The Hanging at Leadville / Firefall

by Cameron Judd

  “I’ve got plans for that corpse, Currell. Jimmy Rhoder can do us more good dead than he did us bad when he was alive. All we’ve got to do is string him up again where he can be found, and all your fear and fretting can come to an end.”

  Currell, his long hair blowing against his collar in the mountain breeze, stared disbelievingly at Straker, obviously thinking the man had gone mad.

  Straker laughed. “Don’t look at me like that, Currell—there’s sense in what I’m saying. Hear me out.”

  “I’m listening. Anything as loco as what you’re saying I got to hear.”

  “Tell me: Wasn’t that pair who called on Uncle Squire this morning Brady Kenton and his partner?”

  “Yeah. I know because I helped get them settled into the rooms above your uncle’s new store building.”

  “Right. Why do you think Kenton’s in Leadville at this time in particular?”

  Currell shrugged. “Never gave it any thought.”

  “Give it some now.”

  After a couple of moments, Currell replied, “Because of the Briggs Garrett rumors?”

  “Exactly. And I’m not just guessing when I say that. I know that Kenton’s been going around asking questions about the Garrett stories in private. Of course, very little in Leadville stays private for long when you’ve got as many ears on the street as I have.”

  “So what’s Brady Kenton and Briggs Garrett got to do with pulling Rhoder out of that hole?”

  “Don’t you see, Currell? Fate has just dealt us the best hand we could ask for. It’s the way Jimmy died that makes the difference.”

  Currell frowned and shook his head. “I don’t see what you’re trying to say.”

  “Just that Briggs Garrett became infamous back in the war for hanging people and setting fire to their bodies. And now, conveniently, people believe he’s alive and in Leadville—”

  Suddenly Currell understood. “And Jimmy Rhoder died by hanging…and his body was burnt when the billiard hall went up!”

  “Exactly, my friend. So if his corpse turns up in a roadside thicket somewhere, what is everyone going to think? That they’ve finally gotten solid proof that Garrett is alive and up to his old hanging and burning tricks again, and that Rhoder died at his hands. The results for us are obvious. Any potential suspicion in Rhoder’s death would be thrown away from us. You and Chop-off could put aside your worries about being caught. Not that there’s any reasonable chance we would be caught in any case.”

  Currell looked intrigued. He mulled it all over a moment or two. “But if you believe there’s no reasonable chance of us getting caught as it is, why not leave it as it lays?”

  “Because there’s more to it than just diverting away any possible suspicion in that murder. There’s also the matter of steering other suspicions in another direction. Toward my dear uncle Squire in particular.”

  Currell’s expression showed he again did not understand.

  Straker asked a question to illuminate his point. “Currell, what do you think would happen to a man in Leadville—particularly a man who was already hated in his own right—if enough people became convinced he was really Briggs Garrett, living under an assumed identity?”

  “Hah! He’d wind up shot down or strung up, one or the other.” Currell’s expression changed again as soon as he had said the words. “Have mercy, Straker, are you thinking what I believe you are?”

  Straker smiled darkly. “I’ll be a well-off man, once I inherit Uncle Squire’s holdings and mines. And a well-off man can afford to be very generous to those who have helped him get where he’s gotten. You hear what I’m saying to you, Currell?”

  Currell looked farther out the trail, to where the trees parted and afforded a splendid view of the high mountain country. Slowly he nodded. “I hear you.”

  Straker said, “I want you to go back into town and find Chop-off. Head out to the mine, and when it’s dark, get Rhoder’s corpse out of there and bring it back close to the edge of town. Find a place to hang it, a hidden place, but one where it will eventually be found. People have got to believe it’s been hanging there several days. Somebody will find it soon enough.”

  “All right…but how will you make them believe your uncle is really Garrett?”

  “Leave that to me. And to Brady Kenton.”

  “He’s going to help you do this?”

  “Indeed he is, though he doesn’t know it. Come on, let’s ride back. It may take you some time to find Chop-off. And you do understand, don’t you, how important it is that no one see you at that mine?”

  “I understand. Don’t you worry—we’ll make sure nothing goes wrong.”

  “You do that, Currell. You do that.”

  They turned their horses and rode back toward Leadville.

  Kenton and Gunnison had gone to work after leaving Deverell’s, dividing to sketch the town from different angles. Gunnison was on Chestnut Street, having been assigned the exercise of duplicating Kenton’s earlier drawing of that avenue. Kenton and Gunnison were an unusual journalistic team in that each wrote and drew, rather than devoting himself to only one craft. Kenton, immensely talented in both areas, was unwilling to exercise only one of his skills. He knew what a prize he had in a partner who also possessed twin talents, even though both were less refined than his.

  Kenton, having finished his preliminary sketch of a corner on Harrison, walked back to Chestnut and spotted Gunnison. As he approached from behind, he noted that Gunnison’s pad lay at his feet, apparently having been dropped, and that Gunnison was standing as if frozen, staring up toward the top of a three-story narrow house that stood wedged between two store buildings across the street.

  Kenton realized that he had caught his partner in the midst of a moment of amazement sufficient to have made him drop his sketch pad. Softening his step, Kenton came to Gunnison and clapped his hand suddenly on his shoulder.

  Gunnison jumped, and Kenton grinned. “What’s wrong, Alex? You look as if you’ve spotted a phantom.”

  “I think maybe I have,” Gunnison replied breathlessly. “Look there!”

  “Where?”

  “The upper window! Look!”

  Kenton did look, and saw nothing but an empty window. “I don’t understand.”

  Gunnison was crestfallen. “She’s gone.”

  “Who, for heaven’s sake?”

  “Kenton, I swear to you, just a moment ago, there was a girl there, looking out.”

  “Is that surprising?”

  “Don’t you see? That’s the very window you had Victoria looking out of in your sketch last night! It was like seeing Victoria herself looking out at…”

  Gunnison trailed off. The mention of Victoria had brought a stab of pain to Kenton, and it had shown on his face. He was also surprised; he had not known until that moment that Gunnison, or anyone else for that matter, had noticed his habit of subtly including Victoria’s image in his sketches.

  Kenton forced a smile and playful tone. “What you saw was just some young Leadville filly wondering who that good-looking fellow with the sketch pad was…and she probably wondered who that dandified boy with him was, too.” Kenton forced a laugh at his own joke, then changed the subject. “Let me take a look at your sketch.”

  Gunnison picked up his pad and handed it to Kenton who examined the unfinished sketch, praising its good points, pointing out its weaknesses, suggesting improvements that could ease the strain on the woodcutters who would later have to duplicate in reverse the pictures finally selected for publication.

  But Kenton’s mind was far from what he was doing. The mention of Victoria had swept a wave of sadness over him, and though he didn’t want to admit it, he also felt strangely edgy beneath the empty gaze of that upper window. He wanted to be elsewhere. He had come to Leadville looking for a phantom of sorts—but not the phantom of his departed wife.

  “Let’s go back to the apartment,” he said. “I’ve got things to do—and the best bet for you would be to write that financée of
yours a letter. I know for a fact it’s been too long since you have.”

  “I can’t deny that,” Gunnison said.

  The pair began walking back to their lodgings. Before they were out of sight and while Gunnison was looking elsewhere, Kenton flashed a quick glance back down the street toward the window at which Gunnison had been staring. When he did, he saw a flash of movement there, as if a curtain had been dropped from the hand of someone behind it, someone watching the street.

  Kenton quickly turned and looked ahead as something that felt like a cold hand clasped the back of his neck.

  Chapter 9

  Kenton worked behind his closed door, so caught up in what he was doing that he hardly blinked as he watched the scene taking shape on the page before him under his trained pencil. This was a scene he had once vowed never to draw; now he could not restrain himself from doing it. Too long it had intruded into his sleeping dreams and waking thoughts—more so than ever now that he had talked to Victor Starlin.

  His pencil made a great sweeping arc, leaving a line that became the edge of a ravine. Another sweep on the other side of the page made the ravine’s opposite side. Bending over his table, Kenton etched in bushes, gaunt trees, shadows—many shadows. Finishing that, he sharpened his pencil, then began drawing a great skeletal structure of crosses and fractured lines. As the white sheet darkened with ever more lines, the vague structure took its shape. It was an image of ruin, and at its base Kenton drew flames, tiny feeble flames almost about to be extinguished but gushing thick spirals of smoke that blended with the shadows and the blackened beams composing the ruined skeletal thing spanning the ravine.

  Then he drew the ropes, and at their ends the seven limp figures that hung there side by side. Below them he drew soldiers. On the page they were clad in makeshift uniforms the color of his pencil lead, but in the memory giving rise to the drawing, they wore ragged butternut. At the foreground he at last began to draw a final figure that bore a drawn saber. This figure he sketched much closer and in much more detail—until he came to the face. His pencil reached for the paper, to draw in the features on the blank face…but nothing would come. What was clear in his memory Kenton could reproduce; what was vague and formless he could not. The figure of the man with the saber he could recall in detail, but the face was as featureless in his memory as that of the sketched figure before him.

  In a burst of frustration, Kenton ripped the paper from his drawing table so violently that the table overturned with a clatter. Wadding the sketch into a ball, he threw it against the wall.

  Alex Gunnison heard the table fall and wondered what had happened. Folding the long letter he had just written to his financée, he sealed it in its envelope, then rose and walked to the door of Kenton’s room. “Are you all right?” he called.

  “Of course I’m all right,” Kenton called back, sounding preoccupied. “The blasted table just collapsed on me.”

  “You probably didn’t close the clasp firmly enough,” Gunnison commented.

  “I know how my own table works, Alex.”

  Outside the door, Gunnison lifted his brows in reaction to Kenton’s hostile tone. Something surely was on the man’s mind. “I’ll be gone for a while,” Gunnison said. “I’ve got this letter to mail.”

  “Then by all means go and mail it, and let me get some work done.”

  “Good afternoon to you, too, Kenton.”

  The sky had clouded, locking down against the earth the stench of the garbage dumps outside town. Gunnison found two long, slow-moving lines at the post office, divided according to surname initials. By the time his turn at the window came, much of the afternoon had waned. He briskly walked back to the apartment and knew even as he entered that Kenton was gone; he could smell the emptiness of the place.

  He’s done it to me again, Gunnison thought.

  Kenton’s door stood open, and Gunnison walked in, hoping Kenton had left a note. There was no note, but wadded sketches lay all around the room, obviously having been tossed randomly, as Kenton was prone to do on those rare occasions when he had to struggle over his work. Wondering what had posed such a challenge this time, Gunnison picked up one of the most finished-looking sketches.

  It showed a burned-out bridge, a spindly framework of charred timbers running from ridge to ridge, overheated rails sagging toward the ground. From the bridge swung seven blackened corpses. Smoke rose from them as it did from the bridge. Men in a mix of Confederate uniforms and rough civilian clothing stood around them, one in particular prominent in the foreground. He was tall and broad, his face not drawn in.

  Clearly this was a depiction of Briggs Garrett’s burning of the Tennessee bridge burners. Gunnison remembered what Lundy O’Donovan had said about Briggs Garrett’s supposedly being alive and in Leadville…and then something suddenly clicked into place in his mind, and it all became clear, leaving him amazed that he had not understood earlier.

  Juan Cortez, the shepherd, had told Gunnison that the concern over which victor Starlin summoned Kenton had something to do with a “garrote.” Or so Gunnison had interpreted the word. Now he saw that what Cortez had really been saying was not merely a word, but a name: Garrett. Alex was chagrined that he had not made that connection the moment Lundy O’Donovan mentioned Garrett’s name to him.

  So it was true: Kenton had really come to Leadville to hunt the infamous Briggs Garrett—to chase a ghost, a rumor.

  It all seemed unlikely and strange…yet in another way it made sense. This was just the kind of situation to intrigue Kenton, and Gunnison had to admit it would make an interesting, though hardly believable, story for the Illustrated American. But why was Kenton being so secretive about his purpose?

  Gunnison tossed the sketch back where he had found it, and his eye fell on a crumpled envelope. Recognizing it as the Victor Starlin letter Kenton had so carefully kept from him, he picked it up with a sense of gratification. Here, surely, would be more answers.

  Removing the letter from the envelope, Gunnison unfolded it. His eye at once picked a name out of the ragged script: Mickey Scarborough.

  Scarborough…he knew that name. Mickey Scarborough was a traveling singer and showman who played dance halls, opera houses and such throughout the West. It seemed to Gunnison that he recalled seeing something, a headline recently saying that Scarborough had died. Yes—now he remembered: Scarborough had died after collapsing on stage during a performance…a performance in Leadville.

  Just as Gunnison was about to read the letter, a wave of guilt stopped him. This was private mail. Though it probably held information he wanted to know, he had no right to read it.

  Fighting back temptation, Gunnison put the letter back in its place, left the room, and closed the door. Sometimes it was frustrating to be a decent person.

  Never had Gunnison put much stock in coincidence, but it did seem remarkable that when he stepped out onto the street again minutes later, Briggs Garrett on his mind, there stood Lundy O’Donovan.

  “I came back like I promised,” he said. “Are you ready to go now?”

  “That depends. Where are you taking me?”

  Lundy glanced around and drew closer. “To an old mine, That’s where we’ll find him.”

  “Who? Briggs Garrett?”

  He made a face as if to say not so loud. “Not Garrett, just a man he killed.”

  Chapter 10

  Gunnison blinked. “You want to take me to see a dead body?”

  “That’s right.”

  That one threw him off-kilter. “If you know where a dead body is, you need to go to the law,” he suggested.

  “No. I don’t much trust the law around here.”

  “Why?”

  “Marshal Duggan used to watch out for us, but since his term was up, things haven’t been the same. After my papa died, the lot jumpers come in on me and Mama and Old Papa. Run us right out of our own home because they wanted the lot. Almost shot Old Papa, and him laid up in a chair like he is. Now we ain’t got nothing but a l
ittle shack over on Chicken Hill. The law didn’t help us at all.” He paused. “Well? You coming with me or not?

  Gunnison’s answer might have been a firm refusal had it not been for the sketch he had just seen. His journalistic curiosity, not to mention a certain sense of competition with his senior partner, moved him. If in fact Kenton had come to Leadville looking for Garrett, it would be satisfying to be the one who found the first solid evidence concerning him…especially at a time Kenton had again made himself absent without explanation.

  “All right. I’ll come.”

  Lundy grinned and without another word began walking. Gunnison fell in beside him.

  He led them on a roundabout route. “Trying to make sure nobody can tell where we’re going,” he explained, and Gunnison began to suspect this was a rumor-inspired game of childish imagination. Nevertheless, he decided to play along for now, just in case.

  “So how did you manage to find this body?” he asked.

  “I’m always poking around. That’s what my mama says about me. Always poking around, snooping into everybody’s business, looking where I ain’t supposed to look. Sometimes you see things folks thought was hid.”

  The sky had gone slate gray. Clouds and stinking sulphurous smelter smoke spread in layers over the town. Leadville was making a lot of people wealthy, but the pristine mountains were paying a big price for it.

  Lundy led Gunnison through a portion of town he had not passed through before; it consisted almost entirely of spit-and-paper houses with big slabs for doors and barrels for chimney tops. Scattered along a nearby street were a half-dozen saloons housed in ramshackle little structures that managed to look ancient despite Leadville’s short history. Resting miners coated with dirt and dried sweat sat beneath rickety overhanging saloon-porch roofs, sipping beer from glass and crockery mugs, eyeing passersby from beneath the brims of hats that had all but grown to their heads. Shaggy-haired, callused, weathered to a permanent deep brown, these men reminded Gunnison of earth-grubbing dwarfs pulled from some European fairy tale, given the gift of human stature and set down here beyond the Mosquito Range.