The Hanging at Leadville / Firefall Read online

  Now only the darkness enclosed him, and it was growing darker by the moment. The clouds had spread over almost all of the sky by now. There was an electric feeling in the air, the rumbling of thunder. Back in Gomorrah there was light, warmth, liquor…but Peabody couldn’t return to it.

  Strangely, though, he wasn’t sure he really wanted to go back. He’d actually managed to frighten himself with that little outburst of his. He’d been angry when he spoke, and he was able to admit, at least to himself in this dark isolation, that when his emotions were aroused he was capable of spouting all sorts of nonsense, spiced up with religious-sounding words.

  His prophecy of the destruction of Gomorrah wasn’t the first one of its sort he’d voiced in dire circumstances. He’d once declared in a moment of public rage that the city of Denver would be washed away by a flood. Everyone had laughed, Denver had of course survived, and he’d made himself look like a fool.

  Now he’d done it again. Fire from heaven! Why had he said such a thing?

  Feeling weary and lonely and desirous of liquor, he wondered how far ahead Rankin and his companions were. As much as he despised Rankin, just now the company of anyone at all would be pleasant. The dark mountain road was fearsome, rousing in him boyish kinds of passing-the-grave-yard terrors, making the wind whisper threats and danger in his ears. And he knew Rankin sometimes carried a flask.

  “Mr. Rankin?” he called to the darkness ahead. “It’s Peabody…can you hear me?”

  No one replied to him.

  He walked forward, moving faster. “Mr. Rankin! It’s me, Peabody! I’d like to ask if you’d let me walk with you, at least as far as the first town! I’ll be no bother! I’ll keep my mouth shut, I promise!”

  He was sure they were close enough to hear him, but they refused to answer.

  “Please, Mr. Rankin! There’s sometimes highwaymen along these roads. I’m frightened, having to walk alone.”

  Rankin’s voice came back through the darkness. “Let Jesus walk with you, then. I got no desire for your company.”

  It was at that moment that the sky burst into something like brilliant flame, streaking from west to east, illuminating the entire bank of storm clouds very eerily, brighter than any lightning ever could. It happened with no warning signs at all.

  Peabody dropped to his knees.

  The flare in the sky revealed to him Rankin and his companions, far ahead, looking back in his direction. They were ducking, lifting their hands to cover their heads, hiding from that burst of light that was nearly as bright as noonday despite the clouds.

  A hot, downdraft wind struck Peabody. Back up the mountain, Gomorrah exploded in fire.

  Peabody didn’t see the actual moment of destruction. He was turned the wrong direction for that. But he felt it.

  The ground shook; a wind of nearly tornadic force bent trees toward the ground as if they were sticks. A brilliant orange-yellow light from the ignited mountaintop illuminated the forest. A wall of heated air struck Peabody, knocking him forward, rolling him down the trail toward Rankin and his companions.

  By the time he reached the place they had been, they were no longer there. The same searing swell had caught them, too, only half a moment after Peabody, and pushed them away before it like bits of driftwood on the crest of a wave.

  Peabody struck a boulder and stopped, stunned, as the wind swept over him, so hot he feared his skin would blister. He groaned and rolled, looking back toward Gomorrah.

  “Almighty God, save me!” he prayed, awed and terrified.

  Rubble began to rain down around Peabody. Twigs, sticks, evergreen boughs severed as if by a large bomb, even fragments of flaming lumber and other bits and pieces of Gomorrah, all of them flaming, peppered all around him and on him, burning him, setting blazes on the forest floor.

  Peabody could scarcely breathe; the air had suddenly grown too hot.

  “Lord have mercy on me, a sinner…Lord have mercy on me, a sinner…”

  He turned his back to Gomorrah and pulled himself into a fetal position, lying up against the boulder with his face buried in his arms. He continued to pray fervently as Gomorrah burned behind him.

  Chapter 3

  Below, Gib Rankin, stunned and covered with dirt and ash, rose up on his forearms and stared up the mountain at the flames engulfing Gomorrah and much of the mountainside around and below it. For half a minute he simply gazed, then said, aloud, “How did he know? How could he have possibly known?”

  He heard a feminine moan behind him. Twisting his head, he saw Princess rising, as stunned and bewildered as he, shaking her head as if to clear her vision, and digging grit from her ears.

  “What was it?” she said. “What just happened?”

  “Fire,” Rankin said. “A fire just came down from the sky.”

  “The sky?”

  “That’s right. Fire from heaven.”

  She hesitated, then said, “So he was right? That crazy preacher really knew?”

  “So it would seem.”

  “He really is a prophet, then?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe it’s for him like it is for me at the faro table: you get lucky sometimes.”

  Rankin stared deeply into the boiling flames up at Gomorrah. The town was burning fiercely. The forest was ablaze, too, but because most of the trees had been knocked flat as they ignited, their flames burned low to the ground. The few trees that did remain standing flared magnificently, like great torches.

  Thomas Shafter appeared from behind, staggering out of the darkness into the light of the burning trees all around. He was stunned, filthy, his face blackened, maybe outright burned. “Otto’s dead,” he said. “He’s lying over there, dead. Big old tree blew over right on him. He’s dead. Dead!”

  “Sorry to hear it,” Rankin said. “I rather liked old Otto.” His distracted, unemotional tone of voice betrayed just how shallow his affection for Otto Dorner really had been.

  “What the hell happened up there, Gib?”

  “The fire of God fell,” Princess said. “That drunk preacher said the fire of God would fall, and it did.”

  “I’ll be damned!”

  Rankin shook his head. “Nope. Not yet you’re not. We’re still alive. And maybe Peabody is living, too. I heard him call right before the fire came.” He looked at the sky, and listened as he heard a very distant roll of thunder. “Hear that? Storm building up. That should put out the worst of the fire. Maybe the Lord’s smiting Gomorrah with one hand and soothing it with the other. Come on…let’s go see if we can find Peabody.”

  “Hell with him!” Shafter said. “Why do you care about him?”

  “I’m just a naturally tender-hearted soul,” Rankin replied. He brushed himself off and headed back up the mountain, toward the flaming town.

  A huge bolt of lightning flashed nearby and thunder exploded loudly, startling all of them. Rankin quickly noted to himself, though, that the lightning bolt, as powerful as it was, seemed pitiful compared to what had happened above Gomorrah. Clearly whatever had struck before had been something much more powerful than lightning.

  Rankin walked fast, Princess and Shafter following because it was always their way to follow him.

  They found Peabody still huddled against the boulder, hiding his face. “I’ll never drink anymore, Lord,” he was saying. “I’ll never taste another drop.”

  Rankin knelt beside Peabody and pulled a flask from beneath his coat. “Here you go, preacher. Something to make you feel better.”

  Peabody looked at the flask glinting in the light of the fire, licked his lips once, and reached out for it. He turned it up. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down.

  Rankin took the flask away and repocketed it. “Glad to find you alive, Parson. Or maybe we ought to call you ‘Prophet’ now. Because it sure happened just like you said it would.”

  “I didn’t know,” Peabody said. “I swear, I didn’t know. I was just talking when I said all that. I didn’t know the fire would really fall!”

&nbs
p; “Why, sure you knew!” Rankin said. “You said it would happen, and it did. Likelihood is, you caused it to happen, Parson.”

  “I didn’t cause it! I didn’t!”

  “Well, something, or somebody, sure did. And I didn’t hear anybody else making predictions. You’ve got the power to tell what’s coming, Parson. A gift from God, for you to use.”

  “I don’t want that gift! I don’t! Can I have another drink?”

  “Surely.”

  When Rankin pocketed the flask again, he said, “Parson Peabody, I want to follow you.”

  “What?”

  “I want to follow you. Be around you. Help you with your work. Be sort of a disciple for you.”

  “A disciple…”

  “You’ve got the gift, Prophet. Whether you want it or not. It’s something you ought to use.”

  “But I didn’t do nothing! I didn’t!”

  Rankin put his face close to Peabody’s. The reflected firelight gave his eyes a piercing glitter. “There are those in Gomorrah, if any are left alive, who would be hard-pressed to believe that. They’ll believe in you. So will plenty of others who hear about this.”

  “Do you think they all died up there?”

  “Let’s go up and see.”

  They proceeded up to the edge of the flaming town. By now they could see that there were indeed survivors. They staggered through the desolated streets like damned souls in some medieval saint’s fevered fantasy of eternal suffering.

  Many more people had not survived. Burned bodies lay all about—smoking, blackened husks that had been living people minutes before.

  Rankin made a face of disgust as he eyed the corpses. It looked as if the dead had been nearly incinerated in a virtual flash.

  He felt something that wasn’t common for him: a sense of quick panic, a feeling that he was contacting something here big and incomprehensible, maybe dangerous…

  What if Parson Peabody really had somehow foreseen this? Could a divine hand truly have smitten this town, just like its biblical namesake had been smitten centuries before?

  Whoa, Gibbon Rankin. Get control of yourself, friend. Don’t start thinking that way. Whatever caused this, it’s probably nothing you can control. Maybe nothing you can even understand…but even if you can’t understand it, that doesn’t mean it’s nothing you can’t use.

  Peabody looked around, eyes wide, taking each step with the care of a man walking among upturned nails. Nearly every building was aflame. The ground itself was hot beneath his feet, like hell was trying to break through from below.

  He saw the burning remnants of the dwelling of Jed Bloom. The canvas top was burned fully away, the timber portion smoldering. Drawn to it, he looked over the wall, then felt weak and disgusted as a lightning flash combined with the light of the burning town itself to reveal to him what remained of Bloom. He turned and lurched away, wishing he hadn’t looked.

  His own words came back to him: God will judge you, Jed Bloom…He’ll judge you, as He’ll soon judge every mocker in this wicked town.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Bloom,” he said. “I didn’t know it would really come true.”

  Princess, tears streaming down her face, was staying close to Rankin. The bodies appalled her, as did even the living people, all of whom were terrified, most of whom were at least to some measure burned.

  She pleaded with Rankin, whose sweaty, ash-dusted face glowed and glistened in the light of the many fires all around. “Take me away from here, please, Gib! This is a terrible place!”

  Rankin’s own thoughts were elsewhere, as his answer revealed. “I’ll bet you that when that fire fell, they could see it for miles and miles. I’ll bet you they could see it all the way to Fort Brandon.”

  “Please!” she begged. “I don’t want to be here. Let’s go away from here!”

  “Word’s going to spread fast about this,” Rankin said. “Look…people are fleeing the town already. They’ll talk about this. This thing’s going to become known across the country.”

  “Gib, please!”

  “Hush, woman. There’s still things to be done here.”

  Peabody had moved far away from Bloom’s burning dwelling. He walked slowly, looking around at the flames, stepping aside when hurt survivors tottered by, and recoiling from the dead he found at his feet.

  A hand gripped his elbow tightly. He turned and saw McCree, burned terribly, face already peeling. “You are surely a prophet!” McCree said in the tone of a man delirious from pain. “Forgive me…forgive me for not having recognized you for what you are!”

  McCree’s face was awful to see. As he spoke, his burned lips kept trying to stick together, fluid oozing from the deep and terrible cracks in them that the heat had caused. Peabody, full of both horror and pity, could hardly bear to look at him. He’d always despised and envied McCree. Now he only felt the deepest pity for him, and oddly responsible for the man’s pathetic condition.

  “I was just talking, that’s all. Just talking! I didn’t have nothing to do with this!”

  “You are a prophet…of the Most High God.”

  “I’m a drunk. That’s all. That’s all I’ve ever been. Just a drunk. You know that! You’ve always said it yourself!”

  Lightning crackled and the wind rose. It would be raining soon, drenching the flaming town and quelling the forest fire before it could spread to the dry mountains around.

  “A prophet…” McCree looked around; other Gomorrah survivors who had been among the group that threw out Rankin and company, and who had therefore heard Peabody’s prophecy, were beginning to notice Peabody. They circled around him just they had encircled him earlier at the saloon door. Now, though, they looked at him with awe and fear instead of disgust.

  “A prophet…of the Most High,” McCree said. Then he shuddered, collapsed, and died at Peabody’s feet.

  Peabody, overwhelmed and scared, burst through the surrounding circle, ran off alone, and was sick on the ground.

  When he straightened, he saw Rankin walking toward him. “I don’t want to be here,” Peabody said to the gambler. “I don’t like this place now.”

  Rankin said not a word, but got down on his knees and knelt before Peabody, bowing his head. “I repent,” Rankin said, loudly, so all would hear. “I’ve been a sinful man, and you have spoken the word of God. I turn away from my wicked life and recognize you for what you are: a man of God.”

  Others drew near the gambler, watching what he was doing. Then, one by one, they knelt beside him, paying homage to the prophet.

  Chapter 4

  “Watch out, you young fool!”

  The shout, delivered in a coarse and unpleasant voice, was all but lost in the clatter of wagon wheels. Alex Gunnison scrambled out of the way of the speeding wagon just in time, fell at the edge of the boardwalk, dropped his carpetbag, and twisted his head in time to see his wife’s precious letter, in which he’d been engrossed for the fifteenth time that day, fall under the wheels. It was smeared into the moist dirt street by the front wagon wheel and shredded by the rear one.

  The driver, a freighter who’d just unloaded his wagonload and was speeding off with utter unconcern for public safety, hollered some foul words across his shoulder at Gunnison and was gone in a great rumble.

  Gunnison stood, slipped in a previously unnoticed heap of fresh horse dung, and promptly fell again, across his own well-stuffed carpetbag.

  He reddened as onlookers on the boardwalk laughed.

  Hard-hearted town, he thought. First they try to run you down in the street, then laugh at you for surviving.

  He stood, successfully this time, and looked at the ruined letter with a sad sigh. A thought that was becoming more frequent passed through his mind again: The life I lead is not one for a married man.

  He retrieved the tattered letter, not because it was in any shape to keep, but because he didn’t want some stranger picking up its fragments and reading the intimacies his beloved wife, far away in St. Louis, had written to him.
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  Picking up his carpetbag and hat, he strode on toward the railroad station. Turning a corner, he passed a church just as the doors opened and a crowd surged out, all smiles and cheerfulness. A moment later, through their midst, a bride and groom emerged. Gunnison paused to watch the celebration, and smiled as the bride paused to kiss a man, evidently her father, on his whiskered cheek.

  Gunnison began to feel even more dejected. He longed to see his own wife. He sadly fingered the ruined letter in his pocket.

  What kind of profession was this traveling journalist business, anyway? For the sake of Gunnison’s Illustrated American, America’s most popular national magazine—the creation and namesake of publishing magnate J.B. Gunnison, Alex Gunnison’s own father—Alex Gunnison was spending more days of his precious young manhood away from his beloved wife than with her. Their most frequent contact was through letters and wires.

  At the time of his own wedding, the plan had been for him to give up his life as assistant and professional shadow for the famous, eccentric Brady Kenton, America’s best-known writer/illustrator and the single greatest asset of the Illustrated American.

  It hadn’t worked out that way. Gunnison was nearly five years into his marriage, and still traveling the country with Kenton, doing his best to keep up with him, and when possible, to keep him out of trouble. Both jobs were difficult at best.

  He should never have let Kenton talk him into staying on this long. It was all Kenton’s fault—Kenton and his blasted persuasiveness.

  Making Gunnison’s life all the harder was Kenton’s tendency to wander off by himself, leaving Gunnison alone and clueless to try to figure out where he had gone, and why. It was no way for a man to treat a partner. Yet it was so much a part of the life routine of Brady Kenton that Gunnison had come to expect it.

  Its familiarity made it no less annoying, though. At times like this, abandoned by the man who was supposed to be his professional partner and tutor, Gunnison could very nearly hate Brady Kenton. How many elaborate showers of abuse had he rehearsed, honed, polished, to heap upon the man when next he saw him? But he knew he wouldn’t. As always, when he saw Kenton next, he’d be glad to see him. Anger would give way to relief, and they’d go on as before, through the same familiar, obnoxious cycle.