Breakheart Pass (3 page)

'Afternoon, Colonel. This is a privilege.'

'Trouble?'

'Just making sure there is none, sir.'

'Steam up?'

Banlon swung open the door of the fire-box. The blast of heat from the glowingly red-hot bed of cordwood made Claremont take a couple of involuntary steps backward. Banlon closed the door. 'Ready to roll. Colonel.'

Claremont glanced to the rear where the tender was piled high with neatly stacked cordwood. 'Fuel?'

'Enough to last to the first depot. More than enough.' Banlon glanced at the tender with pride. 'Henry and I filled every last corner. A grand worker is Henry.'

'Henry? The steward?' The frown was in Claremont's voice, not on his face. 'And your mate – Jackson, isn't it? The stoker?'

'Me and my big mouth,' Banlon said sadly. 'I'll never learn. Henry asked to help. Jackson – ah – helped us after.'

'After what?'

'After he'd come back from town with the beer.' The extraordinarily bright blue eyes peered anxiously at Claremont. 'I hope the Colonel doesn't mind?'

Claremont was curt. 'You're railway employees, not soldiers. No concern of mine what you do – just so long as you don't drink too much and drive us off one of the trestle bridges up in those damned mountains.' He turned to go down the steps, then swung around again. 'Seen Captain Oakland or Lieutenant Newell?'

'Both of them, as a matter of fact. Stopped by here to chat to Henry and me, then went into town.'

'Say where they were going?'

'Sorry, sir.'

Thanks, anyway.' He descended, looked down the train to where Bellew was saddling up his horse and called: 'Tell the search detail that they are in town.'

Bellew gave a sketchy salute.

O'Brien and Pearce turned away from the bar in the hotel saloon, Pearce stuffing the 'Wanted' notices back into their envelope. Both men halted abruptly and turned as a shout of anger came from a distant corner of the room.

At the card table, a very large man, dressed in moleskin trousers and jacket that looked as if they had been inherited from his grandfather, and sporting a magnificent dark red beard, had risen to his feet and was leaning across the table. His right hand held what appeared to be a small cannon, which is not an unfair description of a Peacemaker Colt, while his left pinioned to the surface of the table the left wrist of a man sitting across the table from him. The face of the seated man was shadowed and indistinct, being largely obscured by a high-turned sheepskin collar and a black stetson pulled low on his forehead.

The man with the red beard said: That was once too often, friend.'

Pearce brought up by the table and said mildly: 'What was once too often, Garritty?'

Garritty advanced the Peacemaker till the muzzle was less than six inches from the seated man's face. 'Slippery fingers here. Marshal. Cheating bastard's taken a hundred and twenty dollars from me in fifteen minutes.'

Pearce glanced briefly over his shoulder, more out of instinct than any curiosity, as the saloon bar door opened and Colonel Claremont entered. Claremont halted briefly, located the current centre of action within two seconds and made his unhesitating way towards it: to play the part of bit player or spectator was not in Claremont's nature. Pearce returned his attention to Garritty.

'Maybe he's just a good player.'

'Good?' Garritty appeared to smile but, behind all that russet foliage, his intended expression was almost wholly a matter for conjecture. 'He's brilliant – too brilliant by half. I can tell. You won't forget. Marshal, that I have been playing cards for fifty years now.'

Pearce nodded. 'You've left me the poorer for meeting you across the poker table.'

Garritty twisted the left wrist of the seated man, who struggled hopelessly to resist, but Garritty had more than all the leverage he required. With the back of the left wrist pressed to the table, the cards in the hand were exposed: face-cards all of them, the top being the ace of hearts.

Pearce said: 'Looks a pretty fair hand to me.'

'Fair is not the word I'd use.' Garritty nodded to the deck on the table. 'About the middle. Marshal …'

Pearce picked up what was left of the pack of cards and ruffled his way through them. Suddenly he stopped and turned up his right hand: another ace of hearts lay there. Pearce laid it face down on the table, took the ace of hearts from the stranger's hand and laid it, also face down, beside the other. Their backs were identical. Pearce said: 'Two matching decks. Who provided those?'

'I'll give you one guess.' The overtones in Garritty's voice were, in all conscience, grim enough: the undertones were considerably worse.

'An old trick,' the seated man said. His voice was low but, considering the highly compromising situation in which he found himself, remarkably steady. 'Somebody put it there. Somebody who
knew
I had the ace.'

'What's your name?'

'Deakin. John Deakin.'

'Stand up, Deakin.' The man did so. Pearce moved leisurely round the table until he was face to face with Deakin. Their eyes were on a level. Pearce said: 'Gun?'

'No gun.'

'You surprise me. I should have thought a gun would have been essential for a man like you – for self-defence, if nothing else.'

'I'm not a man of violence.'

'I've got the feeling you're going to experience some whether you like it or not.' With his right hand Pearce lifted the left-hand side of Deakin's sheepskin coat while with his free hand he delved into the depth of Deakin's inside lining pocket. After a few seconds' preliminary exploration he withdrew his left hand and fanned out an interesting variety of aces and face-cards.

'My, my,' O'Brien murmured. 'What's known as playing it close to the chest.'

Pearce pushed the money lying in front of Deakin across to Garritty, who made no attempt to pick it up. Garritty said harshly: 'My money is not enough.'

'I know it isn't.' Pearce was being patient. 'You should have gathered as much from what I said. You know my position, Garritty. Cheating at cards is hardly a Federal offence, so I can't interfere. But if I see violence taking place before my eyes – well, as the local peace-keeper, I'm bound to interfere. Give me your gun.'

'My pleasure.' The ring of ominous satisfaction in Garritty's voice was there for all to hear. He handed his mammoth pistol across to Pearce, glared at Deakin and jerked his thumb in the direction of the front door. Deakin remained motionless. Garritty rounded the table and repeated the gesture. Deakin made an almost imperceptible motion of the head, but one unmistakably negative. Garritty struck him, backhanded, across the face. There was no reaction. Garritty said: 'Outside!'

'I told you,' Deakin said. 'I'm not a man of violence.'

Garritty swung viciously and without warning at him. Deakin staggered backwards, caught a chair behind his knees and fell heavily to the floor. Hatless now, he remained as he had fallen, quite conscious and propped on one elbow, but making no attempt to move. Blood trickled from a corner of his mouth. In what must have been an unprecedented effort, every single member of the regular clientele had risen to his feet: together, they pressed forward to get a closer view of the proceedings. The expressions on their faces registered a slow disbelief ultimately giving way to something close to utter contempt. The bright red thread of violence was an integral and unquestionable element of the warp and woof of the frontier way of life: unrequited violence, the meek acceptance of insult or injury without any attempt at physical retaliation, was the ultimate degradation, that of manhood destroyed.

Garritty stared down at the unmoving Deakin in frustrated incredulity, in a steadily increasing anger which was rapidly stripping him of the last vestiges of self-control. Pearce, who had moved forward to forestall Garritty's next expression of a clearly intended mayhem, was looking oddly puzzled: then the puzzlement was replaced by what seemed an instant realization. Mechanically, almost, as Garritty took a step forward and swung back his right foot with a clearly near-homicidal intent, Pearce also took a step forward and buried a none too gentle right elbow in Garritty's diaphragm. Garritty, almost retching, gasped in pain and doubled over, both hands clutching his midriff: he was having temporary difficulty in breathing.

Pearce said: 'I warned you, Garritty. No violence in front of a US Marshal. Any more of this and you'll be my guest for the night. Not that that's important now. I'm afraid the matter is out of your hands now.'

Garritty tried to straighten himself, an exercise that clearly provided him with no pleasure at all. His voice, when he finally spoke, was like that of a bull-frog with laryngitis.

'What the hell do you mean – it's out of my hands?'

'It's Federal business now.'

Pearce slipped the 'Wanted' notices from their envelope, leafed rapidly through them, selected a certain notice, returned the remainder to the envelope, glanced briefly at the notice in his hand. glanced just as briefly at Deakin, then turned and beckoned to Colonel Claremont who, without so much as a minuscule twitch of the eyebrows, walked forward to join Pearce and O'Brien. Wordlessly, Pearce showed Claremont the paper in his hand. The picture of the wanted man, little better than a daguerreotype print, was a greyish sepia in colour, blurred and cloudy and indistinct in outline: but it was unmistakably a true likeness of the man who called himself John Deakin.

Pearce said: 'Well, Colonel, I guess this buys me my train ticket after all.'

Claremont looked at him and said nothing. His expression didn't say very much either, just that of a man politely waiting.

Pearce read from the notice: “Wanted: for gambling debts, theft, arson and murder.”'

'A nice sense of priorities,' O'Brien murmured.

'“John Houston alias John Murray alias John Deakin alias” – well, never mind, alias a lot of things. “Formerly lecturer in medicine at the University of Nevada.”'

'University?' Claremont's tone reflected the slight astonishment in his face. 'In those Godforsaken mountains?'

'Can't stop progress, Colonel. Opened in Elko. This year.' He read on: '“Dismissed for gambling debts and illegal gambling. Embezzlement of university funds subsequently discovered, attributed to wanted man. Traced to Lake's Crossing and trapped in hardware store. To cover escape, used kerosene to set fire to store. Ensuing blaze ran out of control and central part of Lake's Crossing destroyed with the loss of seven lives.”'

Pearce's statement gave rise to a splendid series of expressions among onlookers and listeners, ranging from incredulity to horror, from anger to revulsion. Only Pearce and O'Brien and, curiously enough, Deakin himself, registered no emotion whatsoever.

Pearce continued: '“Traced to railroad repair shops at Sharps. Blew up wagonload of explosives destroying three sheds and all rolling stock. Present whereabouts unknown.”

Garritty's voice was still a croak. 'He –
this
is the man who burnt down Lake's Crossing and blew up Sharps?'

'If we are to believe this notice, and I do believe it, this is indeed the man. We all know about the long arm of coincidence but this would be stretching things a bit too far. Kind of puts your paltry hundred and twenty dollars into its right perspective, doesn't it, Garritty? By the way, I'd pocket that money right now if I were you – nobody's going to be seeing Deakin for a long, long time to come.' He folded the notice and looked at Claremont. 'Well?'

'They won't need a jury. But it's still not Army business.'

Pearce unfolded the notice, handed it to Claremont. 'I didn't read it all out, the notice was too long.' He pointed to a paragraph. 'I missed this bit, for instance.'

Claremont read aloud : '“The explosives wagon in the Sharps episode was en route to the United States Army Ordnance Depot at Sacramento, California.” He folded the paper, handed it back and nodded. 'This makes it Army business.'

TWO

Colonel Claremont, whose explosive temper normally lay very close to the surface indeed, was clearly making a Herculean effort to keep it under control. It was just as clearly a losing battle. A meticulous and exceptionally thorough individual, one who cleaved to prescribed detail and routine, one who had a powerful aversion to the even tenor of his ways being interrupted, far less disrupted, and one who was totally incapable of suffering either fools or incompetence gladly, Claremont had not yet devised, and probably never would devise, a safety-valve for his only failing as an officer and a man. Not for him the gradual release of or sublimation for the rapid and rapidly increasing frustration-based anger that simmered just below boiling point and did all sorts of bad things to his blood pressure. In geological terms, he neither vented volcanic gases nor released surplus superheated energy in the form of spouts and geysers: like Krakatoa, he just blew his top, and the results, at least for those in his immediate vicinity, were, more often than not, only a slight degree less devastating.

The Colonel had an audience of eight. A rather apprehensive Governor, Marica, chaplain and doctor stood just outside the main entrance to the Imperial: some little way along the boardwalk O'Brien, Pearce and Deakin were also watching the Colonel in full cry, although it was noticeable that Pearce had an even closer eye for Deakin than he did for the Colonel. The eighth member was the unfortunate Sergeant Bellew. He was rigidly at attention, or as rigid as one can be when seated on a highly restive horse, with his gaze studiously fixed on a point about a couple of light years beyond the Colonel's left shoulder. The afternoon had turned cold but Bellew was sweating profusely.

'Everywhere?' Claremont's disbelief was total and he made no attempt to hide it. 'You've searched
every
where?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Officers of the United States Cavalry can hardly be a common sight hereabouts. Someone's bound to have seen them.'

'No one we talked to, sir. And we talked to everyone we saw.'

'Impossible, man, impossible!'

'Yes, sir. I mean, no, sir.' Bellew abandoned his rapt contemplation of infinity, focused his eyes on the Colonel's face and said, almost in quiet desperation: 'We can't find them, sir.'