Pitchfork Pass

by William W. Johnstone

  * * *

  Sam Flintlock breathed deeply of the clean morning air as he mounted the buckskin and rode east. Distant thunder rumbled as the storm rolled closer and lightning spiked among the clouds and Flintlock cursed himself for a fool for even coming here. But he rode on. Jacob Hammer had not escaped to the east where he would have run into the mercenaries. He must have escaped during the battle at the pass and headed west, but where he’d gone after that was anybody’s guess. Sickened and depressed by what he’d seen at the mesa and disheartened by the vastness of the landscape ahead of him, he let the buckskin have its head. Perhaps the horse would lead him to Jacob Hammer.

  * * *

  Probably to keep ahead of the approaching thunderstorm, the buckskin picked its way northward, into broken country cut through by numerous dry washes and fantastic rock formations. After an hour, Flintlock drew rein at a sandstone overhang that promised protection from the now-teeming rain. He dismounted and led his horse into the shelter, ate some jerky then smoked a cigarette. The storm was violent but brief, and the sky was clear blue when Flintlock again mounted and continued on his horse’s northeastward track. Wishful for coffee, another hour and he’d call it a day and head back to camp.

  But after just thirty minutes the buckskin raised his head, his ears pointed forward, scenting something he did not like in the newly washed air. Flintlock eased the Winchester from the boot and kneed the horse into a walk. Ahead of him a sand-bottomed dry wash skirted a stand of juniper and piñon and then headed in the direction of a high rock wall. The big buckskin was uneasy, and Flintlock leaned over and patted its neck.

  “What is it, boy, huh?” he said. “What do you smell?”

  And then his own answering thought . . . You smell a rat.

  Flintlock drew rein, swung out of the saddle and followed the wash on foot, his rifle at the ready. Behind him his horse had found some graze and took no further interest in the proceedings. It wasn’t a cougar, then, so it had to be some other kind of animal . . . or a man. Was that man Jacob Hammer?

  Warily, Flintlock stepped forward, every nerve in his body stretched as taut as a fiddle string. His eyes scanned the landscape ahead, the wash snaking away from him, the rock wall . . . where a naked man stood watching him.

  Without thinking about it, Flintlock instinctively threw himself to the ground, the Winchester coming to his shoulder in a single, swift movement. He expected to hear a shot, feel the impact of lead striking his body. But it never happened. The man just stood there, his back against the wall, his arms bent as though his hands were on his hips. Flintlock got to his feet.

  “Identify yourself,” he said.

  No answer.

  The rifle at his shoulder, Flintlock stepped forward and then froze in his tracks. There was something about the man that was familiar . . . and something else . . . the man’s eyes were open, staring, but he was dead.

  Now Flintlock stepped closer and looked at the lifeless face of Lon Springer.

  The little explorer’s body had been all shot to pieces. The torrential rain had washed away most of the blood but the wounds to his legs, hand and head stood out in dreadful relief against the whiteness of his skin. Springer had died a painful and undignified death. The body had been stripped and then propped up against the wall, and under his armpits two rocky projections caused by erosion helped hold him upright.

  Flintlock shook his head and said, “Lon, who did this to you?”

  The dead man couldn’t answer that question, but Flintlock could . . . the little explorer had been murdered and his body desecrated by Jacob Hammer.

  What really sickened Flintlock was the fact that Hammer did not leave the body for him to see. He had little reason to believe that Flintlock would come this way and admire his handiwork. No, the monster had done it for his own gratification, a grim hunting trophy he’d mounted for display and amusement. In that moment of truth, Flintlock knew he faced a great evil that must be destroyed, even at the cost of his own life. Such a demon as Jacob Hammer must no longer be allowed to cast his malevolent shadow on the earth.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  “I found a place where a rock face had split apart and I put him in there,” Flintlock said.

  “I suppose that’s as good a resting place as any for an explorer,” Jane said.

  “I don’t think Lon Springer was a very good explorer,” Flintlock said. “He told me he kept getting lost all the time.”

  Jane smiled. “Explorers are always getting lost. Didn’t David Livingstone get lost in darkest Africa before Stanley found him and showed him the way home?”

  “That Livingstone feller was lucky it was Stanley,” Flintlock said. “Jacob Hammer found Lon.”

  Bridie O’Toole said, “Sam, are you sure it was him, Hammer, I mean?”

  “It was him, all right,” Jane said. “Think about it, Bridie. Who else would kill a man bit by bit and then display his naked body?”

  “The death of a thousand cuts,” Bridie said.

  “Or a version of it, using a gun.”

  “Samuel, do you think Hammer knew that you had met Lon before?” Jane said.

  “I’m sure he did. I think that’s why Hammer killed him.”

  “And now he’ll try to kill us,” Bridie said.

  “Yes, Bridie, yes, he will,” Jane said. “Starting tonight we’ll sleep in shifts. I’ll take the first four-hour watch, Samuel the second, and, Bridie, you the third.”

  “How do we know when our four hours is up?” Bridie said. “We don’t have a watch.”

  “Yes, we do,” Flintlock said. He reached into his pants pocket. “Captain Von Essen gave me this, said he took it off the body of one of Hammer’s gunmen.” He passed the watch to Jane. “It’s a Waltham railroader and a good timekeeper.”

  Jane smiled. “The spoils of war, huh?”

  “Yeah, just like the sixteen hundred dollars in my saddlebags.”

  “What are you going to do with all that money, Samuel?” Jane said. “Providing I allow you to keep it. It is stolen, after all.”

  “It was stolen from the thief who stole it in the first place, Ma. That makes it legal in my book.”

  “I’m sure if I look hard enough I’ll find some logic there,” Jane said.

  Bridie said, “What about it, Sam? How are you going to spend the money? You can buy me a present if you like.”

  “Maybe I’ll do that,” Flintlock said. “A present for you and Ma. But right now, my thinking is that I might set myself up in the dry goods business. I think I would prosper in that profession.”

  “A laudable ambition, Samuel,” Jane said. “Dry goods would be a vast improvement on what you are presently, a lawman of sorts today, an outlaw of sorts tomorrow.”

  “Outlawing is a tough business. Me and O’Hara once tried the train-robbing profession, but we never did cotton to it . . . too much competition from the likes of Jesse and Frank and them. Tried bank robbing for a spell one time, but quit that real quick after we saw a citizens’ posse string up Stuttering Steve Clifford. Hung him in a barn up El Paso way and it took ol’ Steve the best part of a morning to choke to death, and all the time his pet hog was licking his toes.”

  “Well, if all that didn’t teach you a lesson about the perils of lawlessness, nothing will,” Jane said.

  “You’re right, Ma. All things considered, I’ll be better off selling dry goods,” Flintlock said. “But not in this territory, not west of everything.”

  * * *

  Wood was hard to come by, but during his first watch he stoked up the fire, a beckoning beacon to bring Jacob Hammer closer. He really didn’t expect the man to attempt a night attack, but there was always a chance he might try it.

  At midnight by his watch, Flintlock rose and stretched and then took up his Winchester again and patrolled around the rise. At its western end the bluff broke off abruptly and there was a sheer drop of about twenty feet that ended at a narrow, U-shaped rock formation. He stepped back from the edge. If
a man fell over there he’d land fast and hard and if he didn’t kill himself, he’d suffer some broken bones.

  Somewhere out among the canyons coyotes yipped, and with them was Jacob Hammer. Was he even now staring at the distant, blinking firelight, biding his time, waiting to take his revenge on those he hated? It was probable, no, more than that, it was highly likely. Flintlock glanced at the sleeping women and wished this was all over, done and finished, Hammer dead and his ma and Bridie wiring from Fort Defiance for further instructions. That was his wish, but the reality was that as long as Hammer breathed his ma, Bridie and himself were in terrible danger. A shot could come out of the darkness at any time and find its firelit target. It was a worrisome thought.

  * * *

  Flintlock roused Bridie O’Toole at two in the morning. The woman woke instantly and sat up, fully aware of her surroundings. “Anything happening?” she said.

  “The coyotes are hunting and making a racket, and I heard an owl. But apart from that, nothing,” Flintlock said.

  Bridie rose to her feet and picked up her rifle. “Get some sleep, Sam.” Her voice sounded hollow in the quiet.

  “I’m not much of a sleeping man,” Flintlock said. “Wake me in a couple of hours.”

  “No, I’ll wake Jane at six. She’s a Pinkerton and she aims to do her fair share. Let me have the watch.”

  Flintlock passed over the Waltham and Bridie said, “Sam, do you think he’ll show?”

  “Tonight?”

  “Tonight, tomorrow, will he show?”

  “I think he will.”

  “Think?”

  “All right, I’m sure he will. But by day. Not night.”

  Bridie smiled. “He’ll want to see our faces when he kills us, huh?”

  “He’ll see our faces, but it’s the last thing Jacob Hammer will ever see.”

  “Is he good with a gun?”

  “I don’t know. But to have survived this long in a violent business, I imagine he’s better than most.”

  “Better than you, Sam?”

  “That remains to be seen, but I doubt it.” Flintlock grinned. “I’m pretty fast, you know.”

  “I’m keeping you up,” Bridie said. “You’d better turn in.”

  Flintlock tossed some sticks on the fire and then sought his blankets. As he stretched out his mother spoke from the darkness. “How good is he, Samuel?”

  “Real good, I imagine.”

  “I imagine that, too,” Jane said.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  Jacob Hammer knew he was a dead man.

  He’d seen gangrene before, in China, seen it many times, and smelled it . . . the vile stench of rotting meat.

  The wound on his thigh had turned black and it oozed pus and the pain was intense, unbelievably intense, like no pain he’d ever felt or ever imagined. Later today, tomorrow, his whole leg would become black and poison his blood and kill him.

  If Dr. Chiang had been here he could have cut off the rotten leg, sawed it off just below the hip and given him a chance of life. But he’d killed Dr. Chiang because the man was a traitor and a liar, a soothsayer who could not predict his own death and the death of the man who’d given him a home and made him rich.

  In the end, Hammer knew he’d been surrounded by treachery, blackhearted betrayal. Chiang, curse him, had been one of the traitors, but the two women Pinkertons and the man called Sam Flintlock had been the worst of them.

  Hammer ordained they had to die before he did . . . and their deaths must be as painful and disgusting as his own.

  Oh, he knew where they were. He’d seen their fire not far from where he lay in the shadow of a rock and watched the mule eat the last of the oats from the sack he’d found in its pack. The mule was a deceitful, traitorous wretch and when this was over and his enemies dead, he’d shoot the foul beast between the eyes.

  But for now, he needed the stubborn brute. It would carry him to his destiny.

  Hammer had cut open his riding breeches to allow the leg to swell. There was no chance of removing his boot. His lower leg was swollen inside the leather and the pain would be too much to bear and might incapacitate him. He had to be able to walk, and silently at that.

  It would cause him terrible pain, but Hammer had to find out if he could still walk. Still hobble. Slowly, carefully, he got to his feet and put weight on the rotting leg. Sweet Jesu! He felt pain that was beyond pain, lightning bolts of searing agony that jolted through his entire body. He clenched his teeth against a scream and willed the pain to pass, but it did not. Gasping now, sweat staining his shirt, he took one step, tried another, and fell hard on his side. Now there was no holding back the scream. He rolled on his back and shrieked and shrieked until his parched mouth and throat could shriek no longer. Then a blackness overcame Hammer and he fell headlong into a hellish, scarlet-streaked pit that had no bottom . . .

  * * *

  Jacob Hammer woke to bright sunlight. He’d been unconscious, but for how long? Judging by the position of the sun in the sky, no more than an hour. But now the die must be cast. The deaths of the Pinkertons and Flintlock must be tonight. By tomorrow he might be unable to get to his feet. By tomorrow he might be dead.

  A pipe of opium would remove his pain, dream him into a better place, but he had none. All he had was the faithless mule . . . his only ally.

  He lay on his back and smelled sun-warmed rock and the ever-present stink of his corrupting leg. How simple it would be to get his gun and blow his brains out and end his suffering. But that was out of the question. The Pinkerton women and Sam Flintlock must not go unpunished. Their treachery and deceit was too grievous a sin.

  Now . . . he must get out of the sun.

  A great discovery!

  If he lay on his back and pushed with his good leg he could cover ground, slowly and painfully to be sure, but enough that he soon reached the shade of the massive rock and his canteen.

  Hammer drank deeply, then formulated his plan.

  After several minutes, he finally nodded, satisfied. Yes, it would work if he played his cards right and got a little luck on his side. Certainly, he could kill one of them easily and probably all three . . . and now that was the only thing that mattered.

  Jacob Hammer, a man dying by degrees and in pain, closed his eyes and waited for the twilight time before the darkness, kept alive only by his insane compulsion to kill.

  * * *

  Covering the ten yards that separated Jacob Hammer and the mule was a nightmare of torment. Hammer made the agonizing journey on his back before he got to his feet and placed his arms across the animal’s back to support his weight. He and the mule stood like that for several minutes, while Hammer fought back rising nausea and endured torture that felt like a brawny lumberjack hitting his wounded leg over and over again with the honed edge of an ax. Hammer smelled the stink of his own sweat and the decaying meat stench of the gangrene and he fought down the urge to scream and scream and never stop. But he endured. The madman knew that failure was not an option.

  Climbing onto the bony back of the mule was almost too much for Hammer, but he succeeded because uppermost in his mind was his vision of the two women and Flintlock sprawled dead on the ground, their bodies abused and violated in ways that, despite his pain, still had the ability to amuse and excite him.

  He urged the mule forward, a short-barreled Colt shoved into his waistband at the small of his back, his shirt pulled over the revolver to conceal it.

  His stubbled face white as ash, dark shadows in his sunken cheeks and eye sockets, surrounded by the stench of rot, Jacob Hammer looked and stank like the Angel of Death.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  Sam Flintlock had stripped the area surrounding the rise of wood. The fire still burned but it was a pale yellow shadow of its former self, barely managing to keep the coffeepot simmering.

  “He’s not going to show, is he?” Bridie O’Toole said. “I think he’s dead.”

  “Could be,” Flintlock said. “Come first light
I reckon I’ll ride out again and take a look-see.”

  The stars were bright, a crescent moon was on the rise and the country around them was bathed in a spectral, mother-of-pearl light that silvered the coats of the coyotes prowling the canyons. There was no sound, only the faint crackling of the fire and the soft rise and fall of Jane’s breathing as she slept.

  Flintlock poured himself coffee and then stood beside Bridie again.

  “You should be sleeping, Sam,” the woman said.

  “I will, soon,” Flintlock said. “Strange kind of night.”

  “Eerie. Is that the word, eerie?” Bridie said.

  “Don’t know,” Flintlock said. “I’ve never heard it before. What does it mean?”

  “Spooky.”

  Flintlock nodded. “Yeah, it’s spooky, makes me think of ha’ants and boogermen and such.” He took a sip of coffee, took time to build a cigarette and then said, “I can tell you a spooky story.”

  Bridie smiled and shook her head. “Please don’t. When I’m on guard by myself I don’t want to think about ghosts.”

  “It’s not about ghosts. It’s about a hat.”

  “A hat?”

  “Yeah, a Stetson hat.” Flintlock lit his cigarette and breathed out smoke as he said, “Want to hear it? Keep you from getting bored.”

  “You’ve got no intention of turning in, Sam, so let me hear it. And if it’s real scary I’ll never forgive you.”

  “It’s not real scary, but it’s mighty strange. It all started a few years back, in the winter of ’78, as I recollect. There was a ranch by the name of the JW over to the Texas Trinity River country and one of their top hands was a puncher by the name of Donny Powers, a nice-enough feller when he was sober. Well, come one Friday night Donny decided to go into town and have a drink or two and maybe a woman.”