by Lou Cameron
Everything went about as planned until it was pushing sunset, the locomotive bell was clanging its intentions to back down the spur track, and neither Faro Fran nor the murderous Klondike had seen fit to show up at trackside as yet.
Stringer and Wes Rhodes had posted themselves near the cab of the engine so that everyone moving down the platform to board had to pass them. Some town and county deputies were strung out to cover every boarding point, armed not only with their guns but detailed descriptions of the two wanteds. But while a heap of mighty odd-looking dudes had boarded the special so far, not a one had been a bushy-browed gent with his right wing in a sling or the flashy Faro Fran almost everyone from Tombstone knew on sight.
Stringer looked up from the smoke he was rolling when he heard a shemale voice call him a bastard. It was good old W. R. Hackman of the L.A. Examiner. The petite blonde was lugging a light valise until she put it down near Stringer and told him, “Your stuff is behind the lobby counter at the hotel, you doublecrossing bastard. I thought you told me you’d share the story if I kept it for you.”
He smiled sheepishly. “The story’s not over yet. I wasn’t out to doublecross you, ma’am. I have to change trains in L.A. on my way home. I’d be proud to buy you a Coca-Cola and let you in on what I know, once I know it.”
She stamped her foot and pouted, “Don’t lie to me, damm it. I didn’t even see you in the crowd when they made that strike up at the Lucky Cuss this afternoon. Do you call that sharing a story?”
Wes Rhodes looked uncomfortable and drifted on down the platform to let them sort things out. The perky blonde was warming up to the subject as she added, “Then, when I got back to the hotel this afternoon they told me there’d been a big gun battle just down the street and that you’d been in it or surely watching it. But did you offer me one eyewitness paragraph? You did not. I had to patch it together as best I could from a dozen different versions!”
“If I could get a word in edgeways, ma’am,” Stringer pleaded. “You weren’t at the Cosmopolitan when I looked for you there, more than once. I haven’t been trying to hide anything from you. I’ve been busy as a one armed paper-hanger in a wind storm. If you really want a story, a big one, be advised to march right back to the hotel and wait for me there. I promise I’ll share the scoop with you as soon as I’ve time to sit down, okay?”
She looked up at him uncertainly, thought about that, and then she set her little jaw more firmly. “Oh, sure you will,” she said. “You must think I’m a real country girl. You’re trying to make me miss this train so that you can even scoop me on the little I’ve found out on my own!”
He assured her, “I wasn’t planning on boarding this train. I only came down to see some folk off. I can’t leave Tombstone for at least a day or so. Both the county coroner and county grand jury want me to fill out some depositions before I leave. I mean to wire my final report in, anyway. My own paper would never forgive me if we were scooped while I was making my way home by rail, even if I was free to leave this instant. So, no fooling, W. R., you’d better stick around. Things may be happening, here, long before you can make it home to L.A., and I’m sure Western Union will give you the same special rates on news dispatches.”
She hesitated, wrinkled her perky nose at him, and decided, “You must not know any women here in Tombstone. I think you’re pretty, too, but no thanks. I’m a newspaperwoman, not a playtoy, if it’s all the same to you!” Then she picked up her valise and marched on, her nose in the air and, damm it, her rear view just plain teasing, whether she was walking that way on purpose or not.
Stringer watched her fade out of his life in the gathering gloom of twilight. Then he shrugged, lit the smoke he’d been rolling all the time, and turned absently to see how many more passengers might be coming. He knew they’d better be coming fast if they meant to make the train. The bell had stopped clanging. The crew up in the cab was just waiting for the conductor’s signal to open the throttle. Stringer saw a slightly taller but less teasy-walking female figure coming his way with a carpetbag in each hand and her straw boater cocked at an awkward angle atop her Gibson Girl hairdo. As she spotted him, she faltered in mid-stride, then kept coming, a resigned little smile on her pale face. He ticked his hat brim to her and said, “Evening, Miss Tillie. Your hat’s coming unpinned. I’ve been wondering where you went, after Tucson.”
She stopped, put down her bags, and said, “So, now you know.”
He shook his head. “Not hardly. You told me in Tucson you were bound here to work as a librarian. It took me a spell to figure out you were one of Faro Fran’s gals, and for that I thank you. I’d have never enjoyed our first meeting in Tucson if I’d known, then, how you’d learned to screw so fine.”
She looked hurt as she said, “All right, I’m a whore. I wouldn’t expect you to understand. Let’s say it just happened. I still meant some of the things I said, in bed, long ago and far away.”
He said, “I’m glad. It makes me feel less dumb about the way I might have acted in bed. Did Faro Fran say it was time to light out or was this your own idea, Tillie?”
She heaved a defeated little sigh. “I’m not quite sure what that painted hussy and Skagway Sam were really up to. I confess I bought their story that you could be a hired gun when they sent me back to spy on you that time. But it seems that was only one of the lies they told us girls. None of us know, for sure, what’s been going on. But I, for one, don’t mean to go down with the ship.”
He didn’t answer. She licked her pale lips and asked him, in a timid tone, “Am I free to board, now, honey?”
He said, “I’m still thinking about that. I’m not about to bear witness against you for crimes against nature in Tucson, and the law here has enough bigger fish to fry. But, ah, where did you say old Faro Fran might be holed up, right now?”
Before she could answer, if she intended to answer, another female voice, behind him, screamed, “MacKail! Look out!” Stringer slid sideways into the slot between the locomotive’s tender and the mail car as two shots rang out almost as one.
Then it got very quiet. Stringer risked a cautious peek out of his dark slot, gun in hand, to see the whore he’d just been talking to flat on her back between her bags. He saw gunsmoke and heard running footsteps coming at him from the other way. Another dark human form lay facedown under the cloud of smoke as it began to clear. Then W. R. Hackman appeared through the blue haze, her bitty right hand gripping a bitty nickel-plated pocket pistol. She stopped by the body she’d back-shot, sobbing, “He was about to shoot you in the back!”
Stringer muttered, ‘There seems to be a lot of that going around, this evening.” He stared both ways at both bodies, trying to piece the picture together. He holstered his own gun as he joined the petite blonde by the other. He said, “Put that away and let me do the talking,” as, sure enough, Wes Rhodes and four other lawmen bore down on them, their own guns drawn.
Stringer called out, “Hold your fire, boys. It’s over. This little lady threw down on the results you see at our feet, just as he was set to fire at my back. He fired anyway and nailed the gal yonder, by her baggage. So allow me to present W. R. Hackman, the hero of the hour. Or should I say heroine?”
Wes Rhodes rolled the dead man over with his boot. The light was tricky, but as they all regarded the bushy brows and taped-up right wrist, the town law agreed, “She surely did a heroic job on this mean cuss. He’d be the one as murdered poor Iona Fraser with dynamite, right?”
Stringer nodded and said, “Her, at least. It hardly matters who killed whom, with all of the killers accounted for.”
Wes Rhodes allowed that sounded fair and asked who the other victim might be, so Stringer said, “Oh, that’s old Faro Fran. You might say her demise was an accident, but I can’t say I’m sorry. She was the lethal brains directing Skagway Sam and the others.”
Wes Rhodes led the march up the platform to where the dead gal lay, staring up at the purple sky with an innocent little smile on her pale lips.r />
Rhodes hunkered over her, shook his head, and said, “No offense, Stringer, but this gal don’t look at all like Faro Fran!”
Stringer said, “She fooled me, too, for a spell. But when you get down to cases, how were any of us supposed to know what the one and original Faro Fran really looked like under that red wig and all that face paint? When she was being Faro Fran she talked different and acted different. It was easy enough for her to turn into another gal entire when she wanted to, or had to.”
W. R. Hackman was recovering from her shock and recalling she was a newspaperwoman by now. So it was her idea to ask Stringer how on earth he’d recognized the pathetic drab at their feet as the wicked woman of Tombstone.
He said, “To begin with, she and her gang never would have come to Tombstone if they hadn’t been offered a handsome cut by the mining stock swindlers. I’m sorry, Wes, but facts are facts. I didn’t recognize her as two gals I’d—ah—met up with on separate occasions until just before her confederate tried to shoot me in the back while she was distracting me so demurely. Let’s say there’s simply limits to how dumb one man can be about womankind. Her story was making no sense and so, as I was trying to figure out what she was really up to, I was naturally thinking back and forth betwixt Faro Fran and less gussied-up gals who had to be in with the gang. I couldn’t see Miss Tillie working as one of Faro Fran’s gals with not a trace of makeup or perfume, so I pictured mousy Tillie with powder and paint all over her innocent face and it came to me who she was just as her new boyfriend was throwing down at me. He couldn’t hear us talking. She’d have no doubt preferred he hold his fire and let her bluff her way through. But she once told me she found good help hard to find, and so that’s about the whole story.”
Little W. R. said, “The heck you say. I have to get it on paper and then the wire, fast!”
Wes Rhodes straightened up and shook his head at her, not unkindly, as he told her, “I fear you won’t be going nowheres until you explain these two dead bodies to the satisfaction of this county, ma’am.”
At her dismayed look, Stringer quickly assured her, “I’ll be proud to bear witness for you and, as I said before, we can both wire the story in from here, see?”
“I’m beginning to.” She sighed. “How long do you think we’ll both be stuck here in Tombstone, MacKail?”
He said, “Oh, no more than a week. I’d best get your valise and escort you back to the hotel. The boys will tidy up here, for now. Is that jake with you, Wes?”
With a knowing smile, Wes said, “Sure, you young folk run along. No doubt you have a lot to talk about.”
As Stringer led her away from the crowd encircling the bodies, the train was backing out as well. Her valise stood, lonesome, where she’d dropped it to save his life. Picking it up, he told her, “It was lucky for me you were still on the platform when that rascal threw down on me from behind. How come you hadn’t boarded yet?”
She fluttered her lashes as she answered, shyly, “I was on my way back to take you up on your offer. Last night I took the liberty of reading the copy you left in my safekeeping. You’re a hell of a writer, MacKail. If we put our heads together on this scoop we ought to come up with a humdinger!”
Taking her arm in his free hand, he said he sure hoped so. As they headed back to the Cosmopolitan Hotel and only Dan Cupid knew what else, she must have felt obliged to proclaim, “I hope you understand that when I said I wanted to work with you, that’s all I had in mind.”
He just smiled and squeezed her arm. It might have sounded a mite fresh if he’d pointed out, so soon, that a lady always had a right to change her mind. The evening was young and with any luck the two of them would have their heads together quite a spell.
THE END
YOU CAN FIND ALL OF LOU CAMERON’S STRINGER SERIES AVAILABLE AS EBOOKS:
STRINGER (#1)
ON DEAD MAN’S RANGE (#2)
STRINGER ON THE ASSASSIN’S TRAIL (#3)
STRINGER AND THE HANGMAN’S RODEO (#4)
STRINGER AND THE WILD BUNCH (#5)
STRINGER AND THE HANGING JUDGE (#6)
STRINGER IN TOMBSTONE (#7)
STRINGER AND THE DEADLY FLOOD (#8)
STRINGER AND THE LOST TRIBE (#9)
STRINGER AND THE OIL WELL INDIANS (#10)
STRINGER AND THE BORDER WAR (#11)
STRINGER ON THE MOJAVE (#12)
STRINGER ON PIKES PEAK (#13)
STRINGER AND THE HELL-BOUND HERD (#14)
STRINGER IN A TEXAS SHOOT-OUT (#15)