by Lou Cameron
The one with the black beard looked let down as he insisted, “Hell, Hamp, I ain’t had me a good fight for at least a month and this sassy young squirt has my Injun blood up.”
But Hamp, if that was the town law’s name, said, “Pour your Injun blood back in the spitoon for now, Skeeter. Some gents can take a hint and others need to be handled with care. You boys go on about your chores and let me deal with this cross-grained cuss.”
Most of them simply stayed put as Stringer led his hired mount inside through the open doorway of the sun-silvered livery. The town law tagged after him, shotgun muzzle almost grazing the dust as he called out for someone else lurking in the gloom. When a sleepy-eyed Cahuilla kid came yawing their way, the lawman said, “It’s all right for you to take care of this particular gent’s needs, Chief. He won’t be wanting to head back to Barstow this side of sundown.”
The Indian took the pony’s reins from Stringer but muttered in a dubious tone, “That’s not the way I got it from the boss. He said no strangers should be encouraged to linger until he decides otherwise, Hamp.”
The town law nodded but insisted, “Do like I say and let me worry about the boss. We’re on our way to see him, as soon as you show this young gent you know how to unsaddle a bronc without a gun to its head.”
As the young Indian took charge of the barb, Stringer untied the latigo thongs holding his gladstone to the saddle skirts. He wasn’t about to trust his personal belongings to the tack room of such a dubious establishment in such an unfriendly little town. As he lowered the gladstone to his side in his left hand, Hamp observed “I see you favor double-action slung neither show-off low nor greenhorn high. You don’t much cotton to initiation ceremonies, do you? Was you bullied a lot when you was little?”
Stringer shrugged and said, “Everyone gets bullied when he’s little. He gets bullied when he grows up, if he’s willing to take such shit. As a man who’s job requires him to travel, I get to meet a lot of natural bullies. I’ve learned the hard way that the only way to deal with the breed is head on.”
Hamp smiled thinly and said, “I noticed. Don’t you get in a heap of fights, that way?”
Stringer smiled back and said, “I may well save myself a few. Backing down from muscular morons just encourages them to chase after you, like cur dogs. Sometimes you can make a bully, or a cur dog, reconsider its notion of fun by letting it know you just might kick its teeth in. Did I just hear you say something about the boss bully of your town, you friendly cuss?”
Hamp frowned thoughtfully and growled, “Don’t push your luck with me, MacKail. I told the boys to leave you be because I saw you didn’t spook easy and it’s my job to keep the peace in this here township. You and me both know that I’d be stuck with a tedious heap of paperwork if I was to simply blow you, or any other pestiferous stranger away. But that’s not saying it can’t be done, if it has to be done. So don’t sass back when we go to see Mister Winslow. For he wears his double-action in a swivel holster and knows I’ll swear to the way it happened no matter how it happens, savvy?”
Stringer nodded, soberly, but said, “I take back what I said about this being an unfriendly little town. It’s more like a lunatic asylum with the lunatics in charge. Is their really much profit in running a trailtown barred to the general public? I never heard of a town livery that refuses to take in ponies without a special permit before.”
Hamp led Stringer back outside, saying, “Esperanza’s as sweet-natured a town as you can find, in normal times. Since we’ve been beset by pests out to rob us with paper writs and such, we may feel justified in acting a mite surly to strangers. The boss runs that saloon, catty-corner, along with most everything else in these parts. You’re going to have to satisfy him that letting you stay at least until sundown might be less trouble than trying to run such a cross-grained cuss out of town while it’s hot enough to resist the notion in a manner conducive to the shedding of blood.”
It was already hotter than it had been when he’d first ridden in. Stringer said, “Look, I only wanted to check in with your newspaperman, Jed Miller.”
But Hamp just chuckled dryly and said, “He’d no doubt rather be in a position to talk to you than be where he is right now, out back of the First Methodist, six feet under.”
Stringer gasped and demanded, “The man I was sent to see is dead? When in the hell did that happen, and how come?”
The town law pursed his lips thoughtfully before he replied in seeming sincerity, “Eighteen or, maybe a few more months back. The doc said he died naturally of a heart-stroke. I find it sort of mysterious you didn’t know that, seeing you say you knew old Jed.”
Stringer shook his head as if to clear it, insisting, “My boss just got a news tip from Jed Miller. I don’t see how in thunder Western Union could have delivered it a year and a half late.”
Hamp grimaced and said, “Troublemaker must have sent it. Old Jed was dead and buried long afore the boys found them other dead folk out on the desert. Maybe now you see why we’re so proddy. It just ain’t fair for troublemakers to stick their damn noses into our affairs. Nobody never gave a hang about us whilst we had nothing of value but water out here. Now that we got us a chance for fame and fortune, they can just go back to the county seat and leave us be, damn their eyes!”
By this time they’d crossed to the shady side and were on their way up the plank steps of the frame and tin-roofed saloon. Stringer was neither surprised by the fact it seemed to have no name, nor the fact it was open for business so early in the morning. From what he could see of Esperanza, the town wasn’t big enough to justify two saloons, hence the name of the one could hardly matter. As to it being open at this hour, desert towns paid more attention to the thermometer than any clock. One only needed common sense, rather than Spanish blood, to grasp the advantages of La Siesta in the Southwest. It wasn’t true that Mexicans or Anglos who’d adopted Mexican customs worked fewer hours a day than the dawn-to-dusk folk back East. It was simply stupid, if not impossible, to get anything done once it reached a hundred and change in the shade. So the desert workday was broken into two separate six-hour shifts, with folk going to bed late and getting up early to sleep four hours a night and four more during the daylight heat, from late morning to late afternoon. It sounded more complicated than it was, once you got used to the notion it was too damned hot out to do anything in the middle of a desert day.
The interior of the saloon was dark and relatively cool after even a short walk through the morning dazzle. Despite the hour, there were others already drinking at the bar and the scattering of tables. A gal with bleached blonde hair and a low-cut bodice sat at a piano against the back wall, plunking out a merry ragtime tune, or, at second glance, pumping the pedals of the player piano to get better results than she might have the hard way. Stringer expected to be led to the bar to meet the owner. Instead, Hamp led him into a back room. A heavy set middle aged gent wearing a gray business suit and matching hair was lounging sideways at a rolltop desk. He smiled up at Stringer uncertainly, and told Hamp, “I was expecting something more ferocious-looking.” Then he waved Stringer to a seat aboard a nearby horsehair sofa, saying, “Howdy, old son. I answer to Big Ben Winslow and it may save us both some trouble if we get a few things straight right off.”
Stringer started to introduce himself. Winslow shushed him with the wave of one hamlike fist and said, “We know all about you, MacKail. They say you’re too honest to be bought off and too ornery to be scared off. You just showed my boys that last notion had a ring of truth to it. So my problem, as I see it, calls for me to convince you, some other way. You see, I’m not ready to have the whole world beating a path to Esperanza. Not until we get some legal matters settled, anyway.”
“Mister Winslow, I’ve been known to meet folk halfway, or even further, when I was convinced that publishing a story might do more harm than good.”
He reached for his makings and began to roll one as he went on, “That’s provided I know the story I’m si
tting on, of course. So far, I’m just confused as hell. I’m here to follow up on a news tip from a man who could never have sent it. I’ve been sent threatening notes signed in blood, or iodine, and woofed at by bearded wonders for no damned reason I can see. So before we go on with this bullshit, did or did not anyone find a wagon load of dried-out forty-niners some-damned-where in this vicinity?”
Ben Winslow sighed and got to his feet. He was taller in his boot heels than he looked sitting down, and the double-action .45 he wore under his frock coat did hang sinister in its swivel holster, standing as well as sitting. Winslow said, “We may as well show you. If we can’t keep things quiet a spell we might as well have things in the infernal papers accurate. Let’s go.”
Stringer followed, with Hamp and that shotgun behind him as Winslow led the way out the back of the frame saloon and across a barren dusty yard to a lower-slung adobe structure with a flat roof. The timber doorlintel was so low the three of them had to duck as they stepped inside. The sun was now well above the horizon. You couldn’t see that inside the adobe. Aside from the daylight through the open doorway, the only other light came through small slit windows glazed with green and amber discs of liquor bottle bottoms set in plaster. Winslow said, “We aim to fix this up as a sort of museum, once we get the Gawddamned State Historical Society off our necks.”
He waved in the gloom at the shapeless dark masses laid out on trestle tables along the back wall, adding, “The damned state of Californee had fifty years to claim these wonderous relics, if they really gave a damn. Only they never, and it just ain’t fair to horn in on the only interesting relics ever found in these parts.”
Stringer grimaced and tried not to breathe as deeply once his eyes had adjusted enough to the dim light for him to see what smelled so cobwebby and sour. The six mummies lay lined up but oddly contorted on the plain planks stretched across saw horses the length of that one wall. Whoever had sent that news tip had assured Sam Barca at least one of the dead women had been young and pretty. Stringer could see one of the contorted stick figures in badly faded calico had been an ash blonde, and that the bared teeth grinning up at him from between those thin dried-out lips were pearly and likely those of a teenager. But it was still tough to picture what she might or might not have looked like when her skin had been a more human shade and she’d had eyes in those staring empty sockets. The other adult female figure had one tooth missing. Those left were stained the shade of old piano keys by her age or bum diet at the time of her death. It was otherwise impossible to judge her age, next to the obvious sixteen to twenty year old. There was no gray in her darker hair and both of them were more wrinkled than any living woman he’d ever met.
The three children, a boy, and girl, and an infant of either sex in a pathetic little bonnet and shimmy of once-white muslin reminded Stringer of those dolls country women made with dried apple faces. The little girl was holding the mummified baby by one tiny hand. And it was easy to see how they’d been huddled under the canvas of that covered wagon, too hot and dry at the last, for even the baby to cry worth mention.
The male mummy found with the women and children lay at one end of the pathetic exhibit, his blue-jeaned knees drawn up and that old Hall carbine the tip had mentioned still gripped in his dried-out grapevine fingers. The Hall had been the gun that won the Mexican War, obsolete as it was by turn of the century standards. The hombre who’d died with this one in his hands was dressed pure civilian in his stovepipe boots, jeans and hickory shirt. Any hat he’d had on had blown away or been left out at the scene of the grim discovery. Stringer asked about that.
Winslow shrugged and said, “The boys brought in most of the stuff that held together. The canvas top covered these folk fairly well until you tried to lift it. Then it fell apart in your hands like newspapers left too long in the attic. As to the wagon, it’s still out there, of course. Aside from being bogged hub deep, the wood’s so old and dried out the whole thing would likely fall apart if we tried to haul it into town. We told the infernal historical society they were welcome to the wagon if they felt so damned scientifical. But these here mummies are the property of Esperanza Township, Ben Winslow, Proprietor!”
Stringer smiled thinly and replied, “I’m beginning to see the light. You boys figure these mummies have to be at least as interesting an attraction as a two-headed calf or prong-horned jack rabbit. The historical society no doubt feels they’d look tidier in glass cases, up Sacramento way. There’s hardly anything left over from the gold rush days this well preserved, and considering how recently a lot of folk got out here, they sure do like to brag on the gold rush.”
“I was born and raised out here,” Winslow pouted, adding, “There’s no damned reason for these mummies to wind up in no public museum, getting stared at for free, Gawddamn it.”
His town lawman, Hamp, observed, “That’s the way them museum jaspers are. I mind the time some honest cowpunchers, hunting strays, found a whole mess of Indian cliff dwellings, over to Mesa Verde. The boys who found all them mummies, pots and such, could have had a swell museum of their own in the Four Corners Country, only the damned old state of Colorado moved in to claim the whole shebang.”
He stared at the well traveled Stringer for conformation. Stringer had to nod and say, “I saw the Mesa Verde collection the last time I passed through Denver. They have a cliff dweller gal about as well preserved as these ladies in a glass case. I doubt they have all the pots and stone tools on exhibit. I think the idea is to study such finds. The card in her glass case says that cliff dwelling gal was about nineteen when she died. They must have examined her mummy some, to come up with such details.”
Winslow protested, “They can examine these here mummies all they want, as long as they don’t try to steal them from us! It ain’t fair to jump a gold claim or, hell, a borax claim, and it was us, not them, as found these folk, right?”
Stringer frowned thoughtfully and said, “I’m not certain either the township of Esperanza, nor the state of California would have any claim on these bodies, if they could be identified. Under common law going back to Roman times, a dead body forms part of its own estate. So it’s the property of the legal heir, the same as any money, land, or old socks left behind.”
The two local gents exchanged dubious looks. Winslow asked, sullenly, “After all this time? What about that there statue of limits I’ve heard tell about?”
Stringer shook his head and said, “The statute of limitations doesn’t apply to anything as serious as a death in the family. It’s only meant to keep from cluttering up the court with heaps of old, unimportant cases. As far as common law covers these poor souls, nobody has the right to put them on exhibit against the wishes of any surviving kin. The state even has to turn the body of an executed criminal over to any kith or kin who want to claim it.”
He saw they didn’t want to buy that. He fingered the cuff of the mummified man’s jeans as he continued, “That’s how come Jesse James and Billy The Kid had to be buried instead of stuffed. That mummy of John Wilkes Booth they charge you ten cents to see is a fake. Both of them, with both tent shows.”
He stared down thoughtfully at the faded blue denim covering the mummy’s bony legs to add, “Finding any kith or kin for this bunch might call for more study than the historical society is apt to spring for. These folk don’t quite work as forty-niners. The women are dressed old-timey enough, but they could have been country gals who sewed their own duds by patterns handed down a mite. That infant’s outfit is hand-sewn for certain and I suspect this gent never bought his shirt in any store. But his store-bought pair of Levi jeans puts him at least a dozen years this side of 1849 when he went under.”
Winslow asked Stringer what made him feel so smart about such matters, to which the man born and reared in the heart of the gold rush country replied with a certain smile, “I did a feature on old Levi Strauss a couple of years ago. His factory is on the Frisco waterfront.”
Hamp nodded sagely and announced, “I’
ve heard the tale of that slick Jew tailor. He wore out his own pants panning for gold up to the Mother Lode, made hisself new pants outten sailcloth from a clipper ship abandoned by its crew in Frisco Bay and, when the other miners saw how well Levi’s new pants wore, they paid him more than he could make panning, just to sew good stout canvas pants, right?”
Stringer smiled crookedly and replied, “Sort of. I don’t know why we make tall stories out of western tales that are interesting enough as they really happened.”
He stared down at the dead man’s jeans as he continued, “Levi came ’round the horn with a shipment of canvas. He thought he could unload it at a handsome profit for tents and such in the gold camps. You were right about there being a lot of sail cloth for the taking, once clipper crews jumped ship to tear-ass up into the mountains. There’s no evidence the then-young Levi ever went inland from the crowded bay area. He was a tailor and a smart enough businessman to see that his canvas alone wasn’t going to pay its way around the horn unless he made something out of it. He made and sold tents, wagon tarps and naturally, work clothes. Panning color whilst squatting on wet rocks wore pants out pronto. So pretty soon everyone was wearing Levi’s stout canvas pants.”
He pointed at the faded blue jeans the dead man had died in as he added, “They didn’t switch to blue denim until eight or ten years later. The stuff was almost as tough and a lot softer. They got it from Genoa, Italy, and that’s where we get jeans from. So this poor hombre don’t work as a man on his way to the gold rush. He might be a gent on his way back, from, say, the later strike down San Diego way.”
Hamp asked, “What about that old-timey rifle and the antique wagon?” To which Stringer replied with a shrug, “Lots of folk use hand-me-downs. That Hall carbine would have thrown lead as fast or faster than the muzzle loaders both sides used in the Civil War, because they were even cheaper. They might have bought a heavy freight wagon instead of a prairie schooner for the simple reason it was cheaper.” Then he frowned thoughtfully and added, “Or they might have had a serious load to carry, going east instead of coming west. Could you make an educated guess on that from the way their bogged wagon was facing, Ben?”
