Stringer and the Hangman's Rodeo

by Lou Cameron

  “Good thinking,” he said, seeing the open window with the lace curtain blowing from the breeze. “Back doors are easy to cover as front doors. But they might not be expecting anyone to drop out a side window betwixt buildings.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, to go where, you idiot?” she said as she sat down on the bed and kicked off her silk slippers.

  He started to say he recalled a flop house near the depot he could likely make via a back alley. Then, as they locked eyes he wondered why any man would want to say a fool thing like that. But as he took a hesitant step toward her he smiled down at her uncertainly and said what was on his mind. “I sure hope I’m not reading the smoke signals in those big blue eyes wrong, ma’am. For if I am, aside from feeling foolish, I’m likely to hurt like hell.”

  Her big blue eyes were staring up at him sort of wet and dreamy as she reached to trim her bed lamp, letting her kimono fall open all the way as she replied in a surprisingly pragmatic tone, “Oh, for God’s sake, take off your clothes and get in bed with me, you fool. It’s my duty to a client to keep you alive. And after all, I told you how well I know your breed of man. That stupid war has been over for quite a spell.”

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  *

  By the time they’d gotten past the first awkwardness and were going at it like old pals, Stringer found it somewhat hard to believe Pat had been celibate since her husband had bought the farm in Cuba. She enjoyed it too much and did it too fine for a gal who didn’t practice at all. On the other hand, she wept and swore too hard while climaxing for him to worry about a regular lover walking in on them at a time like this.

  But just the same, as she lay sprawled and sated for the moment across the now really rumpled sheets, he got up to check both the front and back ways in. Both doors were securely locked with dead bolts nobody was about to get through without waking the dead. So he went back to see if Pat was still alive.

  As he rejoined her in bed Pat sniffed, “I’m so glad to see you trust me. Did you really think a law school graduate would be dumb enough to commit adultery on her own premises?”

  He put a soothing arm around her naked shoulders and hugged her mussed-up blond head to his bare chest. “I wasn’t worried about friends of yours,” he assured her. “I was thinking about enemies of mine. I thought that was the whole point of your kind offer to hide me out here overnight.”

  “Pooh, there went my chance to be an evil temptress, luring unsuspecting men to their doom.”

  He kissed the part in her blond hair and told her, “Oh, I suspected you before I got here. That’s why I chose your name at random from the city directory they offered me at the Drover’s Palace. I figured if a lawyer chosen at random was in cahoots with Friendly Frank, there’d have been no sense in coming after me to begin with. A mastermind big enough to buy even half the lawyers in a town this size wouldn’t need hired guns. He’d just put me in jail along with Tom Horn, see?”

  “Oh, gee, there goes all my ulterior motives,” she said, nibbling on his ear. “Now you’ll only remember me as a silly hard-up widow-woman, huh?”

  “Yeah, but fondly. Feeling sort of silly beats feeling hard-up by miles—as I hope we both just proved.”

  “If you have to ask whether I came, too, you weren’t paying much attention. Are you up to getting sort of silly again, dear?” she giggled.

  “In a minute,” he said. “Let me get my second wind and it’s only fair to warn you that you’re in for a mighty silly night. Meanwhile, tell me some more about that judge you’ll be taking me to if we survive the night.”

  “There’s no mystery about Judge Kenton, dear. He’s a fine old gent, and since I’ve argued many a case before him, I can say he’s a straight shooter. Why do you ask?”

  “I’m not sure. I may be on the prod to the point of crazy. On the other hand, they say a man is never more sane than right after he’s enjoyed a great lay and has his thoughts sorted out more logical than usual. Would your Judge Kenton have been the judge who heard the case of Tom Horn?”

  “Good grief, give me credit for more brains than that!” she sniffed. “You told me you suspected someone was after you to keep you from poking into that case. So, even though I know those judges, and can’t find anything bad to say about them, I naturally picked a city magistrate who had nothing to do with Mister Horn’s state trial. I don’t think you’re sane enough yet, dear. You just said it hardly seemed likely the entire legal system in these parts could be on one man’s payroll.”

  He rolled her on her back and kissed her. But as he was about to enter her again he said, “Hold on. How come Tom Horn had judges, in the plural—not just the usual judge and jury?”

  “Silly,” she said laughing, “that mean old drunk has had more than one trial since he murdered that boy nearly two full years ago. He keeps appealing, claiming to have new evidence. But, of course, they keep convicting him because he hasn’t got any. Do you want me to get on top, if you mean to study law for a spell?”

  He laughed, made her gasp in mingled shock and admiration as he drove it in her to the hilt, and they both forgot Tom Horn and everyone else but themselves for a sweet tender time.

  There seemed to be just no end to Lawyer Morrison’s cleverness. After serving him a fine breakfast in bed, with her for dessert, Pat bathed, dressed, and left him soaking in her tub with orders not to even go near the windows until she got back. It was a lot more restful soaking in that tub without her in it with him, Stringer mused. But after a while the water got cold. So he got out and dressed as well.

  He was working on his second Bull Durham in preference to the tasteless tailor-mades she’d left him when she rapped on the back door he’d locked behind her. As he opened it she told him fast, “Come on. There’s nobody out back. I made sure.” So he grabbed his hat from the kitchen table and followed her across her kitchen garden to the fenced-in alley. There, he stared in wonder at the tall black contraption parked by her back gate. It looked as if someone had crunched a hearse to about a third of its length, and it was hard to say which way the thing was aimed. The front and back looked just the same. “Get in,” Pat said. “Nobody is likely to recognize you behind the tinted glass if you sort of lean back.”

  He climbed in. He knew better than to ask where the horses were. But no motor seemed to be running and she looked sort of skinny to crank the whatever herself. But she just climbed in after him, taking the other seat, facing his as if they were in a pint-sized Concord coach. Then she grabbed hold of something like a bicycle handle stuck to the far side between them, and the next thing Stringer knew he was riding backwards down the alley in an eerie silence.

  He laughed. “This thing sure rolls comfortable, in its own spooky way. What in thunder is it?”

  She said, “It’s a Baker Electric. I have to keep it at a garage a few blocks away because the batteries have to stay plugged in to a special charger when I’m not using it.”

  He said he imagined it cost her a pretty penny and asked how come she drove it sitting on the back seat instead of up front like everyone else. She told him it had been given to her by a client in payment for a handsome legal fee and that she’d never figured out whether she was driving it forwards sitting in the back seat or backwards sitting in the front seat. And since it seemed to run as good either way, she’d just had to make a choice.

  Naturally, it took them no time to get over to the fair grounds, and since nobody seemed to be guarding the gates that early in the day, they just drove on in and rolled along the tanbark until Pat spotted some gents gathered atop a flag-draped box at one end of the bleachers. They rolled to a stop in front of them.

  Naturally, everyone in sight was staring at them as Stringer helped Pat down from her amazing rig. A couple of riders were even headed across the tanbark from the far side, chaps flapping and hats respectfully doffed.

  Pat yoo-hooed at a portly old gray-haired gent up in the box, and he took his hat off as well. Stringer could tell it wasn’t his r
egular hat. Most of him was dressed in a sedate gray business suit that just didn’t go with a ten-gallon snow-white Stetson. Pat told Stringer that was Judge Kenton. Stringer said he never would have guessed and helped her up the pine steps they found at one end of the temporary judges’ stand.

  At closer range, even with that foolish hat back on, Judge Kenton looked to be a dignified old man with a friendly smile and a firm shake. When Pat told him they’d hunted him down to talk some law with him, the judge led them up into the empty bleachers where they could talk in private. Nobody else seemed to care. Stringer was keeping an eye on everyone in sight, now that he’d been forced to break cover.

  He remained standing as Pat and the judge sat side by side on the pine plank benching. Pat took the papers she’d typed up that morning from the briefcase in her lap as she quickly explained Stringer’s problem in long Latin-sounding words that no doubt saved time if only one could follow them. After the dumb conversation at the Cheyenne Jail the night before, Stringer was braced for more of the same. But the kindly old judge just looked up, sort of puzzled, and said, “I don’t see why your client has to apply for a gun permit to begin with, Patricia. That city ordinance has been suspended during Frontier Days and half the drunks in town are running around armed and dangerous.”

  “That’s the way it struck me, too, your honor,” Pat said. “That’s why I’d like you to sign this restraining order for my client as well. It’s possible the whole matter simply involves one rather stupid police sergeant. But if it should turn out to be police harassment…”

  “Let’s see if this fountain pen works,” the judge cut in as he reached for the sheaf of papers, adding, “I hope you put an X where I’m supposed to sign.”

  Pat dimpled and said, “I sure did, your honor. But don’t you want to read them first?”

  Judge Kenton winked up at Stringer and said, “This sweet child has never failed to cross a T or dot an I in living memory. I only wish half the men practicing law in this town knew half as much about pro forma. How’d you find her, son?”

  Stringer grinned down at them both. “Just lucky, I reckon. I’d say she knows how to pick her judges, too, sir.”

  The older man lowered the broad brim of his big hat to sign Pat’s forms wherever she’d inked an X, saying, “You’re too kind. I can’t see a judge or lawyer in Cheyenne arguing that you might not have the right to carry a sidearm during Frontier Days. As to this ‘Show Cause’, asking the police to leave you alone unless they can prove you’re doing something awful, it won’t hurt if they’re not really out to pester you and it ought to make ‘em stop if they are. Who do you suspect could be behind such an unusual police policy, Mister MacKail?”

  “I can’t say, sir,” Stringer said. “Like Pat says, I could have just bumped noses with a desk sergeant who thought I reminded him of a brother-in-law. I had no trouble with anyone the first time I paid a call on old Tom Horn.”

  The judge looked up with a curious smile. “What on earth would a newspaperman want with Tom Horn at this late date? That case has been raked over the coals every which way since Horn shot that young sheepherder a couple of summers back.”

  “Tom Horn claims he was framed for a killing he knew nothing about,” Stringer explained. “I’d expect him to say that, in any case. But I couldn’t help noticing a few loose ends my rival reporters seem to have missed, and, well, if someone wasn’t worrying over what else Tom Horn might have told me, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

  Judge Kenton pursed his lips. “Hmmm, that case did raise quite a stir and people in these parts are still arguing about it, both ways. Half the locals seem sure Tom Horn is, or was, a vicious killer who deserves to hang whether he murdered that one sheepherder or not. But just about as many feel he was an old hero who at worse shot the wrong sheepherder by mistake. Both his friends and enemies agree he never made much sense when he was drunk.”

  “He was sober,” Stringer said, “both times I talked to him. Do you know anything about his real enemy, Marshal LeFors, sir?”

  “Deputy marshal, you mean,” replied Kenton. “LeFors is a special deputy, working out of Omaha, mostly with the considerable approval of the Union Pacific, headquartered in Omaha as well. I understand the railroad’s provided him with his own private cars to roam their tracks with his posse and their mounts, lest the Wild Bunch stop the U.P. Flier again.”

  “He seems to have thought that gave him the jurisdiction in the Nickell murder,” Stringer said. “Did it, your honor?”

  “Any federal peace officer has the right to arrest any criminal, anywhere.” The older man frowned thoughtfully. “If you’re asking whether that killing was a state or federal crime, it was state. The Nickell boy was killed right here in Laramie County. That’s why Tom Horn stood trial for it here in Cheyenne. Deputy Marshal LeFors naturally turned his prisoner and the evidence against him over to Laramie County to be tried and convicted, more than once.”

  “That is,” Stringer insisted, “after said county’s sheriff had given up on the case. I can’t help finding it odd that a lawman who never investigated the murder scene was able to pin it on a man no witnesses saw anywhere near that boy the morning he died.”

  Judge Kenton put his pen away as he mused, half to himself, “I don’t know Joe LeFors too well. Only met him around the court house a few times. I can’t say I enjoyed the experience. He’s a sort of pushy gent who admires himself a lot and lets it show. Some go farther, and would have it LeFors has a sinister past as a hired gun. But that may just be jealous gossip and I can’t say the man’s ever been caught abusing his badge.”

  “Tom Horn says LeFors was jealous of him,” Stringer added, “for showing him up one time.”

  “He could be grasping at straws, too. I know I would.”

  “So would I, sir. The point is that Tom Horn was convicted on the testimony of a man who, whether he hated Horn or wanted to sit in his lap, had no other evidence to present in court but his own word that an old drinking buddy had confessed the crime to him.”

  The judge’s eyes looked a little glassy in the stark sunlight. “Hmmm, I’d have to go over the transcripts of the trial to be sure there wasn’t more to it than that. But you do raise some interesting questions, and if a man wanted to run for governor of Wyoming some day, he couldn’t start better than by clearing a man half the state insists could be innocent.”

  The judge turned to Pat. “Patricia, how long would it take you to draw up papers making Mister MacKail here an officer of my court?”

  “I’m a fast typist, your honor. But are we talking officer or friend of the court?”

  “You tell me, child. Which would involve the least fuss?” sighed Judge Kenton.

  “Since my client is not a Wyoming resident, it might save time if we appointed him an investigative expert witness acting under your carte blanche to…sort of…see what he can see.”

  “There you go. Ain’t she something?”

  “I think so,” Stringer said. “What are we talking about, sir?”

  Pat explained. “Actually just a writ, signed by his honor, authorizing you to poke your nose anywhere you like without being pestered by petty officious types.”

  Stringer asked if they meant he’d be some kind of deputy judge and Judge Kenton said that was close enough. So Stringer said, “Hold on. I was sent here to cover this here wild west show.”

  Judge Kenton shrugged and said, “You can, as a guest in my box if you like. I just thought, since someone keeps telling you not to look any deeper into the case of Tom Horn…”

  “I may as well have me a hunting license,” Stringer cut in with a grin. “I’d be much obliged, your honor. I can’t wait to see what Friendly Frank has to say, if ever we meet up again with bullets in my gun and your paper in my pocket!”

  Pat Morrison gave him the papers the judge had already signed and told him she’d have the rest ready at her office that very afternoon. Then she left him to follow his own way back to the chutes and s
tock pens.

  Stringer found Rimfire Rowena sitting on the tailgate of her gypsy cart, cleaning the .22 repeating rifle in her lap. She looked even prettier in broad daylight. She replied to his polite howdy with, “Who was that brassy blonde you got outten that fancy horseless carriage with just now?”

  Stringer chuckled. “I was afraid you hadn’t noticed. She ain’t a brassy blonde. She’s my lawyer. I’ve only spent the night with her one time.”

  It worked. Rimfire Rowena cocked her head back and spat, “That’ll be the day. I’ll bet that dress she was wearing cost fifty dollars and you’re too raggedy to court a self-respecting squaw. How come you need a lawyer? Is some she-goat suing you for child support?”

  He sighed. “I sure admire a gal who wakes up so cheerful and friendly, Miss Rowena. The reason I needed a lawyer was because a pesky copper badge took all my bullets away from me last night. We got that straightened out. But now I need me at least a box of .38 longs.”

  She swung her target rifle up to squint through the barrel as she replied, “There must be dozen hardware shops in town that stock pistol rounds.”

  “I noticed,” he said. “Getting that far with my fool gun empty could be a problem, though. I have at least one gent gunning for me, and the last time I saw him, both his guns seemed to be loaded.”

  She lowered her rifle and looked sincerely concerned. “For heaven’s sake, why didn’t you say right out that you were in trouble again? How come you get in so many fights to begin with?”

  He started to say he was no doubt just lucky. But Rimfire Rowena had already rolled over to crawl into her cart on hands and knees, presenting a rump to him that managed to look naughty as hell, even covered by tanned deerskin. He heard her cussing and fussing inside for a time before she returned, head first, to hand him a greasy pasteboard box. “This is the best I can do you,” she said. “They’re shorts, and black powder, but they’ll fit your S&W, ‘til you can find something fancier.”