Hang the Man High!

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Chub, who had set himself up as carpenter and wheelwright in town after a big sorrel out at the Lazy Anchor had crushed him against the corral fence, looked up from the pins he was whittling for the cracked tree when the shadow darkened his doorway. He saw that it was the white-faced man who had come in on the stage two days before with more trunks than any man should carry around with himself.

“Somethin’?” Chub asked, politely enough. He had heard that this new one had an accent like nothing ever heard in Chambers before.

“You are carpenter?” the man said in a thick foreign accent. His face was broad and white, with heavy bones, and he had a straight, humorless mouth. Chub noticed that the pale hands were thick and that the man carried himself very straight.

“They keep telling me I’m a carpenter, friend. What would you want?”

“I want wooden woman.”

That was when Chub dropped the pin he was working on and gave himself a shallow cut across the back of the thumb.

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