Lost Trails

by Louis L'Amour

  Garcia half-stood, hand going to his six-shooter when the doors slammed open. He relaxed when he saw his deputy in the doorway.

  “Sheriff, surely am glad I found you. Paco Fuentes just said he spotted a suspicious fellow nosin’ around. A real tall stranger and Ketchum signaled to him out the window of his cell.”

  “The gallows ’bout built?”

  “As ready as it’ll ever be, Sheriff,” the deputy said. “We need to test the drop. Otherwise, we’re all saddled up and ready to ride.”

  “Send Billy Gilligan to the judge and get a firm date—as quick as possible—to hang Ketchum.” The sheriff pushed back from the table and tried to compose himself. He looked down at Dr. Otis and said, “I got official business to tend to. You can stay in town, if you like. Even talk to Dr. Slack, but Tom’s gettin’ buried right after the hangin’.”

  “Slack is your town doctor?”

  “Undertaker, sawbones, anything else that turns up. Truth is, he’s better with horses than humans, but that don’t stop him none.” With that, Sheriff Garcia left George Otis sipping another shot of whiskey and making his plans.

  “What do you figger he weighs?” Sheriff Garcia poured sand into a burlap bag balanced on the grain scales.

  “He’s a big one. Maybe two hunnerd?” The deputy pushed back his floppy-brimmed hat and scratched his head.

  “Sounds ’bout right,” Garcia said, adding more sand until the scales registered two hundred pounds. “Help me get this to the gallows.”

  The two lawmen hefted the bag of sand and staggered along to the gallows built next to the jailhouse where Ketchum could see the structure and repent for his crimes. They got it to the trapdoor. Garcia fastened a rope to the bag, then stepped back.

  “Let’s see if it works all proper,” the sheriff said. He took the loop of rope off the trigger for the trap and let it open. The structure shuddered as the bag fell four feet and then swung about underneath.

  “That’s not much of a drop, ain’t it, Sheriff?”

  “Want this to go smooth and don’t want to have nuthin’ go wrong,” Garcia said, sucking on his lower lip. “I ought to put some soap on the noose so it’ll slip over his head easy once I got the hood on him. And maybe yer right ’bout that. We kin lengthen the drop a foot or two. Just enough so’s his feet don’t hit the ground under the gallows.” They worked for another hour, until after sundown, making certain the gallows was ready for the next day.

  “It’s all legal and proper, Tom,” the sheriff told the condemned. “The judge has given the go-ahead for a one o’clock hangin’.”

  “Just as soon have you do it now, Sheriff,” Tom Ketchum said. “The waitin’ is worse than the doin’.”

  “I got to agree,” Sheriff Garcia said. “My nerves are killin’ me.”

  Ketchum laughed harshly. “And it’s gonna be your noose that kills me. But that don’t make us even.”

  Garcia looked at his prisoner uneasily, nodded once, and left to check the gallows for the tenth time. He stepped into the bright sun and pulled the brim of his Stetson down to shade his eyes. Looking around, he saw most of the businesses in town were closed and the crowd was already gathering around the gallows, although the hanging wasn’t for another couple hours.

  “Git yer tickets fer the best seats. Git ’em while I got ’em!”

  Garcia pushed his way through the crowd and found his deputy taking money and passing out slips of paper with numbers scribbled on them.

  “What ’n hell’s goin’ on?”

  “I thought to make a few bucks, Sheriff,” his deputy said. “Why not sell front-row seats to the hangin’? This is the biggest thing that’s happened in Clayton since . . . since forever.”

  “What’re those?” Garcia pointed to a box of sticks. He pulled one out. A crude doll with a string around its neck was hung from the end.

  “Me and Mr. Kincannon are sellin’ souvenirs.”

  Garcia saw the owner of the mercantile going through the crowd with a handful of the gruesome toys, selling them for a dime apiece.

  “Hope you get plenty for your enterprisin’ nature,” Garcia said, shuddering a little. He looked up the steps to where the wind caused the noose to swing fitfully. It wouldn’t be much longer before that noose was filled and a dead man swung at the end. Garcia took a deep breath and remembered all that Tom Ketchum had done. The judge had pronounced the verdict, and it was up to the county to carry out the sentence. And Salome Garcia would because it was his duty. It didn’t hurt much that he got a ten-dollar bonus for the extra work.

  “It’s one o’clock, Tom. Let’s go,” said Sheriff Garcia.

  “About time.” Ketchum swallowed hard, then straightened his shoulders and marched out. Garcia followed a pace back, hand on the butt of his six-gun, but Ketchum made no effort to escape. Just outside the jailhouse door stood the deputy with a scattergun. He looked as nervous as Garcia felt. The only one not the least excited or nervous was the condemned. Ketchum walked with a slow, even stride, paused at the base of the gallows, then mounted.

  The crowd cheered and jeered as Ketchum allowed the sheriff to fasten a rope around his upper arms and tie his feet together.

  “Because you were found guilty of ‘felonious assault upon a railway train,’ it is my sorry duty to hang you, Thomas Edward Ketchum. You got any last words?” Garcia shuffled his feet nervously as he ran his fingers over the noose he had soaped to make it easier to slip over the condemned’s head when he had the black hood on.

  Tom Ketchum looked out over the silent crowd, saw the toys and the way the deputy and a couple merchants passed through the crowd selling concessions. He heaved a tired sigh and said, “Hurry up, boys, get this over.”

  Garcia placed the black hood over Ketchum’s head, then pinned it to the front of the man’s shirt before sliding the noose down and snugging it tight. He didn’t want the hood coming off and Ketchum’s death expression giving the crowd more than they had bargained for. The sheriff looked out over the throng. Some waved their dangling effigies of Ketchum and others were rapt. Most attentive of the lot was George Otis, seated in the front row. Garcia wondered if he had bought the seat or wheedled it out of the deputy.

  The sheriff stepped back, hefted his hatchet, and without fanfare, swung it to sever the rope holding the trapdoor closed. In his nervousness, he twisted the blade slightly and the edge skittered along the rope. Garcia drew back and chopped again. This time he cut the rope.

  The trapdoor snapped open. And then came another snap. A more sickening one followed by a gasp from the crowd.

  “His head!” someone cried. “It done popped off !”

  The sheriff blinked. A photographer worked his magic to capture the scene.

  “Get on back. Don’t crowd now. Let me see what’s wrong.”

  Salome Garcia hurried down the steps and went around under the gallows where Dr. Slack was already working on the body—the headless body all trussed up and lying on the ground.

  “Sweet Mother of God,” Garcia muttered. Ketchum’s head had come off and lay in its black hood some distance from the body.

  “You shouldn’t have put soap on the noose,” Slack said. “Made the rope like wire. Sliced right through. And the drop? It was way too much. Old Tom here, he don’t weigh but one eighty-five, if that.”

  “We figured for two hundred pounds,” Garcia said weakly.

  “Don’t much matter to Tom now. Help me get him into the back of my wagon.”

  “Will you say something to the crowd?” Garcia thought they should be told that the beheading was accidental, but didn’t have the words. He was still too stunned by the sudden decapitation.

  “Reckon I can. What do you want me to say?”

  “That it wasn’t supposed to happen like this.”

  Dr. Slack shrugged his bony shoulders and snorted like a hog, then made his way around the gallows and stepped out into the afternoon sun.

  “Ladies and gents, the sheriff wants me to relate what went wr
ong with the execution.”

  Garcia closed his eyes and tried to push away the faintness welling up inside. He had never heard of a hanged man losing his head like this. When the vertigo passed, the undertaker finished with: “So let’s all give the good sheriff a round of applause for the show this afternoon.”

  Garcia found himself taking a bow and almost enjoying the accolade given him by the townspeople. This passed when the gravity of the situation hit him.

  “Get on back to work, all of you,” he said. “The doc and me, we got work to do.” The crowd slowly dissipated. When everyone was out of earshot, he said to Slack, “Is there anything you can do, Doc? I mean, it’s not right to bury a man like that.”

  “I can sew his head back on, if that’s what you want.”

  “It is.”

  “Be an extra dollar.”

  “Done,” Garcia said, willing to pony up the money from his own pocket just to have it done.

  “There’s only one problem,” Slack said as he rounded the gallows.

  “What’s that, Doc?”

  “There ain’t no head to sew back on.”

  Sheriff Garcia pushed the undertaker aside. Sure enough, the body lay where it had fallen, but the head wrapped in the black executioner’s hood was gone.

  Garcia and his deputy looked across the embalming table at Dr. Slack, who worked to get the blood drained from Ketchum’s remains—or what remained of them.

  “This is the damnedest thing I ever heard tell of,” the deputy said. “Who’d want to steal a man’s head?”

  “I know who,” Garcia said, a tight knot in his belly. “That old geezer from Washington. George Otis.”

  “Why’d he want it?” The deputy scratched his balding head and looked puzzled. Garcia stared at Slack.

  “He talk to you, Doc? The old man from back East?”

  “Nope, didn’t say a word to me, but I know who you mean. That withered, bent-over fella I seen going into the saloon with you earlier on?”

  “That’s the one. He stole the head. I’m sure of it.”

  “Did he, Sheriff?”

  “What do you mean?” Garcia stared at his deputy. “You know somethin’ I don’t?”

  “I was just thinkin’. . . .”

  “Always a danger with someone like you,” Slack muttered, but the deputy plowed on.

  “If this Otis did take the head, is it stealin’? It’s not like property that belonged to somebody. Rob Mr. Kincannon, say, and you stole somethin’ that belonged to him. But the head didn’t belong to nobody.”

  “It belonged to Tom,” pointed out Garcia.

  “I don’t think he’s going to file a report, Sheriff,” Slack said. He dropped a long silver needle into a tray and took tubing from under the table, preparing to pump in embalming fluid. He stopped and looked puzzled. “If I try puttin’ this formaldehyde in, it’s going to leak out his neck.”

  “Hold off a spell, Doc,” Garcia said. “I’ve got a thief to bring to justice.”

  He left the undertaker’s parlor and looked up and down the main street. He hadn’t expected Otis to be standing there, holding Ketchum’s head like Herod with John the Baptist’s, but he had hoped. His stride turning into a fast walk just short of outright running, Garcia went to the town livery stables.

  “Bart!” the sheriff called. “You in here, Bart?”

  The owner’s head poked up from a rear stall. He came out with a pitchfork in his hand. He tossed it aside and wiped sweat from his face.

  “Gettin’ mighty hot in here. Good thing you came along, Sal, so I have an excuse to take a break. What kin I do you for?”

  “The man from Washington. George Otis.”

  “The doctor fella? He said he was a doctor, at any rate, but he didn’t look like one. Didn’t even have a black bag with him when he came.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He left, maybe twenty minutes back. Same way he came to town. In a buggy.” Bart scowled and wiped more sweat. “Funny thing, now that I think on it.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He didn’t have a black bag when he came, but did when he left.”

  “Which way was he headed? Toward Santa Fe?”

  “More likely to Folsom. Saw him with a railroad schedule.”

  Sheriff Garcia wasted no time saddling his horse and getting on the trail toward Raton Pass and Folsom, the spot where Black Jack Ketchum had held up three trains in as many years. He rode steadily, and within ten minutes spotted the dust cloud kicked up by Otis’s buggy. In twenty, he was standing beside the old man.

  “I’ll buy it, Sheriff. I’ll pay good money,” George Otis pleaded. “Twenty dollars. I’ll give you a twenty-dollar gold piece!”

  “It’s not mine to sell or yours to take.”

  “It’s not doing Ketchum any good now. Bury it and science will lose! I’ll give you forty! It’s all I have.”

  Garcia reached past the old man and pulled out the black hood. Stains on the bottom showed where Tom Ketchum’s blood had spewed forth, but the heavy cloth was otherwise untainted. Garcia could understand how the livery owner mistook it for a doctor’s bag.

  With some distaste, he pried loose the corners of the hood and peered in. He had seen some terrible things in his day, but never had he seen a man’s head come off like this. The skin had stretched and then the slickened rope had cut right through like a knife through sun-warmed butter. Part of Ketchum’s spine protruded whitely. Garcia closed the hood up and stepped away from the scientist.

  “I ought to run you in, but I won’t. I can’t figure what to charge you with. You weren’t grave-robbing. We got a law about that, but Tom wasn’t buried yet. And there’s no law against robbing a corpse of money, much less its parts, if you didn’t cause the demise.”

  “This will be the keystone of my collection. It will reveal the terrible criminal nature. Please, Sheriff.”

  “Don’t let me set eyes on you again, Dr. Otis. I’d hate for you to end up like this.” Garcia held up the head.

  Otis slumped as if he melted in the sun. Then he turned and climbed painfully into his buggy and drove away slowly. Garcia watched him for a minute, then mounted and rode back to Clayton, Ketchum’s head precariously balanced on the saddle in front of him. If he hurried, Doc Slack could sew the head back on and they could finish the funeral before sundown.

  Sheriff Salome Garcia wasn’t a superstitious man, but he didn’t want to take any chance of Tom Ketchum’s ghost haunting him because there wasn’t a head to go along with the corpse in its grave.

  To Shoe a Horse

  Don Coldsmith

  Author’s Note: This is a true story, told to me by an old man who was the son of “Ren” and “Cappie.” His opening greeting: “You might be interested that my dad shod horses for Jesse James.” The names are changed, but are names of actual people in that time period, some from my own family tree.

  Ren wakened, not sure why. . . . Some change in the night sounds maybe. He couldn’t recall that anything had actually roused him, but something was different, something he couldn’t quite peg down. It wasn’t the sort of thing such as wakening to go out and empty his bladder. There wasn’t any urgency about that as a rule. Maybe he’d do best to just lie still and listen a little while, till he could get a better feel for whatever it was.

  He could hear the soft but deep breathing of his wife beside him, and hated to disturb her while he figured on the situation. Carefully, he eased out of the bed and stood up. The three-quarter moon told him that it must be after midnight. Not that it made any difference.

  His gun, a .58-caliber Army Springfield muzzle-loader, hung on a pair of pegs over the door. He couldn’t afford better. But he saw no need to take it down yet. Nothing stirred in the barnyard, as far as he could see. Maybe just a possum or a ’coon.

  I’d better be gettin’ that watchdog, he told himself for the dozenth time this week. What had seemed an ideal location to settle and operate a smithy had not quite worked that way. .
. .

  1868 . . . The war was over. There had been a time when Ren had wished he could go and fight the Rebs with his three older brothers. That wish was gone now. Samuel, Jr., the oldest, had died in a Confederate prison camp in 1864. William had lost an arm at Gettysburg, but made it home. John had nearly died with a fever in Arkansas, fortunately missing the Battle of Pea Ridge. John was impressed with the West, and his stories intrigued his younger brother, Ren, short for “Lorenzo,” when John returned to Ohio and the home place.

  There came a day, however, when Sam Heineman the elder, patriarch, called his three surviving sons together. His health was failing, and his wife had passed away from pneumonia a year ago last winter.

  “I ain’t too long for this world,” he observed. “I’ll soon join your mama.”

  “Aw, Father,” protested William, but the old man waved him down.

  “Lemme talk, Will. Now, the farm here in Ohio has been purty good to us. Fact is, though, it ain’t gonna provide for all of you. Now, your sister Peggy will likely marry that Evans kid down the road purty soon, so she’ll be taken care of. William, as oldest, you inherit this place. I’m countin’ on you to manage it, and John to work it. It should provide for two families.”

  He didn’t mention William’s disability, but he paused and turned to Ren.

  “Lorenzo,” he said thoughtfully. “I feel bad about this. I done my damnedest, but there just ain’t no way to make it work for three families. We mighta done better if it weren’t for the war, I dunno. But what I’m gettin’ to, you’re gettin’ purty good with the anvil. You do a better job fittin’ a hot shoe than the farrier in town. I’m thinkin’, was I you, I’d look at some of the free land in the West. John speaks highly of it.”

  “That’s right,” agreed John quickly. “I can tell you about it! Arkansas, Missouri, maybe Kansas.”

  “You been purty friendly with that Roberts girl, Ren,” his brother Will teased. “Gonna take her with ya?”