Stringer on the Assassins' Trail

by Lou Cameron

  He was tempted to mount up again and see what happened. But the paint was still favoring its injured shoulder, albeit not as much, now. It made more sense to save any riding left in the critter for serious riding, if and when it was needed.

  It was just as well he was afoot, gripping the reins, when the paint suddenly took it in its jug head to shy more or less straight up. Stringer hauled it back down out of the sky, slapped some sense into it with his hat, and told it, “Yeah. I smell it too. But nothing that dead can hurt you.”

  He tethered the paint to an aspen sapling, using a clove hitch lest his possibles run off, and eased forward gingerly to see what all the stink was about.

  He found the source in an open grassy glade ahead. A ton or more of beef lay rotting under a cloud of bluebottle and hover flies. A critter that size had to have been a boss bull in life. They’d butchered it sort of peculiar. Aside from skinning off the hide, which seemed reasonable, they’d cut off the critter’s head and hooves, leaving the parts a real butcher would have hung up for sale as a soggy mess of putrid fly-blown prime cuts.

  He moved upwind to roll a smoke as he studied the odd butchery. “Well, old bull,” he muttered, “I can see why they might not have wanted to eat you, if you died from something disgusting. Skinning out a dead range cow before wild critters render the hide useless makes sense. Rawhide always comes in handy as long as nobody’s talking about anthrax or hoof and mouth. But what would anyone want with a sick cow’s head and hooves?”

  He sealed his smoke with his tongue, lit it, and headed back to where he’d left the paint. As he untethered it, he told it, “Don’t ask me. Some idjet just saw fit to gather head cheese and glue fixings off a dead bull he didn’t care to cut up for steaks. We’ll just go around, upwind.”

  They did. The next few miles went as tedious as before. Then, as they were crossing another alpine meadow, toward yet another winding stream, Stringer spotted the carrion crows ahead before the pony could spook again.

  He tethered the reins to some rabbit bush and moved on alone to find much the same story on the banks of the stream. A somewhat smaller but just as mysteriously treated critter lay half awash with its skinned rump in the stream and its headless and hoofless forequarters spread out on the grass by the crows.

  “Now that’s just plain disgusting,” Stringer muttered, as he stared down stream into the distance. He didn’t know how far down the nearest spread or settlement might be. Some said running water purified itself every few hundred yards, given plenty of air and sunlight. Stringer still stepped into the water, grabbed one of the wet slippery legs in both hands, and hauled the hind quarters up onto the grass. It wasn’t easy for one man alone, but he managed. As he hunkered down to scrub the slime from his palms with sand and water, he growled, “Some folk just never seem to have been brought up right. If they were in too much of a hurry to tidy up after a critter they found dead in a creek, how come they had time to skin it out, and for Pete’s sake behead it, like it had been one of old King Henry’s wives?”

  He got his pony around the mess and moved on, observing that even when they’d cut off heads in the old country, they hadn’t seen fit to pollute the drinking water with the leftovers. But the odd way people treated range cows in these parts was no more mysterious than where such an outfit might be when it wasn’t acting so thoughtless. Neither of those skinned-out carcasses had been rotting long. Neither had skinned out itself, no matter how they’d wound up dead. Of course, a plague springing up in a summer herd could explain the hasty departure of the herders, and what was left of said herd. He hoped that wasn’t it. For whether he admired their manners or not, they might have a spare pony in their remuda. None of the stock they’d lost, so far, had been horse flesh.

  He wondered if it could have been larkspur. No larkspur blossoms were blooming in the grass all around, but at this time of year larkspur wasn’t in flower. That was when it was most dangerous to range stock. It didn’t take a genius to keep cows out of blooming weeds everyone knew was poisonous to cattle. But a green weed was just a green weed at any distance, and the damn-fool cows didn’t know enough to stay away from larkspur.

  He didn’t see any, even looking harder as they slogged on. Between places, the timber grew too thick and the grass grew thick and almost free of leafier forbs —as grass was inclined to when it got plenty of rain and wasn’t overgrazed. You saw odd stuff sprouting where the range had been abused this side of Columbus and the Pilgrim Fathers. Weeds of the old world or new thrived best where the native grasses had been mowed too close by stock. Stuff that grew with stickers, poison, or just an awful taste, did better on overgrazed range than the good stuff. But try as he might, Stringer couldn’t even spy Scotch thistle or tumbleweed among this lush grass. So yeah, it was likely some bug those cows had caught.

  He was feeling leg weary and listless by the time he led his wounded pony over still another wooded rise. But he perked up and started down the far side faster as he saw what lay beyond.

  A log cabin and some outbuildings constructed the same way huddled near the white-water creek purring down the grassy valley. Wood smoke rose from the low pitched roof’s stovepipe. So someone was home and better yet, there were half a dozen ponies in the pole corral.

  Stringer didn’t notice what lay on the grassy slope between him and the cheerful sight until he got closer. Then he paused with a frown and muttered, “What the hell?”

  It was a dead buffalo. This time hide, horns, and all. He stared at the bloated shaggy brown form at his feet in the tall grass. “Right,” he said. “I thought those other cows looked mighty big and fat for grass-fed stock.”

  That raised more questions than it answered. Perhaps the folk down yonder would be able to tell him why they desired a dead buffalo on their front lawn. It made no sense to him.

  He led the paint around the shaggy corpse—upwind, of course—and howdied the cabin with his hat as they approached. They were almost there when the unpainted plank door opened a crack and the first rifle round whizzed just under the lobe of Stringer’s left ear, hitting his pony smack between the eyes!

  Stringer let go the reins and threw himself sideways to the grass, drawing and rolling as he braced himself to feel hot lead. He was caught flat-out in the open, and there were limits to how much cover zigzagging alone might provide.

  But he got off a round of his own in the general direction of that door, and then for luck, blew out a windowpane and threw some curses after his bullet as he waited to die.

  But then a girlish voice called out, “Don’t shoot! He didn’t know what he was doing!”

  That seemed for sure. Stringer rolled to his feet and ran the rest of the way as fast as he could. He flattened out against the logs near the smashed window. “I got a lit stick of dynamite here,” he yelled, “so you’d best explain yourself pronto, ma’am!”

  “Oh, don’t!” the same female voice called back. “I tried to stop him, and I think he’s dead now anyway!”

  “Who’s this he we keep talking about, and how come he just shot my pony, ma’am?”

  “Uncle Ned. He thought you were one of those poachers who wounded him this morning. He wasn’t aiming at your poor horse. He was aiming at you. Then we struggled for the rifle, and he suddenly collapsed at my feet, and—oh, what will we ever do if he’s dead?”

  Stringer didn’t see how that could be his problem. But he risked a quick peek through the busted window. Then he saw it was safe to look harder. An ash-blond gal in a calico dress was kneeling in the center of the one room, the head of an ugly old geezer in her lap.

  Before the situation could get grimmer, Stringer moved over to kick the door in and enter, gun in hand. He saw the rifle that had ruined old paint lay between them on the clay floor. He kicked it under a bunk against a side wall. “Stand up,” he said. “Turn around. Then place your palms against that back wall and move your feet back, spread apart.”

  “You don’t have to search me, sir,” she said.


  “Sure I do. Somebody just now tried to perforate my earlobe, and I wasn’t planning on wearing earrings in the foreseeable future. If you want any future at all, you’ll do just as I say. I’m a lot smarter than old Sampson was in the Good Book.”

  She gently lowered the old geezer’s head to the floor and got up, looking indignant as well as scared. She took the undignified position he demanded, and as he patted her down for hidden hardware with his free hand, she protested, “I can assure you I’d never dream of hiding a pistol there, you brute!”

  He smiled thinly. “You’d be surprised where some gals have been known to hide things. You can turn around and tell me what this is all about now.”

  She turned. Her high-cheekboned face was pretty. He’d just established how nicely she was built, if a man liked ’em sort of skinny. But she insisted, “This is no time for stories. What about Uncle Ned?”

  “Your Uncle Ned is dead,” he replied, “and I didn’t mean that as a poem. You say someone got to shoot the crazy cuss before I did, ma’am?”

  “You didn’t shoot him,” she said. “You just scared my wits out with that shot you put through the door. The one through the window passed high over my head, but that first one—”

  “Never mind how bad my aim might be. Get to the round in his chest, unless you aimed those bandages as bad as I aim pistols when I’m rattled.”

  “It started last evening, she said, “when they shot poor old Shoshoni, Uncle Ned’s pet buffalo.”

  “I think we just met, up the slope. Don’t most folk keep cats, dogs, or mayhaps goldfish for pets as a rule? That brute had mighty big horns, ma’am.”

  “Old Shoshoni was gentle as a lamb,” she said. “You see, Uncle Ned started feeding him one winter, when he was just a calf and the snow was deeper than usual. We think—I mean we thought—he was an orphan from his herd.”

  Stringer wasn’t sure of that, having just seen the remains of two other buffalo not too far away. But to get her to the point, he said, “All right. Your uncle had a pet buffalo and somebody shot it. Then what?”

  “They were going to skin him, right out in the open, as if they didn’t see us here at all. Uncle Ned ran out and fussed at them. They rode off, laughing.”

  “I’ve met idjets like that. But if they didn’t stand their ground, who gunned this poor cuss at our feet?”

  “That happened this morning,” she said. “You see, they killed poor Shoshoni just before sundown. So Uncle Ned meant to do something about the body in the morning, when he could see what he was up to. He was terribly upset, of course. I fear he may have drunk unwisely. Anyway, just at daybreak Uncle Ned stepped out yon door to do what had to be done, and you’ll never guess what he saw just up the slope.”

  “I’ll bet I can,” Stringer said. “The rascals had come back for the hide and horns. Mayhaps with a little more backup?”

  “What are you, a lawman?” she asked. “That’s just the way it happened. There were six or seven of them this time. I tried to talk sense to Uncle Ned when he came back in, cussing, to pick up his repeating rifle. But he just stepped outside and told them to light out or else.”

  “Did they light out, ma’am?”

  “Not right away. One of them yelled something awful at Uncle Ned, and then everyone was shooting. I don’t know how many of them he might have hit. He’d been hit in the right lung by the time he had sense enough to take cover in here and keep firing from the doorway. That seems to have decided them to leave us and old Shoshoni alone. They’ve been gone all day. When Uncle Ned saw you coming in just now, he thought you could be one of them. I tried to tell him you didn’t look like any of them and that none had been aboard a pinto. But when he saw you stop by the body of his poor dead pet—”

  “I got it figured, now,” he cut in, adding, “I’ll do what I can to help you tidy up here, within reason. But I got to get on up to the Yellowstone Park as soon as possible.”

  “You’re in Yellowstone Park, sir,” she said. “The creek out front runs into Lake Yellowstone.”

  “Do tell? That puts us deep in the park indeed, ma’am. No offense, but how come I find you squatting on federal land? None of this country was ever opened to homesteaders, even before Congress said it was a national park.”

  She shrugged. “Uncle Ned said he didn’t think anyone would mind. No visitors ever come to this part of the park, and he thought it seemed a shame to let it all go ungrazed.”

  “I think Congress meant to graze elk, deer, buffalo and such on this range, ma’am. But let’s not speak ill of the dead. A man who’d feed a hungry buffalo calf couldn’t have been all bad. Don’t you reckon we ought to bury him now? I’m not sure about that big pet of his, up the slope, but it’s gotten sort of warm this afternoon, and there’s much to be said for the old Hebrew notions about planting a gent the same day he dies.”

  She looked around blankly, as if expecting the chinked log walls to tell her something. Then she sighed. “Oh, dear, as horrid as it sounds, I suppose we can’t just leave him lying there.”

  “I got a dead pony to worry about too,” Stringer said. “Show me where you’d like me to start, and I’ll sort of start small. I hope you’ve got a shovel I can borrow, ma’am?”

  CHAPTER

  EIGHT

  *

  By the time they had Uncle Ned buried under a lone meadow pine she said he’d always liked to sit under on a hot day, they’d established he could call her Fran— Fran Towers—but that she had to call him Stuart, not Stu, if she wanted him to answer back.

  As he fashioned a rugged but serviceable cross for the grave with his pocket knife, she asked him what he planned to do about the more substantial corpses up the slope.

  “That depends a lot on your plans, Fran,” he replied. “I can’t see just leaving ’em be if you mean to stay on. But I can’t see why you’d want to do a fool thing like that either. So we’d better study on that while I rest my poor back.”

  As he drove the cross in place with the butt of his .38, she murmured, “Oh, dear, I hadn’t thought of that. But where would I go?”

  “It depends on where you come from in the first place,” he replied. “Do you have any coffee we could sip while you tell me a mite more about yourself, Fran?”

  She did, and as they sat by the open doorway sipping black coffee, he learned that she’d been sent out here by her parents to keep her out of some trouble she didn’t see fit to detail. Her Uncle Ned had been the older brother of Fran’s for-some-reason worried mother. They hadn’t known that his wife, Aunt Moll, had died a spell back, or that his “Wyoming Ranch” was really an illegal squat on government land. Fran had not seen fit to complain once she’d come out here, a few years back. Her uncle had been more interested in casual horse breeding and serious fishing for cutthroat trout to demand much in the way of housekeeping from a wayward niece. As if to head off a line of questioning Stringer never would have dared to bring up, she suddenly blurted, “Uncle Ned was wild, but he didn’t hold with inbreeding for humankind. Just livestock. So no matter what you’re thinking, I’ve been a good girl for close to three years.”

  Stringer didn’t want to know how she and such a pure-hearted relative had gotten into such interesting conversations. She just didn’t know how much she was giving away about the reasons worried parents might have had for sending her out west.

  As if she’d read his mind, Fran went on, “I didn’t mind as much as I expected to. The air and water taste so fine, and there were only enough chores to keep me from getting bored without spoiling the fun of riding all over such pretty scenery.”

  Stringer sipped some coffee. “It is sort of pretty in this park. But other folk own it. Sooner or later the Army figures to come along and paint you white, if you’re lucky. Wandering game poachers or saddle tramps are likely to treat a young girl alone out here somewhat meaner.”

  He took another sip. “I can see why that presidential party took time off to inspect these parts. T.R. is said to be a sort of natur
e lover, and a lot of folk around here seem to be sponging off old mother and the taxpayer.”

  “Uncle Ned wasn’t hurting anybody,” she replied, sighing. “Grass goes to aspen if it’s not grazed, and he was only running a few horses on Uncle Sam. We may have fished and hunted a mite, but he felt it was wrong to take any big game. He said he could live with bears if bears were willing to live with him, and that the buffalo here in the park were just about all the buffalo left. He said he’d never seen much sport in shooting a glorified cow to begin with.”

  “I think I’d have gotten along with your late uncle,” Stringer said, “even though he shot my pony and had a sort of casual attitude about range and water rights. But you have to face the fact that he’s gone. I can’t hang around much longer. So what’s to become of you, Fran? Surely you can see it’s not safe for you to go on squatting here alone.”

  She glanced up at the late afternoon sky. “The notion does seem sort of spooky. But I have to have time to think. Even if I knew where to go, I couldn’t just run off and abandon everything.”

  “I’m going to take one of those ponies out back off your hands at a fair price,” he said, “whether you were planning on selling me one or not. You’ll need at least one to ride, and say two to pack such small treasures as you just can’t leave behind. That leaves a couple to herd. Ponies worth keeping ain’t hard to keep tagging along. I can help get you started, at least, if you make up your mind sudden.”

  She gasped. “Oh, you weren’t planning to leave right this minute, were you?”

  “I’d like to,” he said. “Makes more sense to wait for moonrise, riding a strange mount in strange country. I reckon I’d best start by gathering my gear from that dead paint up the slope.”

  As he put down the empty cup and got to his feet, Fran protested, “Heavens, I was counting on you at least spending the night with me!”