The Hanging at Leadville / Firefall

by Cameron Judd

  But Gunnison did not respond. He was waiting for Kenton to emerge with Straker from the smoke-filled doorway. Suddenly a terrible crash came from inside the building, and an explosion of flame. The ceiling was beginning to fall in.

  “Kenton! Oh, Lord, no…”

  Others were there now. Perk, still worrying over the horses, led several men around to the back of the burning structure where they began pulling away wall boards to get at the stalls from behind. Gunnison remained oblivious to it all, even to the touch of a feminine hand to his as Roxanne walked up to his side.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said softly.

  Only then was Gunnison aware of her. “Roxanne…”

  A figure emerged from the smoke, coughing, staggering, but still on his feet. “Kenton!” Gunnison yelled joyously. “You’re alive!”

  He went forward. His big partner put a hand on Gunnison’s shoulder to steady himself. “Couldn’t save…Straker,” he gasped. “He was pinned under the roof timbers.”

  “You tried, Kenton. That’s a lot more than Straker would have done for you or anyone else.”

  Kenton turned and watched the flames eat away the big wooden building. The firemen had arrived now, coming straight from the fire at Deverell’s. As the firemen went to work, Kenton noticed Roxanne.

  “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure,” he said.

  Gunnison said, “Kenton, meet Roxanne Chrisman. Roxanne, meet Brady Kenton.”

  Roxanne extended a slender hand. Kenton’s muscled dirty paw closed over it. “Was it you who put the pitchfork into Straker?” he asked.

  “Yes. He pushed me down and told me to stay there while he jammed the door shut. He said he would shoot me if I moved. I moved anyway. The pitchfork was leaned against that tree—I just grabbed it and ran at him.”

  “You’re a brave young woman. Your mother should be very proud of you.”

  Roxanne’s eyes widened. “Mother! Oh, no, Mr. Kenton—in all that’s happened I’ve forgotten why I came after you in the first place. Hurry—we’ve got to get back to the house before it’s too late!”

  “What’s happening?”

  “I think Mother is going to kill Squire Deverell. Oh, please do hurry!”

  “Kill Deverell…why?”

  “After you and Alex left the house, Gableman brought Mother a broadside he found posted on the street. It says that Deverell is Garrett, and Mother believes you wrote it. She said you must have written it and that you must have lied to her when you told her Deverell wasn’t really Garrett.”

  “We know about the broadside,” Gunnison said. “But why does Ella care?”

  “Because of Jerome! Jerome was one of the bridge burners Briggs Garrett hanged and burned!”

  “Jerome…Jerome Marchbanks?” Kenton asked.

  “Yes!”

  “I remember the poor boy…I had no idea he was Ella’s son.”

  “Come back to the house, quickly!” Roxanne urged again. “It may be too late already!”

  As they ran up to the Chrisman house, the door opened as if by magic. A very frightened Fiona appeared. “Hurry—she and Gableman have got him in the backyard, and if you don’t stop her, it’s going to be terrible!”

  “Where is Mrs. Deverell?” Kenton asked.

  “Asleep in her room—please hurry! The Missus has a rope and coal oil, and she’s going to do to Deverell what she says he did to her son!”

  They bolted through the house and into the backyard. There they stopped, staring at a most unusual scene.

  Deverell stood on a barrel, a noose around his neck. The rope was tied to a branch of the lone tree in the yard. Deverell’s hands were bound behind him. Gableman, looking very uncertain, stood nearby, a torch in one hand and a pistol in the other. At his feet was a capped coal oil jug.

  Beyond, Lundy and Kate O’Donovan stood in the doorway of the guest cottage, watching the scene in horror. Lundy was clinging to his mother, his face half buried in the folds of her nightgown.

  Ella Chrisman, who had been standing and staring silently at the pitiful Deverell, wheeled when the group entered the yard. She lifted her arm and pointed at them. “Stay away!” she demanded. “Stay away unless you’ve come to witness the settling of accounts after seventeen years!”

  “Mother, you can’t do it!” Roxanne said. “It would be murder!”

  “No worse a murder than the one that stole my son from me! A murder of the murderer himself—that’s justice. The vengeance of the sufferers!”

  Kenton stepped forward. “Squire Deverell is not Briggs Garrett,” he said.

  Ella Chrisman shook her head violently. “So you say in your spoken words, but I’ve read your written ones. Why you withheld the truth from me I don’t know, but now I have the one I’ve wanted so many years!”

  “I didn’t write that broadside. It was written by the nephew of Mary Deverell so that Deverell would be wrongly identified as Garrett and killed. Then, after some covert murder of Mrs. Deverell, Squire Deverell’s inheritance would pass to the nephew. It was a clever, evil scheme, but it’s over now.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “I can prove that Deverell is not Garrett. Garrett should have a scar across his chest, the mark of a saber slash I gave him the very day your son died. Open his shirt, Gableman. I think you’ll find not a scar upon him.”

  Gableman looked at Ella. She glared at Kenton but nodded curtly.

  The tall black man stepped forward. The entire group drew near. It was almost dawn; the eastern sky was growing milky and light.

  Gableman reached up and ripped open Deverell’s shirt. The light of the torch revealed a long scar running diagonally down the exposed chest.

  Kenton was so stunned, he stumbled back two steps. “Garrett!” he said in a whisper.

  Deverell’s jaw trembled. Tears brimmed in his eyes. “I’m not Garrett,” he said. “That scar has been on my chest since childhood. I fell from a barn loft and cut myself on a nail—it’s no saber slash.”

  His words had no vigor. He spoke them obviously believing they would make no difference.

  Kenton was speechless. Finding the scar on Deverell’s chest was the biggest surprise yet handed him in a week overflowing with surprises.

  “Now you see!” Ella declared joyfully. “He is Garrett!”

  Kenton stepped forward again, looking into Deverell’s face. “No,” he said. “Scar or no scar, I can’t believe this man is Briggs Garrett.”

  But Ella Chrisman had stopped listening. She walked forward and looked with a perversely delighted hatred at Deverell. “You will die as my son died, Briggs Garrett. I thank the heavens for delivering you into my hands. Gableman, bring the coal oil.”

  “No! In the name of the Virgin, no!” It was Kate O’Donovan. She was running across from the cottage, sobbing and crying out. “You must not, Mrs. Chrisman. You cannot do this to an innocent man!”

  Ella, completely taken aback by this development, stared at Kate O’Donovan for several moments. “This is not an innocent man—he’s plagued your life as well as mine. You should want to see him die, Mrs. O’Donovan.”

  Kate was frantic. “No!” she screamed. “No!” She stopped, collected herself, and wiped her tear-stained face. “I feared this day would come,” she said. “Sometimes I let myself hope it would not…but now I can hope that no longer.” Then to Ella: “If it’s Briggs Garrett you must have, then have him you shall, and if the hate in you is so great that you can bear to hurt him more than God already has, then into your hands I give him. May God forgive me if what I do is wrong.”

  She turned and walked slowly back into the cottage. Lundy fell back against the wall and sank until he was sitting on his heels. He buried his face in his hands as she passed him.

  The watching group was confused. Only Kenton seemed to have a glimmering comprehension of what was happening. He had gone pale in the rising morning light.

  Kate O’Donovan rolled out the old man in the wheelchair, bumping across the la
wn until he sat directly before Ella Chrisman. “Here he is. Do with him what you will, if you have it in you to punish a man heaven has already stricken.”

  Kenton walked forward. All were silent as he stooped and opened the old man’s shirt and revealed the long ugly scar that ran like a frozen lightning bolt down his chest, much more pronounced than the scar on the chest of Deverell.

  Kenton looked at the scar, then lifted the old man’s chin and peered intently into his face. After several moments he closed his eyes and turned away, nodding.

  The sun was above the horizon now, spilling down the light of a new day.

  Epilogue

  One month later—Austin Bluffs

  Victor Starlin lit his pipe carefully in the shadows of his cabin. When the tobacco was glowing ruby red, he gave a thoughtful grunt. Across from him, Brady Kenton sat in a chair tilted against the wall, having just finished telling Victor the full story of the “Leadville incident,” as he had begun calling the adventure he and Alex Gunnison had shared on the other side of the Mosquito Range.

  “So Scarborough really did see Briggs Garrett in his audience,” Victor said. “Imagine what that must have been like, looking out and seeing a face that familiar, and that despised, on the body of a mindless old man in a wheelchair. No wonder Scarborough was jolted. And all that followed…”

  “All that followed resulted from a combination of coincidence, manipulation, and the public’s eagerness to believe shocking things,” Brady Kenton said. “That, and the nosiness of a little Irish boy who didn’t even know his ‘Old Papa’ was really a legendary outlaw and the obsession of a willful woman who had spent seventeen years brooding over the death of her illegitimate son.”

  “But how did Garrett get into the condition he is, and how did the O’Donovans wind up with him?” Victor asked.

  “It all had to do with Lundy’s late father, who must have been a fine and merciful man,” Kenton replied. “According to Kate O’Donovan, Jock O’Donovan was at the same flooded river crossing where Garrett reportedly was drowned. All that happened no one seems to know, now that Jock O’Donovan is dead, but the end result was that O’Donovan crawled out of that flooded river barely alive and dragged with him a fellow victim who was in even worse condition. The man had struck his head on something when the flood wall hit and badly bashed his skull. Young Mr. O’Donovan took such pity on him that he took him into his own care, all the while trying to determine his identity. When he found out the fellow was none other than Briggs Garrett, he and his wife faced a difficult choice. They could turn him over to the law, or they could keep him under a new identity. They had come to love the fellow, so they chose the latter—and so Briggs Garrett became ‘Old Papa,’ a man everyone, myself included, naturally assumed was the father of either Mr. or Mrs. O’Donovan. Lundy was just a young sprout when all this first happened, so he never knew who ‘Old Papa’ really was.”

  “Didn’t it disturb the O’Donovans that the man they had taken in was guilty of the kind of crimes Briggs Garrett did?”

  “I asked Kate O’Donovan that very question. Her answer may not make a lot of sense to you, but to me it does, because I’ve seen what Briggs Garrett is now. She says she doesn’t see him as the same man he used to be. The Briggs Garrett who was evil and cruel, she said, is dead and gone. He was, for all practical purposes, drowned at that river crossing, just like all the newspapers said. What was left behind was Briggs Garrett as he once had been in the only days of innocence he ever knew.”

  “In other words, his infancy.”

  “Exactly. Briggs Garrett, when it comes down to it, is no longer a man but a child. And a child he’ll be for the rest of his days, being cared for by a woman and boy who love him dearly. Strange, isn’t it, how things happen sometimes.”

  Victor Starlin reached over and picked up the latest copy of Gunnison’s Illustrated American. On the cover was one of Kenton’s finest drawings. It showed a smoking railroad bridge and seven dangling bodies. In the foreground was a picture of a man with a saber. His face was unseen, shadowed by the brim of his hat. Above the scene were the words: THE SEARCH FOR BRIGGS GARRETT: A TALE OF PUBLIC DECEPTION IN LEADVILLE, COLORADO.

  “You could have drawn the face in, Kenton,” Victor said. “You now know very well what Briggs Garrett looks like.”

  “Yes, I suppose I could have. And I could have told the real story in print, just like I’ve told it to you. As a journalist, telling the real story is what I am naturally inclined to do. But sometimes there are things more important than stories. Things like giving people a chance to forget, and to heal.”

  “Ella Chrisman, for example?”

  “Yes. She’s in Denver now, on an indefinite visit with some relations. The Garrett incident struck her hard. She found that when she faced Briggs Garrett in the condition he was in, she could no longer muster enough hate to harm him. So she just let him go. Now it’s going to be up to her to try to let seventeen years of brooding go as well. It won’t be easy for her, but she’ll succeed. She’s a strong woman.” Kenton smiled mischievously at his old friend. “And not bad to look at, either, Victor. She’s the first woman to really catch my eye since I first saw Victoria all those years ago.”

  “If Ella Chrisman is reflected in her daughter, I daresay she’s quite a beauty,” Victor Starlin replied. He rose and went to a nearby window and looked out at Alex Gunnison and Roxanne Chrisman, who walked together on the surrounding grassy level, hand in hand. “Looks like you may lose your partner to marriage, Kenton. Did the kin of his previous fiancée take it hard when he broke off the engagement?”

  “The Sweat clan? Oh, yes indeed. They wailed to high heaven. It was hard enough for them to find someone willing to obligate himself to poor Glorietta the first time around. Now they’ve got to start looking all over again. I’m sorry for them, but I’m mighty glad for Alex. Roxanne is quite a catch.”

  “That she is. Thanks for bringing her out to meet me.”

  “We tried to get Perk to come out as well, but he wouldn’t do it. Squire Deverell has given him a job as an ore-wagon driver, and Perk’s taken to it just fine.”

  “I’m amazed. Perk’s never had a real job in his life. Never seemed to want one.”

  Victor went to the wood stove and knocked out his pipe. “It’s strange to think of Briggs Garrett, still alive and living in the midst of a town that will never know who he really is.”

  “It is strange, I admit. But I couldn’t reveal him, Victor. I just couldn’t.”

  “I understand, and I don’t fault you for it. But how did you finally convince the people of Leadville that Squire Deverell wasn’t Garrett?”

  “Through the help of Ella Chrisman and a man named Allen from one of the local papers. Ella kept the Deverells hidden until Allen and I were able to get hold of Deverell’s old war records. He fought for the Union and was at the Shiloh fight, among others. He had quite a good record as a soldier. Allen published it all, and Deverell was finally able to come out of hiding. He received lots of apologies, let me tell you, but he didn’t take them very well. He’s still a snappy old terrapin. But he’s taking good care of Perk and giving Mrs. O’Donovan a lot of work as well. There’s a good heart beating inside all that sourness.”

  “There’s one thing I’m still not sure about, Kenton,” Victor said as he refilled his pipe. “Who killed Sullivan, the policeman?”

  “A good question, and one of the mysteries that will probably remain unanswered. My guess is that Chop-off Johnson did it. Clance Sullivan was probably following him or worrying him in some way. Marshal Kelly himself found an old shack up behind the mines where Sullivan was strung up. It appeared that Chop-off had been holing up there.”

  “Speaking of Kelly, what’s his attitude toward you now?”

  “His attitude is that he hopes Brady Kenton stays far from Leadville for a long time. And I intend to make him happy, because I don’t have any ambition to return.” He paused. “At least not until Ella Chrisman does…
and then all Kelly’s men won’t be able to keep me away.”

  From outside came the sound of a chorus of bleats mixed with the music of singing Mexican voices as Victor Starlin’s shepherd drove their sheep back in for the night.

  Starlin grinned. “Let’s have some supper,” he said.

  Gunnison struck one more match and looked closely at the ruined face. Then, fighting off natural reticence to touch the dead body, the explored the jacket pockets.

  Everything he found confirmed that the jacket was Kenton’s. And the face, impossible to recognize as it was, certainly could have been that of Kenton. The general size of the body, the build and general physical character of it, all also matched Kenton’s traits. Even the pistol holstered beneath the coat was Kenton’s. Gunnison took it, tucking it under his belt, near his own pistol.

  “Oh, Kenton,” Gunnison whispered…

  FIREFALL

  CAMERON JUDD

  To Marc Resnick, with appreciation

  Chapter 1

  On an evening in June of 1884, in a small but infamous mining town high in the mountains of the Montana Territory, a ragged and whiskered drunkard named Forrest Peabody staggered toward the welcoming light of an open saloon door.

  Peabody’s left hand was pressed against the crown of his flop hat, protecting it from loss to a new, brisk wind. His right hand clutched the rope shoulder strap of a satchel he had made from an old feed sack, and carried at all times. In the satchel was his most prized possession: an old copy of the Bible, almost as worn out and rumpled as its owner.

  Jed Bloom, a weary miner at the end of a long and unproductive day, sat smoking a meerschaum pipe outside his home, a structure consisting of framing and boards at the bottom and canvas at the top—half-house, half-tent. He eyed Peabody as the latter strode clumsily past.