Prairie Fire by William W. Johnstone

Author:William W. Johnstone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pinnacle Books
Published: 2021-11-10T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 18

The crowd outside of Golgotha Rock was hungry for blood.

Golgotha Rock was in the fading glory of its boom. What had started as a river of copper had, over several years, dwindled to streams. The town hadn’t given up the ghost and died yet, but it seemed the vultures were circling.

Luke slowed his horse to a walk as he saw the mob standing on the flats outside of the town proper. A big tamarack pine stood at the center of a small clearing. A rope was tied to a stout branch and the rope came down in a noose around the neck of a sullen-looking man with a bushy mustache and haystack hair.

The crowd was arrayed in a half-circle around the hanging tree and a preacher man stood in the back of a buckboard. Black, flat-brimmed hat, black trousers, black coat. White, collarless shirt buttoned all the way up to the throat. In one hand he held a Bible and in the other a whip. As Luke drew nearer, he could hear the fire-and-brimstone sermon erupting from the man’s throat. The crowd shouted choruses of Amens! and Hallelujahs! to punctuate his points.

He stopped to listen, pulling his horse up at the edge of the crowd. The preacher had a deep, clear voice. Luke had no trouble hearing the sermon. The man’s voice carried.

“A dark door has opened in Golgotha Rock, I tell you, friends! A door has opened and Satan has walked through!”

The preacher was so bombastic, it was hard to ignore the man’s voice, but Luke did his best. He studied the man about to hang. He assumed it wasn’t a lynching when he got a glimpse of several men with tin stars on their shirts in the congregation.

And that’s what it is, he thought. A congregation. Not a crowd or a mob, but a congregation.

He realized he recognized the criminal. It wasn’t one of Goldsmith’s outfit, but a hardcase from the New Mexico Territory, John Hamilton Little. Sometimes called Short Little because his brother stood six and a half feet tall. Horse rustler, bank robber, an owlhoot with eleven deaths on his gun. At least. Stringing him up was no injustice.

“And this man turned his eyes away from God,” the preacher was shouting, “and took the hand of the devil!”

Luke, who’d seen his share of hangings, was just about to guide his horse around the congregation, when the preacher reached the pinnacle of his sermon.

“Meet your maker, sinner!”

The bullwhip in the preacher’s hand cracked hard. The lash stung the outlaw’s horse on the rump, and it bolted forward. The outlaw’s eyes grew wide in startled shock at the sudden action. He went up as he was jostled from his saddle and then dropped hard.

The crowd had held its breath at the preacher’s motion, but despite the moment of quiet, Luke didn’t hear the telltale crack of John Little’s neck snapping. They’d mis-tied the knot, he realized. The devout citizenry of Golgotha Rock was going to have to watch the condemned man strangle.

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