The Dangerous Land

by Ralph Compton

  Chapter 24

  “What are you doing?” Paul asked.

  Bob lowered himself to one knee so he could watch the hallway. Judging by the muffled voices and steps, there was a scuffle brewing upstairs that hadn’t quite turned into another shoot-out just yet. “Doing what we came to do,” Bob said. “And you two held up your end real good. Kept those men busy while me and the rest came straight in through the front.”

  “What now?”

  “We’re to hold things down here so Starkweather and Hector have a clear path outside when they’re done upstairs.”

  “Why did you kill these men?” Paul asked.

  Bob smirked. “I doubt they would’ve just lain down if we asked ’em to.” Suddenly he spotted something farther down the hall that was well out of Paul and Hank’s sight. Shoving past Hank, Bob stepped into the coatroom and held his pistol up near his head. When he slowly thumbed back the hammer, the metallic sound rattled ominously through Paul’s ears.

  “Joseph?” someone in the hallway said.

  Bob placed a finger to his mouth to tell Paul and Hank to keep theirs shut.

  “Joseph? Is that you? Can you hear me?” the voice asked from a little closer. As the noise upstairs died down to a rustle of tentative feet scraping against the floor, the man who’d been drawing closer to the coatroom stepped past the doorway without looking inside. He was too distracted by one of the bodies on the floor. Ignoring the little fire that was spreading near the broken lantern, he placed a hand on the dead man’s face and said, “Joseph! Who did this to you? Aw, no.” He was a man in his late teens or early twenties, clearly rattled by everything that had happened in the last minute.

  In stark contrast to the young man’s sorrow, Bob grinned and slowly extended his arm to aim his pistol at the target that had presented itself.

  “No,” Paul hissed.

  Bob gnashed his teeth and shot an angry sideways glance at him. So far, the younger man just outside the door was still too overcome by grief and panic to have heard Paul’s voice.

  Seeing that he wasn’t going to be able to talk Bob out of his deadly intentions, Paul grabbed hold of the older man’s shoulder to try to pull him off balance. Bob was stronger than he looked and wasn’t about to be distracted so easily. The commotion, however, was enough to catch the attention of the young man kneeling over his dead friend.

  The instant that young man in the hallway started to turn toward the coatroom, Paul knew he was dead. Bob would pull his trigger, kill the young man, and then . . .

  And then Paul fired the pistol that he barely remembered drawing in the first place. The Schofield roared and sent its round directly into Bob’s chest at such close range that the older man’s shirt caught fire. Paul fired again out of instinct before losing the strength needed to stay upright. Fortunately the walls around him were close enough inside that small room that he barely had to stagger backward half a step before one of them kept him from going any farther.

  “Wh . . . who are you?” the young man in the hallway asked.

  “Don’t fret, kid,” Hank said in a strained voice. “We just saved your life.”

  The young man nodded as if he barely knew where he was. The gun in his hand trembled.

  “Go on and get out of here,” Hank said. “Things are about to get worse.”

  The young man straightened up to look down the hallway. Turning away from the stairs, he said, “I’ll get reinforcements,” and then took off running.

  Hank looked over to Paul and said, “Take a breath and lower that pistol before you put one into me next.”

  When he heard that, Paul let out the breath that had caught in the back of his throat. Every one of his senses, which had been muddled a moment ago, now snapped into perfect clarity. When the mixed scents of blood and burned gunpowder reached his nose, he had to get out of that room. Joseph’s body was still on the floor, so Paul turned away from it to see the stairs roughly where he’d guessed they would be. From the second floor, a few shots were fired and angry voices shouted back and forth.

  “They’re getting ready to really go at each other,” Hank said. “Sounded like a lot of threatening back and forth until now, but I imagine the shots you just fired lit the fuse for the real powder keg to go off.”

  “I had to,” Paul said. “Or he was going to—”

  “I know. Just may not have been the smartest thing, is all.” Now holding his .44 Colt in one hand and the .38 from his shoulder holster in the other, Hank added, “Let’s see this thing through. You with me?”

  Paul nodded once even though every ounce of good sense he had was telling him to follow the younger man’s example and get out of that dark building as quickly as his feet could carry him.

  By the time Paul and Hank had gotten halfway up the stairs, the shooting above them began in earnest. There were only a few lanterns scattered on the wall, casting just enough light to make the place feel like a shadowy nightmare filled with swearing voices and flashes from muzzles firing back and forth. Several steps shy of the top of the flight, Hank dropped down and motioned for Paul to do the same.

  “Starkweather!” Hank shouted. “More of ’em are on the way!”

  “Cover us!” Starkweather shouted from one of the open doors on the right side of a long hall.

  Although it was still difficult to see much up there, Paul recognized the bulky shape of Starkweather leaning out from a nearby doorway. The moment he stuck his head out, gunshots erupted from the farthest end of the hall to punch holes into the walls and doorframe. Even with most of his body out of the line of fire, Paul still had to choke back the instinct to flee. There was so much gunfire coming from either end of the hallway that it seemed the world itself was cracking apart. Starkweather, on the other hand, embraced the chaos like an old friend.

  He stepped out of the room where he’d sought refuge and shouted like a wild animal as he fired again and again. Walking at a slow, deliberate pace, he didn’t even waver when one stray bullet tore his shirt and clipped his upper left arm like the talon of a diving hawk. Starkweather waited just long enough for the man who’d shot him to stick his head out to fire another round before squeezing his trigger again. The pistol in Starkweather’s hand spat a round straight down the hall to snap the other man’s head back and drop him to the floor.

  Paul had seen more than he could stomach. He’d been too rattled to do much before, but that no longer mattered. Standing up, he shouted as loudly as he could while pulling his trigger.

  Hearing Paul’s voice and taking that as a cue to charge, Hector stepped out of the room nearby and swung the rifle in his hands toward the far end of the hall. When Paul fired at him, the Mexican turned around to look for a target. He spotted Paul and Hank right away but didn’t yet realize that they’d turned on him. Paul kept firing at Hector and Starkweather. Because he didn’t settle on one target, he hit neither of them. Hector wasn’t as cool under fire as his partner, especially when Hank joined in.

  Starkweather fired a shot that forced one of the other men at the opposite end of the hall to duck back into cover. He pivoted on his heel and got a look at what was going on behind him. He and Paul locked eyes for less than a second, which was long enough for a chill to rake all the way down Paul’s spine.

  “Give it up!” hollered one of the men all the way down the hall. “It’s over!”

  Hector was the first to dive back into the room from which he’d come. As he rushed past Starkweather, he bumped the larger man just as he fired at Paul. That piece of lead whipped through the air a scant couple of inches from Paul’s head, but he was too far into the fight to turn back now. When Paul kept firing, Hank did the same.

  The shooting continued, only now the men at the other end of the hall barely had a target in sight. Starkweather only showed a sliver of himself as he calmly traded an empty pistol for a fresh one from his gun belt. Even with Hank fil
ling the air with fiery lead beside him, Paul knew the fight wouldn’t last long when Starkweather decided to go on the offensive once more.

  “We have to get out of here,” Paul said.

  Hank dropped down and told him, “We do that now and this whole trip was a waste. We sure won’t get a run at your salesman friend again.”

  Starkweather fired a shot that came dangerously close to the top of Paul’s head.

  “Besides,” Hank added, “if we run, that maniac will just put a bullet into our backs!”

  After pivoting around to fire a few shots down to the other end of the hall, Starkweather stepped out of the room where he’d been hiding and swung his aim back toward the stairs. Paul hadn’t seen the small window behind him before, but he became aware of it when a single bullet shattered it and punched into the wall less than a foot away from where Starkweather was standing. While that shot didn’t put a fright into Starkweather, the next one made him hop straight back into the room where Hector was still waiting.

  At the opposite end of the hall, two men emerged from their own rooms and opened fire while marching straight toward Starkweather. Hank squeezed off another round, but it was the next rifle shot to come through the window that stopped Starkweather in his tracks. The round hissed dangerously close to its target, and what made it even more dangerous was the fact that Starkweather couldn’t see who was pulling that trigger. As he backed into the room behind him, Starkweather fired down one end of the hall and then the other.

  “He’s retreating!” someone from the other end of the hall announced. “Close in on him!”

  However many men were down that way, there wasn’t one among them who was anxious to charge at Starkweather head-on. Only after the gunfire had stopped for several seconds did the first man from that end of the hall make his move.

  “Cover me,” Paul said as he climbed the rest of the stairs while hunched over as far as he could stoop.

  Hank fired a few rounds into the ceiling as Paul hurried toward the room where Starkweather had gone. After a few seconds, Paul shouted, “They’re gone! Must’ve jumped out the window.”

  A few more shots were fired, but all of them came from the rifle that had been shooting into the building’s second-floor window to keep anyone else from getting too close to Hank or Paul.

  Inside the room where Starkweather had been, Paul leaned out through an open window. He thought he saw some movement on the street below but had no way of knowing if he’d spotted Starkweather and Hector or anyone else who happened to be out and about that evening. Wheeling around, Paul holstered his Schofield and headed for the door. “Prescott?” he shouted. “You up here? Speak up. It’s Paul . . . Paul Meakes!”

  Feeling emboldened after having survived what he’d thought would surely be his last moments on earth, Paul strode into the hallway to look for Prescott. Gun smoke hung thick in the air, drifting like fog in front of the lanterns hanging on the wall. Bodies were strewn on the floor, but those were less of a concern than the bodies that stood facing him with guns in their hands.

  “Drop your weapon!” one of the men demanded.

  Hank stood at the top of the stairs near the doorway with his hands held high. “You might want to do what he says, Paul. Real slow.”

  Chapter 25

  He was a dead man.

  This wasn’t the first time Paul had thought that, but it was the time when he surely thought it would come to pass. Three men stood in front of him, all with guns drawn and aiming at him and Hank. If they started pulling their triggers again, that entire hallway would become a slaughterhouse.

  “You two,” the man at the front of the group facing Paul said, “are under arrest.”

  “What?” Paul asked breathlessly.

  Hank nudged him as if they were two boys sharing a dirty joke. “They’re lawmen, Paul. Isn’t that a relief?”

  “I . . . guess so.” Paul had been taking a look at the hallway as he set the Schofield on the floor and slid it away. Soon he spotted the face that had been the reason for him coming to Leadville in the first place. When he saw Prescott lying half in and half out of a room between him and the lawmen, Paul started hurrying toward the fallen salesman.

  “Don’t move!” one of the lawmen warned. “We’ll shoot!”

  “Paul?” Prescott croaked from where he was lying on the floor. “Is that really you?”

  Seeing Prescott’s reaction to him, the lawmen allowed Paul to get closer but were still ready to gun him down at a moment’s notice.

  Paul paid no attention to the lawmen, the guns in their hands, or the bodies he had to step over to get to Prescott’s side. When he saw the salesman, every last one of his thoughts were brought straight back to the reason he’d come. And when it came to saving his children, there was nothing that could stand in his way.

  “What happened to you?” Paul asked. One of the lawmen reached down to pick up his Schofield and roughly pat him in search of other weapons, but he didn’t care much about that. “What’s going on here?”

  Lying on his back with his head in the hallway and his legs stretched over the threshold of the door into the next room, Prescott was eerily still. Some of the dim light in the hallway spilled onto him and reflected off a dark wet crimson pool spreading beneath his upper body. He reached up with one hand, swatted Paul’s aside when he tried to comfort him, and waved at the men gathered nearby. “He’s a friend,” Prescott croaked. “A . . . friend.”

  The lawmen could have backed away or they could have been fashioning a noose for all Paul cared. He didn’t take his eyes off the salesman stretched out on the floor. “Tell me what happened!”

  “I been . . . shot. What do you think happened?”

  “Who are these men?”

  “Supposed to . . . protect me.” Prescott smiled to display teeth smeared with blood. “Didn’t do a very . . . good job, though.”

  “Protect you from what?”

  “From getting shot!” Prescott coughed and grabbed the floor as if it were tilting beneath him. “They’re from the . . .”

  Seeing that Prescott was fading in and out, Paul looked at the men gathering around him and asked, “Is someone fetching a doctor?”

  “He should be here soon,” one of the men replied.

  Paul turned back to Prescott. “What did you put in that tonic, Leo?”

  “What tonic?”

  “The tonic you used to clean my daughter’s wounds at the trading post. She’s sick and it looks like she’s been poisoned.”

  “Maybe it was . . . the arrow.”

  “No,” Paul snapped. “What was in that tonic?”

  Prescott closed his eyes. “Is she . . . feverish? Weak? Dizzy?”

  “Yes!”

  “Oh no. Not her too.”

  “What can you tell me about what happened?” Paul asked, doing his best not to lift the wounded man off the floor and start shaking him.

  “That tonic . . . was mostly water,” Prescott explained. He forced his eyes open wide and grabbed the front of Paul’s shirt for support. “Others were getting sick too. From water. River water. From the lakes west of here. I got the water for that tonic from . . . bigger rivers . . . farther east. Thought they were safe.”

  “Something’s wrong with the water?”

  Prescott nodded and then winced in pain. “Territorial Mining Company. Tearing into the mountains . . . blasting away rock . . . dumping scrap ore. Don’t know it all exactly. Could be chemicals . . . acid . . . something that got people sick.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “I thought I was using clean water,” Prescott insisted. “When I heard more people were sick . . . I did say something. I went to the law. That’s why I’m here. That’s why these men are guarding me.”

  Paul leaned down to try to hear more of what Prescott was saying. His arm brushed against the
salesman’s shirt and came away wet with blood. Feeling a hand on his shoulder, Paul turned around to get a look at the lawman who’d arrested him not too long ago.

  “We should get him to the doctor,” the lawman said.

  Prescott shook his head and started to cough. “Leave me here. Please. Hurts too much. Don’t move me.”

  “I’m sorry, Leo,” Paul said. “I wish I could have helped you.”

  “I’m trying to help the . . . sick folks. I’m the one that should be sorry.”

  “I know a doctor who might be able to help with that. He just needs some of whatever poisoned my children.”

  “Not just . . . your girl?” Prescott asked. “Both children . . . sick?”

  “Yeah. Afraid so.”

  Clenching his eyes shut, Prescott coughed up a short string of foul language cursing himself and the entire situation. The color was fading from his face quicker than water from a cracked bucket. “Vest pocket. Key. Take it.”

  “Save your breath, Leo,” Paul said. “We’ll get you to a doctor and—”

  “Ain’t got much . . . breath left. Take the key. Open the wagon. Third cabinet up top. That’s what you’re after.”

  “Try to breathe, Leo. You’re not looking good.”

  “I been shot, Paul,” Prescott wheezed. “What do you exp . . .”

  Grabbing both of Prescott’s shoulders, Paul looked him in the eye and shouted, “Leo!”

  Prescott didn’t answer. Not only that, but there was nothing behind the salesman’s eyes any longer. Not even the weakest spark to show there was any life left in him.

  “Leo!”

  Paul looked up to find Hank and one of the lawmen standing over him. The rest were checking on other fallen men. A few of those forms sprawled on the floor were moving or trying to speak. The rest were unnaturally still.

  “He’s gone, mister,” the lawman said.