The Long High Noon (20 page)

That event, taking place as it did in the more cramped venue of the Evangelical Church, was packed as closely as Cripplehorn's tent, with all the pews taken and spectators standing three deep in back. The dead man was known to most who attended, and popular. He'd supplemented his stipend from the tribal council working in the local sawmill and supported a Cherokee wife and two small children.

As the town had no jail, Randy and Frank were placed in custody in a room on the second floor of the hotel. The shots had drawn a crowd from the tent, who grasped the situation immediately and seized and disarmed them both; there were just too many of them to shoot and make an escape, so they held off. The city marshal, his deputies, and Walter Red Hawk's colleagues in the Lighthorse Police guarded the men in shifts while shouts reached them from the Rusty Bucket, which was the place of choice whenever informal hanging required discussion.

“They swung Spanish Bob in the church bell tower a couple of years back,” the marshal informed his prisoners. “I'm not just sure any of those Cherokees with badges would place themselves between you two and a lynch mob with practical experience.”

The peace officer's name was Foster. He wore a gray suit and town shoes and his hair was prematurely white. Strangers mistook him for a banker until they got close enough to study his brown seamed face and empty eyes. He carried a Schofield revolver on his belt and a squat English Bulldog in a Wes Hardin rig under his left shoulder. In five years, the first two as a deputy, he'd shot eleven men and been acquitted of murder in one case where the evidence was doubtful.

Frank, who like Randy was stiff-limbed and swollen-faced from mishandling by the crowd, asked Foster what had become of Cripplehorn.

“He ran off with his cash box when the shooting started. I and my men were too busy keeping the pair of you from your appointment in church to look for him, and the Indian police didn't care. My thinking is he hid somewhere out in the trees till the eastbound came along and hooked it after it pulled out. Personally I don't give snake shit. If folks are dumb enough to shell out three days' wages to see two men try to kill each other when they can see it for free anywhere in the territory, it isn't my responsibility.”

“What's to be done with us?” Randy asked.

“Assuming you survive the night we're putting you on the train to Fort Smith in the morning. I and my deputies will ride with you as far as Buffalo, over in the Cherokee Nation, where we'll hand you off to the federals. They'll see you the rest of the way.” Foster stood with one foot on a stool upholstered in petit-point embroidered fabric and one arm resting on his thigh, watching them with his empty eyes. “If I were you I wouldn't mess with Parker's marshals. Half of them had shinplasters out on them before they signed on and the other half is just plain ornery. They don't want to shoot you, because then they'll have to pay for the burial out of their own pockets, but that won't slow them down if they find you're not worth the trouble of delivery. I'd wouldn't count on them being as easygoing as Walter Red Hawk. I've ridden with them and I know.”

*   *   *

It was a long night in their lives, with voices murmuring down in the street and the flicker of torches through the window throwing crawling shadows on the ceiling. The half-breed with the shotgun was posted in their room, the orange point of his cigarette moving now and again and glowing more fiercely when he drew on it from his chair in the corner with a view of the window. His tall partner sat outside the door with a chair borrowed from another room and the back tilted and propped under the knob, where anyone would have to go through him to get in.

Randy said to the breed, “Just be sure that street sweeper ain't pointed too general when the ball starts.”

“Shut up.”

Frank lay for a while in silence, stretched out on the bed with his hands behind his head, watching the muted fireworks. One of his ankles was shackled to the bed's iron frame. “Where do folks get so many torches, I wonder, and so fast? You reckon this is such a normal thing they keep 'em in a nice dry place, pitched and ready?”

The guard told him to shut up too.

“Damnedest place I ever did see,” said Randy, seated on the edge of the mattress with his feet on the floor, one of them chained like Frank's to his side of the bed. “They got law, but it don't raise a finger to stop the show, only when we took it outside. You reckon Cripplehorn had a license and didn't tell us about it?”

After another little stretch of quiet, the breed spoke. “Walter had it in his mind to stop you in the tent the minute you faced off. He was on his way there when he spotted you two trying to spoil everybody's day.”

“How you know that?” Randy asked.

“Hell, he talked about it for weeks. I don't reckon anybody thought he'd act on it. Them Cherokees like to hear their tongues rattle like a gourd. This is the first time one actually done what he said he would.”

“He should of kept his voice down,” Frank said. “You don't shout at two men with guns when all you got is one.”

Randy said, “I like a nice polite arrest. I don't mind if it involves me waking up with a knot on my head from some hoglegs swung by somebody knows how to swing it. I sure don't like to be squawked at like I'm married to a she-bear.”

“Go to sleep, Randy. That'd have to be one desperate she-bear.”

The half-Chickasaw deputy told them both to shut up.

 

TWENTY-SIX

Justice is man's invention. The universe makes no such promise.

A sudden downpour, not uncommon in November in that region, doused the dudgeon of the mob, which broke up into individuals sprinting for cover. Although it had re-formed the next day at the train station, the presence of Marshal Foster, all four of his deputies, and as many Lighthorse Police, every man carrying a shotgun, kept things benign.

Frank and Randy were seated in facing seats, each shackled to a deputy. A fresh, green horse apple splatted against a window and the train began its journey through that feral country, where rocks pushed up like yellow-brown knuckles through the soil and half-naked trees clawed holes in the overcast.

In Fort Smith, Arkansas, where Judge Isaac Parker exercised federal jurisdiction over the Nations, the prosecutor and the attorney appointed to defend the prisoners debated whether the defendants should be tried separately (Parker overruled this), whether Walter Red Hawk had overstepped himself in attempting to arrest non-Indians (Parker allowed this argument to proceed), and whether two men can both be charged with the same homicide.

The celebrated “Hanging Judge” (twenty-five men convicted by that January of 1883, twenty-four hanged, one escaped) was intrigued by this argument. He'd presided over the court for seven years, and although the burden of his docket and awesome responsibility had streaked his hair and beard with white at age forty-four, a novel suggestion always brought him upright in his chair.

A partial transcript of the discussion between prosecutor Clayton, defense attorney MacElroy, and Judge Parker follows:

CLAYTON:
Your honor, the coroner's inquest found both wounds fatal.

M
ac
ELROY:
I submit, your honor, that whereas one bullet pierced the deceased's heart and the other punctured a lung, the first would have caused death immediately.

PARKER:
Counselor, are you suggesting that one of your clients is more guilty than the other?

M
ac
ELROY:
That would be unethical. I'm attempting to establish grounds for separate trials.

PARKER:
I've already ruled on that. In any case, this court has no way of determining who fired which bullet. They come identical from the factory and are unrecognizable upon impact.

M
ac
ELROY:
Your honor—

PARKER:
Pursue another line, Counselor.

Whenever the trial recessed, Frank and Randy were returned, each man's wrists and ankles chained together, to their cells in the brick jail, which was built around a three-tiered steel cage, the latest in penal design with a gear-driven mechanism that allowed the guards to open or shut an entire line of cells just by throwing a lever. This made a hellish clang that had been known to break a man. The two men occupied different levels, with no way of communicating short of shouting, and the guards discouraged such breeches of the peace.

The remaining bone of contention—keenly observed by the reporters assigned from across the continent to cover the trial—was whether Walter Red Hawk, in interceding in an affair between white men, had exceeded his jurisdiction, which was confined to Indians by federal law. In his instructions to the jury, Parker left no question regarding his opinion on the matter: Notwithstanding the deceased's error in judgment, the willful slaying of a tribal officer and a ward of the U.S. government was a federal offense. After deliberating two hours, the panel of twelve returned a verdict of guilty. The defendants were sentenced to hang.

“Frankly, I wish it were from someone else's gallows,” said Parker, raising his gavel. “We grow murderers enough here at home without importing more.”

*   *   *

But the world wouldn't quit turning.

Things had changed since the days when Parker suffered no interference from Washington. In the early years of his tenure, no appeal existed between him and the president—or God Almighty, some said, because showing mercy to murderers cost votes, particularly in the wild territories; but the Judge had enemies in the Congress. They argued that no man's influence was greater than both houses combined, and pushed through a bill placing the infamous Eleventh District firmly in the appeals system that applied to other courts.

The eastern newspapers applauded the decision, while privately regretting the loss of sensational accounts of wholesale executions on the great Fort Smith scaffold. Such headlines as
SIX MEN “JERKED TO JESUS” IN A HEARTBEAT
did more for circulation than war with Canada.

And so those stalwart public servants Flapdoodle, Pettifog, and Straddler succeeded in gelding the old bull at last.

Seeing the advantage in publicity—for Abraham Cripplehorns are rather more common among attorneys than most other places—the lawyer who'd been appointed to represent Frank and Randy reopened their file. His name was F.S.T. MacElroy: “Feisty” to his fellow law students at William and Mary, and he had earned the nickname through more than just his initials. Feisty hired a jeweler.

The jeweler, Otto Weismann, wore a skullcap and a loupe hinged to his wire spectacles. He used his scales to weigh the two bullets that had been removed from Walter Red Hawk's corpse, which the coroner in Cimarron had placed in separate envelopes labeled
HEART
and
LUNG
. The slugs were both intact, although misshapen by passage through the flesh. The difference in weight was almost infinitesimal, but inarguable: The bullet that had penetrated the left lung—a long, agonizing death when left on its own—was a .45. The other, which had stopped the heart upon contact, causing instant death, was a .44. Weismann signed an affidavit swearing to his conclusions and it was sent to the court of appeals.

The newspapers reported the event, to keep alive a story they'd missed covering, but overlooking its significance: It was the birth of modern ballistic science.

Frank Farmer had reason to be thankful he'd replaced his lost .44 New Model Remington revolver with a .45, cracked grips or no. That tiny difference in calibers spared him the gallows.

Armed with this information, F.S.T. MacElroy wrote to Chester Alan Arthur, who at the time was stinging from public accusations about his wardheeling past and needed a reputation as a progressive. He commuted Frank's sentence to life.

But the lawyer wasn't done. He filed a petition asking for a second trial for his clients based on his earlier argument that the slain peace officer had lacked the authority to arrest them. The petition was granted, but for unexplained reasons only Randy's conviction was set aside. The attorney's protests were ignored. Bail was denied. Randy languished in his cell until April 1885, when a new jury heard his case. Once again, Parker presided. His hair and whiskers now were nearly all white.

“Mr. Blood, did you say in the presence of the defendant that you tried to talk Walter Red Hawk out of attempting to restrain Frank Farmer and Randolph Locke from shooting each other?” asked lawyer MacElroy.

“No.” Deputy Marshal Billy Blood, the half-Chickasaw from Cimarron, sat in the witness chair with his feet flat on the floor and his plate star shining on his blue tunic. “What I said was I didn't believe him when he said he would.”

“Objection.”

“On what grounds, Mr. Clayton?” Parker asked the prosecutor.

“Leading the witness.”

“Sustained.”

“I'll rephrase the question. Why didn't you believe him, Mr. Blood?”

“Cherokees are all talk and no action. Everybody knows that.”

“Objection! Conclusion on the part of the witness.”

“Sustained. Mr. Blood, old antagonisms between the tribes are of no interest to this court.”

The defense attorney repeated the question. Billy Blood fidgeted, then said:

“Walter always went by the book, and the book says Indian officers can't touch white men. They're for U.S. marshals and deputized city policemen.”

After the summations, Parker addressed the jury, reiterating what he'd said in the first trial about the killing of tribal officers and wards of the government.

Whether because his iron rule had been challenged by the Congress or for other reasons known only to the jurors, the Judge was less convincing this time. Three days of deliberation ended in deadlock. A mistrial was declared and Randy was returned to custody to await a third trial. In December of the same year he rose before the judge of the Third District Court in Fort Scott, Kansas, and learned he'd been acquitted on grounds of self-defense.