The Hanging at Leadville / Firefall

by Cameron Judd

  With a hand across his mouth and nose, Gunnison explored around a bit. He’d gone only a few more yards, Callon trailing some distance behind, when he stopped again, looking down.

  “Not a horse. A man,” he said.

  Callon came to his side. He looked down, then reflexively pulled back in disgust.

  “Can we can risk a match?” Gunnison said. “Low to the ground, hidden by the timber?”

  “I suppose so…not that I’m really eager to see him,” Callon said. His voice was that of a man fighting nausea. “I can tell you from smell alone that there’s no chance we’ll find him alive.”

  “Still…” Gunnison knelt, carefully, and struck a match. He held it out, cupping it, letting its feeble light play over what lay on the ground. It blew out quickly in the wind, but in its brief moment revealed clearly the blackened remnants of a human face, looking up, mouth open, the one remaining eye half-closed, the skin charred and ugly, the stench of burned flesh, now decomposing, rising from it.

  The face was unrecognizable, half of it burned away, the rest black from fire and decay.

  “Horrible!” Callon said. “Truly horrible!”

  “Poor fellow,” Gunnison said. “Whoever he was.”

  Callon’s professional curiosity—and a desire to not appear less steel-willed and tough than Gunnison—overcame his rather weak stomach, and he came forward again, bravely close to the corpse, examining it with his hand clamped over his mouth and up against his nostrils.

  “Alex…light another match,” he said, his hand muffling his voice.

  “Why?”

  “Just do it!”

  A new flare revealed again the hideous countenance. The flame held longer this time.

  “Lower it…”

  Gunnison did so. The faint light played down the body, and just before it went out, glittered on something pinned on the remnants of the coat.

  Gunnison fumbled for another match, but his hands had begun to tremble badly.

  “Here…let me,” Callon said.

  He took the matches, struck one, and held it low.

  Glittering back at them was a Masonic pin, stuck on the lapel of the coat. It looked familiar…but there were many such pins in existence. The match went out, to be replaced by another.

  Gunnison controlled his trembling sufficiently to remove the pin from the lapel. He freed it as this match, too, blew out.

  He turned it over and waited for Callon to strike another match. This time the light revealed the unsoiled rear of the pin, and on it, engraved initials: B.K.

  It was Brady Kenton’s pin.

  “Kenton?” Callon asked, barely even a whisper.

  Gunnison, stunned and horrified, nodded. This was precisely what he’d feared…but he hadn’t really thought it would be Kenton. It seemed too unlikely.

  Callon exhaled slowly, then said, “I can’t believe it. I truly can’t believe it.”

  Those words were the last spoken for a time. Gunnison was too jolted to weep, but the feelings inside him were the most painful he’d experienced in years. Callon crouched beside him, watching, uncomfortable, and completely unable, for once, to find words.

  Gunnison spoke at last, obviously struggling not to cry. “He must have been out here, almost to town, when the explosion happened.”

  “I’m so sorry, Alex. Truly sorry.”

  “This pin…funny about it. Kenton wasn’t even a Mason. It was given to him by his wife…her father had worn it. When he died, she wanted Kenton to have it, in her father’s memory. She had his initials engraved on the back.”

  “This is a tragic news.” Callon paused, then expressed a newly risen realization: “But it is news, nonetheless.”

  Gunnison looked up at him, though by now the darkness was heavy enough that he could barely see his outline. He fought back an extreme annoyance. How dare Callon treat this with such a cold and impersonal professionalism! “Yes, Paul. I know. I also know that it’s only appropriate that this information be published first in the Illustrated American. It’s how Kenton would want it.”

  “I know. And I agree. When will you wire in the news?”

  “I can’t think about that now. I can’t even believe he’s gone, much less tell the world about it. I want to be absolutely sure first.”

  “What more evidence do you demand? Who else would be wearing Kenton’s pin?”

  “I have to know, Paul.”

  Gunnison struck one more match and looked closely at the ruined face. Then, fighting off natural reticence to touch the dead body, he explored the jacket pockets.

  Everything he found confirmed that the jacket was Kenton’s. And the face, impossible to recognize as it was, certainly could have been that of Kenton. The general size of the body, the build and general physical character of it, all also matched Kenton’s traits. Even the pistol holstered beneath the coat was Kenton’s. Gunnison took it, tucking it under his belt, near his own pistol.

  “Oh, Kenton,” Gunnison whispered.

  “He died doing what he wanted to do. He was here pursuing a story,” Callon said, searching for some kind of comfort, feeble as it might be.

  “No,” Gunnison said. “He was here on the trail of a ghost…one he hoped would end up to not be a ghost at all.”

  “What ghost?”

  “Victoria Kenton. His wife.”

  “But his wife is dead. For many years.”

  “So everyone believes. So Kenton himself believed, or tried to make himself believe, for most of the time I’ve known him. But ever since he and I found Briggs Garrett still alive in Leadville, back in ’seventy-nine,* he felt compelled to investigate the accident that took Victoria from him. I mean, if Briggs Garrett could still be alive, when everyone was sure he’d died years before, then maybe Victoria was alive, too. Anything seemed possible.”

  “How did Victoria die—if she did?”

  “A railway accident. But her body was never identified. There was a terrible fire, you see. They could never even accurately number the victims.”

  “But that’s hardly grounds for assuming someone survived.”

  “I know. But Kenton was always a hopeful man. After Leadville, he became obsessed with Victoria’s death. He studied that accident in morbid detail, and the more he did so, the more he began to persuade himself she truly might have survived. He even started talking about it to me, and Kenton was never one to discuss deeply personal matters. Then, about a year ago, it all intensified. Kenton told me he thought he had found actual, positive evidence she had lived through that accident.”

  “What kind of evidence?”

  “He never told me. And then, all at once…well, he just closed the door again, so to speak. Would tell me nothing more. It all became completely private to him again. I suspect his ‘evidence’ hadn’t panned out like he’d hoped. But I do know he hadn’t given up looking for her. The hope that Victoria is still alive has been the driving force of his life for the past few years. Frankly, his search wasn’t as big a secret as he believed. Many people knew.”

  Callon himself could have confirmed this. Brady Kenton’s search for his wife after years of believing her dead had become well-known among the circles of traveling journalists. Callon had simply not let on to Gunnison that he knew, because he wanted to see if Gunnison might tell him something he hadn’t yet heard.

  Some who knew of Kenton’s quest thought his obsession and unwillingness to yield up hope was vaguely pathetic. Others—Callon included—found it touching, romantically tragic. Callon’s soul had a romantic facet that he hid from the world like an ugly wart.

  “Did Kenton believe he could actually find his wife in Gomorrah?” Callon asked.

  “I suspect not, though I can’t be sure. But the notes he left behind seemed to me to imply he was coming here to meet someone who had important information about Victoria.”

  “I wonder who?”

  “The name ‘Rankin’ was written down several times.”

  “Rankin. I’ll keep the n
ame in mind, in case I find him in the town.”

  “So you are going into Gomorrah after all?”

  “Yes. I think I will. Can’t learn much out here, after all.”

  Gunnison knew what was happening. The chemistry of the situation had changed now that Kenton had been found dead. This tragedy had charged the atmosphere unpleasantly, and Callon was ready to flee it. He was obviously one of those types who shunned grief and the grieving. Gunnison understood; he was sometimes that way himself.

  Gunnison didn’t care that Callon wanted to abandon him. He wanted only to be alone with his sorrow just now.

  “No word from you, in print, of Kenton’s passing, Paul, all right?” Gunnison reminded the man. “The Illustrated American is the appropriate publication to give this news to the world. Not the Observer. Are we agreed?”

  “You have my word, Alex.” Callon reached over and patted Gunnison’s shoulder. “I’m truly sorry. Kenton was a great reporter, a master illustrator, a pioneer of his craft. I admired him deeply.”

  “He was worthy of admiration.” Please, Paul. Just hurry up and go away!

  “Well…goodbye. Wish me luck in Gomorrah.”

  Callon moved off into the darkness and left Gunnison alone with the burned and moldering body, hidden now in the darkness near his feet.

  Chapter 8

  The next several lonely hours were among the most sorrowful of Gunnison’s life.

  The occupied town of Gomorrah quieted, the streets emptying except for a few patrolling guards. Gunnison remained where he was, initially obsessed with the notion that he had to do something appropriate for the remains of Brady Kenton…find some way to have the body removed from this place, treated with dignity, taken away for proper ceremony and burial. He quickly realized, though, that he could do nothing alone. He had no way to deal with a moldering corpse. For now, Kenton would have to lie where he was. Maybe the soldiers would eventually find him, and give him some sort of appropriate burial.

  For the sake of his nose, Gunnison moved far away from the body. For the sake of his mental state, he forced his thoughts to the situation at hand.

  What would Brady Kenton himself have done in this kind of circumstance?

  The question was easy to answer. As fascinated as Kenton would have been by the mystery of Gomorrah’s destruction, nothing would have diverted him from his quest to find Rankin, and maybe Victoria.

  So Gunnison would carry on the quest in his place. He’d remain here long enough to determine if Rankin was still alive and in Gomorrah, or if he was one of those who had survived and fled. Whatever it took, he’d find the man if he was alive to be found.

  Sleepless, brooding hours passed. Instinct told Gunnison that dawn would break before long. He realized how weary he was. Quietly he slipped away, moving around the perimeter of the town, looking for some place he might rest. He found an old shed back in a stand of charred trees, and lay down inside it.

  Just before he fell asleep he heard a shout in the town. He moved to the doorway and looked out, watching a pair of guards running in answer to the alarm.

  “Caught you already, did they, Paul Callon?” he said aloud, quietly. “I’m surprised it took even this long.”

  He’d have found it amusing if amusement was a feeling he was capable of feeling just now.

  He lay down and closed his eyes.

  Daylight spilling into the cabin awakened Gunnison from a hard sleep. Where was he? Why was he sleeping on the ground? Where was Kenton?

  Memory suddenly clarified, and Gunnison felt a wave of grief.

  Kenton…dead. The shock became new to him again, and Alex Gunnison began his day with tears.

  He didn’t cry long, though. Kenton wouldn’t favor that kind of thing. Gunnison pulled himself together, ate breakfast from the supply of food he’d brought in his satchel, and checked his pistols. He was glad to have the weapons; they made him feel safer. Kenton had taught him that the best use for a weapon wasn’t for fighting, but as a tool by which a man could avoid a fight. “Always best to negotiate for yourself from a position of maximum strength,” Kenton would say. “The man with a gun has a voice that can say ‘no’ very loudly.”

  Gunnison placed Kenton’s old pistol in his satchel and stashed the satchel in a corner under dried evergreen needles that had blown in through the open door, and which had provided his natural mattress the night before. He retained in his pockets a notepad, pencils, a small sketch pad, a bit of trail food, and some extra bullets for the pistol holstered under his jacket.

  He looked over the town from the vantage point of the shadowed shed doorway. Guards patrolled as before, and there was still no sign of civilian activity.

  Though he’d decided not to pursue the mystery of the firefall, he couldn’t keep from speculating.

  What could have caused such a massive and unusual explosion? And why would the military find it of such interest?

  Gunnison had never been a military man himself, but Kenton had, and had taught his young partner much about the military mindset. Kenton knew whereof he spoke, having been a special agent for the United States government during the Civil War, working in intelligence and espionage right in the heart of the Confederacy. He’d been an “officially unofficial” agent, Kenton had told Gunnison, meaning he’d been indeed an authorized representative of the United States, but one who would have been completely disavowed by the U.S. government had he been captured.

  Not part of the normal military hierarchy, Kenton had enjoyed a vital but dangerous near-total freedom in his wartime spying days. He’d worked himself deeply into the heart of many a dangerous scenario on behalf of his government, and had never revealed the secrets he’d uncovered except to those to whom he directly answered…sometimes to the President himself.

  It was an unlikely background, in one way, for a man destined to become a journalist, for the instincts of the intelligence agent and the journalist often run counter to one another, Kenton had sometimes pointed out. Both seek facts, but one wishes to possess and guard them in secret, the other to reveal them to the world. If Kenton had experienced any difficulty in making the transition from one mindset to the other, though, it had never shown.

  Gunnison left the shed and moved farther back into the woods. He headed for an area where a full stand of trees had managed to survive the explosion and fire and stood like lone survivors of a massacre. Among them, and in the snarled wood at their base, he could hide quite well, and also gain a better general vantage point on the town, and particularly upon a row of army tents set up along one side of a street. He heard something behind him. Turning, looking beyond the stand that hid him, he saw only the blackened terrain, fallen trees…

  No! There, moving across the landscape in a manner and posture that indicated they were trying to be as covert as possible, he saw the same two men that the Indian wagoner had pointed out the day before. Gunnison ducked, intrigued and concerned. Had they seen him? Were they trying to remain unseen by him, or by the soldiers in the town?

  One of the men pulled out a spyglass, extended it, put it to his eye. Gunnison was relieved to see the man wasn’t looking back at him, but far past him to the right, into the ruined town. So it was the soldiers who held the interest of these men, not Alex Gunnison.

  Gunnison stayed where he was for a long time, watching the town and at times the two spies in the woods.

  For a long time, though, nothing happened. The two supposed Rebels in the burned-out woods behind him eventually vanished. The guards in Gomorrah changed shifts.

  Gunnison took notes, sketched, and fought mounting boredom. He was beginning to think he’d have no choice but to do what Callon had, and walk right into the town, if he wanted to learn anything worth knowing.

  Then, finally, something worthy of note occurred.

  The civilian who had come in on the special train emerged from a tent, and with him a small guard of soldiers.

  Gunnison sketched rapidly, making an almost photographic rendering o
f the scene before him. This would not be his final sketch, only the basis for it. Here and there he put odd scribbles and letters and notes—codes that Kenton had taught him, quick ways to tell himself, later on, that at this point there should be an evergreen tree, or a spot of sunlight, or an expanse of shadow. It was an efficient and workable shorthand that Kenton had developed, and it had always given him a time advantage over his competitors, who usually tried to draw their final renderings directly on the scene—an inefficient process often doomed to utter failure when the scene changed before they had a chance to finish their work. Kenton’s system was better.

  The unidentified civilian’s posture and general bearing made Gunnison believe the man wasn’t entirely comfortable here. Gunnison tried to sketch him, but was too far away for the man’s features to be discernible.

  Colonel Ottinger emerged from a tent and approached the civilian. Hands were shaken, and a conversation ensued. A minute later the man was ushered into the tent with Ottinger’s hand resting on his shoulder, Ottinger himself leaning in close and talking intently.

  Gunnison pondered again Ottinger’s presence here, and mentally reviewed what little he knew of the controversial colonel with the spotted past.

  Ottinger, once considered a handsome man, was still imposing despite being disfigured on the right side of his face and blind in the right eye—a disfigurement dating from a certain infamous series of wartime events. Even more disfigured by those same events, though, was the man’s military and moral reputation.

  A “close-quarter battle,” Ottinger had always referred to the Virginia bloodletting that had made his name infamous to so many. Others used a stronger word: massacre.

  Under Ottinger’s command, Union soldiers had wiped out, cruelly, a band of Confederate sympathizers who just happened to be civilian, and not a few of whom happened to be children and women. Several blacks had also been killed for reasons no one had quite understood.

  Kenton, who had encountered Ottinger a time or two during his own covert wartime career, had loathed the man even though they served the same flag. Kenton saw Ottinger as a wartime opportunist who used his military position for personal gain, and often for personal vengeance, even at the cost of his own men’s lives.