Sure enough, they dragged the wagon to the jail, yanked us out—none of us could stand or walk—and dragged us into the jail, and into Cell Number Two, and locked the door.
“Where’s the rope?” one of them asked.
They found it easily enough, and headed out the door. It suddenly was real quiet in there. And real quiet in town. There hadn’t been a soul on the streets when they hauled us down Wyoming to Courthouse Square, and now Doubtful was dead silent.
I eyed the others, who were all wrestling with the bandannas that bound them.
Zablonski was the first to muscle his hands loose, and in short order he had freed the rest of us. Doc Harrison worked on Cronk, who was half conscious, but there wasn’t much Doc could do except pump air in and out of Cronk’s lungs until the man regained some sensibility. There was no water in the cell.
I hurt. The rest hurt. Some of us were bleeding, but the bandannas soon became bandages stopping the blood. My nose had taken a fist, and was swollen red and thick.
The moment came when we’d done all the doctoring we could manage in the dim light. We knew what was surely happening, not far away, in the square, where the gallows still stood. But in the cell there was only silence, and we were alone with our thoughts.
I was wondering what I might have done better, and Zablonski must have seen it in me.
“Wasn’t a Ned Buntline moment, was it?” he said.
I didn’t know what he was talking about, and he saw it.
“Ned Buntline writes dime novels, with outlandish heroes doing impossible things,” the sheriff of Medicine Bow County said.
“Like stopping a lynching?” I asked.
“Here’s how the dime novel story would go. The brave sheriff, armed with a shotgun, would stand in the path of the lynchers, daring them to walk past him, and they would see the shotgun, and see the sheriff ready to use it, and they would falter, and the lynchers would quit, and the sheriff would be celebrated as a hero.”
“I’m no dime novel sheriff,” I said.
We heard a faint roar from the crowd, a muffled cry in the afternoon.
I felt real bad.
“That’s the dime novel world, with dime novel heroes, not the real world,” Zablonski said. “You don’t have to beat on yourself.”
But none of the others were joining in, and I sensed they thought I’d let them down, let law and order down, let those two horse racers down. Zablonski was trying to cheer me up, but I was beyond cheer.
“A mob is an animal, and sometimes you can’t stop it, and bravery isn’t going to help a lawman,” he said. “That’s the real world, not the fictional one.”
“You did what you could, Cotton,” King Glad said.
But we all knew that just outside a way, there were two bodies, swinging in the breeze, live men one moment, gone the next. I had let them down, let justice down, and nothing would change my mind about that.
I can’t remember a darker moment in my life. It wasn’t only that I had failed; it was that the people in the town I lived in had turned savage, and had murdered two strangers as swiftly and easily as if they were shooting a deer. Something had taken hold of them, tossed all reason and restraint to the wind, fired them up, and turned them into a howling pack of killers. There were men I knew among them. Men capable of murder.
The same thoughts must have been threading the minds of the rest of us in there. They stared bleakly through the bars, waiting to be released, wondering when or whether we’d be released. Someone would turn us loose—maybe.
The clock ticked onward, and the silence outside only deepened through the afternoon, and I had a sense that people had fled Doubtful, ran as far as they could, as fast as they could from the horror.
At last we heard a door creaking, steps, and then we saw Judge Earwig, slowly lumbering toward us.
“They let me go,” he said. “They still have your deputy somewhere. They’re not letting him go until you promise you won’t bring charges. He has the key to here; I don’t.”
“I’m sworn to uphold the law,” I said.
He nodded. “You need food and water. I can’t unlock without a key.”
The others were staring at me, maybe hating me. They wanted to get out, no matter what the price.
“Find One-Eyed Jack,” I said. “He can cut us out with his blacksmith tools. And see if you can find Burtell, my part-time deputy.”
“Burtell’s dead. He tried to stop them, so they strung him up.”
“Burtell?”
“Who knows who else? I’ll be back with something.”
“Water now, please,” said Doc Harrison.
The judge nodded, and returned with a bucket of clear water that he set just outside the bars, and a dipper. He passed the filled dipper through the bars. Harrison immediately offered each prisoner a good sip.
“Who’s dead?” I asked.
“Limp, Skruggs, Burtell, and a stranger.”
“The bookmaker, Boston Bill?”
“No, he’s gone.”
“Who negotiated with you, sent you here?”
“I don’t know. They wore bandannas over their faces.” He eyed the trapped men. “I’ll be back shortly.”
That water was manna from heaven. We drank much of what was in the bucket, which we could reach through the bars.
He returned in a while with a pot of beans from Barney’s Beanery, and with the blacksmith.
“It’ll take a few hours to cut you loose,” Jack said. “Or I can bust the lock.”
“Bust it,” I said.
“It’ll be noisy.”
“What do I tell the mob?” Earwig asked. “I’ll hang the lot?”
“Stay here. Don’t tell them anything.”
Jack jammed an amazingly long pry bar into the door mechanism, slammed it with a sledgehammer, and twisted. Something in there snapped. My ears were ringing. But Jack had done the job. He drew the bolt, and the door swung open. We stepped into bleakness, free at last, but my tasks had only begun.
“Arm yourselves if you want,” I said to the judges.
I found a sawed-off twelve-gauge shotgun, and loaded it. The rest chose to let things lie.
We went to the door, and looked out upon a bleak scene. Four bodies hung from the gallows, swaying slightly in the August breezes. There wasn’t a soul in the square. There wasn’t a sound issuing from any window or building. There wasn’t a horse or wagon, or cart, or ox team on the square.
“Where were you to meet the ringleaders?” I asked the judge.
“At the gallows.”
“I’ll go talk,” I said.
I wanted Rusty real bad. He was in big trouble. I wasn’t even sure he was alive. And I had no idea where to find him.
I headed out the jailhouse door, onto the lonely square, walking steadily, my shotgun cradled in my arm. The gallows loomed above me, with their dismal burden. Each man dangling, hands tied, neck snapped, head sideways, tongues bulging out of Limp and Burtell. Each body swayed slightly. Nothing under their boots but air. Once there had been the trap, solid and treacherous. But the trap hung straight down on its hinges.
I stood at the gallows, waiting, wondering whose eyes were watching me from what dark window fronting the square. There must have been a hundred windows, each hiding its own dark secrets.
No one showed up.
I sat on the edge of the gallows for a while, seeing not one soul.
My guess was that they had fled, every last one, as the reality of their crime overwhelmed them. And if so, I’d have to find and free Rusty on my own. The likeliest place was the courthouse, so I walked there, a solitary man doing a solitary task. The place was empty. I routinely checked each office as I made my way toward Judge Earwig’s chamber, and when I got to the courtroom there was Rusty, gagged and tied, but alive.
He seemed plenty glad to see me. I pulled the gag off his face, and then wrestled with the bandannas that had wrapped his numb arms and legs.
Rusty, he didn’t say anythi
ng. He didn’t say, “Glad to see you,” or anything like that. He just stared at me, and I stared at him, and some understanding passed between us.
He could name names, for sure, but I didn’t ask him and he didn’t volunteer any.
His holster was empty.
The judge kept a pitcher of water and some glasses there, and I poured a glass for Rusty, and he drank it greedily. When your arms are wrapped behind you, and you can’t lift a glass to your lips, you get mighty thirsty, and it becomes a howling need soon enough.
“Burtell’s dead,” I said.
“He was trying to stop the mob,” Rusty said. “He deserves a medal.”
“Are we negotiating with anyone now?” I asked.
“They ran.”
“Who’s the stranger they hanged?”
“No one knows. They just picked on him.”
“You got any notion what needs doing?” I asked.
“Call Maxwell. And cut Burtell loose first, and lay him out proper. And then the rest.”
I agreed with all that.
There was something I wanted to do before we left the courthouse. I headed for the front windows, where the United States and Wyoming flags hung from staffs. I pulled both in, and folded them, and then closed the window. They shouldn’t be flying in Puma County, not now.
We headed across Courthouse Square. Rusty would head for the jail and tell those people it was safe to go. I headed for Maxwell’s Funeral Parlor, and told him to pay respect to the dead.
Chapter Forty-two
No one was talking. I intended to level murder charges against those who’d lynched four mortals that August afternoon. I knew plenty of the people who were rioting at the racetrack, but that didn’t help. They all professed not to know who strung up the match race contestants and my part-time deputy.
Puma County had a guilty secret, and it looked like it would stay that way and that’s the way they wanted it. I spent days poking and probing, and got nowhere, but I knew that someday, sooner or later, some witness would start spilling the facts. And then I’d make sure the guilty were brought to justice.
Odd how the town changed. People were afraid to talk to me. I walked around there in isolation. Maybe the ones who did the lynching were threatening those who watched them do it. Maybe the reason no witness came to me was because he feared for his life if he did. I could only wait because someday the whole story would spill, and I’d do what the law required me to do.
There was new pressure to get rid of me, too. The fastest way to bury the lynching was to oust me from the sheriff office, and sure enough, that’s what happened. The county supervisors called me in one afternoon and told me they were firing me. They said I’d caused damage to county property, namely the cell door, and that was reason enough to discharge me. I stared at Reggie Thimble, and Ziggy Camp, and smiled. They smiled back. They knew what they were doing and why, and it didn’t have anything to do with the wrecked cell door.
“Have a cigar on us, Cotton,” Thimble said. Rusty and I buried Burtell, since no one else was around to do it. The old deputy was a loner, with no family we could find, so we got Maxwell to dig a grave for us in the town cemetery, and we laid our friend to rest there. His last efforts were to restore peace in town, and he deserved better than he got. He took with him the secret of who strung him up. But me and Rusty, we knew we’d find out eventually.
Bad secrets always boil to the surface.
The supervisors didn’t appoint Rusty sheriff. They knew he’d do what I would do, and keep after the case until he had the lynchers behind bars. Or maybe they didn’t like the idea of a sheriff married to Siamese twins. By then, both Natasha and Anna were expecting, and Rusty’s family would soon grow. I sort of hoped that each twin would not produce twins, but the thought was entertaining. They let Rusty stay on as deputy, mostly because the Siamese twins were becoming a tourist attraction, and bringing coin to Doubtful. And until supervisors got around to finding someone new, Rusty would be the acting sheriff.
I didn’t fight the dismissal, figuring my time in Doubtful was up, and it was time to move on. But even before I collected Critter and moved out, I got word from the Wyoming Cattlemen’s Association that they wanted to talk with me. So I did, and the upshot of all that was a new job, at eighty a month, as a range detective with the association, keeping rustling at bay. The cattlemen had been losing a lot of beef, and they wanted to put a stop to it, and figured I was the man. And I could stay right in Doubtful.
So I left my shiny badge with Supervisor Thimble. It was untarnished. I’d never dishonored my badge. But the county and town that employed me now had a guilty secret, and I thought it was a good thing to let go of it, at least for a while. And I had a hunch that my new job, as a range detective, would lead me to the things no one was talking about. Such as who did the lynching in Puma County that August day. The story wasn’t over yet. And neither was my life.
As my ma used to say, you ain’t old until you’re forty.
PINNACLE BOOKS are published by
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Copyright © 2013 William W. Johnstone
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Following the death of William W. Johnstone, the Johnstone family is working with a carefully selected writer to organize and complete Mr. Johnstone’s outlines and many unfinished manuscripts to create additional novels in all of his series like The Last Gunfighter, Mountain Man, and Eagles, among others. This novel was inspired by Mr. Johnstone’s superb storytelling.
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Support Your Local Deputy: A Cotton Pickens Western Page 25
