by Lou Cameron
Stringer didn’t try to appear wild and wooly by the standards of a working cowhand. The gun rig he wore in less refined surroundings was packed away with other possibles in the battered old gladstone he’d toted from his own digs. His somewhat scuffed black Justins were spurred but soberly stitched as well as worn under the clean but sun-faded blue jeans he wore with a matching denim jacket. His shirt was a lighter shade of millhand blue and he’d put on a black sateen bandana in lieu of the necktie he had to wear to the office. His pragmatic riding outfit was, of course, topped by the somewhat battered but not that battered gray Rough Rider hat he’d brought back from Cuba. He saw no reason for the snooty clerk to stare at it as if he’d sprouted horns through his close-cropped light brown hair. He told the priss who he was and who he’d come to see. He never did find out whether they let gents dressed so humble use the house phones or steam lifts. For, just as the desk clerk wound up to argue with him, they were joined by the bearish Remington, who now wore a grimmer expression but still seemed pleased to see Stringer. He said, “You’re just in time to help me drink to the damnation of this overgrown hick town, MacKail. The sons of bitches would rather brag about Gaspar De Portola than have me immortalize the old dago in bronze.”
As he half-led and half-dragged Stringer to the tap room off the lobby, they were greeted by another snooty cuss who told them, or warned them, that they were not in the habit of serving gents of the working classes. Remington brushed past, growling, “That’s no problem, we don’t want to drink with men of the working classes. We want a couple of boiler makers and don’t mess with me today. I mean it.”
They decided he must. The normally puppy dog friendly Remington had some solid muscle under that overlay of lard and when he was pissed, it showed. Stringer waited until they’d bellied to the bar and been served before he commented on the obvious fact that things didn’t seem to be going so swell for either of them. Remington snorted in disgust and said, “I told you I was giving this burg back to the Indians. For all their airs, the sons and daughters of the famous forty-niners are cheap as hell. So I’m off for the east where people are willing to pay for statues of western riders.”
Stringer filled the artist in on the bare-bones details of the grim find to the south and suggested, “If you want to go shares on an illustrated feature, we could maybe kill two birds with one stone. I’ll be switched with snakes if I can fathom a way to make such a simple tragedy worth a full-length article. But if you were to whip up some wash drawings of the pathetic dried-out remains in their old-timey clothes and so forth
Remington shook his head and objected, “Not for what that San Francisco skinflint, Sam Barca, would pay. I told you, these days I only work for top dollar, kid.”
Stringer said, “I haven’t gotten to the second bird, yet. I found a threatening note, like the one you got, waiting for me when I got to work this morning. I think, and Sam agrees, that some clown with a guilty conscience is afraid the two of us might be working on the same story. So if we did go to work on the same story, we might just flush the rascal out, see?”
Remington signalled the barkeep for two refills as he shook his bullet head and growled, “I don’t see it that way at all. If the clown is trying to coverup something here in town he has no reason to worry when and if we both leave town, together or otherwise. He, she, or it could hardly be worried about us working together on long lost mummies in the Mojave. This is the first I’ve heard of it, and you’re right, it’s a new item that only sounds interesting until you consider how you’re going to milk it for half a column.”
The barkeep slid their second round across the mahogany. They clinked. Then Remington growled, “You’re really reaching if you think anyone alive today could be worried about any newspaperman investigating the demise of unknown greenhorns half a century ago. If they were that far off the regular Spanish Trail from El Paso to Cajon Pass nobody needed to murder them. The damned fools committed suicide.”
Stringer nodded but said, “Following the Old Spanish Trail across the Mojave was getting there the hard way, even when you knew the way and drove a sensible wagon. The fact they bogged down in a Conestoga freight wagon is sort of interesting, when you study on it. The riders who finally found them reported not a thing of value on or about those mummified remains and
“You’ve had too much to drink,” Remington cut in with a weary smile, adding, “I know the Mojave of old. Those few towns along the sometimes-banks of the so-called Mojave River were all settled well this side of the Civil War. There wouldn’t have been any local riders, or a town within a hundred miles, when those poor forty-niners went under. So even if some foul fiend killed them all for their pots and pans he’s had more than fifty years to cover his tracks and, besides, I don’t have any intention of tagging along to draw such depressing pictures. I’m heading back to the East Coast by way of Los Angeles, now. I heard the Huntington family is amassing an art collection down that way and I’d just hate to be left out if they’re serious about the subject.”
Stringer chuckled and said, “Bueno. We can keep each other company on the southbound S.P. Coaster and I’ll be proud to aim you at the Huntington estate in Pasadena. I can see how some of your cowboys and Indians would fit right in with old Hank Huntington’s Pinkie and Blueboy. How soon can you get set to hoof her to the depot, Fred?”
Remington sniffed and proclaimed, “I don’t hoof it anywhere if I can help it. I once herded sheep in my misspent youth as a would-be westerner. I swore that if ever I had the wherewithal to ride, I would, and I have. So we’ll just get ourselves over to the depot in style, if you don’t mind and, ah, do you really have to dress so uncouth this side of the Cajon Pass, my rustic youth?”
Stringer nodded and said, “I’m not about to change my pants in broad-ass daylight under a Joshua tree, Fred. As to which of us looks more foolish in his chosen traveling garb, I’ll allow I may be a mite informal, if you’ll allow you look like a big old bear dressed like a sissy.”
CHAPTER TWO
The tedious train ride south passed without incident, and so much for the suspicion that anyone might be serious about the two of them working too close for comfort to some mysterious master criminal. It took the coaster the better part of eight hours to get them to Los Angeles just after dark. Remington said he meant to check into a downtown hotel for a good night’s sleep before scouting up the Huntingtons of Pasadena to see how much they really admired art. Stringer said his best bet would be to catch the next local to Barstow, about a hundred miles to the northeast, and see if he could pick up a livery mount for the rest of the trip to Esperanza, before sunrise came along to make such riding a chore, even this early in the dry summer heat.
They were shaking to part friendly near the entrance of the depot when things suddenly got confusing as hell.
The dapperly dressed Remington seemed the obvious victim of the street gang, if that was what tore in out of the darkness to pile on both of them at once. Stringer’s gun was still packed in his gladstone, which would have been bad enough if at least two of the young thugs hadn’t been trying to twist it out of his left hand at once. Most of them had piled on the burly Remington and he immediately lost his derby and expensive overnight bag to the thugs. But as they gave up on Stringer to scamper off with the burly artist’s belongings, one of them let fly the mocking rooster-laugh of the border bullyboy. Remington proved that, though an eastern dude to the core, and proud of it, he really had absorbed some rustic manners from the cowhands and cavalry troopers he liked to render in oils and bronze.
He moved pretty well for a middle-aged, self-indulgent cuss. Stringer perforce could only follow at a dead run, protesting, “Not uphill into that barrio, you asshole!” as the portly artist pursued his baggage and the dozen-odd young thugs who’d grabbed it across the coach road out front and up a narrow cinder path that wound ever upwards into the dimly-lit Mexican slum that clung to that slope of the Santa Monica Mountains, or chaparral covered hills, in point of fact.
Remington caught up with the one gripping his baggage where the street opened out into a small flat plaza surrounded by frame shacks that should have been condemned the day they went up. Remington’s success seemed determined more by how far they were from any part of town patrolled by the police rather than exhaustion on the part of the smirking Hispanic who placed the bag on the ground to stand over it as if he was a bulldog chained there to guard it, softly growling, “What can I say? You have caught up with me, Fat Boy. Now just what do you think you are going to do about that, eh?”
Stringer had unlocked his own gladstone on the fly and gotten his double-action .38 out by this time. But before he could get closer, Remington had stepped inside the young tough’s guard to grab him by the crotch and collar and then, as the Mexican wailed in agony and flailed his fists in vain at the back of the husky artist’s bullet head, he was lifted high in the sky and went twirling like a baton to land ten feet away with an ominous thud. Then Frederic Remington simply picked up his baggage with a satisfied smile and turned toward Stringer, mutttering, “That’s better. Where can you get a drink around here at this hour?”
Stringer fired a shot into the cinders as the rest of the gang moved in, muttering terrible remarks about the two of them. Remington said, “Oh, Bully, do we get to keep any we down, or do we have to throw them back?” Then he hauled out the huge Colt Dragoon conversion he’d had under his loose frock coat all this time and proceeded to fire point blank as the gang picked up speed for parts unknown. Stringer knew he was missing on purpose. The gang might have suspected it. They didn’t want to take any chances on being wrong. As the last of them vanished from view, save for the one Remington had dumped on his head, Stringer said, “Let’s get out of here, poco tiempo. If they come back at all, it’ll be with guns. This isn’t my first visit to this suburb of Tijuana. What in the hell do you have in that bag that makes you so brave, Fred?”
Remington shrugged and said, “It’s a matter of principle. I did ride after Geronimo with the Fourth Cav that time and, once a man’s brushed with Apache, he’s not about to take shit off any other breed of social misfit.”
Stringer said they’d still best get back to some street lamps and to reload that fool pistol. As the two of them headed back down the hill, the thug Remington had downed was trying to get back up. Stringer wasn’t sure that was a blade gleaming in the dim light, but just in case it was, he kicked the cuss in the head to flatten him in passing. The Mex sobbed, in Spanish, and rolled over on his other side to get some sleep. So Stringer didn’t pursue the matter until he and Remington were well on their way down the hill. Then he muttered, “That’s funny. Did you hear what he said about someone steering them wrong on us?”
Remington shrugged and replied, “Hablo muy poco, and that’s sort of bragging. Are you saying someone ordered those ruffians to jump us, MacKail?”
Stringer said, “It works a couple of ways. He might have meant somebody fingered us as easy marks and so the attack was just part of the local tourist industry. On the other hand, the two of us were warned to stay out of someone’s hair and we did just show up here in one bunch.”
Remington laughed incredulously and announced, “I see it all, now. Some master criminal is afraid we’ll do an illustrated expose on the baggage thieves of Pueblo de Los Angeles. Or do you still think someone’s trying to cover up a handful of pioneers who died and dried out, any way you like it, before either of us were born, for God’s sake?”
Stringer smiled sheepishly and allowed, “It’s wild, no matter how you slice it. But we did ride this far together and we did just get jumped. What if I agreed to ride out to Pasadena with you, come morning, and introduce you personally to my old pal Hank Huntington? I could go admire his garden or something while you tried to sell him some art work. Then, seeing you have to go through Barstow in any case on your way east
“How far is that big desert junction from your trail town and its mummy collection?” Remington cut in.
To which Stringer could only reply, “About twenty-odd miles, or half a night’s ride out to the northeast.”
Remington sighed and replied, “I once rode my ass off in Apache Country to prove I wasn’t a sissy boy to some dubious cavalrymen. Now that I’m so famous, I don’t have to prove a thing, and my sweet little Eva is expecting me to take her up to our summer home on the Saint Lawrence before the full heat of summer sets in.”
By this time, they’d reached a corner furnished with a street lamp and open salon door across the way. If only to get his younger friend to tag along, the burly artist relented enough to say, “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, kid. If you can get that wagon-load of mummies in to Barstow and I have the time between switching from the U.P. to the Santa Fe, I’ll have a look and even sketch the poor mortals for you, if that cheap bastard, Barca, will give me a credit line. I can’t afford to work for what your paper can afford to pay. But it never hurts to see one’s name in print and, hell, you’ve got me sort of curious about the pathetic party.”
But later, after they’d had their drinks in the somewhat sinister downtown saloon, Remington added that Stringer shouldn’t hold him to a layover in Barstow, explaining, “I’d rather miss gazing upon the mummy of Cleopatra than spend a needless afternoon in Barstow. The only things more tedious than the Mojave desert are the ugly little towns strewn out across it by the tedious bastards without the imagination to live almost anywhere else on Earth.”
Stringer agreed that when the Good Lord got around to creating the Mojave he was surely running out of ideas for scenery and that it hardly seemed likely anyone was going to give him a wagon load of mummies, gratis. So they shook and parted friendly with future plans in the air and got the hell out of there before they could get in any more trouble with the local street gangs that night.
CHAPTER THREE
The Mojave Desert is a vast and ill-defined expanse of nothing worth having that takes its name from the more useful Mojave River running out across it from the San Bernadino Mountains. Having no outlet to the sea, the river dies about a hundred miles out in the dead heart of the desert amid a hellish expanse of sometimes wet, sometimes dry, but always poisonous play as or broad shallow salt-flats, some of them worth mining for useful chemicals but none of them fit to drink when filled with water or, more often, mirage.
Yet on its way to hell, the Mojave flows sweet enough to irrigate a modest strip of farmland and even more rangeland for those with the wherewithal to drill down to the water table that’s there even when the river seems a strip of bare sand winding out across the almost dead-flat expanse of Joshua trees and greasewood-dotted caliche, or desert pavement, in its natural state. Given any water at all to work with, the surprisingly rich soil below the crusty, cardboard gray surface can support a surprising tonnage of cash crops. The southwest division of the Union Pacific naturally followed the Mojave River’s course as far as the water, giving up on it where nobody would want to jerk boiler water from the alkaline shallows of the sometimes Soda Lakes. Stringer got off at Barstow, where the U.P. met up with the soon to be defunct Atlantic & Pacific and/or the Sante Fe. The bustling railroad and market town was at least partly open for business day and night. As he’d hoped, Stringer was able to hire a cordovan Spanish barb for two bits a day plus deposit, and headed on for the trail town of Esperanza by the light of the midnight moon. It was easy enough to follow the deeply rutted wagon trace, running almost string-straight out across the Joshua haunted flats, and riding that far under the Mojave sun, even in late springtime, could be dangerous to both mount and rider.
So Stringer wasn’t out to astound or unsettle the good citizens of Esperanza when he rode in just after sunrise. They astounded and unsettled him when he reined in before the only livery stable in sight. He was just getting down from the centerfire saddle he’d begun to find uncomfortable when a dozen gents appeared from all sides, aiming guns at him most impolitely. One of them, a whiskery coot sporting a brass mailorder badge as well
as a ten gauge market gun, demanded, “State your name and business, you nightriding young rascal!”
So Stringer replied, simply, “I answer to the name of Stuart MacKail. My friends call me Stringer because I get sore when they call me Stew. I ride for the San Francisco Sun and I’m not out to spook anyone by nightriding. I rode in from Barstow by the light of the silvery moon because anyone but a total asshole knows it’s cooler at night than at any other time out here in the desert.”
A heavyset townee wearing a shaggy black beard instead of a badge as his emblem of authority growled, “Are you calling any man here an asshole, pilgrim?” To which Stringer felt obliged to sweetly reply, “Asshole is as asshole acts. I can see you boys don’t have an opera house out here, but rawhiding strangers for fun and profit is about as asshole as I can abide. So leave us cut this bullshit.”
Another good old boy in the crowd grinned wolfishly and said, “This pretty little thang sure talks ferocious for a pilgrim nobody invited to our fair city, by moon or sunlight.”
There was an ominous growl of agreement. Stringer snorted in disgust and said, “I’m going to stable this pony now. Then I’m going to scout up your newspaper publisher, Jed Miller. If any of you boys mean to stop me, be advised that while I don’t like the odds here at all, I mean to go down shooting back, and I pack five in the wheel. So don’t start anything you don’t sincerely mean.”
This announcement evoked a distinctly hostile collective growl from the wolf pack. But as Stringer had hoped, the one with a badge and, hence something to lose, lowered the muzzle of his scatter gun with a weary grin and announced, “The stakes is getting too high for the fun involved, boys. This young cuss is either loco or good, and the county does sort of frown on gunning strangers without a decent excuse.”
