Hell's Gate

by William W. Johnstone

  “Barnabas, you’re a scoundrel and low-down,” Flintlock said, looking around him through a pall of smoke.

  There came a sound like a cackle of mocking laughter . . . but it could have been the cries of the sleepless ravens.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Although the transcontinental railroad reached Texas in 1881, stagecoach services in the Arizona Territory connecting settlements and their mining, business and commerce centers were just beginning and would continue for the next forty years. Thus the arrival of a stage in Mansion Creek was a matter of great excitement that always drew a crowd of onlookers.

  Tobias Fynes, moodily gazing out his office window into the bright morning, was one of them.

  A tall man, a pugilist by the look of his flattened nose and the scars on his battered face, lifted down a wicker wheelchair from the top of the stage and placed it near the open door. A moment later a pale young man with a black patch over his left eye emerged from inside and stepped into the street. He was thin to the point of frailness with the narrow, esthetic features of the artist and dreamer. Strands of lank brown hair fell over his narrow shoulders and a great silk cravat, black to match his frock coat, flounced at his throat. A high-crowned hat with a floppy brim completed his attire and his one good eye was blue and as bright as that of a sparrow.

  At first Fynes dismissed the man as just another consumptive invalid come west for the good of his health . . . but then bit by bit it dawned on him. The young man looked like a touring, third-rate actor but there was no theater in Mansion Creek. Then he could only be Lucy Cully’s intended, the poet, a city dude, by the look of him. Just then the damned rhymester was prancing around the wheelchair, his pale hands hanging from his coat sleeves as limp as week-old lettuce.

  Fynes yelled for one of his junior tellers and when the frightened young man stepped into the office the banker said, “Your eyes are younger than mine. Is that Poke Henry up on the driver’s seat?”

  The man said it was.

  “Then get him over here. I need to talk with him,” Fynes said.

  Poke Henry was a wiry, buckskinned old coot of an indefinite age. He’d scouted for General George Crook during the winter campaigns of the 1870s that had finally pacified the Apaches, and in 1883, riding with the Texas Rangers, he’d outdrawn and killed the Mexican bandit Ramiro Callaraga. If he was intimidated by Fynes’s massive bulk or in awe of his importance, he didn’t let it show.

  “Good to see you again, Poke,” Fynes said. “Have a good trip?”

  The driver nodded. “Uneventful, and that’s just as well since I got a famous person on board.”

  Fynes lost his smile. “Is that the man with the eyepatch?”

  Henry’s eyes moved to the street. “No, it’s the older feller being helped out of my stage right now.”

  Fynes followed the driver’s gaze and saw a well-built man with gray hair and beard being helped into the wheelchair. “Is that him?” he said.

  “Yup, that’s Walt Whitman the poet.”

  “Never heard of him,” Fynes said. “He looks more like a blacksmith than a poet.”

  “Well now, that don’t surprise me none, I mean that you’ve never heard of him,” Henry said. “On account of how he’s mostly famous back East and in England. I was told he has friends in high places in Washington, but I don’t know about that.”

  “And the one with the eyepatch?”

  “His name is Roderick Chanley. He’s a poet too, but he ain’t famous. He’s here in the territory to wed his intended.”

  Fynes nodded as though that was something he knew already and said, “And the bruiser?”

  Henry grinned. “Dang, Tobias, I never knowed you to be so interested in my passengers afore. You drumming up business for your bank?”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what I intend to do. Now, who is the tough?”

  “His name is Rory O’Neill, a Limerick man and now a bare-knuckle booth fighter out of Boston town. He’s a bodyguard for Walt Whitman on account of how the old man gets a lot of threats.” Henry smiled. “Ol’ Walt ain’t exactly what you’d call a ladies’ man, if you catch my drift.”

  “Thank you, Poke,” Fynes said. “I’m sure I can drum up some profitable business with those three.”

  * * *

  After Henry left, Fynes hurried to the premises of the Apache County Herald and he was red-faced and sweating like a hog when he barged into Roland Ives’s office.

  Without ceremony he said, “Did you see the stage come in?”

  “Sure did, Mr. Fynes,” Ives said, being civil to a man he hated, but one who held his mortgage. “Walt Whitman was one of the passengers and I was sad to see him look so ill.”

  “That’s who I wanted to talk to you about,” Fynes said. “How famous is he back East?”

  “Pretty famous. His Leaves of Grass collection of poems was well received in certain quarters, especially in New York and London. Why do you ask?”

  “If he dies he’ll be sorely missed, huh?” Fynes said.

  “I imagine so,” Ives said. He was puzzled. Why was the fat man so interested in Walt Whitman, of all people? It just didn’t add up.

  Fynes cut his visit short. “See you later, Ives,” he said, heading for the door.

  “Yes, see you later Mr. Fynes,” Ives said, frowning.

  * * *

  By the time Tobias Fynes reached the Ma’s Kitchen restaurant, dark arcs of sweat stained the armpits of his pale blue sack coat, and his celluloid collar chafed his bull neck. As he’d expected, Hogan Lord sat at his favorite table, his back against the wall so he had a view of the door. He had a pot of coffee and a single cup before him and an untasted bacon sandwich, cut into two triangles, lay on a plate.

  Fynes flopped into a chair that looked too spindly for his massive weight and without preamble said, “We’re in trouble.”

  Lord said nothing, waiting for Fynes to explain himself.

  “Did you see the stage come in?” Fynes said. Then, without waiting for an answer, “Lucy Cully’s intended, that poet feller, is here and there’s somebody with him. You ever hear of Walt Whitman?”

  Like many Western men of that era, Hogan Lord was well read and he always carried a volume in his carpetbag when he traveled. Currently he was reading Carlyle’s history of the French Revolution and as yet unread, a book of the philosophical musings of John Stuart Mill.

  “Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is well known as are some of his other works, particularly his essays,” Lord said. “He supports his widowed mother and invalid brother so he just scrapes by.” Lord shrugged. “Some people, including other poets, call him a genius and I’m not going to argue with that assessment.”

  “Just answer me one question,” Fynes said. “Can we gun the son of a bitch?”

  “We can,” Lord said. “But his death might have repercussions. He is quite famous, you know.”

  Fynes slammed a fist onto the table so hard that heads turned in his direction. Lowering his voice, he said, “I was afraid of that.” Then, after a few moments’ thought, “But he could meet with an unfortunate accident, couldn’t he?”

  “Anything is possible,” Lord said. “But now you’ve added two more people who must be killed for your plan to work.”

  “Three. Whitman has a bodyguard with him.”

  Suddenly Lord showed interest. “A gun?”

  Fynes shook his head. “A prizefighter. He’s a big man with a broken nose, a real pug.”

  “All right, then with the pug and Sam Flintlock and O’Hara, Poteet and his boys will have to kill six people, one of them a pretty young woman. And to add to your misery, Tobias, I just remembered that I’ve heard the name Roderick Chanley before. Roland Ives had an old copy of the Illustrated London News that he gave me to read when I was laid up with a broken ankle that time. I remember it because a writer compared Chanley to Shelley and Keats and said he was just as sickly. At the time I thought that was funny.”

  “Who the hell are Shelley and Keats?” Fynes�
�s left eye twitched, a symptom of his agitation.

  “A couple of dead English poets,” Lord said. He grinned. “I told you they were sickly.”

  Fynes was not in the mood for levity. “Hogan, if we gun that many white people it will be noticed. It could be messy, very messy.”

  Lord’s grin widened. “Two well-known poets and a young bride-to-be with stars in her eyes numbered among the slain? I’d say it will be noticed.”

  “Hogan, I want the Cully house,” Fynes said. “I want it real bad. Say something to please me. I need to hear some good news for a change.”

  “All right, then here’s my advice, Mr. Fynes. Don’t make a move until Whitman goes back East.”

  “When will that be?” Fynes’s heavy face with its pendulous jowls took on the look of a grotesque, petulant cherub.

  “I’ll find out for you and we’ll go from there,” Lord said.

  “All right, but in the meantime tell Poteet to stand by,” Fynes said. “If I’m pushed to it I’ll kill them all and blame it on Jasper Orlov.”

  “He’s a myth,” Lord said. “A boogerman made up by a bunch of rubes to scare their children into bed at night.”

  “Hell, I know that but the folks around town will believe anything I tell them,” Fynes said. “It’s easy to pin six killings on a fairy-tale monster. Who can ever prove that Orlov didn’t do it?”

  Lord was about to speak but the words died in his throat as the door burst open and a freckled youth stuck his head inside and yelled, “Fight!”

  * * *

  It was still early in the day and the three Macklin brothers were only half drunk, but intoxicated enough that they figured a duded-up city slicker and an old graybeard in a wheelchair were fair game for some teasing. Why the brothers ignored the significant presence of Rory O’Neill would never be explained. It could be the brothers were too drunk to notice, but it’s more likely that their entire attention was fixed on Roderick Chanley and Walt Whitman in the same way that a hunter has eyes for only the antlered buck in the clearing and ignores everything else.

  At first the Macklin teasing seemed innocent enough, good-humored play by three high-spirited young men out for a little fun. Bruno, the oldest brother, a man generally considered by those who knew him as an ignorant lout and bully, pushed Chanley away from the wheelchair, grabbed the handles and then, grinning, leaned over and said to Whitman, “Let’s go for a ride, pops.”

  The poet took it all in stride. He smiled, nodded and didn’t seem in the least afraid or concerned, an artist prepared to enjoy an experience new to him, perhaps to be put into verse at a later time. Cheered on by his brothers, Tom, at twenty-three the youngest, and Dave, who was just as loutish and bullying as his older brother, Bruno tipped back the wheelchair so that the small front wheels lifted a foot off the ground and Whitman, now looking a little worried, quickly grabbed on to the arms for support. A grinning Bruno then bounced the chair up and down and there was a real possibility he could tip its occupant into the dirt.

  Then things started to go wrong, very wrong.

  A respectable-looking man among the crowd of onlookers that had gathered yelled to Bruno, “Here, that won’t do. That man has friends here.”

  Roderick Chanley, his sensitive face flushed with anger, also objected to the horseplay. He grabbed Bruno by the shoulder and tried to pull him away from the wheelchair. He got a hard right cross for his pains that slammed into his chin and dropped him like a puppet that just had its strings cut. Bruno watched Chanley fall, laughed and grabbed on to the chair again.

  “Let him be.”

  Bruno turned and saw Rory O’Neill advancing on him, his fisted hands at his side. Confident that his brothers would pitch in, Bruno held his ground and put up his dukes. He’d won too many fist, skull and boot fights against unskilled, flailing cowboys and frightened rubes to be intimidated by O’Neill. But he should have been aware of the man’s determined chin and his athletic economy of movement, the hallmarks of the professional pugilist.

  Bruno grinned and said, “Well, well, well, slicker. I guess I’m gonna have to take you ap—”

  O’Neill moved very fast. He backhanded Bruno across the bridge of his nose with the hard, calloused edge of his hand. The bone broke and immediately the lower part of Bruno’s face was covered in streams of blood and mucus. Macklin turned his head, spat scarlet and then threw a left. O’Neill ducked the punch and slammed a right and a left into Bruno’s soft belly and then followed through with his head, splitting the man’s left eye to the bone. His face a mask of gore, Bruno Macklin knew he was in big trouble, but with his younger brothers and half the town watching he had to win this fight or never show his face in Mansion Creek again.

  But O’Neill, coldly professional, almost detached, was merciless.

  He moved in on Bruno, brushed aside his increasingly feeble punches, and hammered his rock-knuckled fists into the younger man’s face and belly. Pounded into a bleeding pulp, Bruno held on to O’Neill and attempted to pin the fighter’s arms to his side. In desperation he tried a head butt, a move his raised shoulders and stiffened neck telegraphed. O’Neill, his face expressionless, sidestepped Bruno’s clumsy attack and landed a roundhouse right to the man’s chin. His jaw broken, Bruno Macklin whimpered, staggered back a few steps and then lowered his fists, signaling his defeat.

  His experience in the professional ring coming to the fore, it did not enter into O’Neill’s thinking to further punish a surrendered opponent. He dropped his hands, stepped back and without a word or a further look at Macklin he wheeled Walt Whitman back to John Tanner’s freight wagon that had drawn up behind the stage. Bruno Macklin fell to his knees, sobbing. Perhaps he would have sobbed louder had he known that his days as a fighting man were over. The legacy of his one-sided fight with O’Neill was a glass jaw that could never again take a punch. His brothers wanted no part of Rory O’Neill and, their scared faces ashen, they gave the prizefighter a wide berth as they carried away what was left of brother Bruno. The Macklin boys, who owned a two-by-twice ranch ten miles outside of town, soon left the territory and were never heard from again.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  With sullen eyes Tobias Fynes watched the big prizefighter take apart Bruno Macklin, a tough man who was dangerous to cross, or so people said. “The pug is yet another complication,” he said.

  Hogan Lord nodded. “You pay me to take care of complications.”

  They stood on the boardwalk outside the bank. Over by the stage blood stained the ground and Poke Henry kicked at it with the toe of his boot.

  “I want that house, Hogan,” Fynes said. “The sooner we bring this thing to a head the sooner I can tear it apart.” He thought for a few moments and then said, “Sam Flintlock is another complication. How about you lure him into town and then take care of him?”

  “Gunfight him, you mean?”

  “What else?”

  “Flintlock is no bargain. I won’t draw down on him unless I’m pushed to it.”

  “Hell, then listen to me—I’m paying your wages and you’re pushed to it.”

  “Not yet. In a few days’ time Flintlock will come collect his five hundred dollars and ride on out of here. If he does, I won’t stand in his way.”

  “Well, let’s hope that’s how it happens,” Fyne said. He took out his gold pocket watch, glanced at it and snapped the lid shut. He grinned. “It’s ten o’clock, time I went to spend some morning time with Estelle.”

  Hogan Lord watched the fat man waddle away, once again deeply offended by Fynes’s crudity and lack of respect for women, and that included his own dying wife. Raised among Southern gentlemen who held fast to the unwritten rules of the Culture of Honor that demanded people avoid intentionally offending others and maintain a reputation for not tolerating such improper conduct in anyone else, the Culture included the notion that ladies, no matter their position in life, should never be insulted by a gentleman. Southern men were expected to be chivalrous toward women in word and de
ed and the women of the South showed those same qualities, a reason why a former Georgia belle like Ruth Fynes never openly criticized her abusive husband to anyone.

  Tobias Fynes ignored the code of the gentleman and seemed to delight in constantly putting his lack of good breeding on display as though he were proud of it. No wonder then that Lord, raised in the Southern tradition, had grown to hate him.

  Out of idle curiosity and nothing more, the gunman walked in the direction of the stage. The prizefighter saw him coming, his eyes dropped to Lord’s gun, and he quickly placed himself in front of Whitman and his wheelchair.

  Lord stopped, lit a cigar to show that his hands were busy, and from behind a cloud of blue smoke he said, “You must be Mr. Walt Whitman, the poet. I hope I’m not intruding.”

  Whitman smiled in his gray beard and said, “Stranger, if you in passing meet me and desire to speak to me, why should you not speak to me? And why should I not speak to you?”

  “Name’s Hogan Lord.” He extended his hand. “It’s an honor to meet you.”

  Lord had expected an invalid’s limp, four-fingered dead fish but to his surprise there was steel in Whitman’s dry grasp, as though the man spent his day arm-wrestling blacksmiths.

  The poet waved a hand. “This is Roderick Chanley, my fellow traveler. As a poet he’s as I am, as bad as the worst, but, thank God, as good as the best.”

  Lord shook hands with Chanley. The man was beautiful rather than handsome and the eye patch added a rakish look. His left cheekbone was red from Bruno Macklin’s fist but apart from that he seemed fine. But not healthy. There was a gray pallor about Chanley’s delicate features and his voice when he said to Lord, “Pleased to meet you,” was weak and slightly labored.

  Whitman then introduced the rather distant Rory O’Neill as a “pugilist of renown” and then John Tanner as “the young man who will carry us to our destination.”