The Hanging at Leadville / Firefall

by Cameron Judd

  “No, I ain’t.”

  “Good. How can we get transport up to Gomorrah?”

  “There’s no real stage line. Just some folks who run supply wagons, and also haul people for a fee.” He nodded significantly toward the old Indian in the corner.

  “Ah, yes. Thank you, sir,” Callon turned and approached the Indian. Smiling down on him, he raised his hand, palm outturned, and said, “How.”

  Gunnison cringed.

  “Howdya-do,” the Indian replied, gazing at Callon with those tired-looking eyes of his.

  “Have you a wagon in which two well-paying professional journalists might catch a ride to Gomorrah?”

  The Indian slowly shook his head.

  Callon looked irritably back at the stationmaster. “I thought you said this old man could help us!”

  “It’s his son who’s got the wagon, not him.”

  “Ah!” Callon grinned at the Indian again. “Well then, old Tecumseh, where might we find your son?”

  “I would fetch him for you…if only I wasn’t so weak from hunger. I have no money to buy food.”

  Callon sighed and pulled money from his pocket. “Here you go, then. Maybe this will give you some strength.”

  The old man bit each coin, one by one, before pocketing them. He rose slowly. “I’ll go find him,” he said. He walked in a stooped posture out of the station.

  “Weak from hunger, my eye! Looks well-fed to me,” Callon said. “Blasted red-skinned opportunist, if you ask me. Did you see how he took advantage of the situation to get money out of me?”

  Gunnison wasn’t interested. He stared out the window, looking at the near end of the rugged road that led toward Gomorrah.

  He hoped that if Kenton was up there, he was all right.

  Chapter 6

  The Indian’s son looked almost as old as his father. But he moved much more quickly and was even more adept than the old man at gouging for gratuities. Gunnison was just cold-hearted enough to let Callon pick up almost all of these.

  The wagon was a rattletrap pulled by an ancient but strong draft horse. The rear of the wagon had been outfitted with a removable benchlike seat. Gunnison admired the genius of the contraption, which allowed the wagon to be used alternatively for hauling people and hauling ore or freight. But he wished the designer—probably the wagon driver himself—had figured out a way to incorporate some springs to make the jolts a little easier on the human tailbone.

  Callon sat leaning forward so he could fire questions at the driver, whose responses were lean at best.

  “Have you been to Gomorrah since the fire?”

  “No.”

  “Close, then?”

  “Close.”

  “What did you see?”

  “Ashes. Trees down. Smoke rising. Some fire, even after the rain. But not much.”

  “Trees down, you say. Like something had knocked them down?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you think it was?”

  A shrug.

  “Have you ever heard of any such a thing before?”

  “Yes.”

  “Really? Tell me about it.”

  “Old stories. My father’s father told them. There was a town of the Crows. An enemy cursed the town. One day the sky grew brighter than the sun, and suddenly the town was gone. There was fire, and trees knocked down. Many dead. Worse than Gomorrah.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “Long ago. Generations ago.”

  “What did your grandfather think caused it?”

  “The curse of the enemy.”

  “Oh, I see.” Callon looked around at Gunnison, and whispered far too loudly: “Typical Indian superstition. Probably nothing to it. These people believe that when you have a stomach ache, you’ve got a snake or a fish or an insect or something swimming around in your entrails. Very primitive minds. It’s no wonder they’re being swallowed up in the progress of history.”

  Gunnison said, “I’ve been thinking about what that stationmaster said about the soldiers sealing off the town. Maybe what’s happened to Kenton is that he entered the town, but now the soldiers won’t let him leave.”

  “If they’ve got Kenton, then that means he can’t have sent out his story,” Callon said, speaking more to himself than Gunnison.

  “Always competing, aren’t you, Paul?” Gunnison said. “Do you think that right now I care about this story? I just want to find Kenton and make sure he’s not been hurt.”

  “Fine,” Callon said. “Then I’ll write the story as an exclusive. The Illustrated American can miss it altogether.”

  “The point is, Paul, I care more about Kenton’s welfare than about any story.”

  “Good for you.”

  The driver spoke. “We are being watched.”

  “What?” Callon asked.

  “To the north, men in the woods. Two of them. One in black, the other in a gray coat with the sleeves cut away.”

  “Amazing, the observant powers of Indians,” Callon said to Gunnison. He was scanning the woods, looking hard and not being at all subtle about it. “But I think he’s wrong. I don’t see anything.”

  “I do,” Gunnison replied. “I see them.” He leaned up and asked the driver, “Do you know who they are?”

  “I think they are from the place where the Rebels are,” he replied.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “There is a place, two mountain ridges beyond Gomorrah, where there are men living who fought against the United States in the war, and who still have not made their peace with it.”

  “I’ll be!” Callon exclaimed. “An enclave of Rebs, still unreconstructed after all this time?”

  The Indian shrugged, perhaps not quite following Callon’s terminology. “Confederate Ridge,” he said. “So they call it.”

  “Why do you think they’re watching us?” Gunnison asked.

  “I don’t know,” the driver replied.

  The wagon rolled on, climbing more slowly as the elevation increased. Gunnison sniffed the air.

  “Smell that?” he asked Callon. “Charred timber. Scorched ground.”

  “Yes,” Callon replied. “Look over there, through the trees.”

  Gunnison did, and for the first time realized that something significant, something far bigger and more powerful than he had heretofore imagined, had indeed happened at the top of Gomorrah Mountain.

  Before him was an expanse of mountain ridge, quite black, and virtually stripped of standing timber. Trees that had stood there before now lay on the ridge, burned black. They had all fallen in the same direction, tops turned down the slope, clearly pushed down by a powerful force that had struck them from the direction of Gomorrah.

  Gunnison gaped in awe, too stunned to speak. Callon muttered an oath of astonishment under his breath.

  The wagon stopped. “I can go no farther,” the driver said. “I don’t like soldiers.”

  Gunnison paid the driver and thanked him. Callon, who’d been financially drained from tip-giving, didn’t volunteer to contribute to the fare. They dismounted the wagon, gathering their bags and gear.

  The driver turned the wagon and began rolling down the mountain again, leaving Gunnison and Callon alone with their baggage.

  “Did you really see a couple of old Rebels watching us along the way?” Callon asked.

  “I saw men. I don’t know if they were old Rebels.”

  Callon looked thoughtful. “A town burns mysteriously after God only knows what explodes with enough heat and force to knock down trees and incinerate much of a mountaintop…the army comes in, seals off the town…and nearby there happens to be an enclave of unreconstructed Rebels who hide and watch newcomers along the roadway. Surely there has to be a connection?”

  Gunnison said, “What are you driving at?”

  “Maybe these Rebs are onto something new. Some kind of extremely powerful explosive. And if they’re still bitter over the late war, and if they’re of a subversive and retaliatory men
tality…”

  “No. It doesn’t make sense. You don’t develop massively powerful new explosives living in some remote mountain outpost.”

  Callon shrugged. “I’m just trying to contrive a few theories.”

  Gunnison eyed the baggage sitting on the ground. There wasn’t much of it; as men who traveled constantly as part of their profession, both he and Callon had learned to carry as little as possible. But even what they had was cumbersome under the circumstances.

  “You know, we’ll never be able to move around with all that gear,” Gunnison said. “I suggest we find a safe place to hide most of it, and carry only what we can’t do without.”

  Callon was agreeable to this. They carried their baggage off the road and found a small knoll, pockmarked with caverns too little for human accommodation but just the right size for stashing away a few goods.

  They removed from their bags a few essential items and placed these in small satchels—custom-designed for traveling illustrator/writers by none other than Brady Kenton himself some years back and therefore known in the business as “Kenton packs.” Kenton had made a fine sideline income from royalties paid on the satchels by the company that made them.

  “What now?” Gunnison asked. “On to Gomorrah?”

  “Yes…but not along the road.”

  “I agree,” Gunnison said.

  “First, though, I wouldn’t mind a closer look at that fallen timber.”

  Again, Gunnison agreed. Though his goal was to find Kenton, his journalistic instincts were also at work, and he was curious about whatever mysterious force had wreaked such destruction hereabouts.

  The two journalists were careful to make sure there were no obvious observers in the vicinity before they moved out into the expanse of fallen and burned timber.

  Ash and grit crunched beneath their feet. Hardly a leaf, hardly an evergreen needle, had not been burned away by the fire. The only greenery that remained was on the bottom side of the fallen trees.

  Many trees had been uprooted, but most had been snapped off near their bases or about halfway up.

  “What would do this?” Callon asked. “How…and why?”

  Gunnison replied, “Assuming we’re dealing with some natural event here, however unusual, there may not be any ‘why’ to it. It may just be something that simply happened.”

  “A natural event,” Callon repeated. He paused, cleared his throat. “Gunnison, do you think there’s any chance that…well…”

  Gunnison anticipated him. “A supernatural event?” he said. “Is that what you’re asking?”

  “Uh…yes.”

  Callon’s question seemed so sincere that Gunnison resisted the temptation to poke fun at it. As he so often did, he pulled from memory something he’d heard Kenton expound upon at some time past. “What is ‘supernatural,’ after all?” Gunnison said. “We live in a world about which we know very little, no matter how wise we may think we are. There may be parts of reality that we seldom see, but which are real nonetheless. Maybe reality has layers…worlds upon worlds, stacked one upon another, one sometimes bleeding over into another, on some rare occasion, so that an event in one layer causes a seemingly unexplainable effect in another. Maybe what we tend to call ‘supernatural’ is really nothing more than the parts of nature we haven’t yet come to understand. So who can say what the limits of explanation are for something like this?”

  Callon laughed. “Well, aren’t you quite the little philosopher! Where’d you pick all that up, Socrates?”

  Gunnison was about to fire an insult back at Callon, but something intervened to distract him.

  Off in the distance, down below the mountain at the train station, a train whistle sounded.

  “Hear that?” Gunnison asked.

  “Yes. What of it?”

  “Another train coming in, but there’s none scheduled today. I looked at the tables myself back in Greer City and at the train station below the mountain as well.”

  “A special train run, then. It has to be.”

  “Why, I wonder?”

  “I don’t know. I have a gut feeling it probably has something to do with all this.” Callon waved at the charred wasteland around them.

  Gunnison scratched his chin. “Perhaps it’s best for us not to even consider entering the town at all until we’ve had a chance to do some unobserved reconnoitering.”

  “Why? We’ll never find answers creeping around in the outer shadows,” Callon said.

  “And I’ll never find Kenton if I’m a detainee of the military inside a burned-out town.”

  “Unless Kenton is a detainee there, too.”

  “Yes, but I don’t know that he is. But if I can just watch the town for a time, I might be able to spot him.” He turned. “Come on, Paul. Let’s go.”

  “Where?”

  “To find a good vantage point to observe the town of Gomorrah. And maybe to see whoever, or whatever, might come up the mountain from the train station.”

  Chapter 7

  An hour later, in the dimming light of dusk, Gunnison and Callon lay on their bellies, hidden in tangled, burned timber, and studied what remained of the town of Gomorrah.

  “Astonishing!” Callon said. “Not one completely undamaged building, and many gone altogether! What kind of explosive could do such a thing?”

  “A very, very powerful one…if it was an explosive,” Gunnison said.

  “Surely it was. Why else would they be here?”

  Callon pointed at soldiers who patrolled in the dirt streets and around the perimeter of the town. The military presence here was dominant. The images were reminiscent of a war that both the observing journalists had been too young to take part in—images of a town destroyed, then occupied by soldiers wearing blue.

  “I’d considered the possibility of volcanic activity, but I don’t see any of the usual signs that go with it,” Gunnison said. “Maybe it was some sort of unusual volcanic burst. Or a venting of gasses out of the mountain.”

  Callon shook his head. “A town explodes, a mountaintop is charred black, and the army shows up and seals the place off. What does that imply? To me it implies a military kind of concern, a security concern. They’ve got some specific sort of suspicions about this, I’ll bet you.”

  “Maybe it’s simpler than that, Paul. Maybe they came because they don’t know what happened, not because they do. Maybe they came just to help out the survivors.”

  “What survivors? I’ve seen nothing so far but soldiers.”

  Gunnison shrugged. “So maybe all the civilians have left or been moved out of town. Or maybe they’re being held inside some of those tents, or in some of those buildings still standing.”

  “Or maybe they all died in the explosion and fire.”

  Gunnison didn’t like to think about that possibility. Kenton, where are you?

  Callon read his thoughts. “Don’t assume the worst, Alex. He’s a tough bird, Kenton is.”

  “I know.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s already come here and gone back. He might be looking for you somewhere else right now, Alex.”

  Gunnison nodded.

  “Or maybe he’s…”

  Gunnison raised his hand abruptly, interrupting. “Listen!” he said. “Do you hear that?”

  Callon had heard it too. Over on the road that led from the railhead to Gomorrah, there was motion and noise. Gunnison and Callon dropped low amid the blackened timber.

  There was just enough visibility to see that the travelers on the road were more soldiers, about a dozen of them, moving toward the edge of the town. A delegation of other soldiers advanced from within the town to meet them. By the light of torches there were salutes, words exchanged, but nothing audible reached the two unseen watchers.

  Callon pulled from his pocket a small collapsible spyglass. He put it to his eye and studied two men who were speaking to one another beneath a flaring torch. Gunnison wished he’d brought a spyglass, too.

  “Astonishing!�
� Callon exclaimed abruptly, under his breath.

  “What is it?”

  “One of those men over there is none other than the infamous Colonel J.B. Ottinger!”

  “Ottinger?”

  “That’s right. Old Ottinger himself, mangled face, blind eye, and all! I thought he was in Texas.”

  Gunnison scanned the dustier corners of his mind and pulled something from one of them. “You know, I recall that the Illustrated American carried some mention, a few months back, that Ottinger was leaving Texas for the Montana Territory. Fort Brandon, as a matter of fact.”

  “He did this by choice or necessity?”

  “Choice, I think.”

  “But isn’t Fort Brandon considered one of the least desirable stations out of all the frontier forts?”

  “So I’ve always heard. He must have had some unobvious motivation, I suppose.”

  “Fort Brandon is the closest military installation to where we are right now…right?”

  “Close enough that you could probably see the Gomorrah fire from it.”

  Callon put the spyglass back to his eye and quietly studied the scene.

  “Do you recognize anyone else?” Gunnison asked.

  “No. There’s a civilian there, though. I assume he’s a civilian, anyway. He’s not in uniform.”

  “Kenton?” Gunnison said eagerly.

  “No, afraid not. I think it must be whoever came in on the train. A lot of baggage…some of his gear looks like things a surveyor might carry. Or a mining engineer.”

  “I want to get closer,” Gunnison said, jealous because he had no spyglass of his own. He rose and moved forward, as quietly as he could. Even so, a charred stick snapped loudly underfoot.

  Callon scolded him in a sharp whisper: “Gunnison, be careful!”

  “I’m always careful,” Gunnison grouchily replied. He went on, but more slowly yet, Callon now rising to creep along behind him. It was quite dark now; there was little chance they’d be seen from the town.

  Gunnison stopped abruptly only a few paces on.

  “What is it?” asked Callon.

  “That smell…”

  Callon’s nose caught it, too, the wind having shifted slightly. “Have mercy!” he exclaimed. “What is it? A dead horse?”