Shadow Falls: Badlands Read Online Free PDF Page B

contrasting sharply with the skin of his face, which had the color and look of an apples’ fleshy interior.
    “Stand up,” Overton told the Stranger before opening the cell door. Putting down his plate of rotten food, the Stranger obliged—but as the bearded gentleman in the black suit proceeded to remove a measuring string from his pocket, it became clear the purpose he served here.
    “Just about six feet tall,” the hangman said, reading the markings of his string dangled from the crown of the Stranger’s head to his feet. He examined the Stranger up close, eyeing the prisoner’s build. He grabbed the Stranger’s shoulders and squeezed.
    “Solid, I’d say about two hundred pounds, give or take.” The bearded hangman made some notes on a small pad of paper.
    The Stranger thought the number sounded low and would have argued the point if he’d known his actual weight. What he did know was that if the Hangman’s eyeball calculation was too light and the rope too short, he’d drop from the gallows floor and bounce up and down like a yo-yo, indeed slowly strangling to death.
    “Coffin?” the hangman asked. “For an extra five bucks?”
    Overton shook his head without taking a moment’s hesitation. “I say we leave ‘im strung up for the birds as a warnin’ to any others comin’ into my town fixin’ to be horse thieves and murd’rers.”
    Great , the Stranger thought. Overton was sparing no effort to make an example of him. Of all the towns to steal a horse, he had to pick this one.
    The hangman charged Overton a dollar for the rope, which the Sheriff gladly paid, given it was an investment toward his re-election. When the hangman’s grim business was over, he left with a touch of his hat brim in Overton’s direction—but barely a glance toward the Stranger, the man whose body he just examined. As the Stranger sat back on his bunk, feeling a rancid stew churn in his belly, he stared out at the dry Texas sky through the bars of his window; it had been a sky he’d carelessly stared into many times as a free man. Today he cherished every last moment of daylight he could see, marveling the shades of blue he’d never taken the time to notice before.
    As the sun disappeared below the horizon, the Stranger could hear the unmistakable sounds of nightly revelry drifting down the street from the town’s saloons. He figured he was the topic of conversation while Overton was in there buying drinks, slapping backs, and reminding everyone to show up bright and early to get a good view of the gallows.
    The Stranger even imagined Kentuck would be cashing in Cherokee Sue’s toothless gratitude that night for her chance to spit in the face of a murderer.
    If they only knew , the Stranger mused. If they only knew .
    Inasmuch as he fought it—not wanting to cede one precious moment of consciousness—the Stranger fell asleep, his body finally surrendering to the exhaustion. His eyes closed, bringing with them a fractured sense of peace.
    On his wooden slat bunk he tossed and turned once more, his bothered sleep tormented again by spirits of darkness that had returned with a concussive thump in the night. Of all the nightmares that had come in the last few years that leeched into his subconscious mind, this one was different.
    “Brother Thomas, please do something!” the woman shrieked at him, her eyes boring into his as the firelight danced across her frail features. Her mouth had curled in agonizing panic. The Stranger recoiled from her hands, pawing at his coat. The sounds—screams for mercy, screams of unbridled fear—rose around him as they pounded against the locked door and the fire licked greedily at their heels.
    There was no mistaking the crucifix on the wall, even as fire reclaimed it as ash. This was a church all right, but not the burning house of God from his previous nightmares. That one—a recollection of a memory seared into his mind—he had seen with his own eyes. This new vision, a similarly