“Please don’t kill me, Sheriff. Oh, god…please don’t kill me! I’ve had a change of heart—I really have!”
The killer’s plea echoed around the Laramie County courthouse—at least that wing which housed the Brule County sheriff’s office and jail. Sheriff Dusty Mason sat kicked back in his chair, spurred boots crossed on his rolltop desk. A wry half smile shaped itself on his broad mouth mantled by a brushy, dark-brown mustache as he slowly, methodically rolled a quirley and stared out the dusty window before him.
On Willow City’s dusty main street, Cheyenne Street, the workmen were putting the finishing touches on the gallows that would hang the man whose false pleas Mason had been enduring for the past half hour.
“Give it a rest, Clell,” the sheriff said, twisting the quirley closed. “Your caterwaulin’s fallin’ on deaf ears. In a few minutes…” He glanced at the old regulator clock ticking on the pine-paneled wall behind him, beside a large, framed, government survey map of Wyoming Territory. “Twelve minutes and thirty-two seconds to be more precise. The hangman, Luther LaForge, likes things precise, don’t ya know. We mustn’t be late!”
From the jail block on the open balcony above Mason, the notorious bank robber and pistoleer Clell Stanhope shook the door of his barred cage and screamed, “Please, Sheriff. I really mean it! Ahh, lordy, I do!”
He sobbed and snorted, sort of mewling like a trapped coyote trying to chew its leg off. “I’ve had a change of heart. I don’t wanna die. Please fetch the judge back and tell him I’ll confess all my past evil doin’s, and I’ll tell you both where the rest of my gang’s holed up so’s you can go out and fetch ’em in!”
Mason chuckled as he leaned forward and scraped a sulfur-tipped match to life on his desktop.
“Come on, Mason—hear me out! Ya’ll think we’re in Wyoming. But you got another think comin’. We’re down in Colorado. Southern Colorado!”
“Southern Colorado’s big country.” Mason blew a smoke plume at the dusty, sunlit window beyond which the hangman, Luther LaForge, dressed in a bow tie and black clawhammer coat with a Lincoln-style opera hat on his coyote-like head, was strolling around the gallows, pointing details out to the three workmen giving the platform its finishing touches.
One man stood atop the gallows, adjusting the hangman’s knot that would soon encircle Clell Stanhope’s thick neck. Another was testing the trapdoor lever bristling from the platform’s near side, opening and closing the door beneath a sandbag weighing the same as Stanhope himself.
A sizeable crowd had already gathered around the gallows—men, women, children, and dogs. Even a few chickens and someone’s pet coyote. A Mexican woman and her son were hawking burritos while Burt Givens had set his beer keg on the broad porch of his establishment, the Brule House Saloon and Pleasure Parlor. He was filling mugs with his frothy ale while men crowded around, handing nickels to his best whore, the voluptuous and scantily clad Trixie Tate.
Trixie was really working the crowd, laughing, rattling the coins in her beer glass, funning with the men, and ruffling the hair of several lucky patrons while leaning forward to show her bosoms bulging up like small, pale mountains from her deep purple corset.
“You fetch the judge and have him change my sentence to life in the pen, Mason, and I’ll tell you exactly where the hideout is. Oh, Jesus, god, look how they’re funnin’ out there, gettin’ ready to see me hang!” Stanhope mewled some more and sniffed and snorted before adding, “You fetch him and have him throw me in the pen. Hell, I’ll work the rock quarries for the rest of my days. I’ll blow railroad tunnels! I just don’t wanna die, Mason. Please! You gotta listen to me, Mason. You gotta understand.”
“Be tough, Clell. Be tough as the hombre who rode in with his gang and robbed the Bank and Trust a month ago and shot Dave Tully and Homer Simms dead in the street.”
Mason had led a posse out after the gang who called themselves the Vultures. They’d split up somewhere in the southeastern corner of Wyoming, though it might have been western Dakota; it was hard to tell just where a fellow was in those brutally hot, dry, rattlesnake-infested buttes north of the Platte.
Mason and the posse had run Stanhope and two other Vultures down after a long, hard chase. They hadn’t been hard to capture, however, as all three, including Stanhope, had been wounded in their getaway from Willow City and were more like cornered coyotes than angry wolves. They’d stopped to have their wounds tended by an old Hunkpapa woman at a trading post on some nearly dry creek that Mason hadn’t learned the name of, and that’s where his posse had found them.
The rest of the gang, though, had gotten away. Mason figured they’d headed on back out to western Wyoming, where, according to a string of consistent rumors, the curly wolves had a hideout, likely somewhere in the badlands along the Green River or up in the Wind River Range.
“Yeah, I was tough,” Stanhope said. “You got that right. I’m a cold-blooded killer. But I reckon I’m one o’ those killers who, when I’m gettin’ ready to cash in my chips, I start squirtin’ down my leg. Sure, I’m ashamed of it. But, damnit, Mason—I’m scared o’ dyin’, and I’m offerin’ you an option here!”
Mason glanced up to see the big outlaw in a red bandanna and with two black vultures tattooed on his cheeks, above a thick, dark brown beard, press his ugly face against the cell and rattle it until Mason could feel the vibration throughout the entire two-story office. The desperado’s right arm was trussed up in a burlap shoulder sling. Stanhope had been taking a midnight crap in the outhouse flanking the trading post, groaning from the pain of his wound, and Mason had simply shoved his rifle barrel between two of the structure’s brittle boards and pressed it hard against the back of Stanhope’s neck.
Mason chuckled at the remembered image from that hot, starry night along the creek that smelled as bad as the privy, and said, “Your only option, Clell, is to hang from the neck until you shit your pants and die. Besides, look at that crowd out there. You wouldn’t want me to go out and disappoint ’em with the news you’re bein’ hauled off to the territorial pen when they’ve been waitin’ over a month to watch you stretch hemp! Look at them kids laughin’ an’ cavortin’ and runnin’ around that gallows like they was waitin’ for the Fourth of July rodeo parade!”
Before Stanhope could retort, the office’s front door opened and a stocky figure stepped in, removing his black, bullet-crowned hat, his white clerical collar showing against his thick neck and the ropes of flesh sagging from his chin. “Good morning, Sheriff.”
Mason gave a cordial nod as he blew out another smoke plume. “Padre.”
Father H. Charles Connagher stood just inside the open door, holding his Bible in both hands before his prominent paunch, and raised his eyes to the cell block in the balcony over the main office. “I guess it’s about time for the…the, uh…execution.”
“We’ll be out in a minute, Father.” Mason dropped his boots to the floor and stubbed his cigarette out in a peach tin on his desk.
“Perhaps the prisoner would care to make a confession?”
Mason was about to tell the preacher to forget it when Stanhope said in an eerie little boy’s voice, “I’m awful scared, Father. Could you come up here please and hear my confession?”
Mason stood. “Go on outside, Father. We’ll be out in a minute. You can say a prayer over him before he drops.”
Connagher looked at Mason, the preacher’s eyes hidden by the twin reflections in his round-rimmed spectacles. His voice was soft, resonate, officious. “The prisoner has asked for a confession, Sheriff. It’s only right that I hear it.”
“All right, all right,” Mason said, giving an impatient wave. “Go on up and hear it.” Mason lifted his voice. “Finn?”
One of Mason’s two deputies, who’d been standing on guard just outside the office, stepped into the doorway, nearly filling it. Mark Finn was a big man who shaved only every three or four days. He was dressed like a cowhand, though he had an extra cartridge belt slanting across his broad chest. In his hands was a brass-cased Henry rifle.
“Ready, Dusty?” Finn said. “Want me to fetch him?”
“I want you to escort the preacher up to his cell while the pious Clell gives his confession.”
The reverend gave a patient smile. “Confessions are a private matter, Sheriff.”
“Not around here they ain’t.” Mason glanced at Finn and jerked his head to indicate Stanhope.
Finn shouldered his rifle and walked over to the stairs rising to the second-floor cell block. “Right this way, Father.”
“Hold on,” Mason said, extending his hand to Finn. “Rifle, Mark.”
The big deputy’s fleshy, unshaven face broke in a sheepish grin. “Whoops—forgot.” He handed his rifle over to Mason. The sheriff didn’t have a problem with the man approaching the cell with the Colt on his hip, but a rifle was too easy to snatch through the bars.
Finn started up the stairs with the preacher, and Mason leaned the deputy’s rifle against his desk. As the two were still clomping up the stairs, their footfalls echoing hollowly around the office, Mason rose and walked over to the window right of the door.
A few horsebackers rode along the street, men from area ranches in town on business, and there were a few farm supply wagons, as well. Most everyone else was on foot, some dressed in their Sunday best though this was only Wednesday, and gathered in jovial expectation around the gallows. A collie dog was following the hangman and giving him holy hell, tail up, while several in the surrounding crowd as well as the buxom blond whore, Trixie Tate, pointed out the barking dog to others, laughing.
For his part, LaForge ignored the dog that kept just out of kicking range and continued supervising the finishing touches being applied to his gallows.
Mason hooked his thumbs behind his cartridge belt and chuckled.
“Good lord—what’s going on here?” the preacher said behind and above him.
At the same time, there was a squeal of hinges. Mason spun and frowned up at the jail block atop the stairs, where Finn was opening the door of Clell Stanhope’s cell while the preacher stood to his left, scowling at Stanhope, who appeared to be moving toward the opening.
“Mark, what the hell are you doing?” Mason said. “I didn’t tell you to let him out!”
Stanhope rammed his shoulder against the door, and in a blur of motion, the outlaw leader grabbed the preacher around the neck and spun him around so that he faced the sheriff. The preacher made a face, gasping.
Sunlight glinted off something in Stanhope’s right hand, and Mason reached for the Colt Army .44 jutting from the holster tied to his right thigh.
“Mark, he’s got a gun!”
“Hold it, Mason!” Stanhope shouted, pressing his pistol’s barrel against the preacher’s right temple and loudly ratcheting the hammer back. “Skin that hogleg and the preacher’s as dead as Christ on the cross!”
Mason froze with his hand wrapped around the .44’s walnut grips. Finn laughed loudly, blue eyes flashing in the light from the windows. “I know he’s got a gun. Hell, I gave it to him!”
The deputy leaned forward over the balcony’s pine rail, roaring and slapping his thigh. He had his own Colt in his hand, and he was aiming it down at Mason. “Slide your popper out slow, Dusty, and we’ll let you and the preacher live.”
“We?” Mason stared in shock at the big deputy he’d known for at least two years and had come to trust like a brother. “What the hell happened to you, Mark?”
“Well, you see, Stanhope here pays a little more than you, Dusty. That’s really about all there is to it.”
Finn laughed again devilishly.
“You heard your boy, Sheriff,” Stanhope said, pressing his gun barrel hard against the preacher’s head. Connagher’s glasses were sagging low on his face, and his eyes were bright with sheer terror, lips stretched back from his teeth against the pain of the gun barrel grinding into his temple. “Toss that pistol over there by your desk and get your hands up. You got two seconds, then I give this sky pilot a third eye!”
“Hold on, hold on. I don’t know how you figure you’re gonna make it through that crowd out yonder, but…” Mason slowly lifted his Colt from its holster with his thumb and index finger and tossed it onto the wooden floor by his desk. It skidded up against a filing cabinet.
“Oh, I’ll think of somethin’,” the leader of the Vultures said, his broad, dark face brightening with a psychotic grin beneath the bandanna wrapped around the top of his head. When he grinned, the wings of the vultures on his cheeks rose as though the carrion eaters were taking flight.
That Stanhope had one brown and one bright blue-gray eye did little to temper his crazy aspect. He hadn’t shaved since he’d been locked up, and he’d grown nearly a full beard. His hair was long, dark, and curly. Around his neck he wore a tight choker of vulture talons.
He brusquely pushed the preacher over to the top of the stairs. Connagher stumbled forward and nearly fell down the stairs before grabbing the rail with both hands.
Mason stretched his hands out and lurched forward. “Easy!”
Stanhope laughed, then crooked his right elbow around the preacher’s neck, jerking the man’s head back against Stanhope’s chest. His big arm hid nearly the preacher’s entire face. The priest gave a startled cry. Stanhope jerked Connagher’s head back and to one side sharply.
Mason’s knees turned to jelly when he heard the sharp crack.
Connagher flung his arms out to both sides, and they and his legs began quivering as though he’d been hit by lightning. Stanhope released the man. The preacher’s head wobbled, broken, on his shoulders.
Then his knees buckled and he went tumbling down the stairs to pile up at Mason’s feet.