Chapter
1
Ken
Payne saw the buzzards wheeling overhead and had heard the low hum of
the busy flies before he saw the men.
There
were six of them dressed in typical rider's garb still slightly
dusted with alkali dirt and they were hanging from the lowest
branches of a gnarled oak tree that stood alone at the bottom of a
dusty wash. Though it was difficult to judge how long they had been
there, the flies had already begun to gather in large numbers to lay
their maggot laden eggs in their wide open dead eyes and a slightly
ripe stench had already begun to fill the air.
Payne
stood slightly in his stirrups to survey his surroundings and then
slowly stepped down from his saddle with the ease of an experienced
rider. Once on the ground, he withdrew a small bag of makings from
his shirt pocket and promptly rolled and lit a cigarette, his half
lidded eyes never leaving the men as he did so. He took a drag from
the cigarette and then after exhaling a puff of sweet smoke, stepped
toward the corpses for a closer look.
The
men hung from the lowest branches in three groups of two per bough.
The blue tinged tongue of the one nearest to him hung swollen from
the gash of his mouth, the men having succumbed to death from slow
strangulation. One of them had even slipped his hand in between the
rope and his neck in a futile effort to try to stop the inevitable.
Payne
had seen lots of death in his time and he had even dealt in more than
his fair share of it before packing his gun belt away into his
saddlebags, but the sight of this sort of a slow hanging
still put a twisting knot in his guts just as it always had since he
had seen his first hanging as a small boy.
"Wonder
what you boys did to deserve a fate like this?" he asked aloud
as if the six men might still be capable of answering him.
Payne
surveyed his surroundings again with a pair of sideways glances, but
there was nothing else around him but the six men in the tree.
"Well,
I reckon I'll cut you boys down and give you a burial," he told
them. "It's the only thing I can do for you."
Payne
turned on the heel of his scuffed boot to go back to his horse, when
a sick sounding, low guttural sound came from behind him. He
immediately froze is in his tracks and held his breath. His first
instinct was to reach for the .45 that should have been on his right
hip in a well worn holster, but he had hung up his gun a year ago and
it was not there to grab. He wondered how fast he could make it to
the Winchester in the scabbard on his saddle, but he knew it would be
a futile attempt.
The
sound came again, followed by the distinct, low creak from one of the
taut ropes hanging from the tree.
Slowly
Payne turned around and faced the six corpses again. They were all
still save the one with his fingers intertwined between his neck and
the noose, whose body gently revolved in a slow circle. That was when
he saw the tips of the man's free fingers articulate weakly. The
man's eyes quickly flashed open and he emitted a weak gurgle of
mostly garbled words.
"Cut...
Please .... cut me down."
Payne
could not believe that the man was still alive, but in a flash, he
had drawn a knife from the inside of his boot and was at the man's
side to help him. With one hand he had a hold of his legs and lifted
him up to slacken the rope, while with the other he severed the stiff
rope that was around his neck. Immediately the weakened man collapsed
in a limp pile upon him, his dead weight bringing both of them to the
dusty ground below. The man let out a low moan, but it was at least
proof that he was still alive.
Once
he collected himself and was certain that the man was breathing
easily, Payne stood up, walked to his horse and returned to the man
with his canteen. Once at his side again, he knelt down and removed
the plug from the canteen. He poured a bit of water into the palm of
his hand, lifted the man's head and let the water trickle onto the
man's lips until finally the man showed an inclination to drink. He
then did so greedily until Payne withdrew the mouth of the canteen.
"Easy
there, friend," he told him. "Not too much. You need to
drink it slow."
For
a long while, Payne knelt there beside him until the man had drifted
off into sleep.
While
the man slept, Payne built up a small fire, set a pot of coffee and
then undertook the grisly job of cutting the other men down.
One
by one, he took them down and then drug them a short distance away
from the tree and over the small hilltop where he had dug a wide, but
shallow grave for them.
Before
planting each one of them into the thin, dry soil, he dug through
their pockets. Between them all they had little in the way of
personal effects, only the sort of things that ranch hands might
carry: some coins, a deck of cards between them, a Bannock arrowhead
that one of them must have picked up somewhere, a gold pocket watch,
a few bags of tobacco with papers, a few cartridges and a crumpled up
letter that had probably been read and refolded too many times for
its own good. He tossed the playing cards and the tobacco into the
grave; no sense in one of the men's grieving wives or mothers knowing
about their sinful vices if he could help it. The rest he wrapped up
into a handkerchief that one of the men had worn and he placed it
into one of his saddle bags. Then one by one he placed them in the
grave as gently as he could and pushed the dusty soil over them.
When
he was through, he stood back and looked at his completed work. It
was a damn sorry excuse for a grave, Payne thought, and he was sure
that the next coyote or wolf that came by would dig it up because it
was so shallow, but it was the best that he could do with the tin cup
that he had used to carve it out. Payne felt like he should say a few
words over them, but he did not even know the names of the men he had
just buried and he was not a religious man, so the sort of words that
he felt should be said just would not come from his lips.
"This
is all I can do for you boys," he told them. "I reckon I'll
be lucky if someone does the same for me when my time comes. Well,
maybe I'll be seein' you. Adios."
Payne
tipped his hat to them and walked back to the fire.
The
sleeping man instantly stirred as Payne came near and sat up as if in
a daze. He gave a hoarse uncontrolled series of coughs, seemed to
gather his composure and finally looked up at Payne.
"You
the man who cut me down?" he asked in a gravelly voice.
Payne
nodded.
"Well,
you saved my life then, Mister. I'm much obliged."
"I
just hope I didn't cut you down so that they can hang you again,"
Payne told him. He figured him for a rustler, but Payne could not
very well have left him hanging there.
He
knelt down on his haunches and poured two cups of coffee. He handed
one to the other man who immediately breathed in its hot vapors. "Never
thought I'd smell coffee again," he told him with a smile. "It's
one of about a hundred things I thought about while I was hanging
there."
He
seemed to drift off as if in a dreamy state for a moment and for the
first time, Payne noted how young he was. He could not have been more
than 16 or 17 years old.
"What
about the others?" he suddenly asked.
"I
buried them up the hill here," Payne told him.
The
boy's complexion suddenly grew pale.
"All
of them?"
"Five
men," Payne told him.
The
boy nodded and took a drink of his coffee.
"It's
hard to believe," he said suddenly. "It all happened so
fast. One minute things was like they always were. We were ridin'.
And then, well, it's just too real. There were riders all over us."
"What's
it all about?"
Payne
figured that the kid and his friends had probably been caught up in
rustling cattle. Ranchers had been forming stock associations all
over Oregon and their vigilantes had been riding down rustlers and
horse thieves by the dozens throughout the region. They had been so
fierce that even the McCartys had been keeping a low profile while it
blew over.
"I
really don't know," the boy started to tell him. "I ride
for the Running V ..."
"Never
heard of it," Payne interrupted.
"We're
just a little outfit, but the boss, Mr. Voorhies, he ain't so
interested in bein' a great big outfit like the P Ranch or anyone
like that. We only got about twelve hundred head, but they're all
good ones of the boss' own breeding. He says he wants quality over
quantity and I reckon he knows what he's doing. But, we've been
havin' lots of trouble the last few months. And we ain't the only
ones. A couple of other outfits have been havin' problems too."
"What
sort of trouble?"
"People
keep seein' a group of riders comin' into their range some nights.
They don't barely make a sound because they have the hooves of their
horses muffled and all the men wear masks. They've been rimrockin'
groups of cattle belonging to every outfit, shootin' riders who make
the mistake of workin' alone and we reckon they've killed a couple of
men who've disappeared over the last month."
"And
that's who strung you up?"
"Yep.
The boys and I were riding on our east range looking for about fifty
head of missing yearlings. We found them all busted up in a canyon
and they'd been rim rocked by someone and were too far gone to
salvage anything. So we headed home to tell the boss, and well, the
next thing we know, we saw those riders a comin' at us. There were
fifteen or twenty of them all with hoods over their heads and before
we knew it, they were swarmin' all over us like like a bunch of angry
bees. We took cover in the rocks and we got at least one or two of
them with our Winchesters, but there were just too many of them to
fend off for long and they knew it too.
We
had our backs against an outcrop of rock, so the only way out of
there was to go through them or to come out feet first. After about
an hour they told us to surrender and since we ain't gettin' paid
fighting wages, we decided to do it. It might have been a cowardly
thing, but we didn't have much else in the way of choices and for
that matter, we still didn't know what they wanted. We should have
stayed back and fought it out with them, because you know what
happened next. They marched us all off to the tree and strung us up
one by one."
Payne
sat there sipping his coffee in silence and trying to contemplate the
story the boy had just told him. He had never heard a story like it
before and he didn't think the boy would have made it up. Riders in
hoods riding muffled horses, rim rocking cattle and viscously killing
range riders. Having once hired his gun hand out to anyone willing to
pay a good wage, Payne had dealt with more than his fair share of
cattle rustlers. As viscous and uncaring as some of them could be, he
had never run across any that would destroy fine stock once they
obtained it, let alone any that would intentionally seek out and kill
riders.
"Where's
this Running V at?" he finally asked.
"About
half a day to the south west. Maybe further. I don't rightly know how
far they brought us before they hung us and I don't know this side of
the country so well. We're well off our own range."
"Well,
I reckon I'll take you back to your ranch when you feel up to it,"
Payne told him. "We can ride double, I suppose."
"I'm
much obliged to you Mister," the boy told him. "My name is
Billy Howard and I reckon I owe
you my life. I'd like to know the name of the man who saved me."
"My
name is Smith and it's nothin'," Payne lied. "Any man would
have done the same. I just happened by."
"Nah,
it ain't so. Most fellas wouldn't have seen it as bein' any of their
business to stop to bury a group of men hangin'. Anyone else would
have just rode on after havin' a look. But you cut me down and I'm
much obliged for it, Smith. I'd like to call you my friend. I thought
I was goin' to die up there on that tree. I dunno if you've ever
looked death in the face like that, but I'll tell you what, I did
lots of thinkin' while I was up there hangin' from that branch..."
Billy's
voice trailed off and he looked down into the camp fire in deep
thought.
"You
ever felt that, before?"
Payne
thought back on the many times that he had faced death looking over
the barrel of his .45. He had killed a few dozen men in his day,
looking them in the eye as each one had screamed out in agony when
his own lead had hit them and shattered their bones and had ruptured
their hearts. Not all of them had deserved death, but he had dealt it
to them anyway, cutting them down in the prime of their lives like a
newly sharpened scythe takes the head off of a stalk of ripe wheat.
And each time he had stood over them with the smoking gun in his
hand, he was always reminded that had they been a little faster or
had a little more sand than him, that it may have been him lying on
the ground instead of them. Every night those men would come back to
him to invade his dreams with their pale white, agonized faces, their
putrid flesh starting to hang off their bones. Though he had hung up
his gun, the men still came to him each night in his sleep, bent over
and whispering death into his ear with their rotten breath and
reminding him that he would eventually join them.
Billy
looked up from the camp fire in time to see the hollow look of
torment in Payne's eyes and pushed the discussion no further.
Finally
Payne looked up at him as if he was going to answer the question.
"Let's
ride," Billy told him.
Without
another word between them, they kicked out the fire and saddled up
double and headed off to the south west.
