Hell's Gate

by William W. Johnstone

  A man skilled in arms, fast and accurate with the pistol, willing to kill and not afraid to die, can be a devastating force. Such expertise, the masterful coordination between hand and eye, is a rare gift that is given to few men, perhaps one in a thousand. No wonder then that on the frontier, the arrival in a town of a named shootist was an occasion for great wonder and admiration not unmixed with dread.

  Now Carson would prove that he was such a man.

  He walked almost casually toward the rocks, and the reaction from the cannibal clansmen was immediate. Four of them left cover and stood, rifles coming up to their shoulders. Carson shot with both hands, so fast the roars of his bucking Colts sounded like one. Three men went down. The fourth fired and missed. He attempted to work the lever of his Winchester but the effort seemed too much for him. The chest of his homespun tunic stained bright scarlet, he dropped to his knees and then fell flat on his face. Now for the surviving cannibals anger, raw hatred and the desire to smash, destroy and kill, substituted for courage. Spurred on by their blind rage they left the cover of the rocks and charged Carson, firing from the hip. The three men died knowing that they’d scored no hits and one of them, a gray-haired oldster with shaggy eyebrows, screamed in frustrated fury before Carson shot him a second time and finally bedded him down.

  For a while the gunman stood still as a marble statue in the clearing, gray gunsmoke drifting around him, and surveyed the slaughter he’d just perpetrated. Then his shoulders slumped and he stared at the ground, like a weary warrior after a battle won.

  “Spunner!” Flintlock called out, using what he considered the less pugnacious form of address, “It’s Sam Flintlock and O’Hara. Don’t shoot, we’re coming in.”

  The gunman’s body remained still as he turned his lowered head. “I see you, Flintlock. Come on ahead.”

  When Flintlock stepped beside the man, he said, “You hit?”

  “No, not a scratch. There was a lot of them but they weren’t much.”

  “I thought they’d gone,” Flintlock said. “I reckoned it was all over.”

  “They wanted a taste of revenge first, damned fools.” Spunner saw Flintlock’s eyes move to the scattered bodies, already stiff in death. “The women will come back for them tonight and then they’ll leave.”

  “Where will people like that go?” O’Hara said. “When a town finds out what they are, or have been, it will not allow them to settle.”

  “In the old days the Apache would have killed them off,” Spunner said. “It would have been a mercy. But now they’re pariahs, and they’ll wander and starve and perhaps a few of the children will survive. But that’s not likely.”

  “A hard fate,” O’Hara said. “Even for people such as these.”

  Spunner nodded. “Yes, the dead among them are the luckiest.”

  Then from among the trees the sound of a fiddle, a spirited rendition of “Black Them Boots” as a piping, boy’s voice sang the words:

  Black them boots and make them shine,

  A good-bye and a good-bye.

  Black them boots and make them shine,

  and good-bye, Liza Jane.

  Oh, how I love her,

  it’s a scandal and shame.

  Oh, how I love her,

  And it’s good-bye, Liza Jane.

  Flintlock drew the Colt from his waistband and said, “Come in real slow, fiddle player. We’re well-armed men here and in a mighty cantankerous frame of mind.”

  The playing stopped and a man’s voice came from the wild oaks, “Don’t shoot, mister. It’s only poor Joe Grimes who’s been so close to hell this five years he’s smelled the smoke. I got my boy with me.”

  “Then let’s take a look at you,” Flintlock said. “And when you come out of them trees all I want to see in your hands is a fiddle.”

  A few moments passed and a tall, skinny man dressed in the ragged remains of a frock coat emerged from the oaks. Beside him a boy no older than twelve or thirteen wore ragged overalls, an old, collared shirt with a dirty inside neck, and had bare feet. Both man and boy were hollow eyed and hungry and looked as though they’d been up the trail and back again.

  “We fiddled and sang because we figgered you wouldn’t shoot us,” Grimes said. “You knowing we was white men an’ all.”

  “You figgered right . . . for now,” Flintlock said. “Tell us your story, fiddle man, and then state your intentions.”

  “And after that?”

  “After that you’ll be notified,” Flintlock said.

  “You gents wouldn’t have a bit o’ cheese about your person,” Grimes said.

  “Or a hen’s egg,” his son said.

  Spunner said, “Maybe later. Now tell us what you’ve been asked to tell us and do it quickly.”

  Grimes ran a nervous hand over his mouth and beard and said, “You heard me say I’ve been close to hell this last five years, well, it’s the truth. It was that time ago I came into the Arizona Territory with a pack mule and a black serving man by the name of Sable Starling. We were headed for a town west of here where I have huggin’ kin, another fiddle player by the name of Dick Slattery. You boys ever heard of him?”

  Flintlock nodded. “That name is familiar to me. So you were headed for the town of Mansion Creek but fell in with cannibals.”

  “Yes, fell in with a man called Jasper Orlov. Sweet Jesus! He and his tribe captured me and my boy, then ate the mule and the black man. He spared me and my son because I could play the fiddle and Orlov loved to dance, and so did his people. Orlov told me that if I ever tried to escape he’d dine on my son.” Grimes’s haunted eyes lifted to Flintlock’s face. “That was five years ago, mister, five long years of hell on earth. Orlov kept me alive so long as I played for him and when he died I had the same arrangement with his folks. I fiddled when they killed, I fiddled when they butchered and ate people and I fiddled when they danced around the fire like the demons they were. And God help me, I was one of them.”

  Flintlock looked stern. “Did you and your son eat human flesh, Grimes? Come now, don’t lie to me. I’ll know if you’re lying.”

  “Never,” Grimes said. “Not once did me or my son partake of human flesh. We were fed scraps of game and pieces of stale bread and we were always hungry.”

  “But you never, not even one time, became cannibals?” O’Hara said. “Is that what you’re telling us?”

  “Yes, and it’s the truth. We were never even asked to eat human flesh,” Grimes said. “Orlov always told me and my son that we were not worthy. He said, ‘Only my disciples can eat man meat and live for a hundred and three score years.’

  “Thank God he never forced such a hellish food down our throats.”

  Flintlock looked at O’Hara. “What do you think?”

  “He’s telling the truth,” O’Hara said.

  “Spunner?”

  “A man doesn’t make up a lie like that.” Spunner glanced back at his shot-up cabin and said, “Mr. Grimes, I have cheese and eggs from my own chickens. You are welcome to eat with me.”

  “Coffee? Do you have coffee?”

  Spunner nodded. “That too.”

  “Orlov didn’t hold with coffee. He said it was the devil’s drink, a strange thing to say, coming from him.”

  Spunner looked at Grimes’s son and said, “What’s your name, boy?”

  “Billy, sir.”

  “You look pale. The sight of the dead men lying around here trouble you?”

  “No, sir. I’ve seen many dead men,” Billy said. “The sight of you troubles me. I’ve never seen a man as white as you before.”

  Grimes frowned and said, “Billy, watch your tongue.”

  But Spunner laughed, then said, “The boy speaks his mind. I like that. It means he’ll make his mark one day.” He looked at Flintlock. “I never did thank you for coming back when the shooting started.”

  “We didn’t do much except watch,” Flintlock said.

  “I think that you and O’Hara would have done more than watch if t
he fight had gone against me.”

  Flintlock said, “Maybe so. But before we leave, I need to tell you that I know you’re Whitey Carson and you proved it to me today. I’ve never seen a man shoot that well, and I’ve seen some of the best.”

  Spunner nodded. “I was Whitey Carson but I am not he any longer. That man belongs buried in my past and that’s where he’ll stay.”

  “Pity about today,” O’Hara said. “Kind of ruined it for you having to resurrect Whitey for a spell, huh?”

  “The fight was brought to me. It was none of my doing and I can live with that.”

  “Well, as far as I’m concerned you’re Jeptha Spunner, the crazy man who builds flying machines,” Flintlock said.

  “Thank you, Flintlock,” Spunner said. “I appreciate it.” Then, “Mr. Grimes, please be my guest for lunch. You and your son can spend the night in my cabin and tomorrow, after a five-year interruption, resume your journey to Mansion Creek and your loved ones.” He read the concern in Grimes’s face and said, “This was the last attack Orlov’s clan will ever make. Tonight the women will come for their dead and then they’ll be gone.”

  “Is that how it will be, Mr. Spunner?” Grimes said.

  “Yes. I’m sure of it.”

  “Then we’ll accept your kind invitation,” Grimes said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  “He was sure of things before, and look what happened,” O’Hara said.

  “This time I think he’s right,” Sam Flintlock said. “The cannibals have taken a beating, lost a lot of fighting men, and their village is burned to ashes. They won’t stick around this neck of the woods any longer, not if they have any smarts.”

  Flintlock and O’Hara followed a dim trail up the talus slope, losing their footing a few times as they picked their way across broken rock and pushed through patches of heavy brush.

  Under a sky that had lost its brightness they crossed the mesa to the crag. The house was silhouetted in the afternoon light, an ominous, towering black shape that looked more hunchbacked vulture than eagle. As Flintlock and O’Hara walked closer the white windows revealed no lamp glow but stared at them blankly, like old eyes with cataracts.

  “Seems like there’s nobody to home,” Flintlock said.

  O’Hara with his long-seeing eyes said, “At the side of the house, Sam. See them? Looks like the poet feller in his wheelchair and the prizefighter.”

  “Where’s Lucy and Chanley?” Flintlock said.

  “I don’t see them.”

  “Maybe Walt Whitman is taking the air,” Flintlock said. “Looks like he’s mighty close to the edge.”

  O’Hara’s eyes lifted to the sinister bulk of the mansion and he shook his head. “I don’t know what’s happening, but Whitman isn’t taking the air.”

  “But something has happened. Is that what you’re saying?” Flintlock said.

  “Could be. It’s just a feeling I got,” O’Hara said.

  “Then let’s go find out. Maybe them damned cannibals attacked the place out of spite.”

  * * *

  Walt Whitman and Rory O’Neill watched Flintlock and O’Hara until they were within hailing distance and then the big prizefighter pushed Whitman’s wheelchair in their direction. O’Neill stopped in front of the house and then Whitman said, “There’s been a terrible tragedy.” He paused for a while, tears welled in his eyes and he said, “I am heartbroken. I am devastated.”

  “What’s happened?” Flintlock said. He saw no danger but kept his hand close to his gun.

  O’Neill answered that question. “Roderick Chanley is dead. His body lies among the rocks at the bottom of the crag.”

  The sky had darkened and thunder rumbled in the distance and the ravens flapped and fluttered around the house and uttered distressed cries of kraa-kraa. O’Hara heard the birds call out to him and it chilled him to the bone. His hand moved to the medicine bag that hung on a rawhide string around his neck. Death and terror had come to the Cully mansion and the ravens were telling him so.

  “You’d better come inside,” Walt Whitman said. “There is much beauty in a thunderstorm but it’s better admired from inside.”

  “Where is Lucy?” Flintlock said.

  Thunder banged closer and Whitman said, “You’d better come inside.”

  “Lucy is in the parlor,” O’Neill said. “You can talk to her there.”

  Flintlock had questions but he decided to hold off on them until he saw Lucy. But he decided to try one. “How did Roderick fall?” he said. “Did he lose his footing?”

  “Lucy is in the parlor,” Whitman said. His face was white as chalk, even his lips. “What happened here today is better told from her lips, Mr. Flintlock.”

  The wind was picking up and Flintlock felt it blowing stronger. It was going to be a bad night around the Cully mansion.

  * * *

  Lucy Cully sat in a red leather wing chair in the parlor, so large that it almost swallowed the girl’s small, slender body. She held a glass of brandy on her lap, clutching the glass with both hands as she gazed into its amber depths. She was very pale, but her eyes were dry. Lucy looked up when Flintlock and the others walked in. She smiled. “How nice to see you, Sam,” she said. “You too, O’Hara. Please, take a seat, both of you. Brandy?”

  “Not right now, Lucy,” Flintlock said. He drew up a chair and sat opposite her. Then, easing into what had to be asked, he smiled and said, “What happened, Lucy?”

  Silence. The quiet stretched . . . taut as a fiddle string. Walt Whitman coughed twice behind his fisted hand and Flintlock heard the hiss . . . hiss of O’Neill’s steady breathing through the ruptured bone and cartilage of his broken nose. Thunder blasted and the wind flung rain against the parlor window like a handful of gravel.

  “Lucy?” Flintlock prompted. “Will you speak to me and tell me what happened to Roderick?”

  The girl lifted her eyes to his and her lashes fluttered. “Roderick tried to kill me and I shot him,” she said. That statement should have dropped like a bomb into the parlor, but instead it hovered like a feather in a solemn silence.

  Flintlock and O’Hara exchanged a stunned glance and then Flintlock finally found his voice. “Tell me about it, Lucy,” he said.

  “Roderick tried to kill me and I shot him. There is nothing more to tell.”

  “Why did Roderick try to kill you?” Flintlock said.

  “I wouldn’t agree to sell my house to Tobias Fynes and it made him angry, very angry,” Lucy said. “I told him I no longer wanted to marry him and that made him angrier still.”

  “Lucy, how did it happen?” Flintlock said.

  The girl looked confused. “How did what happen?”

  Talking as softly as he could, a stretch for the normally gruff Flintlock, he said, “You and Roderick were around the side of the house, isn’t that right?”

  “Yes, we were,” Lucy said. “We’d quarreled, you see, right here in the parlor, and I ran out of the house to get away from him. He followed me, Sam.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “We quarreled some more and then Roderick grabbed me by my shoulders and tried to throw me off the crag,” Lucy said. She buried her face in her hands and said, “Oh, Sam, it was horrible . . . just so horrible.”

  “When he laid hands on you that’s when you shot him?” Flintlock said.

  “Yes. He didn’t know I’d retrieved my derringer from his room and I shot him. He staggered back from me and lost his footing. And then he fell over the side. Sam, he screamed all the way down . . . a long time . . . a long time to fall and a long time to scream. And then the screaming suddenly stopped and I knew Roderick was dead, dead, dead.” Lucy’s pretty face brightened. “Are you sure I can’t interest you in a brandy, Sam? Anyone? It’s very good, you know. I recommend it.”

  Walt Whitman looked horrified. “Oh my God,” he said, and hung his gray head.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  “Do you think there’s a single bone in his body that ain�
��t broke?” Sam Flintlock said.

  “Sure doesn’t look like it,” O’Hara said. “I don’t think he suffered much. He must have hit the rocks like a runaway freight train.”

  “Well, God rest him,” Flintlock said. “He was a good poet.”

  “Was he?” O’Hara said.

  “I don’t know if he was or not,” Flintlock said. “It was the only nice thing I could think to say about him.”

  Roderick Chanley had hit the rocks headfirst with outstretched arms to break his fall and both skull and arm bones were shattered beyond recognition.

  Flintlock and O’Hara agreed that this was not a corpse to be displayed for grieving loved ones, but one to be nailed up in a pine coffin right away.

  The huge rocks at the bottom of the crag were large and jagged, not rounded with the weather of millennia. They had fallen from the side of the crag during some violent earthshake just a few centuries before and they’d broken Chanley to pieces.

  Flintlock and O’Hara lifted the smashed body from the rocks, akin to hoisting a man-sized flour sack full of shattered pumpkins, and dragged it to a patch of open ground covered in fine sandstone gravel and patches of wild thyme. Because of the bloody state of the body it took several minutes of searching before they noticed two .41 caliber holes an inch to the left of the second button of Chanley’s shirt.

  “She shot him twice,” Flintlock said. “I guess once wasn’t enough.”

  “Lucy was fast on the trigger, Sam. The bullet holes are close together.”

  “Bang-bang,” Flintlock said. “Two bullets into a moving target is good shooting.”

  O’Hara looked troubled. “If Chanley was moving. Maybe he was standing still, talking to her.”

  “You heard what Lucy told us, O’Hara,” Flintlock said. “He grabbed her shoulders and tried to throw her off the crag, so he was moving, all right.”

  “I didn’t see bruises on Lucy,” O’Hara said.

  “They were covered by her dress,” Flintlock said.

  “When a small woman like Lucy is attacked by a man and fights back she gets bruises, and that’s a natural fact,” O’Hara said. “I didn’t see any.”