The Whipping Boy Read Free

hanging, despite the fact that he’d been across the street when it happened. Jake was pragmatic, hardheaded, and indifferent to how a man died who had shot a couple of his pals in the head while they were asleep. Having sold hardware in the Indian and Oklahoma territories for twenty-some years, Jake took a dim view of outlaws and lawmen, criminals and courts—and he devoted as little thought to any of them as possible.
    The “big office,” where the salesmen were waiting, was on the east side of the building, and their view didn’t include the gallows. All they could see out the window was the Dekker wagon yard, which was packed with hacks and farm wagons of every description. When the rain started after noon, Jake wondered why the lot didn’t begin to clear out, but he wondered more about why Mr. Dekker was late for the sales meeting—which never had happened before in his memory. He could see Mr. Dekker’s plain Studebaker wagon and his son Ernest’s fancy team parked in the crowd of other rigs, making him suspect that the two of them were in the old man’s office, across the display room on the other side of the building. But punctual sales meetings were a sacred event, and he couldn’t imagine why the old man would be so late if he was already here, unless he was having an extremely serious talk with his son.
    For years, Jake had hoped that Ernest Dekker would find employment elsewhere. If his father got sick or feeble and Ernest took over, the place would surely go to hell. Ernest was not a hardware man. He was a gambler and socialite who dressed sharp and loafed around town with the straw-hat-and-palm-fan crowd, bird hunting, fishing, playing cards, watching horse races, chasing skirts, dabbling in investment schemes, talking real estate. But none of his interests had anything to do with hardware. Dekker Wholesale sold more than twenty-seven thousand separate items, including heavy hardware, sporting goods, enamelware and tinware, pumps, house and commercial furnishings, mechanics’ tools, and farm implements, and Ernest didn’t know a compression cock from a croquet set. He had never worked at the front desk or in the stockroom, nor had he gone out on the road. Exactly what he did on his occasional visits to the store Jake didn’t know. Lately he had been hanging around Charles McMurphy, the treasurer, so apparently he helped with the figures, although Jake couldn’t see Ernest stooping to such a lowly occupation as adding and subtracting. As vice president he pulled down a far higher salary than any of the salesmen, but he’d never to Jake’s knowledge sold a stick of merchandise.
    Waiting for the meeting to start, Jake daydreamed that the old man was finally in there giving Ernest what he’d long deserved, an invitation to get a job somewhere else. Shrewd and plain-dealing with most people, Mr. Dekker had always been soft on Ernest, probably because he was his only living son. Another son had died at the age of ten, and his one daughter had married and moved away years before. They had little in common: the father was a rough-and-ready commercial pioneer, while his son was of the leisured class. The old excuse for Ernest was that he had wild oats to sow, but now that he was near forty, that had worn thin.
    The white sky had turned black, the office was dark, and Jake noticed that two or three wagons had torn out of the yard in an awful big hurry. He assumed it was just the weather. The waiting teams were restive, rattling the traces and whinnying as if they didn’t particularly want to be pulling home in a storm. Peculiar noises were coming from the direction of the gallows, but none of the salesmen walked out front to see what was going on. The old man had been known to fire a salesman for going to the privy during one of these meetings, so they all stuck tight in the darkening room, chewing, waiting, wondering.
    Bob MacGinnis was