More of them. Whit turned that phrase over even as the wagon rolled to its stop. Not fear of one accused killer. Fear of a whole people dressed up conveniently in one woman's rope and a sheriff's name sitting right there at the center of it steering the talk same as a man steers cattle. Not with a shout, just a quiet nudge in the direction he already wanted them going.
Wagon wheels ground to a stop at the edge of the crowd and he sat there a moment. Hands tight on the reins doing the thing a careful man does before he acts. He looked. A woman hung from that rope. Not some frail thing.
A giant of a woman shoulders wide as a door frame. Her whole frame built like something meant to carry weight not to be strung up under it. Bare feet kicking, weakening. Throat wrapped in rope burn already blooming dark beneath the noose. Her eyes even now, even choking, blazed with something the crowd screaming couldn't touch.
Not fear. He'd seen fear plenty. This wasn't that. The whole square reeked of trampled dust and sweat and something sourer underneath it. The particular smell of a crowd that had talked itself into cruelty and was feeding now on its own noise.
Each shout building on the last like kindling catching. Children peered out from behind their mothers' skirts, too young yet to understand exactly what they were being taught to cheer for, old enough that the shape of today would likely outlast every other memory of this town they'd carry into their own old age. A dog slunk low along the boardwalk's edge, tail tucked tight, sensing in the air something the people standing upright had long since stopped being able to smell in themselves. The old gallows beam hadn't been used in 3 years. Whit knew that.
Everybody in the county knew that. The last hanging here having been an actual murderer, tried proper, sentenced proper. The whole town solemn about it in a way this crowd wasn't bothering to pretend that today. No judge stood anywhere in sight now. No paper with a signature on it.
Just a rope and a crowd, and a woman too big and too foreign, and too inconvenient for anybody here to bother asking a single hard question before stringing her up. That absence, no judge, no paper, no pause told Whit everything he needed to know about how much law actually had to do with what was happening in this square today. "Hang her!" A woman's voice, shrill, delighted, somewhere near the front. "Let the monster die." The deputy holding the rope's slack end was grinning. Grinning like there'd be pie after.
That was the detail that turned Whit's stomach worse than the hanging itself. A man carrying out justice doesn't grin like a boy at a county fair. That grin belonged to a man enjoying himself, which meant this wasn't justice. This was a show somebody had written the script for. Whit sat there.