Stringer on the Assassins' Trail

by Lou Cameron

  He didn’t know how to take that, so he didn’t answer. The sun was still clear of the higher ranges to the west, but it was cooling some, and the meadow gnats were starting to hover. It was too late to ride on unless a man preferred eating from a can a few short miles away instead of enjoying a warm meal indoors as he waited for moonrise. He’d just as soon help the poor gal pack, as long as he had all that time to kill.

  He got to the dead pony and started by removing the bridle. The brute lay on its near side, so uncinching the saddle was a bother. The latigo leather on the off side was stiff from disuse, since the critter had been cinched and uncinched from the near side ever since the cinch had been thonged to the cinch ring in the first place. But he managed with a little spit and a lot of cussing to untie the knots without cracking the leather. From there on it was simply a matter of tugging the near stirrup out from under the dead pony.

  He’d just done so, and was draping bridle and blanket over the saddle to carry one lazy man’s load back down to the spread, when he sensed movement out the corner of one eye and straightened up to morosely regard the lone rider sitting his own bay at the edge of the timber, farther upslope. The gent wore a buckskin jacket but looked white as well as mighty unkempt. He had a Winchester across his thighs behind the saddle swells. Stringer cursed himself for not having brought Uncle Ned’s .30-30 with him from the cabin, but had his .38 close to hand as the stranger rode slowly down from the tree line.

  “Howdy,” Stringer said when he reigned in at conversational and pistol range. “If you are concerned about that buffalo over that way, you and your pals are welcome to the hide later. You can skin out this paint for all we care. But all in all, I feel it would be best if you waited until we’re gone.”

  The rider smiled, exposing a gap where most old boys his age still had their front teeth. “That sounds neighborly,” he said. “Who might this ‘we’ be, pilgrim?”

  “My name’s MacKail,” Stringer replied. “While it would hardly be polite to accuse anyone, the gent someone shot this morning was called Uncle Ned. I mean to take his niece, his ponies, and such, with me as I vacate the premises sometime later this evening. Neither hide should suffer much in the cool shades of the same evening. So allow me to advise you, as a fellow Christian, to stay the hell away from here, this side of sunrise.”

  The rider kept on grinning. “I’ll tell the boys they face the wrath of a girl-child and one brave-talking cuss. What makes you talk so brave, MacKail?”

  “You,” Stringer said. “You’ll find me as brave as any cornered rat when I have no other choice. On the other hand, if folk leave me alone, I see no call to come after them.”

  The ruffian nodded. “I reckon I know the feeling. If it was up to me alone, we wouldn’t crowd you. My boss might want to consider what else an enterprising gent might be able to…ah, salvage in these parts, besides hides.”

  “You can assure him for me I’ve seen nothing in or about that spread down there worth a gunfight,” Stringer said. “The old squatter was just eking out a living here. There can’t be two hundred bucks worth of crow bait in the corral. The gal is too skinny to fight over, and won’t be toting a hundred bucks worth of personal belongings with her when we leave.”

  The sinister stranger raised an eyebrow. “Well, now, some might say even a hundred dollars and a good lay would be worth some modest risk. Since we are talking like fellow Christians, I feel it only my duty to advise you that your own best bet would be to just ride on and let us worry about, ah, salvage. No offense, but you don’t look worth screwing, and you’re welcome to the contents of your own pockets, seeing as you carry a double action as well.”

  Stringer smiled back wolfishly. “It’s a free country, and far be it from me to argue against private enterprise. But you boys would still do better holding up a whorehouse, if you feel a modest amount of cash and free fornication are worth a fight. I know I may not look as tough as some whores you boys may be related to, but like the Indian chief said, I have spoken.”

  The rider said, “I will carry your words of cheer to the boss, assuming it’s safe for one gentleman of fortune to turn his back on another in such tense times?”

  Stringer nodded. “Depart in peace, you son of a bitch, for I want everyone in your gang to know how reasonable I am and how unreasonable they’d be to mess with me when they don’t have to. This valley will be all yours come morning. Try to move in any earlier, and someone is likely to wind up dead.”

  The other man didn’t answer as he swung his mount around to leave. It would have been dumb to do different to a man standing his ground, who you thought would wind up dead, while you had your own back to his gun hand.

  “Do you think they’ll be back?” Fran was asking for at least the hundredth time as Stringer opened another box of shells to line up .30-30 rounds on the windowsill.

  He told her to keep packing. It was still light out. But it wouldn’t be for long, and once it got too dark in here to see what one was doing, it could be injurious to one’s health to light a lamp.

  He’d already doused the fire she’d cooked supper over. If they wanted to burn the cabin down, it was up to them to work at it. He’d drive the six ponies into the nearest outbuilding, and before locking them in, discovered how poor old Uncle Ned had meant to survive as a horse breeder with half a dozen scrub ponies to his name. He didn’t question the girl about those bales of fox and fisher furs. The old geezer hadn’t likely invited her along as he patrolled his winter trap lines in any case. Stringer knew he’d only trapped in winter, because the furs were prime and the odds on meeting up with an Army patrol in deep snow were just silly. He wondered if those other poachers knew, or suspected, how much more there was worth fighting over here than met the casual eye. He hoped they didn’t. He’d know soon enough.

  He’d dragged Fran’s trundle bed over by the window to sit on while he kept watch. She placed a cardboard candy box of keepsakes on a nearby table and came to join him. “Do you really think you can stand them off?” she asked as she sat down at his side.

  That wasn’t a new question either. He gave her the same reassuring answer. It hardly mattered whether a lady called a man a liar after he was dead and by then, if she were still alive, she’d no doubt be cussing harder at other men. Their only hope was that there might not be enough of them for a serious gang rape afterward. He knew that no one man alone, or even one man and tougher gal, could hold this bitty box against a determined rush by a really big gang. Determination was as likely to determine the results as sheer numbers. It took more courage to hunt grown men than it took to hunt unarmed buffalo, even wild ones. The poor half-tame critters in this game preserve barely had sense to run away from a man with a gun instead of coming over to be hand fed.

  Stringer had warned them he wasn’t a tame critter. He’d told them how they could wind up with just about everything but the girl and her modest inheritance of portable property. So if they came, it would be because they wanted a piece of ass mighty desperately, wanted to prove they were tougher than one worried man, or knew about those furs.

  Stringer tried to figure what he might do in their place. It didn’t work. He hardly ever attacked lone spreads. Like most reasonably honest men, he’d just never been able to savvy why anyone with a lick of sense would choose to follow the owl-hoot trail for not-much-fun and modest profit. Both his dad and his own Uncle Don had advised him, long before such thoughts might have crossed his mind, that a man was a pure fool to steal less than a million dollars. For aside from the anguish of doing hard time for grand larceny, knowing one had to do the time for nothing all that grand had to hurt like hell.

  “Oh, it’s getting so dark out,” Fran said.

  “That’s likely because the sun is going down,” he told her. “Don’t you have anything more you want to take with you? It will soon be too dark to look for it.”

  “Try as I might, I can’t find enough to fill both saddle bags and a bedroll,” she said. “I came out here with all
I owned in two carpet bags, and a lot of things have worn out to worthless since.”

  “You may have a pleasant surprise when I load at least three pack ponies for you later,” he said. “But as long as you have your personal possibles gathered, we can worry about that later. Do you know how to handle this rifle we inherited from Uncle Ned?”

  “Of course. But why?”

  “This window covers the slope pretty good,” he replied. “They may be able to figure such things as smart as me. Unless they’re total idjets, their best bet would be to work around and take us from the blind side, using the cover of the corral and outhouses.”

  As he rose to his feet, she said, “There’s no window on that side of the cabin.”

  “I just said that,” he replied as he reached in his pocket.

  It only took her a moment to grasp what he was up to as he dug chinking from between the logs at easy eye level. She told him he sure was smart, and he told her to damn-it, watch the slope, not him, adding, “Once it’s dark, they’ll be able to get almost within spitting distance before you can hope to spot ’em. So if you even think you see movement out there, shoot it. We’ve got plenty of ammo, and even if you miss, they may reconsider. I’ve moved on an enemy position under cover of darkness. It always feels as if a dozen owls with guns are staring right at you.”

  She turned back to her assigned post, but asked where and when he might have been in a war. He knew they’d wind up sharing the stories of their lives before this long night was over, and he had nothing to hide, so he shrugged and said, “Cuba, in ’98. I was supposed to be serving as a war correspondent, not a soldier. But the Spanish snipers didn’t seem to care who they were shooting at. So after the first few days I forgot the rules and shot back. It sure was a quick way to pick up the basic rules of military tactics. Let’s hope at least one member of that gang is a vet of the same war.”

  “Don’t you mean you hope they don’t have any old soldiers with them, Stuart?” she said.

  “I generally say what I mean,” he replied. “Old soldiers don’t worry me half as much as crazy punks with guns. You can figure what an old soldier is likely to do because he’s been trained never to do anything suicidal. It’s the dumb fighters you have to worry about. They don’t last long, but they tend to take more sensible gents with ’em.”

  He decided he’d removed enough chinking. As he folded his knife he mused, half to himself, “A spell back my feature editor sent me to New Mexico to do a feature on Kid Antrim, Henry McCarthy, Billy the Kid, or whatever you want to call the crazy little rascal. I don’t know why my boss, Sam Barca, thought our readers cared about a wild kid who’d be middle-aged tonight if he hadn’t managed to get his fool self killed at twenty-one. But anyhow, I interviewed a lot of old-timers and learned how lucky the kid had been to last that long. He didn’t know the first thing about gun fighting. That was what made him so dangerous, see?”

  “Not really,” she said. “Uncle Ned told me about Billy the Kid. He must have known something about gun fighting if he gunned one man for every year of his life.”

  Stringer grimaced. “He didn’t. At best he took part in say eight gunfights where someone on one side or the other wound up dead. But he was dangerous. Like I said, he didn’t know what he was doing. Take a little boy’s cap pistol away and arm him with a real gun, and I’ll start running too. Lord knows who a wayward child is apt to point a pistol at. Half the gents Kid Antrim slapped leather on must have been surprised as hell, as well as chagrined. Of course, once they learned to take him seriously, it was over soon enough.”

  “Uncle Ned said the law took Billy the Kid unfair,” Fran said stubbornly. “They got his best friend to shoot him in the back.”

  Stinger sighed. “I don’t know why I work as a newspaper man. No matter how often we print the news, some old geezer feels honor bound to change it. Old Pat Garrett gave the kid a better chance than the kid ever gave anyone, and Garrett was too morose an individual to have best friends. Even if he hadn’t been, he’d have had nothing in common with a young saddle tramp turned bad. He was an older, respectable married man who’d taken up the law when — Now that’s sort of funny.”

  She asked what he meant, and he said, “Pat Garrett stood for sheriff of Lincoln County back around 1880, after giving up his earlier trade, which was buffalo hunting. Like everyone else with any sense, he could see the herds were about shot off. Yet here we are, a generation later, being pestered by would-be buffalo hunters?”

  “Uncle Ned said there were at least six or seven hundred buffalo left, here in this game preserve,” she said.

  He pursed his lips. “That’s not what they called a buffalo herd when grown men were serious about the trade. Even if there were a lot more, skinning them in this park has to be a federal offense. The price of lap robes sure must have risen since last I priced one.”

  She repeated that her late uncle hadn’t considered the few Yellowstone buffalo worth taking. He hated to talk in circles, so he changed the subject, and as he’d foreseen, they knew a lot more about one another than either might have wanted to, before the damned old moon came up.

  She never out and out said she’d been playing doctor with the neighbor boys back home at eight or nine. He accepted her protests that half the small-town gossip about her had been untrue. Some of it sounded impossible, given the limitations of human anatomy. But it was probably just as well they had to keep watch from opposite sides of the cabin, for it was sort of hard to maintain an erection and a conscience at the same time, and she was erecting him considerable with her tales about men who’d taken unfair advantage of her warm and trusting nature. He was beginning to feel left out.

  Things got better and worse after moonrise. The silvery light gave them a good field of fire in both directions, and all that seemed to be going on out there was bats. They’d no doubt been swooping low across the grass for night bugs long before the moon had risen. But now they could see them. Sort of. Stringer wished they’d go hunt bugs somewhere else. Fluttering furtive motion off to one side was distracting to a man peering through a gun loop with a gun cocked in his hand.

  Across the cabin Fran said, “I don’t think they’re coming, and I’m getting tired as well as eye-strained, durn it.”

  Stringer peered out at the back view, the cover now seemingly outlined in India ink against silvery paper by the full moon. “Not a creature was stirring, unless you count bats,” he muttered. “It’s commencing to look like we made it, Fran. If they’d meant to come by this real estate the hard way, they’d have moved in by now, if they had a lick of sense.”

  She threw herself lengthwise on the bed. “Good. I was tired of sitting up to watch for Santa Claus.”

  “Not yet,” he said. “As I said a long time ago, about Billy the Kid, some dangerous fools don’t have a lick of sense. So watch that slope some more. You wouldn’t want to caught napping by a moonlight cavalry charge, dumb as that sounds.”

  She sat back up, but protested, “There’s nothing out there to see but buggy grass and bats, Stuart. How long do we have to wait like this?”

  He started to say until morning. “We’ll give them another few minutes,” he said instead. “Then, if it’s still quiet, we’ll see about moving out. It looks like they’ve taken my advice to heart. We’ll wait a spell to make sure. Then we’ll load up the ponies and beeline for Lake Yellowstone before sunrise makes it easier to aim any distance.

  “Without any sleep?” she protested. “Why do I want to ride with you for Lake Yellowstone anyway?”

  “I wish you’d ask questions one at a time,” he said. “I reckon it’s all right for you to catch a catnap before we leave. You have to head for the lake with me because that’s where I’ll be heading next. There ought to be something like a trail along the west side of the lake.

  The party I’m trying to catch up with may be on it, if they’re in the park at all. Either way, we can follow the more beaten track up through the geyser area to the railroad at Yell
owstone Station, see?”

  She was already lying down again. “What happens when we get there?”

  “You’re on your own with six ponies and some furs you might get a nice price on if you don’t mention where you got ’em.”

  She didn’t seem surprised to hear about the poached furs. He wasn’t as surprised by this as he might have been before she’d told him about that choir master back home who’d seemed to think she needed special instructions in the choir loft after class. She fell asleep. He started to argue about that, but she’d had a hard day, even for her, and covering both lookouts from time to time gave him something to do but yawn.

  He smoked half a dozen cigarettes and washed his tongue tasty again with well-sugared as well as cold coffee. It had to be well after midnight now. The bastards were enjoying the sleep of the unjust, letting him do all the sweating. Hell, not even the girl seemed to feel they were worth waiting up for now.

  But he waited some more, smoked some more, and had to stop drinking coffee when he saw there was only enough left to wake Fran up. He figured it was about two or three in the wee small hours when he decided to get out before they changed their minds.

  He moved over and sat on the edge of the trundle bed to wake Fran. The slender blonde sure looked pretty with the moonbeams caressing her childlike sleeping face like that. He leaned closer to place a gentle hand on one of her shoulders.

  “It’s time to rise and shine, Sleeping Beauty.”

  But she must have recalled the part in that old story where the prince had to wake the sleeping beauty up right, for the next thing he knew, she’d reached up to haul him down atop her and kiss him.

  He kissed her back. Most men would have. But as she grabbed his wrist and commenced to feel herself up with his hand, he got his lips unstuck long enough to gasp, “Hold on. I’m not sure this is either the time or place to get so friendly.”

  “I am,” she murmured, and moved his hand down across the thin calico covering her belly, to where she really wanted it.