Stringer on the Mojave

by Lou Cameron

  Calico looked disgusted and said, “So now we know for sure those folk got stuck and died out here before the Year Of Our Lord Eighteen Eighty and change. They never discovered a lick of borax out yonder afore that. Had there been that borax wagon trace to follow, the team would naturally have done so. led or on their own. No dumb brute, or even a greenhorn, would be about to crunch through miles of caliche when there was a beaten path of natural dust to follow. Ain’t that right, Mister MacKail?”

  Stringer shrugged and said, “I think I read somewhere that they first noticed borax near Death Valley about when you said. It took Borax Smith longer than that to figure out the sensible way to haul it out to the railroad. When did your boss, Big Ben, plant that town of his, back there?”

  Kid said, “Hell, Esperanza`s always been there.” But the older Calico shook his head and said, “This wagon trace was here first. The boss figured out where to bore for water just around the time we was getting into that war with Spain. Lord knows how he knew there was water within reach this far north of the river. But maybe that’s how come he’s rich and we ain’t. The way the story goes, Big Ben started as a prospector, got to know the Mojave searching it for gold and, when that didn’t work, he decided water was worth almost as much, and the rest, as they say, is history.”

  Calico reined in as he spotted something in the haze of settling dust to their east and added, “There’s that bowlegged Joshua I told you about. We got to ride through them mule fumes, like it or not.”

  The three of them covered their lower faces with their bandanas, sans comment, as Calico led the way across the dusty wagon trace and past the contorted Joshua that did in fact resemble a bowlegged gent waving spinach green feather dusters above his head. They busted through some brush, circled a grove of taller Joshuas that appeared to have found a secret pond of buried water, and then the remains of the sun-silvered Conestoga wagon lay ahead of them in plain sight, like a ghost ship emerging from nowhere in the tricky gloaming light.

  The design of the Conestoga wagon was older than the land it had helped so much to settle. First built by German settlers along the Susquehanna and used as military freight wagons during the French and Indian Wars, the Conestoga covered wagon, like the Vermont-made Concord Coach, Connecticut-made Colt .45, and New York born Billy The Kid had undergone a sort of sea change, rolling west, and now seemed as much a part of the west as the mustang, longhorn, tumble weed, and a heap of other stuff that hadn’t really been out here to begin with, once you studied on it.

  Stringer hauled down his bandana and got down off his hired barb to tether it to a fallen Joshua trunk. He hoped the pony understood the symbolism of the gesture. The so-called trees grew on trunks that were little more than spongy pulp inside the shaggy gray “bark”. But being tethered to the big chunk of nothing much seemed to steady the brute. Stringer stepped over the insubstantial “log” as the others dismounted and strode over for a look-see.

  As he’d been told, the heavy wagon had sunken into the caliche to its axles and then some. The bowed bottom rested snugly against the earth and a few inches of flour-fine dust filled the boatlike wagonbed as if muddy water had dried out in the bottom of a beached fishing punt. Patches of brittle canvas lay atop the dust like a carpet of fallen leaves. There were odd bits and pieces of shapeless junk amid the debris as well, but anyone could see anything as substantial as a baby bottle or corn cob had been hauled into town and stored in Winslow’s half-assed museum. The low rays of sunset made micalike specks glitter brightly up at him. Stringer wet a finger with his mouth, stretched his arm down to poke his finger into the dust where it lay deepest, and sniffed the results before he decided, aloud but half to himself, “Arsenic salts. Might have blown in after, or they might have crossed a bad water playa, just before.”

  Calico, at least, was interested enough to ask if he was saying the pilgrims had been poisoned as well as mummified. Stringer shook his head and said, “The team and the other member of the party who led it on would have never left if they’d gotten into bad water. But a light dusting of windblown arsenic and other salts might explain why those bodies back in town are so well-preserved.”

  Kid spat and opined, “Shoot, there’s no mystery about that. They just dried out, like prunes.” But Stringer told them, “For a while they did, you mean. The canvas cover would have kept the buzzards and any rain that passed over away from their dead flesh a year or so. Say ten years, tops, before the canvas just gave way to baking in the sun and flapping in the wind.”

  He pointed down at what looked more like leaf litter, adding, “By the time the bodies were only protected from the elements by stiff tatters, they’d dried out and been pickled or tanned by windblown salts sticking to them whenever they did get rained on. I read somewhere that the ancient Egyptians used to soak and dry dead bodies over and over, until they turned to rock-hard poison jerky. Hello, what’s this?”

  Neither knew, so neither answered as Stringer had to really stretch for the loop of sandblasted steel he’d spotted in the fine dust and powdery canvas scraps. There was more there than met the eye. In the end, he straightened up with the remains of a crudely crafted but substantial padlock. Anyone could see it had been busted open. Stringer wasn’t sure how until he’d held the tortured steel up to the light, noted the lead streaks in the deep dent near the now-warped keyhole, and announced, “Shot open. Not too recently, judging from the way the metal’s all gone back to the same color.”

  Calico took the old lock from him, scowled down at it, and said, flatly, “There was nothing in this wagon worth locking up. I was out here when they put everything in the buckboards. Two buckboards. This old wagon bed was loaded pretty good, but not with anything worth shooting one’s way into, damn it.”

  Stringer suggested, “Nobody shot up this particular lock within a good long year. I’d say it was done long ago. Mayhaps by one of the long dead gents, to get at something they’d locked away and lost the key to.”

  He turned to gaze about at the churned up surface all about the site as he added, “On the other hand, Ben Winslow holds, and I tend to agree, that few wagon parties moved cross-country without dime one to their name. Somebody could have stumbled across this wagon, years ago, and just helped themselves to whatever might have been the reason for this lock.”

  Then, as he started to put the lock in a hip pocket he softly but seriously added, “Kid, don’t move a muscle! You’d best hold still as well, Calico. I’m fixing to go for my gun, slow but steady. Glance down, easy, and tell Kid why, Calico.”

  The older man asked soberly, “Have you been sipping mescal on the sly, MacKail?” Then his face went ashen as he gulped and barely whispered, “Jesus H. Christ, don’t move, Kid. There’s a desert diamondback as big around as my wrist admiring them Mex spurs you bought in Barstow from close up!”

  Kid had a better idea. He yelped like a kicked pup and leaped straight up. The big rattler naturally struck, but its fanged ace of spades head hit nothing but the space the panic-stricken Kid had been standing in. As the big snake recoiled, its intended victim came right back down in the same place. But before the snake could strike a second time Stringer had drawn and blown its ugly head off.

  It still took a hell of a spell to stop thrashing about in the dust. As Stringer reloaded, Calico regarded him soberly and said, “You move pretty sudden, MacKail. How come? Didn’t you tell us you was a newspaperman?”

  Stringer nodded but said, “I learned to rope and shoot and such on a cattle spread. But, it’s a funny thing, I’ve had to beat more rattlesnakes and other pests to the draw since I’ve been writing about the fading frontier than I ever had to just living in it.”

  Kid was staring down at the two twitching yards of death in delayed dismay as the shock wore off. His voice cracked as he said, “It don’t matter one damn to me where you learned to shoot so good, Mister MacKail. The bottom line is that you just saved my bacon and I won’t never forget it!” Then he held out his hand and added, “Put her
there!”

  As they shook on it, Calico observed, “We’d best get outten here afore the sunset sends the snakes out in droves. This’n must have been denned under the wagon box and I reckon it took Kid’s feet for a brace of bunny rabbits when it first woke up just now.”

  Kid agreed he’d had his fill of diamondbacks and didn’t like sidewinders all that much better. As Stringer reholstered his .38 with another thoughtful look at the litter in the wagon box, Calico asked if he hadn’t seen enough to put down on paper for The Sun. Stringer said, “Not hardly. I’d still like to know some names and dates. But there’s nothing here to tell us who those people were, when they died, or even how they died. So we may as well head on back to town.”

  As he led the way back to where they’d tethered their three ponies, Calico asked, in a curious tone, what Stringer had meant by how those bodies had wound up so dead and dry, adding, “Seems no mystery to me, MacKail. They was stuck out here in a bogged-down wagon with no team and one water bag betwixt the six of ’em. That hardly adds up to death by snakebite, you know.”

  Stringer shrugged and replied, “I’ll agree it looks as if they died natural out here if you’ll agree it would take a medical exam to say for sure. I don’t think that wagon bogged down. The soil back there is just as dry as any other for miles. That old Conestoga and its load was heavy. Each time it rained, and it does rain almost every year out here, at least once, the steel rims sank in another inch or so until, in the end, they could sink no deeper. Those mummies spent most of the last fifty years or so higher and drier.”

  “I just said that getting so dry, afore they died, is what kilt ’em!” Calico insisted.

  But Stringer shook his head and just as firmly said, “We don’t know that for certain. It reads at least two ways to me. The mummies of two adult women and one adult man do add up to one missing man, leading the team on in hopes of getting them to water before they dropped. But that shot-up padlock could be trying to tell us another story. Not one of those mummies has been checked for bullet holes, right?”

  Calico didn’t answer. By now Stringer had reached his barb and untethered it from the fallen Joshua. As he put his left foot up in the stirrup, with a fistful of reins and pony mane in one hand and the cantle of his hired saddle in the other, he heard Kid shout, “No! Don’t do it!” and things got confusing as hell.

  As two .45s roared almost as one, Stringer’s mount spooked away from him, and Stringer didn’t try to hang on. He let go with both hands and fell backwards on purpose to kick clear of that stirrup and fill his gun hand on the way down. He landed flat on his back in the caliche-crusted but otherwise soft soil and rolled, to wind up braced on his belly and elbows, with his face and six-gun aimed at the other two men he’d ridden out with.

  Kid was still on his feet, a smoking .45 in each fist as he stared down thunderstruck at Calico, who sprawled face down between them. As Stringer threw down on the younger rider who’d been so rude to his elders, Kid gasped, “Not me! Him! He was fixing to backshoot you!”

  Stringer said, “Holster your weapons and we’ll talk about it.”

  So the pale-faced Kid did so, whining, “How come he was so sore at you, Mister MacKail? I disremember you saying mean word one to old Calico, all this time!”

  Stringer got to his feet, dusting off the front of his blue denim outfit with his battered hat as he held the .38 with the other hand. He kept the muzzle of his sidearm trained in a non-committal way as he strode over to Calico’s body, rolled it over with one booted foot, and hunkered down to put his hat back on and feel Calico’s throat for any sign of a pulse. He didn’t feel any. He told Kid, “You surely cleaned this old boy’s plow for him. You say he was throwing down on me from behind? No offense, but his gun still seems to be in its holster.”

  Kid said, “No offense taken, if you’ll note you are still alive, pard. Had I waited for him to draw all the way I doubt you would be.”

  Stringer nodded soberly and got back to his feet, saying, “That sounds reasonable. If you had orders to go along with my assassination we wouldn’t be questioning one another’s recent moves worth mention. Is it safe to assume nobody told you boys to guide me out here on the desert and forget to bring me back?”

  Kid sounded sincere as he replied, “Not hardly. I signed on as one of Hamp Dugan’s town deputies, not as a hired killer. As to why old Calico there just tried to kill you, your guess is as good as mine. Neither Hamp nor Big Ben Winslow said one unkind word against you when they told us to show you the way out to yonder wagon.”

  Stringer put his gun away and reached for the makings as they both stared down at the body sprawled between them. Kid said, “You’d just said something about bullet holes in them mummies, as I recall.”

  But Stringer shook his head morosely to reply, “That’s just silly. Calico couldn’t have been much over forty. So how in thunder could he think I was accusing him of gunning men, women, and children before he could have been old enough to pack a gun?”

  Nobody in town could figure it, either, when Stringer and Kid rode in well after dark, with Calico slung face down across the saddle of his own bay mare. As they reined in out front, both the town boss and town law came out of the saloon to join the gathering crowd. Stringer let Kid explain and the locals seemed to accept the word of one of their own.

  Big Ben Winslow let everyone have their say before he took Hamp and Kid aside. Stringer dismounted to join them, since he felt he had a certain right to take keen interest in the odd guide they’d assigned to him. But as he strode over to the trio he heard Hamp Dugan say, in a tone of finality, “That’s it, then, Kid. By the time anyone from the county can get here, you can be long gone. I doubt the coroner’s jury would find against you. But why take chances?”

  Stringer cleared his throat and said, “I can tell you why. With me as a witness there’s no way a coroner’s jury is going to find against a deputy town marshal just doing his duty. But if he runs, they may put a different label entire on the shooting.”

  All three of them looked as annoyed at Stringer. Winslow said, “We like to wash our own linen, if you don’t mind, MacKail. It ain’t as if we carry this young gent on the payroll under his real name, if you follow my drift.”

  Stringer did. He nodded and said, “Right. Far be it from me to ask personal questions about a man who saved me from a spineshot. Just so we all understand I’m not about to own up to putting two rounds of .45 in Calico with my own .38.”

  “Bueno,” Winslow growled, “Hamp can clean up here, and see your barb is put away. You and me had best go have a short snort and a long talk about what just happened.”

  Stringer agreed. He expected to be led back to Winslow’s office in the rear of the saloon. But the town boss steered him the other way, explaining, “More private at my quarters. My wife says she’s never met a famous newspaperman before, in any case.”

  So they crossed the broad wagon trace and made their way between dimly-lit walls of frame and adobe until Winslow stopped Stringer in front of a rambling mud mansion with a veranda and cactus garden wrapped around it, saying, “I’d best go in ahead and make sure my old woman is dressed decent. We wasn’t expecting company and you’d be surprised how some ladies sprawl about the house in private.”

  Stringer had sprawled around houses in private with ladies in his time. So he just leaned against the garden wall as Winslow ducked inside a minute. He came out in no time, calling, “All set. She’s just dying to coffee and cake you.” The two of them went on in together.

  His host sat Stringer down at a cold fireplace in the front parlor. The room was spacious and the Grand Rapids furniture was more expensive than one usually found surrounded by walls of glorified mud pies. The wife Winslow had mentioned didn’t seem to be around. Stringer assumed, as they made themselves comfortable, that she was rustling up some refreshments. He resisted the temptation to build himself a smoke before he could ask permission of the lady of the house. He knew if he asked man to man, Winslow
would say it was jake to smoke, but he knew how his own Aunt Ida felt about strangers lighting up in her parlor, just because Uncle Don allowed they could.

  It didn’t take long to bring Winslow up to date on the odd behavior of old Calico. Kid had already told him and Hamp about as much. Winslow agreed the shot-up padlock they’d found out there added to the mystery, but hardly could have inspired anyone with a lick of sense to murder. He asked, “Do you reckon he meant to do Kid as well, or would you say he was taking it for granted that such a baby-faced rascal might not see fit to interfere?”

  Stringer shrugged and said, “I just can’t say, not knowing the background or even the real names of your hired guns.”

  Winslow winced and said, “That’s putting it harsh, MacKail. I got me a town to run and any town needs peace officers. As a man of the world you surely know good help is hard to find and that many a fine lawman learned his skills on the, well, naughty side of the law.”

  Stringer smiled thinly and said, “I’ve interviewed Tom Horn, Deputy Marshal Frank Dalton, and other old timers who learned to handle a gun sort of informal before they applied for badges. But Calico reverted to type right after I’d allowed those mummies you have stored across town might have died less natural than first assumed.”

  Winslow nodded and said, “Kid told us. I don’t know the name Calico was baptized under, if he ever was. He got his nickname from the mining town of Calico, named in turn for the California Mining Company. He was ramrod of the company police. Gunned a mining man when he caught him high-grading. The county cleared him, but the company fired him to satisfy the miner’s union. Hamp Dugan hired Calico to work here a few weeks later. I don’t allow no unions in my town.”

  Stringer asked if the man who owned the town could pin things down a mite tighter. Winslow pursed his lips and said, “1900 on the nose. I recalls the year because that’s when I incorporated Esperanza as a township. Before that we only had us a cluster of frame and ’dobe businesses and quarters, run more or less like my private estate. Had to set things up more formal as the town and its trade growed. Needed Hamp and his town force more to control the borax crews, and riders off the cow spreads to the south. Just about everyone living in town works for me, and so they know better than to cause me vexation.”