Like they say, “See America First.”
I thought again about Webb — what a coincidence it was, considering the size of Cedarville, for one of my friends and neighbors to have developed a philosophy so similar to my own. Or was it really such a coincidence at that? After all, there had to be thousands of fellows living quiet, unexciting lives in hundreds of other small towns from coast to coast. Could be, couldn’t it, that there were quite a few of us who spent our summer vacations doing all sorts of unconventional and dangerous things?
It was sure something to wonder about...
The Hanging Man
It was Sam McCullough who found the hanging man, down on the river bank behind his livery stable.
Straightaway he went looking for Ed Bozeman and me, being as we were the local sheriff’s deputies. Tule River didn’t have any full-time law officers back then, in the late 1890s; just volunteers like Boze and me to keep the peace, and a fat-bottomed sheriff who came through from the county seat two or three days a month to look things over and to stuff himself on pig’s knuckles at the Germany Café.
Time was just past sunup, on one of those frosty mornings Northern California gets in late November, and Sam found Boze already to work inside his mercantile. But they had to come fetch me out of my house, where I was just sitting down to breakfast. I never did open up my place of business — Miller’s Feed and Grain — until 8:30 of a weekday morning.
I had some trouble believing it when Sam first told about the hanging man. He said, “Well, how in hell do you think I felt.” He always has been an excitable sort and he was frothed up for fair just then. “I like to had a hemorrhage when I saw him hanging there on that black oak. Damnedest sight a man ever stumbled on.”
“You say he’s a stranger?”
“Stranger to me. Never seen him before.”
“You make sure he’s dead?”
Sam made a snorting noise. “I ain’t even going to answer that. You just come along and see for yourself.”
I got my coat, told my wife Ginny to ring up Doc Petersen on Mr. Bell’s invention, and then hustled out with Sam and Boze. It was mighty cold that morning; the sky was clear and brittle-looking, like blue-painted glass, and the sun had the look of a two-day-old egg yolk above the tule marshes east of the river. When we came in alongside the stable I saw that there was silvery frost all over the grass on the river bank. You could hear it crunch when you walked on it.
The hanging man had frost on him, too. He was strung up on a fat old oak between the stable and the river, opposite a high board fence that separated Sam’s property from Joel Pennywell’s fixit shop next door. Dressed mostly in black, he was — black denims, black boots, a black cutaway coat that had seen better days. He had black hair, too, long and kind of matted. And a black tongue pushed out at one corner of a black-mottled face. All that black was streaked in silver, and there was silver on the rope that stretched between his neck and the thick limb above. He was the damnedest sight a man ever stumbled on, all right. Frozen up there, silver and black, glistening in the cold sunlight, like something cast up from the Pit.
We stood looking at him for a time, not saying anything. There was a thin wind off the river and I could feel it prickling up the hair on my neck. But it didn’t stir that hanging man, nor any part of him or his clothing.
Boze cleared his throat, and he did it loud enough to make me jump. He asked me, “You know him, Carl?”
“No,” I said. “You?”
“No. Drifter, you think?”
“Got the look of one.”
Which he did. He’d been in his thirties, smallish, with a clean-shaven fox face and pointy ears. His clothes were shabby, shirt cuffs frayed, button missing off his cutaway coat. We got us a fair number of drifters in Tule River, up from San Francisco or over from the mining country after their luck and their money ran out — men looking for farm work or such other jobs as they could find. Or sometimes looking for trouble. Boze and I had caught one just two weeks before and locked him up for chicken stealing.
“What I want to know,” Sam said, “is what in the name of hell he’s doing here?”
Boze shrugged and rubbed at his bald spot, like he always does when he’s fuddled. He was the same age as me, thirty-four, but he’d been losing his hair for the past ten years. He said, “Appears he’s been hanging a while. When’d you close up last evening, Sam?”
“Six, like always.”
“Anybody come around afterwards?”
“No.”
“Could’ve happened any time after six, then. It’s kind of a lonely spot back here after dark. I reckon there’s not much chance anybody saw what happened.”
“Joel Pennywell, maybe,” I said. “He stays open late some nights.”
“We can ask him.”
Sam said, “But why’d anybody string him up like that?”
“Maybe he wasn’t strung up. Maybe he hung himself.”
“Suicide?”
“It’s been known to happen,” Boze said.
Doc Petersen showed up just then, and a couple of other townsfolk with him; word was starting to get around. Doc, who was sixty and dyspeptic, squinted up at the hanging man, grunted, and said, “Strangulation.”
“Doc?”
“Strangulation. Man strangled to death. You can see that from the way his tongue’s out. Neck’s not broken; you can see that too.”
“Does that mean he could’ve killed himself?”
“All it means,” Doc said, “is that he didn’t jump off a high branch or get jerked hard enough off a horse to break his neck.”
“Wasn’t a horse involved anyway,” I said. “There’d be shoe marks in the area; ground was soft enough last night, before the freeze. Boot marks here and there, but that’s all.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” Doc said. “All I know is, that gent up there died of strangulation. You want me to tell you anything else, you’ll have to cut him down first.”
Sam and Boze went to the stable to fetch a ladder. While they were gone I paced around some, to see if there was anything to find in the vicinity. And I did find something, about a dozen feet from the oak where the boot tracks were heaviest in the grass. It was a circlet of bronze, about three inches in diameter, and when I picked it up, I saw that it was one of those Presidential Medals the government used to issue at the Philadelphia Mint. On one side it had a likeness of Benjamin Harrison, along with his name and the date of his inauguration, 1889, and on the other were a tomahawk, a peace pipe, and a pair of clasped hands.
There weren’t many such medals in California; mostly they’d been supplied to Army officers in other parts of the West, who handed them out to Indians after peace treaties were signed. But this one struck a chord in my memory: I recollected having seen it or one like it some months back. The only thing was, I couldn’t quite remember where.
Before I could think any more on it, Boze and Sam came back with the ladder, a plank board, and a horse blanket. Neither of them seemed inclined to do the job at hand, so I climbed up myself and sawed through that half-frozen rope with my pocket knife. It wasn’t good work; my mouth was dry when it was done. When we had him down we covered him up and laid him on the plank. Then we carried him out to Doc’s wagon and took him to the Spencer Funeral Home.