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Page 7 of 10
The garrison fort sat about a half mile out in the prairie southeast of town and served as a stock pen during round up season, and as the hanging place when a hanging crime had occurred. It had been a long time since anyone had been hung there, because when anyone committed a crime that required hanging they were generally searched out in the night and killed by gunfire as they slept.
People got killed by gunfire in Baker for one of two reasons: either because they had committed a crime or because they had crossed a Le Gris. The last man to be killed in Baker was Carl Kasemann, a whiskey trader who raped an Oglala girl, a common enough trespass but that she was the daughter of Bull Bear and if the Le Gris' had not killed him a bigger fight would have come. Wrongdoing must be punished. Elisha Quinn had committed the second kind of trespass in town one night by calling Jean Baptiste Le Gris the Younger a thief, and he was shot in the back for it as he left the saloon. It was not so much that the Le Gris's were inherently unjust people, nothing in their genetic make up predisposed them to evil. It was only that there were so many of them that to hurt one was suicide. That deterrent in itself had made the Le Gris, over three generations, more and more used to getting their way and less and less tolerant of disagreement. How they had become so many in a place of so few was the real mystery of the Le Gris, and one that only old Jean Baptiste had the truest answer to.
Annie rode past the gallows on the dusty wagon road. Crime and punishment, the military law. She had never understood her brother's attitude towards the hangings.
"Without hanging, Annie, there's nothing for the Indians to fear. And if that's true, then there's nothing to preserve order," Elisha had said.
His manner was always condescending, reasonable, magnanimous, as if he alone understood the inner clockwork of the universe. As Annie rode past the platform she felt the black rock in her breast pocket cold through her cotton shirt. She gripped it. There was plenty to fear, always plenty to fear. The town dogs came out barking at her in ragged v-shaped pack, their teeth snarling. They circled Spider and growled gutteral threats. Spider raised his pace and they fanned out and ran in behind him. The lead dog, yellow with a black ruff raised on its back, got too close and Spider nicked him with a well-aimed kick that sent him tumbling. The rest of the dogs, in response, turned on each other viciously, separated, and then sauntered back to the shade behind the butcher's house, satisfied by the excitement.
There wasn't anybody on Commerce St. and Annie rode all the way down to Sam Cocker's store. She left Spider at the watering trough. Sitting on the porch of Sam's store, like stuffed men, were Lyle Boudreaux, the muleskinner, Harlow Le Gris, the postmaster, and Indian Dave, a tall Arapaho who'd been Colonel Baker's scout in the war against the Cheyenne and was now Sam's shop help. Annie liked Lyle, and Indian Dave, but Harlow Le Gris she did not. He had thin red lips and light brown eyes with a hungry wanting look in them that made Annie nervous. He was soft looking, the only man in those parts who had never had to work an honest day on account of his appointment as postmaster. Harlow was only twenty years old, and he already knew everything that happened in the county before it happened. Annie was not sure it wasn't because he opened the mail before he gave it out. Some people said he was simple, but Annie did not believe it. Annie walked up the three steps to the porch feeling Harlow's light brown eyes on her.
"Miss Quinn," Lyle said.
Lyle was a short strong man with a wild beard that came right down to his round belly. Indian Dave stood up. He was over six and a half feet tall and wore long grey braids. It seemed to take a long while for him to get to his full height.
"Damn legs hardly work anymore," he said.
"Miss Annie Quinn," Harlow said. "Livin' with Ms. Noreen Quinn, ennit?"
He smiled and his little yellow rat teeth glistened with spit.
"Is Sam in back?" she said.
"Sure is," Lyle said. "Spect he's re-stacking something on account of not wanting to listen to us. Tell em I'll make Harlow shut up if he wants to sit down."
Annie smiled.
"I'll tell him."
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