Naughty Marietta. Nan Ryan

Lacey opened his eyes, gripped the arms of his chair and anxiously wheeled himself across the room and around behind his massive mahogany desk. Grimacing in misery, he opened the bottom desk drawer and took out the old Colt revolver he had carried as a young man. Perspiration dotting his pale, drawn face, he calmly loaded the weapon, raised it and placed the cold steel barrel directly against his right temple.

      His finger on the trigger, he glanced across the room. His watery eyes fell on the poster advertising Marietta’s starring role in her most recent opera. Maxwell Lacey swallowed hard and blinked to clear his vision. Focusing on the diva, he gritted his teeth against the worsening pain and slowly lowered the revolver.

      Shaking his gray head, he laid the weapon atop his desk. He folded his age-spotted hands together, placed them beneath his quivering chin and sat quietly for a long moment, staring fixedly at the poster. Lost in the mists of memory, he was tormented with anguish and regret.

      He thought back over the years to when he was young and the mansion was filled with children’s sweet voices and his wife’s throaty laughter. Now the big house was silent and lonely, had been for a long, long time. All were dead: his son, Jacob, his daughter, Charlotte, his devoted wife, Annabelle.

      Maxwell stared at the poster as tears rolled down his wrinkled cheeks. And he came to a decision. He would attempt to right some of the terrible wrong he had done.

      Suddenly, for the first time in days, the pain eased.

      Maxwell Lacey sat in the shadowy library of his opulent home all night, patiently waiting for the summer dawn. Come morning, he sent a servant to summon his attorney to the mansion.

      Upon his arrival, Marcus Weathers was immediately shown into the library. Puzzled, the attorney stepped inside and greeted his client.

      Turning his wheelchair around and without so much as a “good morning,” Maxwell instructed Weathers, “Draw up my last will and testament!”

      The lawyer frowned, his eyebrows knitting. “You already have a will, Maxwell. Don’t you recall, you made it several years ago.”

      “I’m changing it, so get out your pen and start writing,” Maxwell bellowed.

      “Why the urgency?” asked Weathers as he took a seat facing Maxwell’s desk. “Has something happened? Are you…?”

      “Yes,” Maxwell Lacey interrupted. “Doc LeDette was here last evening. The prognosis is not good. I haven’t long to live and I want to…I have decided that I am going to…. Damnation! What is that infernal hammering?”

      The steady, rhythmic hammering just outside the steel-barred window elicited no curiosity from the darkly bearded prisoner whose cold blue eyes stared unblinkingly at the ceiling.

      In the shadowy cell at the rear of the Galveston city jail, Confederate war veteran and condemned prisoner Cole Heflin lay on his bunk with his hands folded beneath his dark head and his long legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles.

      Cole Heflin knew what the hammering meant. A gallows was being constructed. A hanging was to take place at noon. And he, Cole Heflin, was the man who would be hanged. He had been charged with burning Hadleyville—a Northern munitions-supply station—during the war. The Northern press had dubbed him “the man who burned Hadleyville.” Secretary of War Stanton had declared the act a crime against the Union. A crime for which he would hang.

      Cole did not fear death. He had faced it many times in the bloody four-year struggle in which most of his friends had perished.

      Reflecting on his thirty-four years on earth as he calmly awaited the fast-approaching hour of his death, Cole realized with little regret that he would be leaving no one behind to mourn his passing. His mother and father had long since gone to their final reward and the pretty young woman who had promised to be his faithful sweetheart and wait for him until he came home from the war hadn’t. She had waited only a few short months before running away with a wealthy New Orleans cotton broker.

      There would be no tears shed over his passing, including his own. But he did have regrets and remorse that he had not kept his pledge to Keller Longley.

      Cole’s eyes clouded as his thoughts turned back to that hot summer day in 1864 when his best friend, Keller Longley, died in his arms on the battlefield atop Lookout Mountain.

      When the war began, Cole and Keller—friends since their Texas childhood—made a solemn vow. Should one survive and the other die, the survivor would take care of his deceased comrade’s family.

      Cole swallowed hard as he recalled that terrible moment just before Keller died. “You’ll look after Ma and little Leslie, won’t you, Cole?” Keller had managed to say weakly, clutching Cole’s shirtfront as his lifeblood flowed out of him.

      “You know I will,” Cole assured him as he cradled Keller in his arms and cried like a baby.

      Now Cole ground his teeth in frustration. He hadn’t kept his promise to Keller. He had failed his friend, hadn’t been able to look after Keller’s widowed mother and baby sister. Cole closed his eyes and grimaced, a muscle clenching in his lean jaw.

      Before the war Cole had been a young, struggling attorney. But he couldn’t practice law when the war ended. A fugitive with a price on his head, he’d had to lie low. Had to constantly keep on the move in an effort to elude the occupation troops and avoid being caught and hanged for burning Hadleyville.

      Finally, in desperation, he had attempted a bank robbery to get money to help Keller’s mother and sister. He had been caught. An alert captain on the provost marshall’s staff had matched the captured felon’s face to the old federal death warrant.

      What would have been five years in Huntsville State Prison for the failed bank robbery became a federal death sentence. He would hang for the burning of Hadleyville and the destitute Longley women would be left to struggle on alone.

      The hammer of the ancient clock in the town square struck the hour. The jailer’s booming voice drew the reclining prisoner from his painful reverie.

      “It’s time, Heflin,” the jailer said as the heavy cell door swung open and he held out a pair of silver handcuffs.

      Cole slowly turned his head, nodded and agilely rolled up and off his bunk. Rising to his full, imposing height of six foot two inches, he extended his wrists and said, “Crowd forming?”

      “A big one,” said the burly jailer with a broad smile.

      “Well, let’s go give them what they came here for,” said Cole calmly.

      Flanked by two armed federal marshals, Cole Heflin walked out of the Galveston City Jail and into the sun-splashed square where the newly built gallows dominated the cloudless blue skyline.

      “Here he comes!” The excited declaration swiftly swept through the gathering as the throng parted to let the prisoner through.

      “The bastard’s getting what he deserves!” exclaimed a well-dressed, transplanted Easterner who spat contemptuously at him as Cole passed.

      The expression on Cole’s face never changed.

      “I don’t care what he’s done, he’s too handsome to die!” shouted a brazen young woman and, elbowing her way through the crowd, she stepped right up to Cole and threw her arms around his neck, kissing him soundly.

      A mixture of whistles and boos rose from the shocked spectators. Other less forward young ladies threw bouquets at the tall, dark Southerner, while a majority of the men, Confederate veterans who considered Cole a hero, shouted admiringly, “Hurrah for the brave Johnny Reb! The man who burned Hadleyville!”

      Cole climbed the gallows’ steps to the wooden platform where a new rope hung down in an ominous loop from the sturdy overhead beam. There stood an old robed padre and the hangman, dressed all in black.

      The jailer cautiously uncuffed Cole. Cole gave him no trouble. Instead, he stepped into place directly below the looped lariat and atop the trapdoor.