William Johnstone - A Good Day to Die

The eastern horizon glimmered with the glow of predawn. The few lights showing at Four Corners shed a hazy yellow blur against gray-black gloom.

At the bottom of the shaft, Johnny watched Sam climb through the hatch, then started up the ladder. He climbed swiftly, nimbly. Reaching the top, he stuck his head through the hatchway.

Sam sat in a corner with the open gun case flat on his lap, fitting the barrel and stock extensions to the mule’s-leg, converting it to a long rifle. It was second nature to him to put the pieces together by touch in the dark.

Johnny climbed up on the platform, shucking off the sack of dynamite and setting it down carefully. He eased the wooden hatch closed. Hands resting atop the balustrade, he took a look around. It was still dark enough to keep him from outlining against the night sky.

Sam finished assembling the long rifle. Closing the case, he set it down on its side against a wall, out of the way.

Johnny turned to him. “Now we wait.”

The wait would not be a long one.

Darkness faded. The predawn sky took on a clear, colorless hue that was not white, not gray, but a mixture of the two.

In Wade Hutto’s second-floor office in the courthouse, the air was thick with cigar smoke and whiskey fumes. Rutland Dean stood at a window looking east. He stuck his nose in a space between the nailed-up boards of a barricade, sniffing early morning air.

It smelled fresh, clean in comparison to the stale smokiness of the office. Dean breathed deep, filling his lungs with the air of outside.

White light seeped into the sky, the view gradually brightening. Veils and streamers of mist drifted above the ground. The thicket of trees east of town and north of Hangtree Trail was a black-green wall of foliage. At its base were flickering flashes of motion, flitting shadows that showed so quickly before disappearing that Dean was unsure of what he’d seen ... if he’d seen anything at all.

The screams from the thicket had ended an hour or so earlier—a blessing, for the unseen sufferer as well as for those forced to listen.

The rim of the eastern sky took on faint shadings of yellow, the first herald of sunrise. A dark blur detached itself from the gloom of trees, crawling west toward town.

Dean stiffened. “I see something.”

“What?” Banker Willoughby asked, starting from a fitful half-sleep.

“Don’t know. It’s coming this way, though.”

The others went to the windows, crowding around.

“It’s a rider!” Chance Stillman exclaimed.

Boone Lassiter stood at the window, rifle in hand. “One side, men. Gimme some room.”

“Don’t shoot just yet, Boone,” Hutto cautioned. “Something about that rider ... doesn’t look right.”

“Don’t look like no Injin,” Stillman pointed out.

The figure on horseback advanced toward the courthouse at a slow walk, almost a crawl. Moving out from the trees, it crossed the fields at a measured pace. The image blurred as curtains of mist rolled across it, clearing as the mists moved on.

It was quiet in Hutto’s office, the sound of the men’s heavy breathing clearly audible. A commotion below, shouts and half-stifled exclamations from the first-floor courtroom, indicated the apparition had also attracted attention in that quarter. His brow furrowed, his lips tightly compressed, Lassiter eyed the oncoming rider.

“That’s no Injin,” Stillman said.

“That’s a white man,” agreed Rutland Dean.

“It was.” Lassiter had good eyesight.

The man on horseback closed on the courthouse. He was lashed to a framework of two vertical wooden sticks with crossbars tied to the back of the saddle. It held him upright.

He was bare from the waist up. Below, he wore brown pants. His feet were bare. A rope tied to his ankles ran under the horse’s belly. His head hung down, chin resting on his chest.

The horse wasn’t much to speak of. It was old, swaybacked, heavy-footed—crow bait. A disposable animal, one the Comanches could do without. Its legs were hobbled with lengths of rope allowing it to take only slow, plodding steps. The rider tied to the saddle framework swayed and lurched according to the animal’s gait, as much as his bonds permitted.

“Who is it?” Hutto whispered. His eyes narrowed as he stared at the rider, trying to figure it out.

“Coleman,” Stillman said.

One of the two who had set out after dark to try to reach the cavalry out on the plains west of the Breaks; the other was Hapgood.

“Coleman? Is that Coleman? That’s not Coleman,” Hutto disagreed.

“It’s a big man. Coleman’s a big man. Hapgood’s a little fellow,” Stillman said.

In the dawning light, it could be seen that the field fronting east of the courthouse was studded with a number of irregularly spaced fourteen-inch wooden stakes with red strips of cloth attached to each one.

“He keeps coming straight-on, he’ll cross one of those dynamite pits,” Banker Willoughby said. “What happens then?”

“Nothing. The dynamite’s safe,” Hutto said.

“Unless the horse steps on a blasting cap, maybe,” Lassiter reckoned.

“You’re a cheerful soul,” Hutto grunted. After a short pause, he asked, “You think that could set it off?”

“I don’t know. Blasting caps are awful fluky.” Lassiter answered.

“They can’t be that fluky if our people set them out without any of them blowing themselves up,” Hutto said.

The rider neared, closing on a red-staked patch. Banker Willoughby panted, as though trying to catch his breath. Hutto was sweating. In this, he was not alone.

“Something definitely wrong with that jasper,” Rutland Dean said.

“He wasn’t screaming half the night for fun,” Lassiter bluntly pointed out.

“It’s Coleman,” Stillman said.

The mounted man seemed to have been hung with what looked like strings of gray-white sausages, in thicky ropy loops circling his neck and shoulders, hanging down on his torso, gleaming wetly.

“It is Coleman,” Hutto muttered.

“What’s that hanging around his neck?” Dean asked.

“His guts,” Lassiter said.

Stillman gagged. He put out a hand palm-flat against the wall, bracing himself. He’d gone weak in the knees.

“No,” Banker Willoughby croaked. “Oh, no. It can’t be.”

“They pulled out his guts and hung ’em on him like ribbons!” Stillman cried, his voice crackling with rising hysteria.

Downstairs in the courtroom, somebody started screaming. Hard to tell if it was a man or a woman. Suddently, the screams were interrupted, cut off as if a hand had clamped down over a shrieking mouth, silencing it.

Scattered shouts, cries, gasps, and wordless exclamations erupted from the horrified spectators on the first floor.

It got worse.

Coleman’s head lolled to one side. His eyes opened. His jaw dropped, and he moaned.

“Good Lord, he’s alive!” Hutto cried.

“No, he can’t be!” Willoughby protested. “Not after that! Must be a trick, the way the horse is moving, something ...”

A shot sounded, so near that everyone in Hutto’s office started, all but the man who had fired it. Boone Lassiter. It was a shot from the rifle in the hands of Boone Lassiter.

Coleman’s body jerked, a hole showing over where his heart would be. He slumped against the bonds securing him to the upright framework, sagging.

“He’s dead now,” Lassiter said.

“Good job,” Hutto said heavily. “You did the right thing, the only thing. It was a mercy.”

The horse would have broken into a run but for the ropes hobbling it. Its ears stood straight up, its eyes rolled, its nostrils flared, and it frothed at the mouth. Hampered by its bound, hobbling gait, the poor horse angled past the corner, into the mouth of Trail Street.