Ride With the Devil Read Free Page A

incident seemed so often to lead to another, and another, becoming a chain of events that would inevitably draw him into yet one more confrontation. Whenever that happened, Hawke would leave that town and press on to see what was around the bend, over the next hill, or just beyond the horizon.
    Now, ahead of him, like irregular clumps in the land, a handful of ripsawed, windblown, sun-dried buildings rose from the prairie. The little town offered Hawke the prospect of sleeping in a real bed for the night and eating food that wasn’t camp-cooked. He could have something to drink besides alkali water and trail coffee. Hawke thought that he might even find a woman he could enjoy having a conversation with.
    He stood in the stirrups for a moment, just to stretch away his saddle ache, then urged his horse on. That was when he saw the vultures.
    They were circling too warily, too cautiously, for it to be a small animal. Only one thing could cause this kind of display.
    Hawke had seen them gather like this many times before, over the battlefields of Antietam, Gettysburg, and Chickamauga. He’d seen them since the war as well, during his wanderings through the West. Slapping his legs against the side of his horse, he hurried it on for the next mile until he saw what was attracting the carrion’s attention. Hanging from the branch of a cottonwood tree was the body of a man, twisting slowly at the end of the rope. A sign was pinned to his chest.
     
    THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS TO
    OUTLAWS IN SALCEDO.
    DRIFTER, MOVE ON.
    WE DON’T WANT YOU IN
    OUR TOWN.
    LEAVE THIS BODY HANGING.
     
    Hawke pulled the paper off the dead man’s chest. It was signed, “Salcedo Regulators Brigade.”
    Looking back up at the body, Hawke stared at it for a long moment. He had seen many bodies in his time; stabbed, shot, ripped apart by cannon fire, even some who had burned to death. People sometimes talked about dying peacefully, but Hawke had seen little of that.
    There were few deaths more gruesome than hanging, and the expression of terror and pain remaining in the face of the corpse was evidence of that. The victim’s eyes were open and bulging, his lips were pursed, his tongue protruding, his neck stretched, and his head twisted to one side. He was wearing a shirt without a collar, frayed cuffs, and missing a button.
    “Well, I’ll tell you what, friend,” Hawke said aloud. “I don’t give a damn what the sign says, I don’t intend to let you hang here.”
    Pulling his knife, Hawke stood in his stirrups, then reached up to cut through the rope just above the man’s neck. As he cut the man free, he maneuvered the body so it fell across the front saddle of his horse. Rigor mortis had already set in, making it difficult to get him draped over the saddle, but he managed to do it.

    A small, hand-painted sign on the outer edge of the town read:
    SALCEDO
    OBEY OUR LAWS

    No railroad served the town, and its single street was dotted liberally with horse apples. The first building Hawke saw was the Roman Catholic church. It was large and substantial, constructed of earth-colored stucco with a red clay-tile roof.He had no way of knowing it, but this church had occupied the same spot for nearly a hundred years before the town itself came into existence. The church anchored the east side of a street that ran some one hundred yards to the west, where the street was anchored by St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, a white frame building with a red door, a green shake roof, and a towering steeple.
    At either end of the street, as well as in the middle, planks were laid from one side to the other to allow people to cross when the street was filled with mud.
    The buildings of the little town were as washed out and flyblown up close as they had been from some distance. The first structure Hawke rode by was a blacksmith’s shop.

    SARGE’S BLACKSMITH SHOP
    IRONWORK DONE
    TREE STUMPS BLASTED
     
    It was at the east end of town, and a tall and muscular black man was bent