“You talk a good game. What’s the color of your money?”
From a pocket Cripplehorn produced a fold of banknotes in a spring clasp with an Indian head in copper and held it up. A fifty-dollar note was wrapped around the outside.
“I met a pump-organ drummer carried a roll like that in Rocky Fork. It was all singles inside.”
“You’re free to inspect it, once we come to an agreement.”
“You seem mighty sure we will.”
“Why would we not? Assuming you’re still resolute.”
“Don’t you worry about that. What’s to stop me from crawfishing once I take your money? I don’t need no business arrangement to put Randy in the ground.”
“As I told Mr. Locke, the record of your association is fee simple that your word is good. This fifty is a deposit. The rest will go to the survivor of the contest—or his heirs should he expire shortly after his opponent.”
“What if we go together?”
“That, sir, would be a windfall.”
Frank unbuttoned his coat, exposing the Remington’s cracked grip. “You never know in a crowd like that where a stray bullet may come from.”
Cripplehorn smiled.
“I understand the implication, and I don’t resent it. I will state that I am no gun man—you may inspect me if you wish, I go unarmed—and would be taking my life in my hands against either one of you. And to employ a surrogate would be to share the reward, which would render the exercise pointless.”
“I can see you worked this out.”
“It has been my ambition for some time now, as I said.”
“I don’t have heirs. You can keep my share if Randy gets lucky. I won’t need it where I’ve gone.”
“Then we have an understanding?”
“I reckon so. We been running around going on fifteen years, trying to kill each other for free. I don’t see any sin in making a buck off it.”
Cripplehorn freed the fifty-dollar note from the clasp, letting him see a second one underneath, and put the first on the low table. Frank scooped it up, stretched it between his hands, and held it up to the window. “I ain’t seen one of these in so long we’re plumb shy around each other.” He folded it in quarters and poked it into his watch pocket.
The other man picked up his glass, sipped, and made a face as if it contained alkali water. “Unfortunately, the situation is the same as when I spoke to Mr. Locke, although this time around he’s the one who can’t be reached.”
“He’ll do the reaching, soon as he hears I’m in town.”
“That’s just what he said about you.”
“And here I sit.”
“Two years later. This time we’ll accelerate the process.”
ELEVEN
The press is an institution run by the inmates.
Major W. B. Updegraff (the W stood for Wisdom, but the men who accompanied him to sporting houses called him Dub) came out of Second Manassas with the rank of sergeant-major and a chunk of Yankee mortar in his right knee. He was Major to the staff of The Barbary Spar.
He hadn’t set out to be a publisher. He won his first printing press, a lever-operated Columbian patented in 1813, playing poker in Tennessee. Before that he wasn’t even a regular reader of newspapers, but it seemed everyone else was, especially the farther he moved West. The ten-cent price covered expenses, and advertising and jobbing (election leaflets, business cards, and letterheads) had kept his head above water during the Panic of ’73.
He was forced to leave that first press in Yankton when a local manufacturer of fireworks came looking for him with a bullwhip. He bought another, a Prouty platen, when the Kansas Pacific Railroad left behind an end-of-track town in Colorado, cheap from a publisher who’d grown weary of transporting his equipment every time the railroad moved on. It now stood, an impressive arrangement of gears, rubber-covered rollers, and an enormous cast-iron flywheel with curved spokes, in a building constructed from packing cases within earshot of the splash whenever a drunk was robbed, slain, and flung into San Francisco Harbor. Its sign, printed in Olde English letters on a pine board, hung by chains from the spar of a ship that had run aground off Goat Rock, and for which the establishment was named.
The building was not much larger than a carriage house. This compact arrangement suited the Major, who in a trice could walk from the press to the lithograph stone with its polished slab of gunmetal-colored rock to the yellow-oak cabinet where lead type was stored in shallow drawers to his heaped rolltop desk with tubes of foolscap like piano-player rolls sticking out of the pigeonholes to the type-writer, a knee-high pile of ratchets, pulleys, and balance wheels mounted on casters with a treadle like a sewing machine, without overtaxing his bunged-up leg.
He never used the type-writer himself. He called it the Contraption, preferring to confine his mechanical acumen to the platen press. But every modern office had to have at least one type-writer on display, and he was loath to surrender any part of his tight quarters to anything purely decorative. He’d hired a male secretary away from a city superintendent to operate it, not to write copy but to bring an air of efficiency to his business correspondence. Young Greenfield took dictation as fast as the Major could give it—and he was a rapid speaker, brooking no interruption—and used all ten fingers on the keyboard; when the lad’s pilot light was on, the noise sounded like an army of timberjacks clearing a stand of redwoods. On a truly productive day, the chopping of the strikers and the clunkety-clunk of the press producing sheet after sheet of dense print drowned out the foghorns bawling in the bay and the vibration shook dust and soot from the rafters.
The Barbary Spar advertised a circulation of twenty-five thousand. That figure was based on the calculation that at least five people were exposed to each issue of the biweekly journal. At that it was an exaggeration, because of the five thousand copies printed, five hundred were returned for credit by the merchants who stocked them.
Updegraff was built close to the ground and looked as if he’d shriveled inside his clothes: His open waistcoat, yellowed shirt, and trousers swaddled him, and in fact had the day he’d bought them. He was indifferent to male fashion and thought Greenfield a fop for blacking his shoes and changing his collar twice a week. He himself had worn the same green eyeshade since Dakota, cracked and spliced with sticking-plaster. The cigars that had burned holes in his shirt had left furrows on every surface in the office except the lithographic stone. The only thing he was vain about was his eyesight. The wire-rimmed spectacles he used for reading vanished into a clamshell case whenever someone approached. He was forty-two years old when Abraham Cripplehorn made his acquaintance, carrying a sheaf of neatly written notes on Palace Hotel stationery.
ILLUSTRIOUS GUN MAN STOPS HERE.
by Jack Dodger
Mr. Francis X. Farmer, known to readers throughout North America as the shootist ensnared in a “blood feud” with Mr. Randolph Locke, both originally of Texas, since the spring of 1868, is stopping in San Francisco and hopes that Mr. Locke will be doing the same when opportunity permits.
Asked the reason for the long enmity, Farmer said, “That’s between Randy and me. I don’t see how it’s of concern to anyone else.”
When this correspondent went on to inquire as to the character of his esteemed opponent, he replied, “He was one of the hardest-working hands who rode for the old Circle X, and what he lacks in skill with a carbine or rifle he more than makes up for with a hand iron. I carry around evidence of that, for anyone who doubts my word.”
Farmer was alluding, in addition to two ancient scars on his chest and back, to the artificial ear of expert workmanship that substitutes for that appendage, which was shot off by Locke in Abilene, Kansas, in 1869.
Locke has not gone unscathed as a result of these associations. He lost much of the use of a leg when Farmer shot his horse from under him in Wyoming, ruining him for ranch work. He’s said to have made his living since hunting wolves and buffalo and as a ranch cook.…
“No, I’ve not lost m
y taste for the affair,” Farmer said when asked if time had cooled his ardor. “I don’t reckon Randy has neither, and if he hasn’t turned into a yellow skunk by now, I look forward to taking up where we left off in Salt Lake City.”
Major Updegraff snatched off his spectacles and looked up from the sheaf in his hand. His visitor was a bland-enough-looking fellow despite his elaborate Wild West Show rig-out and false eye. He looked like a barbed-wire salesman who’d gotten too close to his samples.
“You’re Dodger?”
“Professionally, yes. The name is Cripplehorn in private life.”
“I’ve heard of this pair. For my money there’s been too much romanticizing of this kind of range rat already. It drives away business and puts the vigilantes on the prod.”
“If you’re not interested—”
“I didn’t say that. I’m just warming up for an editorial. My readers like it when I get my back up. You don’t say where Farmer’s staying.”
“He asked me not to. He doesn’t want reporters camping out in the lobby, like what happened with Locke when he was in town.”
“That’s all right with me. I can’t get hotel advertising. What brought you here? Why didn’t you go to Gilbert at the Examiner, or Butler at the Call, or any one of a half-dozen others can buy the Spar out of petty cash?”
“They all wanted to turn it over to one of their own reporters, rewrite everything, and copyright it under the papers’ names. I didn’t write it for someone else’s glory.”
“Well, it could do with editing. You got three pages in the middle of midnight rides and bloody gun battles, with no one to attribute it all to. Were you there?”
“No, but it seemed kind of puny without it. I couldn’t get Frank to say a derogatory thing about Randy till the end, and that was tame. The idea was to get him out here and lay the thing to rest.”
“I can see where Butler wouldn’t have any of it. His people are Quakers. Is it your intention to be there when it happens?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
The Major lit his cold cigar, releasing a fresh shower of sparks onto his shirt and waistcoat. He brushed at them and squinted at the other through a screen of blue smoke. “You one of those jaspers likes to attend public train wrecks?”
“I’m an entrepreneur. I make my money off those same jaspers.”
“I’m not one. I don’t pay for outside copy, if that’s what you’re thinking. If I was to start doing that and my reporters found out, I’d have to pay them regular.”
“I’m not. Are you interested or aren’t you?”
“I ought to send a man to interview him himself.”
“He won’t get past the door. I’ve got Frank’s word the story’s mine.”
“The word of a man-killer?”
“He’s been called that and other things as well, but never a welsher.”
Updegraff picked up a page. “Who’s Mississippi Belle?”
“A boat I used to own. The story needed a woman.”
The newspaperman drew a line with a soft black pencil and Belle was gone.
“How do I know you didn’t make the whole thing up?”
“Isn’t this the paper that printed the headline CUSTER’S VICTORY IN MONTANA?”
“That was the War Department’s fault. They withheld the details so as not to spoil the Centennial celebration in Washington. I had to run a retraction. You don’t develop a taste for crow, I can tell you.”
“You can send a man with me to talk to Farmer. He’ll convince him who he is quickly enough.”
“Probably scare him out of town and leave me short-staffed.” Updegraff’s cigar had gone out again when the hot ash met saliva, but he didn’t appear to notice. “Well, I can’t use it as written, starting with the headline. I write those myself, and it has to fit the column. Most of the rest reads like a cheap novel. All this Buffalo Bill hogwash has to come out.”
“That’s acceptable, as long as you keep in the quotations and put my name on it.”
“Don’t you worry about that. One place you’ve got him talking like Henry Ward Beecher and another like Davy Crockett. If I asked any of my people to claim credit, he’d up and quit.”
“Will you send it out on the wire?”
“Oh, hell, yes. The eastern journals will be on this like buzzards on a dead elephant. I’m going to copyright it—don’t get your bowels in an uproar, we’ll share ownership—so they’ll have to mention the Spar. I may have to increase my print run to what it says on the masthead.”
TWELVE
Bad company is like a pox, and the unafflicted would be wise to avoid it.
The railroad man’s name was Herbert, Henry Herbert. Right off Randy was disposed to dislike a man who hadn’t a last name.
He was enormously fat—sideshow freak fat, the kind of fat that made a stranger turn to watch him, slack-jawed, as they passed on the street, like a runaway train on fire and passengers jumping off the vestibules to sure broken necks to get free. Globs of him pushed out under the hickory arms of his swivel chair, which groaned agonizingly like a cow breech-birthing, and if he had on a cravat—as seemed likely—you couldn’t see it for the concertina folds of fat under his chin. Randy wondered why the man bothered. He was sweating in his office on the second story of a bank building in Phoenix, Arizona Territory, with the windows open creating a cross draft of pure furnace air, a slippery mess of overfed catfish who might just lubricate himself free of the chair if he weren’t wedged in tight as a tick.
“I know your dealings with Frank Farmer,” Herbert said. “To be honest, I’d rather be talking to him. This is more in his line of work, and I’m concerned about that leg.”
“Just what is the job? The notice in the paper just said you wanted an unmarried man.”
“A bit of drama, suggested by my partner; to get attention, he said. He was right. Since it ran I’ve turned away dozens of applicants. We’re building a spur from Elgin to Calabesas in Pima County, a stone’s throw from the Mexican border. We need someone to discourage the Apaches from endangering the workers.”
“One?”
“I’d prefer a squad, but the treasury won’t cover paying men just to stand around waiting to be needed. Some of the workers are experienced with weapons, so you won’t exactly be alone. Of all who have come forward you’re the most promising—if you’re who you say you are—but, to be honest—”
His favorite phrase, it developed, like a profane man slinging around Jesus. “I don’t shoot with my leg,” Randy put in. “I’m best at close range, but I shot wolves and buffler from three hundred yards. I reckon I can scatter a batch of yammering savages on those scrub ponies they straddle down here.”
The railroad man’s chair groaned this way and that; thinking with his ass. Finally he swiveled to face his desk, dipped a pen in a squat bottle, scribbled something on rag paper with the name of the railroad printed across the top in bold letters with doodads on them, sprinkled sand from a pot on what he’d written, and blew away the loose grains. “Give this to Ralph Potter, the foreman. Go to Elgin and follow the tracks west. You’ll need travel expenses.”
A black iron safe with gilt lettering squatted in a corner. Grunting and blowing, the railroad man crab-walked his chair over to it on squealing casters, leaned forward, and worked the dial. He took a tin box from inside, opened it, counted out banknotes from a stack, put back the box, shut the safe, and gave the dial a spin. “One hundred dollars. That should cover the fare to Elgin—I’d give you a pass, but that stretch belongs to a competitor—provisions, and whatever other incidentals you’ll need.”
Randy took the sheaf of notes, stuck it in his worn cowhide poke, and put it in his hip pocket. The railroad man asked him if he wasn’t going to count the notes.
“I reckon it’s all there. You train men don’t steal by the dollar. Anyway, I can always find my way back here.”
It was March, although by the standards of most places it was July, especially the farther he wen
t south across that parched territory, where through passengers got out at every poke-hole station to unstick their shirts from their backs and drink water from a pump. At every stop lay the same yellow dog in the shade of the station overhang, sprawled on its side as dead, the same plug-hatted Indian wrapped in a blanket sat with his back to the station wall, the same litter of scrawny boys wearing ropes for suspenders flocked around the alighting passengers looking to run an errand for a penny. Sixty miles of that, from Phoenix to Elgin, with nary a stick of wood in sight except what was required for support and couldn’t be fashioned from the native mud like everything else. All the stations were made of it, frequently whitewashed although not always, with the red mud bleeding pink through the white.
Elgin was more of the same. The names of the businesses were generic: MERCANTILE, SALOON, LIVERY STABLE, BANK, as if the sheer dirt-pounding pressure of arid heat shriveled the imagination like the string of chili peppers hanging from every porch post, and painted directly on the dried mud. There was one mercantile, one livery, one bank, four saloons, with it seemed every horse in the vicinity tied up in front of the latter, heads hanging in the heat.
A fat blue fly landed on Randy’s cheek while he was collecting his bedroll from the brass overhead rack, waited resignedly for him to swat it. When he didn’t bother, it rubbed its front legs together, tested one wing, then the other, and lifted off, floating on the heavy air.
“You get used to it,” said the old man in a split-bottom chair tipped back against the station wall, another fixture at every stop. “It’s dry heat, not like Kansas or Missouri.”
The newcomer finished mopping the back of his neck with a bandanna. “It’s dry in a Dutch oven, but the biscuits burn just the same.”
He entered the livery, where the cool dimness fell across him like mist. The attendant, a wiry sixty in filthy overalls, sat on an overturned bucket scooping sardines from a can into his mouth with his fingers.
“Buggy’s hired,” he said, eyeing Randy’s game leg. “Expect it back at sundown.”
The Long High Noon Page 7
