There was a moment of total darkness as Clancy doused the dim wall sconce. Bubblehead whimpered, “I don’t like it in here!”
Then the sheriff opened the back door to spill a slowly widening stripe of moonlight across the concrete floor as Bubblehead laughed like a little kid and asked, “Can we go out and play now? I like to go out and play at night when the moon is shining. It ain’t too dark when the moon is shining. I like the moon. It’s pretty.”
The sheriff told him to be still and follow after him. But Bubblehead babbled on as they moved across the stable yard in single file, and Dancing Dave turned to Deputy Clancy behind him. “You say night riders might be coming for your village idiot? What did he do to them, steal some of their marbles?”
Clancy quietly replied, “Raped a lady. Then he stabbed her dead.”
Dancing Dave protested, “This harmless-looking half-wit? It’s hard to picture him knowing why boys and girls are built different! Are you sure it was him? Who said it was him?”
Clancy softly answered, “Her. The gal made a dying declaration to the ones as came running when they heard her screaming from the church. He’d cut her bad afore he run off, but he hadn’t had the sense to make certain she was dead. She was the church lady as taught Sunday school over to First Calvinist. So she’d been letting him sit in with the little kids, never dreaming that he was lusting for her body all the time she thought she was leading him away from temptation!”
By this time the sheriff, in the lead, had made it to the stable door. As he opened it, a quartet of figures, wearing feed sacks over their heads and shoulders, stepped out into the moonlight with drawn guns.
Things got mighty quiet for a spell. Then the sheriff cleared his throat and said, “You don’t need to be so harsh, boys. Our prosecuting attorney is willing to bet a month’s pay that Bubblehead will hang for the murder of Miss Mildred Powell, and we’ve been holding this other cuss on a federal warrant!”
A very heavy masked man with a ten-gauge Greener aimed downright rude replied in an icy tone, “We don’t want to bet on that hanging, Sheriff. Miss Mildred had a lot of friends in these parts, and the way she lost her virginity was mighty damned harsh as well. So step aside and let us have ‘em, unless you’d care to join ‘em, over by the spot we’ve picked out to string ‘em up!”
“I want to go home now,” Bubblehead Burnside whimpered. But then other masked men were pouring out of the stable as the sheriff said, “All right, I can’t stop you from taking the half-wit, but this other prisoner was picked up on a federal warrant and there’s this U.S. deputy marshal on his way up from Denver for him, hear?”
It might have worked. But another member of the bunch called out in a worried tone, “Let the federal want be, Porky. They never said they wanted us to take anybody but Bubblehead, and where’s the call for us to hang a total stranger?”
The burly leader called Porky snorted in disgust and replied, “You just now called it, you asshole.”
Swinging the twin muzzles of his Greener so the sheriff could stare straight into them, Porky quietly said, “You didn’t hear anybody here identify any of us by name, did you, Sheriff?”
To which the older and wiser man could only reply, “I wasn’t paying attention, mister. You say somebody called someone here by name?”
Porky nodded his sack-covered head and suggested, “Why don’t you and Deputy Clancy just go back inside, Sheriff? Me and the boys will be proud to take over from here!”
The sheriff started to say something. Then, as if he’d grown weary of staring down the barrels of that Greener, he shrugged and turned away, motioning Deputy Clancy to fall in step with him once he’d made it that far alive.
As the two lawmen walked away from the tense confrontation by the stable door, Dancing Dave tried to live up to his name with some sudden footwork. But he was pistol-whipped and fell to his hands and knees in the moonlit dust, and other rough hands had laid hold of the sobbing Bubblehead, who didn’t resist but got pistol-whipped in any case as he bawled he didn’t like the way they were playing with him.
Both prisoners were bound with their wrists behind them and marched through the stable and out to where others waited with saddle broncs and a buckboard drawn by two mules.
“You boys are making a big mistake!” yelled Dancing Dave as he and the weeping half-wit were thrown face- down across the wagonbed. But nobody seemed to be listening to either of them as the one called Porky called, “Move it on out, boys!”
As the buckboard carried them to a fate only the train robber with a federal warrant on him seemed to grasp, Bubblehead Burnside sobbed, “Why are they acting so mean to us, mister? I ain’t been bad. Have you been bad?”
Dancing Dave Loman had been bad indeed, for some time. But some inner spark of warmth welled up from deep inside him as he said soothingly, “Don’t cry, old son. Crying ain’t gonna help and it’ll only make the bastards feel better about doing us dirty.”
Bubblehead sniffed, “Why do they want to do us dirty, mister?”
To which the homicidal train robber beside him could only reply with a graveyard smile, “Reckon they’re just ornery. All I ever did was done for money. Hardly seems fair I’m about to die over an infernal Sunday school teacher I never laid eyes on! Was she pretty, this here Miss Mildred you admired so much?”
Bubblehead Burnside seemed to forget where they were, or the position he was in, as he smiled broadly and replied, “Oh, Miss Mildred was real pretty, and real nice too. She told the other boys and girls not to laugh at me and call me names when I went over the lines.”
“Went over the what?”
“Coloring book lines,” Bubblehead explained. “Miss Mildred gave us crayons to color with and books with pictures of Baby Jesus and his mom. She said we could color them any way we liked as long as we didn’t go over the lines. I tried not to go over the lines, but some of the time it was real hard not to, see?”
“You didn’t have any notion what you were doing to her, did you?” said Dancing Dave Loman. Then, before his fellow victim could reply, the buckboard under them suddenly stopped so that rough hands could drag them across the rough planking and drop them to the dust with rib-cracking thuds.
Then they were yanked back to their feet and marched out along the cross-ties of a railroad trestle spanning a
