The Hanging at Leadville / Firefall

by Cameron Judd

  El Paso County was sheep country; within its borders as many as two hundred thousand sheep roamed, grazing on the hills and meadows, surviving remarkably fierce winters. Public lands here could be bought from the government at auctions, the highest bidder winning out, or at a dollar twenty-five an acre. Land could be taken by “preemption,” or through occupation for five years under terms of the Homestead Law. Alternatively, land scrip could be purchased, this scrip representing unclaimed lands offered by the government to Union veterans of the civil conflict. Kenton had explained all these things to Gunnison as they rode out of Colorado Springs. The man was a deep well of such information; he absorbed facts as sand absorbs water. The sheep business, Kenton told Gunnison, was hated by cattlemen, but the fact remained that a man could make good money at it if he could endure the accompanying loneliness and rigors.

  Victor Starlin’s letter apparently included directions to his ranch, for Kenton consulted it often, complaining about Starlin’s poor penmanship as he struggled to decipher parts of it. Gunnison offered to help him, but was refused quickly and firmly. Gunnison had noticed how little his partner had told him of the letter’s content and recalled that Kenton initially had planned to make this journey alone. Obviously Starlin had written something Kenton did not want him to know about—and Gunnison set himself in expectation of being sent away from the ranch, probably on some journalistic pretext, so the men could talk alone. His curiosity began to rise about that mysterious letter.

  At length they reached the head of a little valley that was overgrown with a yellow-tinged grass and almost entirely lacking trees, and in it saw the sheep ranch of Victor Starlin. There was nothing ostentatious about the ranch: a little double cabin, roughly but sturdily built to survive the heavy snowfalls that sometimes literally buried entire flocks. Sheep corrals were all about the cabin, connected by narrow gated chutes. A smattering of outbuildings stood here and there, and behind the cabin ran a spring. There was no sign of life about the place other than a tiny trickle of smoke rising from the chimney to the sky, coming, he expected, from the remnant coals of the morning’s breakfast fire.

  “We may be in for a wait until near nightfall,” Kenton said. “Victor is probably out with his flocks.”

  No sooner were the words said, however, than around the back of the farthest shed came a lean booted man wearing a Mexican-style hat and a long lightweight canvas coat. He stopped when he saw the newcomers, pushed up the face-shadowing brim of the hat, looked them over carefully, then waved his hand and started toward them at a trot.

  “Victor Starlin?”

  “Yes indeed,” Kenton replied. “A sight to see for these tired old eyes.”

  He smiled broadly, raised his hand over his head, and waved back at Starlin, and the pair began their descent into the shepherd’s valley.

  Chapter 4

  Starlin served his coffee so hot that the heat came right through the handles of the battered tin cups the men held and obliged them to rest them on the splintery tabletop, lifting them only long enough to take quick and careful sips before putting them down again.

  Victor Starlin was a young-looking man despite the gray around his temples; it was difficult to picture him and Kenton as contemporaries from the war years. But contemporaries they were, and they shared half-told stories and inside jokes that they obviously found very amusing but to Gunnison were indecipherable.

  Gunnison sat, a quiet listener, hoping they would forget him and talk freely about the mysterious matter upon which Kenton had been summoned and their war experiences. Despite his Texas heritage, Kenton had been active for the Union in the war, yet he had never described his activities to Gunnison or even his exact military affiliations. All Gunnison had been able to surmise was that Kenton had been involved in some sort of dangerous intelligence work, that he had served far from home and had come close to death several times.

  If Starlin was a wartime cohort, he had likely been involved in the same things, but Gunnison’s hopes to learn what those were proved as vain with Starlin as they had with Kenton. Starlin chose his words carefully and betrayed little of himself and his past.

  The evening came, and the flocks returned, Starlin’s hired Mexican shepherds with them. By the time the sheep were corralled and the workers were inside, Starlin had already cooked up a fine-smelling pot of beans, an ovenload of aromatic mutton, and three excellent loaves of bread.

  “My cook quit me a week ago,” he said. “Since then, I’ve given up the fields and taken to the kitchen.

  “And a fine kitchen maid you make, “Kenton said. “This is prime. You’d find no finer food or shelter in many a town.”

  In Gunnison’s view, Kenton was right about the food but lying about the shelter. The men were seated around the smallish table, badly crowded and bumping elbows on all sides. Starlin’s shepherds, Mexicans to the last man, were big in their movements and loud in their eating, and put on quite a show as they downed the food. Watching the vigorous way the sated their appetites was almost enough to take away Gunnison’s. By the time the meal was ended, their beards were soaked in grease, gravy, and the juice of cooked beans. There was nothing Mexican about Starlin’s cooking, but that didn’t seem to bother the shepherds.

  Kenton, always one to join in the spirit of things, had eaten with equal vigor and had splattered a varied pattern of stains down the front of his shirt. Gunnison mentally faulted his partner for sloppiness until he glanced at his own shirt and saw he had done the same thing, because of the jostling of his tablemates.

  Kenton and Gunnison bedded down on the floor that night, sleeping well despite the all-night snores around them. As Gunnison dozed off, he realized that he still had not learned why Kenton had been called here in that secretive fashion.

  The next morning, they were up before dawn, and at their breakfast as the first sunrays shone in from the direction of Kansas. This would be the time, Gunnison expected, that Kenton would find a way to be rid of him so that he could talk to Starlin without a listener.

  His expectation proved correct. Kenton informed Gunnison that Gunnison was to be a shepherd for a day, going out with one of the Mexicans to watch over the flock—though his main job would be sketching, not shepherding.

  “Are you coming?” Gunnison asked.

  “No, no—I think our purpose would be best served for me to stay here and discuss the business end of the sheep enterprise with Victor. You go on alone.”

  Though he was frustrated at being denied knowledge of what Victor and Kenton were to discuss, the day proved interesting. The name of the shepherd with whom Gunnison went was Juan Cortez, and though he spoke poor English, he had a way of making himself clear through gestures and symbols when speech failed him.

  As the day passed, Cortez described his life and routine. He told of the hardships and pleasures of shepherding—the pleasures being the time it allowed him for a solitude that he usually loved (having been raised in a two-room house with twelve brothers and sisters) and the possibility of building up a flock of his own, for Starlin paid him partly in lambs. The hardships were the occasional loneliness and most of all, the snowstorms.

  Cortez told him of times he had dug sheep from beneath ten feet of snow in which they had been imprisoned for up to three weeks and seen them survive, having burrowed down through the snow to the sparse winter grass. He talked of the icy winds that sliced through the heaviest of coverings and chilled a man to the marrow and the dangers of becoming lost with an entire flock when a sudden blizzard struck. In a prior year, he said, a terrible storm had struck the region, leading to tragedy in a gulch near Colorado Springs. In the Big Corral area, more than a thousand sheep wandered over the edge of a bluff unseen in the storm and died below, piled atop each other in the snow. What was worse, their shepherd died right along with them; he was a Mexican, and an acquaintance of Cortez’s. Such tragedies were simply part of the hazardous life of the Colorado sheepherder.

  Cortez was an easy fellow to like, and he seemed
very intelligent. Toward the end of the day, it struck Gunnison that the shepherd might have some knowledge of what it was that Victor Starlin wanted with Kenton beyond the renewal of old friendship. Gunnison asked him about it, trying to be casual and subtle.

  At the question, Cortez’s dark eyes narrowed, and he looked around as if to make sure they were not being watched, even though the nearest human beings were surely at least a mile away. Into Gunnison’s ear he whispered a word that the journalist did not understand because of Cortez’s accent.

  “I beg your pardon?” he said.

  He repeated it; this time it was a little more clear and sounded like “Garrote.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Garote!” he repeated. “Garote! Garrote!” He put his hand to his throat and thrust out his tongue in imitation of choking.

  “Oh, yes,” said Gunnison. “I see.”

  In fact, he did not see at all. Victor Starlin was afraid of being garroted, and so he called Brady Kenton to come see him? It made no sense, but pride made Gunnison unwilling to admit his confusion.

  The evening found Gunnison and Cortez on their way back to the corrals. As instructed, Gunnison had completed a padful of rough sketches that could later be finished out. Kenton would be pleased, he hoped. But when he tried to show Kenton his work, the man did not seem interested. He was greatly distracted. Whatever Starlin had told him today about this indecipherable “garrote” matter must have been intriguing.

  “Did you have a productive day with Mr. Starlin?” Gunnison asked Kenton when they had a private moment.

  “Yes, indeed,” he said.

  “Well, I suppose it’s back to the cattle ranches for us now.”

  “Hmmm? Oh, yes, but not for long. We’ve got another thing to do just as quick as we can get to it. We’ll finish out our work around Pueblo, then head out.”

  “Where?”

  “Up, into the mountains. We’re going to Leadville.”

  Chapter 5

  And that was how they had come to Leadville: Kenton determined to get there at all due speed, Gunnison uncertain why they were going at all. When Gunnison pressed Kenton about it, he received only a declaration that the journey was being undertaken out of journalistic interest, nothing more.

  “But,” Gunnison objected, “we’re in the middle of a ranch tour, and Leadville is a mining town.”

  Kenton responded with the sort of patient-but-weary tone that a parent would use with an over-inquisitive child. Leadville, he explained was one of the most newsmaking towns in the nation, with every would-be miner on the continent making for it. Two railroads had engaged in an unprecedented armed war over a right-of-way to reach it, involving even the well-known Kansas peace officer Bat Masterson. Every American had the name Leadville on the tip of his tongue. They could hardly afford to pass it by.

  Gunnison wasn’t inclined to argue with Kenton, having long before learned the futility of that, but he did not accept Kenton’s explanation. Something Victor Starlin had told him was behind this—and it was all the more intriguing in that Kenton clearly didn’t want Gunnison to know what it was.

  As they departed Austin’s Bluffs, Starlin approached Kenton, who was already saddled. “If you need any assistance in Leadville, look up a cousin of mine who is there. His name is Percival Starlin, but he goes by ‘Perk’ for short. He’s a simple and shiftless sort of fellow, but true to the bone in a tight spot, and knows what goes on in that town. I’ve already sent him a letter saying you’d likely be coming.”

  “I’ll keep him in mind. Thanks for the hospitality, Victor.”

  The riders returned to Colorado Springs and settled their affairs and accounts, then headed south toward Pueblo to fulfill their appointment. That ate up an entire day, during which Kenton’s restlessness to head for Leadville was increasingly evident.

  When at last they were done, they boarded the Rio Grande Railroad and wound up, by merit of Kenton’s unique mix of charm and pushiness, riding for several miles in the cab with the engineer. Kenton sketched and interviewed him simultaneously, and Gunnison took notes in the background as they rambled along a smoke-belching route through the mountains.

  At track’s end they left the train and caught one of several Leadville stages, and it was here Gunnison’s experience began to go sour. The journalists were packed in like tinned fish with six other passengers, several of whom seemed to be all knees and elbows. Kenton, in typical good fortune, found his seat beside a lovely young blonde of about twenty. Once he told her who he was, she was obviously enthralled to find herself in the company of so famous a journalist. Her big doe eyes remained on Kenton for most of the journey, absorbing every gesture as he regaled her with stories of his exploits—many embellished and a few outright fictional. As for Gunnison, he was across the coach, squeezed in misery between the girl’s fat mother and a flatulent drummer for whose indiscretions he sensed he was receiving general blame.

  The stagecoach came at last to the foot of Mosquito Pass, the final barrier between them and Leadville. A new road lay ahead, and the coach began a torturous ascent toward a summit of more than thirteen thousand feet. The vehicle creaked and groaned; the fat woman shifted, grinding Gunnison’s side like a millstone. The driver outside swore a lot, loudly, and drove with obvious nervousness.

  As they climbed, the temperature dropped, and for every fallen degree, the girl shifted a little closer to Kenton. Outside, a fast-descending fog obliterated the peaks. Coneys and rabbits by the dozens scampered over the rocks, frightened by the clatter and creak of the stage. The coach scraped over stumps, banged through ruts, moved through the murk like a ghost ship on a misty ocean.

  At last the travelers crossed the crest and descended toward Leadville, which lay in a valley surrounded by hills from which much vegetation had been stripped, making parts of the region look strangely blasted against the splendid mountain backdrop. Heavy lines of black and yellow smoke rose above the town, belched out by smelters.

  The stage swung onto Chestnut Street, the oldest avenue in the town, and rode between rows of typical Western buildings. Some were ornamented brick structures, others smaller wooden false fronts, still others mere glorified sheds with canvas roofs.

  The stage creaked to a halt. People were everywhere—walking, riding, building, laughing, arguing on the boardwalks and trash-strewn streets. The bustle rivaled New York’s. That was no surprise; newcomers were arriving in Leadville at the reported rate of a hundred or more a day. Kenton predicted they would have trouble finding quarters.

  He was right. After departing the stage—Kenton bowed and tipped his hat in farewell to the young lady and her mother, leaving both staring wistfully after him—they strode together through the streets, carrying their bags and Kenton’s folded drawing table, vainly trying to find lodging. They finally checked into what purported to be a hotel; thereafter, Kenton vanished, and Gunnison was left to wander alone through the course of events that led him ultimately to a State Street alley, the frightening attack by Chop-off Johnson, and his providential rescue by George Currell.

  When Gunnison’s remembrances faded enough finally to let him go to sleep, two men walked through the alley below his window, arguing loudly. Both sounded agitated and drunk. Their voices faded as they moved past, and a momentary lull followed during which Gunnison heard Kenton’s snore from the main room where he had been working.

  Rising, Gunnison found Kenton slumped over his drawing table, asleep. His cheek rested against a half-finished drawing; rejected ones lay crumpled and scattered on the floor around his chair, finished ones in a neat stack nearby. One of the lamps on his drawing table had burned itself out, and the other was barely flickering. Between them stood an amber whiskey bottle, open, and a shot glass with half a swallow remaining.

  It saddened Gunnison when Kenton drank over his work, for it always indicated he was thinking again of his lost Victoria, dead now for twenty years, the victim of some accident Kenton had never described. The nature and
circumstances of her death were just one more of the several secrets Kenton held closely.

  Gunnison walked to the drawing table and cranked up the lamp that still burned. Kneeling beside the pile of completed sketches, he picked up one depicting a crowd on Chestnut Avenue. Scanning it, he found what he knew he would.

  Victoria Kenton, recognizable to him because he had often seen the tiny oil portrait of her that Kenton kept with him, looked out on the penciled-in street from a third-story window, barely noticeable if one was not specifically looking for her. Her subtle image turned up often in Kenton’s work, particularly when he most missed her.

  Gunnison put down the sketch and blew out the lamp, then went back to bed to wait for morning.

  Chapter 6

  Kenton’s baritone boomed through the apartment. Sitting up and rubbing the back of his petrified neck, Gunnison wondered how his fifty-year-old partner could sound so vigorous after a night spent slumped stiffly over a drawing table.

  He pulled on his clothes and stumbled out of his room. Kenton was in his own room splashing steaming water from a washstand bowl across his face. Mumbling a good morning, Gunnison went to the stove where Kenton had warmed a kettle and poured a pitcherful for his own washup. Fifteen minutes later, both Kenton and he were dressed and ready to begin their day—though Gunnison still remained unsure just what they had come to do.

  On the street the air was bitingly fresh, and a cool wind whipped down from Mount Zion. Gunnison checked his watch—only half past seven, and already the town was as busy as if it were noon.