by Lou Cameron
“You ask, of course,” Barca retorted. “He sent his letter of complaint via General Delivery, El Centro. And while El Centro seems to be the county seat, you can likely shout his name from any rooftop with a fair chance of his hearing you. The town is little more than a Southern Pacific water stop. Wire me by Western Union as soon as you find out what’s going on down there.”
As Stringer rose, he asked, “And what if nothing’s going on?”
Barca replied in a disgusted tone, “Come back without wasting money on any damned wire, of course. Western Union charges us a nickel a word, you know.”
Stringer nodded and observed morosely, “I know. I sure wish I could get you to pay me that much a word, you tight-fisted old cuss.”
CHAPTER TWO
The day’s ride down to Los Angeles was tedious. Although Stringer had dressed more comfortably for field work in his jeans and blue denim jacket, he’d left his gun rig packed out of sight in his gladstone traveling bag. But he got stared at anyway by fellow passengers who acted as if they’d never seen a beat-up Rough Rider hat or spurred Justins before. Stringer managed to amuse himself during the boring journey by philosophizing how surprising as well as somewhat discomforting it was to consider how sissified the West Coast had become in the past few years.
Stringer decided it was too late to catch the night train to San Diego, where he would get the connection to El Centro the next day. So he booked a room at the hotel across from the Union Depot. Then, seeing it was too early to turn in, he hired a worn-out bay gelding and an even older stock saddle at a nearby livery to ride out to the new suburb of Hollywoodland. He’d been invited to visit more than once by his old acquaintance Wyatt Earp. More importantly, though, while he took some of old Wyatt’s frontier yarns with a grain of salt, he needed the savvy of a real estate agent right now. And whatever he might or might not have been in Tombstone, Wyatt Earp was said to be a pisser of a real estate agent.
Stringer found the old windbag with his latest and much-younger wife, Sarah, rocking on the porch of their bungalow off Western Avenue. While the pretty brunette worked on her needlepoint, the former frontiersman was cleaning a Winchester as if he expected buffalo to stampede up the paved street any minute.
The old lawman and his lovely but flutter-brained wife had met Stringer up in Nome during the Alaska Gold Rush and had run across him a time or two in the current century, and now they both greeted him like long-lost kin. As he tethered his hired mount to their picket fence, Sarah dropped her needlework and ran across the Bermuda grass to give him a big and not too sisterly hug. Old Wyatt didn’t seem to mind though, and as he put his gun and cleaning tools aside he called out, “You just missed supper. But we can coffee and cake you, MacKail. You’ll be staying the night, of course.”
Stringer joined his gracious host on the porch, with his gracious hostess still clinging to him like a cockle burr. He shook his head and replied, “Not hardly, thanks just the same. I’m bound for the Colorado Desert—or Imperial Valley, take your choice—to see if I can find out what’s going on over there. Being I’m between trains, I thought I’d ask for the words of an expert on dry and dusty real estate, Mister Earp.”
The old-timer responded, “Call me Wyatt and don’t make rude remarks about Hollywoodland. You see that line of genuine palm trees over yonder? They get watered regular, and our neighbor two doors down has a real lemon tree growing in his back garth. Ain’t that a bitch?”
Stringer turned to stare dubiously at what looked more like a line of giant feather dusters with their handles buried in the white gravel of the Los Angeles Basin. Then he shrugged diplomatically. “They must be young palms, if you say so. I can’t come up with anything else that grows so silly. Ain’t palm trees supposed to have trunks, though?”
Wyatt Earp sniffed. “Give ’em time. My point is that they’ve taken root. Dang near anything will grow in this fine climate as long as you can get some water to it.”
Sarah Earp untangled herself from Stringer to announce she had a gardening book she was working on and ran in the house, apparently to fetch it for him. Stringer sat on the steps near the old lawman’s rocker and got out the makings as he explained the little he knew about events in the desert to the southeast.
When he’d finished, Wyatt Earp pursed his lips and said, “I don’t know, son. I once drove a stage over yonder in Salton’s Sink. It never struck me as prime farm or even grazing land. Come high summer it gets too hot for buzzards to even fly over. You say the Southern Pacific owns that stretch of mummy sweat?”
“Half of it, leastways,” Stringer explained. “I reckon old C. P. Huntington was in a hurry to lay his tracks across that hellish stretch and just took the land titles because they came free.”
Earp nodded sagely and agreed. “Creep Huntington was a greedy son of a bitch. Did I ever tell you about the time I shot it out with his hired guns at Mussel Slough, boy?”
Stringer acknowledged he had heard the story before, but added slyly, “You sure must have been a traveling man in those days, Wyatt, considering what you say you did at the O. K. Corral in Tombstone a year later.”
Earp smiled modestly. “Me and my brother, Morgan, spent a lot of time on the road riding shotgun for Wells Fargo.”
Stringer knew better. But he’d been raised to be respectful of his elders, so he just said, “I’d rather talk about Salton’s Sink. Is it true we’re talking about a lot of salt spread over the garden spot of the Colorado Desert, Wyatt?”
The older man chuckled. “Enough salt to scrape up off the dirt and sprinkle in your stew, if you don’t mind a bit of grit. Of course, the salt’s only that bad in the low places. I reckon you could get prickly pear or even mesquite to grow in the higher greasewood ground if you could get water to it now and again.” He pointed at a distant greenish blur a few streets over. “That’s a genuine pepper tree, yonder. Comes all the way from South America. You see, we do have some water, here. It runs down offen the Santa Monica Mountains a month or more each winter and settles here under the basin, not all that deep.”
Stringer repressed a shrug of impatience as he insisted, “I know there’s a real estate boom in this basin, Wyatt. It’s all that land up for sale to the southeast that has me puzzled. I’ve been hearing all my life how good the late C. P. Huntington was at squeezing blood out of stones and…”
“That’s the pure truth,” Wyatt Earp cut in. “There never was and never will be a skinflint bastard like old Creep Huntington. He’d have skinned his own mother if there’d been a bounty on old lady hides. But he can’t be skinning nobody over in the desert now. The old son of a bitch up and died on us all afore anyone could draw a good bead on him!”
Stringer said, ‘That’s my point. Whether you listen to his few friends or his many enemies, C. P. Huntington was one hell of a businessman. So how come, while he was still alive and in business, it never occurred to him to make that desert blossom and sell off at least the half he owned for hard cash? Hell, he peddled lots of semi-arid land in his time. Some of it is still piss poor. Wouldn’t you say that had he thought he could peddle that salty desert land without serving time as an out-and-out swindler, he’d have done so?”
Wyatt Earp nodded thoughtfully and considered some before he decided. “You’re right. There are some limits to what we consider safe to sell, even to greenhorns. I just had a look at some mighty cheap tidal flats down south of Santa Monica. It looks a lot like a green grassy meadow, when the tide is out. But I dunno, I don’t think I’d want to defend myself in court for selling city lots that spend part of every day under the Pacific Ocean. Maybe the slickers who took over after old Creep died ain’t as ethical as you and me or even old Creep Huntington.”
Earp’s young wife came back just in time to hear her husband’s last remark. As she sat down on the steps to place the tray she’d fetched from the house between herself and Stringer, she screwed her pretty face into a pout. “They’re just horrid, all mean and stuck-up. Wyatt and me never got an
invite to their grand house-warming over in Pasadena. But we went anyway, figuring they just hadn’t heard my famous husband had moved to these parts after taming Nome that time. I have never in this world been treated so rude before.”
From his rocker, Earp explained. “They turned us away at the gate. A snooty butler did, I mean. I told the cuss I’d once lost at cards to old Creep Huntington and that it only stood to reason his nephew Hank would be proud to show us about his grand new mansion. But it was like talking to a block of ice. So me and my Sarah decided to let ’em hold their fool party without the honor of our presence.”
“Wyatt’s real famous here in Hollywoodland,” Sarah pointed out as she put aside the loose-leaf folder she’d brought out with the coffee and dessert to cut Stringer a heroic slice of lemon cake.
Her husband nodded in argeement. “I get paid real money to go over moving picture scripts for some eastern dudes who just went into business up Western Avenue. Say, would you like to have a part in a Wild West nickelodeon, Stringer? All you have to know is how to ride a bronc, and you’re already dressed more cow than half the nickelodeon cowboys I’ve seen. Before they called on me to show ’em the ropes they had the dangdest remuda of oddly dressed riders you ever seen. Some of ’em even reported for work in English riding habits and posted in flat saddles like they was out hunting foxes instead of outlaws.”
Stringer almost choked on lemon cake as he tried to laugh and swallow at the same time. He washed the errant bite of cake down with coffee, gasped for breath, and allowed, “I can see why they’d feel the need for your memories of an older west, Wyatt.”
He was too polite to point out that features he’d written for the Sun had called for a certain amount of research on his own part and, what the hell, old Wyatt had at least been through Dodge and Tombstone in his time, even if it had been mostly as a card dealer and cat-house bouncer. He assured the well-meaning Wyatt that he wasn’t interested in becoming a nickelodeon star. Then, returning to his own immediate interest, he asked, “If this Henry Huntington who took over for his dead uncle is living as high on the hog as you say, might that not explain all the sudden interest in mongering desert land that even the one and original Octopus had written off as useless?”
Earp shrugged. “Old Creep would have likely sold his worn-out socks if he’d figured there was a market for ’em. Young Hank acts a lot more social and sissy. But he’s got the same blood in him, even if he is trying to pretend it’s blue.”
Sarah refilled Stringer’s cup as she remarked, “He just bought that famous painting—I think he calls it ‘The Blue Boy’—to make folk think him and his fancy wife hail from fancier parts, as if they were ashamed of being plain old Americans like the rest of us.”
Wyatt Earp scowled and added, “But unlike the rest of us plain old Americans, they never done an honest day’s work in their lives. Old Creep Huntington had his bad habits and spitting tobacco was the least of ’em. But to give the devil his due, old Creep built a railroad empire from the ground up with little more than poker stakes and a mess of Chinamen. I don’t see where young Hank gets any right to play so high and mighty with his fancy ways and big house full of old oil paintings. It ain’t as if he made the money or even drove one railroad spike on his own.” Earp shook his head. “No-sir. You just leave me and my little Sarah that much money, free and clear, for doing nothing and we’ll surely show you how to live like royalty. It can’t be all that hard.”
Sarah clapped her hands like the child she really was inside her beautiful head and giggled. “Oh, wouldn’t that be fun? If I was Mrs. Huntington I’d have the biggest house and garden in Southern California, and invite all the neighbors in.”
She saw Stringer had finished his somewhat overly sweet repast and reached for her folder, saying, “I want to show you my latest literary effort, Mister MacKail. You being a famous author and all.”
Stringer had no choice but to take the tome from her and open it, braced for anything. He saw to his relief that half the manuscript seemed to be pictures, hand-drawn in crayon and not too badly at that. Facing each floral illustration was a page of her self-consciously neat handwriting. When she asked him what he thought of it, Stringer said, “You sure know a lot about flowers, ma’am. But weren’t you working on your husband’s biography the last time we met?”
She dimpled charmingly. “Oh, I finished that one. I titled it ‘Me and Wyatt Earp’ and sent it to Boston to be published. I haven’t heard from them one way or the other yet.”
From his rocker her older husband chuckled fondly down at her. “I doubt she ever will,” he told Stringer. “She writ it a mite more flattersome than historical. I keep telling the dear woman I never shot Curly Bill. But she doesn’t listen.”
Sarah retorted firmly, “Pooh, if you didn’t shoot that nasty man who did? He’s dead, isn’t he?”
Wyatt Earp didn’t answer. Neither did Stringer. It was nice to hear that tall story hadn’t come from the old lawman himself. It might have been impolite to report that Curly Bill Brocius had been seen alive and well a full ten years after the Earps had been run out of Tombstone, as pests, by Sheriff John Slaughter.
To return the conversation to safer ground, Stringer turned a page of Sarah’s book and admired the spray of yucca blooms she’d drawn. As he leafed through the book, he addressed Wyatt. “Do you have Henry Huntington’s Pasadena address on hand, in case I’ve time to interview him before I move on to his land of milk and honey in Salton’s Sink?”
Earp shook his head. “House that big don’t need to have numbers out front. You just ask anyone in Pasadena where the grandest house in town might be and they’ll just naturally point.” Then he added, “Won’t do you no good, though. That new Huntington palace is laid out as if they was expecting bill collectors and Apache all at once. The house is set way back from the gate and they got a sort of prison wall wrapped around the whole spread.”
“Don’t they have a door chime?” asked Stringer.
“Sure they do,” his host replied with a snort. “I rung it personal that time. All you get from your effort is a sort of sissy-dressed but mighty big dude looking down at you to say you can’t come in. Entrance is by written invite only. I was dressed a lot more refined than you are right now and they still acted as if they feared I’d spit on the Persian rugs and carve my initials in a marble wall. Why in thunder would you want to talk to such a snooty rascal as Hank Huntington to begin with?”
Stringer answered thoughtfully, “For openers, he might know what the devil the Southern Pacific is up to down in Salton’s Sink. All I have to go on is the word of a fired and no doubt disgruntled employee who may or may not be in El Centro, miles from whatever’s really going on. I’d like to hear the Southern Pacific’s side of the story before jumping to any conclusions.”
“That sounds fair,” Earp commented. “But hold on. I might be able to save you a long ride to Pasadena.”
He got up and went inside, long enough for his young wife to shyly ask Stringer what he thought of her gardening book and have him tell her, truthfully enough, that she sure drew right nicely. Then old Wyatt came back out with a sheaf of real estate brochures. “These come in the mail awhile back. I reckon they figured all the local real estate agents would be interested. I’d almost forgotten I had ’em.”
Earp sat this time on the steps with his wife and their visitor and handed the lithographed promotion pieces to Stringer. “Anyone can see how dumb the pictures are, unless they never had the pleasure of crossing the Colorado Desert in summer.”
Stringer had to agree as he scanned through the Utopian plans of the Southern Pacific Land Office. Even if they somehow, someday, managed to get water out to the middle of those greasewood flats, orange groves and paved tree-shaded roads seemed just a mite optimistic. The architect’s renderings of planned communities in Spanish-mission style were better, as art work, than Sarah Earp’s crayon drawings but a hell of a lot less realistic. For at least the lady had sketched flowers th
at existed rather than just letting her imagination run riot. The railroad grants for sale were listed at a price cheaper—but only barely—than prime farm land in the fertile Sacramento Valley to the north, and they sold at a minimum of a quarter section.
Stringer searched for any mention of water rates. Finding none, he told Earp, “I just can’t see it. Seems to me that if I wanted to grow barley instead of cows I’d pay a few bucks an acre more for a proven farmstead up near, say, Weed or Red Bluff where I’d get my water for the price of a tube well.”
Earp nodded, then opined, “You’d have to drill in crops more profitsome than barley to make a go of it with hired water. It just don’t pay to irrigate grain and grazing land. As to all the orange trees they seem to be promising, I can get you a cheaper price on an already planted grove down in Orange County to the south. You’ll never guess why they named it Orange County ’til you see how many orange trees they got growing down yonder this very minute. I told you I chucked these offers aside as soon as I took one look at ’em.”
Stringer searched for an office address, found one on Main Street not far from his downtown hotel, and asked if he could keep that particular page. Earp said he was welcome to the whole bundle but asked slyly how much salty desert land he meant to buy.
Stringer explained. “I’m not ready to tell anyone I’m a newspaperman until they tell me where all that water’s supposed to come from, or how much they’ll be charging an acre-foot for it. I find it sort of suspicious that they’ve left that out, considering how carefully they drew all these thirsty orange and shade trees.”
Earp agreed that a land swindle would be nothing new for the old Southern Pacific. Nevertheless, Stringer knew there was no real story in such standard real estate practices, and after some more polite small talk he excused himself to remount his hired pony and ride like hell for downtown L.A. in hopes of finding the land office still open.
