Authors: William W. Johnstone

A Good Day to Die (38 page)

BOOK: A Good Day to Die

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T
WENTY-SEVEN

They hanged Red Hand. No matter that he was dead, dead as they come. They hanged him anyway, as a kind of object lesson, stringing him up on a limb of the Hanging Tree.

Noose around the neck, he hung with moccasined feet head-high above the ground, swaying slightly, pendulum-like, according to the whim of the winds. The taut hempen rope creaked under his weight.

A three-man guard was posted to watch the body at night, for the Comanches were ever-bold, unlikely to be chastened by their recent stinging defeat.

The crows first pecked out Red Hand's eyes. The crows were always first on the scene after a hanging and the eyes were always the first to go. Later, bigger birds arrived. Buzzards, battening on to the corpse, tearing it apart bit by bit, bite by bite. It wasn't pretty. After a few days under the hot Texas sun, the aroma got pretty ripe.

Four days and three nights had passed since the riotously happy folk of Hangtown had hoisted the corpse. The night guards kept their distance, sitting around under a mesquite tree, smoking and passing around a bottle of redeye. A blurred horned moon floated in and out of high, thin, hazy clouds.

“He's gone to rot and ruin. Ought to take him down and bury him. It ain't Christian,” a guard said.

“Neither was he,” said another.

“What're they gonna do, leave him up till he's nothing but bones?”

“I reckon.”

The guards were being watched by hidden lurkers, nearby, but unseen. Arrows came whizzing out of the darkness, striking the guards, slaying them. They fell in a heap, bodies bristled with feathered shafts.

A small band of Comanches rode up Boot Hill, leading a riderless horse. A brave cut the hempen rope, dropping Red Hand's corpse into the arms of the others reaching up for him. Wrapping the body in a blanket, they threw it across the back of the horse, binding it in place.

The dead guards were plundered of weapons and personal belongings, their hair lifted by scalping knives. Their horses were taken away on a lead rope.

The braves fled north, taking Red Hand home. The remains would be buried in a secret place where the Texans would not find it.

In a camp hidden in the heart of Comancheria, two aging warriors sat around a low fire late at night.

“It is well,” Wahtonka claimed. “It was not fitting for the Texans to delight in the birds picking clean the bones of Red Hand.”

“He had a vision of great slaughter,” Laughing Bear remarked.

“The slaughter was of our braves, not the whites. The vision was false. It led Red Hand to his own doom.”

“Waugh! It is so.”

The fire burned very low. In its wan red glow, the faces of Wahtonka and Laughing Bear were like a pair of old ceremonial masks.

Laughing Bear threw some kindling on the fire. It flared up, burning hotter and brighter. All too soon it played out, the darkness drawing in, darker than before.

PINNACLE BOOKS are published by

Kensington Publishing Corp.
119 West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018

PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Following the death of William W. Johnstone, the Johnstone family is working with a carefully selected writer to organize and complete Mr. Johnstone's outlines and many unfinished manuscripts to create additional novels in all of his series like The Last Gunfighter, Mountain Man, and Eagles, among others. This novel was inspired by Mr. Johnstone's superb storytelling.

If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

PINNACLE BOOKS and the Pinnacle logo are Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

The WWJ steer head logo is a trademark of Kensington Publishing Corp.

ISBN: 978-0-7860-3035-4

Notes

See
Savage Texas,
the first volume in the series.

BOOK: A Good Day to Die

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