The Gallows Tree

By James A. Muir

When Breed came to the town called Two Bits, he found bad trouble brewing. Someone was hell-bent on setting the local white folks and Apaches at each other’s throats so’s they could make a dirty dollar or two out of the bloodshed. He didn’t much care for what he found. Two Bits was about to find out - the hard way - what if meant to mess with Breed....

• Language: English
• Publisher: Piccadilly
• Release date: Feb 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781005621193

Book preview

Chapter One

STORMHEADS ROLLED BLACK and lonesome over the stark crags of the Sierra Mogollon.

The mountains seemed like they were holding their breath, forcing a stillness over the land that quietened the animal sounds of buzzard and rabbit, the busy shuffling of the gophers and the squirrels. The silence extended even to the sky, for the clouds rolled ominous, night-dark silence. It was as though the raw energy building up overhead sucked all other life into the empty sky. There was a feeling of waiting.

The light was that curiously clear yellow that precedes a bad storm in the high country of New Mexico. The kind of light that is simultaneously softer and clearer than the heat-hazed sun. A leprous kind of light that prompts a man to scratch at the prickling around his neck and spine, and look about him for fear of something he can’t quite understand.

The light and the silence went together: a prelude to something unknown and frightening.

The man on the grey mustang knew exactly why he was frightened.

But he refused to show his fear.

He was tall, even on the pony. A deep-chested man with the bowed legs of a rider, his shoulder-length hair falling black as the clouds above over the ragged seams of his scarlet shirt. His face was tanned dark by blood and sun, the nose flat and wide beneath narrow, impenetrable eyes. His mouth was clamped tight over the fear, causing the bones of his jaw to stand out paler than the surrounding skin. His corded thighs were bare between leather breech-clout and knee-high moccasins. His hands were lashed tight behind his back and his head was held upright by a new-smelling loop of hempen rope.

He was an Apache. His name was Mexican Pony in the Chiricahua language.

He ignored the slow welling of blood from his nostrils with the same disdain he applied to the bullet hole in his left arm, staring straight ahead, refusing to see the men standing watching him.

One came forward, peering up with the morbid interest of a casual visitor to an undertaker’s backroom. He was a white man, no more than twenty years old, dressed in worn denim covered by a grubby yellow duster.

‘Christ! Henry, let’s get it done.’ He seemed worried by Mexican Pony’s trance-like stare. ‘We gonna hang him, or not?’

‘You gettin’ nervous, Rufe?’ A big man in a long, sleek-looking storm coat called cheerfully. ‘Let the bastard sweat awhile.’

Rufe tore his gaze away from the Apache’s face and walked over to the other three whites.

‘We shoulda killed him straight,’ he grumbled. ‘Shot him an’ been done with it. I ain’t got too much stomach fer hangin’. He winds up dead either way.’

‘Yeah,’ grinned Henry, ‘that’s true. Only an injun figgers he ain’t gonna reach them happy Huntin’ Grounds with a rope on his neck. They reckon the soul gets caught by the rope so it can’t get free o’ the body.’ He showed yellow teeth in an ugly smile. ‘Let’s leave him suffer a bit.’

Rufe spat into the sand, tugging his duster tight around him as a sudden chill passed through his body. He watched his companions, beginning to wish that he hadn’t agreed to join Henry and the others on their hunting expedition.

He was twenty-one and foot-loose, a drifter looking for a job after quitting a ranch in the New Mexico Territory when he got bored with working cows. He had drifted west towards the Gila River and met Henry Brandon in a settlement called Two Bits. Rumor had it the place got its name from the price its forgotten founder paid for water rights. Since then it had grown some—though not much. Brandon was a big noise in a small kettle, the owner of the settlement’s one saloon, and the town’s richest man.

Big, bluff and as hard at forty as he had been at Rufe’s age, Brandon enlisted the younger man’s enthusiasm for fast money and his skill with a Colt’s .45 to his own cause.

So far that cause looked to be wiping out the local Indians.

Rufe kept his mouth shut as he waited for the others to decide the moment.

Kyle Marsh waited too. He was close to Brandon’s own age, closer than the gunslick kid, and considerably better off. He ran the General Store that supplied most of the needs—grocery and hardware, at least—of Two Bits. His age was beginning to show around his belly, and the mouse-brown hair he kept neatly cut was starting to thin out. He fidgeted as he waited for Brandon to make up his mind and kill the damn’ Indian: Louise was waiting for him back in town and she’d be madder than hell if they took much longer.

The third of Rufe’s seniors stood as silent and implacable as Mexican Pony. He was a huge man, inches higher than Brandon’s six feet, his raven beard curling luxuriantly over the neat lapels of his black frock-coat. Like the others, he wore a Colt’s revolver bolstered at his waist, but where his friends let their hands rest upon the gun butts, his clutched a battered bible, the worn leather of the covers curling beneath the stroking of his stubby, powerful fingers.

His name was Nathaniel Dempster. His profession—if that was the right word—was preaching. He had ridden in to Two Bits a year ago and talked the blasphemous population into building a church. It was a fine church by the standards of the territory, sixty by twenty and capable of seating all two hundred and thirty of Two Bit’s people. His preaching appealed: it centered on destroying the heathen red men, conveniently ignoring the rigged wheels and diseased whores of Brandon’s saloon with the same aplomb it used to accept Marsh’s inflated prices. Or anything else that might offend the parishioners’ sense of pioneering enterprise.

Dempster smiled as he listened to Rufe’s nervous plea.

‘Our friend has a point, Henry.’ His voice was deep, impressive. ‘Even though we must do our duty, it is surely unfair that any man should suffer unduly.’

‘Injuns don’t suffer,’ grunted Marsh. ‘They’re used to dyin’ same as they’re used to killin’.’

‘All men, be they Christian or heathen, are entitled to some respect,’ said the preacher. ‘We tracked this man because he offended the laws of our town. Now that we have caught him, let us hear what he has to say.’

‘You gonna listen to an injun?’ Brandon asked.

‘Yes,’ said Dempster. ‘He’s entitled to that. And afterwards we’ll hang him.’

He adjusted the stiff collar about his neck, moved the bible to his left hand, and drew his Colt with his right.

Walking over to the grey mustang he raised the book towards Mexican Pony.

‘We know you speak American, so I shall address you in a civilized language. You rode into our town with American dollars to spend. Where did you get them?’

Mexican Pony turned his head, wincing as the noose tore against the cuts on his throat.

‘I traded horses with the fat man, the storekeeper.’

‘Shit,’ said Marsh, ‘I buy ponies off the injuns all the time. I can’t tell one from another.’

‘But you spent the money on liquor,’ intoned the preacher, ‘and all civilized men know that alcohol and the heathen do not agree.’

‘Brandon offered me whiskey,’ grunted the Apache. ‘He said if I didn’t buy it, he would tell the other that I stole the horses.’

‘You imbibed a forbidden brew.’ said Dempster, ‘Became drunk. And killed a man.’

‘The white man took my jug,’ answered Mexican Pony. ‘When I tried to take it back, he drew a gun.’

‘You killed him.’

‘I drew my knife because he drew his gun. He shot me. You can see the hole in my arm.’

‘You killed a white man.’

‘To save my life. He shot me, so I stabbed him.’

‘Killed him.’

‘Yes. Is that wrong?’

‘You killed a white man? You admit that?’

‘He would have killed me. He had a gun. I had only a knife. It was fair.’

‘You killed him.’

‘Shit!’ Brandon interrupted the makeshift trial. ‘Let’s hang the bastard injun and get back home.’

Kyle Marsh nodded silent support and Rufe swallowed hard, feeling that something was going wrong.

‘The heathen commits himself through his own lips.’ announced Dempster. ‘He killed for the sin of drink, his arm was directed by the Devil, inflamed by alcohol and greed. He is clearly guilty, and we must dispense our holy duty.’

‘Good.’ said Brandon. ‘Let’s have done with it. Lynch the bastard and I’ll buy you all drinks.’

‘Wait.’ urged the preacher, ‘there are things I must do in duty to my cloth.’

Mexican Pony smiled. ‘I am not a Christian. Forget your white man talk and kill me. If the Great Spirit wills that I stay on this earth, then I promise I shall hunt you down from the Shadow Land. All of you. And kill you.’

Rufe felt a shiver run hard down his spine and opened his mouth to say something. But Dempster’s words drowned out his voice and he shut up.

‘Lord, accept the soul of this heathen murderer …’ Brandon tightened the noose around the Chiricahua’s neck. ‘Look kindly upon him, O Lord, and forgive his many sins, for he knows not what he does …’

Kyle Marsh moved around to the mustang’s rear, hefting a lead-weighted quirt.

‘And bless us, O Lord, your humble servants, for dispensing of our duty that we may …’

Rufe looked up at the Apache, choking as he saw the man’s face.

‘We seek only to serve, and so send this heathen savage to your bosom, hoping that …’

Brandon nodded. The quirt lashed savagely over the mustang’s rump.

‘Amen.’

Mexican Pony jerked forwards and up as the horse lurched away from under him. He bucked against the rope, fighting to suck air into lungs suddenly cut off from air. His legs twisted upwards as though trying to climb the rope. His mouth opened and his tongue thrust blackly out as a smear of excrement splattered between his legs.

Rufe turned away, bending over as he spewed onto the sand.

Brandon laughed.

Kyle Marsh watched the mustang gallop away, wishing that he had thought to tether the beast: it could fetch money back in Two Bits.

Preacher Dempster closed his bible and holstered his gun.

And Mexican Pony swung limp and loose from the wide branch of the gallows tree, swaying in the growing wind.

The wind rose with the storm heads, drifting tumbleweed fast across the open space around the tree.

The body moved beneath the buffeting of the wind, the blood coming out of the Apache’s mouth leaving wide trickles spread in lines over the sand. A few dedicated flies settled on his mouth and the ordure beneath him, but the wind soon blew them away so that only the corpse was left, like a scarecrow on the tree.

Then the storm broke with a long, harsh roll of thunder that echoed off the distant peaks. The yellow light became abruptly grey as a curtain of rain washed down over the body. Sand sizzled and spat, reducing to a miasma of yellow-washed sludge that floated Mexican Pony’s droppings off down the slope. It drenched his hair, washing away the blood from his nose and mouth, soaking his shirt.

The rope stretched in the downpour, and from the knee-high moccasins two streams of water tumbled groundwards.

The body twisted slowly to left and right, sad and lonely in the grey darkness of the storm.

Matthew Gunn hunkered down under his poncho, holding tight to the drag rein of the tall, grey stallion snorting irritably under the downfall.

The fold of rock offered cover for only a man, and that poor cover, so that his legs were getting soaked by the storm. The horse would have to fend for itself.

He watched the desert turn to mud, marveling at the transformation of sunbaked sand to heavy, cloying pulp that would erupt bright flowers come the next sunrise. It was one more aspect he could enjoy from his Apache upbringing: the knowledge that some of the loneliest places on earth could spring into life from a wasteland. And that a Chiricahua brave could live in those places.

He settled back against the warm rock and waited for the storm to fade away.

Nolan and Christie, the men he was hunting, were long gone into the depths of the mountainous wastelands of New Mexico and Arizona, or maybe into Mexico. He had followed their trail down into Sonora, lost it around Tepehuanes—west of Durango—and drifted back, hoping to find news of the dark man and his laughing, fair-haired companion north of the border. It seemed likely that they would drift back north again; after all, their trade was killing, and at that based on Apache scalps—amongst them the hair of his white father and Chiricahua mother—so that Gunn, raised as an Apache warrior, knew the hunting grounds of the scalp hounds. He had chased the men from New Mexico to Chihuahua, north into Texas, then west through Arizona into Nevada and California, and back down south into Texas and Mexico¹.

One day—maybe—he would find them. And kill them.

He bit down on the pemmican he was chewing and waited for the rain to stop.

Henry Brandon and his crew rode back into Two Bits with the storm beating hard against their slickers. The water had washed away Rufe’s doubts and all four white men felt pretty good about giving the murderous Apache his just deserts. Brandon’s offer of free whiskey went a long way to stoking the fires of their personal convictions about Indians. They reached the settlement with a whole lot of water spilling off their coats and a heavy thirst cloying their mouths.

The man they had hung was forgotten by the time they reached