“We’ll likely have no more trouble,” I said. The old man whupped his draft horse to life, and we creaked and groaned our way into Doubtful.
Them Cleggs unloaded the timbers on the courthouse square and took off for their mill. They needed to bring in another load of planks and two-by-fours for the platform, and I worried about them getting ambushed on the second trip. But I couldn’t be everywhere at once.
A lot of people studied them big timbers, but no one touched anything. I thought the timbers would be safe enough there, out in front of the whole town. But the presence of those timbers changed everything. Doubtful would soon be a place where a big crowd would watch a criminal boy get hanged, and a sort of brooding settled over the town. Them timbers did it. The timbers made everything real.
I found Judge Nippers and County Supervisor Reggie Thimble eating lunch at the beanery, and told them I thought the Cleggs would get the scaffold built proper, and tested proper, before the big event. Lem Clegg claimed to have built one before, and knew all about it, and knew how to test it out, with a weight on the trapdoor, so when I pulled the lever nothing would go wrong, and King Bragg would drop hard and fast. That would be exactly at eleven in the morning, in three days.
“Well, that’s fine,” Thimble said. “Build it to last. I’m all for it. If we can hang five or ten a year, pretty soon we’ll have the cost down to a few dimes a drop.”
I sure wasn’t enjoying the thought of hanging anyone, but I was the sheriff and I’d do what I had to do. But I kept wishing some piece of evidence would come along that would free the boy. I wasn’t sure he killed anyone, even if he once swaggered around Doubtful, making the most of being his father’s son. But boys are like that. He was a different boy now, back in the cell where he was going to spend the last hours of his life.
I kept an eye out for anyone with a bandage wandering around town, but no one like that showed up, and I knew that anyone injured by my buckshot was staying out at the Anchor Ranch, and not coming into Doubtful to get himself arrested by me.
The Cleggs made another round trip, this time with a heap of planks and studs and a cask of ten-penny nails. They unloaded the whole shebang in the courthouse square, and come over to the jailhouse to ask me just where to put up the gallows. I walked over there and had a look. It had to be in a place where everyone could see real clear that justice was done. I decided on a place fairly close to the Puma County Courthouse steps, so the crowd would gather down from the courthouse some. There sure were a mess of people around there, and I noticed the T-Bar men were sort of guarding that pile of lumber. Crayfish Ruble was making sure that nothing stopped the hanging of the killer of his three ranch hands.
It was a real quiet night, and the next morning the Cleggs were hard at work. They bolted the foot timbers to the uprights, and then bolted in the angle pieces so that each upright stood on a base and wasn’t gonna tip none. Then, while them uprights was still lying on the grass, they bolted down a spruce crossbar good and solid. And then the Cleggs got some big ropes and tied them to the crossbar, and began to tug the whole thing up in the air, so that by the end of the first day at work, they got the framework up and braced into place. It looked mighty solemn, and a lot of people stopped to stare at it. The merchants liked it because all them folks stayed right around town and went shopping. A few of the ladies bought spring bonnets they could wear for the hanging.
I told the Cleggs they could sleep in the jail if they wanted, and I saw Lemuel talk a little with Wage and Barter, and then they turned me down without sayin’ why. But I knew why. They didn’t want to bunk in any cell next to the condemned boy. So they drove out to their place that night, and planned to come back in the morning. If they stayed on schedule, they would frame the platform tomorrow, and put in the hardware, and spend the last day before the hanging testing it to make sure there was a good drop once I pulled the lever. I wanted a good drop for the boy too, so he didn’t just dangle there and choke to death real slow.
I didn’t know nothing about making a noose, but DeGraff said he did, so I was going to leave that to my deputy. I went over to Waller’s hardware and bought twenty yards of one-inch hemp rope, tough rope that wouldn’t bust when it took some weight, and I told DeGraff to make a noose, and we’d get her up there as soon as the Cleggs were ready.
Things were coming right along, all right.
TWENTY-ONE
Lem Clegg and his boys was putting up the gallows in fine style, taking real pride in their work. I kept an eye on them, but no one was bothering them none. They’d got the hanging part of it up, good and solid, and now they was working on the platform and the trap. They’d put in posts and stringers, and soon they’d be running plank across. They sure knew what they were doing, and I wondered if they’d built a few other gallows in their day. It felt real good to have some professionals doing the job.
There was a mess of people watching them work, most all the time. A lot of Doubtful mothers, they’d bring their young ones over for a look, and tell them kids to behave themselves or they’d get themselves hanged just like King Bragg was going to in a couple of days. Some of these boys, they got real excited by it and wanted to get real close to see it when the moment came along.
Mrs. Cadbury, the schoolmarm, she brought the fifth grade over to see the gallows going up, and told them all how it would work. Them little kids were impressed, and I thought they’d stick to the straight and narrow rather than get their necks broken. When she came back with the seventh graders, they all begged her to watch it when the time came, and she promised them she’d let them out of school so they could see justice done and take part in the hanging of a mass murderer. I thought that was pretty good myself, and it’d keep the peace around there real good. The more people saw King hang, the better, when it came to stopping crime in its tracks. She told me it was better than reading the Bible to them every morning, and since the gallows had started to go up, she’d had no trouble in class and not even much truancy. So that gallows was sending a message, all right.
Doubtful didn’t have no high school, just grades one through eight, so there weren’t any older children seeing the gallows go up. That was too bad, because the older ones, they’d see that King Bragg was eighteen, about their own age, and that would make some sort of impression on them. The more that came to the hanging, the better off Puma County would be, and of course the merchants were expecting a big day in their shops too.
It sure was a nice spring, and I thought if the weather held, King Bragg would get himself hanged on a fine, warm, sunny day, and that would be good. I’d hate to hang a feller on a cold, mean day.
There was a mess of T-Bar men floating around, but the Anchor Ranch outfit was staying away. That suited me fine. Admiral Bragg, he’d tried everything from a fake hanging to scare me to smuggling stuff to his boy, and only a couple days earlier I’d stopped them from robbing the gallows timbers and trying to slow down the hanging. So I wasn’t very fond of that one, him with all them airs. And his daughter Queen was just as bad, except once in a while when her pa wasn’t around. I felt sorry for her, under his thumb like that. But maybe she deserved it, being so snotty like that.
