Pitchfork Pass

by William W. Johnstone

  “You get around, Lon,” Flintlock said.

  “Well, since you’re a stranger, I can tell you that I do have an exploration problem. I mean, a big problem.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “I keep getting lost. I take a right instead of a left and end up in places I didn’t really want to explore. Somebody, a fellow explorer, once told me that I’ve no sense of direction, but I do. At least, I think I do.” He pointed. “That’s south, ain’t it, Sam?”

  “No, That’s west.”

  “See, it’s a worry.”

  “When you head for Canada, just follow the North Star,” Flintlock said.

  Springer brightened. “That’s splendid. Um . . . what star is that, Sam?”

  Flintlock pointed at the night sky. “That one there. See how bright it is? Just keep following it.”

  Springer clapped his hands. “Crackerjack!” But then his face fell. “But what do I do in the daytime when there are no stars?”

  “Well, get yourself a big straight stick and sharpen one end. At night point the sharp end to the North Star and come morning, head in that direction.”

  “That’s a wonderful plan,” Springer said. “I’ll find Canada real easy with a pointy stick.”

  “That’s what I figure,” Flintlock said.

  “Huzzah! I’ll never get lost again. And now, if you don’t mind me saying so, Sam, you look like something the cat dragged in. When did them cheeks last see a razor and that there mustache scissors? Been a spell, I reckon.”

  “Seems like,” Flintlock said.

  “I’d say you’re a man on a high lonesome, maybe grieving for somebody, huh?”

  “Yeah, he’s buried over there.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “Well, by now I guess he’s exploring, just like you, following the buffalo.”

  “Good way to think on things.”

  Flintlock yawned. “What time is it?”

  “Breakfast time.”

  “I got none of that.”

  “I do,” Stringer said. “Now I’ll get coffee and bacon ready and give you time to shave and clean up.”

  “Don’t much feel like doing that.”

  “I seen many things in my travels, and I recognize a man who’s losing all respect for himself, and I’m looking right at you, Sam Flintlock.”

  “Seems like I’m a man born to troubles.”

  “Self-pity never helps a man, and no troubles are worth sacrificing your dignity and self-respect for, Sam.”

  Flintlock smiled. “Maybe so, but then you never heard of Jacob Hammer, who calls himself the Old Man of the Mountain. Now he’s trouble, pure pizen.” He rose to his feet. “All right, put the coffee on. I have a razor stashed in my possibles bag and Pears soap. Sarah Bernhardt swears by it and she knows a thing or two about bathing.”

  Stringer nodded. “Well, good for her. I’ll get a fire going.”

  * * *

  “You clean up real nice, Sam,” Lon Stringer said. “I think your nose doesn’t look so big now you trimmed your mustache. My eyes were drawn to it afore.”

  “Thanks. I think,” Flintlock said.

  “Now tell me about this Old Man of the Mountain feller that’s causing you all your problems.”

  Stringer listened in silence as Flintlock drank coffee as he sketchily outlined what had happened to him since he rode into Arizona, spending a little more time on the death of O’Hara, the half Apache, and the capture of his mother and the other women.

  When Flintlock was done talking, Stringer shook his head and said, “You have a fearful task ahead of you, Sam, and no mistake.”

  “And I can’t do it alone,” Flintlock said.

  “Can me and the water mule help?” Stringer said. “I got me a British Bulldog revolver that I got to shoot snakes and critters. But I’ve never shot a snake or a critter since I bought it, and if I tried I’d probably miss.”

  Flintlock smiled. “It’s not a job for an explorer, Lon. I need a gunhand. Fact is, I need about fifty gunhands. But thanks for the offer.”

  “Wish I could do more to help.”

  “Lon, you’ve helped more than you know. I was feeling pretty low and used up before you and the water mule showed up. Maybe I needed another human being to tell me just how low I’d sunk. You made me face up to it, look at myself in the mirror and see what I’d become . . . a beaten man.”

  “A feller with a big bird on his throat who handles a gun like it’s part of his hand has been places, done things. I don’t think you’ve ever been beat yet.”

  “There’s always a first time.”

  “And this ain’t it.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Free my ma. See Jacob Hammer in hell. Stuff like that. My dance card is full, but for a spell there I sure thought I’d run out of space on the floor.”

  Stringer was silent for a while, the firelight playing on his weathered face. Finally, he said, “Sam, I’ve thought it through and no matter how hard I try I can’t come up with any advice.”

  “Like I said, Lon, right now I need gunfighters, not advice.”

  Stringer nodded. “Yeah, I guess advice comes cheap. Wise men don’t need it and fools won’t take it.”

  “And what am I?” Flintlock said.

  “A wise man who happens to have more trouble than he can handle.”

  “That about sums it up, except if I was really wise I wouldn’t be here.”

  “Where you be, Sam?”

  “Kansas maybe, in the hardware business, me and O’Hara.”

  “You miss him, don’t you?”

  “I was raised rough and he was the only friend I ever had.”

  “Sounds like he was a good man.”

  “He was a man like any other, neither all good nor all bad. O’Hara led a full life and was prepared to die at any time. It is the Apache way.”

  “I would like to have met him,” Stringer said.

  Flintlock smiled. “O’Hara would have made a good explorer. He wasn’t a one for being cooped up in towns.”

  “And neither am I, when you come to mention it. I enjoyed breakfast and talking with you, Sam, but now I’m getting a mite restless,” Stringer said. “Me and the water mule must be on our way.”

  “There’s water here. You can set a spell.”

  The man shook his head. “Nope, I got to be moving on, Sam. Canada is a long ways from the Arizona Territory and I best be making tracks. I heard they got forests and mountains that haven’t been explored yet, home to grizzly bears as tall as a tree an’ wolves the size of yearling steers. Of course, folks exaggerate and that’s why I want to go see for my ownself.”

  “Be careful, Lon,” Flintlock said. “And never trust a wolf until it’s been skun.”

  “Sound advice. I’ll remember that.”

  * * *

  Flintlock walked Stringer and the water mule to the arroyo and there the man said, “Well, so long, Sam. Good luck and you take care, you hear?”

  “You, too, Lon, and thanks again.”

  “Nothing to thank me for, you would have come around to a right way of thinking without my help.” Stringer waved a hand and walked into the arroyo. “Good luck, Sam.”

  “And you, Lon. Good luck.”

  Then the explorer and the water mule were gone and Flintlock felt a surprising sense of loss at their leaving.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  A gray fog drifted among the junipers as six men dismounted in the shadow of the looming peaks of Balakai Point and stood in a circle to talk treachery.

  “Listen up,” Luke Dawson said. He was big, broad and bad to the bone. “In them saddlebags are a hundred thousand dollars in scrip, that’s over sixteen thousand a man. Tom Sherry, what would you do with that amount of money?”

  The man called Sherry grinned. “Keep me in whiskey and whores for a long time, that’s for sure.”

  “For damn sure,” Dawson said. “Jack Bl
air, what about you?”

  “Oh, I dunno. Maybe I’d buy me a ranch and settle down with the little woman and raise some kids,” Blair said.

  “Except you won’t have the little woman. She’ll be dead.”

  This from Milt Stevens, a young Texan who’d made a gun reputation when he outdrew and killed three gamblers in a Nacogdoches saloon, one of them Billy Joe Sand, a badman out of Kansas who’d killed seven men.

  Dawson grinned and said, “So who the hell cares? Jack can go down into Old Mexico and buy any woman he wants for a hundred dollars.”

  “That’s a fact,” Blair said. “I need something younger, getting mighty tired of ol’ Kate and her constant whining and complaining.”

  “There you go, Jack. That’s mighty informed thinking,” Dawson said. He turned to the remaining two men. “George, Harry, how would you like sixteen thousand to spend?”

  George Divers and Harry Parker were shotgun men, a pair of ambush killers for hire who, for fifty dollars, would cut any man or woman in half with a load of double-ought buckshot. Divers’s common-law wife, Lucy, a reformed whore, was four months pregnant and Parker cohabited with the six-foot-tall Mary “High Timber” Goodrich, a whore who had no intention of reforming. The two men exchanged glances but said nothing.

  “Think about it,” Dawson said. “Are them two floozies back at the compound worth sixteen thousand dollars apiece?”

  Parker, a bearded man with black, reptilian eyes, seemed to make up his mind. “Mine ain’t. Hell, she ain’t worth sixteen thousand when any man can buy her for two dollars and get change back.”

  “That goes double for me,” Divers said. “Lucy is gonna whelp soon and what do I want with a woman and wailing brat?”

  Parker’s voice suddenly had an urgent edge. “Luke, if I catch your drift, you’re asking us if we want to take the hundred thousand for our ownselves. Am I right or am I wrong?”

  “You’re as right as ever was, Harry,” Dawson said. “There are some things a man can’t walk away from, and a pile of money is one of them.”

  Parker nodded and said, “Well, the way I see it, if we’re gonna split the money, we’d better make tracks out of here. I don’t want Jacob Hammer coming after us. I heard tell he’s got one o’ them crystal balls that Chinamen use and it shows him everything.”

  Dawson thought about that, then said, “I reckon us six can handle anything he can throw at us, but you’re right, Harry, best we light a shuck for Flagstaff and split the money there.”

  Parker said, “Good. Then after the dividing is done, I’ll jump a train headed north with sixteen thousand dollars in my pocket. Man . . . I’m going places.”

  “You’re not going anywhere, Harry, except to New Orleans like the Old Man told us,” Milt Stevens said. “I’m not leaving Clara to be killed just to fill my pockets with cash. Besides, it’s Jacob Hammer’s money and it’s not ours to steal.”

  “Went to West Point, did you, Milt? You sure sound like it. Hammer stole the money himself, and we’re just stealing it back,” Parker said.

  “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander,” Divers said.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Parker agreed. “Whatever the hell what you said means.”

  “It means we’re five for, one against,” Dawson said.

  “The majority rules,” Divers said.

  “Yeah, you’re right again, George,” Parker said. “The majority rules. It’s the American way.”

  “Not in this case,” Stevens said. His hand dropped close to his gun. “We ain’t taking Mr. Hammer’s money.”

  Dawson’s eyes narrowed. “Milt, draw iron and we’ll kill you.”

  Stevens hesitated, not liking the odds, and said, “Luke, I say we go on to New Orleans and talk about it then. Maybe you boys will think things over and change your minds by then.”

  Dawson shook his head. “There’s no changing minds in this outfit. But all right, we’ll wait until New Orleans for the split.”

  “Yes, and we’ll talk more about it then, Luke,” Stevens said. “But the money still goes to the Giuseppe Morello feller, like the Old Man told us.”

  Parker, looking tense and mean, said, “My talking is done, here or anywhere else. I want my sixteen thousand and it ain’t going to a damned furriner with a name I can’t pronounce.”

  Tom Sherry, sudden and dangerous on the draw and shoot, had been silent, listening, and now he said, “I got a plan.”

  “Let’s hear it,” Dawson said, peering at him through the mist.

  “Milt is all-fired set on us not stealing the Old Man’s money, right?”

  “Right,” Dawson said.

  “So, he takes his own share, sixteen thousand, and gives it back,” Sherry said. He fixed Stevens with a stare. “That way, Jacob Hammer doesn’t take a complete loss and your conscience is clear, Milt.”

  “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander,” Parker said.

  “What the hell does that mean?” Dawson said.

  “Nothing,” Parker said. “I just like saying that thing about gooses.”

  Dawson shook his head and said, “Well, don’t say it again. Milt, we’ll give you your share in New Orleans and you can do whatever the hell you want with it. Give it back if stealing it troubles you.”

  “No, I’ll have no part of this,” Stevens said. “I’m riding.”

  “Right to the Old Man,” Dawson said. “You aim to spill the beans, huh?”

  “That is my intention, Luke. I want no part of this.”

  “He’ll send thirty men after us,” Dawson said.

  Stevens said, “Luke, it’s not too late to change your mind, and that goes for all of you. Once the money is safely delivered to Morello, Mr. Hammer will reward us. You know he will.”

  “He won’t reward us sixteen thousand dollars,” Parker said. “Or anywhere close.”

  “Make that twenty thousand, Harry,” Dawson said.

  He drew and fired.

  Milt Stevens saw the draw coming and even as he took the bullet he shucked iron and got a shot off, but it missed Dawson by a yard and the young gunman knew it . . . then he hit the ground and knew nothing at all.

  Dawson grinned as he holstered his smoking Colt. “Five shares, boys,” he said.

  “And I want them fancy boots of his,” Parker said. One by one he lifted Stevens’s legs, pulled off the dead man’s boots, whooped and brandished them in the air. “This is my lucky day,” he yelled.

  It wasn’t . . . as the four bullets that crashed into his head and chest duly informed him.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Sam Flintlock drew rein when he heard the gunshot . . . followed a few moments later by a racketing fusillade that roared around the rocks like thunder and then suddenly stopped. A minute or two passed, and then there were several more revolver shots, but these were spaced out, deliberate, as though someone was taking his time to deliver a coup de grâce to wounded men.

  In a thick fog, rare in that part of the Arizona Territory, Flintlock had just navigated a dry wash bordered by cottonwoods on the east side of Balakai Mesa, riding farther south than he ever had before. He had water in his canteens, some grub that Lon Stringer had left him, and he was looking for a fight, so far without success. It seemed that Jacob Hammer’s men were staying close to home, guarding Pitchfork Pass.

  But the firing had changed all that.

  Glimpsed through breaks in the mist, ahead of him a flat, sandy valley heavily covered in saltbush, sagebrush, juniper and bunchgrass, and after scouting around Flintlock picked up horse tracks, six riders heading south. There was no doubt in his mind that they were Hammer’s riders, perhaps headed for the railroad depot in Flagstaff. He didn’t like the odds, but he leaned over in the saddle and followed the tracks anyway. Perhaps he could shake those gunmen up a little and send them scuttling back to Hammer’s bosom. Flintlock liked that last so much he grinned as he said it aloud: “Hammer’s bosom.”

  After an hour, more dry washes
cut across his trail as did stands of cedar, greasewood and rabbitbrush and the sand became gravelly, holding large rocks in places. The fog lingered, but the morning was unusually hot and humid, the rising sun a dull orange ball obscured by mist. In an unnatural silence, the only sounds were the buckskin’s hooves on the coarse sand and the creak of saddle leather. The air smelled of sage and then, as he lifted his nose and sniffed . . . a faint tang of gunsmoke.

  Wary now, Flintlock drew rein. Ahead of him, and much closer, lay the location of the gunfight. Had the Hammer riders casually murdered people on the trail, soldiers or lawmen perhaps? Or had they themselves been ambushed? There was one way to find out. He slid the Henry from the boot and then patted the old Hawken for luck. He had a feeling that before this day was done, if he got into a shooting scrape he’d need all the good fortune he could get.

  * * *

  Sam Flintlock rode up on a peaked rampart of rock that formed a jutting point in the southeast corner of Balakai Mesa. A stand of juniper grew at the base of the precipice and it was there, among the trees, he found the bodies of six men.

  Flintlock swung out of the saddle and approached the dead men. They’d been shot to pieces and three of them showed an additional neat bullet hole in the middle of their foreheads, surrounded by a powder burn. Those three had been shot at close range, either to put them out of their misery or to make sure they were dead. The bodies had been laid out in a neat line and one of them was missing his boots that had been dropped nearby. The dead had been stripped of weapons and their horses were gone. But to Flintlock’s joy, as a tobacco-hungry man, two of the dead men carried the makings. One of the tobacco sacks was soggy, covered in blood, but the late owner of the other had been plugged in a more convenient spot and both sack and papers were unspoiled.

  As the sun rose higher and the fog thinned, Flintlock smoked a third cigarette and then made a scout around the area. He found dozens of empty rifle and revolver cartridge cases and the tracks of at least a dozen booted men.

  The six men had been bushwhacked in the fog and shot down without mercy. Flintlock doubted that it was the work of Pinkertons in force, but rather a number of professional killers who knew what they were doing.