The Hanging of Samuel Ash Read Online Free

The moon climbed into the sky, and the stars slid overhead like sequins. Out here in the desert, the clatter of the world fell away, and a man’s thoughts lined up one behind the other like soldiers.
    When the wigwag signal rose up in the darkness ahead, he coasted in. At first, he figured the engineer to have been right, that someone had covered the lights. But as he drew near, he could see a body hanging from the cantilever, and it had blocked the signal arm. Heat rose into his ears. He’d seen his share of death over the years, but it never came easy.
    At the crossing, he lifted the pilot wheels, pulled off the tracks, and backed down the slope of the road until the headlights lit up the body.
    â€œBastards,” he said.
    For a man with only one arm, getting a body down from that high up would be impossible. Maybe he could drive back for help, but that would take hours. In the meantime, the crossing would be unprotected, and the railroad hated nothing more than paying compensation for crossing fatalities.
    He climbed out, kicked his foot up on the bumper of the road-rail, and that’s when he spotted the cable wench again. Getting back in, he pulled up to the wigwag, tied off the rope, and hit the switch. The body turned in the moonlight as the wench lowered it inch by inch to the ground.
    When it had come to rest at Hook’s feet, he knelt for a closer look. He guessed it to be the body of a young man, no more than a boy, though in the darkness he couldn’t be certain.
    The rope had been knotted and then looped over the victim’s head. Whoever did it hadn’t bothered to secure the boy’s hands. A ligature mark cut deep into his neck, and the veins in his eyes had ruptured and bled. Without a fall to break his neck, he’d strangled in the slowest and most cruel way.
    â€œBastards,” Hook said again.
    He sat back on his heels. Sometimes his work pressed in like a weight, and then there would be the images flashing in his head for months to come.
    He searched the victim’s pockets, finding nothing, no identification, no indication of who he might be or what brought him to die in this place.
    The moonlight reflected from the signal’s red eye. The victim could be a hobo, he supposed, though he doubted it. Most boes hit the rails to escape their pasts, moving from place to place, broke and hungry most of the time, and of little consequence to anyone. On occasion there would be a knifing or a beating, some random act of violence over a stolen meal or a bottle of whiskey. But rarely did boes suffer anything as deliberate and time-consuming as a hanging.
    He looked for prints in the hard-packed road. He walked the tracks with the flashlight and found nothing that might reveal who had been there.
    The Artesia operator had been right about the anger generated in a strike. Given the absence of individual responsibility in a group, men’s capacity for violence increased. If strikers had been involved here, there would have been a number of them trampling about, a gang of fired-up and angry men, which would increase the chances of leaving behind some sort of clue. But he’d found nothing, not a cigarette butt, not a shoe print, not a hint as to anyone having been there.
    Suicide, while always a possibility, struck him as unlikely as well, given the proximity of the body to the cantilever, which was easily within arm’s length for the victim. What man, given this option, could have resisted reaching up and liberating himself from suffocation? This fellow was either dead or unconscious by the time he got up there.
    Hook looked at the time. The search had taken longer than he realized, and he needed to contact the New Mexico State Police, who complained if they didn’t get their hand in from the outset. They’d probably run prints on the chance that something would turn up in their files. If that failed, they’d write the whole thing off as just another dead