The shock, horror, and rage that Sheriff Dusty Mason was feeling did not show on his face. He was good at holding his emotions close to his vest. Having been a lawman for the past ten years had taught him the value of remaining calm in any situation and to give away nothing to his opponents.
When he’d crouched over the dead preacher and then straightened his back to stare up the stairs at Clell Stanhope and Mark Finn, who were walking down toward him, keeping their cocked pistols aimed at his head, he merely said, “You had no call to do that, Clell.”
“How many times you think you can hang me, Mason?”
Stanhope dropped down the stairs to stand two feet in front of Mason, on the other side of the dead Connagher. He was a huge man, standing a good three inches over Mason’s rangy six feet, and he was grinning with one side of his mouth. Outside, Mason could hear the crowd getting louder, impatient for him to lead Stanhope outside and up onto the gallows.
Stanhope jerked his pistol to one side. “Get those hands raised. And step back, Mason.”
Vaguely surprised that he was still alive, Mason raised his hands to his shoulders and stepped away from Stanhope and Finn, who’d followed the leader of the Vultures down the stairs.
“Keep your gun on him, Mark,” Stanhope ordered as he crossed the room to where his gun belt and hat and his long, dirty cream duster hung from pegs in the wall near Mason’s desk. His sawed-off, double-barreled shotgun hung there, as well—a mean little weapon with a hand-carved stock. “And cuff his hands behind his back.”
As the outlaw strapped his black, two-gun rig around his waist, Finn kept his eyes and gun on Mason while reaching around behind his own thick body and removing a set of handcuffs from the back of his cartridge belt. “What’re we gonna do with him? We let him live, he’ll follow us.”
He tossed the cuffs to Mason. “Put ’em on, Dusty. Nice an’ tight.”
Stanhope said, “You mean, he’ll follow us like him…and you…followed us before?”
“Sure.” Finn frowned as he glanced at the outlaw, who was making sure both his Peacemakers showed brass. “I was part o’ the posse, but that was before I threw in with you, Clell.” The big deputy laughed nervously. “You can’t fault me for that. I was just doin’ my job!”
“Nope. Can’t fault you at all.” Stanhope dropped his shotgun’s lanyard over his neck, letting the popper hang down over his belly, and set his hat on his head. It was an opera hat sort of like that which the hangman, LaForge, wore. Only Stanhope’s wasn’t as tall, and it was a sun-faded, brassy brown, with what Mason assumed was a vulture plume poking up from the braided rawhide band. He wore it snugged down over the red bandanna.
“Whatever he paid you, Mark,” Mason said, a grim smile curving his mouth beneath his thick mustache as he snaked his hands around behind his back and cuffed himself. “It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t near enough.”
“Shut up.” Clell drilled Mason with his weird brown-and-gray gaze, then spun the cylinder of his second Colt and poked it into the holster he wore for the cross draw on his left hip. To Finn, he barked, “Let’s go—get him outside!”
Finn prodded Mason out the door with his pistol barrel, and the lawman walked out onto the street, his heart thudding in his chest. With the cuffs, he was defenseless, but he’d had no choice but to put them on. His only hope was that he could signal his only other deputy, Regus Bone, before Stanhope and Finn got the drop on him.
As the two walked out of the sheriff’s office behind him, his own pale blue eyes searched the crowd milling around the gallows. No one had yet seen him and the other two emerge from the office, though it looked as though LaForge and his gallows were ready.
The tall, gray-haired executioner, who looked like a vulture himself dressed in his black suit with clawhammer coat and tails, was standing in front of the platform, hands behind his back, looking up at the single rope shunting a little in the hot, dry breeze. He wore a devilishly proud smile on his face.
Mason saw Regus Bone at the same time Bone saw him. The middle-aged deputy was standing where Mason had expected he’d be—near Trixie Tate, a beer in his hand. He held the butt of his double-barreled shotgun in the crook of his other arm. Catching Mason’s eye, his bug-eyed face acquired a sheepish cast, and he quickly polished off his beer, gave the glass to the whore, then hitched his wash-worn, checked wool trousers higher on his lean hips and began walking around the front of the gallows toward Mason. He obviously hadn’t yet seen anything odd in the fact that Stanhope was not only clad in trail duds and that he and Finn were flanking Mason, holding pistols on him. Or maybe he hadn’t yet seen them or recognized Stanhope in his opera hat and duster.
Mason glowered at the slouch-shouldered deputy, grinding his teeth in a silent, desperate plea that Bone make eye contact with him and get the message that trouble was boiling over for both of them.
But as the older deputy approached the sheriff’s office, he kept his shotgun in the crook of his arm and didn’t even lift his eyes from the street.
When Bone ran the back of his right hand across his mouth, likely wiping the remains of the beer away, the words fairly burst from Mason’s lungs. “Goddamnit, Bone—shoot these sons o’ bitches!”
Mason thew himself sidways and hit the street on his left shoulder and hip, exposing Stanhope and Finn to Bone’s double-barrel greener. Mason looked up to see Bone stopping dead in his tracks, staring down at Mason and beetling the gray-brown brows mantling his close-set eyes.
“Shoot ’em!” Mason shouted, futilely trying to pull his hands out of the cuffs and kicking his legs in frustration.
Just then, one of the crowd near Bone—a tall, slender, long-haired man in a black bowler, shabby black suit, and red vest faded to nearly pink, swung around toward Bone. It was the Vulture known as Magpie Quint. Mason didn’t see the sawed-off shotgun that the man extended from beneath his shabby suit jacket until a loud boom went rocketing around between the false facades on both sides of the street.
Bone was picked two feet up in the air and thrown six feet back before hitting the street with a yelp. His shotgun landed another fifteen feet behind him. He moved his arms and legs, groaning feebly. The man in the shabby suit and red vest walked over to Bone, extended his shotgun out and down, and triggered his second load of buckshot into his already bloody chest and belly.
Two women in the crowd screamed at nearly the same time. The collie dog stopped barking, yelped, and ran toward an alley mouth, warily glancing back over its shoulder.
Bone ground his heels into the dirt, arched his back slightly, then collapsed and lay still.
A baby on the other side of the street from Mason started crying.
Mason felt all the air leave his lungs as he said, “Ah, Christ!”
Stanhope laughed as he looked down at the county lawman. “Sheriff, what in the hell are you doin’ down there?” He laughed again, then canted his head toward Finn, who was staring a little regretfully at old Bone. “Stand him up.”
Finn aimed his pistol at Mason. The big deputy wasn’t smiling anymore, however. “Get up, Dusty.”
Mason climbed heavily, wearily to his feet as he watched several men separate by ones and twos from the crowd and step out away from its perimeter. A hush had fallen over the street. All faces, slack-jawed with awe, were staring toward the jailhouse.
Trixie Tate and the barman, Burt Givens, both stood as slack-jawed as the rest of the crowd. Only a few beer drinkers were around them now, most of the others having moved down into the street to await the hanging.
Only now, it seemed to be occurring to the entire crowd collectively that there wouldn’t be any festivities today.
Mason stood in front of the jailhouse, his hands cuffed behind his back, feeling a hot frustration rippling across every fiber of his being. He looked around at the hard men who’d separated themselves from the crowd and were now forming a rough circle around it.
They all carried rifles or shotguns, and they were bearing down on the crowd. One by one, cold stones dropped in Mason’s belly as he recognized the unshaven, sneering faces of Ed Crow, Doc Plowright, Magpie Quint, Red Ryan, Clell’s brother Lester Stanhope, Hector Debo, “Quiet” Boone Coffey, and Santos Estrada.
Somehow, they’d infiltrated the town without being recognized. Or maybe there was no one else around who would recognize them excepting Mason, who’d seen their likenesses all gracing wanted circulars, several of which adorned his bulletin board. Mason had been preoccupied, guarding his prisoner—the most notoriously deadly killer he’d ever jailed.
Only to have him taken out of his hands by a man he’d come to trust, his own hands cuffed behind his back.
What a goddamn fool he was! Why in hell didn’t they go ahead and shoot him? Or hang him? Either would be better than he deserved, having imperiled his town like this.
“Crow!” Stanhope said as he walked toward the gallows.
The outlaw nearest him—a stocky, bearded gent with an eye patch—tossed the gang leader a carbine. Then Ed Crow slid his two Colts out of their sheaths and cocked them, holding them on the crowd on Mason’s side of the street. Mason looked stonily on as Stanhope approached the hangman, who still stood in front of his gallows. LaForge let his hands drop to his sides. He scowled out from his long horsey face and deep-set eyes under heavy, grizzled brows as the man he’d been sent to Willow City to execute approached him.
Stanhope grabbed the man’s arm and swung him around to face the gallows. LaForge grunted and looked indignantly over his shoulder at the tall Vulture in the dirty cream duster behind him. A collective gasp rose from the crowd as Stanhope shoved LaForge toward the gallows steps. He shoved the elderly, tall, and skinny hangman too hard, and LaForge fell onto the steps.
“Leave me, damn you! What do you think you’re doing?” the executioner shouted in his stentorian southern drawl. His face was sunset red, the bulbous tip of his nose turning deep purple.
Stanhope cocked his right boot and rammed it hard against the executioner’s ass. “Get up there, hangman. Time to test your hemp!”
“No!” yelped LaForge as the outlaw’s kick propelled him up the steps, long arms and skinny legs flopping like those of a ragdoll, his hat tumbling off his shoulder.
He continued to yell, his voice cracking desperately, as Stanhope kicked him up onto the platform. Near the noose dangling from its beam, LaForge dropped to his knees and raised his long arms and opened his hands in supplication. “Please! I beg you! Don’t do this!”
His voice turned shrill as a rusty saw, and he began sobbing, his craggy face crumpling, thin lips quivering.
Stanhope laughed. “You’re crow bait, hangman!”
He set his carbine on the platform, then crouched over LaForge, wrapping an arm around his lean waist and hauling the hysterical man to his feet. When he had him standing on his skinny legs, he pushed him over to the noose and, while the hangman continued to plead for his life, sobbing, cords of sinew stretching beneath his chin, tears dribbling down his paper-pale cheeks, Stanhope drew the noose down over his gray head and tightened the knot around his skinny neck.
LaForge howled and mewled and danced atop the trapdoor, clawing at the noose with his long spidery fingers.
Mason stared in disbelief, as did the rest of the crowd. A few of the mothers, clad in sunbonnets and Mother Hubbards, were ushering their children off down alleys and away from the scene of the hangman’s imminent demise. Most everyone else, including several women, held their ground, staring up in eerie fascination as the hangman bawled and danced, his coarse gray hair blowing in the breeze. Piss darkened his trousers as it oozed down his legs and darkened the door leaping in its frame around his black, thumping half boots.
“Don’t do it, Clell!” Mason’s shout was too low to be heard above the hangman’s cries, so he raised it several decibels. “Clell…let him go! LaForge was just doin’ his job! I’m the one you oughta hang—not him!”
Stanhope turned toward Mason, grinning. “I’m savin’ you fer later, Sheriff!”
He glanced at one of the other Vultures, a big, red-bearded man called Red Ryan, who stood with one hand on the brake-like handle rigged to the trapdoor. Stanhope nodded. Red Ryan grinned, showing his yellow teeth inside his heavy beard, and a collective gasp rose like a distant thunder peal from the crowd.
Red Ryan threw the lever.
The trapdoor opened with a wooden rasp.
LaForge dropped straight down to the end of the rope and jerked back up with a crack like the report of a small-caliber pistol. His hands that had continued to claw at the rope now dropped to his sides. His long, lean body stiffened as it swung from side to side on the creaking rope.
His feet continued to dance. His fingers twitched. His eyes bulged in his skull and he worked his thin lips as though he were trying to say something but couldn’t get the words out.
Then his body slackened. The light left his eyes over which his papery lids drooped halfway down.
Mason’s knees buckled. He dropped to the street. “Ah, Christ.”
Stanhope, standing alone on the gallows now, holding his carbine in one hand, his sawed-off gut shredder in the other, turned back to him. “Don’t pass out, Sheriff. We ain’t done yet. Nope. We ain’t done by a long shot!”
The next half-hour passed as though in an excruciatingly drawn-out nightmare while Mason watched from his knees, hands cuffed behind his back. Stanhope ordered each man who’d ridden in the posse that had hunted him down to step out away from the crowd or Stanhope and his men would rape all the women and shoot all the children in town, then burn Willow City to the ground.
There was much crying and yelling, but finally the six innocent townsmen who’d ridden with Mason were lined up in front of the gallows and shot by the Vultures, who in turn had lined up ten feet away to form a firing squad. While the posse men’s wives and children ran to where the men lay quivering with death spasms, one of the Vultures led a small horse herd out of an alley, and the gang members, including Mark Finn, all mounted, firing their guns in the air in celebration.
While cries of terror continued to rise from the dispersing, wildly shifting crowd, Clell Stanhope rode over to where Trixie Tate knelt near Burt Givens’s beer keg, sobbing. Givens himself had taken cover inside the saloon. The leader of the Vultures grabbed the stricken whore’s arm and pulled her, kicking and screaming, over the pommels of his saddle.
While the rest of the gang galloped on out of town to the north, Stanhope trotted his grulla gelding over to Mason. Trixie screamed and kicked her legs down one side of the horse while trying to pound her fists against Stanhope’s right leg with the other, her long blond hair brushing across the ground.
The vultures on Stanhope’s cheeks spread their wings as the outlaw leader extended his sawed-off popper toward Mason and ratcheted back one of the two hammers. “Been nice palaverin’ with you, Sheriff. Hope ya don’t take none of this personal!”
He laughed. Mason watched the man’s thick, red-brown finger with its dirt-encrusted nail tighten inside the shotgun’s trigger guard. The lawman slowly closed his eyes. His shoulders jerked when the blast came. It hadn’t sounded as loud as Mason would have expected from a double-bore shotgun loaded with ten-gauge buck.
It came again, and finding himself oddly still alive, Mason opened his eyes to see dust puff ten feet in front of him. Stanhope was galloping away, glaring back over his shoulder but not at Mason. He was looking up toward the rooftops somewhere to Mason’s left, one eye narrowed, the shotgun half extended in his right hand, the hammer still cocked.
A rifle cracked again. The bullet plunked into the street to the right of Stanhope’s grulla. The outlaw flinched, spat a curse, then turned forward, let the popper hang against his belly, took his reins in both hands, and booted the horse on up the street toward the north edge of town.
Trixie continued to scream and kick and flail her fists as she lay draped across his saddle.
Mason turned to stare in the direction from which the rifle had spoken. He ran his gaze across a couple of peaked roofs until he spied a silhouetted figure crouched atop the roof of the Laramie House Hotel, half hidden by the tall false facade.
It was a long-haired figure with a low-crowned, flat-brimmed hat. A claw necklace hung around the man’s neck. He was too far away for Mason to tell for sure, but the rifle in his hands looked like a brass-cased Yellowboy repeater. From what Mason could see, the man looked Indian. Maybe a half-breed.
Holding his rifle barrel-up in both hands, the man held Mason’s gaze for about three seconds, then pulled his head back behind the facade and was gone.
Mason looked away from his unknown benefactor, saw the women screaming over the bodies of their dead husbands in front of the gallows. He saw LaForge twisting at the end of his own rope. Regus Bone lay sprawled in the street to his right, blood glistening across every inch of the old deputy’s upper body and dribbling down his gray-bristled cheeks.
Shock lay like a heavy yoke on Mason’s shoulders. Shaking it off, he rose to his feet, trying to jerk his hands free of the steel bracelets and raging, and yelled, “Someone get me out of these goddamn cuffs!”
He looked once more toward where the rifleman who’d saved him from Stanhope’s bullet had shown himself briefly and disappeared.