Free Oliver Strange - Sudden Westerns 08 - Sudden Takes The Trail(1940) by Oliver Strange

further, having—in his eagerness to vent his spleen—overlooked the
fact that the man he taunted was unbound. With all the fury of one who has
nothing to lose, Sudden’s right fist came up and smashed into the leering face
like a battering-ram, and Javert went down as though he had encountered a
cyclone. Mouthing mad blasphemies, he scrambled to his feet and clawed at his
gun, but Jake clutched his wrist.
                 “Don’t
be a fool ! ” he cried. “Can’t you wait a few minutes?
That’s what he was playin’ for—an easy death.” The stricken man spat out a
tooth and wiped the blood from his gashed lips.
                 “I’ll
make it easy for him,” he snarled. “Listen, you with the rope: when he’s
half-choked, lower him to the ground again so’s he can fill his lungs, an’ keep
on doin’ it; he shall die ten times for that blow.” This diabolical suggestion
brought an angry protest from the saloon-keeper, and some of the more sober in
the crowd supported him.
                 “We’re
here to see justice done, Sark,” one of them said. “But we ain’t Injuns, an’
won’t stand for torture.”
                 “An’
I don’t reckon that Pinetown has the say-so in these proceedin’s neither,”
another added, a sentiment which brought a still blacker look to Javert’s
damaged countenance, but was promptly taken up and repeated.
                 More
joined in, and the argument as to whether a man should die slowly or quickly
became general.

  Chapter
VII
                 SHORTLY
after the band of self-appointed executioners had departed on its grisly
errand, a solitary horseman loped into Welcome. Young, attired in range-rig, with
a good-humoured, not unpleasing face, there was nothing remarkable about him
save his pallor, unusual in a land of sunburnt skins. At Gowdy’s store he
dismounted, entered, and asked for “smokin’.”
                 “This
is the most lonesome place I’ve struck,” he remarked. “Yu ain’t the on’y
inhabitant, are yu?”
                 “All
the men are gone to the lynchin’, I s’pose,” Lucy told him, with a feminine
shudder.
                 “Beasts,
I call them.” The visitor stared at her. “Yu don’t say. Who
they string-in’ up, an’ why for?”
                 “Our
new marshal,” she said. “They say he shot a man.”
                 “Well,
a marshal has to do that—times. I ain’t never seen a
hangin’. Where’s it takin’ place?”
                 “On
the road to the west—there’s no trees here.”
                 “What
had the dead man done?”
                 “I
don’t know—it happened a long ways off, before the marshal came here.” Her eyes
filled. “You see, it was owin’ to me he got the job. If I hadn’t told him of the vacancy maybe …
                 Oh,
it’s too bad. I can see him now, ridin’ up to the Red Light on that great black
horse.”
                 “A
black hoss?” the cowboy cried. “With a white face?”
                 “Why,
yes, do you ?”
                 “Hell’s
flames!” he swore, and darted for the street leaving his purchase and the
dollar he had put down in payment lying on the counter.
                 Amazement
held her for a moment, then she ran to the door, only
to see a diminishing cloud of dust travelling west.
                 “He
must be awful anxious to see a hangin’,” she decided.
                 In
this she did the young man an injustice, for that was precisely what he
fervently desired not to see. Therefore he plied spurs and quirt—though not
cruelly—in the effort to drag a little more speed from his tired mount.
                 “Which
I’m shorely sorry, Splinter, but we just gotta make it,” he panted. “O’ course,
he may’ve sold