Seven Days to Hell by William W. Johnstone

Author:William W. Johnstone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2016-12-06T05:00:00+00:00

TWENTY

Seven days until Cullen Baker was hanged. Seven days to hell!

Johnny Cross and Bill Longley came to the Torrent, that narrow swift-running river at the southwest corner of Albedo County in East Texas. The site held a lot of memories for Bill. It was where he had helped Cullen Baker run his barge, where Cullen and Julie made their home with Bill bunking in a nearby shack.

Memories. Hard work, good times . . .

Johnny and Bill were on the far side of the watercourse, on horseback, trailing downstream. It was early morning but already the air was thick, close, stifling. It would only get hotter and more oppressive as the day wore on and the sun rose high.

Swarms of insects buzzed the riders. Insects were the plague of the swamps. One of them.

Riding alongside the Torrent helped. There was something clean about its racing waters that seemed to clear the air around it. A fine misty spray arose from its surface.

“I hate the swamp,” Johnny said.

Bill kept himself from smiling.

Johnny Cross was a man who could endure hardship as few men could and generally he was the last to utter a complaint. Bill knew that, he had ridden with Johnny before.

But Johnny made no secret then and now that he was no friend of the Blacksnake River swampland, declaring that the time he’d spent there in the early months after war’s end was one of the most miserable times of his life, because of the locale.

Johnny had been on the dodge then, running both from blue-clad Federal troops and local lawmen, and Moraine County was a good place for wanted men to lay low and hide out. That’s when he was riding with Cullen Baker, also wanted, as was the very young Bill Longley, then in his midteens but still a blooded Yankee-killer.

“Bet you never thought you’d be coming back to the Blacksnake,” Bill said.

“Never. Only saving the life of a man who saved mine—more than once—could bring me back,” Johnny said.

They’d come a long way in a short time. Johnny had spent the better part of a week in Hangtree waiting for Bill to recover so they could set out on their desperate trek. Bill healed fast but you couldn’t rush these things. The trek was desperate because they were racing to save Cullen Baker from hanging. Execution Day was set for the first of the month.

Johnny had spent the time wisely by readying for the trip. One of his hardest and least pleasant tasks was convincing Luke Pettigrew not to come along. Luke was his longtime best friend and now partner of the Crossbow Ranch, formerly the Cross Ranch but renamed to reflect its changed status. He and Luke had pooled their resources and gone into cattle ranching in a big way. The boom for Texas cattle was on and growing daily.

The hell of it for Johnny was his fear that Luke would think he was being cut out of the play because he was missing one leg, his left leg having been taken off below the knee by a Yankee cannonball during the war.

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