The Gallows Gang (4 page)

Shackleton and Elwood maintained a steady pace back towards the cage. The horse with Barney’s body splayed over the back ensured their mood remained sombre.

Kurt had stayed behind to clear up the aftermath of the gun-battle in the pass, his pleasure in finally getting the second Rodriguez brother in no way diminished by his own losses or his accidental
shooting
of Barney.

Neither Shackleton nor Elwood gained any such pleasure out of his success.

As they closed on the cage, Elwood veered his horse in to speak to Shackleton for the first time since they’d left the pass.

‘I may be wrong,’ he said, shrugging as if he were debating whether to mention what was on his mind. ‘But back when Barney got shot, I thought I heard gunfire and a loud noise, and it wasn’t coming from inside the pass.’

Shackleton hadn’t heard anything, but Elwood
had keen ears as well as keen eyes, so he hurried his horse on.

He expected that the fire would mean he would be able to see the cage from some distance away, but they skirted along the edge of Devil’s Canyon without seeing it or any lightness ahead, adding to his
anxiety
.

So it was with some surprise and trepidation that when he at last saw light ahead they were within a hundred yards of the low camp-fire.

Hiram could have let the fire die down but the nervous glances Elwood was casting around
continued
to make Shackleton uneasy. Accordingly they gave the fire a wide berth, heading for the rill where they’d first encountered Pablo’s men.

When they could see the full extent of the area where the boulder had separated the dying fire and the prisoners, they stopped.

All was quiet, with no sign of people or horses or movement.

Worse, the cage wasn’t there.

‘Whoever flees from the terror,’ The Preacher shouted, ‘will fall into a pit, Jeremiah forty-eight, verse forty-four.’

Nathaniel gripped hold of the sides of the cage as they slid down into the canyon, peering ahead into the blackness beyond. His memory of the canyon in the daylight was of a long slope leading to a distant river. So far the cage had slid down that slope on its base.

But Nathaniel didn’t reckon their luck in getting a smooth ride would hold out for much longer. They were speeding up and the cage was rattling so loudly it sounded as if could collapse or tip over at any moment.

With so many bars now broken that event was sure to crush them.

That thought led Nathaniel to look at the bar that secured him to The Preacher. His heart leapt when he saw that it was broken six feet off the base of the cage.

So he raised his arm and the manacles, dragging The Preacher’s clutched hands with him, aiming to tip the manacles over the top. He got the chain to within two feet of the top but then The Preacher yanked his arm downwards.

‘Remove your scourge from me,’ he demanded. ‘I am overcome by the blow of your hand, Psalm
thirty-nine
, verse ten.’

‘Talk sense or be quiet,’ Nathaniel shouted.

He grabbed The Preacher’s hands with both of his own, then twisted him round and dragged him to his feet. He thrust his hands high. The Preacher
continued
to shout biblical comments at him, but he ignored his protests and with one last lunge he pushed the manacles over the top of the bar.

But as they swung free the cage rocked back and forth, sending them rolling into the bars on the other side and making Nathaniel wish they were still being held securely.

Then the inevitable happened. The sliding cage
hit a rock in its path, which caused it to tip over. Nathaniel felt himself thrown forward to leave the base and he hurtled head first into the darkness.

He waved his arms, frantically searching for
something
to hold on to but he’d left the cage and he couldn’t even see the ground.

All around him was blackness. Wind buffeted his face as he fell, his tumbling motion letting him catch a glimpse of the falling cage above and The Preacher falling with him.

Then the bright sheen of something large and foreboding below came into view, appearing to rush towards him at a rapidly accelerating pace.

After a brief debate Shackleton and Elwood left Barney’s horse, then separated to come at the fire and boulder from two different directions. Shackleton chose the side on which the cage had stood.

When he’d moved close enough to the canyon to let the fire slip out of his view he slowed to let his night vision adjust. After pacing his horse forward for another minute he saw the signs of the fight that had taken place here.

Bodies lay beside the boulder and there was a hole in the ground near the edge of the canyon. Deep gouges in the earth and short lengths of bar and torn metal suggested an explosion had taken place; perhaps that had been the noise Elwood had heard.

He dismounted and paced close to the edge to look down into the void. From the scraping
indentations 
near the edge he judged that the cage had tipped over the side.

Whether the prisoners were still inside, he didn’t know, but he guessed that one of them hadn’t been.

Then he checked on the guards, finding there were four of them, and that they had all been shot repeatedly.

He was aware of Elwood coming closer. After checking the last body, he looked up.

‘That accounts for the four guards,’ he said, ‘but not one of them is Hiram Deeds. I reckon that means some, perhaps all, of the prisoners got away. I wonder what happened, though, to …’

Shackleton trailed off when he saw Elwood’s grim expression, then he followed him round the boulder. On the other side, bathed in the dying fire’s sallow light, was the body of Hiram Deeds, also shot, except the prisoners had given him his own particular end.

The boulder had a sharp overhang and his
hanging
body dangled from that overhang, swinging in the light breeze as the makeshift gallows provided him with a fate that had awaited Javier Rodriguez and the other prisoners.

‘Cut him down,’ Shackleton said.

‘I guess you can’t blame them for doing that to Hiram,’ Elwood said as he looked for a way up the boulder.

‘In his case, you’re right. His double-crossing got him exactly what he deserved.’

By the time Kurt arrived Shackleton had laid out the bodies of the guards in a row and Elwood had
picked up the trails of a group of riders who had headed off southwards along the top of Devil’s Canyon. The escaped prisoners would have had at most a thirty-minute lead on them, but Shackleton was in no mood for beginning that pursuit until he’d confronted Kurt.

He and Elwood stood beside the boulder,
watching
Kurt approach. The poor light meant that he went through the same process as they had, of being at first unsure what he could see, followed by a
dawning
realization of what had happened here.

But Shackleton didn’t let Kurt’s realization be as slow as his had been.

‘Javier Rodriguez has escaped,’ he shouted.

Kurt drew his horse to a halt, casting a quick glance across the scene, then looked around as if he might catch sight of Javier hiding close by.

‘How do you know that? It looks to me as if the cage got blown up, then fell over the side.’

‘It did, but the guards are dead and whoever killed them then made off. We saw several separate prints so even if some prisoners went over the side, most escaped.’

Kurt edged his horse nearer to the edge and peered down into the darkness before approaching Shackleton.

‘Someone will have to go down there and check.’

‘Someone will, but I’ll tell you one thing first. You made some big mistakes—’

‘I don’t need to hear you questioning my orders no more,’ Kurt roared, edging his horse forward to
tower over Shackleton. ‘All I need to hear is
suggestions
on where Javier will go if he’s still alive. Then I’ll get him, and this time I ain’t leaving it to no judge to give him a second chance.’

‘The only person who gave Javier a second chance was you.’

Kurt drew his horse back, shaking his head.

‘That’s the difference between you and me, Shackleton,’ he said. ‘I get things done, then worry about the consequences later. You stand around whining while prisoners you were supposed to be guarding get away.’

Shackleton opened his mouth to snap back a retort, but by then Kurt had already ripped his reins to the side to turn his horse away and was galloping off into the night. Shackleton glared at his receding back until Elwood came over and patted his back.

‘That man’s a fool,’ he said, ‘but he was right about one thing. We can argue about this once we have Javier Rodriguez back where he belongs.’

Shackleton stayed staring at Kurt until his form had disappeared into the darkness, then he gave a begrudging nod. Then they went to their horses.

With their sombre mood returning they collected Barney’s horse. Then they turned their backs on the direction Kurt had gone and made their way towards the ridge.

Nathaniel coughed and spluttered, sending water out of his mouth in a seemingly endless torrent. His stomach was so bloated he felt as if he’d swallowed the entire river, and he reckoned the flow would never end.

But when the spasms did, at last, end he found he was lying on his belly on dry ground. He tried to push himself up to a sitting position, but his limbs wouldn’t obey him and he stumbled down again to lie on his back.

The sudden motion made his stomach go into spasm again and he coughed up another explosive burst of water. So this time when the spasms ended he lay still, catching his breath. Only when he felt composed enough to move and didn’t feel as if he’d vomit again, did he cautiously look around.

It was getting light, the sides of the canyon being visible as brooding slabs of rock that made his neck ache and his head swim before his gaze reached the top.

He lowered his eyes and saw that he was lying beside the river. The Preacher was sitting beside him with his legs drawn up to his chin, looking at the water.

The last thing Nathaniel remembered was falling from the cage and tumbling down into the canyon. The water had been rushing up to meet him, but after that he could recall events in only scrappy, feverish bursts as if he was seeing them by lightning flashes.

The bone-rattling blow of hitting the river, the downwards rush through the cold water, more
downward
motion, fighting for air, a temporary
emergence
above water before the river reclaimed him….

Then there were other disjointed memories of Bible quotations and of a strong arm that wrapped itself around his chest and tugged.

He twisted and raised himself on to his elbows so that he could look up at The Preacher. Then he summed up those events in one simple declaration.

‘You saved my life,’ he said.

Admittedly with them being chained together The Preacher had had no choice but to save his life, assuming, that is, that he had wanted to live. Previously his behaviour had been so bizarre and uninterested in what was happening to him that Nathaniel wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d let the river take them both away.

He waited for The Preacher to acknowledge him but that individual continued to watch the water roil
by, so Nathaniel stretched himself, finding that, aside from the bruises that announced their presence, he had survived the fall intact.

Feeling stronger now, he rolled himself round to adopt the same posture as The Preacher had, sitting beside him. There, he craned his neck, but he
couldn’t
see the point at which they’d gone over the edge, nor the cage. So he couldn’t tell whether they were immediately below that point, or whether they’d drifted downriver.

One thing was certain to him though. If he wanted to remain free for any length of time he couldn’t assume that nobody would come down into the canyon to check whether anyone in the cage had survived the fall. They had to get moving.

With the shared manacles around his wrists and ankles that meant he was going nowhere unless he found a way to communicate and agree on a course of action with The Preacher.

He took a deep breath and put on a
conversational
voice, as if the last few traumatic hours hadn’t happened and they were just two men enjoying a pleasant chat beside the river.

‘I’m grateful to you for what you did,’ he said.

Nathaniel gave him a minute to reply, but The Preacher ignored him.

‘Is there anything you want from me in return?’

He waited, but again The Preacher ignored him.

‘Do you have a name other than The Preacher?’ he tried, without success.

‘Then my name is Nathaniel McBain.’

Nathaniel was considering what his next comment should be when The Preacher swung his gaze down to consider him, this being the first time Nathaniel could remember him responding to an invitation to speak.

‘When Jesus saw Nathaniel approaching,’ The Preacher said, ‘he said of him, “Here is a true Israelite, in whom there is nothing false”. John one, verse forty-seven.’

Nathaniel judged this a good thing, both for the fact that The Preacher had spoken to him and for what he had said.

‘I believe there is nothing false about me.’ Nathaniel paused, giving The Preacher a chance to speak, but the man didn’t take up the offer. ‘I’d aimed to live a good life when I got out, but then I got wrongly accused of killing Ramsey Carr and ended up in that cage bound for the gallows.’

This didn’t interest The Preacher and the small amount of curiosity in his eyes faded away as he returned to looking at the water.

‘Who is this other Nathaniel?’ Nathaniel persisted. ‘Tell me about him.’

The Preacher didn’t take up the opportunity.

So for the next ten minutes Nathaniel talked, hoping he might happen across a comment that would interest The Preacher, stopping from time to time to give him a chance to interject, but the man passed up every opportunity.

Nathaniel spoke of his previous desire to seek a new life and how that hope had been cruelly
curtailed. He spoke of his hatred of Turner Jackson for what he’d done, both back at Beaver Ridge and in trying to kill them. He spoke of his desire to
ultimately
find freedom and to start a new life.

Although he didn’t get a response, talking let him put his own thoughts in order and that told him what he had to do next.

He had somehow to clear his name. To do that he had to find Turner Jackson and make him speak the truth. Even if he couldn’t get that from him, at the very least he would kill the man who had condemned him to the gallows then tried to blow him up.

That resolve returned him to his original problem: that unless he planned to carry The Preacher to wherever Turner was he needed his help.

He quietened and considered the only comment that had produced a reply so far. He decided that direct questions of a kind that usually worked on other people didn’t work on this man. He needed to voice neutral comments that happened to include a biblical context. He had little knowledge of the Bible, so he looked at the river, as The Preacher was doing, and tried to think what might be going through his mind.

‘The river is soothing,’ he ventured.

‘This water,’ The Preacher said, speaking for the first time in a while, ‘symbolizes baptism that now saves you also, Peter three, verse twenty-one.’

Nathaniel smiled, accepting that his dunking in the water had been a baptism of sorts.

‘I suppose I did feel reborn when I came up out of the river.’

‘And the priests came up out of the river carrying the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord, Joshua four, verse eighteen.’

Nathaniel had no idea what this meant, but he was at least getting responses. He raised his eyes to the lightening sky above the canyon rim.

‘A new day dawns,’ he said.

The Preacher followed his gaze. ‘The path of the righteous is like the first gleam of dawn, shining ever brighter till the full light of day, Proverbs four, verse eighteen.’

‘The path of the righteous,’ Nathaniel intoned, seizing on the element of that statement that suggested movement, then he cast a glance
downriver
. The Preacher followed the direction of Nathaniel’s gaze, then rocked himself forward and stood, dragging Nathaniel up to a kneeling position.

‘The path of the righteous is level.’ The Preacher thrust his hands forward, dragging Nathaniel with him. ‘O upright One, you make the way of the
righteous
smooth, Isaiah twenty-seven, verse seven.’

Then he set off walking.

Nathaniel hadn’t been prepared for him to suddenly accept his suggestion about leaving, so The Preacher stumbled as Nathaniel tried to get his legs moving. Then he got to his feet and fell into stride with The Preacher, hobbling over the stones on his unshod feet.

Within a few paces he matched The Preacher’s walking pace and so they strode along beside the river.

Although he didn’t want to risk making The Preacher stop now that he was in motion, Nathaniel couldn’t help but continue to explore how he might communicate with his odds and for now constant, companion.

‘The upright one awaits,’ he said, trying to get into the spirit of The Preacher’s utterances.

For some reason this comment made The Preacher snort his breath, then stop and swirl round to face Nathaniel, his face darkening.

‘The godly have been swept from the land; not one upright man remains.’ He grabbed Nathaniel’s collar and dragged him up close, spitting his words into his face. ‘All men lie in wait to shed blood; each hunts his brother with a net, Micah seven, verse two.’

Then The Preacher released his collar and resumed walking. Nathaniel had no idea what that had meant either, but on reconsidering the words, he decided they hinted at a common purpose, perhaps even of revenge.

That thought made Nathaniel recall one of the few Bible quotations he knew.

‘An eye for an eye,’ he said, although he presumed he hadn’t remembered the exact words, ‘a tooth for a tooth.’

‘Exodus twenty-one, verse twenty-four,’ The Preacher said, nodding as he speeded the pace of his walking.

The women out at the back were wailing again.

Javier Rodriguez thumped the table in irritation,
then swirled round to glare at the post-owner.

‘Tell them to be quiet,’ he demanded. ‘They’re being paid enough.’

‘They aren’t,’ the post-owner said, coming out from behind the trading post’s counter with two jugs of beer. ‘They’re my daughters. And they weren’t for sale.’

Javier glared at him, wondering if he had shown too much defiance, then leaned back for him to place the jugs on the table. When the post-owner had released the handles, Javier shot out an arm and grabbed his wrist.

‘Any more complaints,’ he muttered, ‘and you won’t get to enjoy our custom again.’

The post-owner snorted, clearly debating whether to mention that Javier hadn’t paid for any of the vast amount of liquor his group had consumed; then he nodded and returned to the counter.

‘What we doing next?’ Mitch Cartwright asked.

‘I ain’t decided,’ Javier said, ‘but I’ve got us this far. Trust me. You’ll enjoy what comes next.’

Mitch nodded, mollified, but his comment had only gone to make Javier feel even more unsettled.

He didn’t know what he wanted to do next.

They’d reached a trading post fifty miles out of Bear Creek and around the same distance from the scene of their escape, so he felt confident that they had thrown off any pursuit.

But previously, when he’d ridden with Pablo, he had always been the one suggesting ideas, which his brother had then usually rejected. Now, this second
chance had given him the feeling that he didn’t want to live in his brother’s shadow any more. With seven ruthless and newly freed condemned men at his side, this was perhaps a chance for him to act on his own.

‘We should have seen whether Hiram Deeds had any more dynamite,’ Turner Jackson said, grinning. ‘Then we could have blown this trading post to hell.’

Javier supped his drink while this comment
gathered
a round of enthusiastic grunts. Even in the short time he’d spent with these men, he’d gathered that Turner took greater delight at the thought of killing than was normal even amongst men of this type. Blowing things up appeared to give him especial delight.

Over at the counter the post-owner grumbled, making Javier put down his drink and glare at him.

‘What did you say?’ he demanded.

‘I said,’ the post-owner said, raising his chin
defiantly
,

‘I thought Pablo Rodriguez was bad, but his brother is even worse.’

Oddly this comment pleased Javier and he leaned back in his chair to look around the post. Several of the men were outside with the post-owner’s
daughters
and those who were inside were riffling through the post’s wares with a view to taking what they’d need to remain self-sufficient for as long as possible.

Turner picked up on Javier’s more contented mood with surprising speed.

‘Is that worse or better?’ he asked.

‘Depends on which end of a gun you’re standing,’ Javier said.

Turner nodded, as if his off-hand comment had contained more wisdom than he’d intended.

‘So does that mean we’re striking out on our own instead of rejoining your brother’s gang?’

‘We might,’ Javier said, leaning forward, intrigued at the way Turner had picked up on his thoughts, almost before he’d finished having them himself.

‘I’d have thought,’ Mitch said, watching this exchange with bemusement, ‘you’d want to continue riding with Pablo after he tried to free you.’

‘He only did what you’d expect,’ Casey Dawson said, breaking into the conversation for the first time, ‘when his brother was behind bars.’

Casey’s comment finally let Javier identify his concern.

‘I am not Pablo Rodriguez’s brother,’ he snapped, shaking a fist as he glared at Casey. ‘He’s
my
brother.’

Mitch and Casey furrowed their brows,
murmuring
that they didn’t understand, but Turner nodded, instantly seeing what he meant.

‘You said we’d blaze a trail that’d live in legend for a thousand years,’ he said. ‘I reckon we will and once we’re through, nobody will ever speak of Pablo Rodriguez again, just Javier.’

Javier nodded, then raised the jug to pour himself another glass. Ideas were already forming about all the things Pablo had never wanted to do, which he was now free to explore: train ambushes, the railroad payroll, a new life in Mexico with a woman at his side like Narcissa Maxwell….

But then a particularly loud scream rose up from
outside, making them all look to the door. The door remained closed, but movement caught his eye over by the counter.

Javier started to turn, but Turner had already reacted by raising a gun from beneath the table. Quickly he shot to the side.

Javier turned to see that the post-owner had taken advantage of their being distracted by one of his daughter’s screams to drag a rifle up from under the counter. But before he could fire Turner’s single shot tore straight between his eyes and sent him tumbling from view, his rifle falling from his grasp.