by Lou Cameron
“I’ve never understood why,” she said. “I’m curious about the subject. Would you say I screw better or worse that most other women, dear?”
“Better,” he said, “but you talk too much, and I’m almost there again.”
She agreed she was too. So they just swapped spit and fornicated until they’d enjoyed a lingering, tingling mutual orgasm. Then she said conversationally, “I think you do this just about perfect. How would you rate me against say Lillian Russell and such other fancy gals as you might have slept with in your time?”
He groaned. “I knew there had to be a catch,” he muttered. “There always is.” Then he told her, “You have it on my mother’s honor that I have never been to bed with Miss Lillian Russell, which may be just as well because the one time I interviewed her, she struck me as a mite long in the tooth, and mighty fat for a gal of any age. Furthermore, even if she’d been young and pretty as you, the thought of making love to any gal who’d been belly to belly with Diamond Jim Brady would strike me as just plain disgusting.”
She grinned up at him wickedly. “Some men must get a rise out of picturing a lover belly to belly with somebody else. Why else would they spend so much time chasing the husbands and wives of other folk, dear?”
He rolled off to cuddle her head on his bare shoulder. “I don’t know. I read a book by some Vienna head doc that said some maniacs prefer making love to a corpse or a high-button shoe. But I have enough maniacs to worry about without wasting time on the bedroom kind.”
She snuggled closer, asking what he meant, and only too glad to change the subject, he proceeded to tell her about the crazy afternoon he’d just had. He left out Jack London and Nate’s stakeout, of course. But most of it seemed safe enough to confide in her.
“Oh, you poor baby,” she said. “It’s no wonder you had so much to drink this evening. Don’t you have any notion what those mean rascals could be up to?”
He said no, and dared to hope from her not answering that she was getting drowsy. Stringer was hardly the first man who’d discovered sensible conversation tended to put many women to sleep.
He closed his own eyes to do likewise. Then Opal said, “Honey, I’ve been thinking.”
“I wish you’d cut that out,” he replied.
But she insisted. “You said one of them smoked un-American. Didn’t Teddy Roosevelt get to be president because some crazy furrin gent shot McKinley right after the election?”
“Yep,” Stringer said. “But you don’t have to be an immigrant to go loco. That lunatic who shot President McKinley was acting on his own, as far as anyone knows.”
“Pooh. If nobody got caught in cahoots with the one they did catch, who’s to say whether he was acting on his own or not?”
Stringer laughed incredulously. “You sure have a suspicious nature for a sweet young thing who makes friends so easy. McKinley’s assassin was a wild-talking recluse with the unlikely name of Czolgosz. He confessed he’d done the deed because McKinley had been mean to him, which would have been news to the poor old president, for he’d never heard of Czolgosz before the rascal shot him in the Buffalo, New York, railroad depot. It took McKinley a few days to die, so they got to ask him.”
She shook, or rolled her head on his shoulder. “I find it hard to believe anyone would really be named Czolgosz,” she said. “It wouldn’t be natural. And didn’t they say he was one of them anarchist gents? The anarchists are a political party, right?”
He grimaced. “So they say. I don’t see why, for anarchist means no government at all. How could gents who don’t hold with any sort of organization organize themselves into any fool thing?”
“Well, they have,” she insisted. “They’re always going around blowing things up and assassinating presidents, czars, and such. What if that one who shot McKinley was just acting crazy to protect his pals?”
Stringer shrugged his bare shoulder under her. “It’s a mite late to ask him. As for the ones this afternoon, they was aiming at me, not old T.R. They were trying to stop me from telling him something. I wish I knew what.”
She toyed with the hair on his belly as she suggested, “They could have feared you knew they were out to finish the job they started when they murdered President McKinley. Anyone with a lick of sense could have seen Vice President Roosevelt would simply take over. But you just said anarchism ain’t all that well thought out.”
He snorted in disbelief. “It don’t figure. If Ham Saunders had been out to assassinate old T.R., he’d have pegged his first shot at him, not me. The presidential train was about to pull in. I wouldn’t have been able to warn anybody even if I’d somehow learned of such a plot.”
“I went over to the tracks this afternoon when the presidential special rolled in,” she said. “By that time you and that wounded gun slick had been hauled off, of course.”
“What difference does it make that Saunders wasn’t there? Can’t you get it through your pretty head that he was after me, not anyone else?”
“I wish you’d just lay still and pay attention,” she answered.
He looked down at the circles she was making on his abdomen. “I can assure you that you hold my undivided attention right now, but it’s hard to lie still with such a pretty little thing in the same bed, stirring me up like you are.”
She grinned. “After that train pulled in, there was quite a wait before the president came out on the rear platform to address the crowd. I reckon he had to put out his cigar, tie his tie and such, before he got up and walked back there. Had you really known of a plot to assassinate him, there’d have been plenty of time for you to board the train and yell a warning, see?”
He did. He caressed her bare back as he became fully awake from her ministrations. “Suffering snakes! I reckon I won’t be catching that morning train after all!”
“Goody,” she said. “I don’t have to get to work until late in the afternoon.”
He chuckled fondly, moaned in pleasure, and continued, half to himself, “I may or may not be able to wire a warning up the line. Either way, it’s a story more important than any Cheyenne rodeo. So I’d best hop the noonday combination north for the Yellowstone Park. The more I study on it, the more it seems old T.R. was the only thing in town this afternoon worth all that excitement. Talk about wisdom from the mouths of babes!”
But the babe didn’t answer.
She couldn’t.
Her mouth was too full.
They’d forgotten about the alarm clock. But after it woke them in the morning and she insisted on getting on top, grinning down at him roguishly in the rosy dawn light of a high-country summer morning, they reset the clock and went back to sleep a spell. Stringer didn’t want to expose his back on the streets of Granger until he was ready to haul it out of there. Opal would have wanted him to remain shacked up with her, but all good things must end. So in the end he had to climb out of her bed and go save the president of these United States.
Opal was a good sport about it. She fed him a fine late breakfast, or early lunch, in bed, and only cried a little as he got dressed and strapped on his gun. Neither felt the need to make the usual empty promises. She didn’t bother to dress as they said adios in her doorway in a manner that would have no doubt shocked her neighbors, had her door been facing anything but her rose garden.
He got a funny look from an old woman under a sunbonnet as he strode out to the road via Opal’s gate. He saw no reason to explain what he might be doing fully dressed on a public thoroughfare in broad-ass daylight. So he ticked his hat brim polite to her, she went “Hmmmph!” and he strode on into town.
He met nobody he knew as he stopped first at the Western Union near the depot. When he asked the clerk on duty how soon a wire might get to Yellowstone Station, he was told, “Hard to say right now. The wire’s down somewhere betwixt here and there. We sent a crew up the tracks on a hand cart. So further along we’ll know more about it, like the old song says.”
Stringer frowned thoughtfully. “I’ve heard
of wires going down under winter ice or getting cut by Indians,” he said. “But it’s high summer, and the Shoshoni in these parts haven’t risen for at least a generation. So what’s left?”
“Unless a mighty big crow perched on the wire, I’d go with a rock slide,” the Western Union man said cheerfully, and shrugged. “The country do get bumpy betwixt here and there. Why don’t you try later this evening? By then the boys should have found and fixed the break, if it’s not too far.”
Stringer swore softly. “By that time the party I have to contact will be long gone from Yellowstone Station, if he hasn’t wandered off to pick bears and shoot flowers already. Reaching the party by wire was a long shot anyway. I reckon I’ll just have to deliver my message in person. The northbound is due to leave in less than an hour, right?”
The clerk shook his head. “Wrong. Not with the wires down. The railroad and Western Union share the same wires in the rougher parts of this cruel world, and it’s against federal law for a train to tear off cross-country with no telegraphic communications betwixt sections. Ain’t modern science wonderful?”
This time Stringer cursed louder. “Shit, it has to be a good two hundred miles from here to Yellowstone Station, and no telling where the gent I have to catch up with might wander before I can get anywhere near him.”
The cheerful clerk suggested the line could be repaired any minute, in which case the northbound train might not be delayed after all. But Stringer didn’t answer. He was already going out the door.
There was a general store across the street. He crossed over, entered, and told the old gent behind the counter that he was fixing to ride two hundred miles at high altitude, sudden, and that he was open to suggestions.
The old-timer pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Well,” he said, “sudden or no, you’re talking at least five days to a week on the trail, depending on how tough your ass and mount might be. Is it safe to assume you already got a horse and saddle?”
Stringer shook his head. “I mean to hire both at the livery just down the way. All the camp gear I have right now is what you see me wearing.”
The old man brightened. “I was hoping for a customer like you today. Do you generally bed down cowhand, or could I interest you in a genuine surplus Army tent I just got in?”
“I’ll settle for a canvas shelter half and a blanket,” Stringer said.
“Take my advice and make that two blankets,” the storekeeper said. “You’ll thank me, the first night you spend anywhere’s above the aspen line.”
Stringer agreed. “Water’s seldom a problem up here in the high country,” he reasoned aloud. “So I only need two canteens. If I only pack canned beans and tomatoes, I can get along without any cookware. But I’d best buy a hatchet in case I want to fire up just for warmth.”
“You’re right,” the old man said. “You’re in a hurry, and I can see you’re used to cow-camp grub. But you figure to get mighty tired of cold beans and tomato preserves by your second or third day on the trail, son.”
“I’m tired of them already. But I find cooking tedious when I’m in a hurry. Beans will keep a man going, and tomatoes will keep the beans from binding him too bad. I’d best stock up on more Bull Durham and cigarette paper. I smoke more after a meal when there’s no coffee to go with it.”
The old man said he knew what cowhands et on a serious push, and proceeded to get the supplies together on the counter between them. When he suggested chocolate bars, Stringer said that sounded like a good notion provided they were baker’s chocolate, explaining, “Sweet milk chocolate don’t pack as much of a kick, and it’s tempting to eat it all the first few days.”
The old man agreed disgusting-tasting grub lasted longer, then pointed out the advantages of waterproof matches.
Stringer said he’d take two boxes. “That reminds me,” he added. “Do you sell them paper safety matches that come in books instead of boxes?”
The old timer snorted in disgust. “Who’d buy ’em if I did? You don’t want no sissy paper matches, son. You want a man-sized match as stays lit long enough for you to light something with it, hear?”
“I wasn’t thinking about buying them for me,” Stringer said. “The other night I met a gent who lit sissy smokes with ’em. I know better than to ask you if you stock tobacco scented with mint and violet water. But do you know of any tobacco dealer here in Granger who might?”
The old timer laughed. “Hell, there ain’t three hundred smokers in this town, and even the she-males smoke more manly than that. You’d have to go to some big city, say like Green River, to get anything fancier than plain old tobacco.”
Stringer recalled the mention made of a gal in Green River called Betty, and it occurred to him that Green River would have been the logical place to make a speech from a railroad car, in a more logical world run by logical gents. “Are you saying they might hold with such fancy smoking habits over to the county seat?” he asked.
The Granger storekeeper nodded. “Sure. They even got a Chinese laundry in Green River. How are you fixed for ammo, son? I can see you got bullet loops on that gun rig you’re wearing, but no offense, some of ’em are empty.”
Stringer nodded. “You’re right. I didn’t leave home loaded for bear because I wasn’t expecting to meet all that many bears. My gun takes .38 longs.”
The older man asked if Stringer thought he was blind, and put a couple of boxes of pistol ammo on the counter between them as he asked, “What about more serious shooting? I can let you have a .44-40 Henry or a fine, used .30-30 with Mauser action, cheap.”
Stringer considered before he shook his head. “It’s hard to travel light if you take along everything that might come in handy.”
“A man never knows when he might need to do some long-range shooting, son.”
“I just said that. Back in the time the kings of Prussia were whipping up the first modern armies to scare hell out of the neighbors, a commission was formed to decide just what a Prussian infantryman might need to pack along with him as he marched into battle.”
“That sounds sensible. I sure wish I could have made that sale, for I can think of all sorts of gear a soldier on the march might have the need for.”
Stringer began to roll the supplies he’d purchased into a neat possibles pack as he continued. “So could that Prussian army commission. The trouble was, no one infantryman could have packed it all. So in the end they settled for a needle gun, plenty of ammo, and a lighter pack than any other army uses. They figure their infantry ought to march fast, and if they need something like a spinning wheel or a hay binder in the field, they can steal one somewheres.”
He paid the old-timer off, hoisted the modest but heavy enough roll to his left shoulder, and left to see how he’d make out at the livery down the street.
The sun was almost dirrectly overhead now. So the plank walk he strode was deeply shaded by the overhangs of the various shops between him and his destination. But the same could not be said for the flat barnlike front of the livery. So he saw the gents sunbathing against the barn-red planking before they saw him—he hoped.
There were exactly four of them, dressed cow and wearing their guns low and ominous. He knew it was perfectly reasonable to assume they were just local hands with nothing better to do at the moment. On the other hand, it wasn’t a holiday, and ranch hands seldom ate lunch in town. That still didn’t mean they had to be the same four riders who’d been out to rescue Ham Saunders the night before. But Stringer couldn’t think of a polite way to ask them. So he turned around and strolled back the way he’d just come, trying to keep it casual. That took a bit of effort. He whipped around the first corner he came to, heaved a sigh of relief, and saw he was facing a dirt-paved alley winding off to nowhere interesting. He strolled along it anyway, trying to figure what he might do next. If there was no way to head north by rail, and no safe way to hire a horse, what was left? He figured he could beg borrow or steal a mount off one of the few folk he knew in this tiny town, if he paid
a few calls hither and yon. But the longer he stayed in Granger, the more certain the mysterious gents after him or whoever were to discover he was still in town.
He knew Opal didn’t have any riding stock. If they were keeping an eye on the livery, they had to be keeping an eye on the town law offices. Stringer didn’t have the home address of good old Nate. As he trudged along the dusty alley behind the backyard fences, he muttered, “Damn it, I got to put some distance between me and this town if I have to walk or roller skate!”
Then his eye was caught by a flash of canary yellow in the doorway of a carriage house ahead, and when he saw what was staring out at from the doorway facing the alley, he laughed incredulously. “Oh, no, forget it,” he said to himself.
But he didn’t. He looked around, saw not even an alley cat watching him, and gingerly moved over to the opening. The big yellow horseless carriage seemed anxious to take a spin in the sunlight as it sat there in the shade on it’s red rubber tires, brass headlamps staring wickedly for a glimpse of the open road. A man can get life in prison for stealing a horse in these parts, Stringer thought. On the other hand, this wasn’t exactly a horse, and he was thinking about the life of the president.
He knew how to drive a Panard or a Benz. The nameplate on this one read Buick. It was likely some new breed of the species. Whoever owned it had to be rich as hell. So he knew what Jack London would advise him to do right about now. Stringer put his roll on the passenger seat—just to rest it for the moment, of course—as he studied the controls of the contraption with only natural curiosity. It had the same levers, pedals, and such that the Panard he’d tried out in North Beach had. He looked around some more, almost hoping some lady would come back to shake a broom at him for being in her carriage house. But nobody did. So he set the spark and brake levers, moved around to the front of the sloping hood, and gave the hand crank a try. Whoever Mr. Buick might be, he surely built a fine horseless carriage. The engine started on the second crank and didn’t roar any louder than a cougar in heat, although that should have been enough to bring someone from the house on the double, if anyone was to home.
