by Lou Cameron
Ben and Grits exchanged blank looks. Then the segundo said, “We got nothing to hide. But naturally all the boys have at least some solid coinage and I have to confess to a couple of hundred in coin of solid worth, if you’ll take my word on the war chest under Chuck’s wagon tools.
He’s got the padlock key and I ain’t about to bust in without his say-so.”
Lefors said he’d settle for just looking at locked strong boxes if they weren’t too big. He explained, “We’re talking about three or four army foot lockers stuffed with gold and silver, adding up to all the money took from all them trains.”
It was W.R. who asked demurely how he knew all the loot from all the robberies had to have wound up here at the end of the line. So instead of hitting her Joe Lefors growled, “All right, one foot locker at the very least and we’re still discussing a considerable weight in solid dinero. If I ever catch any of that gang alive I mean to find out why they passed on a considerable amount of paper money. Suffice it to say they rid this way from the Walker River Reserve with more money than anyone could stuff in less’n one good-sized treasure chest. So enough of this jibber-jabber and let’s get to it!”
As Lefors and his possemen fanned out to shake down the whole camp W.R. turned to Stringer to murmur, “Couldn’t the train robbers have divided their loot in smaller packages, Stuart?”
Stringer nodded and replied, “It started out as one ounce silver coins or even smaller gold pieces. But don’t tell Joe that. He’s already a big enough pain in the, ah, neck.”
“Do you think it’s true he’s really in cahoots with Butch Cassidy and the Wild Bunch?” she asked.
“Nope. He thinks he knows what he’s doing. Butch and Sundance have made him look foolish for the simple reasons this gang further west keep fooling him. He’s a bully, a braggart and a natural fool.”
She murmured, “I read your piece on the way he got Tom Horn to confess to that killing up near Cheyenne, or said he did. If I allow the case against Tom Horn was mighty shaky, dear, will you allow Tom Horn was a murderous degenerate and that sometimes justice has to work a little rough if it’s to work at all?”
He shook his head and insisted, “I don’t know how murderous Tom Horn might have been. He was certainly stupid and inclined to act even dumber whilst drunk. But framing him for the bushwacking of that young sheep-herder wasn’t justice, rough or otherwise, for it left the real killer still at large.”
W.R. asked if he had any notion who the real killer might be. He told her, “Everyone knows the boy’s father was on good terms with old Tom and that he’d had a recent knife fight with a neighbor who raised cows and commented often and loudly on the stink of sheep. But my paper was afraid to let me name him in print. There’s no way we, or any other paper, could defend a libel action, now that another man’s been convicted of the dirty deed.”
She seemed to want to hear more. He hadn’t come all this way to mull over stale news. With W.R. tagging along he circled the chuck wagon to catch up with Ben and Grits again. They were hunkered by the fire on that side. When Grits asked if they wanted coffee Stringer told them, “Just had enough to keep us awake all night as it is. You said before you got an odd wire from the beef outfit Tarington contracted with. By any chance could they have told anyone the drive out across the desert is off?”
The cook exchanged glances with the segundo. It was the latter who nodded and said, “As a matter of fact you just hit the nail on the head. If you can tell us why everyone’s acting so odd around here we’d be much obliged.”
Stringer said, “Well, I can’t say where your boss is right now and Joe Lefors was acting odd when first we met up Wyoming way. But in a nutshell, you boys have been sent on a fool’s errand by a crooked beef buyer who didn’t want any beef he bought tallied up any closer to the home office in Sacramento.”
They listened with rapt attention and perhaps some understanding as he filled them in on the swindle, as it looked so far. By the time he’d finished, with W.R.’s help, Lefty, Reb and some of the other regulars on Tarington’s permanent payroll had drifted over to the fire. When Ben at last decided, “That tears it. Our best bet now would be to punch the infernal beef we do have aboard the first eastbound cattle cars out of here and let the company worry about sorting it out.”
Lefty nodded, but said, “Hold on, Ben. How do me and the rest of the boys get paid if we just up and abandon all them cows?”
Reb seemed to feel the same way. Ben said, “Don’t work so hard at convincing us all you’re that stupid, Reb. Let us figure some things for ourselves!”
Grits chuckled and chimed in, “Naturally nobody figures to load cow-one aboard any cars outten here before old Chuck tells us all how and by whom we get paid off.”
That seemed to mollify Reb. So it was Lefty who asked again where their boss might be at such a confusing time. Stringer saw they were talking in circles that threatened to heat up a mite. So he took the petite blonde’s elbow to steer her away from the gathering storm, telling her, “Let’s go. Nothing’s going to be decided here and I’m starting to come up with some interesting ideas.”
She informed him she knew all about the ideas he came up with late at night but didn’t resist as he helped her across the tracks in her high buttons. As they approached the lights of the modest center of town she asked which sign ahead might be their hotel. He told her, “Around the corner from that bitty black and yellow Western Union sign. I want another look at those dead outlaws first.”
She said that certainly sounded like a romantic way to get a girl in the mood but went along with it as he steered her to the hardware shop where all four cadavers had been placed on display, neatly arranged on sloping plywood sheets in the brightly-lit front window. At this hour nobody else seemed to want to gawk at them any more. W.R. wrinkled her pert nose and observed, “They didn’t really improve their looks all that much with that garden hose, did they.”
Stringer stared soberly through the glass at the waxen features of the one who’d taken a round in his left eye. Getting smacked anywhere in the face didn’t do wonders for one’s looks. But now that he saw the cuss cleaned up and under brighter light he nodded and said, “I met him a few days ago, over on the west slope, in a not too brightly-lit saloon. Saw the one in black in sunlight, first day we got here. I took him for a local stock dealer, the more fool me!”
She sniffed and said, “I don’t doubt you met one in a saloon. Aside from your own disgusting habits, there’s the simple fact the gang was stopping trains on both sides of Donner Pass, until tonight at any rate.”
He said, “He never told me he was a train robber when we met that time in Dutch Flat. He told me he was a Circle Six rider, just in from Lookout Crags with fifty-odd head for Great Basin Beef Incorporated. I recall this well because the lady who owned said beef had some trouble getting her money, or said she did.”
W.R. answered, dryly, “I might have known you’d be interested in beef or anything else another woman would want to be paid for. Was she worth it, you brute?”
He grinned sheepishly and said, “This could be serious. Those Circle Six cows are still with Tarington’s herd and, come to think of it, they just picked up even more cows here in Fallon! Come on. We’ve got to get over to Western Union and send us some wires before everyone in Sacramento beds down for the night.”
As they strode that way in step she asked who he meant to ask about what. He said, “I was just about to ask you the same thing, since you uncovered that lead. Who would Tarington wire to see about delivering the stock they do have on hand more sensibly, and getting his own crew paid off?”
She frowned and said, “The company president, I suppose. But Stuart, the office will surely be closed by now and even if it wasn’t I don’t know the silly man’s name!”
He said maybe the head of their night shift in the Sacramento stockyards would be able to help. She said that made sense. They never got to find out, for as they approached the front of the telegraph office fac
ing the nearly deserted street, Ben and Grits came out as if to greet them. Stringer tensed but managed an innocent smile as he called out, “Great minds must run in the same channels. I take it old Chuck got back to camp all right?”
Ben smiled back as sincerely, saying, “As a matter of fact we were just now looking for him. Sacramento says they’ll send us a money order as soon as we wire „em how many head we’ve loaded aboard and when they might expect „em, so…”
“Asshole!” Grits exploded, going for his gun and, even though Stringer had been half-expecting it, going for it inhumanly fast! As Stringer’s fist closed around his own gun grips he saw, numbly, that Ben had come unstuck, as well, and that there was just no way he was going to nail both of them before one or the other nailed him!
Then, as he slammed a round into Grits as the likely evil of two untested sons of bitches, W.R. Hackman blew a little blue hole in Ben’s forehead and hit him again, dirtier, as he back-flipped off the walk. By this time Grits lay in the gutter as well and as an old coot boiled out of the Western Union with a scattergun in his hands and a wild look in his eyes, the girl shouted, “Not us! Them!” So the old coot responded to her imperious female tone by blowing the crotch out of Ben’s sprawled form before he asked how come he’d just done that.
They got to explain more than once as the federal posse, the town law, most of the town, and all Tarington’s riders gathered round the front of Western Union in response to yet more gunplay.
While pretty little W.R. assured everyone she and Stringer had had to defend themselves when those two thugs behaved so mean for no good reason she could see Stringer took Joe Lefors aside and confided, “Grits knew they were caught while Ben was still trying to brazen it out. Miss Hackman just came from covering a big beef-buying scandal in Sacramento and even she didn’t know the name of the company man with the final say-so. Yet there was a segundo saying he was dealing with gents who had the final say-so, even though he couldn’t say where his own boss might be.”
Lefors said, grudgingly, “It do sound uppity. I can’t see both of „em drawing on you unless they thought you was getting mighty warm. But what in thunder were you accusing them of, damn it?”
Stringer said he hadn’t been ready to accuse anyone before they’d pretty much convicted themselves. Then he told Lefors how he’d put the whole thing together and Lefors naturally told him he was full of shit.
So hard as it might be on everyone’s delicate feelings, Stringer insisted on roping a Circle Six steer himself, since nobody else seemed willing, and leading it over to the nearby coal tipple where, by flickering torch light, he shot the poor brute, got Lefty and a couple of the other boys to help him hoist it high enough, and simply cut the carcass open with a butcher knife old Grits had no further use for.
As blood, half-digested grass, and silver, a lot of silver, cascaded from the dead steer’s gaping paunch, everyone there acted surprised as hell. But only W.R. had to ask what all that money had been doing in that poor beast’s tummy.
A nearby cowhand told her, softly, “Cows don’t digest like us and even hogs, ma’am. It’s sort of fortunate they don’t live long and mostly nibble nothing harder than weeds. For it’s a notorious fact that indigestible trash, from rocks to baling wire, don’t, ah, pass through a cow. They got lots of room in their four stomachs and just churn stuff back and forth until it’s digested or whatever.”
It was Lefors who decided, “You couldn’t hide paper money inside a cow. Neither gold nor silver are affected by stomach acids. So what other brands are we looking for, here?”
Stringer said, “The boys here will be proud to help you cut out every head the outlaws added to the original herd by selling or pretending to sell „em more beef going nowhere.”
Lefors grunted and said, “I see how they flimflammed us with herds of cows moving so convenient every time they robbed a train.” He pointed to poor Lord Baltimore, standing hangdog by the butchered steer, and added, “Once they run a modest herd in with the bigger herd and got all sign involved trampled good, they had this redskin who thinks he’s so smart as confused as the rest of us. Now all we got to do is find Chuck Tarington, sweat the few missing details out of him, and…”
“Tarington’s likely dead,” Stringer cut in, nodding at the Indian. “Would you like to hazard a guess as to where they buried him, Lord Baltimore?”
The Indian brightened and said, “There’s only one place they could have. Under that cook fire on the far side of the chuck wagon. The ground is too solid everywhere else around camp.”
Lefors said, “Oh, for Pete’s sake, in front of his whole outfit?” So Stringer said, “Tarington didn’t vanish this evening or even late in the day. They took him out of the game soon after they got here, while most of the boys were in town to wet their whistles and the few stuck with the herd were watching the cows, not what Grits might be doing over by the chuck wagon.”
W.R. cut in to ask, “But why, Stuart? Wasn’t the trail boss in on it?” To which he replied with a wry smile, “Tarington had his faults, like other gents I know who bluster first and think later, but he had a rep for honesty and the real crooks needed someone dumb but honest as the nominal boss. None of us would have been fooled very long by an unknown quality acting downright pointless in the vicinity of all those train robberies. Ben and Grits alone were in on it with the robbers and the aptly-named Mister Swyft, who saw a way to make good on his pilfering, or thought he did. Since he’d be in jail right now in any case, he may want to tidy up any details I’ve left out, given the choice of helping the law or hanging high.”
Lefors growled, “Don’t try to tell me how to do my job and I won’t tell you how to do your own. I’m sort of handy at sweating confessions out of prisoners, MacKail. You might say it’s one of my special skills.”
Stringer answered dryly that he’d been told as much by an old Apache fighter called Tom Horn. Before he could rile Lefors to the point of no return, the perky W.R. hooked an arm through one of Stringer’s and purred, “Don’t you think it’s about time we got down to some, ah, collaboration, Stuart?”
Stringer was no fool. But as they started to leave arm in arm Joe Lefors called out, “Hold on. Where do you two think you’re going?” To which Stringer calmly replied, “You just said you wouldn’t tell us how to do our job. You can read all about it in the Los Angeles Examiner if you don’t fancy the San Francisco Star.”
But that wasn’t exactly true. For when they wired their stories about train robbers and the hell-bound herd, they never even told their editors what they’d been doing to each other all the while they’d been comparing notes in that hotel around the corner from Western Union.
THE END
YOU CAN FIND ALL OF LOU CAMERON’S STRINGER SERIES AVAILABLE AS EBOOKS:
STRINGER (#1)
STRINGER ON DEAD MAN’S RANGE (#2)
STRINGER ON THE ASSASSIN’S TRAIL (#3)
STRINGER AND THE HANGMAN’S RODEO (#4)
STRINGER AND THE WILD BUNCH (#5)
STRINGER AND THE HANGING JUDGE (#6)
STRINGER IN TOMBSTONE (#7)
STRINGER AND THE DEADLY FLOOD (#8)
STRINGER AND THE LOST TRIBE (#9)
STRINGER AND THE OIL WELL INDIANS (#10)
STRINGER AND THE BORDER WAR (#11)
STRINGER ON THE MOJAVE (#12)
STRINGER ON PIKES PEAK (#13)
STRINGER AND THE HELL-BOUND HERD (#14)
STRINGER IN A TEXAS SHOOT-OUT (#15)
