Dead Man's Trail (9781101606957) Read Free Page A

teeth, and they shone in a hard white line against the dark brown of his sunburned face as his head jerked and he continued to dance the bizarre old folk dance that Glendolene remembered from her childhood.
    He danced with such vigor that one of his boots slipped down his right ankle; when he kicked that leg again the boot dropped into the street beneath him. The crowd had fallen nearly silent again as the men, women, and children stood in rapt attention as the man kicked and twisted at the end of the rope. Glendolene could hear the creaking of the straining hemp. A towheaded boy of maybe six or seven broke away from the crowd, ran toward the hanging man, and stooped to pluck the boot off the street. The boy turned, smiling broadly, and held the trophy proudly above his head.
    A man whom Glendolene recognized as Sheriff Dave Neumiller dashed to the boy and, holding a sawed-off shotgun straight up in one hand, grabbed the boot from the boy with the other before tossing the boot back down beneath where the hanging man’s kicks were losing their vigor, and brusquely shoved the boy back into the crowd.
    Glendolene’s knees had turned to warm mud. Now as she swung around to walk around the stage to the Snowy Range Hotel just beyond it, a warm wave washed over her, and she dropped to her knees in the street. She heard her dress tear beneath the wolf-fur coat.
    She’d seen men dead before. Dead men aplenty. Even a wagonload of dead Indian women and Indian children killed by the army back in Dakota, but somehow knowing that her husband was responsible not only for this death but for the celebration around it made her sick to her stomach.
    â€œOh, God, no,” she heard herself rasp, both sickened by the spectacle and embarrassed by her reaction to it.
    â€œMrs. Mendenhour!” said the shotgun messenger, reaching down to wrap his hand around her arm. He was a stocky, ginger-bearded man dressed in a dusty brown vest and striped trousers, with a grimy cream duster sliding around his boot tops.
    â€œI’m all right, Mr. Coble. I’m—”
    â€œGlendolene!”
    The familiar voice jerked her head up. Her husband, the prosecutor of Big Horn County, was striding toward her from the crowd still milling around the hanged man. Sheriff Neumiller was behind him, looking customarily smug and holding his shotgun and smoking a fat cigar, canting his head a little to one side to inspect the prosecutor’s wife slouched in the dirt. Lee Mendenhour dropped to his knees beside her and placed his hand on her back. He, too, was smoking a cigar and held it now in his beringed left hand.
    â€œAre you all right? Damn, you don’t look good. The ride in from the ranch too rough for you?”
    Glendolene looked at her husband—he was a cinnamon-bearded, handsome man in his late twenties, and his tailor-made suit beneath his long, natty elk-hide coat with a rabbit-fur collar fit his slender, well-proportioned frame perfectly. His beaver slouch hat was tipped at a rakish angle, opposite the wing of thick auburn hair slanting over his right brown eye.
    â€œI’m fine, Lee,” Glendolene said, letting him help her stand. “Just stumbled over my own clumsy feet, I guess.” She glanced down at her elk-skin boots. “I haven’t worn these boots yet this winter, and . . .”
    â€œSure?”
    â€œYes, of course I’m sure.” Glendolene glanced past the administering eyes of her young, confident, accomplished husband on whose breath she detected a few fingers of celebratory brandy, to the hanged man who had now stopped dancing the macabre dance at the end of the rope. The man’s body hung slack now, neck elongated, chin dipped toward his chest. He turned ever so gently this way and that, and his chin slid across his chest as he moved.
    The crowd was slowly disbursing around him, and a low hum of conversation sounded along with the occasional screech of one of the