Gallows Express

by Peter Brandvold

  The hot, screaming slug slammed like a ball-peen hammer into Hawk’s left temple. It chewed a dogget of flesh and bone from his skull, then plunked into the street near Hawk’s right boot, shredding a pile of fresh horse apples and splattering the manure with blood.

  He groaned as the violent blow spun him half around.

  With the forceful thrust of two brutal arms, the blow shoved him to his knees as he inadvertently triggered the Russian into the street, blowing dust up over his ankles. He ground his molars against the railroad spike of agony hammering through his temple and into his right eye. His head swam; nausea flooded him.

  The thunder of the oncoming riders grew louder.

  Hawk growled, bearlike, as he lifted his head and tried to bring his pistols up, as well, though the guns now felt like lead anchors in his fists. He blinked as he stared eastward, saw the first horse of that bunch of hard cases gallop within ten yards of him, its broad chest crossed by a conchostudded breastplate.

  He squinted as the single horse separated, became two horses as the railroad spike was hammered farther into Hawk’s brain, giving him double vision. Unable to lift his pistols from a sitting position, Hawk gave another growl as he heaved himself up off his boot heels.

  Staggering, he had the Russian only half raised before the closest eastern rider bore down on him. Hawk tried to lurch out of the horse’s path, but then he saw two rifle butts swing toward him, until he could see the grain in the weathered wood, though he felt only one club slam into the side of his head.

  He heard himself groan, saw the dusty street spin around him. The ground came up to slam viciously into his left shoulder and hip, ratcheting up his misery.

  Darkness washed over his eyes, but he remained conscious enough to feel the ground pitching beneath him like the deck of a ship caught in a hurricane. The gunfire ceased. Hooves clomped around him.

  “No!” shouted Brazos Tierney. “We ain’t killin’ him. Not yet we ain’t!”

  Hawk lolled on his back, his guns useless in his paralyzed hands. He managed to open his eyes a crack and stared as if through three feet of water at the riders milling around him, several staring down at him with savage looks on their bearded faces. Pistols or rifles were in their hands.

  He felt a sharp bite of pain as a horse hoof clipped his left ankle. In the periphery of his vision he could see a few townsfolk standing around, watching from boardwalks or alley mouths, though his overall sense was that, excepting the Tierney gang, the street was deserted.

  Suddenly, Brazos Tierney was staring down at him. The sharply glinting predator’s eyes dropped closer to Hawk’s as the killer squatted over him, grinning and poking his hat brim up off his high forehead.

  Blue Tierney’s face appeared above and to the right of his son’s, long gray hair nudging the shoulders of his blue greatcoat. The old man and the son had similar features though Blue Tierney’s eyes were hard and blue and sunk more deeply in their wizened sockets.

  The man’s voice was garbled in Hawk’s ears, but the Rogue Lawman could make out the words: “What you wanna do with him, son? I reckon he’s yourn.”

  “Hang him.” Brazos plucked the pistols from Hawk’s hands as he continued to grin down at him. “Express ride to the gallows he done had built in our honor!”

  He straightened, drew a foot back, and slammed the boot against the side of Hawk’s jaw, increasing the pain in Hawk’s thundering head. A couple of his back teeth cut into his cheek, and he felt the cool, copper-tasting blood dribble down along his jaw and trickle out the corner of his mouth.

  Hawk saw Blue Tierney’s mouth move, but he couldn’t make out the man’s words.

  “Why, sure,” said the outlaw leader’s son. “We’ll do him like we done them rustlin’ Sioux up on the plains. A nice, slow hangin’ . . . till the blood’s runnin’ out his ears and he’s beggin’ we shoot him!”

  He reached down and lifted Hawk’s head by his thick, dark brown hair and one arm. “Let’s go, boys!”

  “No!” a woman screamed. “You can’t do this.”

  “For god sakes,” said a man’s voice, a familiar one though Hawk’s foggy brain couldn’t identify it until he saw Carson Tarwater and Regan Mitchell enter his field of swirling vision.

  “Christ,” Hawk groaned. “Get the hell outta here,” he barely heard himself mutter, his cheek in the dirt. “Both of you.”

  “What do we have here?” Brazos said, grinning across Hawk’s slumped body at the two newcomers. “Or, I should say, who we got here?”

  “Stop this,” Tarwater pleaded. “This man was only doing his job. We hired him. Let him go. You and your friends are free, Brazos. Why cause anymore trouble, huh?”

  “I wasn’t talkin’ to you,” Brazos said, as the other men in his gang—there had to be a good nine or ten of them—gathered around Tarwater and the young schoolteacher.

  Hawk felt an even worse sinking feeling as he stared up at the men surrounding the pair. He wanted to scream but didn’t have the energy.

  “I’m Miss Mitchell,” Regan said, taking one step back from Brazos but backing into a big, shaggy-headed hombre who’d come up behind her. “The schoolteacher.”

  “Hot damn!” Brazos intoned. “If I’d o’ known they made schoolteachers like you, I might’ve done some schoolin’!”

  “Regan,” Hawk grunted, barely able to make his voice audible. “For god sakes, get the hell outta here. . . .”

  Tarwater stepped between the teacher and Brazos. “Please. This isn’t about her.”

  “Mister,” Brazos said, “is that a southern accent I hear in your voice?”

  Tarwater stared at the man darkly. “That’s right. I fought for the Confederacy under Hood. I don’t know what that’s got—”

  Hawk had seen the knife flash as if from nowhere in the young killer’s right fist, and he’d tensed his body to try to stand. A futile effort.

  “Gnahhh!” Tarwater said as he bent suddenly forward over the pig sticker that Tierney had just buried in his gut.

  Regan screamed and jerked back into the arms of the man behind her. She tried to twist away from the man, and as she did so Hawk somehow managed to climb to his feet though the ground continued to pitch and sway and nearly exchange positions with the sky. As the big, shaggy-headed man lifted Regan up off her feet, nuzzling her neck, Hawk funneled the last of his strength into his right fist, tried a swing at Brazos’s head. He wasn’t sure why. Probably, it was the only thing he was in any condition to do.

  One of the other men warned young Tierney, and Tierney managed to pull his head back just enough that Hawk’s knuckles merely grazed the side of the killer’s head, knocking his hat off. Brazos glared at Hawk, eyebrows arched, face brick red and swollen with exasperation. His eyes shone a murky yellow-gray.

  “Why, you . . . !” With that, he buried his right fist into Hawk’s belly.

  The street came up to slam into the Rogue Lawman’s knees. He dropped onto his side to see Carson Tarwater on the ground beside him, grinding his forehead into the dirt and holding his arms across his belly. A thick pool of blood grew in the fine-ground dirt and horseshit below the councilman, staining the knees of his brown broadcloth trousers.

  “Ah, Christ,” Hawk heard himself groan beneath Regan’s horrified screams that quickly diminished as she was carried away.

  Then everything went as black as night at the bottom of a deep well. He was faintly aware of his hips aching, as though more railroad spikes were being driven through his midsection. The top of his head burned. Then it pounded.

  His mouth came open—he could feel a draft on his tongue. He closed it, but it seemed desperate to stay open.

  There were more sounds and more sensations, but they seemed to Hawk to be emanating from deep inside a distant cave. They were anxiety-provoking sounds, and when he was finally able to identify them, he realized that one was a piano being played badly. So badly that a man commented on it, shouting words that Hawk couldn’t quite make out.

 
; “I told you!” a girl screamed in fury. “I don’t know ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’!”

  “Anyone who knows how to play the piano knows ‘The Battle Hymn of the Damn Republic,’ so play it!” the man retorted, his words clearer. “Any real Texan fought for the North!”

  “I’m from Kentucky!”

  “Goddamnit, you think I don’t know that, girl? I also think you know how to play ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’—so play it or I’m gonna send you back to Ole Kentuck in itty-bitty pieces in a croaker sack!”

  The girl screamed defiantly.

  A gun exploded. The girl screamed again. The scream was clipped by two more pistol shots.

  Hawk opened his eyes with a start. He blinked as he found himself in an upside-down world, the facades he recognized as belonging to the shops around Wyoming Street all inverted.

  Hawk blinked. Shook his head. Ropes raked his wrists and ankles, bit into the tender flesh.

  No, the world wasn’t upside down. He was.

  Beneath his head lay unpainted whipsawed pine boards. He frowned and then his heart twisted in his chest as he realized that he was hanging upside down from the gallows. It was late in the day, with a chill in the air and shadows angling over him and across the street around him.

  The girl’s voice he’d heard had belonged to Claire.

  Hawk twisted his body slightly and looked around again, desperation flooding over him, and he tried to move his feet and arms. Neither would budge because his feet were tethered to two nooses of the three nooses that had been intended for Brazos Tierney and the other two prisoners. Hawk’s wrists were tied to two steel spikes that had been driven into the gallows floor, about four feet apart.

  The more he struggled, the deeper the ropes dug into his wrists, causing fresh blood to ooze out from beneath the blood that had already oozed and crusted.

  He twisted his head, getting a look at Wyoming Street around him. By the angle of the sun, it was around five. There was no one on the street bathed in salmon-touched light. Dust motes twinkled in it. To his right he could hear a girl’s muffled sobs.

  Cassidy?

  Hawk turned his head in that direction. The Venus was there on the south side of the street. Hard-faced men milled on the porch. Tierney’s men. Laughing, drinking, smoking. The shaggy-headed man who’d hauled Regan off sat there on a chair, at the edge of the porch. Holding a double-bore shotgun across his stout legs, his buckskin pants tucked inside high-topped, mule-eared boots, he stared toward Hawk. The breeze tussled his shaggy, curly hair.

  He grinned as though with carnal satisfaction.

  As Hawk hung upside down from the gallows, like a dressed out deer carcass, he jerked again at the knotted ropes and knew a frustration as bitter as any he’d ever known.

  Shadows grew. The light dwindled, turning coppery, then brown edging toward gray.

  The chill wind blew against Hawk, who hung there in mute agony, miniature hearts pounding in both eyeballs, a heavy hammer whacking his head in several different places. His wounded arm was numb. His blood-engorged hands and feet ached with a throbbing pain.

  Blood had crusted on his temple, down his left arm, down the side of his face, and on his lips. Drops had dried on the floor of the gallows beneath him.

  Inside the Venus, another man shouted. Another girl screamed. The girl whom Hawk had heard sobbing before now sobbed louder. “Claire,” Cassidy cried. “Oh, Claire!”

  Someone began playing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Better than the person who’d been playing it before. The shaggy-headed man smiled again at Hawk.

  “Hey, Sheriff,” the shotgun-wielding killer said in a thick Spanish accent. “You wanna join the party? We’re just getting warmed up.” Slowly, he shook his head. “No . . . I don think so, amigo.”

  24.

  “WHEN HAVE I EVER NOT BEEN WITH YOU, YOU SON OF A BITCH?”

  “GID?”

  The voice sifted like faint wood smoke into the prism of Hawk’s tormented half consciousness. In fact, he seemed to smell the voice as much as hear it. It reeked of the malty-sour odor of beer.

  Hawk recoiled at the hand that closed over his shoulder. Every nerve and muscle in his pain-racked body was poised for battle, which is the one urge that held at bay the half wish for death to steal over him and abolish his misery.

  He wanted now, as much as ever, to kill.

  The voice was closer, the beer stench stronger, warm against his left ear. “Hey, G-Gid, you s-s-still kickin’?”

  Reb Winter’s voice.

  Hawk opened his eyes. Reb hunkered down beside him atop the gallows. Beyond Reb hunched another large man-shaped figure on the ground near the gallows steps. Alvin Gault held a Winchester carbine in his hands across his heavy, striped wool coat. The big Indian’s breath frosted in the air before him, touched with torchlight emanating from the Venus.

  Hawk glanced at Reb once more, anxiety pricking him like cactus thorns. He swung his head toward the Venus. None of the hard cases were milling on the porch. The chair in which the shotgunner had been sitting was still there, facing the gallows, but the shotgunner himself was gone. His shotgun lay across his chair, however . . . as though he were maybe only using the privy or something, and would return soon.

  Hawk looked at Reb. “Get the hell outta here, fool! They’ll gun you down like a dog. Both of you.”

  Reb shook his head and grinned, showing his large, square upper teeth front and bathing Hawk once more with the cloying beer stench. He and Gault had obviously buoyed their bravery with some suds prior to risking a visit to the gallows. Reb lifted a large skinning knife in his gloved right hand; his left hand was wrapped around the forestock of his old Spencer repeater with its dangling rope lanyard.

  “Gonna cut ya down. Me an’ Alvin been waitin’ across the street.” Reb grunted as he began sawing into the tough hemp binding Hawk’s left wrist to the pin embedded in the gallows floor. “Think all Tierney’s gun wolves are inside with the girls or gamblin’. Some’re likely passed out. They been hittin’ it hard all day.”

  As Reb continued sawing into the rope and, after all the malt he’d consumed, likely into Hawk’s wrist as well, the Rogue Lawman turned another anxious look toward the well-lit Venus. Shadows of men and women passed behind the lit shades drawn over the windows.

  “Well, hurry up, then,” Hawk growled, continuing to stare, his heart thudding eagerly with the prospect of getting free and also getting his hands on his guns. “I’d right admire if you wouldn’t cut my damn wrist off in the . . .”

  He let his voice trail off as a shadow slithered out the front door and onto the porch. It was followed by a big, hatless, shaggy-headed man. Hawk sucked a breath. “Shit. Hold on.”

  Just then he felt his left wrist come free of the pin with only a slight kiss of Reb’s razor-edged knife. The wrist and hand were mostly numb, anyway. He stared hard at the big man who moved slowly out to the near edge of the porch, staring toward the gallows. Hawk silently prayed that the man didn’t see his visitors, but it was too much to hope for.

  “Hey, who’s over there?” he grunted, cocking his head to one side and then moving toward the shotgun lying atop his chair.

  Hawk jerked his head toward Reb. “Skedaddle!”

  “I-I ain’t l-leavin’ you here, Gid!”

  “Move!” Hawk hissed. “You can help me later.”

  As the big man moved down the porch steps, wobbling slightly as though from drink, he lifted the shotgun straight up. Flames stabbed from one barrel. The great thundering boom rocked the night.

  Reb jerked with a start, almost falling backward. “Shit!” He rose to a crouch, swiveled around, and leapt off the platform, wheezing, “Come on, Alvin!”

  “Hey!” the shaggy-headed killer shouted, breaking into a shambling sort of run and slanting the shotgun across his chest. “You two gonna die bloody!” he shouted as he continued running on past the gallows.

  Reb and Alvin hightailed it westward down Wyoming Street
. From his inverted position, Hawk saw both men slant northward, cutting toward the jailhouse that sat hunched and dark under the velvet sky awash with milky starlight. The Two Troughs rider stopped at the corner of the gallows, set the shotgun’s stock against his shoulder, and canted his head against it.

  The second barrel flashed crimson. Another boom rocked the night, evoking more shouted exclamations from inside the Venus. As the thunder echoed hollowly around the street, Hawk saw the twin lumbering figures of Reb and Alvin angle past the front of the jailhouse and then dart behind its far wall.

  As the din continued to rise inside the Venus, the shaggy-headed man turned to Hawk, his flat face rigid with fury. “Who was that?”

  Holding his freed left hand down against the stake, Hawk said, “Go fuck yourself, scumbag.”

  The big man started toward Hawk but stopped when a man called in a drunk-heavy voice from the Venus’s open door, “What’s the shootin’, Farina?”

  Hawk turned his head to see the elder Tierney, Blue, standing in the doorway in just his hat, socks, and white longhandles, a jug in his hand. Another inquiring face or two stared from over his shoulder.

  “Someone sneaked up to the gallows.”

  “Where the hell were you?”

  Farina glanced at Hawk dubiously, then looked back at Tierney. “I was where I was s’posed to be, boss. In my chair right there. How do you think I ran ’em off?” He grinned unctuously.

  Tierney turned around, gave a dismissive wave with the bottle, and started back into the bowels of the brothel.

  Farina started back toward the Venus without so much as another glance at Hawk, who was glad his severed left bindings hadn’t been discovered, and yelled, “When am I gonna be relieved?”

  “Ya ain’t!” Tierney shouted over his shoulder and then staggered on into the Venus and out of sight.

  Farina cursed.

  He breeched his shotgun and, shambling toward his chair, plucked out the spent wads, tossed them onto the ground, and replaced them with fresh from the bandoliers crisscrossed on his chest. Hawk watched the man, wanting to use his free hand to try to work the ties loose from the other one. But Farina had obviously been rousted back into action, and as the big man sagged down in the creaky chair, he set his shotgun across his stout legs, a knife poking up from one boot well, and directed his glum gaze toward the gallows.