At the Dead Pines trail station, the crowd parted as if the Judge were the Lord Almighty himself. He tossed the traces to a man Phoebe hadn’t seen before and slid the Mauser from its sock. Her grandpap said, “This shan’t take thirty minutes.” He bobbed his head to acknowledge Doc Joel, also out from Cheyenne, the only other person in the nervous gaggle she knew by name.

The station was nothing more than a slant-roofed log box, whole lines of chinking blown out by winters’ winds and spring storms. A simple gallows had been erected, dirt freshly turned where barked Lodgepole pine logs were stuck into the ground. A stout log, peeled shiny as a polished andiron, served as the hanging bar. It glistened in the setting sun. Wooden hominy cases made do for steps up to a pair of nail kegs. Toppling ropes were tied to the keg rims and lay like long, dead snakes in the dust. Twin nooses were looped loosely over the crosspiece. A dozen riflemen circled the gallows, half facing the station house, half facing the crowd. There would be no mishaps during a Judge Cletus Cleveland hanging.

A pocket of men, heads tipped together in conspiratorial whisperings, smothered their chatter as Phoebe and her mother passed. The women took a place in the back of the pack beside a senora. Behatted and elegantly garbed in a fuchsia bolero of serge cheviot, the senora wore a jacket trimmed in black mohair, matching skirt full and flowing. She stood rigid, a fencepost for a backbone, her brown, smooth, flawless face rouged pink, her lips heartily coated crimson. Men in the crowd stole looks at her as often as possible.

They all faced to the west, each hand in the crowd shading eyes against the sun, now low on the horizon. They’d be riding back to Cheyenne in part darkness.

Two prisoners, an Indian and a white man, ankles tethered with rawhide hobbles and chained to an anvil, were pushed from the trail station. The Indian, barefoot, wore nothing but a breechclout. The white man had been dressed down to red balbriggans faded pink, and grimy brown boot socks. Both had crusty lacerations on their faces. The Indian’s left eye was purple and puffed shut. The white man had pissed himself more than once.

At the prisoners’ appearance, the women averted their eyes. The slouching deputies
snapped to attention. One unhooked the anvil and nudged the prisoners up the steps. To
Phoebe’s surprise, neither prisoner showed any reluctance to step up onto the kegs. Two
deputies looped the nooses over their heads, backed down the hominy cases and took hold
of the toppling ropes, ready to send the prisoners to their maker.

Phoebe thought it disgraceful that the Indian was paraded out in a skin that barely covered his privacy. As if reading her mind, the Judge raised his hand, halting the proceeding. He rested the Mauser against the gallows’ stanchion, fetched a lap robe from the phaeton and tied it around the Indian’s waist.

When the Judge again faced the prisoners, he reverently removed his tall Kalispell. The hat, a beige widebrim with a crown as high as Elk Mountain, had neither a crease, dent nor punch to it. The Judge wore it for formal occasions only, and, once removed, it revealed a face with tight lips cut into cast steel, coffee-colored eyes that squinted into crow’s feet at the temples, neat, close-cropped hair more gray than brown. His gray handlebar was waxed shiny and curled up to fine pointy tips. He read from a small slip of paper: “By the authority vested in me, I declare the sentence of hanging for one John Montenegro and one Indian known only as Buck to be carried out post haste.” The Judge looked up from the paper, spoke to the gathering. “For those of you unaware, I found these two guilty of stealing a hog hindquarter from the back of Morley’s Butcher and Mercantile right here in Dead Pines. This is a misdeed equal to out-and-out rustling. There is no such crime in law as rustling a part of a steer, part of a pig.” Heads bobbed their agreement.

The Judge spied a man of the cloth off to the side of the crowd. The parson held a good book, hands gnarled and lumpy as day-old porridge. Biggest man of God Phoebe had ever seen.

The Judge said, “Preacher, you seem to be the only parson about. Do you have words?”

The preacher stepped forward, prized a finger inside his sweat-yellowed church collar. The deputies shifted. One cocked his carbine. Most witnesses had their eyes on the poor souls about to end their days. The lady with the crimson lips stared at the Judge, stared hate at him as though he were a demon from hell.

Phoebe removed a silverine-cased Waltham pocket watch and clicked open its holding snap, the watch being another present from her grandpap when she’d graduated from the Cheyenne School. Her grandpap said a hanging fall sometimes broke a man’s neck. Other times, death took a full five minutes as the body strangled itself of its own accord. She would test his notion of time.

The preacher gazed toward heaven and said, “Heavenly Father, be kindly toward these unfortunates. Show them your mercy today and in the hereafter. Amen.”

The Judge said, “Brevity is godlike.” To the white prisoner, he said, “Do you have last words?”

The white man spat at the Judge. Without waiting for a signal, the deputies yanked on the rim-ropes, snatching the casks from beneath the prisoners. They awked; their eyes bulged. A muffled snap–not much more than the sound of a carpet-thrasher beating against a rug–issued from the Indian. His head twisted to one side at an unnatural angle; his tongue fell from his mouth. The white man stretched his toes toward the hardened earth, then kicked violently, thrashing like a drowning man trying to propel himself out of a roiling, white-frothed river. The Judge ducked beside the stanchion and took up his rifle. The white man’s leg whipping abated; he began to revolve like a slow spin-top. A rivulet of saliva dripped over his lower lip, caught on his chin and stretched out like a string of clear honey. When he finally stilled, his fists were balled in tight knots.

Phoebe kept her face to the west, her hand shielding her eyes, her eyes darting from the crimson lady to the lifeless, dangling bodies. The Judge signaled for Doc Joel. He climbed the steps to the white man and listened with his chest-breather. Nodded solemnly. A watery stain spread down the man’s balbriggans, darkening them wet to the knees. The doctor didn’t bother to listen to the Indian.

Phoebe had forgotten to start the timing.