me. “Going out to Admiral Bragg’s place to pinch a few?”

  ‘I’m thinking on it. I’m also thinking just to send them a message. King Bragg’s gonna get his neck broke on the right day, even if there’s no gallows. I’ll hang him from the flagpole if that’s what it takes. So they may as well cut it out.”

  “Want me to go tell Admiral?”

  “Yeah, do that. Tell him we’re not waiting for a proper gallows. That boy’s gonna hang, and that’s the whole story.”

  “All right. I’ll ride. See you tomorrow—if they don’t shoot me.”

  “Or make a hostage of you,” I added.

  He grinned.

  “Keep a sharp eye out,” I said.

  DeGraff headed into the afternoon, and a little later I saw him ride up the road toward the Anchor Ranch. It would be a long, lonely trek for him, and not without danger. But he’d do the job, all right. I had good deputies. Some of them, like Rusty, had started down the owlhoot trail but saw how it would end, and came on over to the sunlight side of life. That just made them better deputies. They knew how the others lived, what they thought, what they believed they could get away with, and all the ways they were foolish as well as smart. My deputies were handy with guns, but not as fast as all those gunslicks on the ranches. But Rusty and Burtell and DeGraff knew enough to know that the one that aims good is the one that wins a gunfight, and speed don’t matter much if the lead flies past its target. All three of them was pretty happy too. They was getting regular wages, had enough for a few beers after work, and the whole town of Doubtful admired them. Our mayor, George Waller, even told me that Doubtful was lucky to have me and them three keeping things quiet. It was good for business, he said.

  Things weren’t so quiet lately, though.

  I went back into the cells to see about King, who was staring at the ceiling.

  “Anyone going to feed me this week?” he asked.

  “You didn’t get fed?”

  “Not since yesterday. And that pot—”

  He didn’t have to say any more. It stank. That was the trouble with my deputies. Rusty and DeGraff hated to feed any prisoner or take the chamber pot out, and I’d told them a million times to do it, and take care of the men behind bars.

  “How’d you like it if you were behind bars and no one fed you or got you water or took your stinking crap out?” I’d asked them.

  Rusty, he just smiled. “No way I’m ever gonna be behind bars again,” he said.

  Well, they weren’t perfect even if they was good men.

  I beckoned, and King handed me the chamber pot, and I took it out and emptied it in the crapper, and then I pumped a pail of water and splashed it over the pot, and threw it toward the geraniums the Doubtful Women’s Club had planted. I took that back to King Bragg.

  “I’ll get you some chow. It ain’t right, starving you.”

  “In a week, it won’t make any difference,” he said.

  I stopped. “I’m still trying to find out what happened in there. Tell me something. Did Mrs. Gladstone hear what Plug Parsons said to you?”

  “She was right there.”

  “And what did Plug tell you?”

  “He said Crayfish was next door and wanted to see me, and wanted to send a message to my father.”

  “Crayfish was next door?”

  “That’s what Plug told me.”

  “And was he in the Last Chance Saloon?”

  “No, I didn’t see him. So I just ordered a drink from Sammy Upward while I waited.”

  “And where was Plug?”

  “I guess he went to get Ruble.”

  “And where were the ones that got killed? The Jonas boys and Rocco?”

  “Beats me,” King said. “I had my back to the room, and was facing the bar, getting a drink.”

  “And then?”

  “Then I was on the floor staring at the ceiling with Ruble and Plug standing over me.”

  “With your gun in your hand?”

  “No, in my holster. They took it out and told me every chamber was empty and I’d soon hang.”

  “Why didn’t your lawyer, Stokes, go into this?”

  The boy stared. “What’s there to go into?”

  I sure had a prickly feeling in me. “All right, I’ll go over to the café and get you a meal. You want something in particular?”

  “What’s this, my last supper?”

  I didn’t feel much like answering. I locked up and headed down the street to Toady’s Beanery, where we sometimes got our chow for our prisoners. We had a regular account with Toady, and he billed the county. He also kept some of our tin bowls on hand, so he could dish up a meal real quick.

  Toady was a one-eyed Civil War veteran, and he didn’t wear a patch either. Beans was all he made, but some weeks the beans would have bacon, and some weeks beef, and some weeks other stuff, like tomatoes, just for variety.

  “Wondered when you’d come,” Toady said. He reached for one of them mess bowls and filled it. “You still have that boy in there? You feeding him somewhere else?”

  “You mean he hasn’t been fed?”

  “Not this morning or last night.”

  I got angry. Half the time my deputies forgot to feed the prisoner, and I’d told them about it over and over, and now the boy was starving once again. It was one hell of a way to treat someone caged behind iron bars and helpless.

  “Make it double, Toady,” I said.

  The man ladled another round of the beans and handed it to me, and I headed back through the quiet afternoon to my jailhouse. You’d think Doubtful was the peacefullest town in Wyoming. There wasn’t no one in sight, not even them T-Bar men of Ruble’s keepin’ an eye on my office. I unlocked and took the bowl straight back to King Bragg, who accepted it with both hands, like it was a communion plate.

  He sat on the bunk with the bowl in his lap and clasped his hands together.

  “I thank you Lord for these thy gifts. Amen,” he said.

  He glanced at me, saw me standing there, and turned his face away from me and kept on praying. I didn’t know what he was saying, but a boy who’s gonna be hanged in a few days might have an awful lot to say to God. I didn’t know whether to stand there or get out and give him his privacy, but somehow I just stood there and watched while he said whatever he had to say. Then, finally, he was done.

  He took the metal spoon I’d given him and dug in, and I noticed his face was wet with tears, and those tears just kept flowing and flowing down his cheeks even as he downed the beans. It was so bad I could hardly look.

  TWENTY

  Judge Nippers was parked in his swivel chair, drunk as a skunk, so I rattled his shoulder some to fetch him awake.

  “Huh? Huh?” he said, and grabbed for the little revolver he kept in his desk drawer.

  “It’s me,” I said. “Put that piece back.”

  He did.

  “You up to talkin’?”

  “I’m up to whatever the world throws at me. I am a sterling public servant, and won’t abide your insults.”

  “You mind if I hang King Bragg from a cottonwood limb?”

  “Mind! Of course I mind! The boy’s gonna be hanged proper, from a scaffold, by the Territory of Wyoming, just as fine and fitting as can be done. And no shortcuts. No tree limbs. This’ll be done in a professional fashion.”

  “Ah, there’s a little problem,” I said. I told him about the Cleggs comin’ to town and getting their timbers stolen.

  “Admiral Bragg’s work,” Nippers said.

  “The robbers were masked, and we can’t prove it.”

  “Well, it’s perfectly obvious. You tell Admiral Bragg to cease and desist or I’ll hang him from the same gibbet after he watc
hes his boy swing.”

  That was booze talkin’ and I let it pass. “It may take the Cleggs a while to get that scaffold up, if we keep running into trouble. It may not be ready in time.”

  “Well, then I’ll issue a brief stay. When it’s up, I’ll give the go-ahead.”

  “There may be a lot of delays. Depends on how much Admiral Bragg wants to slow it down.”

  Nippers eyed me coolly. “Then spirit the young punk to Laramie. Armed guard, middle of the night. Let Laramie enjoy the hanging.”

  “Our merchants won’t be happy with that,” I said. “They’re already stocked up for crowds of people having a party. George Waller, he says most every merchant in town’s laid in food and picnic stuff. There’ll be people from all over Puma County coming in for the show, and they’ll spend good money. If we move the hanging, you’re gonna have Mayor Waller and every merchant in town mad as hornets. It ain’t just the merchants either. I’ve already employed Doc Harrison to declare him dead. And Sammy Upward’s advertising half-price drinks after the show, and free hard-boiled eggs.”

  “Tough beans,” Nippers said. “If I say spirit the prisoner out, you’re going to spirit the prisoner out. If I say hang the bastard in Laramie, you’re gonna hang the bastard in Laramie. And if the merchants whine, I’ll tell them to elect someone else next time. I’m tired of being a magistrate anyway.”

  “Well, don’t do that until I see whether we can get the scaffold up. I’m going out there and escort the Cleggs next time they’re hauling wood.”

  “You do that,” Nippers said. He’d found his flask, and was losing interest in me.

  I abandoned the Puma County courthouse and headed back to my jail, only to run into Crayfish Ruble, standing right there with Plug Parsons at his side, grinning at me like he wanted to spill a little blood.