The Hanging at Leadville / Firefall

by Cameron Judd

  Kenton had just declared a taste for a flapjack breakfast when a scratching noise caught their attention. A young man crouched at the front of a saloon about two doors down was digging for change in the spittle-permeated sawdust that had been swept out a little earlier.

  Kenton strode over to him. “Young fellow, could you steer two hungry men toward a couple of stacks of Leadville’s best flapjacks?”

  Blue eyes reconnoitered Kenton’s form. “I know you—you’re Brady Kenton!” the boy declared in a light Irish brogue. “I heard talk you were in town. My father, he always read your stories.”

  Kenton appreciated recognition even from a mining-town street boy. Ever since the Illustrated American’s decision to place a woodcut portrait of its best-known writer-artist in the nameplate, Kenton was recognized everywhere he went. Often he complained about the heavy burden of fame, but Gunnison knew better. Kenton loved the attention.

  “I am Brady Kenton,” he said. “And who are you?”

  “My name’s Lundy O’Donovan,” the boy said. He looked about twelve, was destined for lankiness, and had sandy chopped-off hair that reminded Gunnison of a mown wheat field. His big teeth, yellow despite his youth, were rooted in a prominent jaw as Irish as his name.

  “Pleased to know you, Lundy.” Kenton introduced Gunnison and asked Lundy again about flapjacks.

  “Go to French John’s on Harrison. They make hotcakes good as my mother’s.”

  “Thank you, son,” said Kenton. He waved toward the pile of outsweepings. “Tell me, have you had much luck prospecting that sawdust?”

  “Not so far.”

  “Have yourself a grubstake, then.” Kenton dug in his pocket and brought out a coin for the boy, who accepted it with delight.

  They found the restaurant and ordered a big meal. As they ate, Gunnison described his encounter with Chop-off Johnson, which horrified Kenton and seemed to make him honestly repentant about deserting his partner for so long. What with the satisfaction that brought, plus a heap of flapjacks tucked comfortably under his belt, Gunnison decided Leadville wasn’t so bad, after all, despite his rough start here. Leaning back in his chair, he enjoyed a final cup of coffee before Kenton dabbed his lips with a checkered napkin and declared it was time to go.

  The morning light was brighter and richer now. The air had gone a little foul, though; a smell of garbage floated on the breeze, sweeping in from somewhere on the edge of town. They explored Harrison Avenue, then headed down State Street. On the latter Gunnison showed Kenton where he had been attacked by Johnson outside the gambling hall.

  But Kenton was looking the other way. “Tell me, Alex, isn’t that sprout getting such a bad time yonder the same one who steered us to the café?”

  He pointed across the street toward an alleyway where, sure enough, Lundy O’Donovan was being shaken and slapped by a much bigger boy. Two other boys loitered behind the abuser, grinning at the show.

  A moment later Kenton was stomping across the street. Gunnison fell in behind. The boy doing the slapping turned as they approached. Upon seeing Kenton’s tall figure bearing down on him, his eyes grew big, and he blanched. But in another moment he had pasted on a sneer.

  “This young man happens to be a friend of mine,” Kenton said. “I suggest you leave him alone unless you want a three-day headache.”

  The boy called Kenton a “boar’s rump” and speculated on his parentage. Kenton stretched out his big hands and grabbed the offender at the base of the neck. The youth tried to slap the hands away but found he could not lift his arm to do it, for Kenton had pinched a nerve. Gunnison had seen him do this trick before. Kenton had tried to teach it to him, but he had never been able to pick it up.

  The boy gave a loud, shuddering moan and screwed up his face in pain. His two companions looked horrified, turned, and ran away.

  “You’re sorry, I suppose?” Kenton asked.

  “Yes! Yes! I’m sorry!”

  “You sure about that? Really sure?”

  “Yes! I’m sure! I’m sure!”

  Kenton released his victim, who slid to his heels, shuddered, bounced up, and ran off.

  Kenton shifted his attention to Lundy. “Are you all right, partner?”

  “I am now, thanks to you, Mr. Kenton.” Lundy beamed at his rescuer with adoration.

  “Were they after money?”

  “Yes. But I didn’t give it to them.”

  “Good. Now, you keep away from them for a time, Lundy. They’ll be prone to give you trouble if they find you alone.”

  “I ain’t scared of them,” Lundy said.

  They walked away. A block later, Gunnison whispered, “Kenton, he’s following us.”

  “I know. We don’t need a tagalong, but I hate to outright tell him to go away.” He waved toward a mining-goods store to their right. “Let’s duck in here for a moment and see if that breaks him off.”

  The store smelled of leather, metal, and tobacco. They examined its inventory a few minutes, then Gunnison went back to the door and stepped out. No Lundy on the street.

  “Mister?”

  The boy had parked himself in a squat by the door, obviously waiting for the journalists to emerge. Gunnison hadn’t seen him when he came out.

  “Lundy, are you following us?”

  “Yes, sir. I’ve thought of a way I can repay you for your help back there.”

  “Thanks, Lundy, but there’s no need.”

  “But I know about something you’ll want to draw up for your newspaper. Something really secret, all about Briggs Garrett.”

  Gunnison smiled. Lundy obviously had an active imagination. Garrett, a hated Confederate night-rider leader whose main claim to infamy was the brutal hanging and burning of Unionist bridge burners in eastern Tennessee during the Civil War, had been officially listed as accidentally killed two years before. He had washed away in a flood and reportedly drowned. The Illustrated American itself had carried a story about it.

  “When we decide to search for ghosts, we’ll be sure to check with you,” Gunnison said.

  Lundy’s smile remained bright. “He’s no ghost. Ain’t you heard all the talk? He’s alive and right here in Leadville—there was a singer here who saw him right from the stage!” Now Lundy took on a cunning look. “Everybody’s been talking about it, but I can prove it’s true. I’ll come around later and show you what I mean. I saw where you’re staying. Bye now!” He turned and ran down the middle of the street, waving over his shoulder as he disappeared into the milling crowds of Leadville.

  Kenton joined Gunnison at the door. “What did he want?”

  “Nothing that matters. Just some childish nonsense.”

  “Quite a little fire spitter,” Kenton said. “I like that boy, somehow. Persistent, you know. Lives his own life and does what he wants. I was a lot like him when I was that age.”

  “You haven’t changed.”

  Kenton gave a wry smile. “Come on,” he said. “We got us a duty call to pay on Mr. Squire Deverell.”

  Chapter 7

  The journalists quickly discovered, as Kenton would say sometime later, that Squire Deverell “had more bile packed in his gullet than you could render out of a wagonload of bad livers.” What was worse, he was eager to share it.

  Kenton and Gunnison sat in their benefactor’s parlor, sketching and recording Deverell as he alternated between describing his trek to fortune and expounding upon his many hatreds. Currell had been right; it was obvious Deverell assumed the journalists owed him inclusion in the Illustrated American in return for their free lodging.

  Deverell had come from Denver two years before and opened a clothing and dry goods store in Leadville, he said. From that base he had begun grubstaking miners. His gambles had paid off to the point that he sold his store and now spent all his time in mine speculation. His earnings, he admitted, were not enough to put him among Colorado’s elite yet, but were at least sufficient to bring him a well-off status and an impressive house.

  At the moment he
was pacing back and forth before that house’s most extravagant feature: a fireplace big enough to spit-roast a bison in. Deverell was a fascinating figure to his visitors, though in an unpleasant way. He had a head as round as a cannonball, slick-bald on the top but fringed around the ears with unruly white hair. The back of his neck was covered with a pale thin fuzz that caught light like spider silk when he turned at certain angles; Kenton was doing his best to capture that phemonenon on his sketch pad. He wore a black silk house robe over maroon trousers and a shirt of vomitous yellow-green. If the combination was unnerving, it was eye-catching.

  As Kenton sketched, Gunnison took notes of Deverell’s diatribes. Nothing the man had to say was worthy of the pages of the Illustrated American, but they felt obliged to humor him with an interview. By the time he found out no story would result, they would be long gone from Leadville.

  Deverell hated everyone, from Swedes to Chinamen to Irishmen to Negroes to Jews to Catholics to lawyers. On two points he tempered his bigotry a little; he acknowledged that Irishmen had developed two of his most productive claims and lawyers had helped him retain them through a complicated legal dispute. Beyond that, he had nothing good to say about anyone.

  Deverell turned to a large wall map upon which local mining claims had been faithfully penciled in, ones he held an interest in being outlined in blue. Abundant erasures on the map showed that the man followed the flux of changing mining claims in the compulsive way others follow every development in the stock market or at the betting track.

  “Look at it, gentlemen—a maze of overlapping claims. A puzzle thrown out of a box with all the pieces landing atop each other. Paradise for lawyers and hell for the rest. I despise lawyers. I’d rather marry my daughter to a one-legged Chinaman as to trust a nickel and the time of day to a lawyer. Don’t you agree, Mr. Kenton?”

  “Not having a daughter, I don’t feel qualified to hold an opinion,” Kenton said with a smile.

  Deverell looked irritated. “I don’t have a daughter either, sir. It was just a figure of speech to make a point. What I was trying to get across was—”

  He cut off as into the room came his remarkably pleasant little wife, her smile etched across a thin face scrimshawed with wrinkles. She bustled in with far more tea and cookies than the journalists’ recent flapjack breakfast could let them comfortably consume. Kenton figured her for one of those good women God sometimes gave to rotten men to sweeten them a little, like sugar in bitter coffee.

  Kenton praised the cookies and made her blush so that the wrinkles stood out like the lines on her husband’s map. After she returned to the kitchen, Deverell looked sadly after her, leaned forward, and whispered: “Don’t let the wrinkles make you think Mary’s old. Those are the result of a patent face cream sold to her by a drummer who swore it would make her skin like a baby’s. I sued him for all he was worth, which was too little in any case, and didn’t even get a cent of that. Lawyers again.”

  Something bumped a window to their left, and a figure ascended diagonally outside it on a staircase that ran up the outside of the house past the window. It was George Currell. He glanced in and touched his hat in greeting, a somber expression on his face. Kenton nodded back. In a moment they heard footsteps bumping around above.

  “I didn’t notice a third floor from the outside,” Kenton said, for they were on the second level.

  “There isn’t a complete floor, just some rooms on one end. Mark Straker, Mary’s nephew, lives there.” Deverell said the word “nephew” as if he were mouthing a green persimmon.

  “How did he come to live with you?” Kenton was glad to have a chance to shift the subject away from Deverell’s menu of prejudices.

  “His mother was Mary’s sister; she died of fever. His father was killed at Gettysburg. Mary and I raised him—Mary absolutely adores him.” He paused. “I wish I could feel the same toward him. Mark turned out…harsh. I have never understood why.”

  Kenton could have ventured a likely guess, but prudence made him keep his mouth shut.

  Deverell, who for a second had dropped his pompous front to reveal a more human aspect, said nothing for several moments, looking out the window. As he did so, Currell descended again, accompanied by a young man whose handsome features were marred only by unusually dark rings beneath his eyes, marking him as a habitual reveler. Clearly this was Mark Straker. Straker was slipping on a coat as he descended the stairs; beneath it he wore a Remington pistol, high and butt forward.

  Kenton rose. “Mr. Deverell, I’m afraid we have to leave you for now. Deadlines and other work to do, you know. Thank you so much for all you’ve done for us.”

  Deverell looked displeased to see his audience about to bolt for freedom so soon. “Mr. Kenton, I hoped to hear from you about your California tour of seventy-five.”

  Kenton felt a slight stab of embarrassment, as he always did when that subject was brought up in front of Gunnison. Deverell was referring to a celebrated series of stories and drawings Kenton had done four years before in a tour of the West Coast. Kenton, always prone to find trouble, had been even more so in those days before he had begun cutting back on his drinking. The California tour, though a brilliant journalistic success, had brought the Illustrated American a spate of bills deriving from various saloon brawls and the like. One bill was for $578 for damage to a saloon devastated by Kenton in a brawl he couldn’t even remember.

  The “unfortunate incident on the western coast,” as J. B. Gunnison, publisher of the Illustrated American and father of Alex, had come to call the California tour, was what had resulted in the assignment of Alex Gunnison as Kenton’s apprentice.

  Kenton made a habit of complaining about having been assigned a watchdog. In the beginning, the complaints had been sincere, but gradually he had grown fond of his young partner. The gripes had lost their sincerity, though Kenton still carried them on for the sake of banter and habit. Kenton had a deep affection for Gunnison, though he sometimes wondered if the young fellow would ever open his eyes wide enough to become the prime chronicler he could be.

  To Deverell Kenton said, “I’d love to tell you about the California tour, but duty calls, and we need to sketch while the light is best.”

  “You’re going to put what I’ve said in your paper, I hope?”

  “I have a specific place in mind for everything you’ve given us.”

  He glanced at Gunnison, who grinned covertly back at him. Gunnison knew what the comment meant, but Deverell took it as a yes and looked happy. He suggested that Kenton and Gunnison rejoin him for dinner before their Leadville visit was through, and Kenton managed politely to evade a full acceptance.

  They gave their good-byes. Mrs. Deverell reappeared, and Kenton kissed her narrow hand, pleasing her. The Deverells followed the journalists onto their porch and stood beaming after them until they were half a block away.

  Kenton allowed himself a shudder. “Alex, I had to get out of there. That man has more hatreds than teeth.”

  “I noticed. At least his wife was nice.”

  “Too wrinkled. Never trust an overly wrinkled woman, Alex. I never met one yet who wouldn’t put a knife in your back first chance.”

  “Sounds like Deverell’s not the only one carrying around irrational prejudices.”

  Kenton protested, launching into a defense of his declaration. As he talked, Currell and Straker came riding out of an alley that led back to a well-hidden stable, apparently Deverell’s. Currell nodded another greeting at the journalists, still with that troubled expression. Straker, though, was smiling. He looked at the journalists with open interest and gave a salutatory touch to the brim of his hat as he passed.

  Chapter 8

  Mark Straker lit a cigarette and slumped in his saddle as he exhaled a cloud of fragrant smoke toward the sky. The late-summer day was cool and delightful. The hooves of the horses together made a pleasant syncopated rhythm on the evergreen-lined trail.

  Straker liked a good smoke as well as a good ride, and enjo
ying the two simultaneously put him in a most mellow frame of mind. Currell, on the other hand, was tense and distant, as both he and Chop-off Johnson had often been since Jimmy Rhoder had been lynched. Straker found it mildly amusing, particularly since it was he and not the other two who could claim more reason to worry. After all, it was he who had actually committed the murder. Currell and Chop-off had done nothing but help him cover it up.

  “So why are we doing this, Straker?” Currell asked suddenly after five full minutes of silence.

  “Doing what?”

  “Riding! Where the devil are we going?”

  “The best place of all: nowhere in particular. You need to learn to relax, Currell. Enjoy things.”

  Currell swore and declared, “If it’s to help me relax that you brought me out here, you’re wasting your time, and mine. I’m going back.”

  As Currell began to turn his mount, Straker raised a hand. “Wait, Currell, wait. There’s more to it than that. I wanted to get you out here so we could talk in private. I tried to find Chop-off, too, but I couldn’t.”

  “Out smoking opium somewhere, or drunk,” Currell said. “I know his haunts—I can find him.”

  “Good, because you’ll probably want him to help you when you go pull Jimmy Rhoder’s corpse out of that mine shaft.”

  “The hell you say!” Currell’s small eyes were suddenly much larger. “Why would I do that?”

  Straker smiled. He was a man who enjoyed making plans; even more, he enjoyed sharing them, putting them into motion. And the more covert and clever, the better. That was how he had worked his way into his current position as one of Leadville’s criminal leaders—a status of which only his carefully selected associates knew. Like his uncle-by-marriage Squire Deverell, Straker was ambitious and enterprising. Unlike his uncle, he was well liked in Leadville, liked in the way people always like cheerful, devil-may-care young men who were generous when it came time to buy the drinks.