Some of the Mormon women trilled and fluttered in disgust, but the Mexican cowboy smiled thinly and tightened the rope around the man's unshaven neck, adjusting the knot back and forth until it sat correctly behind one ear. The young bandit's Adam's apple bobbed up and down as he tried to swallow, and two bright red spots stood out on his unusually feminine cheekbones. Miguel wiped flecks of the boy's warm saliva from his face with the back of one hand.
Sofia, standing not far away, regarded the scene and Miguel with cold, frosty detachment. No one else had seen or knew of the world-class whipping he had given her after she had saved his life. What had startled Miguel was not so much that she'd disobeyed him but that she didn't react to the punishment at all. No tears, no pleading, nothing at all. He might as well have been whipping a couch or a particularly obdurate mule.
Miguel wasn't sure which had frightened him more, Sofia's lack of reaction or the fact that he'd lost control and beat her so much harder for it. And that after she had saved his life. She had, by all accounts, been murderously effective. The Mormons were not even aware she was behind them until well after most of the shooting stopped. She had killed seven men and one woman, a camp whore who had been advancing on Ben Randall from behind with a knife. The engineer had not known until he was told by young Orin, who saw the woman's throat suddenly explode for no immediately obvious reason. Sofia was changing in ways Miguel could not fathom, changing into something he might not care for, and he seemed to be powerless to do anything about it.
This morning, for instance, she was determined to have whatever additional measure of revenge she could take from the hanging. Miguel was of two minds about that. It was an ugly thing to kill a man in cold blood, even for justice, and he would wish to spare her what she was soon to witness. On the other hand, perhaps it might bring some relief if she could see that sometimes bad men did meet a bad end. Perhaps she could have some faith that the agents who had murdered the rest of their family might one day also swing from a rope or die in a pool of their own blood. At any rate, she was here and he would not deny her in spite of her disobedience last night.
Miguel returned his attention to the task at hand.
"You must be a very brave man to be able to spit like that when you are so close to death," he said. "Me? In your shoes I would have a very dry mouth."
"Cocksucker," the agent muttered.
Miguel nudged his horse away from the younger man and pulled lightly at the reins to reposition himself alongside the next road agent. There were three of them, hands tied behind their backs as they perched on their saddles beneath the spreading arms of an elm tree that sat on a small rise overlooking the town. The other two were older than the boy, one a hulking, bearded menace to humanity, forever scowling at Miguel as if through the pure intensity of his loathing he might somehow effect a change in his situation. Whereas the boy and the other surviving agent, a thin, grim-faced streak of misery and tribulation, sat on their horses with their elbows and wrists bound behind them, this black-bearded monster was chained from wrist to shoulder, so fiercely had he resisted the arrangements for his hanging.
"I am going to put the noose over your head now," Miguel told him. "I can understand that you are thinking of resisting with whatever violence you might yet be capable of, but if you trouble me with this, I shall put your eye out with my thumb. Do you believe me?"
The man's small, porcine eyes, almost lost within the folds of his fat face twinkled with malign intent, but he looked at Miguel and saw the simple truth of the vaquero's threat. He nodded once and bent his head forward for the rope.
The third agent was some sort of gang boss. Not the lead agent-Miguel had blown his head off in the Hy Top Club-but a senior lieutenant of sorts. The other two had deferred to him after their capture, and he had tried to negotiate a settlement with the Mormons by which they might retain their lives. Thankfully, the Mormons weren't having any of it.
"Anything to say?" Miguel asked.
The gang boss responded with a sickly smirk.
"Texas will make my reckoning with you, Mexico. And all your family."
He grinned darkly in the direction of Sofia, and Miguel had to restrain the urge to put a knife into his guts.
"Let us pray," Cooper Aronson said, loudly as he opened his Bible with a bandaged hand. Big Ben, Adam, and Willem D'Age knelt in front of him, their heads bowed.
The youngest of the agents broke then. The pimpled boy cried out, "I can't believe you're gonna to do this to us without even a trial. You people are fuckin' hypocrites."
His eyes darted left and right, looking for a sympathetic face in the small group of witnesses, but mostly what he found was scorn and even now, at this late stage, fear. Miguel saw him lock eyes with Miss Gray, the girl he had stayed behind to rescue after young Adam had taken the others to freedom. She was shivering and attempting to break free of his gaze, but he held her with a sort of dreadful hypnotic power.
"You tell 'em, Sally. You tell I didn't mean no harm. It was all just a little fun, weren't it… I didn't hurt you none. You even told me you liked it; you said you wanted it that way."
The poor girl turned a bright shade of red before blanching nearly white and falling into the woman next to her, all but fainting away. Sofia scowled fiercely at the condemned man and hurried over to Miss Gray to see what assistance she might lend. Miguel suspected that if his daughter still had the Remington at hand, the one he had taken from her after last night's violence, she would have put a round through the man's heart.
We need to get through this, he thought.
He prodded his horse forward again and rode up next to the youngest agent.
He spoke in a low voice but with great power. "If I were you, I would be looking to make this as painless a leave-taking as possible, senor. If I were you, I would shut my mouth now, unless I wanted to die with my neck stretched and my insides hanging out over my belt, swinging in the air for the crows to pick."
He casually drew the knife with which he had killed two men the previous evening, stropped it slowly on his jeans, and gave the road agent his stone face.
Tears were leaking from the young man's eyes, and his lips were quivering with the effort of not crying.
"Why don't you shut up and die like a man?" growled the bearded monster beside him.
"Why don't you show me?" the boy spit, and lashed out with his boot, catching the other agent's horse in the flank.
It leapt forward with a shriek. The rope securing the giant to the tree went taut, his massive legs shot forward as he jerked back, and the animal sprang away. Every branch in the massive old elm seemed to shake as his weight pulled the rope tight. Miguel grimaced at the sound of his neck snapping, and a few of the women screamed and turned away in horror. The substantial corpse twitched and kicked a few times before finding its rhythm, a long, swinging pendulum ride.
"Goddamn you, Billy," said the gang boss before clamming up again.
Miguel shook his head sadly, although not too sadly. "Another murder to account for when you reach the other side, boy."
"A murder?" the young man wailed. "But you were fixing to do the exact same thing to him!"
Aronson, who had stopped in shock, resumed his prayers. A baptism for the dead, he'd told Miguel it was, which seemed to have things quite ass-ended around to the cowboy, but he was not one to interfere in the worship rights of others. Only the sound of the young man's whimpering and his urine dribbling down his pants legs into the dirt could be heard as Aronson spoke.
"Willem D'Age, having been commissioned of Jesus Christ, I baptize you, for and in behalf of this man we shall call John, who is just now dead, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, amen."