“You got to tell me what you know, how you know it, and why you’re telling me,” I said, trying not to look at that wrapper, which was sort of sliding down her shoulders a little.
“Just say Open Sesame, and magic will happen,” she said.
“Now what’s that supposed to mean?”
“Ah, dear boy, I’m looking forward to teaching you.”
She sure was pretty. She might be older, but she was just fine, sitting there, smiling, looking like an angel in the dawn light, making life sweet in the town of Doubtful, Wyoming Territory. I sort of figured she was trying to save King Bragg’s life, and maybe she’d worn that white wrapper with King Bragg as her company. Who could say? She was like some loving angel lookin’ down on us poor mortals.
“Ma’am,” I said, real firm. “I’ve got a headache.”
“That’s very familiar,” she said. “You may turn your back.”
I did, and when she told me I could turn around, she was dressed, with a small sad smile on her lips. She leaned forward and kissed me softly, and left my boardinghouse room.
My ma always told me I’m a little slow.
NINETEEN
That timber cutter Lemuel Clegg and his boys were waiting for me when I got to the office. I sort of halfway knew what they would tell me even as DeGraff let me in. I motioned them three to follow, and closed and locked the door behind me.
The county hired Lem Clegg to build the gallows. He had a mill up in the forest out of Doubtful, where he cut posts and planks and such. When it came to hiring someone to build the gallows, I told the county supervisors, Reggie Thimble and Ziggy Camp, I didn’t have no money in the budget for it. They said, hell, man, hang King Bragg from the nearest cottonwood limb. They thought that was pretty funny until Judge Nippers had a fit, and told the county to have a proper gallows and pay for it. So one way or another, the Cleggs got hired to do the job. I knew they were out there cutting timbers and squaring them up, and getting plank lined up, and such. And now, with a week left before the big event, I knew they’d be putting it up on the courthouse square, and we’d soon be seeing a proper gallows.
“You met my boys? This here is Barter and this other is Wage. I give ’em names to set them in the right direction when they get growed up some.”
“Oh, I got a miserable name hung on me too,” I said. “I never did cotton to Cotton, but I got stuck.”
Lemuel pursed his lips some, not caring for that. He had a scraggly gray beard and his lips were a little orange purse in the middle of it.
“Sheriff, we got robbed. Highwaymen. We was driving the first of the timbers into Doubtful, and half a dozen masked men surrounded us and all we saw was the muzzles of big revolvers.”
“What did they want?”
“Not my purse. They didn’t even ask for my purse.” Lem pulled it from his pocket and dangled it before me so I could see it was fat with bills and coins. “It was the wood they wanted. They plumb stole every stick off our wagon, carried it over to their own, and sent us on our way.”
“You know who?”
“Sure I do. I’d recognize that blooded stock anywhere. That gang was Anchor Ranch or I’ll eat my shirt.”
From the looks of his shirt, I thought he’d be eating a lot of grease and slobber and road dirt if it came do that.
“You say they were masked?”
“Yep, every last one. But if you put all them Anchor Ranch men in a line, I’d be able to finger a bunch. I think I saw Spitting Sam, Big Nose George, and Smiley Thistlethwaite, but I wouldn’t make a bet on it.”
“What was the lumber?”
“The uprights, the crossbeam, four angle braces, and some two-by-fours to start framing the platform. I’d say a hundred dollars of good wood. I gotta tell you, Sheriff, we’d put our best into it. The uprights, they were ten-inch- square posts of lodgepole pine, planed smooth and no knots. The crosspiece was ten-inch-square Colorado spruce, finest we could buy, full of resin to give it plenty of bounce. Why, you could drop a four-hundred-pound fat lady from the Barnum and Bailey Circus from it, and it wouldn’t even shiver. You can drop a hundred people from that spruce, and it wouldn’t hurt the spruce a bit. Why, you could drop a thousand and it’d not show a sign of wear. When Lemuel Clegg builds something, he builds it to last a century. That’s me. We’ll build a gallows for that Puma County Square that’ll last long after our grandchildren have come and gone. The county can put that gallows in a warehouse and bring her out and put her up any time, and it’ll be just as good as the day we built it. Yep, at least a hundred dollars of fine wood in there.”
“The good wood’s not why they stole it,” I said.
“No, I guess it ain’t. Looks like we’ll have to cut some more and get us an armed guard to bring it in.”
“Can you put up the gallows in time?”
Lem sighed. “I suppose so, if we work night and day, and we don’t get any more wood stole from us. But it’ll be cheaper wood. Lodgepole planes faster than spruce, so the whole thing will be lodgepole, which isn’t the best wood for this sort of thing. A good gallows should be made to hang people for a century or two.”
“I know a hundred or so fellers deserve a hanging,” I said. “One long-life gallows might save the county a pile of money.”
“Well, you can start with that fiend King Bragg,” Lem said. “If he’d been out cutting trees like my boys, he wouldn’t have gone bad.”
