Hell's Gate

by William W. Johnstone

  As the cowboys grew louder, enjoying the attention they were getting from the other diners, Lord’s uneasiness grew. Camped out in the badlands Poteet had been a valuable asset to Tobias Fynes’s plans, but now he was in town the moody, volatile gunman was a liability.

  Poteet pushed his plate away from him, lounged back in the chair and said, “That was good. I haven’t had a beefsteak in an age.” His cold gray eyes slid from Lord and settled on the boisterous cowboys. “Noisy, ain’t they?”

  “They’re young, Nathan. Letting off some steam, is all,” Lord said.

  Then his heart sank. The Pima Kid stared back at Poteet and said, “Hell, mister, I had a picture made of me. Do you want it?”

  Poteet just smiled and shook his head. He picked up his coffee cup and drained it to the dregs and Lord felt a flood of relief. “Let’s get you a hotel room, Nathan,” he said. “Then I’ll buy you a drink.”

  Poteet was almost affable. “Suits me, Hogan,” he said. “How’s the whiskey in this burg?”

  “Middlin’,” Lord said.

  “Middlin’ sounds better than what I’ve been drinking,” Poteet said.

  Lord paid their score and then he and Poteet rose from the table and stepped toward the door. Then the Pima Kid did a foolish thing. He stood up and blocked their way. He wore a pearl-handled Colt high on his hip in the horseman’s style and he also wore an expression on his face that was part arrogance, part a shining-eyed desire to again prove himself. Maybe he only wanted to frighten Poteet and put the crawl on him, a victory of sorts he could boast about later. In a future time when men spoke of it and argued the matter back and forth they finally agreed that we’ll never know the Kid’s true intentions. What is certain is that he braced Nathan Poteet, a perfect stranger to him, and paid dearly for it.

  “Mister, I asked you if you want my picture,” the Kid said. “You didn’t answer me and that’s not polite.” He looked back at his grinning companions and then turned to face Poteet again. “Answer me. Why were you staring at me?”

  “Trying to figure out what kind of little animal you were, boy,” Poteet said. “Now will you give me the road?”

  The Kid looked into Poteet’s eyes and realized in that moment that maybe, just maybe, he’d made a mistake. The big man wasn’t wearing a gun, but he didn’t scare worth a damn. However, the Kid was committed to a course of action and with a dozen townspeople watching him he had to see it through to the end.

  “Sure, I’ll give you the road . . . after you apologize,” the young cowboy said.

  “Apologize? Apologize for what?” Poteet said.

  His faltering confidence returning, the Kid said, grinning, “For getting in my way.”

  “Go to hell,” Poteet said.

  In the dime novels the Kid had read, when harsh words were spoken the time had come for the hero of the piece to draw his trusty revolver. The Pima Kid did just that.

  Poteet had been watching the youngster’s eyes and he anticipated the draw. As the Kid’s hand clawed for the butt of his Colt, Poteet, moving with the speed of a rattlesnake, backhanded the youngster across the face. The crack of the blow sounded like a pistol shot in the confined space of the restaurant. At the same time Poteet’s left hand shot out, grabbed the Kid’s revolver and wrenched it violently upward, breaking the youngster’s trigger finger.

  The backhand was powerful enough to drop the Kid. He lay on his back on the floor for a few moments and then sat up, his frightened eyes on Poteet. The big gunman opened the Colt’s loading gate and one by one, taking his time, he dropped all five cartridges into the Kid’s full coffee cup.

  Poteet then stepped toward the Kid. Blood trickled from the corner of the young man’s mouth and his right cheekbone and eye were bruised and swollen. Poteet dropped the fancy Colt on the Kid’s lap and said, “Come back and see me when you grow up.”

  Hogan Lord, relieved, said, “Come, let me buy you a drink, Nathan.”

  And that’s where the scrape could and should have ended. But it didn’t.

  * * *

  Every eye was on Nathan Poteet as he and Hogan Lord left the restaurant. One grizzled customer, wearing good broadcloth, and more savvy about the ways of gunmen than the rest, looked up at Poteet as he headed for the door and said, “That was well done.” Poteet nodded, acknowledging the compliment, and then he and Lord stepped out the door onto the boardwalk.

  The Pima Kid, in a desperate attempt to salvage his reputation as a dangerous gun, would not let it go.

  He rose to his feet and yelled, “I’m gonna kill that son of a bitch.” He walked toward the door, his left hand feeding shells into his Colt from his cartridge belt.

  One of his companions, using the Kid’s given name, said, “Cass, don’t go out there.” He and the other cowboy tried to hold the Kid back, but he cursed them both, broke free and stormed out the door.

  Nathan Poteet had stopped to light a cigar, and he and Lord were about thirty feet away, standing under a painted, hanging sign that read:

  THE GENERAL STORE

  Fudge ~ Candies ~ Groceries

  The Pima Kid’s gun hand was out of action, his forefinger broken and already swelling, and he fired with his left. He put his first bullet in that sign neatly between Fudge and Groceries and the hole was still there until the store burned down in 1902. His second splintered timber inches from Poteet’s feet and a third grazed the leg of a bartender who was reporting for his shift at the saloon.

  The Kid didn’t get off a fourth.

  Poteet drew the British Bulldog and adopted the duelist position. He turned side-on to the Kid, right arm extended, the inside of the left foot tucked behind the heel of the right. Despite the Bulldog’s heavy trigger and rudimentary sights, Poteet needed only one shot . . . the shot that struck the Kid high in the chest and dropped him. After he hit the boardwalk the youngster stared at Poteet with stunned, unbelieving eyes, gasped a few times and then died.

  Diners spilled out of the restaurant and drinkers from the saloon, and already angry voices, led by the Kid’s fellow punchers, were raised against Poteet.

  Hogan Lord tried to undo the damage. “Fair fight!” he yelled. “The Kid fired first.”

  No one in the crowd recognized Poteet as a notorious outlaw but for some it was enough that a local boy had been shot down by an out-of-towner. Lord recognized a few members of the Mansion Creek Peace Commission, a fancy title for vigilantes, and they looked grim. A few of the drunker citizens from the saloon were talking rope and the angry cowboys took up the chorus. A hanging mob is like a savage, mindless animal and Lord feared he may have to go to the gun and shoot Poteet free of its clutches.

  The bartender, at a time when mixologists were considered respected members of frontier society right up there with doctors, lawyers and merchants, saved the day. Bleeding from the bullet that had cut across the back of his right thigh, he raised his arms for quiet and said, “The Kid shot first.” He showed his bloody pants leg and said, “He could have killed me.”

  That last calmed the mob a little and then the enormous, reassuring presence of the banker Tobias Fynes did the rest.

  He waddled along the boardwalk and said to the crowd, “Mr. Townshend is telling the truth. From my office window I saw him get hit by the young man’s deadly bullet and then I saw poor Mr. Poteet forced to fight for his very life.”

  The crowd became silent and even the cowboys quit yelling for a rope. Then, in touching regard for the fallen youth, Fynes forced his face into a sympathetic expression alien to him and said, “Does the dead lad have family close?”

  One of the cowboys said, “I think Cass has kin in Texas, but I don’t know where.”

  “Anyone else know?” Fynes looked solicitous but the question was met with silence. He said, “Then take the poor boy back to his ranch where people who liked him and worked beside Cass can bury him.”

  In truth, Cass Wilson was arrogant and lazy and not well liked, but the two cowboys who’d ridden into town with him
saw no other alternative.

  After that the crowd dispersed and the Pima Kid was taken away hanging over his pony’s saddle, his long yellow hair almost dragging in the dirt. Fynes took Poteet aside, stood as close to him as his belly would allow and said between gritted teeth, his eyes blazing, “Why the hell did you kill the damned waddie? You’ve drawn unwelcome attention to yourself.”

  Hogan Lord said, “He didn’t give Nathan any choice, Tobias. The kid came out of the restaurant shooting.”

  “Come to my office,” Fynes said. “Both of you.”

  If there were people in the street who wondered why the town’s most prominent citizen would be seen in the company of a killer like Nathan Poteet, no one voiced that question because Fynes had Mansion Creek by the throat. If the banker ever decided to call in his mortgages the town would wither on the vine and die.

  * * *

  “Mr. Poteet, I don’t need you right now, but I’ll need you in the future and when that time comes it will be almighty sudden,” Tobias Fynes said. “Do you understand?”

  “Sure do, boss,” Poteet said, taking a sip of the banker’s excellent whiskey.

  “Good, then we are in perfect accord,” Fynes said. “Now that’s settled, you will occupy a hotel room and stay there until I send for you. I’ll provide you with everything you need so you won’t be in want.”

  Poteet was wary. “How long?”

  “Probably no more than a week or two. There is a matter that must be brought to a head very quickly.”

  “What kind of matter?”

  “I’ll tell you all you need to know in due course. In the meantime, Hogan will act as my go-between.” Fynes smiled. “Patience, Mr. Poteet. You’ll soon get all the excitement you need. That concludes our business for now. I have a wedding to arrange.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  “Mr. Flintlock, both myself and Mr. Whitman have assured Miss Cully that there are no supernatural entities in this house, so we’ve all agreed that your services are no longer required,” Roderick Chanley said.

  “If it’s all the same to you, O’Hara and me will stay until the end of the week,” Flintlock said, his growing dislike of the eye-patched poet apparent in the harsh tone of his voice.

  “Suit yourself, but I must ask you to vacate the house immediately,” Chanley said. “I find your presence unsettling and so does Lucy.”

  “Unsettling how?” Flintlock said, on a slow burn.

  “Lucy and myself are pacifists, a word you perhaps have never heard and do not understand. To explain, we’re nonviolent people and we both find the presence in the house of men with guns unsettling. There has already been killing, men shot to death.”

  “You know that Lucy has a derringer, don’t you?”

  “I am aware of that, but she no longer has it. I confiscated the weapon and threw it over the side of the crag.” Chanley looked down his long nose at Flintlock. “You have already brought violence to this house and we don’t want any more.”

  Flintlock decided to be brutally honest. “If me and O’Hara hadn’t shot it out with Shade Pike and his boys Lucy would have been raped and probably murdered.” He glared at Chanley. “Mister, you weren’t there.”

  “I am here now, and since Lucy will soon be my wife I am the master of this house and I want you to leave it,” the poet said. “We will never see eye to eye on guns and violence, Flintlock, so our conversation is over. You and the breed can bed down in the barn if you like, but you must be gone by the end of the week.”

  “I’d like to hear that from Lucy herself,” Flintlock said.

  “My fiancée is indisposed,” Chanley said.

  “I’d still like her to tell me and O’Hara that we have to burn the breeze out of here.”

  “Very well, I’ll get her,” Chanley said. He rose from the kitchen table and stepped toward the door. He turned and said, “I would normally not tolerate the presence of Rory O’Neill here, another man of violence, but since he is with Mr. Whitman I agreed to let him remain. You see, I don’t play favorites.”

  O’Hara pushed his cup away from him and said, “Looks like we just got our marching orders, Sam.”

  “We’ll see out the week, even if we have to camp on the mesa,” Flintlock said. “We need that five hundred from Tobias Fynes. It’s our stake for when we ride away of here and head west.”

  “A couple of more days,” O’Hara said. “I guess we can handle that.”

  “But I’m not leaving until I bed down Jasper Orlov,” Flintlock said.

  “Sam, you heard the man, we’re not wanted here,” O’Hara said. “I say we ride out and leave the poet to deal with Orlov himself.”

  “I can’t leave that monster alive,” Flintlock said. “Any one of those rocks his women and children tossed down on us could’ve killed us.”

  “Spunner said it was only a warning.”

  “Maybe so, but I won’t let Orlov see me turn tail and run.” Flintlock poured himself more coffee and said, “O’Hara, there has to be a reckoning. If you don’t want to be a part of it, you’re free to light a shuck.”

  “That’s a hell of a thing to say to me, Sam,” O’Hara said.

  Flintlock grinned. “I know, and if I thought for one minute you’d take me up on it I never would have said it.”

  O’Hara frowned. “See, you take me for granted, Sam.”

  “Yup, I do, constantly,” Flintlock said.

  Just then Lucy stepped into the kitchen. She looked pale and there were dark shadows under her eyes as though she hadn’t slept well.

  Before Flintlock could say anything she said, “Did Roderick speak to you about leaving, Sam?”

  “Yes he did, but—”

  “Good,” Lucy said. “Then it’s all settled.”

  She turned on her heel and left, her petticoats rustling.

  O’Hara stared at Flintlock and then said, “Seems like nobody wants us, Sam, huh?”

  “Shapes up that way,” Flintlock said. Then, “Get your stuff together, O’Hara, we’re leaving. I won’t stay where I’m not wanted.” He glanced out the kitchen window and managed a smile. “Well, at least it’s not raining.”

  The rain had indeed ended, but a strong wind buffeted the house and it creaked and groaned like a storm-tossed sailing ship. Outside around its tallest spires the ravens cawed a warning about dangers only they knew of and then joined together in a ragged flock and fluttered into the restless sky.

  “Fixing for a big blow, Sam,” O’Hara said.

  “Seems like,” Flintlock said, his face bleak.

  Suddenly, he had a strange feeling of hard times a-coming, of bad happenings, that he could not shake.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  On the morning of what was destined to be Lucy Cully’s wedding day and Nathan Poteet’s last day on earth, the outlaw was wakened from sound sleep when the door of his hotel room was kicked in and damaged so badly that it hung askew on its one remaining hinge.

  The shattering crash of the splintering door jarred Poteet to action. He reached for the Colt on his bedside table but didn’t make it. Strong hands pinned him down and then dragged him kicking and cussing from the bed.

  Grim old Hawk Collins, owner of the Rafter-H ranch, waited until Poteet was punched into submission by several of his hands and then said, “Put on your duds, Poteet. I will not hang a man in his underwear. It ain’t decent.”

  “What the hell is this about?” Poteet yelled, his face black with anger.

  “You know what it’s about, Poteet,” Collins said. “Now dress like I said or by God we’ll do it for you.”

  “That youngster, the one who tried to kill me. You’re here about him, ain’t you?” Poteet said. His mouth was bloody and his left eye was swollen shut from the beating he’d taken. “It was a fair fight and he fired first.”

  “Fired first, fired last, didn’t fire at all, I don’t give a damn,” Collins said. “He rode for my brand and I won’t let his death go unanswered and unpunished.”

>   Hawk Collins, a hard, unforgiving man, was a stern product of his time and place. He’d once counted Jesse Chisholm a friend and still kept up a cordial correspondence with old Charlie Goodnight. Collins was seventy years old that fall and in his lifetime he’d killed four men in gunfights and had hanged eighteen more. His first wife had died of the cholera in 1880 and he married his second a year later, a lass of seventeen who doted on him. He had no children from either marriage, a disappointment to him.

  Poteet knew nothing of this but when he looked into Collins’s green eyes he saw no mercy there. But damn the man, he would not beg for his life like a common coward. He pulled free of the punchers who held him and said, “Boys, let me dress by myself.”

  The hands looked at their boss and Collins nodded and said, “He can put on his own clothes.”

  Poteet dressed meticulously in a clean shirt and collar and then brushed his frock coat. He settled his hat on his head and polished the toes of his boots on the back of his pants leg. “I’m ready. But if it ain’t too much of an inconvenience, I’d admire to know the name of the man who’s fixing to hang me.”

  “My name is Hawk Collins,” the rancher said.

  “You’re named for a bird of prey,” Poteet said.

  “My pa said a hawk flew around our cabin as I was being born, or maybe it was his idea of a joke, I don’t know,” Collins said.

  Poteet stared intently into the older man’s face. “You look like a hawk, like a mad old falcon.”

  Collins said, “Best you don’t make comments on a man’s appearance and instead make your peace with God, son. Your time is short.” Then, to the dozen punchers who’d crowded into the room. “Take him down to the street, boys.”

  * * *

  Tobias Fynes always arrived at the bank early, eager to leave what he called the Death House. And, as was his habit, he stood at his office window to smoke his first cigar and watch the comings and goings of the wakening town. But that morning the procession he saw leaving the hotel made his eyes nearly pop out of his head and he squeezed his cigar in sudden a stab of panic.