by Lou Cameron
As he paused in the middle of the dark street to trace a line of tobacco along the crease of his straw paper Stringer heard a distant but ominous rumble he sincerely hoped was only thunder, although summer storms could be dangerous in their own right in these dry Texas hills.
The old Texas qualification, promising to do this or that “Lord willing and the creeks don’t rise!” was based on the simple fact that when it did get around to raining west of, say, longitude 100 degrees, it tended to make up for any dry spells in between in spades. What that breed stable hand had said about heading out in the dark of the moon with the summer lightning brewing made grim, simple sense to anyone who’d ever been caught by such climatic conditions in a saddle that came with no lightning rods.
He sealed his cigarette and lit it. Then he strode on toward the Parker Arms, even though he heard himself muttering, “Where in the blue blazes do you think you’re going, you silly bastard?”
He didn’t answer himself. He’d noticed long ago that somehow, given the choice between saving his own skin and chasing a possible newspaper scoop, he could get silly as a top hand chasing beef through catclaw and cholla with ten pretty maids in a row admiring his roping skills.
When he entered the Parker Arms, however, he didn’t even spy one ugly maid in the row bellied up to the bar. The crowd had thinned considerably by now. As he eased his own gut to the mahogany and hooked an instep over the brass rail, old Tom, the barkeep, said he could have his beer there or in the back room, where the lady was waiting for him.
Stringer gulped and cautiously allowed he’d best commence with a schooner out here, adding, “I heard Miss Susan Bancroft was out to track me down, Tom. Might you have noticed just what sort of a mood she seemed in, or how much backing she rode in with?”
As the barkeep worked the tap, he replied in a carefully neutral tone, “I’d say she sounded businesslike about whatever business she may have with you. As to the Lazy B riders guarding her rep and roan thoroughbred for her and her daddy, Big Seth, we have house rules here at the Parker Arms. She and her boys know it ain’t considered decent to set up ambushes in the back rooms, and I hope you’ll keep that in mind as well.”
Stringer said he’d try but asked, “What about earlier this evening, when that rider off her very spread tried to backshoot Buckskin Jack in this very room?”
Tom soberly replied, “She says we can bill her outfit for the busted glass and Chuck’s funeral expenses, seeing he was working for them when he acted so strange. I got the impression she wanted to talk to you about something more important.”
Stringer gulped some beer, gulped again, and muttered, “Well, I’d best not keep the lady waiting. Should the matter come up, you can bill the San Francisco Sun instead of my own kith and kin for any funeral expenses I incur in the next few minutes, Tom. I’d best pay you for this beer before I head for the back room, right?”
Tom didn’t cheer him much by saying that sounded like a sensible way to do business this particular evening.
******
Stringer had been brought up to knock politely before entering a room. On the other hand, George Armstrong Custer had ordered Bugler Martin to sound the charge at Little Big Horn, and look where that had gotten him. So, the young gal seated all alone in a back room of the Parker Arms let out a funny little gasp when Stringer just barged in on her, one hand holding a beer schooner and the other casually riding the grips of his holstered S&W.
He didn’t quite gasp but blinked in surprise when he say how ferocious Miss Susan Bancroft looked in her chocolate velveteen riding skirts with matching charro jacket over a cream silk blouse, and flat Spanish hat perched atop her pinned-up light brown hair. She didn’t seem to be wearing any side arm as she sat at a round corner table that came with two tumblers, a pitcher of beer, and a pint bottle of sloe gin.
He asked, “You wanted to see me?”
She looked almost friendly as she answered, “I did if you’re that newspaperman, MacKail. I see you’ve already ordered a chaser. Set yourself down and have something stronger to chase.”
He took the straight-back chair across from the more comfortable-looking one with arms she’d already grabbed, saying, “I’ll stick with just suds for now, no offense. Sloe gin is an acquired taste I’ve yet to acquire, ma’am.”
She shrugged fatalistically and said, “You and my dad. Can’t you see bourbon and rye are less refined?”
He smiled thinly and assured her he felt that was likely why she and those ladies Charles Dana Gibson drew seemed to prefer gin cock’s tails, as such refreshments were called at high-toned gatherings of late. As he tossed his half-shot smoke on the floor and stomped it lest it wrinkle her refined little nose, he asked if she usually got to stay up this late in town, alone. She dimpled sweetly at him and confided, “I sent my ramrod and wrangler out front, not wanting you to get the wrong notion about my feeling for you, ah … Stuart?”
“That’s what they sprinkled me,” he cautiously replied, knowing that whatever her feeling toward him might be, they couldn’t add up the way that had sounded.
He saw he was right when he asked, and she told him, “Chuck Woods went to work for us earlier this spring. We signed him on as a general hand but, lately, he’s been mostly wrangling. The kid we had taking care of our remuda kept pestering and pestering to be given a chance to ride more and, well, Chuck did have a way with ponies.”
Nothing she’s said so far made a lick of sense to Stringer. He suspected she’d say more, sooner, if he just let her take the bit in her teeth. So he just sat there sipping and listening as she went on, “As you know, we wound up missing some prize stock left in old Chuck’s care. Nobody thought much of it, right off, of course. Even a wrangler has to sleep sometime, and we figure the thief or thieves took my favorite palomino and that pinto in the dead of night.”
Stringer nodded but didn’t say anything. She must have been expecting him to. She asked, “Don’t you see? They say it was you as put Rusty Reynolds and the boys on the right track when you met ’em messing with those fool Mex kids and wrong ponies. We’d no sooner gotten word on that when we heard Chuck Woods had slapped leather on you and lost!”
Stringer cautiously admitted, “I’ll meet you halfway on that, no matter how Buckskin Jack wants it recorded by the county, ma’am. But from where I was standing, it looked as if your oddly morose wrangler was aiming to backshoot Buckskin Jack.”
She sipped some sloe gin and asked him, simply, “How do you know? Wasn’t he facing you, point blank, when he went for his gun?”
Stringer started to say, “Yes, but…” and then he settled for, “Why would he have had any call to treat me so mean, Miss Susan? I’d never even heard of the cuss before he commenced to go loco en la cabeza with his hands on his gun grips!”
She nodded but said, “You weren’t the only one there. I don’t mind saying me and the boys took the news mighty broody until we got to studying on just why old Chuck might want to gun a total stranger, as you say.”
He still couldn’t see why. She sipped more gin, chased it down with beer, and said, “The first thing I did was have the boys fan out to ask questions, a heap of questions, about you, of course, and naturally our dead wrangler as well.”
“Find out much?” he asked.
She nodded soberly, considering how she seemed to be putting away that perfumed firewater, and told him, “Enough to tell my boys they’d best hold off on cleaning your plow for cleaning Chuck’s. He came to work for us packing written recommendations from the Hash Knife over to Arizona Territory. You’ve heard of the outfit, of course?”
Stringer nodded and said, “Owned by the Aztec Land and Cattle Company of Arizona Territory. I covered one of their range wars a spell back. Tough outfit. Prone to hire tough men more distinguished as shooters than ropers.”
She eyed his untasted gin idly as she made a wry face and told him, “One of our other Lazy B hands told us Chuck was full of it. He said he’d ridden for the Hash Knife on
e time and that he’d caught Chuck in a few slips about the outfit. I didn’t think much about it at the time. Jealous hands are always meanmouthin’ one another like schoolgirls, and there was no way to find out who was fibbing, short of writing a letter to the Hash Knife and even then having to wonder whether they were telling the truth or getting back at a hand who’d quit unfriendly.”
Stringer nodded his understanding and said, “Lot of trouble to go to over a wrangler, anyway, as long as he was taking good care of your remuda.”
She started to reach for his full glass, decided not to, and said, “Lord, it’s been a long day. I told you how I’d commenced to notice, after the horses were stolen and just before Chuck messed up totally. More than one of the boys had warned me he was acting awfully odd, but did I listen?”
Stringer cocked a brow and said, “Correct me if I’m wrong, ma’am. Don’t a lot of folk seem to feel the Lazy B is owned and operated by your father?”
She nodded and didn’t hesitate or look away as she explained, “I run things for my dad. He’s not as young as he used to be, and, well, if the truth be known, he drinks a mite since my mother died a few summers back.”
Stringer said he was sorry to hear that and tried to get back on more cheerful recent deaths by asking what else the late Chuck Woods might have been up to that his fellow riders didn’t approve of.
She said, “He didn’t socialize with the boys here in town. They say he acted the loner out to the spread but seemed to be thick with other outsiders here in Comanche Woe.”
Stringer smiled thinly and said, “Far be it from me to defend a man I just had to shoot, but in simple justice isn’t it a fact he was an outsider, too?”
She shook her head firmly and said, “No matter how long he’d been with us, he was cow, not town or nester. The boys felt it odd, if not downright indecent, that their wrangler spent so much free time in the company of city slickers and infernal sod busters the Good Lord never meant to inflict on us and our already marginal range!”
Stringer knew how folk who grew steak and folk who grew potatoes felt about one another, and he didn’t want to get into that with either side, being a man who enjoyed steak and potatoes on the same plate. He allowed he’d noticed, during the short time they’d known one another, that old Chuck had seemed sort of odd to him as well.
She said, “Nobody told me until just this evening, after I’d paid to have him buried decent, that one of the outsiders he’d been mighty thick with was that sinister water witch, Wet Willy Wallace, the one the marshal accused of really being Curly Bill. They say Curly Bill hails from Arizona, not all that far from the Hash Knife Outfit, too!”
Stringer grimaced and told her, “If you want to call a hundred miles or more close. You can’t have things both ways though, ma’am. If Chuck Woods was fibbing about having worked for the Hash Knife up in the Tonto Basin, it cuts no ice that Curly Bill Brocius collected taxes in Cochise County, a good twenty years earlier.”
She seemed smart enough and still sober enough to grasp that. It made her look so disappointed he added, “That’s not saying nothing suspicious was going on, ma’am. Whatever their true identities and backgrounds might have been, the fact remains that Wet Willie Wallace lit out for parts unknown right after Buckskin Jack began to question his past, and that seems to’ve inspired the one answering to Chuck Woods to backshoot Buckskin Jack and… Yep, it’s commencing to make a certain amount of sense when you sort of squint at it with your eyes half-shut. I’ll be switched with snakes if I can come up with anything worth such serious fighting in these parts. Has anyone ever struck color in any of the sandy washes you have around here?”
She sighed and said, “If only. Scarce grass and even scarcer summer water are the only natural resources up here betwixt the river vales where the infernal nesters would stay if they had a lick of sense!”
Stringer said, “Well, with Chuck Woods dead and Wet Willy run out I doubt we’ll see more gunplay for a spell. Meanwhile, if you’ve got far to ride, Miss Susan, you’d best be going before the deluge from the Good Book sweeps up this far from the gulf.”
She nodded but said, “I’m staying in town with kissing kin ‘til it blows over. Anyone can tell it’s going to be a gullywashing wonder once it hits. But you’re right about the hour, and I reckon I’d best get to bed and take care of my youth.”
Stringer chuckled softly but refrained from asking what the name of her youth might be as he gallantly rose to help her to her feet. As she took the hand he offered in as firm a grip as she might have used mounting up, he sensed she needed more help getting up then she let on. She said her old man had a drinking problem. He’d heard such weaknesses could run in families. Meanwhile, none of the veins in her pretty little face looked busted and it wouldn’t have been any of his business if they had.
She indicated a side door they could leave by, more sedately than by wading through the sawdust out front. That was the way he led her, on her undecided, if not downright wobbly, legs. As he did so, she giggled weakly and said, “Whee! I didn’t feel this disgusting sitting down!”
He reached for the door latch with his free hand, saying, “That’s why it’s best to be served standing up at the bar, ma’am. You’re not disgusting. The blood’ll come back to your, ah, limbs, once you walk on ’em some. Where’d you leave your mount, out front?”
“Across the street, hitched in front of the hat shop,” she replied. He opened the side door and led her down the steps to the unfamiliar side street, or tried to.
He couldn’t cut loose with the cuss words he felt trying to get out as she missed a step entirely, came down with one boot heel on one of the insteps, and snapped, “Watch your step, darn it!”
He was saved from having to answer that by a sharp explosion of a rifle from a rooftop across the way!
As what sounded like a .30-30 deer round ticked the brim of his old Stetson instead of anything more important the sneaky son of a bitch had aimed at, Stringer stiff-armed Susan Bancroft one way and crabbed the other, drawing his .38 as he landed on one hip and rolled to fire up and across the street from amid his own haze of flour-fine dust and dried horseshit.
“Get under the house!” he snapped at Susan between pistol shots pegged in the general direction he’d seen that rifle flash. She seemed to think screaming like a Comanche war party would do them as much good against a repeating rifle. By the time Stringer’s hammer clicked on spent brass, making him feel stupid as hell, it apparently had. They were both still alive, and no matter where the rifleman had run off to, the rest of the town seemed to be heading their way all at once, from all directions.
First things coming first, Stringer reloaded, still sprawled in the dust. Then he rolled upright and reached down to the shaken Susan, saying, “I can see you’re more used to giving orders than you are to taking them, but for Christ’s sake, honey…”
Then someone behind him was snarling, “There he is, looming over our boss lady, the son of a…”
“He’s on our side!” Susan yelled just in time, as a half-dozen cowhands, obviously drunker than she was, surrounded them demanding answers.
As the somewhat imperious young thing filled them all in, one of them slapped Stringer on the back and allowed they were comrades to the death against any and all unfortunates who didn’t ride for the Lazy B. When another suggested they take the town apart to show the damned farmers and their ribbon clerk pals a lesson, he must have known who else was bearing down on them, for the familiar voice of Buckskin Jack replied, shrill but determined, “You bust one pane of glass and you’ll wind up busting rocks for the county road gang, Silk Waller!”
That must not have struck the Lazy B riders as a diplomatic way to put things when everyone was feeling tense. Stringer tensed a mite as the town and country boys commenced to line up on either side with him and Susan Bancroft in the middle! Silk, the tall and not very sober Lazy B rider, who fit his handle in his shiny black charro outfit and low-slung buscadero gun rig, growled, �
��You’d best get ahint us, Miss Susan. You, too, if you’re with us, MacKail.”
Stringer didn’t move. Susan clung to his left arm as if confused. Buckskin Jack growled, low as a pissed-off fox terrier, “What’s your hurry, Silk? Nobody lives forever, but if you’re really in that much of a hurry…”
“Hold on, both of you!” Stringer cut in. “The cuss that all men of good will ought to be worried about right now just pegged a shot at Miss Susan and me from across the street and, for all we know, he’s still up there with a repeating rifle!”
The little town law turned to one of his dapperly dressed deputies to snap, “Take a couple of the boys with you. No more than two, though, ’til we see how serious these rustic riders may be about disturbing the damned peace in these parts.”
“You’re asking for it, short stuff!” Silk growled. Buckskin Jack ignored him to ask Stringer, quietly, “Which side do you reckon your own bread’s buttered on this evening, MacKail?”
Stringer shrugged fatalistically and quietly replied, “What can I tell you? I mean to escort this young lady safely to wherever she aims to be when that rain I smell in the air commences to come down fire and salt. I’ve no quarrel with anyone here as long as he doesn’t try to stop us.”
Buckskin Jack nodded and said, “So be it.” Silk Waller purred, “Yeah, get her outta here so’s we can have us a real old-fashioned hoedown.”
He may have meant it. Susan Bancroft spoiled all their plans by stamping a booted foot hard enough to raise dust knee-high as she declared in a voice of command, “That’s enough, Silk. You just heard Mr. MacKail explain those shots you all heard as a personal attack on me, the gal as approves or don’t approve your fool wages, and I don’t pay any of you boys to shoot up towns I have to shop in!”
