by Lou Cameron
The result of all this noise was an already dark corridor filled with a blinding haze of pungent gunsmoke from floor to ceiling, and while the floor-shaking thuds in front and back of him were sort of encouraging, he knew he’d thudded, too, getting his rump to the floorboards. So he refrained from asking how anyone else might feel as he let them guess whether he’d been hit or not amid all that confusion. It got mighty quiet as a million years passed in the soap and gunsmoke-scented darkness.
Then another cubicle burst open, spilling forty-watt light and a dashing blur into the thick blue haze. Stringer held his fire when he noticed the blur was dashing the other way. Then he, she, or it, tore open the door to the lobby at the far end of the smoke-filled corridor and lit out for parts unknown, along with much of the smoke.
As it cleared near the floor first, Stringer saw the gent sprawled facedown atop the shotgun seemed in no shape to require any more bullets in him. Stringer turned on his tailbone to regard the other cuss who’d been blazing away with that pistol. The cuss lay spread-eagle on his back wearing batwing chaps and what seemed a dish of old Gina’s spaghetti sauce atop his otherwise gray shirt. The pistol had indeed been a Remington .44-40. The dead man had dropped it smack between his widespread boots. One of the boots had a hole worn in its sole leather.
Stringer was just getting back up on his boot soles when the gaping way out to the lobby was partially eclipsed by one hell of a heap of manhood, who called out pleasantly but firmly, “All right, this would be Hudspeth County in pursuit of some straight answers. So, leave us begin by dropping that damned gun and handing us no bullshit about who just did what, with what, to whom back here!”
Stringer dropped his .38 to the planking. Nobody but a total fool would have done anything else in his place. The big cuss in the doorway had a tin star on his vest to back up the Schofield .45 in his gun hand and, in case there was any doubt about how seriously he took his job, said .45 was trained point blank on Stringer’s chest. As his own gun hit the floor, he thought it best to keep his hands and voice polite, saying, “All I can say for certain is that I’d be Stuart MacKail from Calaveras County by way of Frisco, where I’m gainfully employed by the Sun, and that I neither shot these old boys, nor ever met up with either before.”
The Texas deputy didn’t look too convinced. Stringer continued, “They shot each other. If it wasn’t a lovers’ quarrel, they were out to do me or another customer who tore out of yet another bath just before you got here.”
The tall Texan nodded soberly and said, “The room clerk out front backs your word on that. Says a young cowboy named Jones tore outta here like he’d just seen a haunt. Whilst you’re backing clear of both these dead boys and all the hardware on the floor, I’d like you to tell me what you meant by a lovers’ quarrel. Do either of these unshaven rascals look like sissy boys to you?”
Stringer agreed they’d acted pretty tough, too, as he moved back along the corridor to give the deputy a clear squat. He said, “They were out here talking sort of lovesick about some pretty boy’s ass. Now that I study on it, I can see I may have been mistaken as to just what they meant to shove up the same.”
The big deputy hunkered down and Stringer noticed he seemed to want to get at his own innocent .38 first.
He felt better about that when the Texas lawman sniffed at the steel Stringer had cleaned and oiled more than once since it had last been fired. The deputy got back up and held the S&W to its rightful owner, growling, “Put it away and don’t go reaching for it in my presence without stating your damned good reason well in advance. I can see why you felt the call to draw better than I can see any reason you should still be alive. Are you sure you want to stick to your story about not knowing either one of these pistol-packing pricks, MacKail?”
Stringer shook his head sincerely and insisted, “Like I said, I never saw either of the ugly mutts before. Might they by any chance be better known in these parts, ah … Sheriff?”
The deputy took the hint and growled, “Bleeker, Troy Bleeker. My mother’s people was Fannons, and as to those old boys going stiffer by the minute on us, the one with the twelve-gauge pump answered to the handle of Grits Palmer. The one he shot, and vice versa, would be the late Lobo Lawrence, last seen streaking for Old Mexico and, as anyone can see, he should have stayed there.”
“You mean they were known outlaws?” asked Stringer.
Bleeker shrugged and replied, “Knowing’s one thing and proving can be another thing entirely. When asked, they was both inclined to give their occupations as honest young cowhands, unemployed at the moment but looking for work at, say, a hundred a week.”
Stringer whistled and observed, “Hombres who hire their gun hands for that kind of money have to be pretty good.”
To which Bleeker replied, “They were, until just now, anyways. Weren’t you going to tell me how you managed to come out of their crossfire in such peculiar shape, MacKail?”
Being alive didn’t feel all that peculiar to Stringer, but he didn’t want to argue that point. He said, “They may have been overrated, or rattled. Try her this way. They were expecting somebody else to step out into their field of fire, that other gent they described so sissy. When I came out in the murky light instead, they noticed I was armed and dangerous, got confused about each other’s position and, when I slapped leather as I ducked…”
“You back here, Troy?” another voice cut in to shut Stringer up about the time he was running out of sensible things to say. The older deputy growled back, “Why, hell, no. I always try to avoid the scene when somebody calls the law. Watch where you step if you got any holes in your soles, Cousin Bob. There’s blood and worse all over the floorboards, still spreading.”
Cousin Bob, closer in, did look a mite like Deputy Bleeker, and might have even without the identical droopy hat brim and tin star. He whistled cheerfully as he got a better view of the carnage and asked, “Who done it, this cuss you got here, or the one as ran out the front door lickety splickety?”
Troy Bleeker said, “Neither, as it’s commencing to shape up. This here’s MacKail from Frisco, Cousin Bob. He says he thinks the two on the floor mistook him for the one as lit out. So, all we got to do is find out where he run to and ask him what he knows about all this. The clerk out front says he gave his name as Jones.”
Cousin Bob chuckled dryly and opined, “I tends to doubt that part. I don’t know what name the young cuss gave over to the Pacific Parlor House last night, but Madam La Belle describes an unruly customer much the same was as that clerk out front, and one of the fancy gals feels sure she recalls the horny young breed from her days as a soiled dove in Fort Smith.”
Troy Bleeker nodded and said, “I know the room clerk recalls him as looking sort of like a young Indian dressed up like a cowboy. So, did that whore give us a name to go with him, other than Jones?”
Cousin Bob nodded brightly and said, “She did. She says she’s sure he was Henry Starr, nephew to the late Sam and Belle Starr of Younger’s Bend, in the old Cherokee Strip!”
Troy Bleeker whistled. Stringer just looked thunderstruck as it sank in. Then he said, “I know Henry Starr! He told me I could call him Hank, and the last I heard of him, he was robbing banks in Oklahoma when he wasn’t pimping for his whiter cousin, Miss Pearl Starr, Belle’s daughter.”
Bleeker shrugged and said, “Stands to reason an old boy in Henry Starr’s line of work would want to move around this big old country, some. Palmer and Lawrence may have been after the considerable bounty on that Oklahoma breed and… Hold on, there’s something mighty odd about all this. If these two gunslicks were all set to gun Henry Starr of two-gun fame, how come they acted so scared of you, MacKail?”
Stringer grinned sheepishly and said, “I can’t say. Last time I met up with Henry Starr, he didn’t look like a sissy boy to me.”
******
Thanks to the common sense of Troy Bleeker, nobody even suggested holding Stringer as a suspect. Aside from the simple fact that his gun had not
been fired while those of the dead men had been, the more notorious Henry Starr had been spotted fleeing the scene of the shooting, whether he’d had anything to do with it or not. When Stringer said it was his considered opinion that the only other survivor couldn’t have had anything to do with the spilling off either victim’s gore, he was gruffly told he didn’t know everything and that they’d thank him to back off and let them work out just what might or might not have happened in the steamy darkness. He knew why they weren’t even holding him as a material witness. He was just as glad. For all his crude manners, Henry Starr had treated Stringer decent enough the time they’d met in Tulsa and it wasn’t as if the law needed more evidence to hang the wayward Cherokee, when and if they captured him.
He wired in the story about the way he’d seen things happen in the not-to-certain light. He knew how Sam Barca was going to rewrite his terse account when the local paper came out that evening. As a newspaperman himself, Stringer understood why the headlines sold more by screaming HENRY STARR KILLS TWO SHOOTISTS IN SIERRA BLANCA! It just made him feel a mite morose. He didn’t know why. Old Hank was doubtless keeping a scrapbook of such clippings, assuming he knew how to read and write. Stringer didn’t know why outlaws liked to see their names in the papers, either. He’d always figured that if he was wanted by the law, the first thing he’d consider would have to be changing his last known name and address.
Some few apparently had. The notorious Bender family of Kansas had simply scattered to the four winds, never to be heard of again, after they’d been exposed as murderous monsters, but before the posse could move in on their little house of horror, where prairie travelers checked in for the night, but never seemed to check out.
Curly Bill Brocius had been spotted more than once, alive and well, long after the Earps bragged on killing him in a gunfight that changed a heap with the telling.
Some said Emmett Dalton, the Dalton Brother that somehow lived through that shoot-out in Coffeyville, was out in Hollywood with Wyatt Earp these days, advising those motion picture dudes on how the boys robbed folk west of New Jersey, where they’d filmed The Great Train Robbery in ’03, and Stringer took that tale of Butch and Sundance lighting out for South America with at least as much salt as the railroad dicks drawing extra pay where the Wild Bunch still roamed.
Yet, it seemed most riders of the owlhoot trail were not only unconcerned but anxious to have their names spelled right in the nationwide press. Since he’d spelled everyone’s name right and what the law wanted to do about any of ’em didn’t seem to be his problem, Stringer indulged himself in a good night’s sleep at the Vista Linda Hotel.
The next morning he rode out of Sierra Blanca on a chestnut barb with a scrub pinto packing such trail supplies as he’d picked up at the general store across from the livery. Since he’d brought his more valuable possibles along in his gladstone, these consisted mostly of grub and drinking water for himself and the two ponies. The food and drink for the latter bulked much more than the canned rations and couple of gallons Stringer could get by on.
The San Francisco Sun was paying six bits a day plus deposit for the hired horseflesh and gear. By the time he’d followed the dusty trail to Comanche Woe less than three miles, he was commencing to suspect the fox-faced old fart running the livery back yonder had slickered him and his paper. While the scrub pony carrying the packsaddle tagged along sullenly but placidly, the barb behaved more like a superstitious sissy being led through a graveyard after dark, even though the morning was bright and easy, with nothing more sinister than mesquite and Spanish bayonet to either side of the trail.
The second time the hysterical horse shied at a bird turd, or less, Stringer suspected he’d been screwed on the saddle as well. He never got on without making sure his saddle cinch was tight. So, the ominous way his seating shifted under him as the pony reared suggested a cracked tree, if it wasn’t entirely busted under the leather shrunk to the swells.
The third time it happened, Stringer knew it was time to make a few changes in his travel plans. Regaining control after a big and noisy but harmless desert locust had scared the chestnut half to death with a flash of its black and yellow wings, Stringer pulled off the trail into a grove of mesquite to dismount. “This shit must cease,” he announced. “A man can ride a bum pony with a good saddle, a man can ride a bum saddle aboard a good pony, but he can’t be expected to do both for what they’re paying me!”
He tethered both nags to tree branches and removed both saddles. There was nothing wrong with the simple X-frame packsaddle, but as he’d feared, Stringer was able to bend the fork of his hired stock saddle in a manner that couldn’t have been intended by the old-timer who’d put it together from scratch way back when. The frame of every stock saddle was called a tree because that was what it was made from. If a saddle tree was any good, its fork was made out of a stout tree, elm being best and cottonwood the cheapest, then whittled upside down into the swells and horn mount. A pair of slats carved much the same as barrel staves ran back to support the more skillfully carved cantle or rump rest. The four pieces of wood were united under a skintight cover of rawhide shrunk in place and sealed with a couple of coats of shellac to form a solid foundation for the parts that showed. Solid foundations were not supposed to shift. This tree had split in the worst possible place, where the steel shank of the horn had been driven down through that natural inverted fork, to leave nothing but the rawhide and saddle leather holding the damned thing together.
The next thing Stringer studied was the sky. The sun was already a third of the way to the zenith and getting hotter by the minute. So, while he was certainly entitled to go back and demand a refund, or at least a decent saddle, Stringer knew that even if they didn’t give him an argument, it was going to cost him more time on the trail than he liked to think about. He’d already indulged in too many detours on the way to Comanche Woe. It was about time he buckled down to getting there.
He began by digging through his possibles for something to make riding with a split saddle tree more possible. He’d grown up knowing how handy rawhide could be, so he naturally had a few yards of thongs cut from latigo to shoelace thickness among his possibles. He selected some cut wide enough to tan as latigo leathers and began by soaking it good in a hatful of trail water. He let it soak the time it took him to water both ponies and build and smoke a cigarette. Then he built and lit another, put the sopping wet Stetson back on, which felt fine, and stretched the wet rawhide more than twice as far as anyone could have, dry.
Having such sneaky stuff to work with, Stringer hunkered down to wrap the slickery wet rawhide tight as he could around the fork of the busted saddle, counting on the swells of the fork just below the horn to hold the binding in place. Then there was nothing to do but wait. He knew that as the rawhide shrank, it would clamp the split wood as tightly and almost as strongly as wrought iron could.
He let it all dry in the shade, knowing that whilst the summer sun would dry it faster on the outside, he’d wind up with a stronger bond in the end if he let things work out natural in the cool, dry shade. Any give left in the rawhide if and when he even moved the saddle now, figured to go on giving as much or more.
Assured he’d saved himself at least half the time it would have taken riding back to town and then all the way back here, Stringer told the ponies they could browse all the mesquite pods they could get at and found himself a boulder over beside the trail to sit on as he resisted the temptation to fool with that damned saddle. He knew his hat would be not only dry but sucking sweat out of his head again before those buckskin thongs had dried out totally. Meanwhile, he had plenty of Bull Durham and, hell, an early snack on preserved tomatoes wouldn’t hurt him if it got much hotter.
It did. These parts of West Texas never got less than a couple of thousand feet above sea level. So, the air was thinner and a mite cooler than, say, New Orleans at the same latitude. No place that far south got all that frigid in high summer, and the Texas sun made up for the thin
ner air by glaring meaner through it. As the morning wore on, shade got tougher to find. Stringer rose from his first rock to step across the trail to another that now seemed a mite more shaded. He hadn’t acted on a sudden whim. He’d stared about for a better place to bake before making up his mind. However, when he had moved, he’d moved unexpectedly, as far as the bushwhacker atop a rise to the south was concerned. So, the carefully aimed .30-30 slug he’d fired just as Stringer rose missed its intended target by a good inch and a half.
That was still close enough to Stringer’s rump, where his head had just been, to inspire a headfirst dive into the chaparral across the trail, followed by a roll, some frantic crawling and a heap of cussing before Stringer felt reasonably safe with his side arm in his hand and most of the rest of him behind a rocky outcrop screened by mesquite and smoke bush. Stringer knew that shot had come from the south side of the trail, and he was pretty sure it had come from a deer rifle, meaning the bastard had the range on him. First things coming first, Stringer eased to his left hand and knees to sidewind eastward through the trailside chaparral until he had a clear view of his two ponies tethered on the less safe side of said trail. That’d give him tricky but possible pistol range on anyone out to molest his gear or riding stock. Who that might be, and where the son of a bitch might be right now with that son of a bitching rifle, was up for grabs. Until he found out, Stringer thought it wiser to stay right where he was, playing Tarbaby in the sticker bush. Those thirty-grain shells lobbing thirty caliber soft-nose deer slugs could do so with some accuracy a quarter mile and more while his .38, with luck, might down a cuss on second base from home plate.
There were more than a dozen higher spots overlooking Stringer’s position from less than a quarter mile away. The old cattle trail ran the lazy way east from Sierra Blanca, between bumps great and small to either side. Stringer took off his light gray Stetson and cranked his head over one shoulder for a morose gander at the rising sun to his left. It was nowhere near high noon yet. He grumbled, “Great. Unless one of us moves, and that ain’t about to be me, this standoff figures to last until sundown and my water as well as all my grub is yonder, out of my reach!”
