by Cameron Judd
Hearing that Rankin and company might yet be in the vicinity put a new spark in Kenton’s spirit. “Indeed,” he said. “Perhaps the thing for me to do is to begin exploring the town a bit, asking questions.”
“Yes, indeed. As a journalist, I’m sure you’re quite familiar with that process,” Johansen said. “If they’re to be found here, you’ll be the man who can do it.” He cleared his throat. “And though I must say I don’t have much use for journalists in general, in this case I wish you great success.”
“Livesay’s been hounded for years by journalists wanting to take his time and have him discuss his own private fortunes with them in great detail,” Pernell said.
“Indeed I have,” Livesay said. “Why, just this week, my groundskeeper told me there was some young journalist at the gate, asking to come inside.”
Kenton froze. “Young journalist…was his name Gunnison?”
“I have no idea.”
“My partner’s name is Gunnison…he thinks I’m dead, but apparently knows I was trying to find Rankin, and decided to take up my quest in my place.”
“It might have been him, then. Rankin was here at the time. I suggest you find my groundskeeper and—”
Kenton was already out the door before Johansen had time to finish.
The groundskeeper was a suspicous-minded fellow, not eager to answer questions. Kenton was so intense in presenting them, though, that the man eventually relented, maybe in fear that Kenton would hurt him if he didn’t.
“I don’t recall if this fellow told me his name or not,” the man said. “All I knew was he was another nosey word-scribbler, and I’m under stern orders never to let such a one in. So I sent him on his way.”
“Did he leave town?”
“Far from it. I’ve seen him coming and going from the hotel yonder ever since. Saw him just today, as a matter of fact.”
Kenton was out the gate almost at once, yelling his thank-you across his shoulder.
Gunnison, feeling poorly, had turned in early, but he wasn’t resting well.
Illnesses, especially minor ones like the one that had him now, tended to give him nightmares. Dreams of ghosts, usually, people from the dead returning, sliding through the shadows, rapping on his door…
Rapping on his door…
He opened his eyes. Someone was at the door. He sat up, blinking, wondering what time it was.
“Just a minute!” he called. He lit a lamp and cranked it up bright, then took time to light another. He didn’t like it when nightmares melded too closely into reality. When the knocking had awakened him, he’d been in the midst of dreaming that he was back home with his wife, arms wrapped around her as she slept, when a rapping at the door had awakened him, and he’d gone to open it, as he was now, and before him stood the reanimated corpse of…
“Kenton!” Gunnison shouted the name as he opened the door.
Kenton cocked up one brow and smiled at him.
Gunnison did a slow turn and collapsed to the floor in a dead faint.
When he woke up, he was back on his bed and Kenton was in a chair beside him, bathing his brow with a cool, damp cloth.
“Don’t worry,” Kenton said in a voice that sounded very flesh-and-blood. “I’m no ghost.”
“But I…there was your Mason’s pin…there were maggots on you, and…”
“No need to get gruesome, Alex. That wasn’t me. That was the highwayman who robbed me and took my coat, my pistol, and so on. I was lying unconscious out in the woods. It’s probably what saved my life when the fire came down.”
Gunnison stared at Kenton, then began to weep.
“Thank God,” he said. “Thank God you’re alive. I never could get it in my mind that you were really dead, even though I was sure I’d seen your corpse with my own eyes.”
Overcome, Gunnison reached up and hugged his partner.
Kenton would have none of this. He quickly pulled away, stood, and walked a few paces from the bed. “Good heavens, Alex! We’re not two sentimental old women, you know!”
Gunnison jumped out of the bed. “Oh, no.”
“What is it?”
“I sent off a letter, just today, telling the Illustrated American of your death.”
“And asking for my job, no doubt.”
“I’d tried to send one before, but couldn’t bring myself to do it.”
Kenton laughed. “So now the world will think I’m dead! I think I like the idea. Good excuse for some time off from working.”
“Kenton, how did you find me here?”
“It’s a long story. I’ll tell it later. For now I want to know if you ever found Rankin…and…”
“I never found Rankin, Kenton. I never could get to him in the Johansen house.”
“What about…”
“Sit down, Kenton.”
Kenton did. He was going a little white, looking a good deal like an authentic ghost now.
“Kenton, I think Victoria really may be alive.”
“Did you find her?”
“No. But I found her sister.”
Kenton went a shade whiter. “Katherine?”
“Yes.”
“But Katherine died, too…in the same railway accident that killed Victoria.”
“She didn’t die. But she was hurt, her memory lost to her for years. Within the past two years, it’s begun to return to her. She remembers the accident now, remembers crawling away from it, then walking. And Kenton: she remembers Victoria doing the same.”
Kenton closed his eyes. “Dear Lord,” he whispered.
“But she remembers nothing more, really. Nothing significant. She talked to Victoria, saw that she was hurt, but alive…somehow they were separated. The details after that are gone.”
“But Victoria lived.”
“Yes. She lived.”
“Where is Katherine now?”
“I couldn’t make her stay, Kenton. She slipped away from me. I first found her sleeping in rags outside a building near here; Rankin had apparently gotten tired of her, preoccupied with his prophesying preacher scheme, and she’d left him. I brought her in, fed her, talked to her…I first thought I’d found Victoria herself.”
“But she wouldn’t stay?”
“Kenton, I told her what I thought was true…that you’d died. So she didn’t know you would come here. Also, she’s a damaged woman. Very shy, fearful…she talked a lot about a man named Shafter, who traveled with Rankin and herself. She’d developed the idea he would find her and hurt her. So she left, even though I tried to make her stay.”
“I wish she had.”
“Kenton, I gave her my identification card. I told her how to reach the Illustrated American, if ever she remembers more about what became of Victoria. I suppose I had it in mind to find Victoria myself, even if you couldn’t. I didn’t know, of course, that you’d show up alive and well at my door.”
“What was Rankin’s purpose in sending for me?”
“A swindle. Katherine, you see, lived a very hard life. With her memory gone for years, with no connections, no work, no money, she wandered through the cities, one after another, doing what she could to survive. Some of what she told me is not at all a pretty story. Other parts she didn’t tell were probably worse.
“In any case, she wound up somehow with this Gib Rankin fellow. Thought she was in love with him at first, though that faded as time went by. But she stayed with him for security, and when her memory began to return, she told him the things she recalled. Who she was, and who her sister was…and that her sister had married Brady Kenton.”
“I see.”
“Apparently, Kenton, Rankin heard somewhere the tale about how you have been searching for clues about what happened to Victoria, and hoping she is alive…I have to tell you, Kenton, that this search of yours for Victoria isn’t as secret as you might have thought. Most of your professional peers, anyway, know about it, and some of them, I suppose, talk.”
“I suppose.”
“Ranki
n developed the idea that he could pass Katherine off as Victoria. He figured that the passing of years and the fact you couldn’t know what Victoria would look like after all this time would give him a chance to make it all seem persuasive. What facts Katherine didn’t know, or what things about her that didn’t seem to fit, could probably be passed off as resulting from her damaged memory.”
“The scoundrel…”
“Yes. But it was a clever scheme, in its way. Katherine went along with it, but she didn’t favor it. She was afraid to defy him. Rankin’s plan was to seek some big reward from you for reuniting you with your lost wife.”
“I can guess the rest,” Kenton said. “Rankin was waiting for me at Gomorrah, and then came this strange firefall, and the coincidental ravings of a drunken self-proclaimed preacher that chanced to fit the facts of what happened, and suddenly he saw before him a chance for bigger and better money than he could have gotten from me alone. He rode the crest of the terror over what happened at Gomorrah, told people, through the preacher, that he could assure them of escaping the same fate if only they supported the preacher’s ‘ministry’…”
“Absolutely right. And it worked well, until finally he landed here, with the rich and gullible wife of Mr. Livesay Johansen across the street, where even yet, I’m sure, he continues to roll in abundant donations.”
“Not any longer. The preacher ’fessed up. Blew the whole scheme to pieces—apparently an honest soul at heart—and Johansen sent them packing.”
“What? How do you know?”
“I just came from the Johansen house.”
“You were there? For how long?”
“I only arrived today. Alex, I’ve got a long and amazing story to tell you, one that, unfortunately, I’ll never be able to put into print without endangering the lives and welfare of people who don’t deserve for that to happen to them.”
“I’m eager to hear it.”
“Let’s go downstairs, then. I talk better over a cup of good coffee.”
While Kenton and Gunnison talked late into the night in the cafe of the Johansen Hotel, Parson Forrest Peabody was enjoying himself immensely.
Rankin hadn’t given him much money out of the “donations” they’d collected during his brief tour as a preaching prophet, but he’d gotten enough to have some fine times in the saloons here. He’d drunk his fill, which was a lot, and still had money left.
Given all the trouble over at the Johansen house, Peabody figured it would have been the better part of discretion to have left Pearl Town by now. But he’d made it no farther than the edge-of-town saloons.
Stepping out into the night with a cheap cigar clenched in his teeth, Peabody paused to light it. This required several attempts because his hands wouldn’t stay still, but kept waving about in front of him, the match missing the cigar. Finally it connected, and he blew out a thick cloud of smoke.
As it cleared, he saw Gib Rankin striding toward him, his face dark with anger.
Peabody dropped the cigar. His eyes went wide, and he turned and ran.
Rankin caught up with him beneath the balcony of a cheap boarding house in which the upper rooms had permanent female occupants whose duties were to make sure the males who rented beds for the night were anything but bored.
Rankin grabbed Peabody by the collar and shoved him up against a porch rail.
“Do you know what you cost us, spouting off your mouth to Johansen? Do you realize how much money that old coot-woman was ready to hand us?”
“I’m sorry! I wasn’t trying to make you mad!”
“Oh, but you did! I’m so mad I could kill you right here! Maybe I will…nobody in this damned town would care, or even know!”
Peabody tried to think of something to say. “God would know,” he said.
Rankin laughed.
“Yes, sir, God would know!” a voice directly above said. “And send down fire from heaven on you, He might!”
Rankin looked up in time to see Thomas Shafter, his arm gripped by a grinning saloon girl, hold up a lighted kerosene lamp.
“Let the fire fall!” Shafter yelled. “Glory hallelujah!”
The lamp dropped right onto Rankin’s shoulders, breaking and spilling burning coal oil down Rankin’s back. Though his heavy coat protected him from immediate severe burns, it did render him a human torch.
Howling, he let go of Peabody, ran across the street, and immersed himself in a watering trough, splashing about, putting out the flames.
“Look there, preacher!” Shafter declared. “Got us a baptizing going on! Ree-vival time!”
Rankin came out of the water swearing, pulling out his soaked pistol.
Shafter already had out a pistol of his own. “Wouldn’t do it, Rankin. I can send down some fire from my little heaven up here that would do a lot worse damage than that lamp did.”
Rankin swore some more and shoved the pistol back into its holster. “Devil take all of you!” he declared. “Ain’t neither of you worth fooling with!” He stomped off toward the edge of town, vanishing into the darkness.
“Believe we’ve seen the last of him, Parson Peabody,” Shafter said.
“Yes.” Peabody hardly had a voice.
“Well, evening to you. Been nice working with you, as long as it lasted. Ain’t no bad thing that it’s over. He wasn’t ever going to share much of that money with us nohow.”
“Yes…no…right.” Peabody swallowed and tried to stop trembling. “I’m not feeling too well, Mr. Shafter. I think I’ll go get myself another bit of medicine.”
“You do that, preacher.”
Peabody tipped his hat to Shafter and the lady, tucked his coat together, cleared his throat, and stumbled back toward the welcoming light of the saloons as off to the west, a shooting star cut a swath across the velvet-black sky.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE HANGING AT LEADVILLE / FIREFALL
The Hanging at Leadville copyright © 1991 by Cameron Judd.
Firefall copyright © 2000 by Cameron Judd.
All rights reserved.
For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
ISBN: 978-0-312-94335-6
The Hanging at Leadville Bantam Domain edition / October 1991
Firefall St. Martin’s Paperbacks edition / March 2000
St. Martin’s Paperbacks are published by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
*The Hanging at Leadville