The Stranglers, page 13
part #4 of Page Murdock Series
"Second." Blood who had evidently removed his spurs in order to make his way around behind me quietly, was buckling them back on over his insteps. They were the Mexican kind, with long, cruel rowels.
EIGHTEEN
Schichter was the name of the big German with the black beard. He and Blood and Clarence the dead man and the one they called Shiloh—that had to have something to do with his army coat, which was the only thing about him old enough to have seen that battle—had stuck up an Overland stagecoach in southern Wyoming for five thousand in gold last December, killing the driver and fleeing north. They had lost the gold when their packhorse slipped during the Missouri crossing, but had hopes of recovering the strongbox when the waters went down. Meanwhile they had holed up in Teamstrike. Blood had gotten drunk there and spilled the gold story to Specs and the Mongol-eyed one they called Chink, both of whom were wanted elsewhere, and now they were partners.
A sheriff from the Bear's Paw Mountain country had become the stranglers' first victim when he collared Specs outside Teamstrike and took him back to stand trial for the rape and murder of a Shoshone woman in his jurisdiction. Chink alerted Schichter and the others, reminding them of the lost gold that bound them, and they rode down and hanged the sheriff ten miles short of his destination. After that, Specs and Chink had reciprocated by helping Schichter's band string up two Pinkerton agents who had tracked the stage robbers from Wyoming.
Harvey Byrd and the Indian had come late to the party. After they ambushed my posse, the Indian had seen to Byrd's wounded leg and run to cover with him in the outlaw town, where the Indian happened to match the print of a cracked horseshoe he had conveniently forgotten to mention to me at the site of the Pinkerton lynching to its original in a corral. When he found out the horse belonged to Shiloh he had approached him with his knowledge. At that point the gang swelled to eight, more than enough to jump Cocker Flynn and the Swede and the two deputies from Great Falls when they came looking for the Indian and Byrd. They were all killers and they trusted one another as much as sharks in a feeding frenzy, which was why none of them had managed to dispose of any of the others. "Yet, anyway," added Blood, who told me the whole story on the way through the pass to the Shonkin Sag. A man who likes to talk will tell you anything when he knows you won't be repeating it.
"You forgot one," I said. "There was a railroad detective hanged near Fort Benton month before last."
"Wasn't ours." He grinned. "Reckon we ain't the only stranglers working this part of the woods."
Schichter, riding alone up front, called back for Blood to shut it.
We were not quite abreast, Blood hanging back some astride a chestnut mare with his Spanish-style hat still tilted down over his eyes and the Henry across the throat of his saddle. Byrd and Specs rode shoulder to shoulder between us and the German. Whenever that bunch went anywhere, it must have been hell's own hassle deciding who would be at whose back. We had left the rockfalls behind and were coming up from between the cliffs along a hogback with the land falling off sharply on either side and the razor tops of sixty-foot pines stabbing up at us from below. We could see the Missouri, not brown at this distance but steel-blue, snaking through the tablelands with dense forest all around and sky a hundred miles high and to the west a wiggly blue line that was the Rockies with the sun swelling and flushing hot orange just over the summit. There were no clouds to reflect the sunset, just a coppery strip along the horizon behind the mountains. I looked at it, remembered it. You never know when you will see another.
Schichter was mad. You hear all the time about men going crazy but it's just a word until you see it. He had started out with greed for gold and a keen instinct for survival and ended up seeing himself as some kind of frontier warlord. He was convinced his random murders had the law quaking and was determined to make the Montana badlands his freedom. So much open space could warp a man too long from civilization; most times it shrank him with the heart-sickening realization of his own insignificance, but sometimes it worked opposite, the room to grow in any direction and the sensation of breathing air no one had breathed before charging his brain like a strong drug. I doubted that Schichter still thought about the stolen gold. Blood did, and probably so did Specs and Chink and Shiloh, though I couldn't say about Harvey Byrd. That they stuck with the German said something for the mental hold he had on them. It was a thing that went with madness like dark with a doused lamp.
The long hump of land descended gradually into a saddle and then the true sink of the Sag, thorny with pine and cedar, with puddles like pieces of bright metal reflecting sky at the bottom from the spring runoff. Although the sun was still visible above the Rockies, it was already growing dark at the base of the ancient channel. Peepers stopped singing and plopped into the water at our approach.
I knew which tree it was going to be as soon as I saw it. A lone maple stood in a patch of ground cleared by a trapper whose grandchildren were grandparents by now, his cabin rotting kindling sunken into its stone foundation with seedlings six feet high all around. The tree's trunk was just broad enough to hug and its lowest limb made an elbow twelve feet above the ground to avoid the older, larger trees on the edge of the clearing. Schichter drew rein and held up a hand. Byrd and Specs stopped and Blood spurred past me and reached over and took my dun by the bit chain, halting it. Shiloh and Chink had caught up with us by then. They walked their horses around us and slacked off the reins and let them graze. On every side birds were singing.
No one spoke. Specs, his glasses white in a stray sunbeam, unhooked a coil of rope from his saddle horn and fashioned a noose on the end for weight and with the coil in one hand and the noose end in the other, made a series of expert twirls, feeding out rope between his thumb and his palm, and swung the noose up over the limb. It didn't have enough behind it on the first try and fell back, skidding off the bark. He reeled it in and made some more revolutions and threw it again and this time the noose described a clear high arc and came down on the other side trailing six feet of rope. He tossed the rest of the coil to Shiloh, who caught it and kneed his horse forward and bent down to pass it around the tree and pull two feet off the dangling part and secure the other end, leaning back with a grunt to set the knot. Specs meanwhile had made a better job of the noose, although there was nothing of the thirteen tight coils that snapped a man's neck clean at a proper hanging. Clean deaths held no interest for this crew.
Black-bearded Schichter, looking like a bear in a man's clothes, watched the operation from horseback with a foreman's critical eye. He looked at Blood, who was still holding my horse's bit, and Blood put heels to his and we moved ahead. I was between him and Harvey Byrd now, the latter sitting a dun that was a little larger than mine. Specs waited holding the noose.
My right boot was out of its stirrup. I kicked Blood very hard in the armpit where he was leaning over to guide my mount and he made an awful reverse croak of a noise and I raked the dun's ribs and shot forward, sideswiping Byrd and charging through the space between Specs and Schichter. I was shouting something without words in it at the top of my lungs. I hoped it was as paralyzing as an Indian's war cry. Someone shouted something equally unintelligible behind me—it sounded like German—and a shot was fired, but go hit a moving target with a rifle from horseback. I was making for the west bank that led up and out of the Sag. Pine branches larruped my face and snatched off my hat. Swift cold air stung the lacerations on my cheeks and roared past my ears.
Hoofs pounded earth behind me. I had the reins in both manacled hands and snapped them, digging my heels into horseflesh and hunkering down for speed. The dun was throwing lather that burned like alcohol when it flew into my eyes. The pursuing hoofbeats got louder.
A cannonball struck me from behind and to the left, ripping me out of the saddle, and together the cannonball and I fell and fell with trees and sky blurring past, and then we stopped with a shattering blow that numbed my right side and tore my lungs inside out.
Byrd recovered first. I had broken his fall after he'd launched himself into me from horseback, and now he got his hands around my throat and squeezed, his crooked face a violent mask two inches from mine in the failing light with his eyes starting and his lips skinned back from the offset rows of his teeth.
"Murdering bastard," he was saying in a high, keening whine. "Murder Melrose and take Jim and murder the Indian."
I wrenched onto my left shoulder hard, unseating him, got an elbow in his ribs and pushed and felt something start to give and his grip loosened on my neck a notch and I butted him in the face with my head and we came apart then. He got to his feet first because my bound hands got in the way of my balance, and threw a kick at my head, but it was his bad leg and he couldn't put his weight behind it. His boot grazed my forehead and I reached up and grabbed his leg and pulled and he was down again. This time we rose together. He swung his fist. I ducked it and butted him again, in the chest this time, and when he bent wheezing I swung my laced hands in an uppercut and caught him square on the point of the chin. Something crunched and he straightened out and tipped over backward and lay on the ground moaning through a jaw broken the second time. Then he put a hand on the ground and started to get back up.
There was a sharp crack and a blue-black hole spoiled his forehead and his head snapped back and he toppled off his knees and didn't try to get up again.
I pivoted. Blood was standing on the edge of the trapper's clearing with the Henry to his cheek and smoke twisting out the end of the barrel. While I was looking he swung it a few inches to the right to cover me. Chink and Shiloh rode through the studding of pines and wheeled behind me and pushed me ahead of them using their horses' shoulders. My dun and Byrd's were still running.
"Harvey was no fun to have around without the Indian to stop his yelping," said Schichter, still sitting his black where I had left him. "Chink, his hands."
Chink rode back to Byrd's body and got the key and rode in. He dismounted, sprang the cuffs, and locked them again when he had my hands behind my back. He wasn't any rougher about it than he had to be. His kind didn't hate. When you had your chance you killed them first. When he was finished he let the key drop to the needle-matted ground.
Blood had lowered the Henry. Now he thumped the muzzle hard into my chest. I had to backpedal to keep from stumbling and bumped into his mare behind me. The horse snorted and sidestepped. "Get up there," he said.
The way his left arm hung suggested it was dislocated at the shoulder.
"I don't think so," I said.
He came forward and thumped my chest again. His mare shook its mane and put more distance between us.
I said, "If you want to lynch me you can damn well sweat a little and haul me up from the ground. Nothing says I have to make it easy."
Schichter said, "If you refuse to mount I will have Specs drop the noose over your head where you stand and drag you. I don't know if that's worse or better than hanging, but it takes longer."
"I'll drag him," Blood volunteered.
It was getting hard to see. Shiloh produced a lantern and struck a match. An early moth flung itself against the glass as soon as it started to glow. I wondered if it was the same lantern Cocker Flynn had seen that first night. It was a shame the stranglers hadn't recognized him by day as the man they had shot and left for dead. They'd have thought he was some kind of spook. Blood held his horse and I got a boot into the stirrup. Chink gave me a boost up because I couldn't grip the horn with my hands behind me.
The air was cooling rapidly, the way it will up there at night until well into the summer. The sweat I had worked up wrestling with Harvey Byrd was icy under my clothes. The saddle under me was cold and slippery stiff and the chestnut mare was shivering a little under the chilling froth of its half-day journey. All the birds were through singing. It was just me and the stranglers and the horses and crawly yellow light from the lantern and the chee-chee-chee of ground frogs that whenever a man heard it for the rest of his life would take him back to that night.
"It takes three minutes to choke to death," Schichter was saying in his flat foreman's voice. "I guess it must seem longer to the one doing the choking. None of us thought to tie that sheriff's hands behind him up in the Bear's Paw and when we walked his horse out from under him he reached up and hung on until his arms went dead and his fingers just kind of slipped off the rope. You ought to be glad we've learned from our mistakes."
While the German was talking, Specs leaned over from his saddle and hooked the noose over my head and snugged what knot there was up under my left ear. I had lost my hat in the fight with Byrd. The rope felt stiff and rough as burrs around my throat. Blood was still holding the horse.
"If you have something to say we will hear it," Schichter said.
"Go to hell."
"I hope you will save me a place in line." He nodded to Blood, who led the mare forward.
I kept my seat as long as I could, my thigh muscles tighter than they'd ever been, but the saddle slid smoothly between them and the stirrups hung up on my cramped toes only long enough for Chink on the ground and Specs on horseback to pull them loose. My heels grazed the chestnut's rump. And then there was just air under me and black sky above with stars punched in it.
NINETEEN
It was an eerie weightless feeling, suspended in vaulted night with cold air coming up under my pants legs and the part of my brain that understood gravity shrieking that this was all wrong. The rope was iron on my neck and I felt my tongue sliding out and my eyes straining at their sockets and my vision shrank to pinpoints with purple all around, the faces of Specs and Schichter and Shiloh on horseback in the lantern glow sharply detailed, as if seen through a strong lens. Then the pinpoints closed and I was in total darkness. I heard loud popping noises and knew they were made by blood vessels exploding in my head. Then I heard nothing, felt nothing. Instead I dreamed.
Dreamed that I was trapped inches below the surface of a swift river, caught in the undertow and hurtling along, bumping into horses and things standing stationary in the current and sliding around them and tumbling down a cataract, unable to grab on to anything along the way because my hands were manacled behind me. The cold water was numbing and I barely felt the impacts as I bounded off rocks and limbs and horses' legs and went on with my lungs bursting and fishes and flotsam skidding past my face. The empty hollow of my skull echoed.
"Murdock. Come on, Murdock. Come on."
I was in a slower part of the river, less cold, with more things floating in it and patting my face and sunlight refracting down through the water and splintering into colors as if through a prism. There were horses standing here too, their legs all around me. Come on, Murdock kept echoing and the floating things were alive and slapping my face and making my cheeks burn. I opened my eyes and the kid's narrow anxious face with its pillow-fuzz of neglected beard was looking down at me through the shifting water. I warned him about the undertow but my mouth filled with water and nothing came out. He slapped me again.
"You're all right, Murdock," he said. "We cut you down and you're all right."
I moved my eyes and they made grating sounds in their sockets and ached. There were horses' legs all around me and other faces a mile up under hats whose wide brims trapped the lantern light. One of the faces belonged to someone I had met a long time ago. The sheriff from Great Falls?
I was lying on my back on a patch of moist cold earth. Beyond the high faces the bent white arm of the tree I had swung from reached up to cup the sky in naked fingers with a rag of old hemp dangling from its elbow.
White muslin diagonaled the kid's forehead where someone might have popped Aunt Aurola's shotgun pellets loose with a knife. I dragged a dry tongue over lips like old leaves, but my throat closed up on the first word.
'Talk later," he said. "We thought you had a crushed pipe, but you're breathing all right now. You weren't at all when we cut you down. Your face was as black as my boot."
"First thing you should do when you get so you can talk is thank the kid," said the sheriff. He was wearing a patched buffalo jacket on top of his coveralls and had traded his short scattergun for a Spencer carbine. He had a cold and his nose was running into his coal-smear of beard. "He got the drop on me out where I was digging and talked me into rounding up a posse and heading for Teamstrike. He didn't want tending, but them greasy pellets infect quick and halfway here we held him down and done the job. We hit the Sag about the time they fired that lantern. By the time we got dismounted and close enough to use our rifles, these here was too busy watching you twist to mind us. We got every damn one of 'em."
I cranked myself up on one elbow and looked around. I had a stiff neck to go with my sore throat and aching head. "These here" were Schichter and Shiloh and Specs and Blood, shadowy bales lying where they had fallen in the dirty glow from the lantern burning low on the ground, recognizable mostly by their clothes, although you couldn't miss the German's supine bulk. Specs' glasses lay on the ground near his body, one smashed lens twinkling. The front of Shiloh's army coat smoldered and gave off a foul stench of burning wool and cooking meat. The sheriff saw me notice it.
"He wanted to make a fight of it with a bullet in one arm and two in his back already. I obliged him at six feet."
Someone was missing. I did some more looking around and the sheriff read my thoughts again.
"That one slunk off gutshot into the woods. The kid went in after him and come back alone."
I looked at the kid, but he was busy unstopping a canteen and you had to have been studying his hands and seen the slight tremor. I would not have followed someone like Chink into the woods; but there would be time to talk about that later. I took the canteen from the kid while he was trying to tip it up to my lips and did it myself. The cold water washed a channel down my burning throat. My neck was swollen and felt as if the noose were still drawn tight around it and when I was finished drinking I put a hand there to make sure. My fingertips found the braided imprint in the flesh. The burn scar would be with me for a while, and maybe forever. My hands felt hot too and I realized that it was from returning circulation and that I wasn't wearing manacles anymore.
