The Long High Noon

by Loren D. Estleman

* * *

  “Well, if they weren’t in their rooms, you should’ve gone looking for them,” Cripplehorn said. “The town isn’t that big.”

  One of the off-duty deputies, tall and rangy with handlebars and a little paintbrush beard, moved a plug from one cheek to the other. “My mama didn’t raise me to go looking for no puma in no thicket. You wanted ’em to stay put, you should of posted guards at their doors.”

  “The marshal didn’t have any more men to spare and I don’t trust civilians I don’t know. Find them. Please.”

  “That’s better. It’s a little-bitty word, don’t cost nothing, and does so much.” He loosened his pistol in its holster, looked at his partner, and jerked his head over his shoulder. The other deputy, a Chickasaw half-breed with deep pockmarks on his face, slammed shut the breech of his ten-gauge and they moved off away from the brumping band inside and the clerk juggling bright-colored balls.

  * * *

  Randy’s hand dropped to his weapon, but Frank spread his hands away from his leathered Remington, palms forward. Randy rested his hand on the bar and Frank hooked a heel on the brass rail next to him. He nodded at the bartender, who realized he was still holding the bottle and cork and filled a fresh glass.

  “How many’s that?” Frank asked, tilting his head toward Randy’s and meeting his gaze in the mirror mounted on the backbar.

  “My second. I stop at two now, just enough to take the sting out of my leg.”

  “I do regret that. That horse you had throwed up its head or I’d of just kilt you instead of making you lame.”

  “Well, I taken your ear. I know how much store you set in good looks.”

  “It slowed me down some at the start, but since I got famous I ain’t wanted for companionship.”

  “What about that woman you stole from her sheriff daddy in Colorado?”

  “I left her and she died. That’s another regret. Whenever I think of you I clean lose my good manners. As I recall, you always had a way in that department. I seen the most looksome women with the ugliest toads.”

  “They come, but they never stick. They expect you to put ’em first, leastwise when you’re together. If it’s another woman they can always scratch her face and pull out her hair, but they can’t fight what they can’t see. I never could commit to one like I do you.”

  “You might send flowers now and again, seeing as how you’re so sweet on me.”

  “Go to hell, Frank.”

  “You first.”

  The tall deputy came in the door, his hand resting on his gun handle. His partner, the half-breed, stood on the threshold with his shotgun leveled. Frank and Randy turned to face them.

  Randy said, “Gents, you better be as good as you think you are.”

  The tall deputy took in the two men with their hands hovering near their pistols. “How good you got to be with a street sweeper at your back?”

  Frank said, “That’s the trouble with a long narrow room like this. If he cuts loose, we all three go down squirting blood with all our inwards outside. So that makes two of us you got to take down all on your own.”

  The man with the paintbrush whiskers switched cheeks on his plug, switched back. He leaned over a little and shot a brown stream into the nearest spittoon. He caught his partner’s eye in the mirror. The man with the shotgun backed out the door and turned away, followed by his partner, moving backwards also.

  When they were alone with the bartender, mopping his face with his swamp rag, Frank said, “Can you get that pistol out of that soft holster in under two minutes?”

  “If I hold the holster down with one hand and jerk hard.”

  “Me, too. We ought to ask Cripplehorn where he got them slick holsters and tie-downs he writes about in his books. I reckon them boys are readers.”

  “Hell, I don’t believe he ever wrote even one. Got time for a hand?”

  Randy jerked down the rest of his drink. “Always.”

  They sat at one of the gaming tables while the bartender brought a deck of cards.

  * * *

  “I heard they grow their lawmen tough in the Strip,” Cripplehorn said. “Is there no end to these myths?”

  The half-breed Chickasaw cradled his shotgun. “We chose badly.”

  “I understand how you feel. You hear that?” The entrepreneur tilted his head in the direction of the tent. The band was still playing, but above the thumping brass and boom of the bass drum came the regular chugging beat of a freight train at full throttle. “They’re pounding the bleachers with their feet. Before long they’ll come streaming out screaming for their money back. The vendors have been plying them with beer all afternoon. I may be the first man ever strung up on a complaint of disappointment. What were they doing when you left?”

  “I looked back in through the window,” said the tall deputy. “They were playing cards.”

  “Locke and Farmer?”

  “Yup.”

  “Playing cards.”

  “Yup.”

  “What kind of place is this, where men are shooting at each other one day and socializing the next?”

  The half-breed rolled his shoulders. “If you spend enough time out here, you get used to everything.”

  “I’ve been crisscrossing the West for more than ten years. I’m not used to it yet.”

  “You just need more time.”

  * * *

  Frank, who sat facing the window in the Rusty Bucket, shielded his eyes against the lowering sun. “Half-past two or thereabout. I forgot to wind my watch this morning; ain’t used to wearing one after all them visits to pawnshops. Two cards.” He laid down two.

  Randy dealt him two off the deck. “That’s what’s good about the sun. It don’t need winding.”

  “It’s dependable, that’s certain. Everybody knows when the sun’ll come up and bed down; it’s in the Almanac. But the moon comes and goes on its own and nobody knows when.”

  “That’s on account of God made the sun, and He’s an orderly man. The moon’s the devil’s work. Dealer takes one.”

  Both men raised the stake. The bartender came around with the bottle and a fresh glass for Randy, but Randy shook his head and Frank cupped his hand over his, preventing him from pouring. He returned to the bar and sat on a stool, dividing his attention between the Fort Smith Elevator and the Regulator clock clunking out the minutes on the wall opposite.

  Frank asked Randy if he was thinking what Frank was.

  “If I was, I wouldn’t own to it.”

  “I’m thinking Cripplehorn’s got no leave to poke around in what’s between you and me, and nobody else neither.”

  Randy concentrated on his cards. “We gave him our word.”

  “Till day after tomorrow, we said. That’s today.”

  “I never wanted this folderol to begin with,” Randy said. “I only went along with it because I needed money at the time.”

  “Same here. It just feels like we’re standing in downtown Denver in our long-handles with the flaps down. I don’t figure he bought the right for that. Call.”

  Randy spread his cards on the green baize. “Two pair, jacks and deuces.” The fifth card was the five of clubs.

  Frank’s teeth showed in his imperials. He laid his hand down faceup. He had two jacks and deuces and the five of hearts.

  Randy said, “I’ve played poker all my life and watched a thousand games. I never saw such a thing before. I never even heard it could happen.”

  “That tears it, don’t it?”

  Randy looked up and smiled. “Who invited God into this game?”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Nature is a random force, disaster its close cousin.

  They selected the railroad tracks for the contest, Frank on the north side, Randy on the south. That placed the sun to Frank’s left and Randy’s right and at a disadvantage to neither man. No trains were scheduled before early evening. They took off their coats and laid them on the ground, Frank folding his carefully according to the creases, Randy letting his f
all in a heap; that gave their arms freedom of movement. Randy, unaccustomed to his new hat, took it off and dropped it on top of the coat to avoid distraction.

  The band music and the noise of hundreds of customers pounding the bleachers reached them from a distance, as of a storm on the other side of a mountain range, lightning pulsing and thunder a dull thud, dumping torrents, while they stood in the sun, utterly detached from someone else’s tempest.

  They squared off, raising their pistols to shoulder height and extending them the length of their arms, hammers cocked.

  “Drop your weapons or I’ll shoot you both where you stand!”

  The man who had stepped around the corner of the brick train station on Randy’s side of the tracks was hatless, with his thick blue-black hair cut in a bowl and a bright star on his blue tunic. He held a Henry rifle braced against one shoulder, his other hand resting on the forepiece. He had features the color of brick, and with the sun carving caverns in his cheeks and the flat planes of his temples, seemingly as hard.

  Frank and Randy faced off the way they played poker, allowing nothing to draw their eyes from the game.

  “I’m an officer with the Cherokee Lighthorse Police and it’s my intention to prevent murder on grounds entrusted to me. Drop ’em!” he roared.

  Walter Red Hawk’s reactions were slower than his sense of probity, and were no match for Randy’s relentless practice or Frank’s experience in the field. The Cherokee managed to fire only one shot before two pistol bullets struck him full in the chest. He went down, reflexively cranking a new round into the chamber, which was still in it unfired when he fell into the gravel off the edge of the station platform. His slug had passed between the two men as they wheeled his direction. The coroner’s inquest the next day established death as instantaneous. Two rounds were dug out of the corpse, both of which had hit vital spots.

  That event, taking place as it did in the more cramped venue of the Evangelical Church, was packed as closely as Cripplehorn’s tent, with all the pews taken and spectators standing three deep in back. The dead man was known to most who attended, and popular. He’d supplemented his stipend from the tribal council working in the local sawmill and supported a Cherokee wife and two small children.

  As the town had no jail, Randy and Frank were placed in custody in a room on the second floor of the hotel. The shots had drawn a crowd from the tent, who grasped the situation immediately and seized and disarmed them both; there were just too many of them to shoot and make an escape, so they held off. The city marshal, his deputies, and Walter Red Hawk’s colleagues in the Lighthorse Police guarded the men in shifts while shouts reached them from the Rusty Bucket, which was the place of choice whenever informal hanging required discussion.

  “They swung Spanish Bob in the church bell tower a couple of years back,” the marshal informed his prisoners. “I’m not just sure any of those Cherokees with badges would place themselves between you two and a lynch mob with practical experience.”

  The peace officer’s name was Foster. He wore a gray suit and town shoes and his hair was prematurely white. Strangers mistook him for a banker until they got close enough to study his brown seamed face and empty eyes. He carried a Schofield revolver on his belt and a squat English Bulldog in a Wes Hardin rig under his left shoulder. In five years, the first two as a deputy, he’d shot eleven men and been acquitted of murder in one case where the evidence was doubtful.

  Frank, who like Randy was stiff-limbed and swollen-faced from mishandling by the crowd, asked Foster what had become of Cripplehorn.

  “He ran off with his cash box when the shooting started. I and my men were too busy keeping the pair of you from your appointment in church to look for him, and the Indian police didn’t care. My thinking is he hid somewhere out in the trees till the eastbound came along and hooked it after it pulled out. Personally I don’t give snake shit. If folks are dumb enough to shell out three days’ wages to see two men try to kill each other when they can see it for free anywhere in the territory, it isn’t my responsibility.”

  “What’s to be done with us?” Randy asked.

  “Assuming you survive the night we’re putting you on the train to Fort Smith in the morning. I and my deputies will ride with you as far as Buffalo, over in the Cherokee Nation, where we’ll hand you off to the federals. They’ll see you the rest of the way.” Foster stood with one foot on a stool upholstered in petit-point embroidered fabric and one arm resting on his thigh, watching them with his empty eyes. “If I were you I wouldn’t mess with Parker’s marshals. Half of them had shinplasters out on them before they signed on and the other half is just plain ornery. They don’t want to shoot you, because then they’ll have to pay for the burial out of their own pockets, but that won’t slow them down if they find you’re not worth the trouble of delivery. I’d wouldn’t count on them being as easygoing as Walter Red Hawk. I’ve ridden with them and I know.”

  * * *

  It was a long night in their lives, with voices murmuring down in the street and the flicker of torches through the window throwing crawling shadows on the ceiling. The half-breed with the shotgun was posted in their room, the orange point of his cigarette moving now and again and glowing more fiercely when he drew on it from his chair in the corner with a view of the window. His tall partner sat outside the door with a chair borrowed from another room and the back tilted and propped under the knob, where anyone would have to go through him to get in.

  Randy said to the breed, “Just be sure that street sweeper ain’t pointed too general when the ball starts.”

  “Shut up.”

  Frank lay for a while in silence, stretched out on the bed with his hands behind his head, watching the muted fireworks. One of his ankles was shackled to the bed’s iron frame. “Where do folks get so many torches, I wonder, and so fast? You reckon this is such a normal thing they keep ’em in a nice dry place, pitched and ready?”

  The guard told him to shut up too.

  “Damnedest place I ever did see,” said Randy, seated on the edge of the mattress with his feet on the floor, one of them chained like Frank’s to his side of the bed. “They got law, but it don’t raise a finger to stop the show, only when we took it outside. You reckon Cripplehorn had a license and didn’t tell us about it?”

  After another little stretch of quiet, the breed spoke. “Walter had it in his mind to stop you in the tent the minute you faced off. He was on his way there when he spotted you two trying to spoil everybody’s day.”

  “How you know that?” Randy asked.

  “Hell, he talked about it for weeks. I don’t reckon anybody thought he’d act on it. Them Cherokees like to hear their tongues rattle like a gourd. This is the first time one actually done what he said he would.”

  “He should of kept his voice down,” Frank said. “You don’t shout at two men with guns when all you got is one.”

  Randy said, “I like a nice polite arrest. I don’t mind if it involves me waking up with a knot on my head from some hoglegs swung by somebody knows how to swing it. I sure don’t like to be squawked at like I’m married to a she-bear.”

  “Go to sleep, Randy. That’d have to be one desperate she-bear.”

  The half-Chickasaw deputy told them both to shut up.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Justice is man’s invention. The universe makes no such promise.

  A sudden downpour, not uncommon in November in that region, doused the dudgeon of the mob, which broke up into individuals sprinting for cover. Although it had re-formed the next day at the train station, the presence of Marshal Foster, all four of his deputies, and as many Lighthorse Police, every man carrying a shotgun, kept things benign.

  Frank and Randy were seated in facing seats, each shackled to a deputy. A fresh, green horse apple splatted against a window and the train began its journey through that feral country, where rocks pushed up like yellow-brown knuckles through the soil and half-naked trees clawed holes in the overcast.

  In F
ort Smith, Arkansas, where Judge Isaac Parker exercised federal jurisdiction over the Nations, the prosecutor and the attorney appointed to defend the prisoners debated whether the defendants should be tried separately (Parker overruled this), whether Walter Red Hawk had overstepped himself in attempting to arrest non-Indians (Parker allowed this argument to proceed), and whether two men can both be charged with the same homicide.

  The celebrated “Hanging Judge” (twenty-five men convicted by that January of 1883, twenty-four hanged, one escaped) was intrigued by this argument. He’d presided over the court for seven years, and although the burden of his docket and awesome responsibility had streaked his hair and beard with white at age forty-four, a novel suggestion always brought him upright in his chair.

  A partial transcript of the discussion between prosecutor Clayton, defense attorney MacElroy, and Judge Parker follows:

  CLAYTON: Your honor, the coroner’s inquest found both wounds fatal.

  MacELROY: I submit, your honor, that whereas one bullet pierced the deceased’s heart and the other punctured a lung, the first would have caused death immediately.

  PARKER: Counselor, are you suggesting that one of your clients is more guilty than the other?

  MacELROY: That would be unethical. I’m attempting to establish grounds for separate trials.

  PARKER: I’ve already ruled on that. In any case, this court has no way of determining who fired which bullet. They come identical from the factory and are unrecognizable upon impact.

  MacELROY: Your honor—

  PARKER: Pursue another line, Counselor.

  Whenever the trial recessed, Frank and Randy were returned, each man’s wrists and ankles chained together, to their cells in the brick jail, which was built around a three-tiered steel cage, the latest in penal design with a gear-driven mechanism that allowed the guards to open or shut an entire line of cells just by throwing a lever. This made a hellish clang that had been known to break a man. The two men occupied different levels, with no way of communicating short of shouting, and the guards discouraged such breeches of the peace.