The Gallows Gang by I. J. Parnham Read Free Book Online

the area where the boulder had separated the dying fire and the prisoners, they stopped.
    All was quiet, with no sign of people or horses or movement.
    Worse, the cage wasn’t there.
     
    ‘Whoever flees from the terror,’ The Preacher shouted, ‘will fall into a pit, Jeremiah forty-eight, verse forty-four.’
    Nathaniel gripped hold of the sides of the cage as they slid down into the canyon, peering ahead into the blackness beyond. His memory of the canyon in the daylight was of a long slope leading to a distant river. So far the cage had slid down that slope on its base.
    But Nathaniel didn’t reckon their luck in getting a smooth ride would hold out for much longer. They were speeding up and the cage was rattling so loudly it sounded as if could collapse or tip over at any moment.
    With so many bars now broken that event was sure to crush them.
    That thought led Nathaniel to look at the bar that secured him to The Preacher. His heart leapt when he saw that it was broken six feet off the base of the cage.
    So he raised his arm and the manacles, dragging The Preacher’s clutched hands with him, aiming to tip the manacles over the top. He got the chain to within two feet of the top but then The Preacher yanked his arm downwards.
    ‘Remove your scourge from me,’ he demanded. ‘I am overcome by the blow of your hand, Psalm thirty-nine , verse ten.’
    ‘Talk sense or be quiet,’ Nathaniel shouted.
    He grabbed The Preacher’s hands with both of his own, then twisted him round and dragged him to his feet. He thrust his hands high. The Preacher continued to shout biblical comments at him, but he ignored his protests and with one last lunge he pushed the manacles over the top of the bar.
    But as they swung free the cage rocked back and forth, sending them rolling into the bars on the other side and making Nathaniel wish they were still being held securely.
    Then the inevitable happened. The sliding cagehit a rock in its path, which caused it to tip over. Nathaniel felt himself thrown forward to leave the base and he hurtled head first into the darkness.
    He waved his arms, frantically searching for something to hold on to but he’d left the cage and he couldn’t even see the ground.
    All around him was blackness. Wind buffeted his face as he fell, his tumbling motion letting him catch a glimpse of the falling cage above and The Preacher falling with him.
    Then the bright sheen of something large and foreboding below came into view, appearing to rush towards him at a rapidly accelerating pace.
     
    After a brief debate Shackleton and Elwood left Barney’s horse, then separated to come at the fire and boulder from two different directions. Shackleton chose the side on which the cage had stood.
    When he’d moved close enough to the canyon to let the fire slip out of his view he slowed to let his night vision adjust. After pacing his horse forward for another minute he saw the signs of the fight that had taken place here.
    Bodies lay beside the boulder and there was a hole in the ground near the edge of the canyon. Deep gouges in the earth and short lengths of bar and torn metal suggested an explosion had taken place; perhaps that had been the noise Elwood had heard.
    He dismounted and paced close to the edge to look down into the void. From the scraping indentations  near the edge he judged that the cage had tipped over the side.
    Whether the prisoners were still inside, he didn’t know, but he guessed that one of them hadn’t been.
    Then he checked on the guards, finding there were four of them, and that they had all been shot repeatedly.
    He was aware of Elwood coming closer. After checking the last body, he looked up.
    ‘That accounts for the four guards,’ he said, ‘but not one of them is Hiram Deeds. I reckon that means some, perhaps all, of the prisoners got away. I wonder what happened, though, to …’
    Shackleton trailed off when he saw Elwood’s grim expression, then he followed him round the