Stringer on the Assassins' Trail

by Lou Cameron

  There must not have been, for nobody tried to stop Stringer as he climbed up beside his pack, threw the critter in gear, let go the brake, and almost drove through the fence across the way as the spunky machine sprang into motion. He managed to turn her in time, and only took a little yellow paint off the right mud fender, along with a hell of a lot of whitewash from the fence. Then he was tearing along the alley, looking for a way out. There wasn’t any. But she dead-ended in a circular turnaround intended for bigger horse-drawn vehicles. So it was easy to whip the Buick around and retrace his route through the dust clouds of their earlier passage.

  He hunkered low and held his breath as he drove past the carriage house this horseless carriage belonged in. But nothing happened, and the next thing he knew he was back out on the street, trying to remember which way the road across the tracks might be. As he tore past the big red livery, the four gents standing there seemed to know he’d stolen the bouncing Buick. “It’s him,” one of them yelled, and all four slapped leather.

  But then Stringer had the ass end of the horseless carriage pointed at them as he gave her more gas and tore for the railroad crossing he’d spotted just in time.

  Considering they were firing into a cloud of swirling dust, one of them, at least, was a fair pistol shot. His round spanged off a buggy-whip socket or whatever to Stringer’s left. But the Buick didn’t act like a winged pony might have. It just bounced over the tracks like the good bucker it was.

  Then they were on the service road following the northbound spur the U.P. had run up to the Yellowstone country. The dust wasn’t so bad, once they were a mile or so out of town. But the red rubber wheels were flinging gravel up against the undercarriage like hail on a tin roof, and so, remembering he was only borrowing this contraption and that it wasn’t his own to mess up any more than he had to, Stringer slowed down and tried to figure out how much damage that lucky shot might have done.

  As he drove along, he saw it wasn’t a buggy-whip socket after all. It was a sort of brass arm with a little round looking glass mounted out on the end of it. He could see where the bullet had left a dull lead streak on slightly dented brass. It was a good thing it hadn’t hit the looking glass, even though he could see no use for one stuck out there like that. Then he realized what it was there for, chuckled, and reached out to adjust it back the way it had been before that bullet had ticked its mount. It only made sense as a way for a driver to peer back the way he’d just come. Stringer wondered why. Up to now he’d never had any trouble turning his head around as he rode.

  Then, as he casually made sure he had the newfangled notion lined up to reflect the road behind him right, he saw there was some sense to the doohickey after all. He still turned his head to make sure, and right, there were four horseman tearing up the road after him, waving their pistols and no doubt cussing him—if he’d been able to hear them above the roar of the engine and the rattle of gravel.

  Stringer’s first instinct was to get out his own gun.

  Then he decided to see how modem science might deal with a situation like this, and floored the gas pedal. He almost wound up in the ditch before he got the critter back under control, and Judas Priest, the speed gauge said they were going over forty miles an hour!

  He slowed down to thirty, partly to keep from killing himself and partly because he knew not even a thoroughbred could match such a pace long enough to matter. The next time he topped a rise and could see back over the mustard yellow clouds of dust, he saw that he and the canary-yellow Buick seemed to have the road all to themselves. But he still held her near thirty as he drove on. It was always best to be sure than sorry.

  As he tore by an outlying spread almost as fast as an express train, a bunch of ragged-ass little kids ran over from the house to wave at him through the barb wire. He waved back, and then they were gone and so was he, from where they stood staring into a dust storm. He laughed like a mean little kid. This was more fun than scorching past a copper on a safety bike, and not nearly the work. He remembered the city speed limit back in Frisco had been posted at fifteen miles an hour, and decided it made sense. Folk were sure to wind up killing one another in these new thunder buggies if ever they became at all common on the road and drove at this fantastic speed.

  He noticed there was a little string of numbers that gave mileage as well as speed. He didn’t know how far he’d made her from Granger before that. But as he watched the gadget tick off quarter miles, he whistled and muttered, “Hell, this is even better than going by rail. It’s only a few miles an hour slower and you can steer any fool way you want.”

  He found himself speeding up and then slowing down as he tried to work out a comfortable pace. Though forty to as high as sixty was fairly comfortable aboard a train, the difference between running on steel rails and country roads became painfully if not dangerously evident once you got up above say twenty miles an hour. He decided that was fast enough. Even though he was in a hurry, he had to get there alive, and some of the turns the rutted dirt road was taking this far from town were turning out a mite spooky.

  The service road only followed the graded tracks more or less, thanks to the cheaper way they’d laid it out. So where the rails might cut through a rise or cross a draw on landfill, the road just did what it had to. They’d never meant anyone to drive it at such astounding speed. The telegraph lines, of course, kept pace with the rails. As he whipped by pole after pole, Stringer failed to see any break in the overhead wires. That figured, even though he was a good day’s ride from town now, by horse.

  He topped another rise to see a town near the tracks ahead. He didn’t know if the folk who owned this stolen rig had missed it yet. But he could see that if they had, there’d been nothing to stop the law from wiring ahead. So, to the astonishment of the few folk on the dusty streets of the tiny town whether they’d been expecting him or not, Stringer drove right on through at a polite but hardly conversational fifteen miles an hour. Then he was out the far side, picking up speed again as he tried to figure out where he might be by now. If he recalled his mental railroad map correctly, that would have been the town of Opal, Wyoming, back there.

  “Opal?” he muttered. “Now that’s sort of stretching coincidence, when you study on it.” Of course, a lot of ships passing in the dark had been known to fly false colors, he thought. But a cow town barmaid worried about her rep could have come up with something more original than the next cow town up the line.

  He decided that since he was unlikely to meet up with her again under any name, it wasn’t all that important. Whoever she was, she hadn’t set him up, her suggestions about his recent troubles had been helpful, and… she’d been the only living soul in town who’d known his future plans, and there had been four—count ’em—four gun slicks staked out to make sure he couldn’t leave town by horse after they’d likely cut the wires to stall the rail line for him.

  He was dying for a smoke. He knew it wouldn’t work with all this wind in his face. He muttered, “Perfidy, thy name is woman.” But wait a second, he thought. It would have been just as easy for them to gun him in Opal’s rose garden as down by the livery in the center of town, and how could they have cut the wires any farther north than say about here or farther, without some rapid transportation of their own?

  He drove on, batting the little he knew for sure around in his head until it felt like a tennis court. Opal couldn’t have told anyone his current plans earlier than he’d left her house so she could get dressed. She wouldn’t have wanted the neighbors gossiping about a dead stranger in her rose garden in any case. As to the wires being down, that worked two simple ways. They could have simply fallen down. It happened. Or the plotters could have wired some confederate to do it, in code of course, anywhere between here and poor old Teddy Roosevelt.

  The engine ahead of him coughed, choked, and picked up again as they rounded a mountain turn he didn’t feel like looking down at. “I’m sorry about all this dust and gravel, too, Mr. Buick,” he muttered.


  He thought he had Opal’s helpful hints worked out now. She suggested the plot involved the president for one of two reasons. She might have made it up out of thin air to throw him off what was really going on. Or she might have told him something she and her pals figured he already knew, to convince him she was on his side. Either way he let her know which way he’d be going. “Like a total fool,” he muttered. Damn it, they almost surely would have at least one confederate out ahead of him, who knew he was coming.

  He found himself slowing down, then speeded up. But nobody ahead could be expecting him to arrive this fast, he reasoned. The wires were cut before he lit out of Granger in his wondrous transporation.

  Then the engine choked again, coughed its last, and fell silent. As the horseless carriage coasted to a stop on the flat bottom of a grassy draw, Stringer muttered, “Oh, shit, that’s true. You’re supposed to put gasoline in these things now and again.”

  Stringer was used to open range. He’d grown up on it. But he’d never noticed how quiet things could get until just now. At last a locust buzzed in a nearby clump of soapweed. “Aw, shut up, bug,” he muttered, and climbed down to see whether by any chance there was a spare fuel can anywhere about.

  There was. He found a round red five-gallon can in the small back trunk. It was empty. The locust laughed at him again, and all he could do was reach for his possibles roll. “Come on, beans,” he muttered. “We just made a good fifty miles the easy way. Now we got to make another hundred and fifty the hard way.”

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  *

  Lodgepole pine was scrawny and gloomy. Aspen was more cheerful, but buggy. So it evened out as Stringer trudged the higher hills and dales well east of the rail and service roads. He was doing so for more than one good reason. To begin with, it was shorter. Railroad engineers, like buffalo, liked to follow as level a contour line as they could manage, even in mountain ranges. They often, in fact, wound up winding all over along the same easy grade. Many modern railroad routes followed old buffalo trails. Deer and other folk in more of a hurry liked to blaze their own trails up and over, or better yet, along ridges. So, since most of the ridges in these parts ran more or less north and south, it was quicker by deer than buffalo to the Yellowstone Park and Teddy Roosevelt.

  His second and mayhaps more important reason for leaving the low road was that he just hated to get bushwacked, and any of the gang that might be laying in wait for him would be more likely to expect him to follow the more civilized route north.

  That didn’t mean he could assume that no one was following him, so Stringer watched where he planted his boot heels, and from time to time looked back to see how clear a trail he might be leaving. He didn’t see any. This late in the summer the soil was firm and the grass dry and springy, even up here in the sky where it got more rain. He knew it would be downright broom-straw dry on south-faced slopes beyond the Continental Divide farther east. He knew he had to somehow get over said Divide, somewhere between where he was and where he was going, for the Divide ran smack through the southwest corner of the big park, and most of the interesting stuff, including Yellowstone Station, lay on the east slope. He knew the low pass the railroad took through the divide to get there. Finding a more private one for himself might or might not be a problem.

  The ranges he recalled between where he might be and Old Faithful had looked sort of impressive, even where they rose free of summer snow. But he knew the gang had to know that the regular pass just north of Big Springs was about as fine a place to set up and ambush as there might be along the whole infernal route.

  As he reached the bottom of a saddle at a brisk easy walk and started up the far slope a lot slower, Stringer could sense there had to be a better way to cover that much distance, whether anyone was shooting at him or not. For at the rate he was going, old T.R. would surely have been assassinated or seen his full of the park’s natural wonders and left, long before anyone could hike a hundred fifty miles afoot.

  He considered taking the spurs off his boots. They were small no-nonsense gunmetal jobs he’d attached to his boot heels with shrunk-down rawhide thongs to make sure they stayed put. He decided that what one man had united might not be a good idea to sunder. They didn’t really slow him down, which was why he wore them, with or without a mount. The gun on his right hip was bothering him more, with its constant bouncing, but he knew for sure he wanted it right where it was.

  He’d noticed that since the turn of the century a lot of gents had taken to tying the bottom of their holsters tight to their thighs with latigo strings. It did keep a holster from spanking, and some said it helped a gent draw faster, provided, of course, he was standing still, just right. Stringer had tried it just long enough to give the notion up. He’d noticed it seemed an easy way to spill the gun out of its holster aboard a bronc, or even playing cards. He’d also noticed that gents who strode into strange surroundings packing their gun in a manner suggesting they were looking for every edge in a quick-draw contest, seemed to wind up in more quick-draw contests. He shifted his gun rig so the holster slapped him on the ass for a spell, and that seemed to help with his hiking.

  He paused atop the next rise to sit on a lichen-crusted granite boulder to roll a smoke and give his legs a break. He hadn’t gotten around to filling the canteens he’d picked up in Granger. Like everything else from the general store, they were still wrapped up in his possibles. He considered breaking out a can of tomatoes to wet his whistle and decided to settle on just a smoke for now. A man could go forty days without food, four days without water, and four minutes without air. So there was no sense acting sissy when the unpacking and repacking figured to slow him down.

  He’d just gotten his Bull Durham going when, somewhere in the clump of aspen behind him, a gun hammer snicked and a sad soft voice told him, “Hear me, Saltu, we are not wicked people. We have done nothing to you or your kind, nothing!”

  Stringer didn’t turn his head. The way his heart was starting to pound was his own business. “I never said you did,” he answered casually. “Some of my best friends are Shoshoni, and to tell the truth, I didn’t know any of you were here until just now.”

  “If you didn’t know we were here, why have you been looking for us?” The Indian covering him from the aspen grove sounded more worried than the white man he had the drop on. “Don’t try to tell me you have not been looking for us. There is nothing this far up the slope from your Saltu trails for you to be looking for, except us. There is no yellow iron in these hills. The beaver are all gone. There never were many buffalo. Heya, I have been watching you for some time, Saltu. I know why you have come!”

  Stringer took a drag on his smoke and let it out as calmly as he could manage. “Since you seem to have the drop on me, and I just heard you tell me not to say I wasn’t looking for you, let’s see if I can word it more diplomatic. What I’m really looking for is a flying machine, or failing that, a good pony. I have to get far to the north, fast. That’s why any earlier progress you may have noticed me making may have seemed sort of brusque and direct.”

  “Are you from the B.I.A? Hear me, my people and me have not broken any rules of the Great White Father. Not any sensible ones, anyway.”

  Stringer managed a chuckle he didn’t really feel. “Would I be wandering about half lost, on foot, with no more than a pistol to my name, if I was hunting reserve jumpers for the Bureau of Indian Affairs?”

  “Who said anything about being off the reservation?” his unseen questioner demanded defensively.

  “You did, sort of,” Stringer replied. “If you were on the war path, we wouldn’t be having this tedious conversation and I wouldn’t still be wearing so much hair. If you were any kind of an outright outlaw, you’d be robbing me instead of fussing at me right now. So what’s left? The nearest Shoshoni reserve is miles from here. No doubt if I was with the B.I.A., I’d feel obliged to chide you for that. But I’m just a poor wayfaring stranger on my way to the Yellowstone Park. So it’s
no skin off my nose if you and your band like it around here better.”

  He heard the rustle of shrubbery behind him as the man with the drop on him moved closer. “I think you may be what you say you are. You sound too reasonable to be working for the B.I.A. They always talk to us as if we were children. You speak as if you feel you are talking to a man. You don’t seem to be crazy either. But you are still talking about a very long way to walk, Saltu.”

  Stringer shrugged. “I was starting to notice that. You wouldn’t see me sitting on this fool rock if I considered it a hop, skip, and jump. Meanwhile, I still have to get there. So is it jake with you if I get up and mosey on now?”

  The Indian stepped all the way out of the aspen.

  “I am not holding my gun on you now,” he said. “But hear me, it will soon be dark and the way ahead is even steeper. What do you think you would say if I told you where you might be able to get a pony?”

  “I’d start by asking how much you wanted for it,” Stringer said as he casually turned to see an older Shoshoni wearing more blue denim and less buckskin than he’d pictured. The gun was an old Hawkins .50, single shot. Stringer was still glad he hadn’t been shot with even one round that big. The wiry old gent holding it, polite, could have passed at any distance for a cowhand, had he cut his hair more regular and taken that eagle feather out of his hatband. He wore old Army boots instead of Justins too. Stringer didn’t think he wanted to know where he’d gotten them. The Shoshoni rising of ’78 had been short but mighty hard on all concerned, and what the hell, it had been over quite a spell now. So Stringer got to his feet and held out a hand. “My name is MacKail. My friends all call me Stringer.”