Stringer and the Deadly Flood

by Lou Cameron

  Stringer moved closer, saying, “Never met him. He sent a news tip to my paper, the San Francisco Sun. They sent me down here to talk to him. My name would be, ah, Stuarto MacKail, señora.’’

  She corrected him. “That would be señorita, por favor. I do not understand why everyone seems to think I was married to poor Herberto Lockwood. He was simply living with me in this carreta. Where is your own mount, Stuarto?”

  He stared up at her, bemused, as he sorted out what she’d just said. “I don’t have one. I just got here by train.”

  “In that case you had better find a pony for to ride far and fast,” she advised him earnestly. “That malo will be back with others, if I know the people he works for. I shall hitch up my mule as you go over to the livery near the railroad stop for to hire a good Spanish riding mule, not a pony, for our escape, no?”

  He smiled incredulously and said, “Hold on, Juanita. I only came to have a few words with you, not to join you in a war with that water outfit.”

  She opened the bottom of the Dutch door to drop lightly to the ground beside him. “We shall have plenty of time for to talk, once we are a safe distance from here. You do not have to declare war on International Irrigation. They declare war on you if they feel you are in their way. And, just now, we both got in their way. You can come with me or you can catch the next train out. If you stay here, they will kill you, comprendo?”

  “I do now,” Stringer assured her. “I’ll be back with a mount directly. I’ve yet to get a good story by running away from it.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Spanish riding mule was bigger, stronger, and almost as fast as most cow ponies. The real advantage of any mule in dry country was that it got by on less than half the water a horse needed. So while vaqueros felt almost as dumb aboard a mule as a gringo buckaroo, they’d bred a pretty good mount with the size and gait of its usually Arab mamma and the toughness and stolid ways of its burro daddy. The sterile jenny Stringer picked up at the livery cost him thirty dollars and change, with a beat-up but serviceable bare-tree Mexican saddle and horsehair bridle thrown in for another ten. They’d flatly refused to hire him by the day once he’d mentioned he might be riding out on the desert. He knew Juanita had the shotgun aboard her gypsy cart. But as long as he was in downtown El Centro and meant to let the Sun pay these unforeseen travel expenses, if they would, he picked up a used Winchester and a couple of boxes of .44-.40 and some more .38 Longs at the hardware store next door.

  He was halfway back to the willows when he met up with Juanita in her cart, coming toward him. As he wheeled his mule to fall in beside her, she called, “I put your bag in the back. I did not open it.”

  “I never thought you would,” he assured her. Then he asked, “How come we’re headed north? I thought Old Mexico was the other way.”

  She seemed to repress a shudder as she replied, “I would rather take my chances with hired gringo guns than Los Indios in the desert to the south.”

  He asked, “How many wild Indians do you still have down Mexico way?”

  “Too many,” she replied. “Those hiding from the Federáles in the bleakest parts of the desert are most desperate. They do not attack because they hate your kind and mine. They attack anything that moves because if it moves they feel free to eat it or rob it.”

  Stringer figured she knew what she was doing, and he followed her lead without more questions. When they had crossed the railroad tracks and began pushing through greasewood, she sighed and explained further. “Herberto and I came to El Centro for to be above the floodwaters when they swept in from the east. I do not know how far north we can go before we are lower than the Sea of Cortez. But we must go somewhere and Herberto said any ground higher than the beaches of long ago should be high enough.”

  Stringer swept their seemingly dead-flat surroundings with his eyes. There was nothing in the way of a serious dip or rise before the purple mountains in the east and west looming above the horizon. There was nothing above the horizon line to the north or south.

  “If this is what Lockwood called high ground,” he commented, “I can’t wait to see what he called low ground. It looks mighty flat to me.”

  She nodded in reply. “That is for why Herberto was a water engineer and you and I are not. Did you see those trees back there, where first we met? Herberto said they had sprouted there and grown so fast because all the well water that people threw out as slops ran north, but, of course, mucho slowly. Herberto said that long before Cortez or even Cristo the sea reached as far inland as the town of Indio, far to the north, almost a hundred of your Yanqui miles. Do not ask me for why this is all very dry ground today. When we make camp I can show you the charts he drew. I do not understand them. Pero, that hombre who came for them may have. That is for why I did not want to give them to him. I do not think it was fair of them to fire Herberto for being wrong if they thought he was right, do you?”

  Stringer shook his head and turned in the saddle to gaze back the way they’d just come. The rooftops of El Centro weren’t half as far back as he’d hoped they’d be by now, and in the shimmering heat waves he just couldn’t tell whether anyone back there was showing any interest in their departure or not.

  He told the girl, “Keep driving. I’m fixing to rein in here for a spell to cover our retreat.”

  When she asked if anyone was following them, he said that was what he meant to find out. She nodded and drove on, while Stringer drew the Winchester from its saddle boot and dismounted to rest his mule. As long as he had the chance, he decided to water some greasewood, keeping his back well turned to the onward-moving cart. If anyone to the south was close enough to see his fool pecker, they were way too close.

  While his mule nibbled experimentally on some salt bush that was struggling to grow amid the greasewood, Stringer cradled the saddle gun with one elbow and rolled a smoke. A black dot that could have been a mounted rider, or most anything else, kept bouncing back and forth in the shimmering air but didn’t seem to be getting any closer by the time Stringer had finished his smoke. He turned to see how Juanita was making out. He swore softly when he saw the gypsy cart looked no farther away and only a mite smaller than it had the last time he’d looked. He calculated rapidly in his head and muttered to himself. “Let’s see. The horizon’s about three miles off to a rider in the saddle. That cart’s moving less than three miles an hour. Rooftops stick up above the horizon. So that makes it another two or three hours minimum before we can even consider a serious stop.” He glanced up at the sun and saw it was a little over halfway down in the west from its zenith. “Ought to be safe to trailbreak before snake time.”

  Then he rolled another smoke. He’d been born too late for the real Indian fighting in the west. But the war with Spain had taught him a thing or two about patience. Nine out of ten times a man was just wasting his time covering the back trail. But that tenth time could leave him feeling dead as well as foolish. He didn’t know which way that water company rider had gone after crawfishing out of sight. There hadn’t been a train through El Centro since then, and even if there had been the gent had been mounted. That meant he had to have ridden cross-country to wherever the gents he worked for might be. Of course, he might have stayed in town to sulk or mayhaps wire home for help. If he’d been sipping Coca Cola in any saloon along Main Street, he’d have had to notice them leaving. But, wherever he was, the company man didn’t seem to be trailing Juanita’s now fairly distant cart.

  Stringer turned to study the wagon ruts that had been left when the cart moved on. He was pleased to see they were not as clear as he’d feared. He was more used to the Mojave and other western deserts, where the topsoil was covered by a more brittle crust of so-called “desert pavement.” Busting through caliche left ruts that lasted until at least one hell of a rain storm. And in desert country it seldom rained. But this odd soil didn’t have a crust worth mentioning. So, while the wheels sank in deep enough, their impressions weren’t sharp, and the gentle ground breezes were
already starting to fill the ruts with drifting baby-powder silt. Small wonder then, he mused, that he hadn’t seen any other tracks out here so close to a town.

  He filled his hat with canteen water and fed it to the mule. Then he allowed himself a few gulps and put the wet hat back on. It sure felt good as the rapid evaporation of the desert cooled his head. He was tempted to mount up and ride on while he still felt up to it, but he rolled another smoke instead. By the time he’d smoked that one down, the gypsy cart was just another wavering dot in the shimmering distance.

  “Well,” Stringer told his patient mule, “if he don’t want a fight, he don’t want a fight.” So he remounted and set after Juanita at a walk, knowing his riding mule walked faster than the poor brute pulling the gypsy cart.

  It still took quite a while to catch up, and by the time he reached her Juanita looked as if she’d been crying.

  “I was so worried, Stuarto!” she cried. “What kept you so long back there?”

  He said reassuringly. “Nothing. But I had to stay put long enough to make sure. I could tell you a tale of Spanish cavalry raiders surprising the daylights out of a supply train down in Cuba one time. But it wouldn’t be polite to tell such war stories to a Spanish lady. Let’s just say I’m a quick learner.”

  She smiled at him. “Thank you for calling me Spanish as well as a lady. My father had some Spanish blood, it is true. Pero, my mother was almost pure Pima.”

  He nodded soberly and declared, “That makes you half-Americano, then. The Pima scouted for the U.S. Cavalry during the Apache wars on this side of the border.”

  “I do not know for myself,” she replied. “Mamacita did not like to discuss that side of her family. My father was a Mexican trader. It was from him I inherited this cart. My brother and me, we brought a load of mescal up from Sonora for to sell to the workers along the big water canal to the east. My brother was shot by a mean gringo for some reason. It was about then the water company fired Herberto and so…”

  “That’s none of my business,” Stringer cut in. But then he added, “When we have the chance I’d surely like to go over those mysterious papers his former employers seem so interested in. Whether he left wedding certificates among his effects or not is none of my beeswax.”

  She frowned hard at the rump of the mule ahead of her. Then she asked, “Wedding what? Did you think Herberto and me were man and wife, Stuarto?”

  He said, “I’m not paid to think about such matters. I don’t do the social pages for the Sun. But as long as we’re on the subject of the poor cuss, are you up to telling me about that gunfight he lost with Cactus Jack Donovan the other night?”

  She sighed. “I only know what they told me later. I was surprised for to hear poor Herberto got in a fight with a notorious malo, or anyone else. He was a most gentle person, even drunk.”

  “Oh, did he drink a lot?” asked Stringer.

  “Si,” she replied. “He was most upset about losing his job and even more worried about the big flood he kept warning everyone about. It made him angry when they all laughed at him and said it was most foolish to worry about high water where water is so rare. Pero, he never got angry enough to fight with anyone. To tell the truth, I do not think he knew how to fight. I know he did not wear a gun like you. Don’t you find it strange that a man so mild would wish for to fight a famous gunfighter?”

  Stringer frowned thoughtfully and replied, “It might not have been his notion. Could this Cactus Jack by any chance happen to be on the payroll of International Irrigation?”

  She answered, “Quien sabe? He is, as I said, what my people call a malo, a bad one. Some say his gun hand is for hire, while others say he is simply evil-tempered. For why do you find this important, Stuarto? Herberto is dead, no matter why he was shot down in the streets of El Centro, no?”

  Stringer growled, “I’m not dead, yet, and I find it mighty odd that someone tried to gun me, about the same time, miles away from a less fortunate gent who might have had something he wanted to tell me. I wish I had a better notion what it might have been. To tell the truth, we get lots of crank letters and hardly any of ’em pan out as news worth printing. So mayhaps old Herb was more than a disgruntled employee with odd notions after all. Hardly anyone shoots pure cranks, let alone innocent reporters on their way to listen to pure jabber.”

  She demanded further explanation. So he filled her in on his misadventures in L.A., leaving out any mention of Zelda, who’d no doubt by this time rejoined her husband in San Diego feeling a mite smug about the fun she’d had and the traveling expenses she’d saved on her most recent trip to and from her sister.

  The pretty gal closer to hand and certainly not married took a dimmer view of her own people than Stringer. She said she was of the opinion one of those Chicano kids had tailed him to his hotel and gone home for a rifle.

  Stringer said, “That works fine, I’ll allow. So does a fired and somewhat drunken engineer blundering into a shoot-out with yet another surly pest. But when you add both incidents up, you get a coincidence even Jack London would hesitate to use in one of his wild Alaska yarns.”

  She said she didn’t know what “coincidence” meant. So he told her, “Try fortuna ciego. What are the odds on two men who’d never met, but were fated to meet, getting shot at about the same time by pure accident?”

  She nodded gravely. “Perhaps the two happenings were only meant to look like unrelated trouble by someone who did not wish for the two of you to ever meet. Pero, Stuarto, if that was the case for why would they wish for to kill both of you? Would not the death of one of you alone serve as well to prevent you from ever meeting?”

  He said, “They may have sent someone after both of us to make sure one or the other died. I wouldn’t be here talking about it if I hadn’t proven it’s possible to miss. I wish I knew as much about them as they seem to know about me. You see, once a good newshound gets the scent he’s inclined to keep sniffing until he finds something out. They didn’t bother you about any papers old Herb might have left with you until they’d had time to find out I was still alive. I suspect they wanted to make sure I never laid eyes on ’em. So how far out here were you planning to roll before the first trail break? I’d sure like to see what your man might have left in the back of this cart.”

  She reined in her draft mule immediately. “Our beasts could use a rest. I will show you the papers right now.” So, as Stringer dismounted and tethered his mule to one clump of scrub, Juanita dropped down off her seat to tether the other. Both animals had to be watered before they did anything else, but that only took a moment. Then she led him around to the back of the cart, and they both climbed into the stuffy interior. The heat inside was oppressive, but it took only one sniff to tell that Juanita was a mighty clean housekeeper. The sun beating down all day on the canvas roof had baked the scent of lemon oil and pine soap out of the paneling and spartan furnishings. There was a hint of chili pepper and toilet water in the air as well, but not a whiff of bedbug or chamber pot. He saw two bunk beds folded up against one side, while the other was lined with chests that no doubt served both for seating and as tabletops. One chest was an old army footlocker. Juanita dropped to her knees to open it, lifting out the top tray filled with men’s shaving gear, clean socks, and a brass barometer. Then she handed him a sheaf of papers, neatly bound with a rubber band. “I think these are what that company rider must have been after. Herberto had nothing else of value here. Such money as he had would have been on him when he was killed. I did not ask about it. So perhaps they saw no need to mention it to me.”

  Stringer grimaced and said he knew about small-town undertaking customs. Then he found a seat on another chest and opened what looked like a survey map.

  It was. In fact it appeared to be a printed government survey map of the so-called Imperial Valley and hence mostly blank. He found pencil lines on it as well that nobody but the late Herbert Lockwood had likely felt called to draw in, neatly but lightly, with hard lead. Stringer knew engineers
in the interest of accuracy liked to draw lines too skinny for anyone but a spider to notice. Once he got used to the contrast between the printed ink lines and the spiderweb of faint penciling, he was able to read the survey map fairly well. But it failed to explain why anyone would have wanted the man who drew them all that dead.

  The canal lines Lockwood had drawn from a point just below Yuma didn’t seem to be leading water, if they were leading any water at all, more alarmingly than Sam Barca had mentioned back in the pressroom in Frisco. It was easy to see that the neat little dashes across the original main channel dug by Chaffey meant the channel was blocked—or perhaps each dash indicated the channel had been cleaned out to that point. The newer southern channel, parts of it looping south of the Mexican border as it aimed for the desert crossing of Calexico-Mexicali, and a fossil streambed leading south to the sea had symbols here and there that might have indicated floodgates. Dotted lines ran north from each, which Stringer assumed indicated canals to be dug at some future date. To the north, cutting across the tops of the more complex and even skinnier lines of the irrigation maze, ran the diversion canal that was intended to get temporary water to the area while the original silted-up canal was being cleaned out to do the job properly. Since the Southern Pacific had crossed the same desert a lot earlier, its railbed was printed in ink. Stringer had to peer hard to distinguish the diversion canal that was being dug in line with it. The water scheme made more sense once he saw that, although the new canal was being run south of the tracks and crossed feeder ditches that apparently ran under the railroad through culverts. Barca had been right apparently about the Southern Pacific working in cahoots with the water outfit. But Stringer failed to see anything more criminal than the idea sounded in the first place. So where was the news? News was stuff that had happened recently. The half-baked plans of old Charly Rockwood had been third page news at least three or more years back.