by Lou Cameron
Stringer grimaced and said, “I’ve seen dances work out as friendly south of the border when the offending parties were more blue eyed. Were you able to get anything on that marshal as gunned Mysterious Dave, Gina?”
She nodded soberly and replied, “That’s another good reason not to go to Texas, Stuart. This is the first time he’s been mentioned in the national press, but the county wired us he’s not a real marshal. Just a sort of sinister young man with no visible means of support who enforces such local statutes as public opinion in Comanche Woe seems to call for. The county sheriff was a little miffed to learn we thought Buckskin Jack Blair was a proper lawman, as a matter of fact. In sum, he sounds more like the Big Bad Wolf to me than one of the Little Piggies a boy your age should be interviewing!”
Stringer laughed and said, “I have to hand it to old Sam Barca. He’s got a real nose for news. To tell the truth, I wasn’t looking forward to poking about a dusty Texas town for enough dirt to justify my time and trouble. Buckskin Jack sound like just the sort of colorful cuss Sam Barca’d want me to track down and interview.”
She wrinkled her nose and said, “He sounds more like a dangerous moron to me. The county sheriff’s department advises us they have little or no control over gunplay in Comanche Woe and don’t think it would be a safe place for outsiders to poke about in until things calm down and change considerably, as they put it.”
He smiled thinly and murmured, “Even better. We’ve been running short of fresh material since the cattle boom of the ’80s faded into the financial depression of the ’90s and Teddy Roosevelt’s Square Deal. Most of the well-known gunslingers left have been left so long they tend to recall things a mite more dramatic than one imagines they seemed at the time. That rivalry betwixt Comanche Woe Township and the surrounding county sounds like what brewed up during the Lincoln County War, and events leading up to the somewhat overrated gunfight at the O.K. Corral, which really took place across the street in a vacant lot, but who am I to argue with the Tombstone Chamber of Commerce?”
She asked if he’d like second helpings, and when he confessed he couldn’t have gotten another meatball down with a shoe horn, she cleared her table to serve almond cake and coffee strong enough to lick its weight in whiskey. He naturally offered to help and she naturally told him men didn’t know how to cope with household chores and shouldn’t try. She sounded more like the gal of his golden dreams than ever.
But that wasn’t saying it would be smart to wake up with her in the inevitable cold gray dawn. While she looked a lot less mousy in her slinky silk kimono, she still had to have both company and calendar seniority on him and, even worse than being at least a few years older than him, she nagged almost as bad as his Crazy Aunt Ida back home in Calaveras County.
He tried to explain away the way things likely worked in and about Comanche Woe Township. She seemed to feel they were talking about outright anarchy, with the town law in open rebellion against its county supervisor and sheriff. When he insisted the Texas Rangers and State Guard would move in long before anyone important could get hurt, she looked triumphant and said, “I knew it sounded like that dreadful mess in Lincoln County! I was only a little girl, I mean a very little girl, of course, when they did, in fact, have to send troops into Lincoln County to calm Billy the Kid down. I’m not sure I knew how to read and write that long ago, but I recall my elders fussing about the awful state the country seemed to be in. Nobody could understand how two sets of lawmen could get elected in the same county, with each feeling it had the right and duty to arrest the other!”
He shrugged and said, “Call it the tarnished side of the coin of freedom. Things like that couldn’t happen in a tightly run country where simple country folk didn’t get to vote.”
She didn’t understand, or she said she didn’t understand, which worked out about the same. For the next thing Stringer knew, they’d finished dessert, left the dishes in the sink, and wound up back aboard that sofa in the parlor with him lecturing her on constitutional government and her hanging on every word with her kimono hanging loose above her waist sash, although he couldn’t quite spy either nipple, yet.
It hardly seemed fair. He’d held out, so far, on both that pert little redhead at the office and that gal on the second landing who was no doubt posing even bolder less than a city block from this older and even less wiser one to mess with. A man could find another rooming house easier than he could find a new job.
He found himself repeating, “The republican voters of Tombstone Township elected a town marshal at loggerheads with the county sheriff the democrats further out in the sticks preferred, with exactly who might be in charge the subject of heated discussion every time the matter of arresting a republican or a democrat came up.”
She nodded brightly and said, “My point, exactly. Didn’t Sam Barca send you to Tombstone years and years after that trouble, and didn’t you still manage to get yourself into quite a gunfight, anyway?”
He smiled sheepishly and allowed, “I stumbled over a new set of Tombstone pests. The last time I ran into Wyatt Earp, he was selling real estate in the Hollywood subdivision of Los Angeles. His pretty young wife’s been trying to bust into motion pictures at one of those new studios down yonder, wearing cowgirl duds. She lies worse about old Wyatt Earp than even he does. State, territorial, or the federal government always moves in to restore law and order once they break down totally in some out-of-the-way corner of cow country. If things are getting out of control around Comanche Woe I could come back with a scoop instead of a Sunday feature. Such blowups have usually blown over before any newspapermen can make it to the scene. That’s why so many such tales read like penny dreadfuls. Eyewitnesses of the rustic persuasion do enjoy greening the city slickers with tall tales.”
She leaned even closer to insist, “I’d hate to think I’d sent you to your death, just as we’ve gotten to know one another, Stuart. Don’t you think it would be safer, and just as much fun, if we put our heads together and worked out as fine a feature from just the facts on file? I’m not supposed to remove any clippings from the morgue, but who’s to say what teeny weeny sins we might be able to get away with over the coming weekend? It’s not as if either of us are blabber braggers, right?”
He nodded, uncertainly, but muttered something about missing his train if he didn’t haul his fool head away from the vicinity of hers, any minute now. There was no mistaking the smoke signals she was sending with both her big, soft eyes and big, firm breasts, and he could only hope it wouldn’t show when he stood up in his thin, tight jeans.
He figured they’d both survive his erection whether they dealt with it sensibly or stupidly. A man who poked his pecker into places that he ate no doubt deserved to starve, and if she saw he was leaving with it hard she might at least refrain from dismissing him as a queer to the other gals at the office.
Then she calmly told him she expected him to use French slip covers if he meant to spend the weekend with her, and that she had some on hand in case he’d neglected to bring his own. He laughed despite himself and when she asked him why, in a hurt voice, he made up a gallant fib about when he’d bought the tin box of Don Juan brand he happened to have on him at the moment. He knew he was in as much trouble now, whether he gave in or not. No woman was about to forgive a man who’d passed on such a kind offer, and risking her undying enmity the other way sounded like a hell of a heap more fun. So, when she leaned even closer and cooed more sweetly, he just reeled her in to kiss her good and feel her up for hidden weapons whilst they were swapping spit and commencing to sweat harder.
When she pleaded with him to stop teasing her, he rose from the sofa with her panting passionately in his arms and demanded directions to the nearest bedroom. It still seemed hardly fair, though as he carried her into her perfumed love lair and lowered her to the satin sheets she’d spread in advance as if expecting company. He had to admit old Gina was likely safer to mess with than either that redhead, or the gal on the second landing.
To which she replied with a wild shake of her unbound black mane, and an even wilder bounce of her firm but ample derriere, “It feels lovelier this way, the way Adam and Eve must have felt before they learned about shame. I only mentioned rubbers because I was ashamed to ask right out for you to do this to me!”
He had to laugh. He said, “I don’t seem to get to do much at all in this position, and I’m not sure Adam and Eve started out with her on top. Let me at least take my fool boots off, lest my spurs wreck your sheets.”
That seemed to tickle her fancy. She sniggered like a mean little gal writing wicked things about the teacher on the blackboard as he stripped himself down to mount her more gracefully, with a satin pillow under her rollicking rump and her nails spurring his bare buttocks as he posted in the saddle of mutual lust until she told him she’d lost count of how many times she’d climaxed. He told her she was starting to just show off, and they found a comfortable position that allowed them to share a smoke without taking it all the way out of her.
It was a swell way to carry on a friendly conversation. So, he felt mighty peeved when she commenced to nag him some more about going to West Texas.
Sam Barca had not, in fact, given Stringer any deadline on that feature he wanted. Such stories read about as well in any Sunday edition, so he could have spent the whole weekend up on Russian Hill with Gina Musso. Only he wouldn’t. He didn’t mind a gal who liked to bounce at her own pace any more than any other man might have. But as he noticed the bossy edge to her voice as she kept telling him, between times, not to go to Comanche Woe, he began to suspect he knew how come a not-bad-looking gal who screwed so fine managed to live alone so easy.
She bitched like hell when, in the end, he still got out of there in time to catch the predawn milk train down the coast. He didn’t see why. By that time, neither one of ’em could have come again, on a bet.
CHAPTER THREE
There was much to be said for starting a long train trip sleepy-headed. Getting to West Texas via the Southern Pacific in high summer would have been awesomely tedious if Stringer hadn’t gotten to doze a good deal of the way. The scenery got more interesting and the heat wasn’t quite as bad once they made it east of Tucson. He still decided he’d had as long a railroad ride as he’d ever wanted when they stopped at Sierra Blanca, just southeast of El Paso, and the conductor told him he had to get off there and change trains some more.
The two days and change he’d spent eating railroad grub and breathing coal smoke had given Stringer plenty of time to study the map he’d picked up in Frisco. He knew getting off at the next fair-sized Texas town to the east could save him about a day on the trail, assuming they had horses for hire in Van Horn. But, on the other hand, he knew for a fact they had a pretty good livery outfit here in Sierra Blanca and that, better yet, he and his paper were known there, too. It could be a pain in the ass trying to hire a couple of ponies and a decent saddle off livery men who’d never heard of you. There was a pretty good hotel with hot baths and tap room attached near the Sierra Blanca depot, come to study on it. So, before the infernal train could lead him even further astray, he got down his gladstone and dropped off the damned rolling stock. One always tended to forget how hot the summer sun glared down in West Texas until one stepped out into its full glare. Stringer felt like a cockroach striding across the bottom of a brick kiln by the time he’d made it across the dusty street to the veranda of the Vista Linda. Inside, any thermometer lurking there in the almost inky shade would have read at least ninety degrees but, next to the white heat outside, that felt swell.
Stringer dropped his gladstone near the check-in desk and said they could sell him some soap and a Turkish towel as well as a room key. When he added he’d come a long way, had a long way to go, and needed a few hours’ sleep between clean sheets with a clean hide, the old-timer behind the desk informed him he was hardly the first guest who’d ever come up with that grand notion. He added, “Some riders in a hurry to get over the pass still follow the old cattle trail to the Pecos. Anyone can see you’re in the cattle business, Mr. ah, MacKail?’`
Stringer nodded, having long since learned it saved trouble in the long run to just sign your damned last name for the damned hotel and make up anything else you might want to, as the need came up. Having no need to brag on working for the Sun, Stringer said, “We’ll talk about where I can pick up a couple of ponies after I wash at least a pound of railroad soot out of my poor gritty hide.”
So, the clerk handed over the soap and towel, Stringer tipped him a dime extra as they settled up, and then he headed back to the bath cubicles with his gladstone, room key, and scrubbing stuff for his suddenly itchy crotch.
Once he’d locked himself inside the second cubicle down, illuminated fair enough by a forty-watt Edison bulb over the claw-footed tub, he started the water running and proceeded to get undressed, hanging his hat and duds on the handy brass hooks stuck in the door. Had he not been standing so close to said door he might not have heard the low and somehow ominous growling going on out there in the dank, gloomy corridor. The cuss growling in Spanish had such a thick Anglo accent that even Stringer sensed he was talking the lingo more for privacy than comfort. Some asshole talking back to him in Spanish just as badly confirmed Stringer’s suspicion. He leaned his bare chest against the door and shoved an ear to the panels. It was still tough to make out what they were up to out there. Even when you could hear them better, they didn’t make much sense in their baby-talk Spanish. As near as he could figure, they were queers, searching for some like-minded frequenter of steamy baths with doors that locked on the inside. The more reasonable-sounding one was trying to calm the gruffer one down by assuring him the object of his affections had to be back here some damned wheres and to take it easy, lest they all get in trouble with nit-picking lawman who didn’t understand the way they felt about his passion to take care of someone’s girlish ass, if Stringer was translating it right.
He decided it was none of his business and, noting his tub was about full, turned off the taps and climbed in. It felt divine. But he’d just lathered up and settled down to soak when some asshole rattled the door latch and softly called out, “He must be in here.”
To which Stringer replied in a louder tone, “No he mustn’t. I feel free to tell you boys without even looking at you that you’d both be safe picking up the soap in my bare presence, for you see, I was born with this horrible curse and no matter how I try, I just can’t get over being queer for women!”
There was no answer. Stringer hadn’t expected any. He chuckled and dismissed the poor pests from his mind as he went on soaking soot out of his body. Queers around any place a man might unbutton his pants were just one of the things a traveling man had to put up with, like paying a whole dime a bottle for railroad beer, or avoiding card games with any strangers who wore diamond rings and asked you to call ’em “Ace.”
But as he dried off and started to put on fresh underwear and a clean shirt from his gladstone, Strin
ger reflected on more menacing annoyances to be encountered in one’s travels. So, once he had his jeans back on, he thought it best to wrap his gun rig around his hips as well. He knew a lot of gents still dressed like men in West Texas, and while he was sure Gina had only been trying to get him to do the story on her kitchen table by larding things on thick, there was an outside chance she’d really been warned of possible trouble up the trail a piece. So, as he finally stepped out of the bath cubicle with his now somewhat lighter gladstone in his left hand, his right hand was more handy to his S&W double-action .38, now that he was wearing it instead of toting it packed away with his other possibles.
This turned out a better move than even Gina might have thought possible, since he was still, after all, a hard day’s ride from the scene of any recent shoot-outs. But, as Stringer found himself facing a roughly dressed and dimly visible cuss holding a shotgun like he expected to flush quail in the steamy dark corridor, Stringer just let go of his gladstone and raced it to the floor, slapping leather as he dropped, and things still got mighty noisy back there before he could get off a round of his own.
As far as he was ever able to determine, it seemed as if the shotgun muzzle he’d dropped under just in time blew a dragon’s belch of orange flame and number-nine buck through the space Stringer’s guts had just been while, at the same moment, a sixgun lobbed at least three rounds of .44-40, point blank, where Stringer’s back had just been!
