Savage Guns by William W. Johnstone

Author:William W. Johnstone
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Kensington Publishing Corp.
Published: 2010-09-18T04:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-ONE

Lem Clegg and his boys was putting up the gallows in fine style, taking real pride in their work. I kept an eye on them, but no one was bothering them none. They’d got the hanging part of it up, good and solid, and now they was working on the platform and the trap. They’d put in posts and stringers, and soon they’d be running plank across. They sure knew what they were doing, and I wondered if they’d built a few other gallows in their day. It felt real good to have some professionals doing the job.

There was a mess of people watching them work, most all the time. A lot of Doubtful mothers, they’d bring their young ones over for a look, and tell them kids to behave themselves or they’d get themselves hanged just like King Bragg was going to in a couple of days. Some of these boys, they got real excited by it and wanted to get real close to see it when the moment came along.

Mrs. Cadbury, the schoolmarm, she brought the fifth grade over to see the gallows going up, and told them all how it would work. Them little kids were impressed, and I thought they’d stick to the straight and narrow rather than get their necks broken. When she came back with the seventh graders, they all begged her to watch it when the time came, and she promised them she’d let them out of school so they could see justice done and take part in the hanging of a mass murderer. I thought that was pretty good myself, and it’d keep the peace around there real good. The more people saw King hang, the better, when it came to stopping crime in its tracks. She told me it was better than reading the Bible to them every morning, and since the gallows had started to go up, she’d had no trouble in class and not even much truancy. So that gallows was sending a message, all right.

Doubtful didn’t have no high school, just grades one through eight, so there weren’t any older children seeing the gallows go up. That was too bad, because the older ones, they’d see that King Bragg was eighteen, about their own age, and that would make some sort of impression on them. The more that came to the hanging, the better off Puma County would be, and of course the merchants were expecting a big day in their shops too.

It sure was a nice spring, and I thought if the weather held, King Bragg would get himself hanged on a fine, warm, sunny day, and that would be good. I’d hate to hang a feller on a cold, mean day.

There was a mess of T-Bar men floating around, but the Anchor Ranch outfit was staying away. That suited me fine. Admiral Bragg, he’d tried everything from a fake hanging to scare me to smuggling stuff to his boy, and only a couple days earlier I’d stopped them from robbing the gallows timbers and trying to slow down the hanging.

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