Hanging Fire by Eric Red

Author:Eric Red
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2018-11-13T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 19

The 2:13 train to Victor was scheduled to reach the station in less than an hour. That was the end of the line. The big Pacific Northern steam engine had a full head of steam on as it barreled across rural Idaho, nine cars long, pulling six passenger wagons, one horse truck, and the brake van. Its single headlight lanced through the gloom, steam and smoke belching from the locomotive’s high stack. The train hurtled across the lonely landscape through the night, nearing the end of its long journey.

It was just past midnight. Bill Tuggle snapped his pocket watch shut and settled back on the hard seats of the passenger compartment as the coach rocked and shook around him as it clattered down the rails.

He looked down at the bag of Idaho potatoes in his lap. Idaho was known for its potatoes and he’d purchased a bag.

There was not a free seat on the train. The coach was packed, booked to capacity. Folks on this railroad were coming from far and wide for the hanging party. A watchful Tuggle scrutinized the cross section of people on the train, which made for an unlikely if interesting polyglot—farmer families with kids, cowboys with sidearms, reporters with notepads and box cameras and tripods stashed in the overhead compartments, fancy wealthy men in fine coats and top hats with their perfumed, groomed women in lace dresses and silk petticoats rubbing elbows with grubby, saddle-worn wranglers both male and female sitting side by side with them on the wooden seats. Nobody seemed to mind; they were all just waiting to get to the show many had traveled clear across the country to see.

Tuggle himself was a large, stocky man in his late forties, wearing a leather duster and rough gray felt shirt. His old cowboy boots were weathered and dusty, the spurs rusted, and the heat in the coach was making his feet swell painfully. Beneath a thick beard, the man’s scarred, leathery face was tanned from the desert sun, where he spent most time. Thinking he had never been this far west before, the rugged man looked out the window at the passing moonlight forest rolling past. The spectacles he wore for distance were perched on his nose; he adjusted them. Big, handsome country, what he could see of it. His side of the train faced south and somewhat east, and Tuggle realized he was probably looking at this side of the Teton Pass. Down below, out of sight from this vantage, was the valley they called Jackson Hole. Occasionally there was a flash of sparks and cinders through the window as the wheels bit some rough section of track. Coal smoke would curtain off the view now and then only to blow clear and reveal the Idaho vista again, bathed in cold moonlight.

The muffled percussive timpani of the steel wheels of the steam train on the rails and trestles below was a comforting, even soothing, sound—the steady click-a-clack of the wheels on

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