“Boy, my mouth isn’t where the action is so I’d want six dollars.”
“No, I mean just ask questions.”
“I get schoolboys in here all the time asking questions.”
“All right, I’ll just ask them right here at the organ.”
“I charge extra for public performances, Sheriff.”
I sure was feelin’ slow. I couldn’t get the right words to tell her I was there on sheriff business. So I just decided to plunge in.
“You know Rocco, the one that King Bragg shot?”
“Do I know him? Did I know Rocco? I knew him from top to bottom.”
“What I want to know is, did he rent some of your nice girls for Crayfish Ruble?”
She frowned. “He rented them but didn’t return them. He always said they decided to catch the stagecoach to Denver and Crayfish paid for the tickets. I lost a couple of my best temporaries that way. He’d come in and offer me thirty-five a week plus board to rent a lady, so I didn’t have to feed anyone, and I thought Crayfish was cheap, but who was I to complain? Long as he fed the girls, that was fine with me.”
“So Rocco would rent girls for Crayfish, and sometimes not bring them back?”
She sighed. “Is that news to you?”
“Yep, it’s news. What did you think of Rocco?”
She smiled. “Woowoo,” she said.
Danged if I could make sense of that.
“Do you miss him?”
“Honey, he was my favorite gentleman.”
“You any idea why King Bragg killed him?”
“I never believed the Bragg boy did it,” she said. “Honey, I got customers, I gotta go now—unless you want to join our Special Tuesday Half Price Happy Hour, including drinks and ladies.”
“No, no, I’m heading for the square,” I said.
I hardly got clear of her before she was playing “Down by the River.”
I got out into the sunlight. I sucked in some fresh air, and kept on doing it. Truth is, I was glad to get out of there. I was about ready to suffocate in there, so I gulped in lots of fresh springtime air on my way back to the courthouse square where the gallows was going up.
When I got there, it looked pretty near done, and the Cleggs was just winding things up with a little stair they’d built that would take me and the prisoner up to that platform. There sure was a bunch of spectators. Some young mamas was holding their little tykes up so they could see the gallows, and telling the little fellers to behave themselves.
Lem Clegg spotted me and came on over. “You’re just in time, Sheriff. We’ve got to put up the noose and test the whole shebang. You say your deputy can tie the knot?”
“DeGraff, yep, he says he can.”
“And I need some canvas bags and some rocks. How much does that boy weigh?”
“Oh, maybe a hundred twenty, thirty.”
“Well, we’ll test it out with some canvas bags with that much stone in them. Make sure everything works. We wouldn’t want anything to go wrong now, would we?”
“No, sir, I ain’t counting on it.”
“Well, you get the noose and we’ll fill some sacks with rock.”
“I’ve got some canvas bags,” a feller said. It was Alphonse Smythe, the postmaster. “Good stout mailbags,” he said.
“Those’ll work,” Lemuel Clegg said.
Smythe hightailed to the post office to fetch a couple of them bags. A bag full of rocks should test her out all right.
“I’ll get DeGraff and the rope,” I said.
I found both in the office. “You got to make Clegg a noose now,” I said.
“I can do that,” he said. “I’ve made a few.”
We got the hemp rope and headed back there. DeGraff, he knew what he was up to, and it made me wonder some about how he’d spent his earlier years. He laid out the rope on the platform, and made a sort of N with one end of it. I sure didn’t know how that would get turned into a noose, but he went right ahead with the loose end and pretty quick he was making them coils, six in all, and then tied it up. It was a noose, all right.
“I thought them nooses had thirteen coils,” I said.
“No, that’s just superstition. They’d be too hard to handle. Six coils is about right. The coils keep the rope from going in reverse. Once she tightens, it’s real hard to pull it loose. That makes sure the condemned gets strangled good and proper. That rope just slams the airpipe shut. The knot is always put a little to the left, and that snaps the neck. Some say the knot itself does it, but I think it’s just the twist, it being off-center, does it. Anyway, done right, the condemned is totally ruined. Not a twitch, except they soil their britches.”
