Hell's Gate

by William W. Johnstone

  “Roderick, I won’t dignify that question with an answer,” Lucy said.

  Tobias Fynes had been listening to this exchange with growing impatience. He felt the Cully mansion and the treasure map slipping through his fingers—and all because of a headstrong, stubborn girl.

  He decided to take matters into his own hands and solve this problem the way he always did, by charging straight at it like a maddened bull.

  “You two stay here and talk things over while I go and tell the guests there will be a short delay,” Fynes said.

  “There’s nothing more to talk about,” Lucy said. “And tell the guests to go home because there will be a long delay.”

  “Stay here nonetheless,” Fynes said, his piggy little eyes vicious.

  The fat man left the room and crossed the hall to the library. When he stepped inside Flintlock and the others looked at him expectantly.

  “There will be a short delay,” Fynes said. “The bride and groom wish to join in prayer for a while before the ceremony. At the moment they wish only to take spiritual counsel with the Reverend Reedy.”

  Uriah Reedy, now more than half drunk, bowed his head and said, “The Lord be praised.”

  “Yes, indeed and so he should,” Fynes said. He grabbed his mistress Estelle Redway by the arm and said, “I’ll wait outside the parlor door until I’m needed and you will come along too, Estelle. A bride should have another woman close on this, her happiest day. Fiddler, give us a tune while we wait.”

  As Fynes and the others left the room, Flintlock and O’Hara exchanged puzzled glances and Walt Whitman seemed concerned. Rory O’Neill stood behind the old man’s chair and laid a comforting hand on his shoulder. Hogan Lord stood with his back against a wall, his face like stone. Only the fiddler and young John Tanner, who had stayed for the festivities, seemed to be enjoying themselves, helped by a plentiful supply of Fynes’s bourbon.

  “It seems the bride is shy,” Tanner said. “I guess that’s to be expected.”

  The fiddler, a red-nosed man named Slattery, grinned and said, “Let’s drink to that.” He downed three fingers of Old Crow and then picked up his fiddle, launched into “Old Joe Clark” and while Flintlock and O’Hara stood silent, young Tanner applauded and tapped his toes.

  * * *

  “Well, have we reconciled our differences?” Tobias Fynes said. He’d given up trying to look like a benign uncle. Now his face was flushed and angry.

  “The only difference we have is a matter of timing,” Lucy said.

  “And you’ve made it clear that you don’t want to marry me,” Chanley said. He looked like he’d just sucked on a lemon.

  “Roderick, I didn’t say that I wouldn’t marry you,” Lucy said. Tears started in her eyes. “I just need a little more time to think about it.”

  The Reverend Reedy, swaying a little, blinked like an owl and said, “Dearly beloved, shall we now proceed with the marriage?”

  Fynes said, “Of course you need time, Lucy.” He stepped toward her and held out his arms. “You’re very distraught, my child. Here, let me give you a hug.”

  Estelle gave a little gasp of alarm as Lucy hesitantly let Fynes embrace her. It was the easiest thing in the world for him to grab her left arm, twist it behind her back and push up hard until her hand was between her shoulder blades and she cried out in pain.

  Fynes whispered into Lucy’s ear, “All you have to do say is ‘I do’ and the pain will stop.”

  “This is for your own good, Lucy,” Roderick Chanley said. “This cursed house has done something terrible to you. It’s turned you into a madwoman.”

  Fynes said, “Now, Lucy, will you say those two little words? Think of it, my dear, soon you’ll be married to Roderick and live happily ever after.”

  “Let me go,” Lucy said. “You’re hurting me.”

  Fynes forced the arm higher up the girl’s back and she cried out in pain. Estelle ran to the fat man and attempted to pull his hand away from Lucy’s arm. Roderick dragged her away and said, “Don’t interfere. Lucy will thank Mr. Fynes for this later.”

  Beside Fynes’s great bulk Lucy looked tiny and fragile, as though the fat man could break her to pieces in his arms. “Listen to me,” he said, his florid face close to hers, “if you cry out again, Flintlock and the breed will come to your rescue. Hogan Lord will not allow that to happen. He’ll kill them both. Do you understand me?”

  Tears of pain and anger in her eyes, Lucy nodded. “Yes, I understand.”

  “Will you say the words?” Fynes said.

  Defeated, Lucy went as limp as a rag doll. She would not allow herself to be responsible for the deaths of two men she liked, and she’d no fight left in her.

  * * *

  Lucy’s cry troubled Flintlock and O’Hara and they both headed for the library door. Hogan Lord got to the door before they did. He’d cleared his frock coat from his gun. “What’s going on in the parlor is no business of you boys,” he said.

  In deference to the wedding, O’Hara had earlier unbuckled his gunbelt and laid it aside on a chair. Now he crossed the floor, drew his revolver and held it by his side. “Hogan, I’m making it my business,” he said.

  Flintlock kept his voice calm, level. “No, O’Hara. He’ll kill you.”

  Lord and O’Hara locked eyes. The chime of the clock in the hallway was loud in the silence. “I don’t want to kill you, O’Hara,” Lord said. “But if it comes down to it, I will.”

  “Hogan, go find out what’s happening and come back and tell us,” Flintlock said. Then, his eyes accusing, “You gave me your word not to draw your gun.”

  Lord stared hard at Flintlock and thought that through. Like O’Hara, Flintlock had laid his gun aside, figuring that no one cares to be around a gun-toting wedding guest. As he faced Lord he knew the gunman would not draw down on an unarmed man.

  Finally, Lord said, “Yes, I did give my word and I haven’t drawn my gun yet. I’ll go take a look. But what you heard was a little yelp of happiness from Lucy, nothing else. You two stay right where you’re at, and O’Hara, put that hogleg away—doesn’t exactly make the place feel homey.”

  Slattery the fiddler, aware of the tension in the room, launched into a spirited rendition of “Bile ’Em Cabbage Down” and the moment passed.

  Lord stepped out of the room and O’Hara said to Flintlock, “I had my gun in my hand, Sam. He knew I could shade him.”

  Flintlock said, “No, O’Hara, he would have killed you. One way or another, he would have killed you.”

  Raising his voice over the lilting strains of the music, O’Hara said, “I can’t believe he’s that fast. I had my Colt in my hand and I put the crawl on him.”

  Flintlock shook his head. “You didn’t put the crawl on him, O’Hara. Hogan Lord is fast. Maybe he’s the fastest that’s ever been.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  As the tipsy preacher prepared to marry Lucy Cully and her intended, two things happened that spoiled his introductory speech on the joys of marriage. The first was that Hogan Lord stepped into the room and obviously didn’t like what he saw, the second was the fusillade of bullets that crashed into the front of the mansion.

  Western men, Lord, Fynes and the Reverend Reedy, hit the floor immediately but Lucy and Roderick Chanley stood in the middle of the floor, bewildered.

  “Get down!” Lord yelled. From the library he heard the fiddle squawk to a frightened stop.

  As a bullet crashed through the parlor window scattering shards of glass, Chanley hit the floor and Lucy followed. She crawled to Lord and said, “Who is out there?”

  The gunman shook his head and said nothing. He made his way to the window and crouched behind it, gun in hand. After a couple more shots thudded into the front of the house near him, he slowly raised his head and looked outside. Less than a hundred yards away a stand of juniper was threaded by strands of gunsmoke. Lord ducked down again as a bullet shattered through the window a few inches above his head. During his brief glance outside
he’d counted fire from at least six rifles, but there could be twice that number hidden among the trees.

  “Hogan, do you see them?” Fynes said. The fat man was sweating heavily but game enough, grasping a Sharps .22 caliber four-shot derringer in his fist.

  Without turning his head Lord said, “I see their smoke, but that’s all I see.”

  “How many?” Fynes said.

  “I don’t know. I’d say at least six.”

  “Who the hell are they?” Fynes said.

  “Beats me,” Lord said. “But they’re an unfriendly bunch.”

  He jumped up, thumbed off five fast shots and as answering bullets broke windowpanes, ducked down again. As he reloaded from his cartridge belt Lord looked at Chanley and said, “Hey, poet, crawl across the floor and open the door.”

  To Lord’s surprise Chanley’s face was gray, his eyes wide and staring. The man looking back at Lord seemed paralyzed, immobilized by fear. Without taking his eyes from Chanley’s face, Lord said, “Tobias, go open the door.”

  But before the fat man could move, Lucy said, “I’ll do it.” She crawled across the floor, reached up for the handle and pulled the door open.

  “Wide,” Lord said.

  Bullets buzzed through the parlor like angry hornets.

  Lucy pulled the door wide and Lord yelled, “Sam! Sam Flintlock!”

  “I hear you!” Flintlock yelled.

  “Are you and O’Hara still alive?”

  “So far!”

  “Who the hell is out there?”

  “I think it could be Jasper Orlov and his bunch,” Flintlock said.

  Lord didn’t answer for a few moments and then he yelled, “There’s no such person!”

  “Stick your head out the front door and then tell me that,” Flintlock said. “There is such a person and he means to kill us.” Then, “Hogan, can you hear me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m going out back to the barn for rifles. Keep ’em busy, huh?”

  “I’ll do that,” Lord said. “But don’t be long. Those boys out there might take it into their heads to rush us.”

  Flintlock didn’t answer. He was already making his limping way to the back door of the house.

  * * *

  A wind always soared across the high crest of the crag and it tugged at the brim of Flintlock’s hat as he stepped out the door and crossed ten yards of open ground to the stable. His buckskin nickered a greeting as Flintlock entered and slid his rifle and O’Hara’s from their scabbards. He also pulled the Hawken. It was loaded and seemed to be in good shape. Flintlock had a plan for the old smoke pole. He picked up half a box of .44-40 shells from his saddlebags and then made his way back into the house.

  Bullets still ripped through the mansion and he heard the flat statements of O’Hara and Lord’s Colts as they maintained a slow but steady fire.

  “O’Hara,” Flintlock said before he entered the library door. There was a good possibility that O’Hara would shoot first and identify his silent intruder later. “It’s me.”

  “You got my rifle?” O’Hara said.

  “Yeah.” Flintlock took up a crouching position and duckwalked across the floor. O’Hara holstered his Colt and grabbed the rifle. He raised an eyebrow at the Hawken but said nothing. Flintlock hunkered down behind the window and shoved the barrel of the Hawken through a broken pane. He pulled back the hammer as beside him O’Hara levered a stream of shots from his Winchester, empty brass shells chiming on the floor around him.

  Thanks to the day-in, day-out tuition of old Barnabas and his mountain men cronies, when a serious shot had to be made Flintlock relied on the Hawken. The rifle was not nearly as good a weapon as a Winchester repeater. In a shooting scrape you got one shot with the Hawken and then you were pretty much done, and sometimes dead. But Flintlock was amazingly accurate with the old rifle and Barnabas, not prone to giving compliments, had once told him he could shoot the tail feathers off a hummingbird at a hundred yards.

  Now that skill would be put to the test.

  As Hogan Lord kept up a steady fire from the other room, Flintlock turned to O’Hara and said, “Dust them trees good. Maybe you can flush one of them out of there and I can nail him.”

  O’Hara nodded, stood and levered the Winchester from his shoulder, laying down a withering fire. Flintlock looked over the barrel of the Hawken and waited. His heartbeat was slow, his breathing normal, and after a few moments his patience was rewarded. A man wearing a brown tunic and knee-high moccasins broke cover and moved toward either a hiding place or a better spot from where to shoot. His mistake. And a fatal one.

  Flintlock drew a bead, triggered the Hawken and through the smoke he saw the man stop, stand on his tiptoes and then slowly drop to his knees. A well-aimed shot from O’Hara finished him. The man fell on his face and lay still.

  Hogan Lord saw the hit and let rip with a cheer, soon overshadowed by the almost inhuman cacophony of wails that erupted from the tree line. All firing ceased as a lamenting chorus of half a dozen women dragged the body into the brush and out of sight.

  “What the hell?” Flintlock said. Then, yelling, “Hogan, what do you make of that?”

  “Beats me,” Lord said. “It seems that they’ve all given up and gone home.”

  Flintlock wondered at that. A similar reaction had taken place during the rock-throwing incident. As soon as O’Hara dusted the ridge with rifle fire Orlov’s people had quickly retreated. Now after one of their number went down they withdrew. For some reason they would not stand in the face of determined opposition. It was a thing to remember.

  * * *

  The moment had passed for Tobias Fynes. That damned little witch Lucy Cully was now with Sam Flintlock and O’Hara and there was no possibility of forcing her into a marriage. Maybe Hogan Lord could shoot them both but that was asking a lot of the gunman. And uppermost in Fynes’s mind was the unwelcome fact that during the fight Flintlock had inflicted the only casualty on Orlov’s people, if that’s what they were. The man was better than he seemed and bore watching.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  A wary Flintlock and O’Hara stepped among the trees, Winchesters in hand.

  “You bedded him down all right, Sam,” O’Hara said. “Looks like he bled out before they moved him.”

  Flintlock nodded. “He’s dead, all right. A man doesn’t lose that much blood and keep kicking. They dragged him back that way,” he said, using his rifle to point out what looked like a scarlet snail track across the grass between the trees. “You’ve scouted around, O’Hara. How many were we facing?”

  “Judging by the ejected cartridge cases, I count five using Winchesters and three using pistols. A couple of the revolver shooters reloaded several times.”

  “Eight? Is that all there was?” Flintlock said.

  “No, Sam, there was more than that. Judging by the tracks I’d say at least two score people were here, not all of them shooting, because half of them were women and children.”

  “I’m glad I didn’t know what the odds were,” Flintlock said. “They might have spooked me.”

  “We killed one of Orlov’s men,” O’Hara said. “I say we’ve punished him enough. What we do, Sam, is follow Fynes back to town and get our money.”

  “And leave Lucy here alone with Chanley? I think a couple of vultures are in cahoots. Fyne wants the house and Chanley wants money.”

  All of a sudden O’Hara looked frustrated and angry. “Sam, listen to me. When we spoke with the preacher he told us the wedding ceremony was going real nice until the shooting started.”

  “The preacher was drunk and why has Lucy locked herself in her room and refused to come out, huh? And what about that cry of pain we heard? I think she changed her mind about marrying Chanley and he and Fynes tried to force her into it.”

  “You mean by torture?” O’Hara said.

  “Yeah, somebody hurt that girl, hurt her bad enough that she screamed.”

  O’Hara said. “Sam, I know we heard a cry, b
ut after talking to the preacher and Lord it was probably a shout of happiness. You don’t like Fynes and you’re real sore about Chanley ordering you out of the house and that’s why you’re coming up with these wild ideas.”

  “They’re not wild ideas, O’Hara,” Flintlock said. “I think Fynes was trying to force Lucy into saying, ‘I do.’ But the danger has passed and I reckon first things should come first. Fynes has already left, so we’ll head back to the house, saddle up and meet him in Mansion Creek. I’ll see things clearer once we get our five hundred.” He smiled. “Maybe we’ll help Lucy get new glass panes for her broken windows.”

  O’Hara did not answer. His eyes were on the ravens flapping around the tallest reaches of the house, borne upward by a whirling wind. The cries of the birds were lost in distance but their agitation was such that O’Hara knew they were sending him a warning from the cosmos. Too late he heard the shuffle of feet behind him. He saw Flintlock go down under a pile of bodies and then something hard crashed into his head and O’Hara saw nothing at all.

  * * *

  Sam Flintlock woke to darkness stained by the orange glow of firelight. He tried to move but groaned and quickly closed his eyes again. He remained perfectly still, after finding out the hard way that his slightest movement would set the pain in his head to spiking. But then he realized he was cruelly bound hand and foot and couldn’t move a muscle anyway.

  Flintlock opened his eyes again. His brain quickly registered two things: the glow of a campfire a short distance away and the grinning decapitated head that had been placed between his legs. It was a man’s head with a bullet hole in the middle of the forehead. Flintlock giggled. Good shooting!

  “Sam, come back.” O’Hara’s voice from somewhere in the gloom.

  “O’Hara, where are you?” Flintlock said. He giggled. “Are you in Timbuktu?”