Ragtime Cowboys

by Loren D. Estleman

  At length the last car cleared the woods. He leveled the carbine again, aiming low at the Dodge. The sheriff was a dumb lug and belonged to Joseph P. Kennedy instead of the voters who put him in office, but Siringo had no interest in finishing out his career as a murderer of policemen. He centered his sights on the left front tire and tightened his finger on the trigger.

  Something struck the iron rim not six inches to his right, striking a spark and peppering his cheek with bits of rust. He heard the shot then, belatedly, bent by distance and wind, and dropped flat.

  The report had not come from any of the automobiles, which were still moving, the noise of their motors probably having drowned it out to the ears of the occupants. Nor did it belong to the defenders: Looking up at the rim where it had been struck, he saw a scallop-shaped nick on its top, shiny where the bullet had scraped off the rust. It had to have come level.

  He took a deep breath, mustering sand, and went up on his knees, shouldering the Winchester and snapping a shot at the top of the other silo. He hadn’t dared take time to aim, presenting as he did so clear a target, and although he couldn’t tell from that distance whether he’d hit anything, it didn’t matter, because it got the result he wanted. He saw a tiny billow of smoke atop the wooden tower and went flat again, just in time to hear the slug crack the air inches above his head.

  The damn dime novelists had gotten it right for once. The criminal had returned to the scene of his earlier crime.

  31

  When the first shot rang out, Hammett looked first at Charmian, then at the other guns inside his range of vision, including the one on top of the concrete silo. Siringo’s hatless head appeared suddenly, then the spurt of flame from his Winchester. He didn’t see where the third shot came from, but when Siringo ducked, he didn’t have to.

  “Mr. Hammett!” It was Charmian. “Who’s shooting?”

  “Mr. Siringo and the eel,” he called back. “They both took the high ground.”

  “But, when—?”

  “Get away from the window!”

  Her head vanished below the windowsill just as something struck the frame, followed closely by the sound of the shot.

  Hammett got up, moved the stool farther from his window, and laid the Mauser’s barrel on the sill. “He’s been here since Dillard’s last visit!” he shouted. “The sheriff must’ve dropped him off before he drove in sight and worked his way around to the other silo. He didn’t get into position till just now or he’d’ve picked at least one of us off when we came outside.”

  “Is Mr. Siringo all right?” came Becky’s voice from inside the cottage.

  “Hang on.” He put his thumb and finger inside his mouth and whistled sharply through his teeth.

  Another whistle answered from atop the near silo.

  “He’s fine!”

  “What can we do?” Charmian asked.

  Hammett reached down and tightened the lace on the brogan. “Start shooting!”

  “At what?”

  “The silo.”

  “It’s too far! This shotgun—”

  “Stop wasting time!”

  The Greener bellowed, spraying pellets that fell many yards short of the wooden silo.

  Hammett shouted again, cracking his lungs. “Everybody shoot!”

  The salvo from the weapons in the hands of the laborers sounded like an army of axes chopping wood. Hammett clambered out the paneless window and charged the wooden silo, firing the Mauser from the hip. The powerful semiautomatic rifle pulsed in his hands. Something struck the ground at his feet, throwing a clump of dirt and grass at his pants cuff, but he didn’t slow down. The next shot made a snapping noise in the air past his left ear. He ran and fired; and now Siringo was returning Lanyard’s fire from the top of the concrete silo, as fast as he could lever in fresh rounds.

  Hammett’s hat flew off his head, either from his own slipstream or carried away by a bullet. The Mauser’s magazine emptied with a click. He threw it aside, drawing the .38 from his belt, and fired it at the top of the wooden silo, which stood well beyond pistol range.

  And now more guns spoke. Dillard and his posse had taken up positions and were throwing lead at the running figure.

  He was wheezing, and his pace grew uneven; his injured foot had entered the fight on the other side. He was close enough to the silo to be aiming almost straight up. The ladder attached to the side was nearly within reach. He was lunging at it, groping with his free hand, when something struck him from behind with the force of a catapult. His fingers grazed a rung of the ladder as he fell.

  *

  Siringo saw him fall, but only on the periphery of his vision. He was concentrating on the silo opposite, firing until the Winchester clicked, then ducking below the rim to reload. He cursed as he fumbled more cartridges out of the box he’d brought, forcing himself to fill the magazine before resuming.

  The wooden structure was just within range; he could hear the slugs chunking into the boards, see splinters flying, but the man atop it was careful not to present much of a target against the sky; when Hammett had gotten too close for Lanyard to shoot at him without standing up and aiming almost straight down, he concentrated again on Siringo, and his shots were placed closer to his target. He must have had a telescopic sight and a gas loader with an enormous capacity, because the reports were so close together they sounded like one extended roar and he never stopped to reload. Siringo changed positions between shots, confounding the man’s aim through the glass aperture, but his bump of good luck, and the eel’s bump of bad luck, couldn’t continue.

  The sheriff and his men had found cover in scattered trees. They couldn’t shoot up at Siringo’s silo with any hope of hitting him, so they’d started snapping at the man running on the ground. There wasn’t an expert shot among them, but then one of them got lucky. The old Pinkerton couldn’t tell where his partner had been hit, but either it was a heavy round to knock him down at that range or it had found something vital.

  Hammett’s bump of courage must have been the size of a pumpkin. Siringo had never known a man—not Wyatt Earp or Pat Garrett or Billy Bonney or the whole goldarn Wild Bunch put together—who would run straight into crossfire when he could have stayed put and gone on breathing a little longer. He’d never see anything to compare with it, even if he survived that day.

  And then—hell’s bells!—he did see it.

  *

  Hammett breathed dirt.

  He lay on his face with something hot and wet streaming at a leftward angle from his right shoulder and his pulse centered where it started. All the shooting now was coming from the cottage and pigpens and both silos; the sheriff and his men had stopped when their only real target had fallen.

  Without obvious stirring, he groped for the .38 where it had fallen and thrust it under his belt, covering the movement with his body.

  The ladder was useless. It stood squarely in the sight of the posse: If their aim hadn’t improved except by luck, neither had his odds, and a man climbing a twenty-foot tower was hard to miss. He filled his lungs, emptied them, filled them again, coughed, pushed himself onto his hands and knees, and scuttled around the base of the silo, putting it between him and the sheriff’s party just as a slug from their direction banged against the wood near the ground.

  He rolled over into a sitting position, resting his back against the silo, and groped behind his right shoulder with his left hand. The skin of his back jumped when he found the wound. He dragged his handkerchief out of his inside breast pocket and stuffed it into the hole, gritting his teeth. Then he looked up at the silo, rising and narrowing for miles toward empty blue sky.

  London’s mania for innovation and modernization had not stopped with his writing. The storage building was rigged for automatic filling, with an electric motor on a concrete base, connected to an open bin and a copper pipe as big around as a man’s arm running from the bin to the top of the silo: The silage was shoveled into the bin and propelled by suction up the pipe into the silo.
What the pipe lacked as a ladder it made up for by its placement.

  But a man had to be fast. He had to climb twenty feet of slippery copper before the posse grew bold enough to come after him and before the pain of the bullet in his shoulder paralyzed him.

  He reloaded the .38 from his pocket, pulled himself to his feet, and began shinnying.

  *

  “You dead, Hammett?” Siringo called out.

  He didn’t expect an answer. Thinking aloud kept a man alert. There was a lull in the shooting; either the eel had run out of ammunition finally or he was playing the waiting game, counting on Siringo to forget himself and present a better target.

  Hammett had vanished behind the wooden silo, whether to die or work some angle couldn’t be known.

  The posse was getting curious. Siringo saw the sheriff lean out from behind a redwood, sweeping an arm in the direction of Lanyard’s silo. The man he was looking at, a badge-wearer crouched at the base of a neighboring tree, shook his head violently.

  Siringo grinned. In every party of manhunters there was always one who placed his life before his job.

  It was the volunteers you had to watch for: ordinary men who got a boot out of playing cowboys and Indians.

  This time it was a skinny runt in a tweed suit and an argyle sweater, a bank clerk or sub-assistant postmaster. He waved to Dillard from behind his tree and started off at a slow walk, bracing his rifle against his hip like a great white hunter stalking a wounded lion.

  Siringo decided not to wait for the man to trip and shoot himself in the head. When he was halfway to the silo, the old Pinkerton chucked a round past his head that sent him swiveling and running for cover, throwing away his weapon in favor of speed.

  It was such an amusing sight Siringo forgot the eel.

  A blow to his mouth rattled his bones and he ducked below the rim, the stem of his pipe still clamped between his teeth. He’d forgotten it was there until the bullet shattered the bowl. He spat out the stem and checked for more damage. A molar wobbled when he tested it. It was one of only two he had left. His luck; it was the good one.

  He told himself to concentrate on the work. Eating soup at every meal got old fast.

  *

  People who talked about climbing a greased pole had never tried it.

  Hammett had to stop every few feet, wrapping an arm around the copper pipe while he wiped his other palm on his coat, then reversing arms and wiping the first. The hands shook, not from fear but from increasing weakness. His wound was bleeding again despite the handkerchief he’d stuffed into it. How long a man had before he bled out was something Pinkerton didn’t teach.

  The first shot in a while barked on the other side of the silo. The shot that came behind it was much closer; the vibration of the recoil made his hands buzz on the pipe.

  It had nothing to do with him. He resumed climbing.

  *

  The sun was closing in on the western tree line. He figured the men on the ground were waiting for darkness before storming both silos. Lanyard would be waiting for the same thing. Siringo would have to show himself to stop the assault, and the sky offered no promise of a night without stars and moon.

  He hoped Hammett wasn’t dead, and not just because he’d miss the man’s company.

  *

  His hand slipped. He caught himself with the other, but the movement brought the heavy brogan on his bad foot banging against the copper pipe. He was close enough to the top now to hear planks shifting when the sniper walked his way to peer over the rim.

  There was no cover. Freeing one hand to grasp at his .38, Hammett slipped six inches and gripped the pipe again with both hands. He clung to the pipe and looked square into Edgar Edison Lanyard’s eyes and then the muzzle of his rifle, a Browning semiautomatic with a magazine as big as a toaster. The man’s straw boater was a flat disk pushed to the back of his head.

  32

  Hammett wasn’t dead.

  Siringo knew it when the silhouette of the other silo changed and he made out the outline of a man rising above the rim on the side opposite Siringo. The eel had detected someone approaching from that side. The darn yonker must’ve been part housefly.

  This wasn’t like plugging branches and scraps of waxed paper by the HOLLYWOODLAND sign. When you missed, they waited motionless for the next shot. He was only guessing that Lanyard’s back was to him; he was just a shadow against the reddening sky. Siringo had to expose himself to draw a clear bead, and if he’d guessed wrong …

  *

  “God hates a coward, Charlie.”

  Jimmy McParland, the greatest Pinkerton who ever lived: hero of the Molly Maguire case, superintendent of the Denver office, and Siringo’s personal idol, was walking square down the middle of Boise’s main street, heading for an interview in the penitentiary, with dozens of eyes tracking his progress, and probably nearly as many firearms from behind cover.

  The I.W.W. had blown up Idaho’s ex-governor in his own home and the Wobblies had made it clear the Haywood-Pettibone-Moyer trials would nol-pros or others would join him.

  And here was the old man bold as Biddy’s garters, wearing the trademark bowler that had become part of the Agency uniform based on his preference, swooping handlebars, and gold-rimmed glasses, swinging the gold-headed stick that had been presented to him personally by Allan Pinkerton at the close of that affair. All that was missing was a bull’s-eye painted on his chest.

  “He may hate a coward, but that don’t mean you have to be in a hurry to make His acquaintance.”

  “They’re the yellow ones. They know if they try anything in a crowd they’ll be kicking air long before those men in the dock. Look at Orchard: the worst murderer since John Wilkes Booth, and he didn’t have the sand to plant his charge any closer than the front gate.”

  Harvey Orchard had killed twenty-six men for the miners’ federation, including thirteen scabs in one dynamiting in Colorado. He was testifying against his accomplices in the Governor Steunenberg killing in return for a commutation of his death sentence, and it was him McParland was going to see. Siringo had been assigned to bodyguard the superintendent throughout the court proceedings. Every creak of a wagon, each slam of a door had him clutching the handle of his Colt fit to bust it.

  “I guess cowards was smarter in your day. I knew plenty dumb enough to think he can outrun a mob.”

  “Maybe so, but if we show the white feather, who’s to avenge our murders?”

  Well, McParland survived, Orchard got life as a reward for turning state’s evidence, and Haywood, Pettibone, and Moyer were acquitted anyway. It was after that McParland gave Siringo the gussied-up Colt he’d left behind in Los Angeles.

  “It’s a parade piece, but I expect it will brighten up that little room of yours.”

  “What for? The trial was a bust.”

  “You weren’t. I’m alive.”

  “I didn’t do nothing.”

  “Sure, you did. You walked a foolish old man down Capitol Street not six yards away from four sticks of dynamite.”

  “How can you be so specific?”

  “We got a tip the next day.”

  “Why didn’t he touch ’em off?”

  “I sent men to ask him, but he blew himself up in his house when he saw them coming up the walk. Told you they’re yellow.”

  *

  He wished now he’d brought that fancy rig along. Three guns didn’t seem near enough under the circumstances.

  He rose to his full height, such as it was, spread his feet, shouldered the repeater, aimed at the center of the silhouette on top of the other silo, and fired.

  *

  Hammett shifted his gaze from the Browning’s muzzle to the telescopic sight and through it to Lanyard’s eye, shrunken by the reverse lens. It narrowed slightly, bracing for the recoil. Then it snapped open wide in surprise.

  The report came after, fading as it walloped around among the hills. The rifle faltered. Hammett closed one fist tightly around the copper pipe and swept
up his other hand, grasping the barrel and wrenching it out of the eel’s grip, in the same moment hurling it away.

  Lanyard, reeling from the impact of the distant bullet, disappeared. Hammett grasped the pipe in both hands again and closed the last three feet before the top in three seconds. His back was wet, his breathing sounding like steam exiting a ruptured boiler. He took hold of the iron rim that circled the top of the silo, raised his good foot, missed the rim with it, raised it again, hooked it with his heel, and pulled himself up and over.

  Something flashed into his vision. He moved his head just as the eel’s fist swept past his jaw and glanced off the top of his shoulder.

  It was the wounded shoulder. He lost vision, and when it returned, he was lying on his back with the weight of the world on his chest and two hands closed around his throat. Something hot streamed under his collar and humid, whistling breath dampened his face. Lanyard’s eyes bulged. His face, ordinary—invisible—in repose, was split from east to west by the rictus of his mouth and from north to south by a stream of red coming from a matted temple and the torn remains of one of his small, flush-mounted ears; the blood dripped from the corner of his jaw down inside his shirt and came out the cuff on that side where he was throttling Hammett. His hat was gone, his hair in his eyes.

  Hammett couldn’t get to the .38 in his belt; his assailant’s weight was pressing too hard for him to work his weakening arm between their bodies. He groped in the pocket on his other side, felt something solid, and swung it in an upward arc, tearing the pocket and connecting with the center of Lanyard’s head wound. Something collapsed beneath the brass knuckles; the gust of breath in Hammett’s face robbed him of his own. Then the eel’s eyes rolled over white. The grip loosened on Hammett’s throat and he lay beneath Lanyard’s lifeless weight.

  *

  How long they lay together couldn’t be measured in terms of time.

  When Hammett’s heart rate approached normal, he heaved at the thing pinning him down, but it was like pushing at a sack of wet cement. He braced his hands and his good foot against the planks beneath him and tried to slide out from under. At first he was unsuccessful. He rested again, braced again, tried again. He gained an inch. Three more attempts, with rests in between, and he’d gone six. With one last lunge he shoved his body free, then hauled his leg and arm out into the open.