Stringer and the Hangman's Rodeo

by Lou Cameron

“I didn’t know Remington still made black powder .38s. How much do I owe you, Miss Rowena?”

  “Don’t talk dirty to a lady. I’m a sharpshooter, not a shopkeeper, and they ain’t worth much, anyways. You’re right about the line being discontinued. I don’t know why I hung on to ‘em when I swapped my old .38 for a better balanced .32 a spell back. But lucky for you, I’m half pack rat.”

  He told her she was sure a pretty little rodent and put the box on the tailgate to begin reloading. He picked out the least green shells for his sidearm. As he began to fill the bullet loops of his rig he found himself asking just how long a spell they were talking about, adding, “No offense, but gunpowder more than seven or eight years old ain’t too apt to go off.”

  “I don’t reckon it’s been seven years,” she replied. “Let’s see now. I was about sixteen when I got good enough to join the rodeo circuits and I was using that old .38 until I was twenty or more. So they ain’t seven years old, quite yet.”

  He didn’t answer. He knew better than to ask a lady her age and he didn’t see why she wanted him to add it up in his head. “I reckon you thought I was a heap younger, huh? I reckon you thought I was just a bitty small-town gal. But I guess I’ve been around, some,” she said, answering his unspoken question.

  He assured her he could see she was a woman of the world. As he turned to go he ticked his hat to her and told her she was a real pard.

  She said, “Hold on. Just let me get that .32 I told you about and I’ll go with you.”

  “Go where, Miss Rowena?” he asked with a puzzled smile.

  “I don’t know if you don’t,” she said. “Didn’t you say we was fixing to have a show-down with some gunslick?”

  “Not hardly. I’m trying not to meet any more Friendly Franks, but even if I do, it’ll be a private fight. Boys only,” he laughed.

  She looked hurt and turned away. He ticked his hat at her again anyway and headed back to civilization. When he was clear of the last chutes he saw Pat had driven off in her Baker Electric. He headed for the nearest exit on the far side, walking catty-corner across the tanbark. He was maybe two hundred feet from the chutes when he heard an angry female voice call out to him and turned to see the distant figure of Rimfire Rowena with a nickel-plated six-gun in one hand. She yelled, “See that horse apple two feet from your boots?” When he looked down, he could indeed see such an object almost at his feet, Rimfire Rowena fired from the hip and pulverized it. Then she turned her back and flounced out of sight.

  “Remind me never to get that little sass really upset,” Stringer chuckled to himself. Then he headed on back to town.

  Stringer doubted Pat would have those other papers ready yet but an established member of the Fourth Estate didn’t need a court order to paw through a newspaper morgue.

  A staffer who kept calling him “Frisco Boy” led Stringer back to the files and made sure he didn’t smoke as he scanned what they had on Tom Horn’s case, which included reporter’s notes and clippings from other papers as well as what they’d printed themselves. It added up to quite a pile. But Stringer was a fast reader who, like most experienced researchers, could skim over stuff that was repeating what he’d already read whether it was worded just the same or not. So in less than an hour he’d put their file on Tom Horn back together as neatly as he’d found it and slammed the steel drawer shut with a snarl.

  His rival newspaper man rose from the steam radiator he’d been perching on to ask with a yawn, “Find what you were looking for?”

  “Too much,” Stringer answered angrily. “How many versions of that story did you run, anyway?”

  The older and more jaded staff writer shrugged. “As many as we could figure out. Next to beef, the main product of cow country would seem to be bullshit. As if Tom Horn being a pathological liar wasn’t enough, half the lawmen connected with the case chose to change their original ‘Beats Me’ to an ‘I Knew It All the Time’ as the case against Horn developed.”

  “I read the interview where that posse member suddenly recalled seeing the rock under the dead boy’s head, almost a year after they scouted the scene without finding any sign.” Stringer grimaced. “I’m just wondering why Tom Horn claims he was riding for Joe LeFors when he captured Peg Leg Watson when the Pinkertons say he was riding for them and that they thought it was Peg Leg McCoy?”

  “I can answer part of that,” the older man offered. “Watson held up trains under the name McCoy. I think Joe LeFors used to work for Pinkerton as well. He’s as hard to pin down about his past as Horn. We were even afraid to run one interview we had on the cuss. A local cattle baron with a reputation for paying his bills told one of our reporters that Tom Horn and Joe LeFors had once hung cow thieves for the C.P.A. together, sort of informal.”

  “Do tell? I didn’t find that in your morgue.”

  “Of course you didn’t. We don’t like to be sued for libel any more than the fancy Frisco Sun. You know how many so-called lawmen started out as law benders in these parts. Good help is hard to find, and it’s catching two birds with one stone to hire a worn-out outlaw as a law officer. It gets you a good gunfighter at a moderate salary and often keeps him from holding up any more banks.”

  As they headed back out front Stringer said, “I dunno. If I had a lick of sense I’d forget the whole thing. Joe LeFors is far away. Tom Horn’s in jail, and the case is so old and larded over with contradictions that Sherlock Holmes couldn’t make much sense of it.”

  The staff man walked him to the front door and asked where Stringer aimed to go next.

  “Back to the fair grounds, I reckon,” Stringer said. “That was the story I was sent here to cover in the first damned place. I can’t say I enjoy being told to back off any news lead. But the rest of the profession has had a good two years to make some sense of the Nickell killing, and no offense, you can’t even make up your mind whether Horn was arrested in Omaha or here in Cheyenne.”

  The older man laughed and told him that yet another paper had LeFors luring Horn to Montana with a promise of a job before arresting him. The two newsmen agreed it was a pisser and split up.

  Stringer stood undecided for a moment on the hot cement walk. It was only a little after high noon. The stands by now would be sun baked and he knew the opening ceremonies involved hours of flag waving, speeches, chuck wagon parades, and such. They hardly got into the interesting events the first day, if at all. So, unless those swinging doors just across the street indicated the entrance of a church, he had plenty of time for a cold beer.

  He was halfway across when a husky male voice behind him called out, “Stringer!” He almost changed the future format of many a pulp magazine by blowing away Bat Masterson.

  But as he knelt there on the hot asphalt with his gun out and trained he recognized the older gent and fellow newspaperman just in time.

  The Canadian-born William Bartholomew Masterson was fifteen or twenty years older than Stringer but still a handsome man who kept in good shape. No doubt he had to, to get away with sporting a derby hat and silver-handled cane in Cheyenne on a day like today. Like Stringer, he was a reliable reporter who called things as they were. But some said he was a more accurate sports reporter than an objective historian of his own early years, or at least one summer, down in Dodge.

  As Stringer got back to his feet and holstered his .38 with a sheepish smile, Masterson joined him. “How come you pulled that one on me, MacKail?” Masterson asked mildly, “Didn’t your mother ever tell you it’s not nice to throw down on kindly old sports reporters? Had you been someone I didn’t know, acting so strange, I might have gone for my own pistol, and then where would we have been?”

  “Sorry, Bat,” Stringer said laughing. “You called me from behind at a bad time. Have you ever heard tell of a gent called Friendly Frank Folsom?”

  Masterson shook his head. “He sounds like someone Ned Buntline made up. I sure miss old Ned. Didn’t he tell amazing tales about us whilst he was still alive?”

  “Friendly
Frank is real,” Stringer explained. “So let’s take cover in that saloon while I tell you how come I’m so proddy this afternoon. What are you doing here in Cheyenne, Bat?”

  “The same as you, I imagine. I came out to cover this fool rodeo as a sporting event. That’s what they call it, a sporting event. I don’t know about you, but in my salad days I tried to avoid horses that bucked. Now they pay a man good money to ride a bronc we would have just shot as useless when beef was a serious industry.”

  They went inside. The place was nearly empty at this hour, since just about anyone not tied down to a local job was out at the fair grounds, watching Indian chiefs wave flags en masse.

  They both ordered beer and took a corner table. Masterson would have sat with his back to the wall, of course, had not Stringer said, “I’ve got better call to watch the doorway, if it’s all the same to you, Bat.”

  Masterson shrugged and surrendered the corner to Stinger. “It’s been a spell since anyone’s tried to creep up behind me,” the dapper reporter said. “You’re right. You’re really on the prod. I used to see that same look in a man’s eyes while I was shaving. That’s one of the reasons I gave up packing a badge. What’s this all about, son?”

  Stringer brought his fellow newspaperman up to date on his recent adventures, leaving out the slap and tickle with Pat, and Masterson decided flatly, “Back off, old son. It’s not your fight. Joe LeFors and me go back a ways. We ain’t enemies. But he ain’t the sort of man who collects friends. He’s a hard man. The men who ride with him are the same. If any of ‘em thought you were out to make a liar of Joe LeFors they wouldn’t send a tin horn to scare you. They’d come after you personal.” He inhaled some suds, then added, “As for Tom Horn, I know him of old and he’s loco.”

  “Do you think he gunned that young sheepherder?” Stringer asked.

  “I wasn’t there,” Masterson replied. “All I know about it, aside from what you’ve just told me, is what I read in the papers back east, and for some reason the New York Times didn’t carry it on the front page. I’ll allow it surprised me to read old Tom had been accused of a cowardly bushwhacking, since it was never his style in the past. If anything, he was always brave to the point of suicidal despair. You know about him and Geronimo, of course?”

  “I just read in the morgue across the street that he’d scouted for Miles in that campaign, down Arizona way.”

  “He did more than scout,” Masterson said, wiping the foam from his mouth. “He tracked Geronimo’s band down, lonesome. Then he rode into their camp—alone—and told Geronimo, in the flesh, that he was there to take them in peaceable.”

  Stringer whistled softly. “That sounds like a good way to wind up naked on an ant pile, smeared with honey.”

  “I told you Horn was crazy. Lucky for him, Geronimo was sane, tired of running, and knew about the mountain artillery Miles was packing with the main column. So in the end Horn arranged an honorable surrender.”

  “Naturally, the War Department didn’t honor the terms and fired Horn as a scout, now that they had no further use for his services.” Masterson grimaced. “You might say he talked his fool self out of a job. My point is that he was willing to face Geronimo man-to-man, not shoot him in the back, and Geronimo was not exactly a fourteen-year-old boy, unarmed.”

  Stringer began to roll a smoke as he tried to recall the clippings he’d been reading. “One of the more popular theories put forward was that Horn shot the kid in the mistaken belief he was aiming at his father, Kell Nickell.”

  “In broad daylight, from no more than two hundred yards away, if the killer really did fire from the nearest cover?” Masterson asked. “Not if Horn was half sober. And drunk or sober, he’d have had no reason to fear a trash white homesteader, man or boy. The Tom Horn I know wouldn’t have been laying for anyone like that in the first place. He’d have just gone right to their front door and done whatever he’d been sent to do.”

  “I heard about the way he dealt with an outlaw forted up in a cabin,” Stringer said. “Maybe he just didn’t want any witnesses, and if he hadn’t been paid to murder the whole family…”

  “He’d have gunned ‘em on the house,” Masterson finished, adding, “I never said Tom Horn was nice. Just crazy-brave. But, hell, what are we arguing about? The man’s had a fair trial, and if they mean to hang him for something he didn’t do, it’s not as if he never did anything, you know. Look on the bright side and consider all the killing the old coot’s gotten away with in his time. I don’t see how any man could have managed to kill the forty or so Tom brags on, unless you want to count Indians. But it was his own notion, not yours or mine, to live by the gun, and like I was forced to decide some time ago, that ain’t no way to live if a man aims to die of old age.”

  Stringer fumbled for a match to light his smoke and Masterson instantly reached across the table with a handsome patent lighter, murmuring, half to himself, “It’s a shame poor old Tom couldn’t quit whilst he was ahead, when the Indian fighting trade got slow. He had the makings of a mighty fine cowhand. He won the roping prizes total at the Globe rodeo a few years back.”

  Stringer frowned thoughtfully as he got his smoke going, and then, as Masterson put the lighter away he said, “There wasn’t anything across the street about winning roping prizes. What year are we talking about, Bat?”

  The older reporter shrugged and replied, “Just before Queen Victoria died. I can’t recall the exact date. They started all this rodeo bullshit down in Globe in the nineties. I mean, with formal rules and all. Before that it was just cowhands funning around when they had no better chores to tend to. Anyway, they gave Tom Horn a fancy gold-plated belt for being the world’s champion roper, they said. So he could have no doubt gotten many an honest job with lots a cattle spread after that. But, like I said, he chose to live by the gun as a half-ass range detective and full-time drunk, and now they’re going to hang him and I’d better get on out to the fair grounds and see who’s fixing to win the roping contests this year.”

  “Hold on a minute,” Stringer said. “They’re still making speeches out there and I may have a deal you’d be interested in, Bat.”

  Masterson drained the last of his schooner. “I’m listening,” he said.

  “Look, Bat, I was sent to do a feature on that rodeo, the same as you,” Stringer was saying. “At the same time I suspect I may have stumbled over something hotter. But I can’t be in two places at one time. So how do you feel about sharing both stories?”

  “You mean, if I cover the rodeo for you, you’ll give me an exclusive on whatever the hell you think you’re working on? I dunno, kid. It’s not as if our papers were deadly rivals in the same town, but…”

  “But me no buts,” Stringer cut in, insisting, “You work for a New York paper. I work for a west coast paper. There’s no conflict of interests if we share both stories, is there?”

  Masterson stared down wistfully at his empty beer schooner and decided to go for a cigar instead of a second round. As he fished out a Havana Claro, he said, “That’s assuming there is another story, and that you’re content with the way I cover the rodeo for you.”

  He bit the end off his cigar, spat, and explained, “I wouldn’t want this to get around, Stringer. But you just may be a mite more, ah, western than me. I tried to tell my editor that I was never a cowhand in my misspent youth. But you know how good old Ned Buntline carried on about the time I acted as a deputy for my older brother, Ed.”

  Stringer nodded gravely. “I read about the way they murdered your big brother, all seven versions, and I’m sure sorry about every one of ‘em. Bat. But, come on, you were in Dodge at the height of the cattle-driving days.”

  Masterson lit his cigar with the same fancy machine, then he confessed, “As a part-time lawman and full-time townee, son. I ride pretty good. I shoot pretty good. I’ve never roped a calf in my life, and as for that bulldogging…”

  “Nobody ever did that until a cowboy invented it at a Texas rodeo a year or so ag
o,” Stringer cut in, explaining with a chuckle. “He missed with his rope and, feeling sort of frusterpated, just leaped on the critter and wrestled it to the ground. The judges were so delighted they declared it a new event and awarded him a prize for acting so unusual.”

  Masterson sucked in some expensive smoke. “I’d say he deserved it. My point is that my reportage of the rodeo here is more likely to be colorful than accurate. When I’m not sure of the finer points of a game I’m covering, I sort of fake it with humorous observations, and to tell the plain truth, I’m not up on the funny rules they have about riding mean horses and such these days.”

  “Neither are our readers,” Stringer soothed him, laughing. “But surely you can tell when a roper misses or a rider gets thrown, can’t you?”

  “Sure, but I’ll be blamed if I can see why the judges give one entrant more points than another when they both do about the same thing from where I’m sitting.”

  “You don’t have to. They announce how many points they’re awarding and you just have to write ‘em down. All I need to fake my own feature for old Sam Barca is who won what or who got hurt enough to be worth printing. Come on, Bat, you’re going to have to take the same notes for your own damned story, aren’t you?”

  Masterson shrugged. “All right, don’t say I never warned you if I get something wrong and we both wind up looking dumb. Where will you be while I’m trying to tell a cowboy from an Indian, MacKail?”

  “I thought I’d hire a livery mount and ride over to Iron Mountain, where that boy was murdered. Folk in the neighborhood might be able to sift some wheat from a lot of chaff. It’s only a few hours ride, you know.”

  “A few hot hours in the saddle at this time of day, you mean. If I was you,” Masterson cautioned, “I’d wait until the prairie sun got a mite lower.”

  “I might just do that. I have to stop off at my…ah…lawyer’s place before I leave town. You’re damn right about this being an awkward time to ride—a horse, that is.” Stringer grinned.