Breakheart Pass

REV. THEODORE PEABODY

DOCTOR MOLYNEUX

CHRIS BANLON

CARLOS

HENRY

BELLEW

DEVLIN

RAFFERTY

FERGUSON

CARTER

SIMPSON

BENSON

CARMODY

HARRIS

CAPTAIN OAKLAND

LIEUTENANT NEWELL

A Gunman

US Cavalry

Commandant of Fort

Humboldt

The Governor of Nevada

The Governorȧs niece and

the daughter of Colonel

Fairchild

The Governorȧs Aide

US Marshal

A villain of some note

Chief of the Paiutes

A gambler

Chaplain elect for

Virginia City

US Army Doctor

Engineer

Cook

Steward

US Army Sergeant

Brakeman on train

A trooper

US Army Telegraphists

Three minor villains

Passive but relevant

The following bears very closely on the choice of 1873 as the date for this story.

NB. It might appear odd that a US Army relief mission should be sent to attend a cholera outbreak, but this is not so: the State of Nevada Health Service was not established until 1893.

ONE (#ulink_65c82ee9-6d33-5b5a-9b43-8cf6a5e51215)

The saloon bar of Reese City’s grandiosely named Imperial Hotel had about it an air of defeat, of uncaring dilapidation, of the hauntingly sad nostalgia for the half-forgotten glories of days long gone by, of days that would never come again. The occasionally plastered walls were cracked and dirty and liberally behung with faded pictures of what appeared to be an assortment of droop-moustached desperadoes: the lack of ‘Wanted’ notices below the pictures struck an almost jarring note. The splintered planks that passed for a floor were incredibly warped and of a hue that made the walls appear relatively freshly painted: much missed-at spittoons were much in evidence, while there were few square inches without their cigar butts: those lay about in their hundreds, the vast majority bearing beneath them charred evidence to the fact that their owners hadn’t bothered to stub them out either before or after dropping them to the floor. The shades of the oil-lamps,like the murky roof above, were blackened by soot, the full-length mirror behind the bar was fly-blown and filthy. For the weary traveller seeking a haven of rest, the saloon bar offered nothing but a total lack of hygiene, an advanced degree of decadence and an almost stultifying sense of depression and despair.

Neither did the majority of the customers. They were remarkably in keeping with the general ambience of the saloon. Most of them were disproportionately elderly, markedly dispirited, unshaven and shabby, all but a lonely few contemplating the future, clearly a bleak and hopeless one, through the bottoms of their whisky glasses. The solitary barman, a myopic individual with a chest-high apron which, presumably to cope with laundry problems, he’d prudently had dyed black in the distant past, appeared to share in the general malaise: wielding a venerable hand-towel in which some faint traces of near-white could with difficulty be distinguished, he was gloomily attempting the impossible task of polishing a sadly cracked and chipped glass, his ultra-slow movements those of an arthritic zombie. Between the Imperial Hotel and, also of that precise day and age, the Dickensian concept of a roistering, hospitable and heart-warming coaching inn of Victorian England lay a gulf of unbridgeable immensity.

In all the saloon there was only one isolated oasis of conversational life. Six people were seated round a table close by the door, three of them in a high-backed bench against the wall: the central figure of those three was unquestionably the dominant one at the table. Tall and lean, deeply tanned and with the heavily crow-footed eyes of a man who has spent too long in the sun, he was dressed in the uniform of a colonel of the United States Cavalry, was aged about fifty, was -unusually for that time - clean-shaven and had an aquiline and intelligent face crowned by a mass of brushed-back silver hair. He wore, at that moment, an expression that could hardly be described as encouraging.

The expression was directed at a man standing opposite him on the other side of the table, a tall and powerfully built individual with a darkly saturnine expression and a black hairline moustache. He was dressed entirely in black. His badge of office, that of a US Marshal, glittered on his chest. He said: ‘But surely. Colonel Claremont, in circumstances such as those -’

‘Regulations are regulations.’ Claremont’s voice, though civil enough, was sharp and incisive, an accurate reflection of the man’s appearance. ‘Army business is army business. Civilian business is civilian business. I’m sorry, Marshal - ah -’

‘Pearce. Nathan Pearce.’