Hell's Gate

by William W. Johnstone

  Wiping the blood and grime from his face, Reno limped to the pile. He had to lean against the wood for support, and breathing heavily, he looked down at The Voice, and the axe, and the blood.

  “You . . . horse’s . . . arse . . .” Jed Reno wheezed, and made a painful gesture at what remained of his trading post. “All three . . . of you . . . curs . . . dead . . . burnin’ in . . . Hell.... Means . . . I gotta . . . clean this . . . mess . . . up . . . myself.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Jed Reno salvaged what he could from the three dead men. The guns he could resell, even the two flintlock pistols, a matched set of A. Waters with walnut grips—antiquated as they were. Reno also found a nice key-wind watch, and wondered who the dead man stole that from, but decided that the odds highly unfavored the victim—if the victim hadn’t been murdered—coming into Reno’s store and seeing his watch for sale. The boots and shoes might bring a bit of a profit, or he could trade them to the Shoshone woman for some more beads, along with the hats. Not much use with the clothes, especially now that they were all pretty much hardened and stained with dried blood. Reno was lucky. He even found a few gold coins and some silver in the outlaws’ pockets. He was alive, and figured he had made a pretty good trade with the three dead men.

  It was shaping up to be one passable, profitable day. But Reno certainly didn’t look forward to cleaning up the mess.

  He loaded the corpses onto his pack mule, saddled his bay gelding, and led his cargo away from the post, crossing the tracks of the iron horse. He looked east at the town, still mostly tents, although a few sod houses and frame buildings had been put up. Then he looked west, following the iron rails and wooden crossties laid by the Irishmen working for the Union Pacific Railway. He could see black smoke puffing out of the stacks of a locomotive down the line. Back east, he heard the screeching and ugly hissing and saw more black smoke as another train made its way through the settlement, hauling more spikes, rails, crossties, fishplates, sledgehammers, and maybe even a few more workers.

  It was a big undertaking, the transcontinental railroad, and as much as Jed Reno despised the damned thing, he had to admit it was progress. And had made him fairly wealthy.

  He rode about five miles north, decided that was good enough, and dumped the bodies into an arroyo. Buzzards had to eat. So did coyotes. And one thing Jed Reno did not like about that railroad was the fact that since they had started laying track across this part of the territory, most of the game had left the country.

  * * *

  Reno could remember talking with Jim Bridger, Kit Carson, and other trappers. It hadn’t been at one of the rendezvous because, the best Reno recalled things, those gatherings had ended by then. Maybe it had been at Fort Bridger. Talk had reached Bridger’s trading post about a railroad being planned, one that would stretch across the country. Carson had shrugged. Bridger had allowed it was true. Reno had laughed and called it a fool’s folly.

  “How you gonna get one of them trains across these Rockies?”

  “Don’t underestimate man’s ingenuity,” Bridger had said.

  “Where, by thunder,” Carson had said, “did you pick up that ‘in-gen-yoo-ah-tee’ word?”

  “And in winter?” Reno had said. “Can’t be done.”

  Of course, a few years earlier, Reno would never have thought he would be seeing prairie schooners by the hundreds crossing the Great Plains and then across the mountains, bringing settlers from New York and Pennsylvania and other places foreign to a man like Reno, bound for the Oregon country and later California. Farmers. Merchants. Women and children and even milch cows and dogs. One gent had been hauling sapling fruit trees to start some orchards in the Willamette Valley.

  Born in 1796 in what was now Bowling Green, Kentucky, Jed Reno had seen much in his day. His father then apprenticed Reno to a wheelwright up in Louisville, and Reno took that for longer than he had any right to before he stowed away on a steamboat and went down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. New Madrid. Then St. Louis. And then he signed up with William Henry Ashley and set out up the Missouri River and became a fur trapper. That had been the life, maybe the best years Reno would ever live to see, but . . . well . . . nothing lasts forever. Beavers went out of fashion. Silk became favorable for hats. Now fur felt had become popular. By Jupiter, Reno had a hat of fur felt on his head now, too.

  So when Reno happened upon some men who said they were surveyors, and when they paid him gold to do their hunting and scouting for them, Reno decided that Jim Bridger was a pretty wise gent after all.

  Reno had only one eye, but few things escaped his vision, and he had two good ears. And to live in the wilds of the Rockies and Plains since 1822, you had to see, and you had to hear. Reno listened to the surveyors. And he watched.

  Apparently, there were a number of surveys going on. A couple were down south, which made a lot of sense to Reno. Weather would be warmer, less hostile, across Texas and that desert country the United States had claimed after that set to with Mexico. Another up north, somewhere between the forty-seventh and forty-ninth parallels north—whatever that meant. Reno wasn’t sure England would care too much for that. Seemed to Reno that ownership of all that country up north was being debated between the king—or was it a queen now?—and whoever was president of these United States.

  But the surveyors kept talking about a war brewing between the states. It had something to do with freeing the slaves or, to hear one of the men who spoke with a Mississippi drawl, it had to do with “a bunch of damn Yankees pushing us good Southern folk around.” That got Reno to figuring that there was no way the United States would put up a railroad across country that might not be part of the United States in a few years. So he paid even closer attention to the surveyors.

  Around 1853, some surveyors had been hauling their boxes and making their maps along what most folks called the Buffalo Trail, led by some captain named Gunnison. Something the surveyors called the Thirty-fifth Parallel Route. Reno figured that one died when Ute Indians killed some of the soldier boys, but he also met another one of those young whippersnappers who called himself an engineer. Went by the name of Lander, Frederick W. Lander, who worked for some outfit called the Eastern Railroad of Massachusetts. Lander told Reno that there could never be a railroad in the South, but a railroad had to connect the Pacific with the Atlantic because if war came—not among the states, but against a European power with a strong navy and mighty army—the United States would not be able to defend California without “an adequate mode of transit,” whatever that meant.

  So Reno decided to throw up a trading post along Clear Creek in the Unorganized Territory, take a gamble that Lander was right, and that eventually he’d be selling items to greenhorns stopping for a rest on this transcontinental railroad.

  The post was a combination of logs—which he had hauled down from the Medicine Bow countr y—and dirt. He had built it into a knoll that rose near the creek, digging out a cave that he knew would be cool enough in the summer and hot enough in the winter. The logs stuck out and made the post look more like a cabin, though, and gave it more of an inviting feel. Reno had never cared much for those strictly sod huts that looked, to him, like graves. This way, part log cabin, the post didn’t seem completely like a grave to Jed Reno.

  A few years later, Lander came back again, and this time he had some painter guy with him. That’s when Jed Reno began feeling pretty confident about his investment. After all, if you hired some artist to paint some pretty pictures of you working, then you had to think that this was being documented for history.

  Besides, even if it didn’t happen, if the railroad went north or south or never at all, well, Jed Reno still had a place he could call home, that would keep him warm in the winter and cool in the summer. He had a good source of water, and could fish or hunt or get drunk or just sit on his porch—if you could call it a porch—and watch the sun rise, the sun set, the moon rise, the moon set. By Jupiter, he was pretty much retired anyhow, like ol’ Bridger.


  Of course, the war came—just like everyone had been talking about—and the surveyors and engineers stopped coming. Poor young Frederick Lander. He joined up to fight to preserve the Union, and from the stories Reno heard, the boy took sick with congestion of the brain and died somewhere in Virginia in 1862. Wasn’t even shot or stuck with one of those long knives or blown apart by a cannonball. Reno wondered if that gent with the paintbrushes—some gent named Albert Bierstadt, who had dark hair, a pointed beard, and penetrating eyes—ever amounted to much.

  * * *

  Most of the blood inside the trading post had been covered with more dirt, which Reno packed down with his moccasins. The merchandise that had been busted, or soaked or stained with blood, he tossed into a canvas bag and hauled to the smelly dump that the settlers, who had not moved on with the railroad, had started up and was already attracting vultures and rats and coyotes and flies. But it was far enough away from Reno’s post that the smell seldom bothered him too much.

  He salvaged most of the merchandise, not that it really mattered. Since the railroad moved on, Reno had not seen much business, and since the trains brought only supplies and more workers, it wasn’t like settlers were stopping to spend money on trinkets and blankets and tin cups. Reno began to doubt if he could ever sell anything else—not that he really cared one way or the other.

  Fixing the hitching rail was probably the easiest thing, since he had hammers and plenty of nails and even some spare ridgepoles, located behind the post, he could use. The roof and the porch, however, were another matter. He had to use another pole to replace the one he and The Voice had knocked down, and then secure that with another pole, nailing one end to the vertical pole and ramming the other between two logs, which he then patched with chink.

  After that, he had to climb onto the roof and throw enough brush down to cover the hole one of the bandits had made with his double-barreled shotgun. He could hear some of the dirt sprinkling from his ceiling and probably dirtying up his bolts of fabric and those nice woolen blankets. But he could beat the dirt out of them later. It would give him something to do.

  While he was still on the roof, he heard a couple of shots from the settlement, which some citizens were starting to call a town. Reno ignored that, kept busying himself with the roof, and then piled dirt on top of the hole. He was satisfied with his handiwork. Of course, he had built a few cabins in his day up in the Rockies when he needed a place to winter, and some things Mr. Sneed, the wheelwright, had taught him back in Louisville still registered in his brain.

  He had just finished, and was making his way to the ladder he had fashioned, when he spotted the dust. Reno remained on the rooftop, and checked the loads in the revolving Colt’s pistol he carried these days—another sign of progress, he told himself. An Army Colt could shoot six times before you had to reload it. Back in Reno’s day, a man had to do his job with only one bullet. Else he was dead.

  Four riders, coming from the settlement. Four on horseback. A couple others followed afoot.

  Tenderfeet.

  Reno sighed. He hoped those fool city folks weren’t coming to complain about him using their dump. Or maybe someone had found the bodies of the three men he had killed and were out to investigate another killing in Violence.