The Gallows Gang (6 page)

‘And the worst thing about this is,’ Mayor Maxwell said, as he thought of yet another angle with which to berate Kurt and Shackleton. ‘I have invited the state governor to come to our very town next week to see me deal with Javier Rodriguez. He said that we were a shining beacon of hope for small towns
everywhere
. What can I tell him now? That he can’t come because our beacon has been ground into the dirt by the two men I trusted the most?’

‘We—’ Kurt began, but Maxwell hadn’t finished.

‘And don’t tell me that I should stop our town’s proud day just because you two are so incompetent as to let ten of the worst outlaws this county’s ever known escape.’

Neither Shackleton nor Kurt would have presumed to tell Maxwell anything, as they appeared to stand no hope of getting a word in to explain themselves.

Previously Shackleton had been in a quandary as to what he should say. If they’d met Maxwell and the governor of Beaver Ridge jail immediately after Kurt
had shot Barney in the back, he’d have had no
problem
telling them what he thought about him.

But faced with such a tirade he reckoned
presenting
a united, albeit silent, front was his best and
probably
only option.

‘For me,’ Governor Bradbury said, when Mayor Maxwell paused to take a drink of water, ‘the worst thing is I recommended you two and then defended you when the mayor questioned whether we had enough men for the job. He’d have given me fifty but I said a small team of the lawman who brought in Javier Rodriguez and the man who’s never lost a
prisoner
would get the job done. How do you think that makes me look?’

Governor Bradbury waited, but neither man replied, judging that, like Mayor Maxwell, he didn’t want an answer, and that he was saying whatever he had to say to direct the mayor’s anger away from himself.

‘It makes you look,’ Mayor Maxwell said, ‘as bad as I do. So I sure as hell ain’t cancelling the governor’s visit and I sure as hell will send Javier Rodriguez to the gallows before his very eyes next week.’

Silence reigned for several seconds and taking it that this time they did want an answer, Kurt spoke up.

‘After we eliminated Pablo Rodriguez with our small force, taking serious losses in the process, we picked up on Javier’s trail. Your dragging us away from that pursuit means it’ll have gone cold, but we will recapture him and the rest of the escaped
prisoners
long before the governor’s visit.’

‘See that you do,’ Governor Bradbury snapped, his eyes flaring after Kurt had offered a veiled criticism of his own actions. ‘You have seven days or neither of you will ever work for me again.’

‘And I have enough connections,’ Maxwell said, ‘to ensure neither of you will ever work for anybody ever again.’

He glared at each man in turn to check that they understood he had the political power to carry through with his threat, leaving Governor Bradbury to point at the door.

‘So why are you standing around here talking?’ he demanded. ‘You’ve got a prisoner to get back behind bars where he belongs!’

Kurt nodded and started to turn away, but Maxwell raised a hand, halting him.

‘And,’ he said, his tone low, ‘I am grateful that you brought Narcissa back safely. After what the Rodriguez brothers did to her, I can’t blame her for being hot-headed enough to seek her own revenge.’

Kurt nodded, then joined Shackleton in leaving. Once they were outside the mayor’s office, Shackleton heard a new argument starting up inside, presumably one in which each man made it clear to the other that the escape wasn’t
his
fault. They didn’t stay to hear its conclusion.

‘All right, Shackleton,’ Kurt said as they headed down the boardwalk. ‘You don’t like me and my methods and I ain’t particularly taken with the way you question my every move, so do we split up or do we work together?’

Shackleton gave the matter serious thought before he replied.

‘We work together as a team. If we disagree, the majority decides.’

‘So be it.’ Kurt halted and waited for Elwood, who pushed himself away from the hitching rail where he’d been talking with another man and made his way over to them. ‘What’s your suggestion?’

‘We go back to the watering hole. If we make good time, we should get there by early afternoon.’

‘After a day, the trail will be too cold. We need to stop thinking like trackers and think like lawmen. There was something plain odd about Narcissa Maxwell heading off after Javier on her own. I reckon we should question her when she’s calmed down.’

Shackleton didn’t know the history of what had happened to her at the hands of the Rodriguez brothers, but he could guess, so he turned to Elwood to make the casting vote.

‘I’ve got my own suggestion,’ he said. ‘While Maxwell was bursting your eardrums I asked around. There’s been a killing at Wilson’s Crossing.’

Shackleton winced. ‘Javier Rodriguez?’

‘No,’ Elwood said. ‘It’s worse. It’s The Preacher.’

‘So,’ Mitch Cartwright said, ‘we’ll ambush a train only because Pablo never wanted to?’

‘Yeah,’ Turner Jackson said before Javier could reply. ‘And I say it’s a good idea.’

‘So do I, but …’ Mitch looked around the saloon as he gathered his thoughts. ‘But I reckon we can do
so much more if we join back up with Pablo.’

‘We could do so much less,’ Javier said, entering into this argument for the first time. ‘My brother has no ambition, no vision. And that’s why his greatest achievement will always be that he is my brother.’

Mitch wisely gave up on the argument and wandered off down the bar to join Casey.

Yesterday, everyone had worked off their
frustrations
at the trading post. So now they’d holed up at Baxter’s Point, a forgotten two-bit fleapit of a town that clung to the side of a ridge like a particularly irritating boil. Nobody would ever stop in a place like this, which is precisely why he and Pablo had often stopped here.

The former prisoners who had now become his to command were drinking in pensive mood as they awaited his decision as to what they did next.

In the short time they’d been free Mitch and Turner had become Javier’s closest advisers, with Turner advocating that they strike out on their own and better Pablo’s exploits. Mitch advocated
rejoining
Pablo.

Javier had favoured Turner so far, but he enjoyed hearing Mitch present an alternative point of view, and he hadn’t put his own suspicions about Turner from his mind. It had been rumoured he’d had a part with Nathaniel McBain in ensuring that the prison breakout had failed, whereas Mitch had been the ringleader in organizing that breakout.

There was no way of knowing now whether those rumours were true, but he had resolved to keep both
men close, carefully weigh up their actions, then make a judgement on whom he could trust the more later.

On this current matter, he had already decided to side with Turner. They would hold up a train,
something
Pablo had always been loath to do. Turner understood why he had to do it, but the others didn’t. He was musing on why that was the case when Turner sidled along the bar to him.

‘Mitch is getting to be trouble,’ he said from the corner of his mouth.

Javier snorted. He had expected him to make a comment like that.

‘It’s nothing I can’t deal with. I’m not like Pablo. I listen to what my men have to say.’

‘Then listen to this. The railroad is a fine start, but for a man with ambition, we have to think even bigger than that, and we can start with Bear Creek’s bank.’

Javier was minded to agree and press him for more details when he heard a rider approaching outside. He glanced at the bartender who winked, a simple signal to say the newcomer had already been sized up and the message passed inside that he represented no problem to anyone here.

But Javier hadn’t expected that Jim Parker would enter. He was trail-dirty and his features were
thunderous
as he looked around the saloon. His mood didn’t lighten as he made his way over to Javier.

Jim had ridden with Pablo since the beginning and if Pablo were to pick anyone to pass a message
on to him it would be Jim.

‘What’s my brother got to say for himself?’ he said.

‘He ain’t saying nothing no more,’ Jim said. ‘That lawman Marshal Kurt McLynn killed him.’

‘Him again,’ Javier spat. Around the saloon
everyone
looked at him with a mixture of embarrassment and perhaps even shame in their eyes. After he’d spent most of the last day saying how he planned to move on without his brother, he couldn’t blame anyone.

‘Yeah,’ Jim said, ‘and he got every last one of us.’ Javier raised an eyebrow, regaining some of his composure.

‘Yet you survived.’

‘Sure did. Someone had to let you know what happened.’

‘And how did it happen?’

‘That lawman ambushed us,’ Jim said, then went on to describe the events in Devil’s Canyon of which he’d seen only the aftermath.

Javier didn’t pay those details much attention as he put his own thoughts about this revelation in order. The tale only piqued his interest when Jim moved on to describe what he’d found out about them since the ambush.

‘Say that again,’ he said.

‘They’ve got a name for you,’ Jim said as Turner punched the air. ‘You ain’t been free for long, but already you’re known as the Gallows Gang.’

Javier patted Turner’s back. ‘We kind of figured that’d happen.’

‘But that don’t matter none. The Pablo Rodriguez gang is still in force. You ready to ride now and make that lawman regret ever hearing of us?’

‘No. Pablo died because he was a clumsy fool. Nobody will remember him.’

Jim’s mouth opened wide in shock.

‘You have to,’ he murmured, backing away a pace.‘Kurt killed your brother.’

‘I don’t
have
to do nothing no more.’

Jim shot a glance down the bar at Turner, who grunted that he agreed with Javier. Then he looked around the rest of the saloon. He received nothing but blank expressions.

‘You’re all yellow-bellied critters,’ Jim muttered, his face reddening.

Then he threw his hand to his holster, but he didn’t get to reach it as Javier’s low shot to the guts bent him double. A slug from Turner a moment later sent him crashing into the bar where he clung on for a moment before sliding down it to lie sprawled on the floor.

‘Anyone else got a problem with me not going after the lawman?’ Javier said, pacing up to the body.

Nobody replied, but he noticed that neither did anyone meet his eye. Turner was the first to react.

‘Swift, Casey,’ he said, gesturing, ‘check he wasn’t being followed.’

Javier glanced at Turner and nodded,
acknowledging
that was a wise precaution, then he kicked over Jim’s body to turn him on to his back. He looked into his lifeless eyes, noting that, aside from
himself, he was the last tie with the Pablo Rodriguez gang.

‘The Gallows Gang,’ he said, rolling his tongue around the words and relishing their sound.

‘Why Baxter’s Point?’ Nathaniel asked, looking past the town sign to appraise the unpromising-looking collection of buildings ahead.

The Preacher didn’t respond other than to stop and stare silently ahead.

From somewhere, perhaps the saloon, gunfire sounded and this made him draw his horse to the side, then pace into the scrub until he disappeared from sight. Nathaniel heard him dismount and with a last bemused look towards town he followed him.

‘This place sure is a dead-end town,’ he said when he joined him, but The Preacher declined the
opportunity
to provide a sage and cryptic biblical
quotation
.

Nathaniel had let The Preacher lead him here and even for someone whose every utterance was
enigmatic
, his explanations had been particularly obscure.

But quotations that referred to brothers had been common, so Nathaniel had deduced that The Preacher was on the trail of one of the Rodriguez brothers and for now that was good enough for him.

How he was following that trail Nathaniel didn’t know and he’d resigned himself to not getting any straight answers. But any residual scepticism slipped away when he saw two men head out of the saloon,
then make their way towards them.

They were Swift Tate and Casey Dawson, two men whom he’d last seen running away after Turner Jackson had rolled the dynamite into the cage.

He lost his last reservations about what The Preacher’s motivations were when the man slowly removed his gun from its holster, dropped to his knees, and crawled through the scrub towards the town sign.

Nathaniel followed, joining him when he stopped a few yards from open ground and ten yards from the sign, at a point where the two men would pass within a few yards of them.

They waited in silence while the two men carried on until they reached the sign, where they scanned the land ahead of them, then back towards the saloon.

‘Jim Parker ain’t no idiot,’ Casey said. ‘He won’t have been followed.’

‘I know that,’ Swift said, ‘but Turner reckons that by ordering us around he wins favour with Javier.’

‘I figured that too.’ Casey leaned on the sign and felt in his pocket for a smoke. ‘I don’t trust that man.’

‘Me neither. I reckon Mitch is talking more sense.’

‘Like he always does.’ Casey glanced around, taking in the fading light. ‘I reckon we should stay here for another ten minutes, then go back in and report it’s all clear.’

Swift agreed with this plan, and the two men leaned back against the sign, smoking.

Nathaniel watched them until he was sure they
were relaxed and off-guard. Then he glanced at The Preacher, wondering how they could work out between them what they should do now, but The Preacher’s next pronouncement left him in no doubt as to what he planned to do.

‘For the day of vengeance was in my heart,’ The Preacher murmured, ‘and the year of my
redemption
has come, Isaiah sixty-three, verse four.’

Then The Preacher rose from the scrub like a towering, vengeful angel of death, his gun swinging up to aim at the men.