The Long High Noon

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Many of them are, but they answer to the public. Wives in particular are opposed to exhibitions involving violence. You can’t stage a legal cockfight in Texas, whose state bird ought to be the one-eyed rooster. In Washington there’s a move afoot to outlaw prizefighting anywhere in the country. You can imagine the hue and cry when we propose a duel to the death.”

  “Women can’t vote.”

  “Their husbands can. You’d be surprised to know how much influence a domestic arrangement can exercise in the privacy of a polling booth.”

  “You propose to bribe the authorities?”

  “A man who can be bribed is a man who can double-cross you. He must be bought.”

  “And you think we can do this with a thousand dollars.”

  “I’ll do the horse-trading. That’s my end.”

  Weber stepped into a pair of checked trousers, tucked in his shirttail, and pulled braces over his shoulders, observing the effect in the full-length mirror on the wardrobe. “Just how much do I stand to clear from this arrangement? After all’s said and done, it doesn’t seem as if it will be enough to earn independence from my father.”

  “Mr. Weber, I think you want his approval more than anything else; to prove to him that you, too, can be a self-made man. The fact that the opportunities aren’t as plentiful as they were in his time enhances the success. In addition to attendance fees, I intend to charge newspapers and magazines for interviews with my clients and will offer an exclusive with the survivor—if there is one—at auction before the event. I have contacts—subscriptions, anyway—with several of the major eastern newspapers, as well as Harper’s Weekly, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, and Ned Buntline’s Own, and expect to hear from others once the news gets out. I estimate our enterprise will clear at least a hundred thousand once all the dust has settled.” He twisted his face into a mask of concern. “I must warn you that there will be an inconvenience.”

  The young man—he was thirty, but a chronic adolescent—paused in the midst of tying his cravat. He watched Cripplehorn’s worried reflection in the mirror.

  “I know you’re a modest man, Mr. Weber, who would go to any length to avoid sensation. That may not be possible in this case. I’m very much afraid that the journals will attempt to portray you as the greatest promoter of entertainment since P. T. Barnum. Your likeness will appear in the vulgar press, your every movement recorded: the entertainment venues you visit, the men and women who accompany you. Reporters will gather around you wherever you go. Your opinion will be sought on every subject. I’ll understand completely if in the light of this intelligence you decide to abandon our business arrangement and avoid the nuisance.”

  There was always risk involved; a man pushed his chips into the center of the table and fought the urge to hesitate before taking away his hand. It was like standing on a bridge railing and looking down into a creek that didn’t appear nearly as deep as it had before he’d accepted the boyhood dare to jump. A rocky bed and a fragile tailbone spelt disaster. Sometimes he wondered if that wasn’t why he lived the way he did, for that heart-stopping moment when fate could go either way, and that the money was just another way of preserving it in a scrapbook. It was a test of courage, and it made a man understand what drove a Randy Locke and a Frank Farmer.

  The time for the shakes and self-recrimination would come later, after the moment passed. And then he would plan his next.

  The moment this time was briefer than usual. He saw the light of glory in Sheridan Weber’s dull eyes.

  “Barnum, you say?” He resumed dressing. “Coarse bounder. They say he lived openly with Jenny Lind.”

  “They say a great many things. It’s all very vulgar, and so—public.” Cripplehorn almost shuddered, then thought better of it. A man could go too far even with the idiot son of a pompous ass.

  “Indeed. But I suppose one must take the lemon along with the sugar.”

  “You’re most unselfish. Now, I may be able to keep your name out of it. Mind you, these journalists are tenacious, and can be thoroughly unscrupulous. I can’t promise to be successful, and I wouldn’t want to influence you with false—”

  “That would be an expenditure of effort far beyond its worth. There’s too much else to be done if this venture is to succeed.” He shrugged into a Prince Albert coat cut for a younger man, put on a gray bowler, and selected a gold-knobbed stick from an assortment in a hollowed-out elephant’s foot beside the door. “The money’s downstairs in the safe.” He reached for the knob.

  Cripplehorn beat him to it. “Allow me.”

  EIGHTEEN

  The human element is the open question in any transaction; one cannot allow for it, only prepare for difficulties.

  I’m back; did you forget me?

  No reason you shouldn’t. My life would make a diverting book, but not as fast reading as Mr. Locke’s or Mr. Farmer’s. I wouldn’t be its hero, only its narrator.

  I’m the fellow who brought this whole affair to your attention, back when the West wasn’t anyone’s never-mind but the two men at the center. I reckon I should have took out the copyright when I had the chance.

  Apart from a couple of wranglers working the Wild West crew, I’d had no contact with any of my fellow Circle X hands in sixteen years, and nearer seventeen. They didn’t remember me, for which I was grateful, given the extent of my contribution to the outfit.

  That season I’d helped birth a foal—getting in the way mostly, ranch work and me being casual acquaintances at best. It’s a wonder that critter isn’t still in there.

  I think of that colt from time to time: scrawny thing, more leg than anything else, and not sure what to do with them except try to stand, and for the first half-hour or so he found that challenge enough, doing splits like an acrobatic dancer I paid a nickel to see in a shack in Dry Fork they called the Opera House. He’s dead now, most likely, or worse, tied up to some damn tinker’s wagon, hanging his head and waiting to be rendered down for glue to stick a heel on some lady’s pumps. I hadn’t any contact with Randy or Frank in all that time, but I sure knew what they was about.

  The Buffalo Bill outfit was touring Europe. For those of us in the press corps—what manager Nate Salsbury called it, after the crew in Washington that was writing down everything President Arthur had to say, which for pure interest wouldn’t fill anyone’s idea of a book worth peddling—the time dragged. A man got his fill of empty palaces, fallen-down temples, and busted statues in museums, and after a while even the spectacle of plains Indians chasing pigeons around St. Mark’s Square for supper lost its charm. What time I didn’t spend embroidering on Cody’s career for press releases and souvenir pamphlets I whiled away reading newspapers, for whom Farmer and Locke never seemed to lose appeal. They came in bundles by ship from the States; but even the journals in London and Paris and Rome picked up items of general interest by way of the Trans-Atlantic cable. I still have cuttings in which Monsieur Locke and Signor Farmer are prominent. I can’t read them myself. How those old emperors and popes managed to take over so much of history talking gibberish is beyond me.

  See, nothing much of real interest had happened in the creaky Old World since Herr Bismarck whupped Louis Napoleon more than ten years ago, and what with “Bison William” and Annie Oakley and their passel of red Indians splashed across posters on every vertical surface from Buckingham Palace to the Parthenon, it seemed Europeans couldn’t get enough of scalpings and gunfights and other colonial truck; it reminded them of Guy Fawkes and other excitements they’d got too civilized to let happen again, and missed, for all the pettifogging in Parliament and the Hague. Scuttlebutt said Salsbury approached Cody with the idea of inviting Frank and Randy to join the excursion, but Cody was agin it; seems he’d had his fill of taming such folk after Wild Bill Hickok shot out an acetylene spotlight from a Chicago stage because it hurt his eyes, showering sparks over the paying customers.

  I was sorry to hear it. I’d grown weary of injecting nonexistent Indian battles and p
hysically impossible feats of marksmanship into the official record, and could have done with some unadorned anecdotes from the Genuine Article. So I took my excitement from pallid, third-person accounts of that contest that had been going on since before the smoke had cleared from the War of the Rebellion.

  That pair was about as hard to track as a grizzly through dry cornstalks. They left their sign on every scrap of newsprint those tramp steamers could carry without sinking. I reckon them that sank, when they’re discovered and raised, will be found to have ferried their share, all clumped together like Spanish coin. Frank and Randy would shake their heads at the places their names had gone where they never did; some places they probably never heard of.

  I knew about Abilene and Salt Lake City, though I craved for details I wouldn’t know for many years, when I was able to collect them from what the legitimate historians call “primary sources.” When all the pomp connected with placing the whole business before a paying audience came about, I learned the name Abraham Cripplehorn (and made up my mind about that fellow’s character based just on the scanty evidence presented between the lines; I was on a personal basis with Ned Buntline, that unprincipled sot, and had built my opinions on that model). I followed his efforts to settle their differences—for the price of a ticket—before the court of public opinion, and thought about it long and hard when my company visited the Coliseum, hoping to stage the exhibition on the site where all those gladiators had made their last bloody stand. Nothing had changed except the tin hats.

  And I read about that business in San Francisco, where the impetuous behavior of the principals nearly brought it to an abrupt end.

  * * *

  A fellow had to travel a fair piece from the city of Oakland—and on foot to boot—to find a place to set up camp. The whole state was settled worse than Ohio. Randy had begun to think he’d have to walk clear to Nevada for unclaimed country when he found a grown-over vineyard with a weathered house and barn leaning towards each other like a couple of drunks looking for support and a sign in front where a bank had slapped its brand. He busted up the sign for firewood and after he’d cooked and eaten some beans and bacon and drunk coffee he found a cozy spot inside the barn among some old straw. The barn looked as if it would fall down about the same time as the house, but he had a cowboy’s superstition about empty houses and ghosts: No one ever heard of a haunted barn. He lay on his back on his blanket, watching blue twilight steal in through the loft, and shot the first bat that showed itself, for the practice. The odor of sulfur and cordite lingered and lulled him towards sleep. A night like that made a man feel in harmony with existence. When the thing was done and Frank was in the ground, he reckoned he’d spend his cut on a grand house on top of some mountain and camp out in the backyard every night.

  In the morning he walked a mile into the town the bank belonged to, all brick with a school and a library and even a Catholic church, and sent a wire to Cripplehorn letting him know where he could be found. He asked the clerk for the location of the livery.

  “There isn’t one.”

  “What kind of town don’t have a livery?”

  “Our kind. Most folks have their own horses. We’re carriage trade here. I can’t remember the last time I saw a man sitting smack-dab on top of a horse.” His eyes flicked over Randy’s range gear.

  “Well, what do you do when you need a carriage pulled?”

  “You might ask Lyle Miller if he’s got a horse to spare.”

  “Where’s his spread?”

  “He’s not a rancher. He owns the local milk route.”

  He got directions to a windowless building with wide double doors at the top of a wooden ramp. A sign reading SIERRA FARMS FINE DAIRY PRODUCTS ran across the front.

  The doors were spread open. Randy climbed up the ramp into a place that smelled like a well-kept stable. Horses occupied ten stalls and five wooden milk wagons stood in a neat row along the back wall with the company’s name painted on their sides. Tall milk cans gleamed spotlessly in a ten-tiered wooden rack erected across from the horses. In a little office built from two partitions in a corner, a squint-eyed old runt wearing a white shirt and necktie tucked inside clean overalls and a by-God Panama hat looked up from a ledger on a tall desk that was designed for standing behind, grinned, and said, “Howdy, cowboy. What can I do you for?”

  “You Miller?”

  “I favor Lyle. Miller’s my father. Yep, he’s still alive. Ninety-eight last month.”

  “Maybe he’s dead and you just didn’t notice. Where’s the farm, Lyle?”

  “Oh, the name? That’s just for the customers. No one wants to buy milk from a factory. I get my stock from all over the county, depending on who’s selling it cheap. You looking for a job delivering? You don’t look like much of a milk drinker to me.” His merry old eyes took in the rifle and belt gun all over again fresh. He chuckled.

  “I’m through having anything to do with cows. I need a horse if you’re selling.”

  Lyle took a short yellow pencil from a row of them in his bib pocket just to scratch his temple with the eraser.

  “I’m considering pasturing Mabel. She’s getting so old she practically has to deliver by the glass.”

  “She stand a rider?”

  “Sure. A man ain’t a load of full milk cans.”

  “I’ll have a look.”

  The white mare was huge, with thick shaggy cannons and teeth worn down to brown stubs, but there was muscle under the loose and shifting skin. She’d do until a proper mount came along; or for that matter an ox with spirit.

  “I’d sell you a stepladder if I had one,” Lyle said, watching Randy make his inspection. “She’s Percheron stock. That’s the closest thing you’ll find to royal blood around here.”

  “How much?”

  “Ten dollars.”

  “I’ll go six. She may be the nag queen of England, but in horse years she’s older’n your old man.”

  “I could get eight from the dog food people in San Francisco; but my heart ain’t in it. I started with Mabel and fourteen customers. She’s family.”

  “She’s barely a horse. Six.”

  “Make it seven and I’ll throw in a pair of blinders.”

  “Six and you can keep the damn blinders. I ain’t fixing to sell butter and cottage cheese. It’s a saddle horse I’m after.”

  “Oh, you’ll need the blinders. She wouldn’t know what to do without ’em. You can kick her all day long and she’ll just stand there like a knot on a fence.”

  “You don’t know much about horse-trading, Lyle. I’m about to go down to five.”

  Lyle stroked the mare’s broad face. “Don’t you listen to him, old girl. You’re going out more dignified than I will.”

  Randy gave him a banknote and a cartwheel dollar.

  “Where’s your saddle, mister?”

  “I sold it in San Diego. You can’t carry one and hop a freight too.”

  “Bareback, hey?” Lyle shook his head, stuffing the money behind the pencils. “Ride ’em, cowboy.”

  Mabel clopped down the wooden ramp with Randy hanging onto the reins as much to stay upright as to steer the horse. He hadn’t ridden bareback in years, not since before he hurt his leg, and riding the tall mare was like sitting on the driver’s seat of a stagecoach; the ground looked far away. It made him feel like a stunted boy his first time aboard.

  On the road outside town he tried to spur the old girl into a trot—a gallop was too much to count on—but apart from blowing indignantly through her nostrils she showed no result, plodding at the same pace that had taken thousands of gallons of milk from door to door. For once in his life he hoped he wouldn’t run into Frank. Seeing his old foe sitting a giant draft horse with blinders on might just kill him with laughing, which would be an unsatisfactory end to their contest.

  He could make as good time on the soles of his own feet, but he had too much cowboy in him to choose walking when anything at all was available on four legs.

 
“Whoa!”

  The mare, a tribute to obedience, stopped so abruptly he almost fell off. He drew the rifle from the bedroll he’d strapped across Mabel’s neck and shouldered it, but held off on the trigger when he recognized Abraham Cripplehorn’s Pike’s Peak of a hat on the head of the man standing between the tumbledown house and barn where he’d staked his camp. A horse about half the size of Randy’s stood between the traces of a two-wheeled buggy on the side of the road.

  “What’s that you’re riding?” asked the entrepreneur as Randy approached him. “It looks like something from Homer.”

  “It’s from Lyle, and I’ll thank you not to disparage a man’s mount. You must of hit paydirt, all dressed up and renting that town rig.” The man was wearing a stiff new suit, royal blue almost to the point of purple, with yellow piping, and oxblood boots with flaps over the toes. The hat was the same, but freshly blocked and brushed. He looked like the circus had gone off and left him behind.

  “I have, after a fashion: a mother lode named Weber. I thought you might be running low on money for supplies and provisions.” He slid a sheaf of banknotes out of his inside breast pocket.

  Randy was swinging his good leg over, figuring how to drop to the ground without landing on his bad one, when something made the decision for him. It passed so close to his face that his first thought was someone had struck a match off his nose. The sound of the shot came cracking after, by which time he’d thrown himself all the way onto gravel.

  NINETEEN

  When your rosebush grows nothing but thorns, don’t condemn your bad luck. Pierce them and sell them as needles.

  “Get down, you ignorant son of a bitch.”

  Cripplehorn had remained standing, staring toward a line of chestnut trees to the east. When Randy, already flat on the ground, snatched the nearest ankle and jerked it out from under him, he went down hard enough on his back to knock the wind out of him. Comically, his absurd Stetson came floating down afterward like a child’s handkerchief parachute.