by Lou Cameron
Some of his dudes were drifting over, looking lost. Lumford told Rhodes, “Don’t worry yourself about it, Wes. Nobody’s asking you to buy any mining shares, you know.”
Then he waved his straw skimmer at his dudes and said, “This way, gents. First we’ll get you checked into the Hardwood or Cosmopolitan. Then we’ll all go over to the O.K. Corral and you can have your pictures taken right on the scene of the famous gunfight!”
They all seemed to feel that was a grand notion. As the promoter led his gaggle of thirty-odd geese on down the street, the town law spat. “Shit,” he muttered, “they’ll find more silver in the O.K. Corral than down the flooded shaft of the Lucky Cuss. Drunken cowhands are always dropping loose change as they mount up. Them miners left the mountain cold sober as well as disgusted.”
Stringer said, soberly, “I wasn’t there. Did you know Dutchy Steinmuller sent out a garbled report about flooding in the Tombstone Lode, not too long before he died, one way or another, or that my own troubles began when I was sent by my paper to sort that out?”
Wes Rhodes said, “We’ll let the county coroner decide what killed the old man. If you’re suggesting he was done in to keep him from telling the outside world them shafts was full of water, or that someone’s been trying to keep you from reporting the same, the two of you must have been drinking from the same bottle. Make that the three of you if we throw in that fool lawyer. The goddam mines have been flooded since they was abandoned. Everybody knows that. So where the hell is there a mystery worth shooting a crow over?”
Stringer said, “I don’t know. I’m still working on it. Am I under arrest, Wes?”
Rhodes said, “Naw, just try to stay out of any more trouble. I got to make sure them poor dudes don’t get in trouble, now. You know how some of the boys can act when they spy patent shoes and sissy spats.” He started to stride after the parade. Then he turned to shout back, “Don’t you go leaving town before I tell you you can, hear?”
Stringer raised his own voice to protest, “Dammit, Wes. If Knuckles Ashton can leave town, why can’t I?”
“We don’t know where Knuckles might be, dead or alive, and the coroner just might want to talk to you about old Dutch Steinmuller, depending on how the autopsy turns out. That’ll be down in Bisbee and even with the train running, if it’s still running, that’s sure to take some time.” Then he turned and walked faster to catch up with Lawyer Lumford and his dudes.
Stringer swore and might have followed at a less tiring pace had not a buckboard loaded with baggage cut him off as it tore around one end of the depot. He’d just finished cursing that when a more interesting box wagon came out the same slot with a cargo of red fifty-gallon fuel drums. Stringer trotted along beside to ask the driver how come.
The driver reined his mule team to a politer pace as he called down, “Gasoline, they call it. It’s sort of like naphtha.”
Stringer replied, “I know what gasoline is. A few folk in my part of Frisco drive horseless carriages. I meant how come they want so much of the stuff here in Tombstone. No offense, but I’ve yet to see any gas buggies in this town.”
The teamster answered, friendly enough, “None taken. There ain’t none. This load is for the thumping wonder up to the Lucky Cuss. They got a bodacious internally combusticated water pump up yonder. It come all the way from France to pump out the old mine, see?”
Stringer didn’t see, but it was too hot to keep dogtrotting down the middle of the dusty street, so he waved the wagon a polite adios and veered off to do something more sensible. Since it was going on noon now, the most sensible notion he could come up with involved fried eggs on a bed of chili con carne, washed down with iced Coca-Cola, at a stand-up greasy spoon on the shady side of the street.
After that, since he was already in the neighborhood, he headed for the Western Union office to see if they could help him make a lick of sense out of Dutchy Steinmuller’s inane report that long-flooded mine shafts were flooded.
They couldn’t. The clerk out front was friendly enough to call his telegrapher from the back, seeing business was slow at that time of the day in any case. They both recalled Dutchy Steinmuller coming in to send a wire, at urgent day rates, any number of days ago. The old man didn’t come into town much anymore and, when he did, he seldom spent on a nickel-a-word telegram.
Stringer asked if they kept written records of such transactions. The counterman looked startled as he replied, “Lord have mercy, have you any idea how many messages we send each week? When a customer writes his message on a blank, out here, I carry it in to Jake, and it goes out within the hour.”
Jake said, “I stick it on a spike and type it up on the tape machine. By the time the night man comes on duty there’s usually a dozen or more spiked atop it. When the spike can’t hold no more we pull everything off and start all over. We keep the original mayhaps one day, in case anyone accuses us of a mistake. Then it all goes in the trash barrel or the stove, depending on the time of the year.”
Stringer nodded as that sank in. Then he asked, “Can I take it you and the other wire services send typed messages instead of the old dots and dashes, these days?”
“The railroads still use Morse, the cheap bastards,” Jake sneered. “Edison’s ticker tape’s a lot faster and sends fewer mistakes. They say that some other inventor back East is working on an electricated typewriter that will type regular pages at a distance. I sure would like that. As she is, we got to pull the tape out of the ticker, cut it to size, and paste it on the telegram blank.”
“You don’t save any of such ticker tape, even in, say, a waste basket?” Stringer asked hopefully.
The two Western Union men exchanged blank stares. Then Jake said, “I follow your drift. But you’re sniffing the wrong pole. The ticker only feeds us one copy on tape and naturally the customer gets that. As for messages sent out of here, as in the case you’re asking about, we never see the damned tape. It comes off the spool at the other end.”
Stringer started to ask a dumb question before he thought harder and muttered, “Right. If you’d sent a garbled message from here, by accident, my boss in Frisco wouldn’t have been able to get the wire service to admit they’d been the ones who sent the report that the town rather than the lode of Tombstone had been flooded just awful. But, whether Steinmuller’s tip was sent one way or the other, what could the old gent have had in mind?”
The counterman shrugged, suggesting, “He was old and sort of dotty, even when he was sober, which was seldom. They say he hardly ever left his ‘dobe up in the hills. He was working on some kind of collection, butterflies or more likely stamps. What if he just got restless one day, wandered on up to the old digging on his old mule, and noticed for the first time that the shafts were flooded. Might not that have struck a crazy old hermit as fresh news?”
“I wish that didn’t work so good. It explains the fool’s errand I was sent on better than it does that dynamite in my bed,” Stringer hated to admit.
Jake said, “We heard. Wes Rhodes keeps wiring the county all about you. We heard that just before you got to Tombstone you saved Skagway Sam’s life, too. Him and that painted whore of his are about as popular in these parts as the pox half their soiled doves are said to carry. You might have just made somebody mad at you for preventing rough justice.”
“I’ve talked to Skagway about that. Nobody’s tried to kill him since he and Faro Fran came back from L.A.,” Stringer retorted.
Jake said, “Trying to take out Skagway Sam, here in Tombstone where he owns a private army, could take years off a man’s life. It was hard enough to ambush him in Tucson, where his backbone wasn’t supposed to be so well guarded.” He shrugged. “Maybe someone figures that if they can’t make a meal of Skagway Sam, they can at least take a bite of you, his old pal.”
Snorting in disgust, Stringer protested, “That’s just plain dumb. I’m not friends with that bunch at the Oriental Saloon. I may have saved them in Tucson from a back-shooting, which was only Christ
ian. But I’d no sooner arrived in Tombstone than I had to shoot it out with one of Skagway Sam’s bully boys.”
The counterman said, soothingly, “Hell, nobody here ever said you was tied in with that disgusting bunch. We just suggested that somebody else who hates ‘em more ferocious might not think as clear and logical, see?”
Stringer said, “Sort of. They’d have to be disgusting indeed to drive anyone that loco en la cabeza.”
“They surely are disgusting,” Jake said knowingly. “It ain’t the way it was when good old Lou Rickabaugh was running vice on Allen Street. Before Sheriff Slaughter got elected on a nice-nelly reform platform and ran just about all the old sporting crowd out of the territory, a man could play an honest game of chance or get laid without winding up crippled for life. With Rickabaugh gone and the sheriff’s department moved clean down to Bisbee, you can’t hope to win at cards and you may as well take sheep shears to your poor old dong as shove it in one of Faro Fran’s whores.”
Stringer thanked him for the warning and left, little wiser than before. The sun was really bearing down, now, and the town law had told him to stay out of trouble. So he went back to his hotel, had a quick bath, and locked himself in, naked, with the old scrapbooks he’d brought back from Steinmuller’s place. He spread the ones covering the Earps and Clantons on the bed and got out his own notepad as he leafed through the moldering pages, taking occasional notes in shorthand as he tried to patch together a sensible Sunday feature.
It wasn’t easy. Clippings from the Epitaph or Nugget, covering the same events, read just the opposite. To the Nugget’s way of thinking the Earps were city slickers, horse thieves, pimps, and worse yet, Damnyankees.
The Epitaph, published by New Yorker John Clum, took the position that even the Earps’ somewhat sinister pal, Doc Holliday, was an amusing rogue who doubtless meant well, while the Clantons and their friends were Texas trash who raped cows, stole Mexicans, and cussed in front of ladies. The two less partisan papers gave both factions mixed reviews. Neither side seemed all good or all bad to the Expositor or Evening Gossip, but they seldom agreed on all the details, either.
Stringer had the advantage that he’d met the likeable compulsive talker, Wyatt Earp, and his lovely but loony young wife, Josephine Sara Marcus, when they’d been running a saloon in the Alaska gold fields, long after the events so scrambled in all the old newspaper clippings on top of his bed. He knew the truth just wasn’t in old Earp if it got in the way of a good yarn, while his young wife, who’d never been there, dreamed up real whoppers her doting husband was too polite to correct. It was thanks to her romantic imagination—and no doubt the imagination of her shemale rivals—that some said Wyatt had courted her away from his enemy, Sheriff Behan, while others recalled her as the notorious Tombstone Sadie, a slut that might have made Messalina blanch.
Stringer had already known, and the old clippings confirmed, that at the time his present wife was still in pigtails both Earp and Sheriff Behan had been attached to other ladies in Tombstone. As a man who knew his way around San Francisco, Stringer felt inclined to go along with old Wyatt’s boast that he’d lured his present pretty baby from the wicked stage, where she’d been performing as a Frisco entertainer noted more for her looks than her talent. The less-glamorous seamstress he’d been living with in his Tombstone days had been called Mattie. The Epitaph had her down as a seamstress of note and Wyatt’s third wife. The Nugget took the position that she’d been a local whore old Wyatt had lived with on and off without formal ceremony. Either way, she’d been left behind when the Earps moved on, sudden, and she’d died soon after from strong drink or by her own hand, depending on which paper was publishing her pitiful obituary.
The two more objective papers as well as the Nugget cast considerable doubt on old Wyatt’s current brag about his shoot-out with Curly Bill Brocius, alias Graham, by reporting Curly Bill alive and obnoxious as ever ten years after Earp claimed he shot him at Iron Springs. There apparently had been some sort of fuss over yonder, because there were several clippings detailing the efforts of Arizona Territory to have Doc Holliday arrested up in Colorado for the murder of one Florentino Cruz, who’d been either a ferocious cow thief or an innocent Mexican-American cowhand, depending on whether one read of his demise in the Epitaph or the Nugget. The case had been dropped when Holliday checked into a Glenwood Springs sanitarium to cough the last of his lungs out and die with his boots off.
By the time Stringer finished putting his notes in order it was just too damned hot to start his Sunday feature, so he put the project aside and just lay down to die for a spell.
After a short, sweaty nap and a longer second soak in the bath down the hall, Stringer decided it couldn’t be any hotter outside than in and got dressed again. Strapping on his six-gun, he locked up and went down to the tap room. Nobody was there but the barkeep and Wes Rhodes, sipping a lonesome rum and tonic. Stringer bellied up to the bar beside the town law and told the barkeep he’d try the same, with less rum and more ice. Then he asked Rhodes, “Do you drink here often or were you worried about my leaving town?”
Rhodes smiled thinly. “You’re the least of my worries, old son. I saw what the boys hauled back from Steinmuller’s place. It couldn’t have been you. You ain’t been here that long.”
“I noticed,” Stringer replied, smiling back. “He’d have been in worse shape if you enjoyed more humidity in these parts.”
Rhodes grimaced. “He was only dried out on top. When the boys tried to pick him up, most of him came up stiff as a plank. But a lot of him stayed on the bedding, more sticky. They brung the bedding and the goo in as well, of course. It’s a good thing they did. The county coroner never would have noticed that rifle ball if the boys had left it behind.”
The barkeep slid Stringer’s highball across the mahogany to him. Stringer picked it up with a nod of thanks and asked the town law what rifle ball they were talking about.
Rhodes said, “A .30-caliber deer or military slug, copper clad. From where it was stuck to the bedspread with a gob of old Dutch Steinmuller, we figure he was hit low in the back at long range. It must have smarted some, but the tough old buzzard made it on home and just lay down to get over it or not. Anyone can see he didn’t get over it. The poor old fool should have come on into town. It wouldn’t have been a fatal wound if he hadn’t treated it so casual.”
Stringer sipped some cool bitter blandness. He’d said easy on the rum, not no rum at all, but mayhaps it was just as well on such a hot day. He put the cold clammy glass back down and told Rhodes, “Try it this way. He was afraid to ride into town once he’d made it home and felt more foiled up. I was wondering how his mule survived so long, out back, even with cactus to get at. What if he lasted a while with that slug in him? What if he sort of agreed with you that it was only a flesh wound from a spent bullet? He might have pumped the watering trough full to the brim and done some other chores before it came to him that he was feeling poorly and lay down to die, see?”
Rhodes frowned down at his own drink as he replied, “Only partway. I follow you as far as making sure his mule would be all right for a spell. The front door was barred from the inside. The back door wasn’t. My boys agreed with you that there was nothing out of order in the ‘dobe, save for him. So what other chores could you have in mind for a dying man to tend to?”
Stringer explained, “He could have burnt any number of papers in his potbellied stove and it would still have been cold by the time I showed up. I took the liberty of looking about for some papers he should have had out there. I didn’t find them.”
Rhodes snorted in dismissal. “That’s dumb. My boys found hardly anything out there but papers. The old coot had back-issue newspapers and magazines piled halfway up one wall.”
Stringer sipped some more cool refreshment before he explained, “He wouldn’t have worried about anyone after him getting their hands on old newspapers. Everyone for miles already knows this town was sort of wild in its day. Steinmuller knew ab
out something more recent than the Earp and Clanton feud. As an old newspaper man, he figured that whatever he’d found out would be of interest to the outside world. The one wire we know he sent makes no sense, by itself. I think he began by just posting a letter. He might have thought, at first, it was only what we call a lead, or a tip about odd goings-on that might be worth following up on.”
“But you said he sent a wire,” Rhodes cut in.
Stringer replied with an annoyed expression, “If you can’t pay attention at least let me work it out for myself. The wire services get dozens of letters a day about cake-baking contests and lightning striking a grain elevator. As a small-town newsman he might not have fully grasped that his hot flash from a half-forgotten town would wind up in an unread slush pile. But he should have kept his own copy of it. He should have kept a copy of the much more expensive message he sent by wire when, to him, the story seemed to be breaking in an unexpected way. Most of us in the game make shorthand notes as we go along, too. I didn’t find anything out there to indicate he was anything but an old eccentric who like to collect old newspapers.”
Wes Rhodes hadn’t gotten his job by being a total idiot. He stopped drinking and started smoking, for now, as he mulled this info over a few times. Then he said, with a shrug, “He might have thought he was on to something important. Everyone said he was a mite touched. But, even allowing he’d reported some earlier events afore he sent that wire, it don’t make sense no matter how you study on it. Everyone in town already knew the mines was flooded. The poor old cuss was just wasting a nickel a word on such a pointless message.”
Stringer asked, “If he was just a dotty old hermit, why did someone else feel they needed to kill him?”
“The more I chew this cud the more it looks to me as if we’ve been trying to play Sherlock Holmes with the disconnections of real life in the real world. That prissy fiddle-playing dope-fiend detective never had to keep law and order in a real town on a Saturday night. I’ll allow them stories are clever. But they cheat. Old Sherlock never has to work on one alley knifing whilst someone else is beating his old woman to death for unrelated reasons on the far side of the same block.”
