Stringer and the Deadly Flood Read online

  Cactus Jack said he did and that he was fixing to ride over right this minute to propose to Miss Maria’s father.

  “Hold your horses, old son,” Stringer warned him. “It’s too late at night to call on quality folk uninvited. You’re not supposed to act like a horny Texan anxious for some Mexican ass.”

  Cactus Jack snapped, “Easy, now, MacEwen. You are talking about the future Mrs. Donovan!”

  Stringer shot back. “And you start by acting that way your own fool self. You ride over by broad day and get her father into a friendly discussion about the weather or whatever. Then you ask if his daughter’s been spoken for. If he says she hasn’t, it means he’s following your drift and the rest comes natural. If he doesn’t want you around, he’ll tell you she’s engaged whether she is nor not, see?”

  Cactus Jack growled, “Courting Spanish gals sure sounds like a bewildersome chore. But what you say makes sense, now that I study back on some Mexican brothers I’ve had to fight in my wicked youth. I thank you for your Spanish lesson, MacEwen. For your sake I hope you ain’t steered me wrong.”

  Stringer let that pass. He sensed that, unlike Gus, this one would be a hard man to back down, so there was no sense trying before one had to.

  Cactus Jack strode off into the darkness to no doubt practice talking about the weather, and Stringer headed for his own tent before he could get in any more trouble.

  CHAPTER TEN

  He didn’t bother to light his lamp, so he didn’t know he had company until he sat down on the cot, almost right in the lap of Kathy Doyle. He didn’t know who she was until he’d grabbed her and almost punched her, demanding, “Quien es?”

  She gasped and replied in her all too familiar voice, “Take it easy, for God’s sake. I bruise too easily to wrestle with men your size, Stringer!”

  He’d already determined she had nothing on but a terry-cloth robe, open down the front. So he just said, “Easy with names. Any wall can have ears and these are canvas. I thought you said you weren’t receiving creeping Bedouins this evening, honey.”

  “I told you not to creep into my tent,” she giggled. Then she added sternly, “But I didn’t slip into your tent to be naughty, so keep those big hands to yourself. I just heard you talking to someone out there. What was all that about?”

  He replied, “A love-sick assassin. I can’t see his pending engagement making the society pages of either of the papers we work for. But if you’re here for business, let’s get on with it. If you’re ready to compare notes, suppose I tell you what I know so far, and you can take it from there.”

  She agreed, and he quickly brought her up to date on the tip from the late Lockwood and the adventures that had followed, leaving out some of the exercises he and Juanita had worked out on that skimpy bottom bunk in her gypsy cart.

  By the time he’d finished, he could tell Kathy was hooked. So he made her tell why the Examiner had sent her out.

  Apparently their tip had come from Sacramento, where a state senator had been raising ned about the Imperial Daydream, as he called the plan to irrigate the Imperial Valley. A lot of land, mostly railroad grant land, had been sold long before any waterworks seemed to be anywhere near them, and so a lot of new settlers had been bitching, loudly, about the dusty greasewood flats they appeared to be stuck with. Kathy had been sent to the Yuma headquarters of what she described as a water trust. She confided she’d been “just a little naughty” in Yuma when, after getting the usual run-around, she’d taken to listening in on telephone conversations and reading other people’s mail.

  “As I put it together, separate contractors have been digging all over the place out here in the desert,” she explained. “This construction crew here had gotten way behind schedule under a project foreman who kept taking the advice of his surveyor, your poor Mister Lockwood. So they called him back to dig somewhere else and put our Blacky Burke in charge. In Yuma they seem very happy with the results. He’s been digging away like crazy. But since I found out some of the big shots back in Yuma seem to be worried about their project just the same, I thought I’d come out here and see for myself. But I haven’t seen anything so far,” she shrugged. “Okay, mister, now it’s your turn.”

  Stringer grimaced. “You’d have to be an engineer, like the one Burke fired, to tell whether he was crazy or not. Burke strikes me as a hard-driving roughneck who plays even rougher than he has to. I’m not ready to say whether he knows what he’s doing yet. Old Herb Lockwood could have been just a nitpicker in the path of progress.”

  Kathy cut in. “They told me in Yuma he was a railroad construction man of the old school. Someone said something about Burke digging a waterway closer to the railroad tracks than they’d told him to. Does that mean anything to you?”

  Stringer replied cautiously. “It might just mean he didn’t like to haul supplies any farther than he had to. And I can see how a man who was more used to laying ties and tracks than surveying water tables would consider that a needless worry. I can also see why an earlier contractor who did worry more about such matters might have gotten behind schedule. It must be a bitch to survey little more than a yard, either way, across flats covered mostly by windblown dust and greasewood roots. Burke is being paid by the mile. He’s a gut-and-gitter of the old school. If he can finish this diversion before the spring flooding along the Colorado, he’ll be long gone before any mistakes he might have made show up. He no doubt figures the higher railroad bank to the north will stop any mild flooding in the meanwhile.”

  Kathy thought a minute. “All right, let’s say our uncouth Blacky’s cut a few corners to get the job done. Why would he want anyone killed to keep that news under wraps? You just said he’s being paid by the mile, so surely they know back in Yuma where he more or less has to be, right?”

  Stringer nodded. “I don’t think they much care where he is, back in Yuma. The engineer in charge of all this nonsense walked off the job a while back and they’re just sort of muddling through as best they can. We’re already just west of the weird warning Lockwood wrote across Burke’s march of progress and so far nothing’s happened.”

  She asked Stringer what he was talking about and so, although he suspected he already might have revealed to a rival more than anyone with a lick of sense should have, he told her how Lockwood had warned everyone to “remember the Alamo” out here. “I wish I knew what the hell he meant by that,” he mused.

  Kathy Doyle hesitated. She’d been scooped by Stringer more often than she’d ever managed to scoop him. But in the end she told him. “Well, since we’ve agreed to share credits on this one, I may as well say I think I know. Back in Yuma I got to look at a huge wall map, all covered with contour lines and explaining the so-called hydrography of this delta. That’s what they called it on that big survey map, a delta, not a desert.”

  He replied skeptically, “I know all that, honey. Get to the point.” So she continued coyly. “I thought you’d forgotten that time we lost our heads. Anyway, the Alamo is a river—a once-upon-a-time river, that is. As the muddy waters of the Gila-Colorado pushed across the head of the gulf at right angles it ran this way and that, in a mess of different twisty river beds called the Alamo, the Bee, and New Rivers. Each bed would silt in after a time, so then the water would have to run some other way in turn. Once there was dry delta land all the way across, the main stream finally found a way to the sea. So that’s been what we call the lower Colorado ever since. The old Alamo River never ran that way. It ran into Salton’s Sink, to the north, until the whole valley just dried up as you see it now.”

  Stringer half closed his eyes to picture his present surroundings the way they might have been back in the Ice Age, when an even mightier and muddier Colorado had been sloshing all over these parts with a mind of its own. He nodded thoughtfully. “I knew we’d come up with something if we put our heads together. That has to be what Lockwood meant.”

  She answered demurely, “The results were sort of interesting the last time, you doublecrossing
brute. So what did that poor dead engineer really mean?”

  Stringer explained, “Just what he wrote. Burke’s already dug across the old bed of that fossil river, running north into that fossil sea. Nobody noticed, or at least nobody cared but old Herb. The old channel can’t be more than a few inches deep now. Lockwood was afraid that since water runs downhill, even if downhill is only a few inches, a flash flood off the slightly higher flats to the south would naturally run along the old bed of the long-dead Alamo to mess things up here. I see now why Burke has been tossing the spoil to the south. It ought to dam any unwanted water coming this way, assuming we’re not talking about rain you don’t usually get out here. The surrounding desert would easily soak up six or so inches of rain before any of it got to running.”

  Kathy answered, “I can see that without a hydraulics degree. But I’ll be cussed if I can see why a muddy work camp called for Blacky Burke to kill anyone.”

  Stringer explained, “He never killed anyone directly. He just told his hired guns he didn’t want anyone reporting careless workmanship before he could finish the job, take the money, and run.”

  She said she didn’t see much news in that, adding, “I’ve tried more than once to write an exposé on San Francisco construction inspectors. My editor says nobody will care unless and until their own house slides town Telegraph Hill.”

  Stringer nodded morosely. “I know the feeling. But Blacky Burke never worked in a pressroom. Unless we’re missing something, I’d say he simply doesn’t want to pay off any inspectors, company, state, or federal. He’s just suffering a guilty conscience, knowing he’s been bulling on across the desert to get paid by the mile and to hell with where all the water ever winds up. He doesn’t know no paper in the country is likely to run a line on him until such time as he causes a total disaster worth reading about over breakfast by folk miles away with hardly any notion where the Imperial Valley might be.”

  Kathy observed sarcastically, “Pooh. Unless we can make a disaster happen, I’d say we both came down here on a snipe hunt.”

  Stringer agreed. “But Blacky doesn’t know our editors. We could both be in a lot more danger than any story we could milk out of this tedious mess might justify. How far can that steamer of yours go on one boiler-full? I noticed you had it brought this far out on the desert by rail.”

  “I had to,” she replied. “They told me water was a sometimes thing out here and I have to stop every fifty miles to cool her off and fill her up again. Why do you ask? Are you looking for a ride?”

  He hesitated, then nodded. “I reckon I am. We’re both pressing out luck the longer we stay out here with these unprincipled rascals. I doubt like hell that anyone’s going to confess right out to killing anyone, but that’s the only news angle either of our papers would be interested in. So how about it, Kathy? This time you’ve no reason to try and beat me to the wire, and I think we could make El Centro on one good boiler charge. The cross-country trains stop there and we could load your steam buggy aboard a flatcar there, see?”

  She pondered his proposal a moment. Then she nodded in agreement. “I like you better when we’re not fighting over a scoop. I’d be nervous about driving across the desert alone in any case. I guess that makes us friends again after all, right?”

  He agreed he had no hard feelings. Then she proved him a liar by shoving him off the cot, forking a leg across him as he lay on his back, and getting to work on his fly, saying, “I’d rather be on top than on this hard ground, and that silly cot is just too frail and skinny for real fun.”

  He’d just had time to agree before she’d impaled herself on his erection, crooning. “Oh, that does feel good. I’d forgotten how nicely hung you were, my dear.”

  He laughed like hell but had to allow he’d forgotten how nice she was built where it counted as well. She sniffed and said she’d just known he couldn’t be true to her. Then she bounced on him enough to drive them both loco en la cabeza and inspire him to haul the covers off the cot, the duds off both of them, and to finish right, with her on the bottom.

  She said the earth under her rollicking rump didn’t seem to be solid cement after all, and proved it by damned near bucking him off before they climaxed together. Then she giggled at him shyly and asked, “For heaven’s sake, aren’t you going to kiss me even once tonight?”

  He did. He’d forgotten how nicely she did that, come to study on it. That inspired them both to start moving in time together in a sweeter sugar-and-spice way. There was a lot to be said for making love in old familiar places, if one didn’t overdo it or forget how sneaky this sweet-loving little gal could be.

  Later, as they lay there atop the quilts with her head resting on his shoulder and her free hand searching for further signs of life in his sated shaft, Kathy murmured, “I think our best bet would be for me to act dumb in the morning, let them feed me some banana oil, and then decide on a drive out across the desert. Naturally, I’d need you to guard me against snakes or worse and…. Let’s see, I could write my tent off as travel expenses and nobody would notice if we slipped all my valuables in the trunk again. We’d be long gone before anyone got around to wondering when we’d be back. How does that sound to you, darling?”

  He chuckled in mock horror. “Scary. You never let the wheels in that pretty little head of yours stop ticking, do you?”

  She replied archly, “A girl has to look out for herself in this man’s world. Do you think I could get this back up with a teeny-weeny French lesson or do you want to go to sleep, dear?” He said both sounded just grand.

  So they were enjoying crimes against nature, or at least the statute laws of more than one fool state, while farther up the line Gus ducked into Blacky Burke’s headquarters tent to report.

  “You know what that newspaper gal and that rascal who calls hisself MacEwen are doing right this minute, boss?”

  Burke cupped the mouthpiece of the telephone on his chart table in one large palm. “I can imagine. She’s not bad looking and he already had the inside track with her. Hold the gossip a mite. I’m on the horn to Yuma and it sounds serious.”

  Gus found a seat and sat there fidgeting while Burke went on talking, or in fact mostly listening, until he hung up with a frown and told Gus, “That rain that passed over us here just hit the mountains to the northeast, and a hell of a lot harder. Yuma says the damned Colorado is in flood and the Gila’s rising. I don’t know what the hell they expect me to do about it. It’s up to them to work the floodgates betwixt here and there.”

  Gus was interested in only one topic of conversation and it certainly wasn’t rainstorms. He leaped back to his feet, insisting, “The two of ’em was screwing. I could tell as I was hunkered near his tent outside.”

  Blacky snapped back, “Damn it, Gus, I’m more worried about rising water than rising peckers right now.”

  But Gus pressed on. “That ain’t all. They was talking about you. Talking mean. That jasper I warned you not to hire never come right out and said he was the famous Stringer MacKail. But from the way they was jawing about newspaper stories together I just can’t see him as a train robber she recalled so fondly!”

  Gus’s information had caught Burke’s attention at last. He pursed his lips and muttered, “Hmmm, one Mac does sound like another Mac when you study on it. Whoever he may be, I sure don’t want him blabbing about me to any damned newspaper gal!”

  With a wicked grin Gus asked, “You want me to gather Cactus Jack and some of the others now, Boss?”

  Burke grimaced. “Don’t be so crude. There’s no way even Cactus Jack could pick a gunfight with a she-male the Yuma office knows it sent here. Come morning we’ll show her around as sweet as anything and see if we can’t put her aboard the first eastbound freight we can flag. She can’t write mean things about us if she don’t know anything, right?”

  Gus agreed, then hesitated. “What about MacEwen, or whoever he is?”

  Burke shrugged and replied, “Oh, we’d best do him in and plant him in the des
ert, no matter who the hell he may be.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  It was just getting light again when Kathy nudged Stringer awake, demanding in a disgusted voice, “Have you been making wee-wee in your sleep, for heaven’s sake?”

  He yawned, felt the damp quilting they lay naked atop, and replied, “I might ask you the same thing, little darling. But I suspect we’re both innocent. It’s too damned cold and, Jesus!” he added, sitting up, “there’s too damned much of it!”

  She had to agree, as they both sat there in the cold, gray dawn observing the wet mud all around them. Even as they watched it seemed to be getting wetter. Stringer swore and helped Kathy up to the cot where they’d fortunately piled his duds and her robe. As they proceeded to get dressed, he told her, “You’d better sneak out, slip into that duster at least, and load up your steamer. This is no place for a lady right now. The damned canal is overflowing. I don’t know why either.”

  He stomped on his boots, put on his hat and gun rig, and ducked out to see if he’d guessed right.

  He had. A silvery sheet of inch-deep water now extended from the canal to the railroad bank as far as the eye could see, and everything that wasn’t under water seemed to be running around in circles screaming in Spanish. Few of the Mex kids were dressed, and more than one full-grown Mexican, male and female, were out in the open calling on their saints, Christian or Indian, to save them from this Biblical deluge which was now almost two inches deep in spots.

  But Stringer knew inches of water still added up to a lot when it was spread, and apparently still rising, across one hell of a heap of territory. He sloshed down to the far end of camp where he found Cactus Jack Donovan and a dozen Mexicans shoveling dirt in the ditch leading through the railroad culvert. As he watched questioningly, Blacky Burke suddenly splashed past him, yelling angrily, “Are you out of your mind, Jack? We’ve got all the water we need on this side of the tracks. Let it run on through, you damned fool cowboy!”