“Be that as it may,” Charmian said, “they’re not here.”
Dillard scowled down at his hat, appeared to notice for the first time that it wasn’t on his head, and put it on. It seemed to contain most of his authority, as his voice got louder and deeper.
“I see it’s time to put my cards on the table. Somebody swore out a complaint against ’em for theft, which I reckon is why they faked their names this trip. Where are they if they ain’t here, I’d like to know.”
“You’re the lawman,” Becky said. “I’m sure you can figure it out. Perhaps not, on second thought. I forgot who I was talking to.”
His face darkened a shade.
“There’s no call to talk to me like that, little missy.”
“You left two women here without official protection after someone fired a shot through our window. What is the call if not that, I’d like to know.”
“You don’t have any objection to me going in and looking around, I guess.” He took a step toward the porch.
Charmian said, “You guess wrong, unless you’ve come with a warrant.”
He stopped.
“I was sheriff when your husband was still digging up other folks’ oyster beds. I never had to get a warrant to go in anyplace in this county.”
“Never’s a long time. You’re not coming in and that’s that.”
“Who’s to stop me?” He strode forward.
Siringo drew a bead and squeezed the Winchester’s trigger. Dirt sprayed the sheriff’s pants cuffs from the slug he’d placed at his feet. The echo of the report growled over the rolling hills of the Valley of the Moon.
29
He ejected the shell, chambering the next round, while Dillard was still reacting. The sheriff jumped back two feet, fumbling a big cedar-handled revolver from under his coat, looked around, heard the action of the lever, and stared up at the window.
“You’re lucky you’re slow,” Siringo said. “You almost ran square into that first slug.”
“Who the hell are you?” Dillard was shielding his eyes from the sun with his free hand.
“The deciding vote in the next election, if you take one more step toward the house.”
“Siringo?”
“Yup.”
“Where’s Hammett?”
“The other end of this Roscoe,” said a voice directly beneath Siringo’s feet.
The sheriff lowered his gaze. “You men are in serious trouble, threatening an officer of the law.”
“I see it as defending the Constitution. Get back in your car and don’t come back here without a piece of paper signed by a judge. Your best bet’s J.C. MacNamara. He’s on Kennedy’s list.”
“You admit you stole it?”
“I did,” Siringo said. “Hammett’s just my accomplice.”
A lazy grin spread across the red ham face.
“There’s no call for all this gun stuff. Give me the notebook and we’ll say it was all just a misunderstanding. Mr. Kennedy said he ain’t interested in pressing charges so long as he gets back what’s his.”
“We’ll take our chances in court, if it’s all the same to you. The prosecutor can enter it as evidence.”
“That’d be the Honorable Oliver Wentworth,” said Hammett.
The sheriff’s smile fled. “Be reasonable!”
“I thought that’s what we was being,” Siringo said. “You’re the one standing out in the hot sun in a wool suit when you could be enjoying the breeze on the way back to town.”
“How do I know you won’t shoot me in the back?”
Charmian spoke up. “You have my word they won’t. I know these men better than you do.”
“A woman’s word don’t—”
A shot rang out below. Dillard’s homburg flew off his head. He scrambled back into his automobile.
“This ain’t the end of it!” he shouted over the roar of the motor. He swung the vehicle around and headed back the way he’d come.
“That was neat,” Siringo called out to Hammett. “I didn’t know you was a trick shot.”
“I’m not. I was aiming at the car.”
*
“How many of these guns work?” Siringo asked.
They were in the main room of the house, where most of London’s collection of firearms was on display.
“All of them,” Becky said. “I make it a point to keep them clean and oiled. Daddy showed me how.”
“What about ammo?” said Hammett.
Charmian opened a drawer in one of the display cases. It was lined with cardboard boxes labeled with different calibers. “Do you think they’ll be needed?”
Siringo said, “I hope not; but you can’t hope your way out of a fix. I know Dillard. I met plenty of him in the old days. They do things the hard way. He’ll come back with an army and that warrant—if he remembers to get the warrant.”
“There won’t be any trouble if you’re not here when he does,” Becky said.
Charmian scowled. “Don’t be a child. They’ll take us prisoner and use us to smoke Mr. Siringo and Mr. Hammett out into the open.”
Someone knocked. Gripping his Colt, Siringo went to the window beside the front door. “It’s just the hat-hater.”
Charmian opened the door. The ranch hand had his own hat off and a slash of white bandage across his nose, sharply contrasted with his sunburned skin. He stiffened when he saw the man who’d broken his nose standing behind his employer.
“It’s all right, Ivan. We’re all on the same side.”
“I heard shots.”
“We’re okay, but we’re expecting trouble later. How many of the hands are conversant with firearms?”
“Convers—?”
“Can they shoot?” barked Siringo.
“I can work a gun if I have to, but I’m not an expert. Yuri is; he hunted tigers in Siberia. I can’t say about the rest.”
“Round ’em up.”
Charmian said, “Tell them it’s voluntary. I can’t ask them to put themselves in danger just because I pay them to work the ranch.”
“Miz London, there ain’t a thing all them men wouldn’t do for anybody named London. If it wasn’t for your husband, I’d still be in San Quentin. Every one of ’em’s got a story like it.”
“Thank you. These men are in charge. I hope you can put any bad feelings behind you.”
Ivan stared at Siringo for a long moment. Then he held out his hand. “Sorry about the hat.”
“They don’t last long here.” Siringo accepted his powerful grip. “Sorry about the nose. I was saddle sore and took a bigger swing than intended.”
The ranch hand grinned, displaying some gold plate.
“I guess where you’re concerned a man has to look out for either end.”
When he left, Hammett and Siringo began snatching weapons off the walls and from cases. When they were finished, the dining table was an arsenal of shotguns, rifles, revolvers, and semiautomatic pistols, representing many manufacturers from many countries. Siringo pulled the drawer filled with cartridges out of the display case and laid it across the arms of a rocking chair. “Start loading,” he said.
All four got to work.
*
“What are you doing?” Becky demanded.
She found Hammett seated in her father’s study, working his bandaged foot into a high-topped brogan he’d found in a cupboard.
“Working a jigsaw puzzle, can’t you tell?” Wincing, he laced the shoe tight.
“You’re going to make your injury worse.”
He stood, testing his weight on the foot. “Time enough to recover after today. Meanwhile it gives me support.” He grinned at the unmatching footwear. “I may not make the cover of a gents’ magazine, but I’m no good to anyone wobbling around on a cane.”
“What are you going to do?” She followed him into the main room.
“Mr. Siringo and I discussed it. I’m setting up shop in the stable. That way we can catch anybody who tries to charge the house in the crossfire.�
�� He selected a gas-loading Mauser rifle from the weapons on the table and hefted it. The boxes of ammunition had been sorted and placed beside the firearms they belonged to. He loaded the magazine, racked a cartridge into the chamber, and put the box in his pants pocket.
Siringo came in, accompanied by Charmian. “You was in the army,” he told Hammett. “How are you at drill?”
“Better than I was at driving an ambulance. I never killed anyone on the parade ground.”
All four picked up as many firearms and boxes of ammunition as they could carry and went out into the front yard, where the ranch hands waited in a ragged line. Hammett approached Yuri, the Russian with the imperial whiskers, and showed him a bolt-action rifle of Scandinavian manufacture. “Know how to load it?”
The slope-shouldered worker snatched it and the box from Hammett’s other hand, slid open the breech, poked a long brass-shelled cartridge with a copper nose inside, and slammed the bolt home.
Hammett went down the line, handing out rifles, handguns, and ammunition until he ran out, then got more from Charmian and Becky. Standing there afterward, some holding long guns, others with revolvers and pistols stuck under their belts and in the bibs of overalls, they looked like peasant rebels.
Hammett had raided a dump in back of the house of empty coffee tins, lard buckets, and glass jars. He rammed kindling sticks from the fireplace into the ground, hung the vessels on top, ordered the men to stand thirty yards away, and had them fire one by one, indicating to each which target he was to shoot at. When everyone had fired six times, he told them to put up their weapons and inspected the results.
He signaled them to follow him to the yard where they’d stacked their farm implements in a pyramid. He disarmed Ivan and two men whose names he didn’t know and told them to take their pick from the stack. “If you can get close enough to lop off someone’s head with a scythe, do it,” he said. “Otherwise I don’t want any one of you birds within a hundred feet of a trigger.”
Siringo took command, sending Ivan to the house to watch the back and sing out if anyone tried to dry-gulch Yuri while he guarded the front, Ivan to the stable for the same reason regarding Hammett, and distributing the others among the pigpens and other outbuildings.
“And you, Mr. Siringo?” asked Charmian. “Where will you be?”
He pointed at the concrete-block silo. “I saved the best view for myself.”
She glanced down involuntarily at his bad leg. He grinned.
“I trust my old complaint over Hammett’s new one. Anyway, last time I was under siege, I had to go down to get out. This time I’m going up.”
“And I?”
“You and Becky load for Yuri and lay low.”
She raised her chin. “I’m as good a shot as Jack was. We hunted pheasants together from the time they were imported from China until he was too ill to go.”
“Pheasants ain’t men.”
“I agree. They’re twice as fast and they can fly.”
“Okay, I know when I’m licked. Becky, you’re loading for your stepmother. Ivan can load for Yuri. That way we got guns on both sides of the house, which I like better.”
“I can shoot, too,” Becky said.
“Somebody has to load.”
“But why me? Why not Roberto?”
“Who’s Roberto?”
“I am Roberto.” This was a stocky Hispanic who had proven as inept with percussion arms as Ivan. He was armed with a hay hook.
Siringo shook his head.
“Roberto scares the pants off me with that corkscrew. That’s worth something. Anyway, you’re the youngest here, and outranked.”
“Very well.” But her eyes blazed defiance.
Hammett cradled his Mauser and took out his flask. Siringo scowled.
“If that don’t improve your aim, put it up.”
“What’s the difference? It’s a suicide play any way you look at it.”
Siringo took the flask from him and raised it. “Pinkerton men.” He drank.
“Good-bye, my lover, good-bye.” Hammett took it back and swigged.
Charmian held out a hand. He lifted his brows.
“Jack taught me to drink, too.” When she had it, she smiled. “Gentlemen; Becky. To the call of the wild.” She emptied the flask.
30
Siringo slung his Winchester over his shoulder, made sure his Colt was secure in its holster and the Forehand & Wadsworth belly gun under his belt, and climbed an iron ladder up the side of the cement-block silo. When he clambered onto the roof, he was grateful to find that it was concave rather than convex, giving him a sounder purchase and a circular rim that concealed him from anyone on the ground when he lay on his stomach behind it.
It was more than twenty feet high and gave him a spectacular view of the ranch with its rolling hills, towering redwoods, and miles of vineyards. The thick vines curled about the pickets that supported them, resembling battlefields he’d seen in photographs taken during the Great War, decorated with coils of barbed wire. He hoped they’d slow down the assault the same way they had in France.
He saw the ranch’s old wooden silo a hundred yards off, the great boulder beneath which Jack London slept off his roistering life, the jagged ruins of Wolf House sticking up like the petrified bones of some great animal dead since before Man, and wished again that Charmian would have the gaunt rafters bulldozed and buried instead of shackling herself to a corpse. Everything he’d read by and about London celebrated life in its full ferment and decried death and destruction, while here in the heart of his chosen country, disappointment and loss was on exhibit as if it belonged to an extinct civilization. Dwelling on the past did no one good. When Siringo himself wrote about it, it was gone—except when it came bounding back from cover like a rebel bushwhacker.
*
Tom Horn made a tight six-foot-five squeeze through the trap into the cattle car on the A.T. & S.F. The Agency had advanced him a hundred in cash to ride the rails on a robbery investigation, and he’d lost it all on one turn of cards.
Siringo was “Charlie Cully” then, sent by the Agency to spell Horn, who was needed to testify in Albuquerque. He lent Horn money to get there, but he managed to lose that, too, and the last Siringo saw of the big jug-eared galoot was when Horn gave the brakeman his last dollar to put him in the stock car and then his shorn head lowering itself through the hole. He would spend the rest of the long trip from Coolidge hanging onto the hay rack to keep from being slashed to pieces by the longhorn steers below: a Horn among horns.
Then again, when Tom was braiding a lariat in a cell in Wyoming, killing time while waiting to mount the scaffold, Siringo supposed he looked back on that journey with a wistful expression.
*
No sign of intruders yet. He sat with his back to the rim, the carbine across his lap and his legs stretched out, waiting for the blood to stop pumping pain to his knee. When he turned his head to survey the grounds near the cottage, he saw the barrel of Hammett’s Mauser sticking out the stable window that the eel’s bullet had shattered—was it only a week ago?—Charmian’s Greener, a handsome English shotgun that could finance rebuilding Wolf House, if only she could bear to part with it, and the pigpens bristling with more artillery. From his position he saw far more than anyone else on the spread, legitimate residents and otherwise.
He took out his pipe, but he didn’t charge it. There was no good purpose in calling anyone’s attention to his smoke. The stem felt good between his teeth and took his mind off his knee.
Charlie Siringo reckoned that he’d had a good ride any way you studied it. He’d looked into Kid Curry’s cross eyes, the eyes of a killer, and lived to write about them, sung range songs with Billy Bonney, cheated a lynch mob in Gem, survived smallpox, and stood close enough to see men blown to pieces with dynamite, coming away with only a ringing in his ears that came back on quiet nights. If it all ended here, he came out ahead on points.
“Leastwise it beats sitting around the house watching the r
oof leak,” he said aloud.
*
Hammett, sitting on Abner Butterfield’s milking stool, leaned his Mauser against the windowsill and reached down to loosen the lace on the brogan. He rolled a cigarette, didn’t light it, hung it on his lower lip, and looked out the window, scanning the buildings and terrain. Siringo was out of sight atop the silo, but the man who looked for them could spot the weapons belonging to Charmian and the men on the ground. As he was watching the house, Becky bent to say something to her stepmother, caught his eye, and straightened when he raised a hand in greeting, removing herself from his line of sight.
He grinned wolfishly and listened to the horses snorting and shuffling in the stalls on the other side of the partition.
A high harsh whistle pierced the air, coming from atop the silo.
*
Siringo took his fingers out of his mouth, removed his Stetson, and rolled over onto his stomach, peering over the metal rim at the line of motor vehicles coming up the ranch road, Sheriff Vernon Dillard’s big Dodge in the lead. He rested his Winchester on the rim and drew a bead on its tombstone-shaped radiator, but he held his fire. The procession wasn’t inside range of the firearms at ground level, and the cars were passing between thick stands of redwoods; if the sheriff and his posse comitatus decided to bail out and take to the trees, there would be no smoking them out. He hoped the others wouldn’t be tempted to start the ball early.
With that thought in mind he watched anxiously as the motorcade continued at walking pace. Besides the touring car there were a couple of Ford roadsters, a Hupmobile, and a T truck. He wondered if it was the same one in which Lanyard had made his escape after shooting at Butterfield, and if it was the eel driving.
He counted five in the Dodge, two in each of the roadsters, and six more in the truck, including four in the bed, clinging to the stakes. The light caught shiny bits of metal he took for badges, but they wouldn’t all be deputies: The county wasn’t rich enough to afford that many on the payroll. Dillard must have deputized half the village.
Amateurs, then, most of them; or at least not full-time lawmen.
Which didn’t encourage him, not even a little bit. He remembered the trigger-happy p.c. shooting bloody hell out of that line shack that was supposed to contain Billy the Kid and getting nothing for all that expenditure of lead but one dead armadillo. And since there were no armadillos handy, that left two ex-Pinkertons, a parcel of ranch hands, and two women.
Ragtime Cowboys Page 18
