Savage Guns

by William W. Johnstone

  One of them T-Bar men came up to me. It was Carter Bell. He had witnessed the shooting and testified at the trial. So he was still around town.

  “That hanging going to happen like it should, Sheriff?” he asked.

  Carter Bell had a real nice-sounding name, but he reminded me of a rodent. I swear, every time I looked at him, I thought of rats. He had that rat-face on a skinny body, and if I didn’t know he was a live person, I’d of thought him to be a big old alley rat. He didn’t have rat whiskers, but he had little buck teeth at the end of a long snout, just like one of them big gray rats. You sure couldn’t always tell a person by his name.

  “Everything’s going just as the court directed,” I said.

  “Well, if it ain’t, there’s going to be a hanging anyway,” he said.

  “You planning on doing it?”

  He smiled, his little rat-mouth widening. “Count on it, Sheriff.”

  “You got the itch to string up the boy, do you?”

  “I got that itch so bad, I’d like to bust in there and do it all by my lonesome before anyone else has the chance, Sheriff.”

  “How come? What did the boy do to you?”

  “He killed three T-Bar men in cold blood, and I saw it.”

  “I guess you and Plug Parsons were the two that saw it happen, with Sammy here.”

  Then this lobo wolf Bell, he said, “if you don’t hang that punk proper, watch your back, Sheriff.”

  “Well, my ma, she always said I needed an eye in the back of my head.”

  “You ain’t hearing me. I saw the Bragg boy shoot our friends deader than buzzard bait. The court settled it weeks ago. So drop it now, damn you. You gonna quit sniffing around or not? Answer me, dammit.”

  He was standing there, hand hovering over that sidearm of his, looking for an excuse to yank it out.

  “Bell, cut it out,” Sammy said.

  Bell sure got himself riled up. He was crowding me, and if he’d try to pull iron he would have gotten a knee right where it hurts. Maybe I’m a little thick in the head, but I’m fast with the rest of me. But the steam sort of hissed out of him, like maybe Sammy was giving orders, and pretty soon he backed off. But he was hot and stayed hot and looked like he’d go for iron any moment.

  “Just ’cause you’re wearing a star don’t mean you’re bulletproof,” he said.

  I turned my back on Bell. “Thanks, Sammy.”

  “Don’t thank me. He’s right. Quit sniffing around and get on with the hanging.”

  I got out of there and wondered whether to go visit Rosie. But hell, Rosie’s place was full of them T-Bar boys, and Crayfish himself, so I thought maybe I’d go talk to Big Lulu, who ran the Home Comfort, where one could hire several temporary wives.

  Big Lulu was a rival of Rosie, and half a block away, but Lulu had a different clientele, mostly shopkeepers, bankers, tent preachers, traveling salesmen, piano tuners, and folks like that who wanted all the comforts of home, especially when there weren’t any comforts of home available to those fellers. And Crayfish was there as often as he was at Rosie’s, singing fine old hymns around the parlor organ, joking with one of them wives that made the gents comfy, or taking tea and crumpets in the parlor with a few of the gals.

  I had in mind a little conversation about Rocco.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Big Lulu’s was sure a nice place, with a homey parlor where lots of swell folks gathered. I went in there, and felt right at home. Big Lulu herself was at the parlor organ, wearing a gray wrapper with purple petunias on it, just like my ma’s. She was a little on the plump and curvy side, but lots of fellers preferred that to skinny and bony.

  She was playin’ “Rock of the Ages,” and some fellers were singing away. I saw George Waller, the mayor, warbling away so that his Adam’s apple sort of wiggled his red bow tie. After that, Big Lulu paged through some other music and started in on “Nearer My God to Thee,” which was real nice. It was a good song for tenors, but was all right for baritones.

  She had horsehair sofas and chairs in there, and ivory lace curtains, and some Brussels carpets on the plank floor, so it was all fixed up good. After a bit, one of them young ladies of hers, all dressed up in lavender gauze, came out with a tea cart and began dishing up hot tea from a blue pot. She smiled and offered me some, but I was waiting to talk to Big Lulu, so she turned to a drummer that was in town selling schnapps, and offered him some. He licked his lips and smiled.

  Finally, Big Lulu, she wrapped up her concert, and everybody was feeling real uplifted, and she turned to me.

  “You want something, Sheriff, or shouldn’t I ask?”

  “Well, yes, I’d like to talk with you private.”

  “Well, that’s five dollars, same as everybody.”

  “No, I mean talk with you about stuff.”

  “Boy, my mouth isn’t where the action is so I’d want six dollars.”

  “No, I mean just ask questions.”

  “I get schoolboys in here all the time asking questions.”

  “All right, I’ll just ask them right here at the organ.”

  “I charge extra for public performances, Sheriff.”

  I sure was feelin’ slow. I couldn’t get the right words to tell her I was there on sheriff business. So I just decided to plunge in.

  “You know Rocco, the one that King Bragg shot?”

  “Do I know him? Did I know Rocco? I knew him from top to bottom.”

  “What I want to know is, did he rent some of your nice girls for Crayfish Ruble?”

  She frowned. “He rented them but didn’t return them. He always said they decided to catch the stagecoach to Denver and Crayfish paid for the tickets. I lost a couple of my best temporaries that way. He’d come in and offer me thirty-five a week plus board to rent a lady, so I didn’t have to feed anyone, and I thought Crayfish was cheap, but who was I to complain? Long as he fed the girls, that was fine with me.”

  “So Rocco would rent girls for Crayfish, and sometimes not bring them back?”

  She sighed. “Is that news to you?”

  “Yep, it’s news. What did you think of Rocco?”

  She smiled. “Woowoo,” she said.

  Danged if I could make sense of that.

  “Do you miss him?”

  “Honey, he was my favorite gentleman.”

  “You any idea why King Bragg killed him?”

  “I never believed the Bragg boy did it,” she said. “Honey, I got customers, I gotta go now—unless you want to join our Special Tuesday Half Price Happy Hour, including drinks and ladies.”

  “No, no, I’m heading for the square,” I said.

  I hardly got clear of her before she was playing “Down by the River.”

  I got out into the sunlight. I sucked in some fresh air, and kept on doing it. Truth is, I was glad to get out of there. I was about ready to suffocate in there, so I gulped in lots of fresh springtime air on my way back to the courthouse square where the gallows was going up.

  When I got there, it looked pretty near done, and the Cleggs was just winding things up with a little stair they’d built that would take me and the prisoner up to that platform. There sure was a bunch of spectators. Some young mamas was holding their little tykes up so they could see the gallows, and telling the little fellers to behave themselves.

  Lem Clegg spotted me and came on over. “You’re just in time, Sheriff. We’ve got to put up the noose and test the whole shebang. You say your deputy can tie the knot?”

  “DeGraff, yep, he says he can.”

  “And I need some canvas bags and some rocks. How much does that boy weigh?”

  “Oh, maybe a hundred twenty, thirty.”

  “Well, we’ll test it out with some canvas bags with that much stone in them. Make sure everything works. We wouldn’t want anything to go wrong now, would we?”

  “No, sir, I ain’t counting on it.”

  “Well, you get the noose and we’ll fill some sacks with rock.”

  “I’ve got som
e canvas bags,” a feller said. It was Alphonse Smythe, the postmaster. “Good stout mailbags,” he said.

  “Those’ll work,” Lemuel Clegg said.

  Smythe hightailed to the post office to fetch a couple of them bags. A bag full of rocks should test her out all right.

  “I’ll get DeGraff and the rope,” I said.

  I found both in the office. “You got to make Clegg a noose now,” I said.

  “I can do that,” he said. “I’ve made a few.”

  We got the hemp rope and headed back there. DeGraff, he knew what he was up to, and it made me wonder some about how he’d spent his earlier years. He laid out the rope on the platform, and made a sort of N with one end of it. I sure didn’t know how that would get turned into a noose, but he went right ahead with the loose end and pretty quick he was making them coils, six in all, and then tied it up. It was a noose, all right.

  “I thought them nooses had thirteen coils,” I said.

  “No, that’s just superstition. They’d be too hard to handle. Six coils is about right. The coils keep the rope from going in reverse. Once she tightens, it’s real hard to pull it loose. That makes sure the condemned gets strangled good and proper. That rope just slams the airpipe shut. The knot is always put a little to the left, and that snaps the neck. Some say the knot itself does it, but I think it’s just the twist, it being off-center, does it. Anyway, done right, the condemned is totally ruined. Not a twitch, except they soil their britches.”

  He fetched him a ladder and climbed up to the crossbar and slung the rope over it.

  “Now that boy’s about five seven or eight, right?”

  “I guess that’s right.”

  “I’ll fix it for a four-foot drop. That’s enough. Too long a drop, and it pulls the head clear off. That’s not being respectful of the deceased, even though the spectators like to see it. You get a hanging where the head comes off, and them schoolchildren talk about it for a week. So a shorter drop, that’s better. Too short, though, and it doesn’t snap the neck. So it’s got to be done just right.”

  “We don’t need the mailbags,” Clegg said. “My boy Barter, he’s the same size as King Bragg, and he can just step in here.”

  “You sure you know what’s what?” I asked.

  “Oh, sure,” Clegg said. “Barter, you fetch yourself up here and stand right on that trap there. Right smack in the middle.”

  The boy, a grinning fool, just hopped up there and stood on that trap.

  “Now, Sheriff,” Clegg said, “This here trap will drop when you pull that lever over there. It’s nothing but a stick on a pivot, but when that stick clears, the old trap will drop right smart. Go pull her slow and steady.”

  “But your boy’s standing on it.”

  “He’s not connected to a rope. Just pull her.”

  “Are you set, Barter?” I asked.

  “Good as gold,” he said.

  “All right then.” I yanked the stick, and sure enough, the trap swung down and the boy dropped straight through that hole in the deck and landed in a heap on the new green grass of the courthouse square. He laughed, and got himself up. There was lots of whistling and cheering around there. I hadn’t realized that there was plumb fifty people watching.

  “All right, I’ll push that trap up and swing the lever back,” Lem Clegg said. “It sure works good. That kid of mine dropped like a ton of bricks.”

  He put the trap up and the lever in place and ducked out from under the platform.

  “All right, Barter, you stand here on the trap and let Deputy DeGraff fit the noose to you. You and the condemned is just about a perfect match,” Clegg said.

  The boy stepped out on the trap, and DeGraff was about to drop that big old noose over his head, but I didn’t like it.

  “Whoa up. Barter, boy, you get off that trap. The deputy can fit you out with a noose without you standing there.”

  “Nobody’s pulling any levers,” the boy said. “I ain’t afraid.”

  “Well, I am.”

  I guess he took me serious, because he did step back off that trap onto solid platform, and DeGraff dropped that noose over his neck and then began adjusting the length of the rope from the crosspiece. He had simply wrapped the rope three or four times from the crosspiece, and now he pulled the coils tighter until he’d taken some of the slack out. He left two or three feet of slack in there, so I’d have some wiggle room when I laid that noose over King Bragg, but pretty soon he had it all rigged up, and the rope tied down tight on the crosspiece.

  “All right, Barter, you can pull that thing off now,” his father said. “And let that be a lesson to you. Make an honest living and you’ll never wear a necktie.”

  Barter smiled like some fool, and did a little jig, dancing real close to the trap, and then doffed the noose. It sort of swung there, in the wind, twisting and turning with the spring breezes. I thought it was a mighty fine job.

  That’s when Smythe returned with a couple of mail sacks.

  “I guess we won’t be needing ’em, Alphonse,” I said.

  Smythe sure looked disappointed. “I was hoping to see one drop,” he said.

  “Well, if you want to see a mailbag drop, we’ll just do her,” I said.

  We hunted around for some rock. There wasn’t much on the square, but a bunch of fellers did come up with a few dozen stones after scouting things out, and we filled the mailbag and drew the strings shut.

  “Weighs a good hundred pounds, Alphonse,” I said.

  The postmaster eagerly dragged the bag onto the trap and centered it precisely.

  “You want to pull that lever, Alphonse?”

  “Sure do,” he said. “I’ll send the U. S. Mail to Eternity.”

  By now there was some crowd, all right, taking it all in. I seen some rotten boys whistling and cheering. There were half a dozen ladies too, in summer bonnets and straw hats.

  “Now this here’s serious business,” I said. “We’re making sure justice is done, so you mind your manners.”

  Them brats just grinned at me. I knew half of them and told them I’d be talking to their pa if they didn’t behave. But they just snickered like it was the funniest thing they ever heard.

  Smythe took hold of the lever and looked around real solemn. He was pretending that the mail bag full of rocks was the real thing. He stared at the rocks, and then at everyone hanging around there, and then slowly, majestically, he inched that lever along until suddenly that trap dropped and that bag of rocks hit the turf. He grinned. Them rotten boys all whistled and cheered.

  “Now it’s my turn,” a redheaded kid said.

  “No, it ain’t your turn.”

  “How come?”

  “Because you ain’t old enough. And it’s none of your business.”

  “I’m almost as old as you are.”

  He had me there, but I ignored him.

  Smythe, he dragged his mailbag out from under the platform and began doling out rocks to that pack of boys. “You put these back where you got them,” he said.

  “I’m keeping mine for a souvenir,” said that rotten redhead.

  “This show’s over,” I said loudly. It wasn’t just them boys I was talking to. It was half the town of Doubtful, seemed like. Pretty soon they all drifted off, except for a few fellers who thought they knew everything, and were pointing at the noose, or at the gallows, or at the platform and the trap, sharing all that stuff they had in their heads with anyone in sight.

  DeGraff picked up the spare rope and carried it off to the sheriff office, and the Cleggs cleaned up their stuff and left, and then I was alone on the square, with that dangling noose, and wondering whether what was gonna happen in a couple of days could be called justice at all—or a mistake.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Things was real quiet. No one was trying to bust into the jail to hang the boy, or to bust him out. I told DeGraff to keep a sharp eye out anyway.

  “We got two more days to guard him, and then it’ll be over,” I said.r />
  “Over for the kid, that’s for sure,” he said.

  My deputies had done a good job. They’d worked long hours, night and day. They were forted up and ready for trouble. And I made sure the prisoner got fed and cared for, which was something I plain insisted on after I found them fellers were ignoring the boy’s needs. Still, I sure wished it was over. I didn’t like the tension in town, like a ticking bomb, with all them T-Bar men of Ruble’s running around, drinking too much, and scaring the people half to death. They was all armed, some of them with two guns, as if they were just itching for trouble. But it wasn’t illegal for them to carry, so they did.

  I unlocked the jail door and went in there to King Bragg’s cell, and found him staring at the ceiling. He barely acknowledged that I was standing there. I guess when a feller knows he’s gonna get hanged in forty-eight hours or so, he’s got a lot on his mind.

  “You all right?” I asked.

  He stared at me as if that was the dumbest question ever asked. Lot of people stare at me like that. My ma used to say you could learn more from the way people looked at you than from what they were saying.

  “Tell me again how it happened you went into the Last Chance that day,” I said.

  He just stared at me and said nothing.

  “Tell me, boy. I want to know.”

  “I went in because I was stupid,” the kid said. “All it cost me was my life.”

  He’d about given up; I could see that. There weren’t any tears, any anger, any hope left in him.

  “Well, just so I know, what did happen?”

  “There’s a record in the courthouse. I was tried, remember?”

  “I want you to tell it, King.”

  “Why?”

  “Just tell it.”

  He stared silently at the ceiling, but then he did talk. “I went in there—the Sampling Room, because that’s where all the Anchor men go, and that’s where we were welcome. I got a drink from Mrs. Gladstone. She always said I was too young for hard liquor, so she’d give me a draft beer, like I wasn’t grown up yet.”

  “You were wearing your sidearm?”

  “Of course. My father gave it to me. I’d practiced until I was good. I burnt more powder than anyone in the valley. It was for the Anchor Ranch. For my father. We had the oldest and best place, and we’re not going to let someone like Crayfish Ruble drive us out.”