by Lou Cameron
It was unfair. The deer-shy critter was called a chongo because it had freak horns and, thus, probably a warped nature. Young calves sometimes injured their horn buds trying to gore telegraph poles and such, resulting in odd racks to throw ropes over. This particular chongo had one horn down over one eye like a wild spit curl while the other curled back as useless as a pencil behind a bookkeeper’s ear. Snagging either freak horn at all would be tough. Doing it in the time and space alloted looked about impossible, and Reynolds must have known it. As the chongo broke cover, he laughed and yelled, “Go git ’em, greaser!”
Lefty Chavez went, steering the disputed palomino with his knees as he shook out a loop on the run. At Stringer’s side, Roy Bean Junior shouted, “Pero no! Mas vuelta, imbécil!” and Stringer had to agree Lefty was never going to hook those busted-up horns with anything less than a community loop. Then the young vaquero threw as freaky as the horns of that freak cow had grown and they all stared slack-jawed as the Mex kid’s leather loop rolled along the ground about the size and shape of a kid’s play hoop to cut in front of the chongo near the very end of the sixty-foot reata and snare the one front hoof coming down in it.
Dally roping, with the line snubbed loosely around the horn instead of tied to it, was said to be easier on all the stock involved. As Lefty reined the palomino to a sliding asswipe stop and the reata twanged like a big old catgut fiddlestring, the chongo went ass over tea kettle to wind up flat and stunned in a cloud of dust. As it tried to rise, Lefty jerked his end of the reata to spill it again, calling out, “Are one of you boys going to hog-tie it or do I have to do all the work around here?”
There came a friendly roar of laughter and someone shouted, “You’re all right, Chavez. Just hold the fool brute and I’ll free your line for you.”
As the friendly hand rode forward to do so, Stringer turned to Rusty and asked, “Satisfied?”
The leader of the ad hoc posse hesitated, then nodded soberly and turned to Roy Bean Junior, saying, “I hope you can see how it looked to me and the boys, Mr. Bean.”
Roy nodded as soberly back and replied, “I’d have done about the same in your place and my dear old dad would have likely hung us.”
Rusty laughed in a surprisingly boyish way, and that was the end of it. They gave the two kids from Langtry their guns and, the horses and horse thieves they were still after not being present, loped west along the trail Stringer had just ridden out of Sierra Blanca. As he and the two Hispanics watched their dust recede, Roy Junior muttered, “Damned fools ain’t likely to catch up with them thieves that way, neither, but I doubt any trails in these parts will be safe for la raza until they do. You say there’s a town around here, somewheres, amigo viejo?”
Stringer pointed northeast with his chin and said, “Comanche Woe. Can’t be more than an hour’s ride or so, and you’re right about this being no time for night riding on unfamiliar ranger. We’d best get all these ponies out of sight and out of mind before we have that drink on this afternoon’s adventure.”
Lefty Chavez laughed and said, “I can use more than one. I thought I’d shit when you came up with that dumb notion about roping from this palomino! Didn’t it ever occur to you that a pony I borrowed off my cousin here was as likely to be broken for right-handed roping as any other?”
Stringer laughed and said, “I’ll allow it occurred to me as soon as you lit out after that chongo. But not many of those old boys could have known all that much about dally roping. They didn’t notice when you threw cross-grained to keep from confusing your mount as much as it should have confused you, you slick-roping sneak!”
CHAPTER SIX
The sun hung low behind them as the three young strangers rode into town aboard a palomino, two paints, and a fourth expensive-looking pony packing Stringer’s possibles. Stringer and his companions stared back at the town just as suspicious, for Comanche Woe didn’t have all that much to feel snooty about.
As if being forty miles or more from anything else worth mention was not enough to hide its sins, the sun-silvered clot in the erstwhile commercial artery hunkered low betwixt two brush-covered rises in a dell that drained eastward through that arroyo those Comanche never should have come up, down to the more canyon-like Cottonwood Draw that at least rated lettering on the survey map.
The town itself had been granted a dot and minor post office designation. Closer up, it consisted of a couple of business blocks and about as many private dwellings as an angry card player might have managed tossing the whole deck in the dealer’s face just before the shooting commenced. None of the ramshackle dwellings of adobe or unpainted planking lined up any neater with its helter-skelter neighbors and, save for the one main street following a more or less level contour line, the dirt pathways sprawled on the south slope of the shallow draw were as carefully surveyed as the dead and dying worms spilled out of some giant’s bait can.
The reason most of the town clung to the south and, hence, northward-facing slope, save for the obvious reasons nobody in West Texas wanted to spend more time on a south-facing slope than he or she had to, was occasioned by the odd sight of standing water, a good six or seven acres of it, impounded behind a low dam at the east end of town. He knew the dam had been erected to hold back spring water. There just wasn’t enough higher ground around Comanche Woe for all that scummy liquid to be rainwater in country where it rained so seldom.
Their route into town took the three of them below rooftop level too soon for Stringer to firmly map the whole layout in his head, but signs were lettered in hopes of helping strangers find their way amid unfamiliar surroundings. So, as soon as he spied one describing a big barnlike structure as the town livery he turned to the others to declare, “We’d best get these ponies under cover, pronto. No offense, Lefty, but you and that palomino are attracting looks that are making me nervous as hell!”
Lefty and Roy Bean Junior didn’t seem to want to argue that point with Stringer. They’d already been treated more suspiciously in these parts than he had. When they reined in by the cavernous door of the livery to find a fat old gent of the Mex persuasion in charge, the two younger boys from Langtry knuckled down to question a fellow Hispanic more about the way la raza stood in this ugly little Anglo town than they did about the price of oats and water, or avenas y agua, as folk took care of spent ponies in Spanish.
Stringer and Roy Bean Junior got to do most of the work as Lefty and the old hostler powwowed in rapid-fire Chihuahua Mex that Stringer had some trouble following. He was more fluent in Californio, which was closer to the dialect of the Catalan Volunteer Regiments sent to back the padres in the mission days of Spanish California. Chihuahua had a lot more pagan Indian stirred up in it than the old padres might have approved. Stringer was just able to make out that Lefty’s big Mex sombrero was likely to make as tempting a target as a street lamp to certain Texas riders, and that since all the street lamps they’d ever had had been shot out long ago, it might be wiser to borrow a gringo hat or, better yet, stay the hell out of sight after dark with a payday weekend coming on.
That turned out easier than one might have thought in such a gringo town. Perhaps because Comanche Woe was such a gringo town, the few local members of la raza stuck together. The old hostler invited all three of them to spend the night with his large clan in their small adobe. Stringer felt gratified to be included, but as they got all four ponies safe in their stall for the night he told his Hispanic pals he’d take his chances overnight in the main part of town. Roy Bean understood. The two purer Mexicans looked miffed, so he assured them it wasn’t that he hated frijoles and tortillas, but that he hadn’t been sent all this way to enjoy any. When he said he had to interview the one and only Buckskin Jack, the old Mex crossed himself and said, “You would be wiser for to leave your pistol here in my care, with your other belongings, señorito.’’
Stringer cocked an eyebrow and demanded, “Por que, viejo? Up to now it’s been my experience that strangers get rawhided more when they drink unarmed
than when they drink the other way around!”
The older local nodded soberly and replied, with dignity, “One survives being called vile names by drunken Tejanos. The town marshal rawhides indeed. That is for why they call him Joaquin Cuero. But, to date he has never drawn on a victim unable to defend himself. So, go with God and no gun when you go to meet him, and that way he will have no excuse for to gun you when he tells you whether you are to remain in town or leave it, poco tiempo, see?”
Stringer frowned and replied, “Not hardly. I don’t see how he can call himself the town law if he feels free to act so lawless. I mean, hell, this is the twentieth century and even when they let assholes like Strangling Granville Stuart deal with suspicious strangers sort of informal they had to offer some excuse. Teddy Roosevelt never would have made Strangling Granville our present Minister to Uruguay if he’d killed boys passing through Montana just for the hell of it!”
The old Mex shrugged and said, “Perhaps our Joaquin Cuero does not have such lofty political ambitions. A youth of la raza who works in the Parker Arms Saloon witnessed the death of Mysterious Dave Mather less than a week ago. He says it was more an execution than a gunfight. When the elderly ranchero came into the Parker Arms, our brave marshal simply demanded to know for why he was wearing those .45s under his frock coat and then drew his own revolver and fired without waiting for any answer!”
Roy Bean Junior whistled softly and opined, “Men with such mean ways tend to make habits of ’em ’til somebody puts ’em outta their misery, Stringer. When I was little, my dear old daddy had to deal with such types down to the Jersey Lilly. His Honor told us more than once that this world can be divided amongst men who don’t have what it takes to kill, men who have what it takes if they have to, and men who enjoy killing because they don’t have what it takes to think civilized. You’d best come along to Mex town with me and Lefty, and, come sunrise, we can all haul ass outta this shit pile. I for one would have taken my chances on the trail tonight if I’d known it was the private shooting gallery of a homicidal lunatic!”
Stringer was tempted. Sam Barca had only mentioned space rates and Stringer had never felt they’d paid him enough for those front-line dispatches from Cuba. However, he found himself asking the older local more about the showdown between the late Mysterious Dave and the murderous sounding marshal Blair. The hostler confessed he’d only gotten the story secondhand but repeated it much the same as Stringer had heard so far. The only thing new he picked up on was that the late David Mather had not been passing through but was, in fact, a longtime resident of the area, albeit not registered to vote by the name he’d been wanted under back in Kansas, of course.
That did it. Dangerous as the game was starting to sound, things kept getting more and more curious in Comanche Woe. Leaving everything and everybody he’d come to town with in the old Mexican gent’s care, save for his notebook and six-gun, Stringer strode out in the cool shades of evening to see if he could find out what on earth was going on in such an out-of-the-way part of the earth.
Finding the Parker Arms Saloon was no great chore, unless a town this small could afford two drinking establishments sporting red and gold coats of arms over their batwing doorways. Stringer had no idea whether the three gilt leopard heads staring down off that red shield stood for Parkers in general, or the branch Chief Quanah Parker’s white mamma hailed from. This being Comanche Woe, and old Quanah having been an awfully ornery Comanche in his younger days, it made at least as much sense as having saloons in Dodge named after Long Branch, New Jersey, or the Alhambra in Old Spain.
Inside, he didn’t ask. It was tough enough to get a beer at the crowded bar. Though the sun was barely down, a heap of old boys had already ridden into town. He knew most of them worked on cow spreads on the rolling range all about because hardly anybody worked in a shop or smithy wearing chaps, and there weren’t that many shops or smithies in town to begin with. As he got his beer and stepped back from the bar to sip at it without an elbow poking him in either rib, a young rider with his chaps half unbuckled as if to cool his legs favored him with a thoughtful look and confided, “I’d check that sixgun afore Buckskin Jack spies you wearing it, if I was you, stranger.”
Stringer had already noticed none of the other roughly dressed riders were wearing side arms. He smiled thinly and said, “I’m not so strange, cowboy. You can call me Stringer, Stringer MacKail, and rest assured I never came in here looking for trouble.”
The cowhand smiled back and replied, “I never would have tried to warn you if I’d thought you was Butch Cassidy. My elder brother rid in Cuba under a hat like yours and I’d hate to see another vet get blowed out from under it. Why don’t you just check your pistol with old Tom, ahint the bar? He’ll give it back to you as you leave, provided you look half sober.”
Another cowhand who’d been listening to their conversation chimed in, “Old Windy’s right, and it ain’t as if time was not of the essence, ah, MacKail. The bully of the town ought to be showing up any minute now, it being just past suppertime.”
Stringer started to say he’d never like bullies all that much, even when he’d been small enough to be afraid of ’em. All a preddy town tamer had to hear was that some strange galoot was in his town, passing surly remarks about him before he even knew what the cuss with the rep to worry about might look like. So, before any born troublemaker could mark him down as trouble-come-to-town, Stringer nodded agreeably and said, “I thank you boys for your tip, and if ever I make it back to the bar I’ll ask old Tom to hide this rig under the same.”
He meant it. There seemed no sense riling the lawman he’d come all this way to interview before he could ask the first question, and there was no question that the hardcased cuss didn’t approve of anyone else wearing a gun in his august presence. The place wouldn’t be half so full at this hour if Buckskin Jack made a habit of gunning unarmed patrons with no known criminal records. Stringer still felt proddy enough to ask if either of the talkative locals had witnessed the demise of Mysterious Dave.
The young hand who’d started the conversation allowed he’d only heard about it later, after the poor dead cuss had been laid out in the window of the hardware store to see if anyone wanted to come forward and spring for his funeral.
The older hand who’d joined them said, “I was playing faro at the corner layout you can’t quite make out from here when it’s this crowded. The crowd thinned considerable when Buckskin Jack called his man, over here by the bar, so I got to see most of it. The older gent they just buried as Mysterious Dave was better known in these parts as Pete Harlow. Lived alone on the far side of the dam and kept a herd of, say, two hundred head on Uncle Sam’s free fodder all about.”
Windy nodded and said, “His brand was registered Tumbling H. I rid roundup for him a time or two afore I got steady work out to the Garson Spread. He treated me all right. Whoever would have thought he was a wanted murderer from Dodge City!”
Stringer shot him a politely annoyed look. The one who claimed to have seen the fight stared less politely and continued, “I can’t say how tough he was in the old days. He didn’t do so hot agin’ Buckskin Jack. When old Jack flat-out accused him of being Mysterious Dave Mather, the man we knew as Harlow told him he was full of shit, which made more sense than his next move.”
“He went for his gun?” asked Stringer.
To which his informant replied, uncertainly, “He got the front of his coat unbuttoned. That’s when I’d have drawed, had I been Buckskin Jack. Old Mather, Harlow, or whoever, was good enough to get both hands to both guns as he went down, and the doc says he was hit smack in the heart, at point-blank range. Staggered him all the way to the back wall and wound up facedown by the player piano.”
Windy asked if it was true that player piano had been plunking out “The Eyes of Texas” all the while that Texas lawman was having it out with a jayhawking Kansas outlaw. The man who’d been there said not to talk so silly and added, “The piano rolls they just got in play m
ostly new ragtime tunes from Saint Louis and, in any case, nobody put a nickel in the night Buckskin Jack shot Mysterious Dave down.”
Stringer chose his words carefully as he asked if anyone else in Comanche Woe shared Buckskin Jack’s sincere belief he’d gunned the right man, with or without musical accompaniment. They both stared blankly at him, as if he’d just asked whether Teddy Roosevelt was still the president. Young Windy said, “I just told you I seen him lit up electrical in the window of the hardware shop. They naturally had old Wanted posters and a tintype taken of the cuss in his younger days.”
The one who’d seen the somewhat unexpected gunfight added, “I follow your drift, but you’re drifting wide of the mark. Buckskin Jack has enemies in these parts, political and personal, so you’re not the first who’s raised that same question. Old Buckskin Jack had that tintype and other evidence to go on long afore he accused a well-knowed local rancher of being a wanted man. He said it surprised him, too. Posing as Harlow, the cuss had never caused no trouble in these parts.”
“He paid his just debts pronto,” Windy offered. Stringer knew that didn’t mean much, since men as bad as the late Doc Holliday had never welshed on a gambling debt or bar tab. His beer schooner was getting low. He glanced toward the bar, saw no way to spring for a round without a crowbar, and asked his new pals if they knew anything about their marshal running Henry Starr or Curly Bill out of town since his shoot-out with Mysterious Dave.
Neither did. Windy said he’d heard something about Curly Bill showing up after all these years as a tube well driller, of all odd trades, but that he hadn’t heard tell of anyone ordering him out of the area, if he was anywhere in it. Both of them seemed surprised to hear Henry Starr was anywhere in West Texas, albeit both had read of his recent doings in Oklahoma, Windy said, “My whole family voted for T.R., considering my big brother rid with him in Cuba and all. Though his presidential pardon of that Cherokee bank robber was just plain dumb, if you ask me.”
