Dead Man's Trail (9781101606957) Read Free

ridge. The black man with the big rifle lay belly-down in a pool of blood oozing out beneath his brown wool coat.
    The half-breed couldn’t tell if he was breathing.
    â€œEasy there,” he said, setting his rifle down and kneeling to grab one of the man’s shoulders gently and roll him onto his back. “Easy, partner.”
    The man didn’t hear him. His broad jaws, lightly covered in a gray-flecked beard, hung slack. Full pink lips were stretched slightly back from thick, square white teeth. His chocolate brown eyes stared sightlessly up past Yakima at the coldblue sky yawning to accept him.

Chapter 2
    â€œI’ll be seein’ y’all in hell soon, you yellow-livered sons o’ bitches! You’re killin’ an innocent man here!”
    Glendolene Mendenhour jerked her head up from a light doze at the man’s intoned warning that vaulted above the thudding of the stage horses and the squawking of the Concord coach’s thoroughbraces. She turned her head, elegantly adorned with a sleek marten-fur hat, toward the stage door on her right, and stared out past the drifting dust kicked up by the galloping team.
    They were just now entering Wolfville, in the Wyoming Territory, and in the broad main street stood a tall wooden platform that she knew to be a gallows. A crowd of men as well as women—and, for heaven’s sake, children!—was gathered around the death-dealing platform, as solemn as a church congregation. A few dogs milling with the crowd were the only ones making any noise, but suddenly above their barking sounded a wooden scrape and a man’s agonized scream.
    Close on the scream’s heels, the crowd expelled a loud, victorious roar, several men pumping their fists in the air. The cacophony was so sudden and loud that one of the dogs gave a yelp and ran, tail between its legs, toward a gap between two of the main street’s clapboard-sided business buildings. As the stage driver gave a bellow nearly equally as loud as the crowd’s roar, the stage swerved toward the left side of the street and slowed until it came to a stop in front of the Andrews & Meechum Stage Line office, which shared the low, shake-shingled building with the Wells Fargo office.
    Glendolene only glanced at the building out the stage’s left door before looking out the right door window again, blinking against the dust that caught up to the stage in thick waves rife with the stench of ground horse manure.
    She couldn’t see much of the gallows because of the crowd milling around it, but as the shotgun messenger opened the door and she hiked her wool skirts up beneath her long brown wolf-fur coat to step down to the wooden platform he’d placed in the dusty street for her and the coach’s three other passengers, the crowd parted slightly. She stepped to one side, squinting against the coppery late-afternoon sunshine that only partly warmed the chill December air, and found her stomach tightening.
    She was unaware of the grimace twisting her face as she stared at the gallows, beneath the open trapdoor of which a man dangled at the end of a rope. No, not dangled. He appeared to be
dancing
there beneath the gallows, almost as though he were performing one of the old German dance steps Glendolene had frequently witnessed in a dance hall in her hometown of Belle Fourche, in the Dakota Territory—the old folk dances where the dancers lift their knees high, nearly to their chests, and thrust them down again while crossing their arms on their chests and nodding their heads.
    Only this man who danced from the rope beneath the gallows did not have his arms crossed on his chest. They were tied behind his back. He wore no black hood, as Glendolene thought she’d heard that condemned men wore when they were executed in such a fashion. This man’s long, stringy light brown hair danced about his head, the bangs sliding across his eyes. He stretched his lips back from his