Texas Bloodshed

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Scratch Morton peered up at the gallows and said, “I’d just as soon go somewheres else, Bo. This place surely does give me the fantods.”

“You don’t have anything to worry about,” Bo Creel told his old friend, “if you haven’t done anything to give Judge Parker cause to order you hanged.”

Scratch frowned and shook his head. “I dunno. They don’t call that fella the Hangin’ Judge for no reason. He can come up with cause if he wants to.”

Bo laughed and said, “Come on. We don’t have any business with the judge, hanging or otherwise.”

The gallows they’d been looking at was no ordinary affair. It stood off to one side of the big, red-brick federal courthouse in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and had eight trapdoors built into it. When huge crowds gathered on the broad courthouse lawn to watch convicted criminals put to death, it was quite a spectacle at times. It wasn’t that unusual to see eight men kicking out their lives at once at the end of those hang ropes.

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