The Hanging at Leadville / Firefall Read online

  Other two-in-one Westerns from bestselling author

  CAMERON JUDD

  Confederate Gold

  Dead Man’s Gold

  Devil Wire

  Brazos

  The Quest of Brady Kenton

  Kenton’s Challenge

  Timber Creek

  Renegade Lawmen

  Snow Sky

  Corrigan

  Available from St. Martin’s Paperbacks

  THE HANGING AT LEADVILLE / FIREWALL

  TWO CLASSIC WESTERNS—IN ONE BRAND - NEW VOLUME

  Cameron Judd

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  THE HANGING AT LEADVILLE

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Epilogue

  FIREFALL

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  DEATH IN MINING SHAFT

  “Lundy!” Gunnison yelled.

  No answer.

  “Lundy?” His call was softer this time. He had reached the top of the shaft. Pausing for a moment, he gathered his resolve and pushed the trapdoor open.

  The toe of a boot caught him on the side of the head, jarring him loose from the ladder and sending him down. The trapdoor closed again. He fell, then by pure luck his hands caught the knotted end of the rope, slowing his fall at the last possible instant. But the thing he struck at the bottom was stiff and reeking. He heard a yell go echoing up the shaft and realized it was his own.

  Gunnison had expected ugliness, but this burned and eyeless corpse, a cut rope tailing from its rat-chewed neck, was foul beyond description. Panicked, he turned and bolted out of pure instinct into the darkness…

  THE HANGING AT LEADVILLE

  Cameron Judd

  For Richard Curtis: agent, educator, and encourager

  THE HANGING AT LEADVILLE

  Prologue

  The music started just after sunset, rising up from a single voice that was as high as the surrounding Colorado peaks and as pure as the air had been before the smelters were built. A throng of men, women, and children stood and sat in the clearing before the makeshift stage and let themselves fall under the musical spell of the guitar-strumming singer. He was a rotund man with a shock of thick, strawy hair and the appropriately melodic name of Mickey Scarborough.

  Entertainment was abundant in the town of Leadville, but most of it was not of the quality of the Western Warblemaster, as Scarborough coyly billed himself. Two weeks ago, the first notice of Scarborough’s impending performance had been published in the Leadville newspapers, and from Malta to Stray Horse Gulch, the people of the mountains had marked their calendars not to miss his show. Mickey Scarborough was reputed to be a fine performer, with a peculiar quavering tenor voice and a charisma to rival that of his more famous peer, Eddie Foy.

  Even so, it was not solely the quality of his show that accounted for his appeal. Almost equally attractive was a certain well-publicized element of mystery surrounding Scarborough’s unusual voice. His throat, the story had it, had been injured at some time or another, giving him a voice with an eerie, effortless vibrato and a remarkably high range. The mystery involved the nature of the injury, and Scarborough, with his showman’s instinct, played the enigma as skillfully as he did his guitar. He delighted in stating in his advance publicity that a wagon wheel had crushed his neck while he was a boy or that a fire had once seared his vocal cords or that a careless hunter’s stray bullet had grazed his voice box—then recanting each tale from the stage, leaving his listeners intrigued and speculating about what had really happened.

  Whatever the truth about the origin of Mickey Scarborough’s unusual voice, there was one thing that was no mystery: It was a remarkably beautiful one, particularly when used to render the slow and sentimental ballads that Scarborough was famous for. When he sang of lonely orphans and doomed lovers and dying soldiers, even the staunchest and most rugged men would cry like babies. It was said that Ulysses S. Grant once grew so emotional upon hearing Scarborough’s rendition of “Barbara Allen” that he had to leave the hall for fear of shaming himself.

  Mickey Scarborough’s Leadville performance, people would say for years thereafter, was the finest he ever gave. Those who had seen his earlier shows elsewhere claimed that his voice on that 1879 night was purer and higher than ever before, and far more emotion-filled. And that seemed particularly fitting, for after the Leadville performance, Scarborough never gave another. He died later than same night, leaving behind a legacy of excellent showmanship and a new mystery even greater than that of his warbling voice.

  He collapsed on the stage, near the end of his show and at the close of a number so dramatic that some initially believed his trembling fall and astounding shout to be part of the performance. It happened like this: As the last chilling tenor note echoed away toward the mountain, Scarborough seemed to freeze in place, staring into the audience before him. His eyes grew wide and his face pale; then his hand rose, pointing into the crowd. He called a name loudly, twice, then fell to his knees, still pointing. A moment later, he gripped his chest, made a convulsive movement, and pitched straight forward, crushing his lute-shaped guitar to splinters beneath his heavy body.

  For a few moments, the crowd stared in stunned silence, then with a collective cry surged forward and onto the stage, surrounding the fallen man. Someone rolled Scarborough onto his back; his eyes stared at the dark sky, and he whispered once more the name he had called, then dropped into unconsciousness. A local woman of means pushed through the crowd and to his side, examined him, then ordered that he be brought to her home for whatever care she could give him. A group of men carried Scarborough to a bed in her home, but her efforts came to nothing, for less than an hour later the Western Warblemaster was dead.

  Scarborough’s passing rocked all of Leadville, and not just because it was so shockingly dramatic in itself. Even more amazing was the name he had called. Witnesses to the collapse pounded each other with questions. “Did he say what I think he did?” “Yes,” the answer would come, “
not only called the name, but pointed out the very man attached to it there in the crowd, right there among us!” “Did you see who he pointed to?” “No, no I didn’t—but surely someone did.” “Scarborough must have seen the fellow himself, in the flesh, and gotten scared so badly by the sight that it killed him.”

  And so the rumors started, sweeping first through Leadville, then through the surrounding countryside. The stage drivers carried the story with them into Fairplay, and from there on, it ran unfettered across Colorado, growing in the telling, stirring old feelings and furies, generating an explosive atmosphere in the town of Leadville that grew ever more volatile.

  Mickey Scarborough could not have played out a more appropriately dramatic death scene had he been able to script it in advance. Nor could he have roused more awe and speculation if the name he had shouted in those moments before his passing had been that of Satan himself.

  And so it all began. It was 1879, and the summer was edging toward fall.

  Chapter 1

  He traveled in milling crowds, between rows of board-and-batten buildings, through relentless stenches and din. Above stretched a starry Colorado sky close enough to touch, below spread boot-sucking mud, and behind crept a one-armed man who had been Alex M. Gunnison’s shadow for the last fifteen minutes.

  Quickening his step, the young man pulled his sodden feet out of the mud and stepped onto the boardwalk where he cut around a pair of stumbling drunks and into the closest alley. He crossed a clay-slick miner passed out with his hand around his bottle, meandered through a maze of alleys, backlots, and sheds, then entered the middle of State Street, coming out beside a saloon band parked at the front door of its sponsoring establishment.

  The band was drunk; it sometimes seemed half the people in this town were drunk, and proud of it. The four musicians were putting an old marching-band tune through a musical Inquisition, dismembering it in their brass torture chambers before spitting its remains into the night. Gunnison glanced behind him. His follower was gone.

  Relieved, Gunnison began walking rapidly down the State Street boardwalk. But he had forgotten the haphazard design of this town’s walks and tripped when the low one he was on abruptly butted up against one a foot higher. It sent him sprawling. Immediately a man rushed to him, gave soothing words and a hand, and then was gone, taking with him Gunnison’s wallet. Not that it mattered much. Gunnison had been wise enough to empty the cash from it last night in the dungeon of a hotel he had slept in, and now his fold of bills was stashed in his sock.

  All this is Brady Kenton’s fault, Gunnison thought bitterly as he brushed himself off. It was Kenton who had insisted on coming to Leadville for reasons unclarified; he who had walked happily down its dismal saloon-lined streets, exulting in the very smells and clamor that seemed so repelling to Gunnison; he who had vanished within two hours of their arrival yesterday afternoon, leaving his partner stranded like an abandoned orphan.

  It wasn’t the first time Kenton had done this to his companion. In Dodge City the previous summer, he had vanished for three days—difficult to do in a town that size, but Kenton had pulled it off. The prior spring in San Antonio he had given Gunnison the slip for a day. At least there had been plenty to enjoy in Dodge and San Antonio while searching him out. Gunnison’s abandonments there had been mere temporary assignments to limbo. This one, though, was beginning to feel more like damnation to hell’s outskirts.

  Clumping glumly down the boardwalk, Gunnison had to scold himself for his overblown feelings. He knew he was not being fair to either Kenton or Leadville. Kenton didn’t vanish simply to torment him. He did it because it was his way, and those ways, Gunnison was convinced, were largely beyond even Kenton’s control. His modes of thinking and acting were written into his inimitable nature, as inerasable as an inscription on a gravestone, and there was nothing for Gunnison to do but live with them.

  Kenton, who always preferred being addressed simply by his surname, was perhaps the most unusual man Alex Gunnison had ever known. Thoroughly Texan, sometimes brawlish, and uncomfortable without a Colt on his hip or beneath his coat, Kenton looked far more like a cattleman than like the journalistic chronicler he was. The look wasn’t completely deceptive. Kenton had done some ranching in his day—that and a little of almost everything else. The man was an ongoing surprise to his younger friend and professional partner. Almost weekly, Gunnison discovered more about him and his wide-ranging experiences, and with every discovery held the man in a little more awe.

  It was as a journalist that Gunnison knew Kenton best and admired him most. Wherever the chronicling team’s travels took them, Kenton always managed to sniff his way, like a keen-nosed hound, into the heart of every place and time he chose to preserve in words and woodcuts. Too often, unfortunately, he sniffed his way into trouble as well, which was one of the reasons Gunnison’s publisher father—Kenton’s superior, if he could be said to have one—had assigned his son to travel and work with the unpredictable journalist.

  Gunnison stopped and looked around. Where could Kenton be? Probably somewhere digesting the essence of this brawling Rocky Mountain silver camp ten thousand feet above the level of the distant ocean. Eventually, Gunnison knew, he would find Kenton, most likely with his pad filled with notes and sketch outlines that in finished form would enhance the pages of Gunnison’s Illustrated American and prove once more that Brady Pleasant Kenton was the best of America’s traveling artist-reporters.

  Kenton was the idol of his counterparts at Frank Leslie’s Illustrated, Harper’s Weekly, and the like. Gunnison realized that many of them would gladly have traded places with him and become the one privileged to be Kenton’s assistant and student—the second and more official capacity in which Gunnison traveled with him.

  Winding through the crowd, Gunnison looked for Kenton’s familiar form in the mix. Someone bumped him from the side; an artificial flowery smell rose into his nostrils, riding parasitically on the shoulders of a fleshy organic stench. An expanse of paint and powder slid sidewise across his line of vision; a yellow-toothed smile beamed.

  “Well, ain’t you the pretty one!” the powdered face said, exuding liquored breath. “Want to have a fine evening with Moll, my fine young dandy?”

  “No, ma’am, no thank you.” Gunnison backed away. Her perfume was overpowering, its putrid sweetness like rotting vegetables.

  “Come with sweet Moll. You’ll never forget it if you do.”

  “I’m sure I wouldn’t, but no thank you all the same,” Gunnison said. He tried to sidestep her, and her smile vanished. She stuck out her foot to make him stumble, but he dodged her. She swore at him, then swished on down the boardwalk trailing her smell like a wake. Within five seconds, she was accosting a new potential customer, this one inebriated enough to respond.

  There, on down the street…Gunnison was sure he had seen Kenton. A tall, broad figure in the door of a gambling hall, there for a second and then gone….

  Pushing through the crowd on the boardwalk proved frustratingly slow, so Gunnison descended to the muddy street again and there slogged a sticky path toward the gambling hall. He went to the door and looked around its packed interior. A haze of smoke he could have swum through dimmed the atmosphere, but a dozen hanging lamps pierced it sufficiently to show that Kenton was not there. The man Gunnison had seen was just one more of the thousands of miners and would-be miners who populated this town of unending flux.

  Disappointed, Gunnison turned and started down the boardwalk again, passing an alley. Immediately a rough hand grabbed his collar. He yelled in surprise and was dragged back off the boardwalk into the alley where his head bumped hard against the gambling-house wall and he stared suddenly into eyes as dark and threatening as muzzle holes.

  The eyes belonged to the one-armed man Gunnison thought he had evaded. He leaned close, the single hand gripping Gunnison’s collar with the strength of two.

  “Clean out your pockets! Clean ’em out now!” He punctuated the order with another firm
rap of his victim’s head against the wall, making sparks jump in his eyes. The man’s breath was heavy with gin and the residue of opium smoke.

  “I have nothing,” Gunnison said.

  “You’re lying!” Another firm rap, more sparks inside his skull—but also a burst of anger. Gunnison remembered self-defense lessons forced on him in the past, with Kenton the eager teacher and Gunnison the reluctant student. Now he was glad for them. He swung his arm and knocked the grasping hand free, then drove up his knee, the man’s groin the target. Gunnison missed, but his knee hit him at the base of his slightly overhanging belly. The fleshy mass absorbed the blow like a pillow.

  Still, it hurt enough to make the man fall back. Gunnison dug beneath his vest for the small knife sheathed there. The three-inch blade glittered in the light from the street. Gunnison chuckled to see a flash of fear in the man’s face. This one-armed devil would run from him now.