He took in everything relevant in a split second—there were four men, two of them armed. One was leveling his gun at Hawthorne, aiming when he should have been firing already, and Hawthorne shot him in the neck.
The other one was just slapping leather, and as the first gunman fell back into a jail cell, Hawthorne swung the Schofield around in the gun smoke and put a bullet into his chest. The force of it slammed the second man back into a set of metal bars, but he didn't drop his gun. Hawthorne gave him a second to realize he was as good as dead, but when the realization didn't come fast enough he gave him another bullet in the gut to put a finer point on it.
The other two stood horrified, and one of them, a rail-thin fellow in a ragged suit and Derby hat, threw up his hands and said, "Wait! Wait, mister! Don't shoot!"
His partner stood next to him, round face drained of color, and Hawthorne saw that the man had wet himself. Piss had darkened his trousers and now pooled on the stone floor of the jail. He wore a battered Stetson and an ornate vest like you'd find at a high-end store. He couldn't seem to speak.
Hawthorne stepped into the jail, gun pointed at Derby Hat. He said, "I only need one of you alive to answer my questions. Which one?"
"Please, mister, we ... we tried to talk them out of jumpin' you, honest to God. Please."
Blood was beginning to spread across the floor, seeping out from underneath the bodies of the two gunmen. The first one, with his throat torn away, wasn't completely gone yet. He lay face-up, choking on his own blood, unable to even raise his hands to staunch his life flowing away. Hawthorne stepped up to him, aimed at his head, and put another shot into his face.
The sharp, nasty tang of gun powder suffocated the room, and a cloud of smoke hung low in the air. Hawthorne trained his gun on the man in the Stetson who'd pissed his pants.
"I reckon I'll kill you," he said. "You don't seem to have much to say anyway."
He cocked the hammer, and Stetson finally found his voice. "B-B-Baron! I know where Baron is, I'll talk, don't kill me!"
Hawthorne hesitated for a moment, lowered his gun slightly.
And then he saw the subtle shift in Stetson's demeanor, the relaxing, and noticed Derby Hat's eyes stray to the door behind Hawthorne, and Hawthorne heard a foot step behind him and he spun around but not fast enough.
Something hard came down on his right shoulder, sending a numb current down his arm. He dropped the Schofield, started to scramble toward his attacker, but the next blow connected against his temple and the image of the station master, holding a steel pipe, hovered above him as he dropped.
* * *
Frank Baron had eluded Hawthorne for six months, ever since robbing the Englehart Ranch and killing Englehart and his family. He knew the law was after him, and probably some bounty hunters too, but it was Hawthorne who worried him. He was a spooky sonofabitch.
He'd heard stories about Hawthorne. How he would hunt his prey relentlessly, murder in his weird gray eyes. How he didn't care a whit about a guilty man's life. How he lived solely to kill the wicked and never stuck around for the bounty.
None of it was fair, Baron thought. He wasn't a wicked man. He just did what he had to in order to survive. Englehart wouldn't give him the pay he deserved, and they'd gone back and forth about it until finally Baron had went and got drunk, got mad, rode back to the ranch and killed Englehart in his sleep.
And Englehart's family, well ... the wife woke up, didn't she? She woke up and tried to stop him. He had to kill her. As for their two daughters, he was doing them a favor. Baron himself grew up without parents and knew what a hard road that was. The girls were better off dead.
He took all the cash in the house, some fifteen hundred dollars, and hightailed it out of there.
With that Hawthorne bastard on his trail.
Baron heard about Fort Mason from some odd little fella in a dive tavern nestled in one of Boulder's seedier districts.
It's a good place to hole up. Some outlaws and such there, and it can be a mite dangerous, but it sure as hell's better than lookin' over yer damn shoulder all the time.
Fort Mason. Ain't that the place where all that disease and stuff happened? That wastin' away ailment?
Yeah. But they done burnt all the bodies and the Army lit out from the place, left it to rot. Even them Indians don't go near it. Makes it perfect for hidin' out.
So Baron was sold on the fort, even though folks had a lot of unsettling things to say about it. There were rumors about corpses found in the vicinity, drained of blood, and other stories about how, from nearby towns, black smoke could be seen sometimes hanging over the fort, along with the horrid stench of burning human flesh.
He'd been there a week and hadn't seen nor heard a damn thing to support the wild stories. Sure, some of the men who'd been there for longer than a few weeks seemed ... off, maybe. Pale and frail-looking, with crazy fire burning in their eyes. And they smelled peculiar. But if you stayed away from them, kept company with the fellas of more recent arrival, you were fine.
Of course, some of them had a tendency to drop out of sight from one day to the next, but so what? It wasn't a town or a settlement. It was a place where wanted men found sanctuary for a while, and then moved on.
Baron felt relatively safe at Fort Mason.
Until that sonofabitch Hawthorne caught up with him.
And now here the sonofabitch was, shackled to the wall in the brig, unconscious. Baron stood before him, arms crossed above his ample belly, torn between terror at seeing the bastard again, and satisfaction at him being chained and helpless.
Pete and Neil—two fellas Baron had become chummy with since arriving at the fort—had taken the time to secure Hawthorne and fetch Baron from his tent. "Thank Charlie Peeples there," Neil said, holding his bowler hat. "He snuck up behind him and whacked him a good one on the head."
Baron knew the station master was behind him, could smell him, but he turned to the pasty man standing by the doorway anyway. "I owe you, buddy," Baron said.
"Weren't nothin'. I knew you and your friends were waitin' on him and had an ambush set up. Just wanted to do my part for a fellow traveler."
"Well, I owe you, ain't no two ways about it." Then, to Pete and Neil, "And you fellas too, for not ratting me out."
Pete and Neil didn't say anything about how Pete had pissed his pants or how he'd been ready to sell Baron out as soon as Hawthorne pointed a gun at him. Their pals, two fellas Baron didn't know, lay dead on the floor. Pete and Neil had disarmed Hawthorne, dragged him to the wall, where the rusted old irons were, and clapped the shackles on his wrists and ankles. On the wrists, it was one chain, about three feet long, slipped through a heavy bolt in the wall. It held Hawthorne's slumped body suspended with his arms above his head.
Baron looked at him. Even out cold, Hawthorne was intimidating. He was lean and hard-looking, with close-cropped black hair streaked with gray at the temples. A jagged white scar in the shape of a cross was cut into Hawthorne's forehead, like the very mark of Cain.
"So what are you gonna do with him?" Pete said.
"Don't rightly know yet," Baron said. "I'll think of something."
Charlie Peeples spoke up. "If'n you don't mind me puttin' my two cents in, I reckon you should leave him, at least for the night. You know. Sleep on it and all that."
Baron glanced at Charlie, surprised by the interest. The fella was usually quiet, didn't seem to take up a hand in other folk's matters much. But the forced casualness in his voice now was obvious. Baron said, "What do you care about it?"
"Oh, I don't. I don't care nothin' about it. Just a suggestion is all. I'm just sayin', let him stew a bit, you know? Come morning-time, maybe you'll have a clear idea 'bout what to do with him. Just ... you know, leave him alone for the night. Leave him here in the brig."
Charlie seemed downright jumpy now. He wouldn't look Baron in the eye.
Baron frowned, and shrugged. "Maybe that ain't such a bad idea."
"Absolutely," Charlie said. "Absolutely. It's a damn good idea, if I may say so myself."
"Do whatever you want," Neil said. "Hey, me and Pete are gonna go to the mess hall for some whiskey come nightfall. You comin'?"
Baron nodded. "Yeah. Yeah, I'll meet you boys there."
Pete gave the key to the shackles to Baron, and he and Neil headed out. Charlie lingered by the door until Baron turned to him and said, "Something else?"
"No, nothin'. I'll be seein' you."
With a quick furtive glance at Hawthorne, Charlie left, and Baron turned his attention back to his captive, who slumped against the shackles. Only the slight rising and falling of his chest betrayed any life in him at all.
Baron smiled. "Okay," he said. "You'll keep 'til morning, I reckon. But you can be sure of something awful happening once morning comes, you son-of-a-bitch."
Two of the boys who'd come to the fort a few days earlier had set up a sort of tavern in what used to be the mess hall. They'd brought a wagonload of fine whiskey with them and sold it for the two bits a shot, provided you had your own cup. Their first night, a small gang of hardcases had tried to steal the stash of booze by gunpoint, but the rest of the fort's population—against all odds as far as Baron could figure—had rallied against them. After a brief gunfight, the would-be robbers were dead and the make-shift tavern was back in business. Apparently, these were criminals and wanted men who valued forward-thinking enterprise.
Baron met Pete and Neil outside the mess hall just as the sky was going purple with dusk. "'Bout goddamn time you showed up," Pete said. "We got us a powerful thirst and here you are dilly-dallyin' around."
Baron clapped him on the shoulder. "Well, let's have a drink on that, then."
The three of them moved inside. The place was lit by four lanterns and a barrel fire in the middle of the room. A few makeshift tables and chairs were scattered around, and a short bar made of rough-cut planks at the far end. There were about forty men in the entire fort and well over half of them were crammed into the mess hall at the moment, the stink and heat of them heavy enough to make a delicate-minded person faint dead away.
The stench of the place was doubly worse on account of the peculiar rotten odor some of the fort's more long-term residents carried around with them. Not for the first time, Baron speculated on that. The stink of them, the pasty paleness, the dull eyes. He wondered about the disease that had supposedly driven the Army out, wondered if it really had run its course.
But like always, Baron managed to push the thought out of his head. There was whiskey to be drunk.
Men were already rowdy and half-gone, even though the sun had barely disappeared outside. The walls and floor vibrated with booming voices and raucous laughter. The two tavern keepers worked behind the plank bar, pouring out shots and pocketing coins. Baron, Pete, and Neil bellied up, cups out and coins in hand.
"Welcome, sir," one barkeep said, grinning like a fool. "May I interest you in some oh-be-joyful?"
Baron slapped his coins on the plank, held out his battered tin cup, received a less-than-satisfying slosh of whiskey in it. He threw it back, slapped more coins down, took another.
When all three of them had wet their whistles, Neil said, "So what you gonna do with your fish in a barrel out there, Baron?"
"Don't rightly know yet. Something. He's been dogging my heels for too long, making me a nervous wreck. Whatever I do, it's gonna be nasty."
Pete said, "Coop Johnson's got one of them dentist kits. Maybe you could borrow it, yank that bastard's teeth out one by one."
"That's not a bad idea."
Neil said, "I think you should cut off his fingers. And then his toes. And then—" He took another shot. "Then his pecker."
"Yeah, that's good too."
"Or," Pete said, with a philosophical shrug. "You could just shoot him. I kinda wonder why you don't just do that."
Baron paused with his cup halfway to his lips. That was a damn good point, he had to admit. He said, "Well, that fella, the one at the station house ..."
"Charlie Peeples," Pete said.
"Yeah, Charlie Peeples. I reckon he put the thought in my head. The thought that I should ponder on it and all, maybe do something really vicious come morning."
Neil took off his Derby hat and leaned in closer. "You boys ever wonder about that fella? I mean, you ever think about what a queer one he is?"
"Well, hell," Pete said. "That's stating the obvious, ain't it?"
"He's an odd stick, sure enough," Baron said.
"And he smells something fierce."
"Shit," Pete said, "Almost everybody in this place smells like a dead beaver's asshole."
They drank more, slapping down coins, getting their cups filled over and over, and it wasn't long before they were half-roostered. The conversation turned to their various bizarre encounters with the fort's older residents, the way their eyes never seemed to change no matter what they were saying, the way they ate like animals, the way they would stare off into the distance when they thought no one was watching.
Neil said, "I tell you boys 'bout the other day? I swung by Barracks B to see if Savory still had that whore with him, and I come across old Marcus Condon. He was out behind the building with a jar a' ointment, putting it all over his chest."
"Yeah?" Baron said. "So what?"
"Well ... he had these ... marks, like. All over his chest and stomach and back."
"What kinda marks?"
"Like teeth marks, 'ceptin' they was perfectly round, you know? Like leech bites."
Baron said, "Again, so damn what?"
"But they weren't no leech bites. They was big. Like, bigger than
my
mouth."
Pete said, "That's pretty goddamn big."
"To hell with you. I'm trying to tell you something."
Baron said, "You're saying he had a bunch of marks on him that looked like they came from a giant sucker leech."