The High Rocks Page 16

  Fourteen steps led to the scaffold. The extra had been added as an afterthought to compensate for Bear’s great height, even as the strongest rope in town had been sought to support his tremendous weight. He mounted them with ease in spite of the chains that linked his ankles and wrists. His expression was impossible to read.

  The first trooper followed him to the top while the others took up a position of attention on the ground in front of the gallows. There, a buckboard with an empty coffin on the back and a teamster with a bad cold waited to transport the body to the cemetery south of town. At intervals the teamster helped himself to a healthy swig from a bottle he had on the seat beside him to relieve his sniffles; the gurgling noise it made as he tipped it up sounded ridiculously loud in the charged atmosphere of the firebreak.

  I was standing in the alley between the jail and the deserted dress shop next door, a vantage point the crowd had overlooked, probably because of the icy gusts that whistled unhampered through the narrow gap. From there I had a good view of the scaffold and the Indians on the ridge. I spotted Two Sisters mounted at the northern end of the line, wearing ceremonial feathers and a coat pieced together from the kind of pelts the Flatheads considered too fine to waste in trade with the other nations. His feelings concerning the scene unfolding below him must have been mixed; no doubt he was pleased to see his people’s killer punished, but at the same time he was losing the one excuse he needed to unite the northwestern tribes in a war against the whites.

  “Any last words?” Trainer asked Bear, as the noose was slipped over his head.

  “I come here to die, not make a speech,” he said. “Let’s ride.”

  The reply was a disappointment to some of the spectators, who had evidently been hoping to hear something of historical or biblical origin. I saw Jack Dodsworth of the Staghorn Republican flip shut his notepad with a disgusted gesture. They couldn’t know that those last two words were a summary of Bear’s whole life.

  There was nothing else to do, but do it. A glance passed between Trainer and the corporal, and at a nod from the captain the noose was drawn tight and a black cloth hood was tugged down over the magnificent leonine head. Patterson stepped away from the trap and stood with his hand on the wooden lever, waiting. Trainer’s arm came up, stopped. For a space they might have been puppets on a miniature stage, Goliath and his armorers in a biblical reenactment, awaiting David’s entrance. Then the arm came down. The lever was released with a squeak.

  The trap fell, banging at the end of the leather straps that held it. Bear plunged through the opening. The rope jerked taut, stretched—and broke.

  The shattered end sprang upward, wrapping itself around the gallows’ wooden arm. Bear, still wearing the noose, hit the ground hard and lay kicking in the mud and slush. He was strangling.

  I was halfway down to the firebreak when Trainer recovered from his initial shock and ran down the steps, taking them two at a time. By the time he got there, Ezra Wilson, who had been standing by waiting to sign the death certificate, was kneeling beside the body and struggling to loosen the noose with his hands. The officer reached past him and sawed at the rope with his knife. It parted and fell. Wilson tore away the black hood.

  “Pierce!” shouted the captain. “Another rope! On the double!”

  A trooper left formation and took off at a sprint up the slope. The others dropped their rifles to hip level and moved forward to drive back the pressing crowd. I slipped past them.

  “You tried once,” I panted, reaching Trainer. “Isn’t that enough?”

  He turned his vague gray eyes in my direction, but said nothing.

  “Somebody’d better do something, and fast.” Wilson was straining every muscle to hold down Bear’s heaving shoulders. “His neck is broken.”

  “Hurry up with that rope!” the captain roared.

  The trooper returned a moment later bearing a coil of rope, and he and Patterson secured one end and slung the other over the gallows arm. While a noose was being fashioned, Trainer, another trooper, and I lifted Bear to his feet and hustled him up the steps. If I couldn’t help him any other way, I could at least help him die.

  This time Patterson didn’t bother with the hood and he didn’t wait for the order to drop the trap. As soon as the noose was in place he tripped the lever.

  This time the rope held. The gallows creaked, the scaffold swayed; for a moment it seemed as if the entire structure might collapse. Bear kicked twice and dangled.

  A gust of wind caught the gallows arm and twisted it around, straining still further the nails and pegs that held the structure together. Then it died. The great body swung in silence.

  The minister remembered his job suddenly and began reading from the Book of Genesis.

  I think it was that first failure on the part of the hangman that led to the rumor, which persists, that Bear Anderson survived that day, and that someone else was hanged in his stead. It doesn’t seem to matter that any attempt to sneak him out would have had to have taken place in front of more than a hundred witnesses, not counting the Indians, and that nobody but a perfect double could have taken his place the second time, as that time he was hanged without the hood over his head. Legends don’t perish that easily. As late as last year he was seen in St. Louis driving a trolley, and there’s no indication that these sightings will cease until time makes his further survival impossible.

  I do nothing to discourage such talk. Although I stopped carrying a badge six years ago, when Judge Blackthorne died and they brought in an assistant district attorney from New Hampshire to replace him, people still seek me out on occasion to ask about Bear and the time we rode together up in the Bitterroot. When the conversation approaches the hanging, I change the subject. They’d resent me if I tried to force the truth down their throats, and in any case they wouldn’t believe me. It’s easier among the Indians, where there is no written history and the storytellers can leave out the last part in order to keep the myth going. Now that Two Sisters and most of the braves who were there that day are gone, and the Flatheads themselves are socked away on reservations, it’s an easy thing for them to believe that Mountain That Walks still prowls those rocks on the back of his big dun horse, his belt a tangle of bloody scalps, looking for fresh victims. He’s become part of their heritage, and when the bad feelings are done between red and white, and scholars begin collecting these stories and putting them down on paper, you can bet that Bear will be there in some form. That’s when he’ll prove to be as indestructible as the legends say.

  On that day, however, there was no doubt. When it was certain that the rope had done its job, Captain Trainer undid the knot that anchored it and allowed the body to fall of its own weight to the ground. Wilson bent over it, pried open each eyelid, and straightened.

  “He’s dead.”

  The statement carried up to the ridge, and after a few minutes Chief Two Sisters wheeled his horse and led his braves back into the shelter of the high rocks.

  Other works by Loren D. Estleman

  Bloody Season

  Motor City Blue

  The High Rocks

  Whiskey River

  Stamping Ground

  Motown

  Murdock’s Law

  King of the Corner

  This Old Bill

  Kill Zone

  “Seized me by mind and throat and never let go. I loved it … [should] sell a million copies.”

  —David Nevin, author of the New York Times

  bestseller Dream West, on City of Widows

  “First-rate … City of Widows is a class western from its opening scene … Readers will enjoy both Estleman’s story and the witty way he tells it.”

  —Amarillo Globe Times

  “Loren D. Estleman is a rare talent. Funny, graceful, unsentimental. Every word is entertaining and to the point. Skip any line while reading City of Widows and you miss a delicious turn of phrase or a trenchant observation of humanity laid bare by a well-honed wit.”

  —Lucia
St. Claire Robson, Spur Award-winning

  author of Ride the Wind

  “I was going to see how City of Widows opens and read 55 pages. It’s a honey.”

  —Elmore Leonard

  “Master storyteller Estleman weaves complex plot and populates it with three-dimensional characters whose actions are always slightly unexpected.”

  —Booklist

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.

  THE HIGH ROCKS

  Copyright © 1979 by Loren D. Estleman

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  Cover art by Carl Cassler

  A Forge Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

  eISBN 9781429924450

  First eBook Edition : June 2011

  First Tor edition: September 1996