The Hanging at Leadville / Firefall Page 25

  After Kenton began writing and illustrating for Gunnison’s Illustrated American, he took up the cause of exposing Ottinger’s crime in an article that helped make Kenton famous, and very nearly made Ottinger infamous. Kenton pointed to evidence that the massacre itself had been carried out not for valid military reasons, but because Ottinger had things to hide, personal sins, and certain people had to die to ensure that hiding took place.

  The Virginia massacre, Kenton had told Gunnison, had involved cruelty equal to or worse than the well-known Carolina massacre carried out during the Revolutionary War by the hated Bannistre Tarleton. Kenton had said he believed Ottinger should have stood trial for wartime crimes, and would have done so had not he been owed several large favors by men in positions of high authority. In what Kenton saw as one of the great failures of military and national justice, Ottinger escaped all prosecution for his crimes.

  So, despite his transgressions and these many years after the war, Ottinger remained an active, if aging, colonel, serving the latter half of his career in the West, mostly in Texas.

  But now, abruptly, in the Montana Territory. Why? Gunnison wondered what could motivate an aging man to uproot from his familiar life and move so far, to Fort Brandon of all places.

  One thing was growing clear to Gunnison: He wasn’t going to find the answer by mere observance. Somewhere along the line, he was going to have to talk to someone.

  Chapter 9

  Soldiers brought out some of the unusual-looking baggage that had accompanied the unidentified civilian, and began to unpack it. Gunnison wished again that he had a spyglass.

  With straining eyes he watched with great interest the unveiling of what he thought at first was some sort of surveying equipment, but which at second glance seemed to be something not quite that, though similar. Scientific gear of some sort, he could see…and suddenly a possible explanation for the presence of this anomalous civilian figure in a militarily dominated setting began to dawn on Gunnison.

  This fellow was surely some sort of scientist, brought in to determine what had happened here! If so, that would tend to validate the presumption that the destruction of Gomorrah had come as the result of some sort of natural event.

  Two soldiers, plus the civilian, loaded themselves down with the equipment in addition to their weapons. A couple of other soldiers followed, armed with carbines.

  Gunnison sketched furiously, then froze—the presumed scientist and soldiers were walking directly toward the place he hid!

  Gunnison readied himself to be discovered. They would spot him, raise a yell, and he’d be hauled in…

  He reached under his jacket and touched the cold butt of the pistol. But he moved his hand away again, ashamed of himself for even having the thought. These were men who, like him, were doing what they were supposed to do. They were not enemies. If he was caught, he was caught, and would just make the best of it.

  The men veered off before reaching the stand of trees, though, and trudged across the burned landscape and toward the south. Gunnison was not seen.

  He gave them a good head start, then carefully followed them, making sure to remain out of sight of anyone in the town.

  He found the presumed scientist at work with the instruments. Some of the soldiers aided him, clumsy at the unfamiliar tasks, while others stood guard. Gunnison found a hiding spot that gave him a good view of the work going on and also a line of sight into the town. His observations erased any question he might have had that the man was anything other than a scientist of some kind.

  Gunnison sketched the scientist and his assistants. Eventually they moved away, going across a hill and almost out of sight.

  Before Gunnison could follow, new activity began back in the town. The door to one of the few remaining original buildings, a damaged store building, was opened, and people emerged. Civilians!

  So Gomorrah wasn’t emptied of all its original residents after all. They were simply being held out of sight.

  They filed out of the building, one by one, moving slowly, looking like refugees. They were dirty, wearing ash-blackened clothing. Several limped, and a few had burns and bandages. One man’s hairless head was discolored from scorching. The people walked out into the street and formed a line outside a tent whose rear faced the place Gunnison hid.

  There were only a few women. They were allowed to enter the tent one at a time in advance of the men. When they came out again, the men were sent in.

  Gunnison realized that these people were being allowed to pay a visit to a latrine, which the tent covered. It had probably been dug by the soldiers after they encamped in the town.

  Gunnison was struck by how much this all looked like a captors-and-prisoners scenario. Someone stumbling upon this scene without any advance knowledge of what had happened here would come away with the impression that he was seeing a town that had been bombed and burned into submission and overrun by a force of uniformed military invaders, its surviving population captured.

  Gunnison’s attention was suddenly diverted: the rear canvas wall of the latrine tent had moved. A man inside had just rolled out underneath it, and lay there hugged up against the tent for a few moments, hidden from the soldiers but fully visible to Gunnison. A few moments later, he rolled again, three full turns away from the tent, rose, and dodged behind a heap of charred firewood. There he crouched, peeping up over the top of the pile, and then he moved again, circling around behind the remnants of a shed, then over to a still-intact cabin, and behind it toward the very stand of trees in which Gunnison hid.

  Gunnison crouched lower. The man dodged into the grove, dropped to his belly…and saw Gunnison. He gaped in surprise, scared and wild-looking, and began to rise to run away.

  With motions, Gunnison indicated he should remain where he was, and tried to convey that he, too, was hiding. The man, though looking suspicious, seemed to understand, nodded, and did not run.

  Eyeing one another occasionally, he and Gunnison quietly watched as the people finished their latrine shifts and were herded, like weary cattle, back to the building from which they’d come.

  Gunnison crept over and put out his hand.

  “My name’s Gunnison, Alex Gunnison,” he said. “I’m a journalist, from Gunnison’s Illustrated American.”

  The man’s eyes showed his recognition of the famous publication’s name. Gunnison received the inevitable, familiar follow-up question: “Gunnison, you say? Is it your magazine, then?”

  “My father’s,” Gunnison replied. “I just work for him.”

  “I see,” the man replied. He was a big fellow, middle-aged, burly, broad-faced, and nearly hairless. The left side of his face was darker than the right and mildly blistered. This indicated to Gunnison that this man had been here when the fire occurred, but hadn’t been directly exposed to the full fury of it. Lucky for him. “My name’s Decker Smith,” the man went on.

  They shook hands, and Smith asked, “You ain’t the journalist I’d have expected to see. A man here name of Gib Rankin had swore Brady Kenton himself was coming to talk to him.”

  Gunnison said, “Brady Kenton did come. It’s only too bad he came when he did…I found his body myself, on the far edge of town, badly burned.”

  Decker Smith let out a long, slow breath. “So he was too close when hell fell on Gomorrah.”

  “Yes.”

  “Mighty sorry to hear that. Mighty sorry.”

  “I need to understand what happened to him, Mr. Smith. I need to know what happened on this mountain, and what’s happening now in this town. And most of all, I want to know about Rankin.”

  “And I’m glad to tell you, young man. But let’s you and me get away from here, eh? Find us a place a little farther away from our soldier friends and damned old Colonel Ottinger.” He spat the name like it was a bad-tasting bug that had flown into his mouth.

  “Fine…but tell me first: Was there another man, named Paul Callon, dark-haired, slender, about my age, also a journalist, maybe caught sneakin
g around town…”

  “There was such a fellow, yes. Didn’t hear his name and didn’t know he was a journalist. They’ve got him under guard, away from everybody else.”

  Gunnison and Smith slipped away, using the terrain and natural cover—what was left of it—to keep themselves hidden.

  Seated on a fallen log just past the point where the outermost flames of the Gomorrah Mountain fire had been rained out, Decker Smith stared at the clouds thickening in the sky and told the note-scribbling Gunnison his story.

  “I’m a saloonkeeper in Gomorrah…or was. My place is gone now. I’ve thrived there, though. The miners from these parts love their liquor.

  “The best way to tell this tale, I suppose, is to begin with Rankin, and Parson Peabody. Rankin first.

  “Rankin’s a gambler and a general cheat. As deft a man at bottom-dealing and such as ever I seen. The man would sit down at the gambling table, fumble around, drop the cards, act like he’d hardly ever held a deck before, just to draw in the gullible…but on the street one time, I watched him once doing card tricks for a couple of children who’d passed through with their folks. Amazing, what that man could do. He could handle the cards, make the deck seem to vanish and come back again, pull cards out of the air, out of the children’s pockets and hair…a regular conjurer, Rankin was. After that I watched him close whenever he commenced to gamble in my place, knowing he was surely cheating, which is something I won’t stand for in my own saloon.”

  Gunnison asked, “Was Rankin a permanent resident of Gomorrah?”

  “No. Came here maybe a month ago, just him and a couple of cronies, and a woman he calls Princess. I don’t know if that’s her real name.”

  “Tell me all you can about Princess,” said Gunnison.

  “I’d put her in her forties. A woman who’s lived a difficult life…but still with some of the bloom on the rose. Dark hair, thick. And the prettiest eyes maybe I’ve ever seen. And she’s no soiled dove, even though she keeps company with a rough kind of man. I can always tell your soiled doves…there’s something that gets into the eyes of a bad woman, a kind of a flinty hardness that Princess ain’t got. When we ran her out of town with Rankin, I was wishing she could have stayed behind. She deserved better company than that sorry rodent.”

  Gunnison felt the skin on the back of his neck tighten as if in a cold wind as a new possibility rose to mind. Might Kenton have been coming here not for mere information about his wife, but for Victoria herself? Might Princess actually be Victoria? It was a tenuous stretch, but possibile.

  “So Rankin and Princess were run out of town before the fire?”

  “Yep. Plus a couple of Rankin’s companions. And Parson Peabody.”

  “Tell me about Peabody.”

  Smith arched his brows. “I’m not sure what to tell you. I’m not as religious a man as I should be, and I’ve never put stock in your mystical-spookish types…but the parson, he seemed to know.”

  “About the coming fire?”

  “Yes. Yet he’s no more than a common drunk who fancies himself a saint and a preacher. Totes a Bible around in a satchel, throws sermons at every sinner he meets, drinks like the devil himself. I always thought him a pest and a hypocrite…but now I’m wondering if maybe the parson proved himself to be something a lot more than, any of us thought.”

  Gunnison asked, “How does Parson Peabody fit in with Rankin?”

  “He didn’t, not until now.”

  “I’m confused.”

  “T’other night, about dusk, there sits Gib Rankin in my saloon, dealing cards, gambling, going through his fumbling act, all the while cheating three new miners out of their day’s earnings because they hadn’t been in town long enough to know better about him. Finally I had enough and told him to get out of my place.

  “Old Rankin puts on a show of being truly hurt that I’d been so unkind to him. I got unkinder yet and took him by scruff and belt and heaved him right out the door. Meanwhile he’s protesting that he’s got legitimate business in town, waiting for Brady Kenton to come meet him and talk about something important. Nobody really took Rankin seriously about that—I figured it was just one more of his lies being told for some self-serving reason.

  “Anyway, here’s Rankin. He’s been thrown out of the saloon, and the idea comes up that while we’re at it maybe we ought to just run him and his friends all the way out of town and be done with them for good. The preacher McCree—he was a real preacher, not like Parson Peabody—shows up and goes along with the notion of throwing them out of town, for he had no use for them any more than I did.

  “Meanwhile, Parson Peabody has stumbled into the middle of all this, and everybody figures, why not just throw him out, too, while we’re cleaning house? The parson was harmless, but just so aggravating, you see. I swear, the man could have made Job shoot himself. So we herded them all, Princess included, to the edge of town and told them to head down the mountain and not come back.”

  “And that was all there was to it?”

  “Not quite. Something odd happened right then with the parson. He got mad, and started in to talking about the coming wrath of God, about to fall on the town and all of us in it…fire from heaven, he said. Fire from heaven.”

  “And then it happened,” said Gunnison.

  “Not right away. But a little later, yes, it happened.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Maybe I’ll let you tell me. You tell me what it would be if hell itself exploded in the sky above you and rained down all around. Tell me what it’s like when buildings burn like matchsticks, and the air gets too hot to breathe, and the trees are pushed down like sticks…people dying all around, screaming, burning, others killed too fast even to scream. God. God, it was awful.” He closed his eyes, squeezing them so tightly shut that the slits of them disappeared in the creases of his weathered face. Gunnison wondered if the man was about to weep in front of him.

  Chapter 10

  Gunnison gave him a moment or two to collect himself, then asked, “Where were you when it happened?”

  “In my saloon. The building shook, the roof split apart, half of it gone before you could say billy-hi, and all above you a sky full of light and fire and heat like you never felt. I dove down under a table, and that probably saved me. But the building was ablaze right off. That’s the kind of heat we’re talking about.

  “I ran outside, looking for safety. There was none. It was hell out there, people crumpled down like wilted flowers, dead and dying. I saw the Reverend McCree beating flames on himself, trying to put himself out. Old Jed Bloom, who lived in a tent-roof house not far from my saloon, died on his bed, that canvas roof burned away like it was a piece of paper you’d roll yourself a smoke in. I never seen such a thing, and hope I never do again.”

  “How did you survive once you were outside?”

  “There’s a water trough on the street. I throwed myself into it. The water heated like it was in a pot on a fire, heated fast, but by the time I came out of it, the flash of heat was past.”

  “How many died?”

  “I don’t know. You never could say how many people were in this town. It was always changing. But I can tell you there’s no more than twenty still left in the town, not counting the soldiers there now. Most others who survived left town right after it happened, right through the burning woods. The rest, dead. All those who are left alive now are them who were lucky enough, like me, to have been indoors when it happened, in places with thick enough roofs and walls to knock off the worst of the heat.”

  “So…what do you think it was?”

  “I’ll answer you by telling you this: When the call came for Parson Peabody to be given his due offering, he got everything I had in my pocket. What fell on us was the fire of God, and Parson Peabody knew it was coming. So when they said pay, I paid.”

  “I thought you said Peabody was already gone when the fire came.”

  “He was. But after it happened, him, Rankin, Princess, and one of Ra
nkin’s friends, name of Thomas Shafter, came back into town. The other man who’d gone down with them wasn’t with them when they came back. I suppose he died, or ran off. But the Parson was certainly alive, and Rankin himself was a convert to the Parson. Right in front of everybody Rankin dropped to his knees before Parson Peabody, calling him a prophet and repenting for his sins. And most of us still here, who knew about the prophecy he’d made, knelt right beside him. That man knew the fire was going to fall, Mr. Gunnison. I can’t explain it, but he knew.”

  “It was surely coincidence, Mr. Smith.”

  Smith firmly shook his hairless head. “You’d not say it if you’d been here. If you’d heard that prophecy and seen how exact it came out, you’d have believed, too. And you’d have paid your offering.”

  “Who asked for the offering? Parson Peabody?”

  “Not directly. Rankin asked it on his behalf.”

  Gunnison frowned. “Did the money go to Peabody after it was collected?”

  “I didn’t watch what they did with it. I didn’t care. I just wanted Peabody to go away, and not make it happen again.”

  “You believed the parson actually caused the fire to come down?”

  “I considered it a possibility. At that point, I could have believed anything.”

  “But to think something like this could have been caused by nothing but a common drunkard seems…well, unlikely at best.”

  For the first time, Smith seemed offended. “Listen to me, young man: you weren’t here. You didn’t see the sky explode. You didn’t see people’s clothes burning off them while they screamed and ran. You didn’t see Parson Peabody’s face as he predicted it all, like something had just overcome him all at once, some kind of power, or spirit, or something. You can’t judge what happened, nor what anyone here thought about it. I know what I saw, and I can’t explain it.”