Pitchfork Pass

by William W. Johnstone

  O’Hara was behind the gunmen, and the Apaches had taught him none of the niceties about not shooting a man in the back. He drew a bead on a big fellow wearing a black-and-white cowhide vest and cut loose. The man had been lying on his belly and when the bullet hit he simply dropped his head and died. For a moment, his companions stared at the dead man, trying to figure out where the hell the bullet had come from that killed him. O’Hara didn’t give them time to ponder the question. He fired and another man, who wore a bandolier of rifle ammunition across his chest, jerked and fell kicking, the rowels of his spurs scarring the rock.

  But the three surviving gunmen were professionals and they kept their heads. They returned fire and bullets ricocheted around O’Hara . . . then one slammed into the left side plate of his Winchester’s receiver, bounced away, its lead nose deformed, and plowed into his shoulder. O’Hara staggered, dropped his jammed rifle and went for his revolver, determined to sell his life dearly.

  BOOM!

  Barely hanging on to consciousness, O’Hara’s vision narrowed into fleeting images . . . Flintlock running, shooting the Hawken from the hip, dropping one of the gunmen . . . Bridie O’Toole on one knee, working her rifle . . . the two surviving gunmen snapping off a few shots before taking to their heels, suddenly wanting no part of what was happening . . . Bridie chasing after them, shooting as she ran, but scoring no hits . . . the woman cursing a blue streak as she watched the gunmen vanish among the rocks.

  Then came a sound of steel-shod hooves on stone and the fight was over.

  At least for now.

  Flintlock moved warily toward O’Hara, the old Hawken in his right hand, hanging by his side. His eyes widened when he saw the blood on O’Hara’s shirt. “You’ve been hit,” he said.

  “Seems like,” O’Hara said. He sat on a rock. “Bullet’s still in there. I can feel it.” He shook his head. “Hell no, I don’t. Right now, I don’t feel anything.”

  Bridie stepped to O’Hara’s side. “Let me take a look at that wound.” Then, to Flintlock, “Collect their guns and ammunition.” She raised an eyebrow at the Hawken. “Dan’l Boone, if we get into another shooting scrape I don’t want you using that thing. Are you out of your mind?”

  With a woman’s gentleness, but with firm, strong hands, Bridie removed O’Hara’s bloodstained shirt and examined the wound. After a while she said, “It’s bad. I have to get the bullet out of there.”

  “Listen up,” O’Hara said. “Those boys will be back with their friends, a lot of friends. I found a place where we can hole up.” He grimaced as Bridie put his shirt around his shoulders. “There’s water and grass. Not much but enough.”

  The woman nodded. “You’re right, the sooner we leave the better. Where’s your horse? Can you ride?”

  O’Hara thumbed over his shoulder. “Back a ways. When there’s gunmen coming after my hide, I can ride.”

  “Just sit there while I help Sam,” Bridie said.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” O’Hara said.

  Flintlock and Bridie stacked up the rifles and gunbelts and then led their horses down from the rise. When Flintlock returned with O’Hara’s mount he said, “O’Hara, can you hear me?”

  “Of course I can hear you,” O’Hara said, opening his eyes, his face gray and drawn. “I’m not dead yet.”

  “You won’t believe this.”

  “Try me.”

  “One of those boys we killed was Benny Lake. Remember him? Short little feller, did a lot of talking, shacked up for a spell with a redheaded whore by the name of Rusty Something-or-other.”

  “Sure, I remember. Rusty Rawlins was the gal’s name, or so she said. Benny plugged two men that time, a United States Marshal and a Methodist preacher.”

  “Yeah, back in ’79 up on the Platte. Me and you went after him for the thousand-dollar reward. We had us a time, chased him halfway across Nebraska.”

  “And we never did get him,” O’Hara said. His voice was weak, strained.

  “No, but we got him now. Maybe once I find my ma, we can go claim the reward.”

  “Bet it’s grown some over the years,” O’Hara said. “But we’d need proof. You could take his head, Sam, but it won’t keep, not in this heat.”

  “I know. Damned shame,” Flintlock said.

  “You boys are having such an interesting conversation I hate to interrupt,” Bridie said. “But it’s time we got out of here.”

  After O’Hara was helped into the saddle and Flintlock and Bridie mounted and settled their load of guns and belts, the woman said, “I don’t know why I’m even asking this, but why did Benny Lake shoot the Methodist preacher?”

  “Benny’s shooting was a little off that day,” Flintlock said. “He was aiming for a Baptist preacher.”

  “Oh, that explains it, then,” Bridie said.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Darkness and a rising moon found Flintlock and the others in the basin at the end of the arroyo. Postponing what she had to do, Bridie ate the thin slices of bacon Flintlock had broiled over a small fire that he’d started with banknotes from the ten thousand dollars they’d taken from Ryker Klein. She’d tried to get O’Hara to eat, but he’d refused, though he drank a little water and then slept for an hour.

  “Sam,” she said, “the bullet has to come out.”

  Flintlock nodded. “I’ve never done that before, but I’ve seen it done. I’ll have to use my Barlow and dig deep enough.” Flintlock, his face creased with worry, looked at the sleeping O’Hara. “It will hurt him.”

  “I’ll do it,” Bridie said.

  “Have you dug out a bullet before?”

  “No. I don’t make a habit of digging bullets out of men’s shoulders.”

  Then, at a loss for words, deciding to state the obvious, Flintlock said, “It has to be done.”

  “Yes, it has to be done. Give me a canteen and your knife.”

  Flintlock did as he was told and said when he opened the folding knife, “I can use the sole of my boot to give it an edge, like barbers do to razors. Of course, they use a special kind of leather strop for that.”

  “If we’d whiskey we could wash the blade, to rid it of impurities,” Bridie said. “But I remember being told that fire does just as well.”

  “I never heard that,” Flintlock said.

  “Well, you’ve heard it now.”

  Bridie held the blade in the flames for a minute or so, and then said, “I’m ready. Sam, hold O’Hara down. I don’t want him to move when I begin cutting. And keep the canteen handy.”

  “Why?”

  “Because my hand will get bloody and the knife could slip. When I ask, pour water over both my hands. Now hold him down and whatever you do don’t let him move. Ready?”

  “He’s half Apache warrior,” Flintlock said. “He won’t move.”

  * * *

  O’Hara roared and bucked like a wild stallion when the knife blade entered his wound, digging, probing, as Bridie tried to pry out a mangled bullet that was in deep and had caused considerable damage.

  “Hold him, damn you!” Bridie O’Toole yelled, sweat already beading on her forehead.

  “Hell, I’m trying,” Flintlock said, his whole weight pressing on O’Hara’s chest. Then, “He’s in tolerable pain.”

  “We’re all in pain,” Bridie said. “Throw wood on the fire. I need more light.”

  “Can’t you feel the bullet yet?”

  “No. I can’t. I don’t know where it is.” She shook her head. “I can’t find it. It’s deep, very deep.”

  Flintlock, a man strong in the arms and shoulders, held O’Hara down with his forearm and stretched out enough to toss some twigs on the fire.

  “My hand, Sam!” Bridie said, her voice cracking under strain. “Use the water.”

  O’Hara was also a strong man and pinning him down was like wrestling an angry Irish railroad track layer who didn’t want a tooth pulled. “I can’t let him go,” he yelled. “Oh my God, look at that! He’s bleeding bad.” />
  Bridie stuck the knife blade in the fire, used the canteen to wash the blood and sweat from her hands, dried them on her shirt and picked up the Barlow again. “Hold him,” she said. “Don’t let him go. Do you pray?”

  “Not as a rule.”

  “Then pray now. We need all the help we can get. Are you ready?”

  Flintlock didn’t answer, but to O’Hara he said, “You lay still, damn it. You’re the poorest excuse for an Apache warrior I ever did meet.”

  Through gritted teeth O’Hara said, “Sam, when this is over I’m taking your scalp.”

  “And welcome to it if it stops your caterwauling,” Flintlock said.

  “O’Hara, this is going to hurt,” Bridie said. “I have to go deeper.”

  Flintlock lay almost on top of O’Hara, holding him down.

  “Here goes,” Bridie said. “I’m so sorry, O’Hara.”

  Her face was spotted with blood and when she pushed her hair from her eyes she left a scarlet smear on her forehead.

  Bridie pushed the blade deep into the wound and this time O’Hara, at the limit of his endurance and on the ragged end of consciousness, had only the strength to groan.

  Then, after a couple of hellish, blood-soaked minutes of probing . . . cutting . . .

  “I feel it!” Bridie said. “I scraped the bullet. O’Hara, stay with me for a just few moments longer. I’ll have the bullet out in a moment.”

  But she spoke to an unconscious man.

  “Got it!” the woman yelled. She laid the knife aside and picked out the bullet with her fingers. It looked like a small, gray mushroom. “For a moment there, I thought I’d never find it.”

  “So did I,” Flintlock said. “Now what do we do?”

  “Sam, I’m not a doctor,” Bridie said. “All I can do is wash the wound and then cauterize it.”

  “Cauterize it? What does that mean?”

  “Burn the wound to kill the poisons.”

  “A doctor would do that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you sure you want to burn it?”

  “I heard or read somewhere that it’s been done.”

  Bridie washed the Barlow and then lifted the hem of her skirt and used the knife to cut off a length of white petticoat. She poured water into O’Hara’s gaping wound and dabbed it dry with the cloth.

  “Sam, use two sticks and pick me a coal from the fire,” Bridie said. She pointed into the flames. “There, that one seems big enough.”

  “I don’t like this,” Flintlock said. “I don’t think we should do this.”

  “You’d like gangrene even less. Now do what I told you to do.”

  Reluctantly, Flintlock, after a few fumbling tries, used sticks to pick up a cherry-red coal about the side of a walnut.

  “Drop it into the wound,” Bridie said. She read the hesitation in Flintlock’s face and said, “Now! Before it cools.”

  Flintlock let out with a great, shuddering sigh and then placed the glowing coal on the open wound. Flesh sizzled. A smell like burning bacon and then Bridie used the knife again to remove the now-dark ember. She folded her piece of petticoat into a pad and placed it on O’Hara’s shoulder. “I’m glad he didn’t feel that,” she said.

  “I felt it,” Flintlock said.

  Bridie nodded. “So did I. Hopefully he’ll sleep now and gather his strength.”

  “I’ll make sure there are no guns near him,” Flintlock said. “If the Apache part of O’Hara wakes up before the Irish does, he could play hob.”

  Bridie looked at Flintlock, her eyes shadowed in the darkness.

  “I pray that’s the case,” she said. “I hope he wakes up.”

  Her face was empty, betraying none of her thoughts.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  In the teeming rain, the hansom cab stood outside a rundown, clapboard tenement building in one of Washington’s poorest black neighborhoods, the iron clash of the horse’s pawing hoof on the wet cobbles loud in the hissing quiet. The top-hatted driver sat huddled in an oversized oilskin coat, miserably waiting the return of Major General Claude Elliot, who had grimly promised him that his visit to this dismal, poverty-stricken place would not be of an extended duration. So far, the soldier had been gone for only ten minutes, but to the driver, who feared for his life and worried that his horse might be stolen from the shafts, it seemed like an eternity.

  “My dear Senator Flood, the excellence of your port almost makes up for the dreariness of our surroundings, but is such secrecy really necessary?”

  Adam Flood, a short, stout man in his early sixties with a network of red spider veins across his nose and cheekbones, wore sober black broadcloth in contrast to the general’s blue and gold finery. He smiled and said, “Alas, the president insists that our negotiations with Colonel Janowski on what he calls the Arizona Affair be conducted in the utmost secrecy. I brought the port from the president’s own cellar, knowing how dreadfully melancholy these proceedings might be.”

  General Elliot reached into his surtout coat and produced a gold watch the size of a soup plate. “The bounder is already ten minutes late,” he said.

  “I’m sure he will be here shortly,” Flood said. “Colonel Janowski is quite infirm from his many war wounds and that does slow him, especially in inclement weather.”

  Elliot was a tall, well-built fifty-year-old with a gallant war record, his wide face with its broad, lower-class nose saved from mediocrity by a pair of magnificent muttonchop whiskers and an equally magnificent mustache.

  He waved a hand. “Why here in such a depressing slum?” He looked around him at a small room, peeling paint on the walls, furnished with three wooden chairs and iron cot jammed against a wall, and an oil lamp. There was no rug on the stone floor and the room smelled of its previous occupants, probably an entire family. “Who owns this place?”

  “The Senate and people of the United States,” Flood said. He smiled. “We keep this place for, shall we say, clandestine meetings like this one and it’s occasionally used to house someone the government wishes to keep well away from the public eye.”

  “Spies, do you mean?”

  “Yes, spies and others, and sometimes professional assassins.”

  “I didn’t know our government employed such men, assassins, I mean.”

  “When the security of the nation is at stake, we employ many unsavory characters. Alfons Janowski is one of them.”

  “The deuce you say! An assassin? I was led to believe the colonel is a soldier of fortune.”

  “My dear general, and what is a soldier of fortune but a paid killer? Ah, I think I hear his carriage now.”

  * * *

  At first meeting, Colonel Alfons Janowski was a disappointment. And General Elliot could not hide his dismay. Could this small, thin man hobbling with a cane, missing his left eye and right arm, really be a hero of the Crimean War, the French conquest of Senegal, the Russo-Turkish War, the Anglo-Zulu War and latterly a hired warrior in Arizona’s Pleasant Valley War? Add to those a dozen other foreign and domestic conflicts in which he distinguished himself by his bravery and daring and Elliot expected the man to be ten foot tall, not a stunted . . . cripple.

  Senator Flood made the necessary introductions and Janowski gratefully sat on a chair, accepted a cigar and refused a glass of port. He turned a black eye that was as bright as a bird’s to General Elliot and said, a faint smile playing on his lips, “Please excuse my present infirmity, General. I have been wounded in battle seventeen times and this damp weather reminds me of every one of them.”

  “Not at all, Colonel,” Elliot said. “You look”—he could not bring himself to tell an outright lie and finished lamely—“just fine.”

  Janowski’s smile widened. “You are too kind,” he said. His accent was tinged by a trace of his native Poland.

  Elliot poured himself another glass of port that he seemed to need urgently, took a swig and then said, “Colonel, did Senator Flood make you aware of the, ah, Arizona Affair, and our d
ilemma?”

  “Yes, he did, and by dilemma you mean the president’s need for secrecy?”

  The general nodded. “We can do nothing that might embarrass President Arthur and empower his enemies in government. You understand?”

  “Perfectly,” Janowski said. He leaned forward in his chair, his thin, sallow face alight, and for the first time that evening Elliot became aware of the little man’s hidden well of vitality. “The president wants this common criminal who calls himself the Old Man of the Mountain crushed and his lawless empire destroyed. Am I correct?”

  “Destroyed, yes, but discreetly, Colonel, discreetly,” Senator Flood said. “Not to belabor the point, if you succeed no one will ever hear of it. There will be no medals.”

  “And if I fail?”

  “Then, my dear colonel, if you are unfortunate enough to survive the encounter you will be erased. That unhappy task will fall to General Elliot and his security agents.”

  Janowski took the threat in stride, revealing no change of expression. He said, “The British gave me similar terms back in ’68 when I was charged with the liquidation of a troublesome native princeling in the Indian province of Uttar Pradesh. That expedition became somewhat onerous because in addition to an eight-hundred-man private army Prince Raamiz had two hundred servants and a harem of fifty beautiful Eurasian women. My seventy mercenary stalwarts defeated the prince’s army, stormed the palace and I personally shot Raamiz in the head. There was ancillary damage of course, some eighty servants dead and most of the women. The harem took up arms and wanted to die with their lord, and naturally we obliged.”

  “By God, sir, that was an efficient operation,” Elliot said. “Tip-top.” He pounded a fist into his knee. “How many of your own force did you lose?”

  “Eight. Seven died from battle wounds and one succumbed to dysentery. The British were very happy with the outcome and paid me ten thousand pounds and eight shillings. Then they warned that if I or my mercenaries ever spoke of the Uttar Pradesh incident we’d be hunted down and hanged.”