by Lou Cameron
Big Ben did, whistled, and said, “I reckon now we know who he was really after next door.”
To which Stringer could only answer, tight-lipped, “I reckon we do.”
There was much to be said for a three hour nap after a gunfight. Stringer emerged from the adobe with a cooler, if not much clearer, head. The late afternoon sun was as dazzling as ever, but the long shadows and thin air conspired to keep things bearable. Recalling Sam Barca’s instructions to bring back some photographs of the long-abandoned Conestoga, and wanting another look around out there in any case, Stringer went back to the general store in hopes they could sell him a Kodak.
They couldn’t. The nice old lady explained, “There’s no place to have your film developed within a mighty tedious journey. I think Miss Binnie, the lady blacksmith down the way, has herself a box camera, though. Lord knows where she gets her films developed, or if she’ll lend it to you.”
He decided it was worth a try. He got the hired barb and center fire saddle from the livery and rode up the main street to Binnie Kellog’s smithy.
It didn’t seem to be open. He tethered the barb on the shady side of the street and, recalling what she’d said about living in the back, circled around to see if he could scout her up.
He could. She was hanging some washing up to dry out back, this time wearing a loose clean cotton shirt with her skintight jeans. They shook on it and he told her what he had in mind. She frowned thoughtfully and told him, “Gee, I don’t know. It’s a big old clumsy box camera with a tricky shutter and a way of popping open to expose the plates at the oddest times. What did you want to take a picture of, Mister MacKail?”
He told her. She hesitated, then said, “Well, I don’t have anything better to do before the next borax rigs come through. Let me saddle my old mule and I’ll ride out there with you.”
He could do better than that. She nodded with approval when he helped her saddle the Spanish riding mule she kept in the lean to behind her ’dobe quarters. The brute naturally tried to swell its fool self as they were cinching her McClellan saddle, and he naturally gave it a good punch in the ribs to deflate ’em. She confided she hadn’t been able to exercise the sneaky thing much of late, and that it was true the devil found work for idle hands and pent-up mules.
He held the brute’s bridle for her when she went inside to fetch her camera. It took her only a moment, and when she came out with it he saw she’d strapped on a ladylike but no-nonsense target revolver, chambered for nine rounds of .25 Long. He knew better than to ask her why she felt the need of such weaponry on the open desert. That diamondback had been a big son of a bitch. But he did ask whether she didn’t think she ought to wear a hat. She shook her head, the late sun glinting on her chestnut waves, to say, “I’m tanned enough for summer and it’s only spring out here. I’ve found it better to sweat free than all wrapped up, out here. Would you hold this stuff for me whilst I mount up?”
He could and did hold her big wooden camera and canvas bag of dry plates for her as she gracefully got aboard her mule. To ride astride a woman had to swing one leg shockingly wide and settle right on her open crotch. He understood, objectively, that it was no worse than a man rubbing his balls all over the saddle, if you studied on it. But he was used to seeing menfolk riding astride and it still took some getting used to when women rode so brassy-assed, in pants, for Pete’s sake.
Once she was seated comfortably for herself, albeit not for him, Stringer handed up her stuff and she lashed it to the handy brass loops of her McLellan while she followed him around to the front. He untethered his hired mount and they rode out to the north side by side. There was a faint breeze off the distant Tehachapi range to their west. Lizards skittered from one patch of shade to another ahead of them. It was shaping up to be a pleasant evening. But they’d have to hurry if they meant to get there while there was still enough light for photography. So they took advantage of the cooler last few hours of the day to lope their mounts a good part of the way. He admired the way Binnie rode, even if she did sit a man’s saddle sort of sassy. Ladies who rode more properly always seemed about to fall off, even though some gals could keep up with the hounds and take fences just as high as any man could, sidesaddle.
When they slowed to a walk to pace their mounts he found himself saying as much and Binnie didn’t seem to like it much. She said, “I wish people didn’t dwell on the few differences between men and women’s bodies so much. It makes them sound like little kids who’ve just found out boys and girls are different, without really knowing why.”
He smiled sheepishly and said, “I’ve known why for some time. I’ve read what Miss Virginia Woodhull and the other bloomer girls have to say about us menfolk setting this world up just to put ladies at a disadvantage. I reckon both sides hold some mighty dim-witted views about one another.”
She said, “Darn it, a lot of things are set up sort of spiteful for my sisters and me. This world is run by men, as we all agree, and if men didn’t fix it so’s an independent thinker of my gender finds it hard to get ahead on her own, who did?”
Stringer pointed straight up with his free hand to inform her, flatly, “Call him God, Allah, or Wakan Tonka. Just so you don’t accuse my gender of dealing from the bottom of the deck! To hear you gals talk, one would think that once upon a time all the men and boys held a secret meeting, just to figure out mean ways to fix you sweet little things. For we naturally wanted to have all the fun of shifting furniture, and that’s why we took a vote and agreed unanimously that housewives would forever find it tougher to shove sofas and chests of drawers about.”
She smiled despite herself and said, “I can move my furniture, or an anvil, if I have to. But don’t you admit you’d find me more feminine if I hadn’t worked myself into better shape than the Gibson Girl?”
He shrugged and told her, truthfully, “I hadn’t considered challenging you to an arm wrestle and, no offense, you’re shape isn’t bad when you’re at your forge without your shirt on. We do seem to be living in changing times, and those sporty young ladies Charlie Gibson draws do seem more active than gals were supposed to be just a few years back. Come to study on it, I haven’t seen a lady faint for some time, now. When I was going to Stanford we had a couple of coeds who fainted in class regularly. I reckon they wore their, ah, unmentionables, tighter than those tennis-playing Gibson Girls.”
Binnie said, “Of course. I haven’t worn… Never mind. I may forgive you men, in the end, if ever you’ll stop being so damned stubborn about women’s suffrage.”
He protested, “Bite your tongue! That’s one charge I purely refuse to plead guilty to, Miss Binnie. The machine politicians who keep refusing you gals the vote are acting out of pure panic, not feelings of superiority.”
“You couldn’t prove that from the speeches they make about women having smaller brains and no control over their emotions,” she grumbled.
But he insisted, “No man who’s ever tried to kiss a gal who didn’t want to be kissed would deny her a certain amount of will or won’t power. But given their druthers, and despite their speeches on the Fourth of July, most politicians just hate to see anyone vote. It can make the results so unpredictable.”
She smiled and said, “I can tell you Esperanza would be run a lot different if anyone but Big Ben Winslow’s personal pals had a say at a town hall meeting, assuming he let us have town hall meetings. The so-called city council is said to meet in a back room at the saloon. Jed Miller used to say they didn’t bother with running Esperanza along such formal lines.”
He started to ask who they were talking about. Then he recalled the name and said, “Right, the gent who used to publish the one and only newspaper back there. I heard he died some time back. Was anyone ever able to say how come?”
She shrugged and said, “Some said heatstroke and others said he just got old. They took his body into Barstow and the county wrote it up as death by natural causes. I wasn’t one of those who went along with anything really sinister. Ol
d Jed had his differences with Big Ben. Almost everyone in town has had some differences with Big Ben. But he’s never gotten really nasty with anyone. He doesn’t have to. When a man owns the land you’re standing on and controls the only food and water for miles around, you learn to get along with him or else you just git.”
He pointed off to their northeast, saying, “The wagon’s over yonder, somewhere. Look for a Joshua that looks like a bowlegged stick-up victim. Someone sent an anonymous news tip, in the name of Winslow’s dead critic, in an apparent attempt to cause him some trouble. Any ideas, Binnie?”
She shook her head, saying, “If whoever did it didn’t want you to know his real name, you’ll likely never find out who it was, for sure. The late Jed Miller wasn’t the only person in Esperanza who ever found Big Ben annoying. What kind of trouble did they cause him?”
He grimaced and said, “Not much, in the end. He seems to have had some half-baked notion of sitting on the story of those mummies they found out here until he could establish ownership of them, as if they were a mineral strike or something. But now that they’re shaping up as real people with their own names and histories, he seems to have seen the error of his ways.”
The old sun-silvered wagon, as before, suddenly popped into view among the spinach green needles and shaggy gray trunks of Joshuas all about. As they reined in to dismount Stringer added, “Now I think he’s planning to cash in on the story, itself, rather than the pathetic sun-dried pioneers in the mummified flesh.”
She got down, grimacing, to mutter, “I can see the big sign now. Last Water and Only Mummies For Eighty Miles.”
Stringer laughed and tethered both their mounts to twin Joshua trunks, saying, “That wouldn’t really surprise me. How do you like this local wonder, so far?”
She slid a plate holder into her big box camera as she told him, “I can see now how they got stuck. It’s not going to be all that noticeable in a newspaper photograph. You’re going to have to mention it in the caption and maybe have someone draw a white arrow.”
He asked what she was talking about. She snapped the shutter and moved to take another shot from another angle as she told him, “Those wheels never came with that Conestoga wagon bed. I repair lots of rolling stock. So I can tell.”
He frowned and muttered, “I can’t.” Then he stared harder at the apparently ordinary, if sun-silvered wheel spokes and rims to add, thoughtfully, “Come to study on ’em, they do look a mite skimpy for such a big old wagon.”
She snapped another picture and insisted, “Skimpy my foot. Some poor fool cobbled this rig together out of mismatched parts. They likely thought to gain cheap transportation that way.”
She stepped closer, put her free hand to the sandblasted steel rim of a rear wheel, and explained, “This wheel would be about right for a stage coach, but a mite narrow-rimmed for a prairie schooner. Fitting a much heavier freight wagon with such wheels was just begging for trouble.”
Stringer nodded grimly and said, “They got it. But I don’t see any broken spokes and the steel rims seem to have stayed in place after all.”
She shook her head and said, “I never said wheel one busted. They dug in. The original wheels that came with this big wagon would have had five inch rims, three times the width of these. You can haul faster, when lightly laden, on a hard surface, with narrow rims. As soon as you’re talking about crossing halfway soft ground…”
“Ouch!” He cut in, adding, “The poor brutes trying to haul this wagon must have thought they were plowing their way across the desert. Unhitching them to push on faster to water makes a heap more sense now, up to where they started shooting one another over the notion.”
Then something snatched his hat from his head and, having been under sniper fire in Cuba, Stringer had himself and Binnie Kellog flattened in the dust before the report of the high-powered rifle caught up with its sneaky round.
The startled girl had heard the gunshot as well, by the time she was about to snap his head off. So she said, instead, “You nearly broke my ribs and I’m sure you busted my camera, but thanks just the same, and where is the son of a bitch?”
It was a good question. From the saddle or even standing afoot one could see clean to the horizon above the waist-high chaparral and between the scattered Joshua trees of the Mojave. But as they lay in the dust between the wagon box and the nearest wall of sticker-bush they couldn’t even make out their own tethered mounts, though they could hear both the pony and mule bitching and trying to bust loose.
“That rifle shot was from three hundred yards to our south,” Stringer said, “The sneak must have trailed us from town. So much for chatting with pretty ladies on the trail and never looking back.”
She said, “If he shoots or drives our mounts away we’ll be stuck out here. What if you make some noise here, and I sort of slither out to one side?”
He shook his head and replied, “What if we both stay put and neither one of us gets picked off? It’s too big a chance, Binnie. That high-powered rifle has our sixguns way outranged and while we don’t know that sniper’s position, he, she, or it knows about where we are. We’d better start by easing around to the north side of this wagon box. That ought to improve our position a mite if we get rushed.”
But she protested, “That puts us even further from our mounts and it’s a long way back to town, damn it!”
He soothed, “You can still walk it better, alive, than full of rifle balls, Binnie. Start crawling. I’ll cover your Aunt Fanny Adams from here, but for Pete’s sake keep it down!”
She said she didn’t like it, but started crawling, dragging her box camera and dry plates after her. She hadn’t crawled far when she complained, “There’s something dead around here!” To which he replied in a cheerful tone, “I shot a diamondback out here the other day. The coyotes must have left some scraps of it about. Watch out for live ones under the wagon box. It’s getting on to snake time.”
He’d meant that as sage advice. But some folk were funny about snakes. It inspired her to leap to her feet. Stringer swore and sprang after her to flatten her in a flying football tackle as that rifle spanged again in the distance.
He told her, “Take it easy!” as she struggled under him to get back up. She struggled good. Her lithe young body had been hammer and heat-treated at her smithy until she was stronger than the average man her overall size, and she was tall for a woman. But as she fussed and rolled her head from side to side in the dust, he managed to keep her pinned on her back and, though he couldn’t say why, it just seemed natural to calm her down, or try to, with a friendly kiss.
She kissed back, just as friendly, at first. Then, as they came up for air, she laughed incredulously and asked, “Have you gone loco? We’re about to get bit by snakes or perforated by rifle fire, you romantic moose!”
He kissed her again, in a more brotherly way, and said, “I’ll let you loose if you promise not to make it so easy to bite or shoot you. Do we have a deal?”
She stared up at him oddly, then tried to twist her wrists from his grasp and slide out from under him. When she found out she couldn’t, she relaxed again to marvel, “You’re strong as a bull, aren’t you?”
He insisted, “That’s not the question before the house, honey. I’m not trying to prove I’m bigger and stronger than you. I’m trying to keep us both alive. Are you ready to do as you’re told, you infernal suffragette?”
She smiled sheepishly and told him she’d be good. So he let go and rolled off her. A few moments later, they were both on the far side of the wagon box. He’d found his hat along the way. So he busted off a length of brushwood and held the hat up, just above the edge of the wagonbox. It went sailing off again and as the rifle report caught up with them, Stringer swore and said, “Same position. Same range. He, she, or it has a good field of fire and doesn’t have many friends. So figure on a pure Mexican standoff until sundown.”
She asked why he kept saying he or she, adding, “How many female suspects do you have in
mind, Mister MacKail?”
He told her, “Call me Stuart, like my Mamma named me, or even Stringer, as I was dubbed by an uglier boss. It sounds dumb to get called Mister by a gal who kisses so well.”
She blushed and lowered her lashes, insisting, “Never mind all that. Why do you think that could be a woman out yonder with that rifle?”
He shrugged and said, “The main and logical suspect we all agree on is a man, somewhere around sixty. He might or might not still talk like a Pennsylvania Dutchman. Either way, he’s rich enough to hire others to do his dirty work, so I doubt that could be him in the flesh out yonder.”
He got out his .38, inserted an extra round in the chamber he usually left empty, lest he wind up shot in the foot, and went on, “Hired guns tend to come more ruthless than brave. But, if that sniper has any brains at all, it should be obvious the range is too distant for anyone to this side of a total idiot to get hurt.”
She sniffed and said, “Thank you very much. I’ve always had a deathly fear of snakes and it was your fool notion to mention them. What has rifle range got to do with anyone’s gender?”
He hesitated before he replied, “Well, since you asked, and don’t get upset about it, we seem to be pinned down by someone mighty sissy for a professional shootist. Mighty sissy or mighty unskilled, at the least.”
He put his sidearm back in its holster and got out the makings as he added, “You thought of our mounts, right off, and you’re not my notion of a desert desperado. Whoever that is out yonder has to know we only pack two pistols between us. So why are we getting shot at from such tricky range, and how come the sneak hasn’t even tried to circle? It’s just about impossible to pick anyone off when they have a good line on where you’re aiming from.”
As she watched him roll a smoke she suggested, “Maybe he’s just out to keep us pinned down out here. He may not really be out to hurt us.”
