by Lou Cameron
In a carefully casual tone he asked just how mean Ben Winslow had been known to get in his time, explaining, “There’s just plain mean and then there’s dangerous mean, Tessie. The boys did try to give me the impression they could do wonders and eat cucumbers when I first rode in this morning. But just between you, and me, and your French dolly, has anyone at all been done-in since you’ve been here in Esperanza?”
She answered grudgingly, “Not in front of me. But I’ve only been here, let’s see, three or four months. They do say Skeeter Norris has killed his man, and anyone can see Skeeter is afraid of Big Ben, and even Hamp Dugan.”
Stringer grimaced and muttered, “If we’re talking about that thickset bearded brute who could use a bath as well as a shave and a haircut, I’d say he’d be more likely to stomp a man when he was down than gun him. Ben Winslow and his tame lawman, Hamp, had me all to themselves a spell with nobody to witness sudden moves but dead mummies. I don’t see why your boss offered me cold beer, and hot little you, if he was out to do me dirt.”
She insisted, “If he believed you had nothing up your sleeve he never would have ordered me to seduce you and find out all your secrets, damn it. Do you think I bed down with every damn rider who stops by for a cold bottle of Steamer?”
He chuckled and said, “I sure hope not. While we’re on the subject, just how often does your big boss share you so freely with suspicious characters?”
She sniffed and said, “Don’t go mean-mouthing me just because it’s getting too hot for any more slap and tickle. To begin with, Big Ben don’t share me, or his wife, with anyone. He keeps his fancy gal from back East at home, away from the center of things.”
He didn’t answer. Tessie looked away and softly murmured, “All right, he did screw me once, right after I come to work here and told him I didn’t want to dance with the boys and get them to buy me drinks. It wasn’t a friendly screwing, like we just had. He hit me, in the belly so’s no marks would mar my face, and then he raped me across his desk, to show me I had to give in to him and anyone else he told me to.”
She sounded more like a lost child than a bleach blonde bawd as she added, in almost a whisper, “I was married to a man like that, one time. It gets to where a woman would rather do most anything than get smacked around and raped whilst she’s not nearly in the mood. I know Big Ben Winslow smiles nice and even acts nice, most of the time. But he’s mean as hell inside, and if you take me with you back to Barstow, we’ll both be safe and he can screw them mummy gals for all I care!”
Stringer wrinkled his nose and muttered, “I doubt he likes ’em in just that way. I wish I knew what he had in mind for those old-timey cadavers. For I’ll be switched with snakes if I saw anything in there worth fighting over.”
She repeated that the owner of the town had never made much sense to begin with and tried to pin him down on when they’d elope to Barstow. He told her to hold the thought, explaining, “I don’t know how long I’ll be staying or when I’ll be leaving.” Then he put an arm around her bare shoulders to haul them both into a more comfortable position as he added, “You can quote me on that, when they ask what you got out of me this afternoon. Tell Ben you asked what I meant to put down on paper about his pet mummies and that I told you there was little to say, save that I figured it was finders keepers unless and until someone comes forward to name and claim the poor dry things. That seems to be what’s gnawing at him, as if he feared someone might.”
He yawned and lay back trying to relax, all too aware the gal relaxing with him could be in trouble or just trying to start some. For like many a knocka-round hairpin, Stringer had been led down the garden path by a maiden or two in distress.
He’d never figured out why, but some gals were like that. They knew few men admired another who mistreated the sometimes unfair sex. Just hearing about a woman getting roughed up could inspire many a man to mayhem. The trouble was, as any lawman or barkeep could tell you, that some gals liked to holler when they hadn’t really been hurt. He’d once nearly had his head handed to him, in his misspent youth as a cowhand working his way through college, when he’d stepped between what seemed to be a drunken brute abusing a poor sweet little thing, only to have the two of them climb his frame at once.
The one trying to get him to save her from her brutal boss seemed to require conversation even when he had nothing to say. She fondled his sated privates and snuggled closer as she offered him a penny for his thoughts. He patted her bare shoulder soothingly and assured her, “Just trying to let go and catch some shut-eye, Tessie. Can’t we just lie quiet ’til that fool sun outside drifts down the sky-bowl some?”
She yawned but told him, “I wish I knew how to convince you it was time for both of us to light out, Sweet Lover. Can’t you write about them mummificated travelers as well in the bigger and safer city of Barstow or, even better, San Berdoo?”
He shrugged and said, “I don’t really have any story, yet. Save for a few descriptive details I could use for padding, I really don’t know anything more now than I did when I got here. Didn’t your boss give you any particular questions to ask me? He must have been worried about something, unless he’s just a natural Dan Cupid.”
She nuzzled his collarbone, halfheartedly stroked his organ grinder and murmured, “He just told me to find out if you had any notion who those folk might have been, the same as he wanted me to find out from that mule skinner a spell back.”
Stringer’s eyes popped wide awake as that sank in. But he kept his tone casual as he faked a yawn and asked, “Oh? You mean your boss asked you to, ah, get this friendly with one of those borax wagon boys?”
She made a wry face and admitted, “I wasn’t asked. I was told. At least I got to seduce young Wally, the sweet kid who first spotted the Conestoga from his high perch and took the time to scamper over. Big Ben told me to find out if them mule skinners had found anything in the way of an engraved watch or a family bible they were holding out on the rest of us.”
Stringer let her drone on and, while it annoyed him to hear about a lady who was playing with his privates sharing this same bed with another man, or boy, he wasn’t too surprised to hear the young mule skinner who had opined the question was just dumb as hell. For, like Stringer, the kid who’d found the damned mummies to begin with had seen no reason to hide anything. As Tessie repeated the kid’s common sense observation, nobody trying to hide anything would have had to report anything. They could have just driven on by and left that old wagon to bake another hundred years or more, as far off the regular trail as it was.
When Stringer agreed and added that Winslow’s suspicions made no sense to him, either, Tessie brightened and said, “Oh, I sort of forgot, not having young Wally in mind this afternoon, you big old loving man. That sneaky Ben did tell me to make sure the kid who’d first found the wagon didn’t recall any chests or personal baggage that the boys might not have hauled in to town with the bodies and other possibles.”
The penny dropped. Stringer laughed and said, “Hell, that’s it, then. I’ve been trying to play chess when the fool game is simply button, button, who’s got the button?”
She asked what button they could be talking about in their present state of sweaty dishabille. He explained, “I see Ben’s point. Coming or going, that one male mummy at least, should have had some jingle in those old jeans. Yet there doesn’t seem to be dime one, or even personal identification, among a whole wagon load of personal effects.”
She asked, “You mean they got robbed before they died out yonder, Dear?”
He shrugged and told her, “Might just as well have happened after they were dead, even dead some time. The borax crew who reported finding them doesn’t have to have been the only outfit that ever drove along that wagon trace. Given all the years they lay out there dried like figs, any number of prospectors or, hell, wandering Cahuilla could have stumbled over the site. Anyone wandering on with a strong box or even a pocket full of change would hardly have ever thought to report their
find, of course.”
She asked, in that case, how they’d ever find out how much was missing. He yawned, sincerely, and assured her, “We won’t. We can’t. We don’t know they had anything of value with them. They could have been on their way, either way, flat busted. On the other hand they could have been headed either way with a hell of a lot of anything. If so, anyone who took it could have done so before either of us was born and, hell, given a lot less lead than that, I don’t see how anyone would ever cut their trail. You have to be sure someone’s been robbed before you go after any robbers.”
She let go of his limp manhood, murmuring, “Goody. I don’t think Big Ben deserves no more money, anyway. The mean thing already owns a six by six mile township, lock stock and barrel.”
He didn’t answer. To begin with she seemed to have dropped off at last and his brain was spinning enough without any more help from the not too bright, albeit awfully friendly Tessie.
He didn’t have to sleep with any mule skinner, young or old, to see that they’d have surely combed through the long abandoned wagon for any valuables before moving on to the next water with the news of their discovery.
By the same reasoning, no matter how surly he might be to both passing strangers and his hired help, Ben Winslow couldn’t have known for sure about any valuables those long dead travelers had been packing. Had he even suspected the bogged down wagon was out there he’d have already helped himself to anything left. So what was the infernal mystery, and who was sending threatening notes signed with skulls and daggers, or news tips signed by a man who’d died before the infernal mummies had been found?
CHAPTER FIVE
The mummies had been found further out than Stringer had expected. He’d wanted to head out alone, around four that afternoon and had been a mite annoyed when Ben Winslow assigned two of his boys to show him the way, or make sure he only rode where he’d said he’d be riding. But after the three of them had ridden more than an hour along the string-straight wagon trace, with the same everchanging but monotonous scenery on all sides, Stringer had to admit finding anything as small as a Conestoga wagon, well off the trail to their east, might not be so easy, after all.
The deceptive thing about the Mojave flats was one’s ability to gaze at purple mountains miles and miles away, or miss a naked lady standing on her head just off the trail to either side. The Mojave was desert, and dangerously brutal desert at that, but it was not a barren expanse of rolling sand dunes. Its surface was almost dead flat, covered with fine gravel cemented into a bonemeal crust by the mostly calcite caliche sucked to the surface and baked dry by the sun’s hot breath. Where the ground dipped at all, it tended to form playas or seasonal lakes, miles wide if inches deep and, depending on where the rare rainwater ran from, paved with a treacherous crust of salts, from pure table salt to hellish chemical brews, from arsenic to zinc sulfide. When desert water holes were posted “Bad Water” nobody was whistling Dixie.
But the desert got sweetwater everywhere, however rarely, in the form of occasional rain or, more often, dew. So the caliche was broken every few yards by the thrifty root-crowns of the nondescript to spectacular vegetation that had adapted to the vicious climate of the Mojave.
To the casual eyes viewing them from a passing train, the southwest deserts were the southwest deserts, covered by a threadbare carpet of sticker-bush that seemed a uniform slate gray at any distance. But, up close, there was a lot of variety. Those who knew the country could have been led blindfold out on any stretch of the dry country from Eastern Oregon to the Baja, been allowed one good look, and made a pretty good guess as to where they were.
There were few if any cacti out here on the Mojave. The tall saguaro that distinguished the Sonora Desert was replaced here by the weirdly gesturing Joshua tree, which was really a sort of yucca, more closely related to lilies and onions than any real tree.
The Joshuas grew lonesome or in bunches, stretched dead on the ground in jackstraw tangles or gesturing with their pom-pom-gloved gray shaggy arms with an odd urgency that unsettled some desert travelers. Stringer knew they just grew that way, and grew slow as hell as well. But so many seemed about the height and width of a tall skinny man that the sudden sight of a Joshua at the edge of vision from a desert campfire had no doubt inspired many of the funny stories even the Indians told about things that went bump in the night out here.
As Stringer rode on along the wagon trace with the guides or guards, called Kid and Calico, he found the Joshuas annoying simply because there seemed to be so many of them along this stretch, and a man couldn’t see through them. The wagon trace, cut deeply through the caliche by the steel rims of many a heavy borax rig, put Stringer’s head at about the same level in relation to the surrounding desert, riding, as it would have if he’d been walking across unbroken crust. He knew the caliche would be busted up badly near the scene of the old covered wagon, so he kept an eye peeled in hopes of spotting where others had turned off earlier. He resisted the impulse to ask the men riding with him how far they still had to go. The older man called Calico seemed friendly enough in his own laconic way. But the well-named Kid looked as if he still picked his face, and few serious gents packed a six-gun on each hip along with a bowie knife, to boot.
The late afternoon sun drew long shadows of scattered Joshuas across the powdery gray trail ahead. Further off to the northeast, great clouds of dust had been hanging against the cobalt sky above some growing dots at ground level for some time. At first, Stringer thought it was some other riders. Now he could see why there was more dust than a cavalry column could have raised at that casual pace. Some borax wagons were taking advantage of the setting sun as well. Stringer said nothing. He’d ridden as the new hand with an outfit before and the one called Kid was likely looking for any excuse to poke fun at him. The game of greening the greenhorn didn’t call for the so-called greenhorn really doing or saying anything dumb. If you wanted to low-rate a stranger you could imply he was stupid just because he had to ask directions to the local barber, and there seemed to be at least one hand in every outfit who just lived to low-rate anyone he could. So Stringer waited for one of the others to comment on the approaching borax outfit. He could just hear Kid snort, “Well, sure it is. Tell us something we don’t know!” if he gave any indication of interest. So in the end, it was Calico who said, “We’d best cut over to the west a piece and get upwind of them infernal mules. Looks like three rigs traveling together, and sixty mules raises one hell of a dust storm.”
Kid said, “Shoot, I was just about to say that. Are you supposed to be our boss, Calico?”
The more sensible-looking Calico sighed and said, “Stuff a sock in it. I don’t care which side you pass that outfit on, Kid. I’m passing it upwind. You do whatever you’ve a mind to.”
Naturally, the three of them forged up the low bank to their west to walk their ponies in line a good fifty feet wide of the wagon trace. Stringer didn’t ask why they were moving so slow. The hooves of a loping pony didn’t break through the caliche deep. Just enough to rub the fetlocks raw against the pasteboard-thick rim of pasted-together gravel. A man afoot could walk most places without busting through, or leaving any trail worth mention. A pony walking left a long dotted line of what looked like dented rather than broken caliche.
Riding almost a yard higher now, Stringer regarded the approaching borax rigs with interest. He could see how anyone perched up in the sky could see farther, even rolling along the sunken trace. Judging from the hollow rumble of the tank wagons trailing behind the barnlike borax rigs, and the speed at which the long lines of dusty mules were hauling all three outfits, Stringer could tell they were low on water by now. The genius of Borax Smith had been almost matched by Ben Winslow’s cleverness in drilling for water at just about the point the borax haulers would be starting to worry. A stopover in Esperanza no doubt made all the difference between an easy or downright worried haul from the more distant borax beds, and, of course, the boys would want to wet their whistles wi
th something more expensive than water while they stopped off their tank cars for the final run to the railroad sidings to the south.
Calico waved as the three big rigs rumbled by. The mule skinners waved back or cracked their braided whips in reply. The three riders from town forged on, well clear of the wagon trace, as the wall of fine gray dust hung there, taking its own sweet time to settle. Calico twisted in his saddle to tell Stringer, “Almost there. Got to watch for a Joshua with a double trunk waving across the road at us like a bowlegged scarecrow.”
Stringer said that sounded fair and glanced westward at the now much lower sun to see how much more daylight they’d have to work with. He frowned thoughtfully at the faint dents he could just make out over to one side. He wouldn’t have been able to see them if the sun hadn’t been raking the desert pavement at such a low angle. He knew he was likely leaving himself open for a bit of fun about his eyesight, but he still observed, aloud, “Somebody drove or rode some four legged critters south, yonder to our west, a rain or more ago.”
Calico didn’t answer until he’d studied the bare caliche between the clumps of brush and Joshua for a spell. Kid said he didn’t see shit. Calico decided, “Coach or wagon team, more than just a rain ago. What we’re seeing is long-ago busted crust, filled in by drifting dust and starting to set solid some more. You wouldn’t see nothing if the new caliche-lime wasn’t holding finer grains together. For otherwise the desert’s healed flat as ever out yonder.”
Kid said, “Oh, I see now what you boys are yapping about. What difference do them ancient tracks make? Somebody come by years ago. So what?”
Stringer didn’t want to argue with the loudmouth. Calico said, “Big Ben will want to know about them faded hoof marks. We’ve all been sort of wondering about the team that lit out from that Conestoga and never came back.”
Kid snorted and said, “Hell, nobody never said them mummificated folk hauled the wagon out here, themselves. It only stands to reason they had mules or oxen pulling ’em until their water run out. Those critters would have been mummificated as well if they hadn’t run off or been led off. So now we know which way they headed and, again, so what?”
