Gallows Express Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1. - “YOU WORTHLESS SON OF A TWO-PESO WHORE!”

  Chapter 2. - “AH, HELL”

  Chapter 3. - THE SHORTEST ROUTE TO TRINITY

  Chapter 4. - “KILL ME AN’ GET IT OVER WITH, DAMN YOU”

  Chapter 5. - SCHOOLTEACHER

  Chapter 6. - “THAT’S INSANITY, MR. HAWK”

  Chapter 7. - THAT ROGUE LAWMAN FROM NEBRASKA

  Chapter 8. - RANCE HARVIN

  Chapter 9. - TRINITY RIDGE

  Chapter 10. - “THE TIERNEYS MUST BE STOPPED”

  Chapter 11. - “WHY TORTURE ME?”

  Chapter 12. - REB

  Chapter 13. - THE MAYS GANG

  Chapter 14. - A FAVOR

  Chapter 15. - A VISIT WITH THE STANLEY FAMILY

  Chapter 16. - “HOLD ON—I AIN’T FINISHED YET”

  Chapter 17. - “DANGEROUS DOINGS, MR. HAWK”

  Chapter 18. - “WHAT GRADE O’ SUICIDAL FOOL AM I LOOKIN’ AT NOW?”

  Chapter 19. - DEEP WATER

  Chapter 20. - “NO BLONDY”

  Chapter 21. - “THAT SON OF A BITCH ANSWERED MY PLEAS AND LET ME LIVE”

  Chapter 22. - QUIET SUNDAY

  Chapter 23. - GALLOWS EXPRESS

  Chapter 24. - “WHEN HAVE I EVER NOT BEEN WITH YOU, YOU SON OF A BITCH?”

  Chapter 25. - “THINGS ARE HEATIN’ UP”

  Epilogue

  Final Thoughts

  He felt an incredibly huge, powerful, invisible fist slam into his chest.

  Not a fist.

  Looking down, he saw stuffing puff from the front of his quilted red blanket coat and then a thick red substance dribble out through the ragged hole, rolling in thick beads down his coat and across the buckles of his double cartridge belts to the street beneath him, where they licked up little curls of frozen dust.

  He released the Winchester and flew back against the steps, and, no longer feeling anything, but now hearing the muffled whoops and yells and pistol pops of Tierney and his reveling men, looked up at the sky.

  He saw a bird wing past. Not an eagle, a hawk, or even a buzzard. Just a barn swallow, its little wings flashing silver in the sunlight.

  Odd, he thought with a startling clarity, that the last bird he’d ever see was one so benign as a common barn swallow.

  Blood welled from between his lips curled with misery. His eyes closed on the now-empty sky.

  Praise for the work of Peter Brandvold

  “Lots of action . . . If you thought they didn’t write ’em like this anymore, this is the book for you.”

  —Bill Crider, author of the Sheriff Dan Rhodes Mysteries

  “Recommended to anyone who loves the West as I do. A very good read.”

  —Jack Ballas, author of A Town Afraid

  “Brandvold writes a lot like L’Amour.”

  —The Fargo Forum

  “Brandvold creates a fast-paced, action-packed novel.”

  —James Reasoner, author of Redemption, Kansas

  “One of the best writers of traditional action Westerns in the business right now. He’s very prolific.”

  —Bookgasm

  “Brandvold’s rousing adventure The Romantics feels more cinematic with every passing chapter.”

  —Cowboys & Indians

  “Action-packed, entertaining read for fans of traditional Westerns.”

  —Booklist

  Berkley titles by Peter Brandvold

  The Rogue Lawman Series

  GALLOWS EXPRESS

  BORDER SNAKES

  BULLETS OVER BEDLAM

  COLD CORPSE, HOT TRAIL

  DEADLY PREY

  ROGUE LAWMAN

  The Bounty Hunter Lou Prophet Series

  THE DEVIL’S WINCHESTER

  HELLDORADO

  THE GRAVES AT SEVEN DEVILS

  THE DEVIL’S LAIR

  STARING DOWN THE DEVIL

  THE DEVIL GETS HIS DUE

  RIDING WITH THE DEVIL’S MISTRESS

  DEALT THE DEVIL’S HAND

  THE DEVIL AND LOU PROPHET

  The Sheriff Ben Stillman Series

  HELL ON WHEELS

  ONCE LATE WITH A .38

  ONCE UPON A DEAD MAN

  ONCE A RENEGADE

  ONCE HELL FREEZES OVER

  ONCE A LAWMAN

  ONCE MORE WITH A .44

  ONCE A MARSHAL

  The .45-Caliber Series

  .45-CALIBER FIREBRAND

  .45-CALIBER WIDOW MAKER

  .45-CALIBER DEATHTRAP

  .45-CALIBER MANHUNT

  .45-CALIBER FURY

  .45-CALIBER REVENGE

  Other titles

  BLOOD MOUNTAIN

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  GALLOWS EXPRESS

  A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley edition / May 2011

  Copyright © 2011 by Peter Brandvold.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-51462-7

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  Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

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  For my Tin Cup pards,

  Norm and Lee

  1.

  “YOU WORTHLESS SON OF A TWO-PESO WHORE!”

  “GOOD citizens gathered before me now,” shouted the Medicine Bow County sheriff from atop the gallows where three outlaws were about to be hanged, “let today be the first day of the end of lawlessness in Trinity Ridge!”

  Not a large crowd had gathered—most folks were too afraid of repercussio
ns from the gang of doomed men—but most of those who had braved the danger gave a hearty cheer, throwing gloved or mittened fists into the air. Their breath frosted in the chill, sunny air around their faces and red noses.

  A few whores who had gathered on the second-floor balcony of a Trinity Ridge fleshpot, wrapped in blankets and threadbare mittens or moth-eaten wool coats, also yelled and hooted and stamped their fur-slippered feet.

  “You got that right, Sheriff Stanley!” screeched the drunkest of the three doves, a willowy blonde with a red scarf wrapped around her neck and a brown wool cap on her head, who looked all but devoured by her oversized, striped blanket coat. “Let this be the end of Blue Tierney’s stranglehold on this county. Not to mention the son of a bitch’s bastard son!”

  The whore next to her had been drinking from a brandy bottle, but now the girl, a brunette with extraordinarily long eyelashes, jerked the bottle down as she spewed brandy into the air, laughing. “Claire,” she scolded the blonde when she’d recovered from her paroxysm. “You’re gonna get your throat cut!”

  “I ain’t afraid of . . .” Claire let her voice trail off when she saw Brazos Tierney, standing atop the gallows behind the sheriff, hands cuffed and ankles shackled, a hangman’s noose dangling in front of his head, turn his face toward her. Tierney’s face was expressionless beneath his cap of thin, curly brown hair. But his gaze was direct and sharp with menace, breath jetting from his broad nostrils and lips.

  Steeling herself, Claire stepped forward, shouting drunkenly down from the balcony at the gallows, “I ain’t afraid of you, Brazos Tierney. Not no more, I ain’t. You’re about to die, and I hope you’re shittin’ your pants, you worthless son of a two-peso whore!”

  The crowd’s din had dwindled slightly when the whore shouted the first time, but a hush now settled over Trinity’s main drag, called Wyoming Street, as all faces turned to regard her skeptically. Even Sheriff Stanley turned to face her, knowing, as did the rest of the town, that it was her half brother, who tended bar in the whorehouse, whom Tierney and the two other men had brutally beaten eight days ago. Drunk and disorderly, they’d taken umbrage when Echo Lang had told them to clear out, that the party was over, the Venus was closing its doors, and all the whores were going to bed.

  They’d beaten the man so badly that not even Claire had recognized Echo’s face the next morning, when the undertaker had hauled him out into the early, coppery light. They’d beaten him unconscious, and then they’d cut his throat with a broken whiskey bottle.

  After that, they’d all passed out only to awaken hours later in Sheriff Aaron Stanley’s jail that was nearly directly across the street from the Venus. Stanley hadn’t been able to believe his luck. He’d wanted to take down Brazos Tierney and his two cutthroat amigos for a long time. While he’d suspected that they were the three responsible for robbing spur train number seventy-nine from Denver from time to time, and knew they were almost constantly rustling cattle from the surrounding ranches to sell up north in Wyoming Territory, where stock detectives and brand inspectors were few and far between, he’d never had anything concrete to pin them with.

  Now, he did.

  And he couldn’t bring himself to feel overly sorry for the beefy pimp and bartender, Echo Lang, a locally infamous lout and loudmouth. In fact, the sheriff thought Lang a small price to pay to be rid, once and for all, of Brazos Tierney, J. T. Hostetler, and “One-Eye” Willie McGee. The circuit judge had taken the train to Trinity muy pronto in response to Stanley’s cabled summons and had sentenced the three men to be hanged before the Baldwin locomotive’s broiler had been refilled with water for the return trip back to Camp Collins.

  Stanley had wanted to hang the three as the judge’s train pulled back out of the station, but protocol required a professional hangman be called in, a gallows be built, and a man of the cloth be present.

  Well, the gallows had been built in record time, and now the three condemned men stood awaiting the hangman to tighten the nooses about their necks and for the preacher to send them off in somber Lutheran style.

  Once Stanley had finished his speech, that was. . ..

  He looked at the whore on the balcony. She was staring down at Tierney, one hand on the rod-iron rail, her other fist on her hip, and the sheriff had to restrain himself from chuckling at the girl’s pluck, besotted as she was. He turned his head farther back to look over his right shoulder at Tierney, who was glowering back at the girl.

  Stanley reached up to pull the brim of his cream Stetson lower to shield his eyes from the intense high-country sun, then thrust both his gloved hands into the air, redirecting the crowd’s attention back to himself.

  “As I was saying,” he said as loudly as he could without shouting, “let today’s hangings of these three men—men whom we know have been instigating illegal activities throughout not only our town and county but through all of north-central Colorado—be the beginning of the end of lawlessness.

  “Let this be a warning to others of their ilk: robbing trains and stage coaches and rustling cattle, not to mention the general harassment of innocent, law-abiding citizens on the streets of Trinity”—the sheriff shook both his fists in the air for emphasis as he pitched his voice much louder—“will . . . not . . . be . . . tolerated!”

  As his words echoed off the tall, sunlit storefronts around him, the crowd threw their hands in the air once more and cheered. There couldn’t have been more than forty or fifty people out of the town’s total population of three hundred forty, but the cheers went up like a roar. The town’s obvious approval and eagerness to rid the town and county of the Tierney gang’s evil influence made Stanley’s chest lighten, easing the anxiety that had been raking cold fingers along his spine ever since he and his deputy, Matt Freeman, had led the men out here to the gallows. He’d figured Brazos Tierney’s father, Blue Tierney, would make some play to save his son from the hangman’s noose.

  So far, however, there’d been no sign of the man or any of the men who rode for him out at his Two Troughs Ranch. Maybe Blue Tierney had had enough of the firebrand, as well.

  As the cheers dwindled, Stanley’s eyes swept the crowd. He was about to open his mouth to say one more thing when his eyes picked his young wife out of the crowd. Stanley frowned and closed his mouth. Janelle was the last person he’d expected to see out here today, and for a moment he thought his eyes were deceiving him.

  No, it was her, all right—dressed in her old, red wool coat with the once-fashionably large buttons, red stocking cap, and thick black scarf. She was holding their year-and-a-half-old son, Jake, in her arms, the boy extending a small, mittened hand toward one of the two curs sniffing between the cracks of the nearby boardwalk fronting Herman’s Drug Emporium & Candy Shop.

  Stanley glanced back at his deputy, Matt Freeman—a big, mustached man in a black wool coat and broad-brimmed felt hat, holding his double-barreled shotgun in his crossed arms, a confident, proud look in his eyes. Flanking the deputy sheriff were the hangman, Amos Scudder, who’d arrived that morning from Camp Collins, and the Reverend F. Oldwin Hawthorne, who held his Bible in his large crossed hands, an oblique expression on his blue-eyed, lantern-jawed face.

  “Matt,” Stanley said above the crowd’s low din, “tell Scudder and the Reverend to get started, will you?”

  Freeman nodded and ran a wool-gloved fist across his nose from which a drop of mucus clung. He was a big, healthy man, a former freighter, but he had been fighting a cold for the past month and the lingering, high-country winter hadn’t helped. “You see her?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Janelle don’t need to be seein’ this.”

  “No, she don’t.”

  Stanley descended the gallows’ three steps to the street and, while the hangman began placing the black hoods over the doomed men’s heads, made his way around the edge of the crowd toward the back, sidestepping through the small group of unshaven ranch hands holding beers and looking bleary-eyed as they stood around the low piles of shovel
ed snow outside Trinity Ridge’s main sporting parlor, the Venus. Janelle had watched her husband walk toward her and their son, and her usually soft hazel eyes acquired a stubborn cast as Stanley stopped in front of her.

  Before he could open his mouth to speak, Janelle hefted their son in her arms and said, “Please don’t do this, Aaron.”

  “Please don’t do what, honey—for chrissake!”

  Seeing one of the townsmen regarding him and his wife curiously, Stanley grabbed Janelle’s arm and led her a ways back from the crowd while the boy grinned up at him and, having forgotten the sniffing curs, held his mittened hand out to his father. Absently, Stanley gave the child his finger, which little Jake gave a soft squeeze in his mittened fist.

  “We talked this all out. This has to be done for the good of the town, the county. What’re you doing here, anyway?” He frowned at the boy grinning up at him. “And with Jake? This is no place for a child.”

  “I’m worried, Aaron. I’m worried what might happen with that . . . that beast’s father. I love you, Aaron, and I don’t want anything to happen to you.” Janelle sniffed as she fought back the flood of tears that washed over her eyes. “Isn’t there any way you can just fine these men and turn them loose?”

  “What?!”

  Several people turned at the sound of Stanley’s raised voice. He hadn’t intended to speak so loudly, but Janelle was acting hysterical.

  They’d talked out the significance of today’s punishment over the course of several suppers in their little frame shack on the south end of Trinity Ridge, and he’d thought that his young wife had accepted his explanation. He could see now that, while she’d tried to be strong, her heart had withered. Fear had overcome her.