by Lou Cameron
Absently, he started to reach for the makings. He stopped as soon as he realized where his hand was heading, and picked up a smooth agate pebble to put in his mouth instead. Aside from even cigarette smoke being visible one hell of a ways in bright sunlight, he knew he’d last longer without water if he kept his fool mouth shut and his spit flowing. He’d been in this spot before. He’d read and written stories about other men who’d broken cover first. He had to assume anyone who’d gone to the trouble of trailing him this far to peg a shot at him had to be serious, if not professional.
As he rolled the pebble about in his already thirsty mouth, dying for Bull Durham, Stringer made himself think back to that hot, sticky day betwixt Palma Soriano and Santiago, down Cuba way, when he and the world had been a mite younger and felt less sneaky. By that time, he’d found out Spanish snipers felt a gringo was a gringo whether he wore a press patch or not. So, he’d found himself in the same boat, or ditch, with those infantry scouts from the New York 69th when the Dons opened up on them from higher ground with that sneaky smokeless powder.
After the first flurry things had gotten just like this, with nobody hurt on either side until that poor sappy corporal, his name had been … What, Riley? Ryan …?
“Mud,” Stringer decided, recalling how sure the young squad leader had been about the yellow bastards having run away, and how red a ruin his face had seemed after the yellow bastards hit him twice in the head with those British dum dum rounds.
“I told him it seemed safer to wait for darkness, or at least some reinforcements,” Stringer muttered, spitting out the pebble, since it didn’t really seem to help. Maybe if he moved on down the trail, say, a full quarter mile and then dashed across …
“Forget it,” he sternly warned himself. There was only one safe way to play a pistol against a rifle. You forted up with the pistol and let the son of a bitch with the rifle come to you, hopefully suckering him into point blank range.
So, another million years went by, without the fool sun getting any higher as far as Stringer could see, and then he heard distant hoofbeats and harness jingles, which didn’t mean all that much to him until he heard someone call out, “That shot must have come from some damned where around here, Cousin Bob!”
That inspired Stringer to gather his heels under him and rise just high enough for a bareheaded peek through the heat waves rising from the chaparral. When he spotted sunlight glinting off a badge at least one of the riders from the east was wearing, he felt no call to holster his six-gun just yet but did feel obliged to call out, “Rifleman off to your right flank with a hard-on about something, boys!”
That inspired all five of them to scatter, riding low and busting brush in all directions, some less sensibly than others. As the deputy called Cousin Bob came his way, levering a round into the chamber of his own rifle, Stringer thought it best to put on his hat and step out on the trail with his own gun pointed down at the dust. As the lawman recognized him, he reined in to call out, “Who was it, that pesky Henry Starr?”
To which Stringer sincerely replied, “I doubt it. We know one another on sight and old Hank’s never tried to shoot me before. Is that who you boys are looking for, Cousin Bob?”
The Hudspeth County lawman shook his head and said, “He’d hardly be on this trail outta Sierra Blanca. We just got word Buckskin Jack Blair run yet another badman outta Comanche Woe, and old Troy sent us to head the rascal off. It ain’t like Sierra Blanca’s the city dump of Comanche Woe, you know. If the son of a bitch ain’t good enough for them they got no right sending him to us!”
Before Stringer could allow that sounded only fair another deputy called out from a rise to the south. As far as they could make out from his doleful yells, he’d found a spent .30-30 shell down yonder and spotted dust way off to the southeast. Cousin Bob turned back to Stringer with a thin smile to opine, “He’s making for Old Mexico by way of the Big Bend, then. Wouldn’t be worth a white man’s time to track him through the Santiago Canyonlands with the lead he has on us.”
Stringer holstered his S&W and reached for his makings as he said, “Whether he’s headed for Old Mexico, or Mars, he couldn’t have been Henry Starr. So, who’s left? You say Buckskin Jack’s claiming he ran yet another hardcase out of Comanche Woe? He’s commencing to shape up as a thundering wonder, or the king of bullshit artists!”
By this time the other riders were drifting in from their vain pursuit of the long-gone bushwhacker. Cousin Bob said, “He gunned Mysterious Dave and crawfished Starr and that other cuss in front of witnesses.” Then he called out to one of his pals, “Robles, what was the handle of that desperado old Troy Bleeker told us to watch out for?”
The other deputy called back, “Curly Bill from Arizona Territory, wasn’t it?”
To which Cousin Bob replied with a nod, “Right, Curly Bill Broadass or some such name. Troy says we got no warrant on the son of a bitch but wants it distinctly understood that he’s to stay on the far side of the county line and at least one mountain pass. They say he’s tetched as well as sudden with a six-gun.”
Stringer almost spilled his tobacco as Cousin Bob’s words sank in. He protested, “Aw, come on, we can’t be talking about Curly Bill Brocius, whose real name was likely William Graham. He was last seen alive in the mid-nineties and whether he’s still around or not, he’d have to be sedate and pretty elderly. He was in his thirties when he gunned Marshal White in Tombstone twenty years and change ago!”
Cousin Bob nodded but said, “Troy Bleeker’s pushing fifty, and you still wouldn’t want to mess with him. He says Curly Bill was mean, sober, and as unpredictable as stale dynamite when he’d been at the red-eye.”
Stringer insisted, “Damn it, Curly Bill stood trial for the killing of Marshal White and beat the charges. The stories about him taking part in the killing of Morgan Earp and the crippling of Virgil Earp were never made at the time. Old Wyatt, out on the coast, never even claimed he’d killed Curly Bill, more than one way, until just recently for those western movie writers. So, it’s safe to assume Wyatt figures old Curly Bill must be dead by now, too. Like I said, nobody’s seen hide nor hair of the old gent for at least a dozen years and he was leading an unhealthy life way back when.”
The riders from Sierra Blanca didn’t seem too convinced. Stringer knew they didn’t want to be told they’d likely been sent out on a fool’s errand. Lighting his smoke, he strode back to where he’d left his hired mounts and trail gear. He treated himself to a deep gulp of canteen water. His hat was bone dry and heating up by now but he didn’t test his saddle tree yet. When Cousin Bob said he and his boys might as well head on back to town, having scared old Curly Bill off to Old Mexico, Stringer couldn’t refrain from asking him, “Why? I mean why Curly Bill and not some other bushwhacker just now? Unlike Henry Starr, Curly Bill wouldn’t know me from Adam and if he did know me he’d have no call to start up with me.”
Cousin Bob pointed out, “They say he was mean as hell in the old days and for all we know he’s gotten senile, since.”
Stringer shook his head firmly and insisted, “Like Mysterious Dave Mather, he sounded more ferocious than anything he ever really did! He was accused of everything but leprosy at a time the republicans and democrats in and about Tombstone were meanmouthing one another. Curly Bill was in with the county administration and even helped the sheriff’s department collect taxes. He just as naturally sided against the town law and some say he shot Marshal White on purpose instead of by accident, as he claimed at his trial. In any event we’re talking about an elderly gent no worse than the Brothers Earp and probably a lot nicer than their pal, Doc Holliday. So, what call might you or that town marshal up in Comanche Woe have to harass him in his declining years?”
Cousin Bob shrugged and said, “Ours is not to reason why. We’re peace officers, paid to keep the peace, which ain’t half as easy with notorious gunfighters loitering about. Even if they don’t start up with somebody, somebody’s always starting up with them and we don’t
want nobody acting up in Sierra Blanca the way that asshole acted in the Eagle pool hall up to El Paso the time John Wesley Hardin was passing through in his old age.”
Stringer muttered, “Aw, shit,” but Cousin Bob brightened and decided, “I swan if that don’t explain the gunplay in the Vista Linda bathing facilitations yesterday pretty good. Those old boys as almost gunned you were likely out to gun Henry Starr, just so’s they could brag on having done so. It’s open season on a wanted man, you know, and all this excitement up to Comanche Woe seems to be drawing murderous bastards young and old outta the woodwork!”
Stringer couldn’t argue with that. He asked the deputy out of Sierra Blanca if he or his pals had any notion what was behind all the trouble up the trail in Comanche Woe. Cousin Bob shook his head to reply in a mighty cheerful tone, considering, “Nope. Like I said, our job is seeing they keep their damned troubles to themselves. Comanche Woe has always been a trashy town attracting mighty trashy folk. It’s surrounded by marginal range and not much else worth fighting over, yet they’ve always had more fights up yonder than you could shake a stick at. It was worse afore they hired Buckskin Jack to tame things down a mite. Since he’s been on the job hardly anyone gets kilt up there no more.” Cousin Bob spat and added in a surlier tone, “Trouble is, since that town tamer come to town, the killers seem to be scattering in ever’ damned direction.”
Having delivered himself of these remarks about a rival trail town Cousin Bob stared thoughtfully down the trail back to Sierra Blanca and decided, “It’s going to get a heap hotter before it ever gets a lick cooler out here and, like I said, the cuss we were sent to head off seems headed off to Old Mexico.”
Stringer started to argue and decided not to waste his breath. When Cousin Bob invited him to saddle up and tag along back to saner surroundings Stringer shook his head and said, “My feature editor would never forgive me if I failed to cover Comanche Woe, now. I can’t wait to interview a town tamer who’s apparently shot it out with one notorious killer and run at least two as bad or worse out of town within the past few days!”
Cousin Bob shrugged and said, “You’d best get there soon, then. Troy Bleeker figures, and I agree, a man who’d order Mysterious Dave, Henry Starr and Curly Bill to slap leather or get outta his town on the double can’t be long for this world!”
Stringer glanced down at his hastily repaired saddle as he nodded and replied, “I just said that.”
CHAPTER FOUR
By late that afternoon the ever-rising trail seemed a mite cooler, and Stringer felt surer his repaired saddle would hold together as long as it didn’t rain and he refrained from roping anything grander than a horny toad from the scrub pinto. He hadn’t thought to tote a throw rope along in any case, and he’d changed to riding the pinto once he’d made sure the prettier chestnut barb was insane. You could usually trust a mutt pony, or a mutt dog, for reasons having not a thing to do with Professor Darwin’s notions about survival of the fittest. Anyone could see a critter bred for good riding or good hunting was likely better at it. However, the results of such hasty conclusions could be high-strung and worthless critters, too pretty to just shoot or drown young, the first time they showed signs of being contrary. A handsome horse, like a beautiful bitchy woman, could get away with a heap of bullshit, whilst nobody with a lick of sense put up with much from an ugly pony, dog, or sweetheart. So, a mutt had to act halfway decent just to get by and, as he’d hoped, the jugheaded pinto handled as obediently as any rider might want and, what the hell, if it had a jolting gait, it had a jolting gait. Stirrups were made to take some of the jolts aimed up a man’s spine by way of his tailbone.
Meanwhile, the damned chestnut barb tippytoed like a four-legged ballet dancer under its much lighter packsaddle and fought the lead line when it suspected Stringer wasn’t expecting it. As he rode along half lulled by the hoof clops of both ponies, he kept warning himself to dammit stay sharp and keep it in mind that the purple hills rising up ahead were called the Apaches for good reason. He hoped the days the so-called Apache or Nadene had raided this far east were past, but when they’d still haunted those jagged-ass peaks dissected by countless and still unmapped caves and canyons, they’d shown the mighty confused cavalry a thing or two about bushwhacking. The rock and brush-strewn range closer in all around them didn’t inspire the feeling he was riding carefree up a bridal path in Golden Gate Park, or even hunting strays on Uncle Don’s M Bar K in Calaveras County, come to study on it.
From time to time they’d pass a distant cow, or the flash of one’s calico hide as it moved off through the brush like a damned deer at the sight of a man on horseback. They were longhorns, with mayhaps just a tad of whiteface blood to make ’em chew less tough. Some said those humpbacked Hindu cows from the Orient could stay alive on Texas range this hot and dry. Stringer knew few other beef breeds could. The Mex rancheros had known what they were doing when they brought the Spanish longhorn to this part of the world. The breed had thrived on the sunbaked range of old Spain because, before that, it had managed to get by, however barely, on the Barbary Coast of North Africa, just like the Barb, or so-called Arab horse the Spanish favored. Both breeds had been introduced to Spain by the Moors from North Africa, just like the big straw “Mexican” sombrero and a heap of other odd cowboy notions Anglo cowboys now accepted as their own tradition. The deer-shy Spanish longhorns all about were likely to stay there until someone invented another breed, or some other way to make a living off land this hot and dusty.
Stringer knew, for old-timers kept telling him, that only a few years back there’d been a hell of a lot more grass and a lot less mesquite in West Texas. He’d covered the odd story of the old stockman who’d fenced off a quarter section of marginal range just to keep it pristine for his grandchildren, his rabbits or whatever. Sam Barca had refused to run the story. He’d said it would strike most readers as pointless. He might have been right. Stringer still found it interesting that a quarter section of almost worthless scrub, left to nature to heal with nothing bigger than a rabbit allowed to graze it, had reverted in only a few short years to a meadow of dense shortgrass.
Plenty of critters, more than seemed to be about, had been allowed to graze these slopes, and then some. Mesquite was as much a weed as it was a bush or, left alone long enough, a small tree. It was a member of the pea family, unlikely as that sounded, and its curly brown pods of tasty seeds didn’t do so well on thick grass. Everything from ground squirrels to hungry hobos was inclined to eat mesquite seed before it could sprout, unless it could get itself buried, pronto, in wind-drifted dust or cracked mud left over from a short-lived storm.
Stockmen held mixed views on the stuff, once it did sprout on overgrazed range. Mesquite was a pain in the ass to ride through and a good many cows always managed to hide out in it through roundup time. On the other hand, the feathery leaves and more nutritious pods offered more fodder per acre than such marginal range would support in the form of grass, even managed right.
So, a lot of southwestern stockmen, some said all too many of them, seemed to accept chaparral range as natural to their part of the world and, what the hell, a man wearing fancy chaps would look sort of dumb if there’d been no chaparral to ride through.
Meaning only to follow the established cattle trail up and over to Comanche Woe, Stringer was naturally only sporting denim jeans over his knees as the trail choked tight in stretches to offer him some grand excuses for cussing. The predominate mesquite was thorny enough, but not half as bad to brush against as the catclaw and cholla, delicately called deerbush by some total assholes in these parts. It wasn’t any sort of bush. It was a damned cactus plant that pretended to be a bush until you brushed so much as a hair against it. The fuzzy gray-green cholla pads looked a lot like leaves mixed in with the mesquite. You found out they weren’t by riding on with one or more clinging to you with its spines, like some species of vegetable tick. Stringer and the paint had enough sense to avoid most of the cholla they had to work past. Th
e damned fool barb kept getting stuck with it and acting even more loco en la cabeza.
The third or fourth time Stringer dismounted to flick cholla pads out of and away from the barb’s chestnut hide, he found himself in a sandy clearing handy to the trail. So he announced, “We’d best consider calling it a day, here, ponies. I doubt we’re halfway to Comanche Woe, and cholla doesn’t go with moonlight worth shit.”
Suiting actions to his words, Stringer tethered the ponies side by side on the far side of the clearing, unsaddled them, filled their nose bags with tepid water from one of the rubberized canvas bags, and rubbed them down as they drank. He dropped a couple of fistfuls of cracked corn in each pony’s moist bag then, their basic needs taken care of, he fed himself a can of beans, washed it down with a can of tomato preserves, and spread his bedroll in the sand well clear of either pony’s shitting range. By now the sun was low and coal-ember red in a cloudless purple sky. He knew they were much higher than Sierra Blanca on a windward slope. So, while it was uncomfortably warm in his denim jacket at this hour, he began to gather firewood while he could still see what he was doing. The same chore could be a real pain in the ass at midnight when and if one woke up shivering on frost-covered sand. A man had to think ahead in semidesert country with a will of its own.
Green mesquite wood was about as easy to set afire as the briar they made tobacco pipes out of, and a son of a bitch to chop in any case. There were plenty of dead branches, however, that busted off easy if they hadn’t already fallen to the sand. He found a whole dead stalk of Spanish bayonet to use as kindling. Spanish bayonet was the West Texas answer to the tree-like Joshua of the Great Basin or the totally trunkless yucca sprouting from the California Coast ranges to the High Plains of Montana. Spanish bayonet split the difference by growing waist-to shoulder-high on a thick, shaggy trunk like a halfassed palm. The unbranched trunk, like that of the more dramatic Joshua, was more dry pith than wood and once you busted into it with a boot you could crumble it in your hands as if it was dry-rotted balsa wood. So, Stringer was hunkered on his heels near his bedding later, crumbling crud to kindle his camp fire, when he heard a dog barking in the distance.
