The entrepreneur wheezed, reinflating his lungs, and rolled over onto his stomach beside Randy. “Who is it?”
“Who you think?”
“No. He wouldn’t be that rash. I gave him more money just this morning.”
“You tell him where I’m fixed?”
“Of course not.”
“Then he followed you. The trouble with you easterners is you never turn around and look where you come from. You might as well of been borned with no swivel in your neck.”
“You said there was a reward from Arizona for your capture. Maybe it’s a bounty man.”
“If it is he’s a fool. They want me alive, which we sure won’t both be if he tries to wrassle me all the way back there.”
“But you said Frank would never use a rifle on you because of the unfair advantage.”
“Maybe he’s changed.”
“I don’t believe it. Yours has always been an affair of honor.”
“I wouldn’t put it as toney as that, but I agree it ain’t like Frank. Then again, that slug missed me. Could have been just his way of announcing himself. There’s one sure way to find out.” He planted his palms on the ground.
“What are you doing?”
“Getting up to fetch my Ballard.”
Before Cripplehorn could put words to his astonishment, Randy stood, brushed himself off, and slid the rifle from the bedroll strapped to the mare. He patted her big neck. Muscles rolled beneath his palm. “I talked you down some earlier. I’d be obliged if you’d forget it. I never had a horse stand so close to a bullet without jumping. On the other hand, maybe you’re deaf.”
Mabel blew again, contemptuously.
“Or lazy. I don’t reckon no milk horse gets shot at regular.” He checked the load in the breech, then rested the barrel across the mare’s slightly swayed back. The smoke had drifted away from the trees, so he addressed the whole bunch at the top of his lungs.
“Frank, I ain’t got all day!”
Silence stretched; Cripplehorn hugged the earth and wished for a hole. When the answering shout came from the trees he flinched as if it were gunfire.
“How do I know you won’t plug me when I show myself? I reckon I owe you that.”
“Horseshit, Frank. If you meant to put me under with that Winchester, I’d be under. So howdy right back at you.”
“You’re lucky I sold the rolling-block I had in Colorado. I could of shot you from there and let it fester till I caught up.”
A breeze damp with bay combed the distant leaves. Then a figure appeared, moving slowly their direction, small against the towering chestnuts. A brass-action carbine dangled from one hand, muzzle pointing groundward. Randy socked the Ballard back inside the bedroll.
Curiosity got the better of Cripplehorn’s sense of self-preservation. He rose to his feet, sidling until the horse and buggy stood between him and the approaching figure. After what seemed an hour, Frank Farmer stopped just inside pistol range. The tail of his frock coat was swept behind the Remington in his holster. Randy stepped out from behind the big mare.
“How do, Randy. That a horse or you shave a buffalo?”
“Shaving it weren’t the hard part. The hard part was slapping on the bay rum after. I heard you taken up with a woman.”
“It didn’t stick. I heard you turned down the opportunity to shoot a Chinaman.”
“I didn’t think that was knowed outside the camp.”
“I still got friends with the railroad. There ain’t much to do in a roundhouse but play cards and jabber. I heard that spur went bust.”
“Did it? It don’t surprise me. That jasper I knocked flat with a powder keg wouldn’t stop talking about the Irish going on strike. No wonder the line put up so much reward over one skinny foreman.”
“It wasn’t striking done it. The Apaches came back, meaner’n bloody turds. Though I can see why they’d take on so about your claiming six months’ pay for one day’s work; if that’s what you call caving in the straw boss’s head.”
“It was six weeks, not months. I’m surprised it isn’t ten foremen by now, and there was powder in that keg.”
Frank nodded, rolling a cigarette, with the Winchester cradled in the crook of his arm. “You ready?”
“God’s sake!” Cripplehorn. “You’re undoing the work of years! Can’t the pair of you control yourselves for two more months?”
Randy slid his Colt out of its holster, cocked it, and thumbed the cylinder around, checking his loads. “Ready.”
Frank stooped to lay his carbine on the ground and checked his Remington. When he was standing with his feet spread and the pistol hanging at his side, Randy adopted the same pose. He was raising the Colt when Abraham Cripplehorn jerked the buggy whip from its socket next to the driver’s seat and, holding the ironwood handle by the whip end, hit him on the back of the head with all his might. Randy dropped, out as cold as his pistol.
BLOOD FEUD COMES TO SAN FRANCISCO.
by Jack Dodger
Randy Locke and Frank Farmer, who are well-known to these columns, brought their enmity to San Francisco yesterday when Farmer made an attempt from ambush on Locke’s life.
Locke narrowly escaped death when a ball fired from cover passed within inches of his head as he was dismounting at his campsite west of Oakland.
The incident might have ended in tragedy had not an uninterested party, Abraham Titus Cripplehorn by name, took action, disabling Locke with a blow before he could return fire. His opponent, observing that the match was over for the time being, made the following statement to Cripplehorn:
“You tell that little skunk when he comes around I’ll fight him anywhere, anytime, out on the desert with only the scorpions to bear witness or on stage at the Bird Cage Theatre in Tombstone.”
“‘Bear witness,’ he said that?” Major W. B. Updegraff, resting his stiff leg on a leaf of his heaped rolltop, looked up from the pages in his hand.
“Something on that order. I wasn’t taking notes at the time.”
“It seems to me you hinted months ago about a public contest between Farmer and Locke. Are these desperadoes always so accommodating, to advertise your intentions in the press?”
“It isn’t as if they ever made a secret of their antagonism.”
“You made yourself a part of the story?”
“Fortunately I always write under a nom de plume. I was told once journalists should remain in the background.”
“There’s a simpler way.” The man in the cinder-burned waistcoat found a stub of orange pencil behind one ear and scratched out the byline. “This is straight news, not human interest. I don’t assign credit. I see you’ve annexed Oakland to San Francisco. I thought that authority belonged to the city superintendents.” He struck San Francisco from the lead paragraph and crossed out the headline entirely. “I don’t like it, Cripplehorn, or Dodger, or Puddin’ ‘n’ Tame, or whatever you’re calling yourself Tuesdays and Thursdays. After that first piece ran, I received a visit from a member of the Committee of Safety.”
“Vigilante, I suppose.”
“You suppose right, and you wouldn’t be so smug about it if you were here in ’77. The only reason you still see Chinese in town is there were more of them than Denis Kearney and his Pick-Handle Brigade had hickory handles. Back then it was the Tongs had the Committee running about reading the law at the end of a stick; now it’s pledged to keep blood sports out of town, like cockfights and bear-baiting and public duels. If they get the notion I’m encouraging barbarism, they may just decide to bust up my press and me along with it.”
“I’ll take it to the Bonanza then, on the assumption the publisher hasn’t been threatened yet.” Cripplehorn held out his hand for the pages.
“People only buy Ted Sullivan’s rag to start fires. I didn’t say I wouldn’t run it. Kearney’s star has set, and this new litter skeedaddles when a cat yowls in a black alley. Even if they were a blister on the arse of the original Committee, I wouldn’t let ’em tell me what
I can print and what I can’t. That’s my name on the flag on Page Two: W. B. Updegraff, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief. I don’t see any of their names there.”
“I’m glad you see it that way. I was bluffing about Sullivan. He turned me down the first time.”
“I know. He told me over whiskeys at the Bella Union after I ran it. Did you really coldcock Locke, or was it something on that order, like that Farmer quote?”
“There wasn’t anything heroic to it. I hit him with a buggy whip handle when his back was turned.”
The Major showed yellow teeth around his cigar stump.
“Too bad Kearney didn’t know you five years ago. He drafted the city ordinance against carrying firearms, but he liked his bludgeons.”
“It’s a pleasure doing business with you, Major. When I’ve made all the arrangements I’ll place a full-page advertisement in the Spar.”
“Like hell you will. I don’t approve of your design any more than the Committee. If you come in here waving money in my face promoting murder, I’ll throw you out through my one and only window.”
TWENTY
The success of any venture is measured by the size and number of obstacles overcome.
Cripplehorn had said nothing to Frank while Randy was senseless. Where reason was missing, recriminations accomplished nothing. Frank withdrew, leaving the entrepreneur to await Randy’s awakening.
“What in hell did you hit me with?” He sat up, feeling gingerly the knot on the back of his head.
“Does it matter?” Cripplehorn was seated on the driver’s seat of the buggy, drinking peach brandy from a silver-and-pigskin flask.
“Where is he?”
“Gone.”
“Gone where?”
“Why, so you can finish what he started? I always heard you cowboys were as good as your word.”
“Talk to him. He’s the one broke it.”
“As would you have, given the opportunity. You two are worse than a philandering husband. He can’t keep his pecker in his pants and you can’t keep those hoglegs in their holsters. I’m splitting you up until the time of the contest.”
“Where you sending me?”
“I’m putting you up at the Asiatic for now. The reporters will be looking for you at the Palace and the Eldorado. I know how that annoys you.”
“Hell, I thought you was going to say South America or somesuch place.”
“Frank’s the one broke the bargain. I’m sending him out of the state until I can get things worked out in Sacramento. There will be resistance, but I’m counting on Weber’s money to soften it up.”
* * *
But secrecy was a luxury infamy could not afford. An old acquaintance from his cowhand days recognized Frank on a railroad platform in Boise, and by the time his train crossed into Montana Territory, reporters were gathering at every station clamoring for his comments. He avoided them by staying aboard until the engine gushed to a stop in the mining town of Butte, where he stepped down carrying his valise and his Winchester in its scabbard.
“Frank, you running away from Randy?” asked an unpressed gentleman of the press from Chicago.
“Say that again and I’ll drop you where you stand.”
The representative from the Billings Gazette asked him if it was true he intended to shoot Randy in broad daylight in public.
“I’d shoot him in the dark if I could see in it.”
“Aren’t you concerned you’ll be arrested for murder?”
Frank, bathed, brushed, and barbered, smiled in appreciation at this vision from the Omaha Herald, a trim young woman in a becoming traveling suit and a flower patch on her straw hat. Spots of color appeared on her cheeks.
“I’ll cross that crick when it counts.”
The reporter from the local Miner, in pinstripe suit and stovepipe boots, asked him what he thought of Butte.
“I’ll let you know once I find it under all this muck.” Every surface in sight bore traces of smoke from the smelting plants: A finger left a track through the grime.
“Where are you stopping?” asked the same journalist.
“Someplace clean, I hope.”
“Good luck with that.”
Frank registered at the Copper Palace, a four-story hotel decorated almost entirely with material from the local mine: The ceiling in the lobby was made up of pressed sheets of copper, all the hardware and even the chandelier were copper, and copper covered the desk, behind which stood a clerk who might have been fashioned from the same reddish metal, although this was probably an illusion created by reflection from all that copper. That evening Frank dined in the hotel restaurant with the comely female reporter from Nebraska Territory, who after he said his good-byes in a voice that carried, followed him up to his room as the waiters were clearing the tables.
* * *
“Abraham Cripplehorn?”
The entrepreneur took in the small, fussily dressed man standing outside the open door of his room at the Palace. On his waistcoat hung a brass star attached by tiny chains to an engraved plate containing his title of office. “You have the advantage, sir.”
“I’m Connie Post, sheriff of San Mateo County. I’m here to serve you.”
“How very generous.”
The irony of this response found no purchase on the little man’s spade-bearded face. He handed the guest a roll of parchment covered with Spencerian script and embossed with a seal.
“This is an injunction, signed by Judge Webster Bennett, prohibiting you or anyone else from conducting a murderous exhibition in this county. You’ve been served.”
“Indeed I have. Bennett, you said?”
“Webster Bennett, district judge.”
“Thank you.”
That individual, horse-faced with white sidewhiskers combed out to shoulder width, entertained Cripplehorn from behind the desk in his chambers in a county courthouse dripping with limestone gewgaws and bronze statuary, some grafter’s dream of wealth come to life. The glass eyes of antelope heads stared down from the walls. Going by his obvious threescore and ten, the jurist had bagged the creatures back when San Francisco was still in swaddling clothes.
“Don’t think I’m ungrateful for your offer, Mr. Cripplehorn. I’m retiring at the end of this term and do not intend to seek reelection. Mr. Cable, the prosecuting attorney, is running for my party, but he isn’t in a position to reverse the injunction I ordered. Any donation from you would come entirely from your interest in good government.”
Appeals were telegraphed to all the other counties in California. Some were rejected by return wire, others after local debate attended by concerned citizens, many of them women. (“Supporters of the event should not hold their husbands accountable for opposing it,” wrote the correspondent from the Examiner. “Faced with overwhelming numbers, a wise general withdraws from the field.”) Still others were considering the request when Sacramento intervened:
BY ORDER OF THE GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA, NO CONTEST INVOLVING HUMANS THAT IS DESIGNED TO CONCLUDE IN THE DEATH OR SERIOUS INJURY OF ONE OR MORE OF THE PARTICIPANTS SHALL TAKE PLACE ANYWHERE IN THE STATE. ANY ATTEMPT TO STAGE SUCH AN EXHIBITION WILL BE MET WITH THE FULL WEIGHT OF THE LAW. THE STATE MILITIA IS HEREBY ORDERED TO STAND READY TO DEFEND IT, IF NECESSARY WITH DEADLY FORCE.
“Please correct me if I’m mistaken in my understanding of this proclamation,” Cripplehorn told the press in the conference room at the Palace. “Is it the governor’s intention to prevent killing by killing?”
Badinage, however, was ineffective, and after conferring with Sheridan Weber (“Don’t ask me about politics, Abe; I haven’t voted since Grant”), the entrepreneur looked into substitute venues.
However, no sooner did the news enter the telegraph columns than representatives of the neighboring states and territories declared that they would not host so callous a display of savagery. Oregon, Nevada, Arizona, and Utah warned that all three principals would face arrest the moment they crossed their borders.
“Arizona
wasted its breath,” Randy said. “It’s my neck to visit the place anyway.”
The rest of the country followed suit. In the governor’s office in Albany, New York, Grover Cleveland signed a bill banning the event by name, the first law in that state’s history aimed directly at three U.S. citizens in particular.
Cripplehorn was indignant. “This kind of thing wouldn’t have been possible before the Rebellion.”
Randy was bemused. “I wisht my old man was alive. He’d be proud to think his son had been declared war on all on his own.”
“We just lost Rhode Island in the Bulletin.”
“We lost Delaware and Ohio in the Call. I’m almost afraid to look at the Examiner.”
“I can’t see why you find this so amusing.”
“You’re the one wants to be the Cornelius Vanderbilt of gunning folks. All I want is Frank in the ground, and that always was against the law.”
Mexico and Canada came next. Under pressure from Washington, President Diaz mobilized the federales to turn Cripplehorn & Company back at the Rio Grande. Ottawa, not to be outdone by the rest of North America, announced that the Northwest Mounted Police would eject them from the Dominion of Canada as undesirable aliens. In Butte, Frank bought a round of drinks for some journalists and remarked that he felt downright hurt: “I never wanted to go till they told me I couldn’t. Now I got a hankering to ride up there and shoot some moose, and maybe a Mountie or two. I seen a picture once of British soldiers in a history book. Those red shirts make an easy target.”
Unlike Randy, “the dandified gentleman from Texas” not only didn’t mind the attention, but sought it out. He couldn’t stand five minutes at a bar waiting for someone to recognize him without identifying himself, and didn’t have to pay for a drink the rest of the visit. He bought a new suit and a pair of boots with fancy flaps like he’d admired on Cripplehorn, had a gunsmith replace the old cracked grips on his Remington with ivory ones, and had just left the shop when his gaze fell upon a frame building with photographs on display in the front window.
Butte, M.T., September l6—Mr. Frank Farmer, the notorious Southwestern gun man, had his picture struck last week in O. C. Nordstrom’s studio on Silver Bow Street last week. He posed before a Swiss alpine backdrop with pistol and rifle on display, and most who have seen it agree that he is a fine figure of a man for an assassin. Straightaway several of the local citizenry offered to buy prints of his likeness for souvenirs, and by the end of the week they were selling for a quarter apiece. It is rumored that should the mines play out, the city fathers can increase revenue by inviting all of the celebrated frontier pistoleers to come in and have their likenesses made for sale to tourists.
The Long High Noon Page 12
