Stringer in Tombstone

by Lou Cameron

  The older Scot’s eyes grew proud and misty. “Ay, and they still display his false teeth in the Tower of London. From the way they treated all of us they captured, we must hae given them a grand scare. Dinna buy any stock in this daft venture, MacKail.”

  “I never intended to. Are you telling me it’s some kind of confidence game?” Stringer prodded.

  “I dinna ken what it may be. The only mon in the lot I ken of auld would be Lawyer Lumford. I’ve ever found him honest, for a mon with an English name. Sae I’d say he was sincerely daft. Whether the others are at larceny or lunacy, there’s nae silver left in this mountain. Not high grade enough to pay its way to the surface, anyway. A dollar’s worth of silver is best left in the mountain if it takes ye more than a dollar to bring it oot, ye ken.”

  “I noticed that up Alaska way,” Stringer agreed. “There was always some color in the gravel of the gold fields. But only an idiot would pan all day to wind up with less than he could make swamping out saloons.”

  “Ay, but there’s something aboot the very sound of gold or silver that makes many a mon act like an idiot. I’ve reached an age where I’d rather draw decent day wages than go chasing pipe dreams. They offered me stock in this venture for my services. I said I’d take money if it was all the same to them. Take the advice of a mon wha’s chased his share of fairy silver, laddy. Dinna buy in, nae matter what they find at the bottom.”

  Stringer promised he wouldn’t and, having seen about all there was to see until the water level dropped one hell of a lot, he headed back to where he’d left Blue Ribbon.

  Pushing through the crowd the other way, he recognized many a face from town. Annie Fraser was standing with another young gal and shot him a warning look before he could howdy her. He did nod at other familiar faces until he bulled out the far side only to see some tents had sprouted like mushrooms on the slope over that way. Through the open fly of one he saw the barkeep from the Oriental Saloon dispensing refreshments over a plank mounted across two barrels. Stringer was only slightly more surprised to spot Faro Fran set up in another tent behind her layout. She was playing solitaire as she waited for the suckers to tire of the action farther upslope. The evening was still young. She looked bored and sort of hazy as well because she was smoking a Havana Perfecto. As she recognized Stringer, standing out in the better light, Faro Fran growled, “The next tent over if you want to get laid, MacKail.”

  He laughed. “I was wondering where the gals might be. But you do me a disservice, ma’am. I’m too romantic to pay for such pleasures.”

  She raised her bare shoulders questioningly. “Don’t look at me, then, unless you want to try your luck at cards.”

  He said, “I don’t reckon I could afford to play with you either way, no offense. But would you mind telling me how come you got so bothered in that club car the other night, seeing I was only smoking a bitty cigarette?”

  The tough redhead removed the big cigar from her painted lips and stared at it as if she’d just noticed it. Then she gave a raucous laugh and clamped it back in place between her teeth as she asked, “Is that the excuse Sam gave for starting up with you?”

  “I figured he needed some excuse. But if it wasn’t your delicate feelings, what’s left?” Stringer inquired.

  “Practice, most likely,” the brassy dame replied. “Sam has his good points, but he’s a natural bully who just can’t stand younger and nicer-looking men. Don’t get ideas, but that night I did comment that you seemed a nice-looking young gent I might have seen up in Alaska one time.”

  Stringer said, “I’m sure I’d have remembered, ma’am. You ain’t bad-looking, yourself, and if you were there you must have seen how few shemales of any variety there were up there. I think I have Skagway Sam figured out. I don’t see him about, just now.”

  She said, “That’s because he’s keeping an eye on things at the saloon in town. Action or no action, we don’t want anyone stealing the whole joint while most of the town seems to be up here. How are they coming with that hole in the ground, by the way?”

  “All I saw was a hole in the ground. I wasn’t planning on buying any stock in the Lucky Cuss.”

  “That’s too bad,” Fran responded wistfully. “I got some I could sell you below face value. That damnfool Sam bought some shares before I could stop him. He won’t do that again, if he knows what’s good for him.”

  Stringer smiled thoughtfully. “Oh? I didn’t know you was in charge of the outfit, ma’am.”

  “Sam is the muscle,” she replied, “but I am the brains. Lord knows he must have been standing behind the privy door when the brains was passed out. He’s good at what he does, you understand. It’s just that I have to keep telling him he’s not supposed to gamble with our money.”

  “You’re the gambler, right?” Stringer said.

  “Care for a friendly game of cards, stranger?”

  He chuckled at that. “I can see why you were vexed at the notion of a real gamble on mining stock. I am inclined to agree with you that only suckers take a chance on losing their own hard-earned money. So I reckon I’ll have to pass on your kind offer.”

  She exhaled more blue smoke, lest fresh air sneak in under the tent fly when she wasn’t looking. “You might try one of our other games of chance, then. Go on over to the next tent and tell Mavis I said to give you half-price and your own choice as to what and whom you like best.”

  “Another time, mayhaps,” he said, laughing as he left her to play cards and smoke cigars by herself some more. Passing the bigger tent next door, he spied another lady wearing mostly paint and black lace, sitting listlessly just inside as she filed her nails. Her shape wasn’t bad, but it was hard to tell if she was ugly or pretty under all that makeup and an obvious wig. He shot a glance at the nearly setting sun and decided to be true to his librarian, provided he could kill the next few hours without thinking about other temptations.

  By the time Stringer had enjoyed a light supper and another dip in the tub down the hall, the sun was setting and it didn’t seem as hot, if he left his duds off in the privacy of his room. He knew it was way too early to consider sneaking over to see if Iona-Annie Fraser was still talking to him, so he got out the notes he’d made from old Steinmuller’s clippings and tried to get to work on that feature Barca would be expecting.

  It wasn’t easy. To begin with there were too many names and unimportant charges and countercharges to juggle if one wanted simply to tell the story of the epic battle at—or near—the O.K. Corral. Stringer decided not to include a lot of incidents that, while interesting in their own right, tended to blur the picture and might not have ever really happened.

  He wrote his first draft, shorthand, read it over, and decided that while he could doubtless shorten and clarify it well enough once he got back to Frisco, it was just as well he do so now, while he had time to spare and everything fresh in his mind.

  It was getting darker in his hotel room. He lit the bed lamp, rubbed his writing hand dry again on the bed linen, and got down to business, writing:

  The notorious feud between the Brothers Earp and the Clanton-McLaurey-Behan faction, which culminated in the so-called gunfight at the O.K. Corral in the autumn of 1881, was less an epic struggle between Good and Evil than the sort of explosion one might hope for by pouring gasoline and nitric acid into the same pickle jar. The tough little town of Tombstone, barely carved out of Apacheria and beset by bewildering political rivalries, simply wasn’t big enough to hold such different breeds of self-righteous men at the same time…

  Quite some time later, Stringer stopped writing and chewed the end of his pencil as he tried to come up with a good ending. There wasn’t any. Nobody had won more than a skirmish in a war both sides were fated to lose in the end. For sure, the bloodshed had gone on a spell, with Virgil Earp walking into a shotgun ambush one night as he walked out the Fifth Street entrance of the Oriental, winding up crippled for life and out of the game forever. Morgan would be killed a few months later in that pool
hall, leaving only Wyatt Earp, who may or may not have avenged his brothers over at Iron Springs or that night in the Tucson yards, but who’d certainly been run out of the territory, along with Doc Holliday, when the popular and much braver John Slaughter replaced the wishy-washy Behan as county sheriff and proceeded to clean the county up indeed.

  Stringer knew Barca would demand more of an ending than what he’d put down on paper so far. But he was just stuck, for now. It hardly mattered that Ike Clanton had come to a bad end in ‘87 when a federal marshal shot him as a suspected cow thief, or that Old Man Clanton had wound up down in Mexico, raising cows or pushing up daisies, depending on who one might be drinking with at the moment.

  Yawning, Stringer heard what sounded like a thunderstorm brewing up outside. He glanced at the window. It was dark enough, now, and when he checked the time he frowned and muttered, “Thunderation indeed! I should have been over to old Annie’s an hour ago if I mean to catch her still awake.”

  That earlier thunderclap he’d heard made little sense to Stringer as he walked along the dark silent street to Annie’s place. He could hear the low mutter of the big pump up the slope, once he was outside, but that big bang he’d heard, inside, had been way too loud for the backfire of even a swamping-big gas engine. Thunderstorms, while rare, were not impossible in such dry country. But they usually came with considerable clouds, and the night sky above was so clear it looked as if a man could reach up and scoop stars into his hat if he maybe jumped a mite.

  He turned a corner to see the way ahead was a heap more brightly lit. It appeared some fool kids had lit a bonfire in the street up yonder, close to Annie’s place. Then Stringer was running as the reality of what he could be looking at sank in.

  He’d been right, Stringer saw with a stab of pain, as he bulled on through the thick crowd filling the street between him and the fire. The thick ‘dobe walls of the poor gal’s house were all that was left, unless one wanted to count roof tiles and busted-up timbers scattered all across her garden and the street out front. As Stringer clung to a tipped gate post, biting his knuckles to keep from screaming out loud, the town law, Wes Rhodes, ambled over to join him, saying, “Evening. You just now get here?”

  Stringer gulped and nodded. That answered Rhodes well enough for him to opine, “Looks like your mad bomber struck again. Only this time he flung his dynamite in at a spinster gal who lived all alone. Her name was Iona Fraser. She worked at the library. You wouldn’t know her, of course?”

  Stringer swallowed a mouthful of bile. “As a matter of fact I did. I’d been by that library more than once. How bad was she hurt?” he asked, already knowing the answer.

  Rhodes replied, “Bad enough. We found her head in the alley out back. My boys are still poking about for the other parts that blowed through the roof. Them parts still inside won’t add up to a bucket of ashes by the time the fire dies down. Some kids was trying to douse the insides with watering cans when we showed up. I told ‘em not to. Makes it easier to look for jewelry and such in the trash outside if we have some light on the subject. Can’t be nothing inside worth salvaging, now, fire or no fire. That loco bastard used at least six sticks of dynamite, this time.”

  Stringer asked, white-lipped, “You agree it was the same man, then?”

  “Could have just as easily been a woman,” Rhodes replied. “Nobody saw nothing, here or over at your hotel. But I’d sure say it was the same maniac at work. How many folk in a town this size could there be with such a peculiar hobby?”

  Stringer was about to say something when, across the way, he spotted two deputies hanging on to Murdoch Fraser to keep the distraught old gent from dashing into the burning house. Wes Rhodes said, quietly, “You admitted knowing the gal, MacKail. I’m glad you did, because I’d heard you was spending some time around the library. But a rejected suitor hardly ever tells the law he knew a gal he’s just blown up and, if you knew her any better than that, I don’t want to hear about it. It ain’t right to spread gossip about dead ladies, see?”

  Stringer swore under his breath and insisted, “I value her reputation more than you know. But if you think these two attacks with dynamite aren’t at all connected, there’s something I just have to tell you, Wes!”

  Rhodes shook his head and said, “No there ain’t. I told you I’d heard gossip about the poor dead gal. To tell you the truth, we was scouting about for an S and W .38 and mayhaps what was left of a Roughrider hat, until you showed up just now. Since she was alone in bed when she got blown out of it, that’s the way it’ll read, officious.”

  Stringer protested, “I understand your wanting to protect her good name, Wes. But at the cost of covering up for that dynamiter, for God’s sake?”

  Rhodes shook his head. “Not hardly. When we catch the killer he or she will surely hang high as a Christmas goose. But I’m betting Miss Fraser wasn’t the intended target, just now. She was the victim of a dreadful mistake, most likely. Would you care to tell me just where you’ve been, all evening?”

  Stringer said, “In my hotel room, writing, since just about sundown. Why?”

  Rhodes said, “There you go. If you was alone, writing as silent as me and most folk do, nobody scouting about for you would know where you was. Since they didn’t see you anywheres in town they looked, they assumed you might be somewhere you might not want anyone to know about.” He pointed his chin at the burning building and added, “They figured a growing boy your age would hardly ever turn in this early, at the hotel, when he had such nice-looking and, some say, willing friends.”

  Stringer protested, “I’ve been trying to tell you that dynamite was meant for me, dammit.”

  Wes Rhodes shushed him, cautioning, “Not so loud. I got ears, and a brain as well. I’m taking your word someone’s out to kill you. They just misses you some more. If they don’t already know you’re still alive, they soon enough will, and do they try again, me and the boys figure to catch ‘em, see?”

  Stringer saw, but asked, “What if they get me, the next time they try?”

  “If it’s any comfort to you, me and the boys will arrest the hell out of ‘em, providing we can figure out who done it.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Stringer figured Blue Ribbon was safe enough in her stall behind the hotel. But the same couldn’t be said for himself or even his notes and other belongings in that room the rascals who were after him knew about. It would have been criminal on his part to stick anyone else with such dangerous quarters, so he paid for another night in the same room at the desk, then asked the night clerk to hire him another, on the same floor, if that could be managed.

  The clerk chuckled incredulously. “Surely you jest. I hear one out-of-towner paid a dollar to sleep on the pool table over at the Hatch Joint. As for this here establishment, we got everything but the broom closets booked for the rest of this week. See for yourself.”

  He spun the open hotel register around to Stringer’s point of view on the far side of the counter as he explained, in a joyous tone, “We haven’t done business like this since before the mines closed down. Word that they might start up again has drawn the pilgrims from far and wide, see?”

  Stringer cast a casual eye on the freshly inked pages and was about to turn away when a bold signature caught his eye and he paused to read it over again. W.R. Hackman was a name to remember indeed if one was in the newspaper game. Stringer had read heaps of Hackman’s stuff in the L.A. Examiner. Hackman wrote like the old pro he doubtless was and, like Stringer, he specialized in the exposé reporting that could get a reporter in serious fights.

  Stringer made a mental note of the room number and just nodded to the clerk while he headed for the stairs as if he’d changed his mind about needing two separate beds for the night. But once he was on the second floor and checking room numbers along the hallway, he saw to his further delight that Hackman’s quarters were on the far corner from his and, even better, Hackman’s door, if opened just a crack, covered his own empty room’s doorway at easy
pistol range.

  Stringer knocked. There was a short delay, the rustle of cloth on the far side; then a cute little blue-eyed blonde in bare feet and a sky-blue silk kimono opened up to regard him with a mixture of curiosity and distaste. She said, “Yes?” as if she didn’t mean it.

  Stringer said, “Never mind, ma’am. I thought old W. R. was checked in alone.”

  But as he ticked his hatbrim to her and started to turn away she said, “I’m W. R. Hackman. What’s this all about?”

  Stringer had to smile but managed not to laugh as he told her, “I’m Stringer MacKail of the San Francisco Sun. I’d read your stuff and, no offense, I wasn’t expecting you to look so ladylike.”

  “I’ve read your stuff, too, and I didn’t picture you as a saddle tramp,” the saucy blonde retorted. “Are you going to come in and tell me what this is all about or am I supposed to catch my death standing here in this drafty doorway? I just took a bath and my hair is wet, dammit.”

  He said he could see that as he followed her inside her dimly lamplit room. He didn’t know her well enough to say how much he liked the smell of a fresh-scrubbed shemale who hadn’t spoiled her clean natural odor with perfume yet. She shut the door behind him and leaned her back against it, saying, “If you didn’t know I was a woman until just now, is it safe to assume you had something else in mind?”

  He grinned down at her. “I was hoping a fellow newspaperman might want to back my play in exchange for sharing a story with me, but—”

  “You’re on,” she cut in flatly, adding, “If you’re talking about the venture up at the Lucky Cuss, I fail to see how we could hope to scoop anyone. Aside from at least half a dozen reporters who rode in with me aboard that special train, the local Epitaph is still in business and they no doubt have the inside track, here in Tombstone.”

  Now that he saw how big and tough W. R. Hackman looked, Stringer had no intention of mixing her up in his own problems. But he felt he owed her an explanation and he figured she thought so, too, so he said, “To tell the truth, I don’t see how the troubles and woes I’ve been having could tie into that mine up the slope. Whether they’re crooks or not, the new owners have made no secret of their intent to pump out the shaft and sell a mess of mining stock whether there’s anything there or not. They seem to want all the publicity they can get and, to date, few if any other reporters have been called upon to duck. I seem to be the only newspaper cuss for miles that’s in trouble. If I knew why, I’d know who was behind it.”