Ned climbed onto the gallows first. Despite the gruesome nature of what was about to unravel, they’d both got their dried clothes back for the hanging so that everyone’s modesty remained intact. A strange concept. If you were willing to watch a man die, you shouldn’t have qualms about any other aspects of his physicality.
Cole hesitated, his stomach squeezed so tightly it might solidify in this cramped form, but then Ned looked back at him, and courage once again flowed in his veins, helping him climb onto the platform with Rory’s assistance.
He might’ve hated Ned O’Leary, but this man knew him, and at least in their final moments, neither of them would be alone. Ned gave a single nod when Rory wordlessly asked him if he wanted his head covered. While the sheriff spoke to the townsfolk, Rory put a jute sack over Ned’s head and brought over the noose with a somber expression.
Cole couldn’t focus on what the sheriff was saying, his attention drawn to the way Ned’s fingers twitched behind his back. They were going pale from the rope digging into flesh too tightly.
“You?”
Cole blinked, staring back at Rory, who held up the sack with a question in his eyes, but Cole shook his head and joined Ned on the trapdoor, which creaked the moment he put his weight on it, dipping ever so slightly. If he was to die, he’d do so with eyes wide open, staring into the sky that was about to open high above and cry for his soul. Perhaps he’d get to catch a final drop on his tongue.
The people gathered to witness his death meant nothing, their voices like the roar of a waterfall—loud yet insignificant, so he focused on the trees dotting the edge of the ravine and tried to smell them through the insistent odors of human activity. When Rory slung the noose on him, it fell to his collarbones, heavy as if it were made of steel, but he kept his shoulders straight even as it tightened to hug his neck in preparation for that final squeeze.
Next to him, Ned already had his strapped properly, and the jute covering his features kept moving back and forth, sucked in and pushed out by frantic breathing, as if he were choking already. Cole’s blood boiled with the need to see his face one last time, and as Cole stared at the fabric, he imagined that Ned was looking back at him. That he also wished they’d been put in a single cell after all. That they’d taken the time to talk things through, since it would change nothing at this point.
But it was too late.
Fear kicked in again, but when Cole swallowed the anguish blocking his throat like a blob of cold, slimy mud, it wasn't the nearing loss of his life that he regretted. As he stood on the gallows with the rope resting around his neck like a tight collar, he mourned for the life he had not lived. For the young man whose dreams had been crushed, and who didn't get the happy ending he’d wanted, in the Californian sun, with Ned O'Leary at his side.
The real Ned might be a bastard, but he was still here, and as the crowd became noisier, he leaned in, his head pulsing with the sense of impending doom. “We’re about to die. Tell me one more truth before it happens. Please.”
Ned inhaled so deeply the sack hugged his lips. "I never loved anyone but you." His voice broke at the end, and so did Cole’s heart.
How dare he. Why now? Why not tell Cole what he wanted to know?
“I hate—” he stalled as those words left his throat, scraping it bloody, because things like revenge no longer mattered, and with only the trapdoor under Cole’s feet keeping him from leaving this world, his true feelings became painfully clear for once. “I hate that I never stopped loving you, Neddie.”
Ned’s chest rose and fell in a fast sequence, and Cole imagined the old Ned standing alongside him. The one with a smoothly shaven face and the scent of rosemary in his hair. The one who’d held him all night. The one who’d gone against his principles and shot an innocent girl for him. Because regardless of what he’d said to spite Ned, he remembered that terrible night in the barn and the way Ned had carried him off to safety. There had to be some kind of redemption in that.
A howl louder than any wolf could have made resonated somewhere above their heads. Distorted by a kind of echo, it buzzed in Cole’s ears, like an insect trying to drill its way in.
It was as if Beaver Springs had suddenly emptied, but the onlookers were still there, their gazes searching for the origin of the cry coming from somewhere beyond the archway marking the town’s borders. The howls wouldn’t stop, as if a pack of ungodly wolves was about to charge in through the narrow throat of the ravine, but then Cole felt it.
The gallows shook.
Ned turned his head from side to side as the trembling intensified, but Rory didn’t pay him any attention, approaching the sheriff in fast strides.
“Sir? What’s going on—” The words died on his lips, and he put his hand on his forehead as if he couldn’t believe his eyes.
With the noose holding him in place, Cole wouldn’t have known what transpired if the thundering hoof beats and mooing hadn’t told him about the approaching horde before the first bull stormed past the wooden archway.
Time slowed down, stretching like taffy.
The crowd of spectators stayed still for a moment too long before creating a stampede of their own, some attempting to climb the rock wall across from the gallows while others ran blindly ahead in search of sanctuary from the herd descending on the town like locusts.
But once the cows entered the ravine, there would be no stopping them.
One of the deep howling sounds Cole had noticed earlier resonated above them, and despite the noose around his neck, he turned just in time to see a horseman, dressed in furs, and with a wolf skull obscuring his face. He made the sound again by howling into a large horn.
“It’s the Wolfman!” Someone yelled, but a saner person pulled them along the road, running from the frantic herd.
“What’s going on?” Ned uttered, but Cole couldn’t bring himself to answer, choking on shocked joy.
He opened his mouth to call out to Lars—the only person who could be hiding behind the mask—but before any sound could have left his mouth, the animals had reached the gallows, which sank forward as the deluge of cattle crashed into it from one side. The floor under Cole’s feet was no longer straight and instead bowed toward the swarming lumps of meat and horn, trembling as if it were about to burst into a cloud of splinters and nails.
The smell of dung and sweat blew into his face with dust rising from under dozens of hooves, but his instincts remained sharp as ever, and he narrowly avoided a horn in his calf by raising his leg high above the herd, which boiled under him like evaporating stew.
Unable to withstand the pressure it hadn’t been made for, the unstable platform shook, threatening to collapse. The trapdoor dropped from under Cole’s feet without warning, and only the quick reflexes of a sharpshooter saved him from choking.
He managed to land one foot on the edge of the opening, but Ned didn’t have such luck. While the change in the angle of the platform didn’t send him to his death immediately, wood escaped from under his feet, and a choked gurgling reached Cole with the force of its desperation.
Lars descended the steep hill on one side of the ravine, howling through the horn as another cow smashed into the side of the gallows, tilting them farther. Cole froze when Lars produced a gun and shot just above his head, aiming for the noose as if he’d ever been able to hit anything smaller than a man’s torso. At this rate, instead of saving Cole from hanging, Lars would plant a bullet in his forehead. But Cole’s anger ceased to matter when the sheriff spun around, about to pack a whole round in the assailant despite balancing on the edge of the trembling platform.