Stringer and the Hell-Bound Herd Read online

  By 2 A.M. they had the herd settled down to a slow but steady pace and Rosalinda was carrying Stringer in straight enough lines for him to ride some herd on the desert stars as well. So, seeing how much anyone had offered to pay him for bringing up the rear in the first damned place, Stringer spurred the roan into a trot and swung out to the south and then just about due east to catch up with Chuck Tarington out on point. He wasn’t all that astounded when, out to the right flank of the whole shebang, he spied the twin streaks of railroad steel against the inky blackness of the sage flat they seemed to be punching across the wrong way.

  He homed in on the point as much by sound as sight. The wagons out ahead of the herd rumbled not at all like cows, and as he overtook her in the dark, Stringer knew at first clang that Tarington was following the Californio tradition of La Campanilla or bellwether. It was considered a needlessly fancy Mex notion by most Anglo hands, but on the chaparral ranges of the west coast a lot of old boys still thought it had bush popping up a canyon after strays beat hollow.

  He had to yell to determine which of the shadowy riders betwixt the wagons and campanilla cow might be Chuck Tarington. When the trail boss bellowed back and asked if Stringer was lost, the unpaid tagalong reined in beside him to reply, “I was just fixing to ask you the same question. The last time I looked at the map Wagon Springs was north-northeast of that bedding ground we commenced this leg of your drive from. Last time I looked at the Little Dipper, which you could notice as easily from your very own saddle if you ever bothered to look, we seemed to be traveling east-southeast more or less in line with some railroad tracks. Your turn.”

  Tarington answered, “That’s easy. We got to get to Wagon Springs by way of Fallon, down to the end of yonder eastbound spur. I know it looks out of the way, and for that matter, it’s going to cost us at least an extra three days on the infernal desert.”

  Stringer asked, “Why? Don’t you figure you’ll drop off enough beef for the buzzards if you drive direct across bone-dry desert in High Summer?”

  Tarington snorted and replied, “Don’t try to teach your granny to suck eggs. The considerable space betwixt water holes on the salt and sage fiats we still got to git across is the main reason we’ll be jumping off into the Big Dry from Fallon. The company’s got us some tank wagons waiting there. If we drift the herd no faster than ten or twelve miles a night across the really bad stretches we can keep „em alive with tank water where we have to graze „em and rest „em on sage alone. The tank wagons will come in handy on salty playas as well and, of course, we can refill „em on the fly from the few water holes we will be passing, see?”

  Stringer said, “I’ll allow it reduces the odds from pure impossible to just improbable. You said there were other reasons.”

  Tarington nodded and confided, “Cows. They wired me in Reno that the grim grazing of August and the high cost of shipping beef by cattle car has inspired a small spread near Fallon to sell off its modest herd at bargain rates. So we may as well pick up a few more head to punch along with them tank wagons and, speaking of punching, cow-puncher, it was your own notion to make this drive with us and you assured me you knew how to do it. So what are you doing up here when I assigned you to ride drag?”

  Stringer didn’t want to sass the boss of the outfit if he could help it and he couldn’t have helped it if he’d opened his mouth a crack. So he simply spun Rosalinda around and rode off, cussing under his breath. He knew he was being hazed as a new hand, even though they expected him to work for nothing but coffee and beans.

  Riding drag was always the worst position on a cattle drive, for even when there wasn’t much wind, a herd on the move raised one hell of a heap of dust and since what went up eventually came down, the drag riders got to ride through a constant haze of the finest grit.

  So by sunrise, Stringer and the other two drag riders were blackfaced as banjo players with a minstrel show above the bandanas they’d tied over their noses and mouths. You still got to lick a lot of fine, gritty sand off your teeth, even after you’d wet the cloth with canteen water and, out this far on the Nevada Desert you got to taste the dregs of a dead, salty sea as well.

  For geologists held, and Stringer believed, there’d once been not one but two vast inland oceans in the now high and dry basin bewixt the Sierra Nevada to the west and the Wasatch Ranges of Utah, far to the east. Everyone knew the Great Salt Lake of Utah was the puddle left by an Ice Age sea that had lapped against fossil beaches high above the Mormon Delta. They’d only figured more recently that Carson’s Sink, the dead heart of the Nevada Desert, had been the deepest part of a sea about as big and salty that had dried out more completely because Nevada got even less rain than Utah, impossible as that might sound.

  But sage instead of salt spread out all around where Tarington made camp for the day and though Stringer wisely spent as much of the day as possible on shut-eye in the shade of a tarp tented over waist-high sagebrush, he still wound up with a much clearer picture of the outfit by the time they’d eaten supper and saddled up to punch on.

  Aside from the dozen drovers riding flanks and drag, more than enough to handle that many head unless a real emergency came up, Tarington had men handling the wagons and remuda that appeared to have been with him longer. Grits, who dealt out the grub, did so in generous proportions and Stringer found it easy to believe Tarington was called Chuck because of an open hand with food and coffee, rather than having been sprinkled as a Charles. Other hands hired just to herd the cows had, like Stringer himself, been picked up by the outfit hither and yon. There was no mystery involved in such a hiring practice. Like a traveling circus or orchestra, a contract drover only kept key members as a permanent cadre, since they had to be paid at least pocket money between drives and one never knew the size or duration of the next drive. As a rule of thumb, three riders could keep up to a thousand head more or less under control in open and reasonably flat country. As the numbers rose or conditions got more complicated, you put on more riders. Whether the dozen-odd men and boys with this outfit could get just under two thousand head from here to wherever in hell they were going would depend, Stringer knew, on what lay betwixt hither and yon. Driving at night was naturally going to require the services of more human eyes than usual. Driving by day, in this hot, salty dust, was apt to take more help than any outfit could afford to hire.

  They made it to Fallon in two nights. Tarington beat Stringer to Western Union and the saloon across from the railroad stop, in that order. Stringer didn’t know what the burly drover had wired his employers in Sacramento. He wired Sam Barca where he was, added it was getting mighty boring, and that he’d be here in Fallon until at least sundown if he was missing anything anyone had found out out on the coast.

  By the time he caught up with Tarington, the boss drover was well on his way to getting drunk. When Stringer asked about those tank wagons and the bargain beef that was supposed to be somewhere around here Tarington confided that he’d delegated the authority to good old Ben, his segundo, because Ben needed the practice and he, Tarington, had heard they had a French gal working the cribs upstairs.

  So Stringer just wet his whistle with beer and his grimy face with pump water out back before he lit out after Ben before he wound up drunk and stupid as well.

  He caught up with Ben and their cook, Grits, over by the railyards. Since the line ended at Fallon the yards fanned southeast from the passenger platform with empty freight cars parked on the various sidings for loading mostly fruit and produce. For, despite its lonesome location, there was irrigation water available to the the narrow strip running from Carson to Pyramid Lakes, and when you could leach out the salt and water, the soil of the Great Basin was so fertile that when you planted a seed you had to step back lest you wind up with a corn stalk up your pants leg.

  The segundo and the cook, who in most outfits was at least as impressed with himself, were jawing with a dusty stranger near a pen of dusty and not too frisky-looking cows. Stringer tallied „em at around
two dozen head, all scrub stock with mixed brands. Stringer rolled a smoke as he listened in long enough to make certain these miserable brutes were the bargain beef Tarington had told him they’d be adding to the main herd here, then he murmured to Ben that he wanted to talk to him about those water wagons.

  The baby-faced but sizeable Ben let himself be hauled off to one side without raising any fuss, asking, “What’s wrong with them tank wagons? Did Chuck send you?”

  Stringer confided, “I haven’t even seen the fool tank wagons, but someone had best send for Numero Uno before he takes delivery on those local cows, Ben. Can’t you see they’re skin and bones and at least old enough to vote?”

  Ben nodded but said, “Ours is not to reason why. The company’s already paid for „em by wire.”

  “Sight unseen?” asked Stringer with a puzzled frown.

  “That’s about the size of it and I agree it’s one hell of a way to do business. But now that Great Basin Beef has paid for „em, they’ll be mighty vexed if we don’t deliver „em to Wagon Springs, along with the others.”

  Stringer demanded, “How? There’s not one of „em I’d bet on in a race with a desert tortoise! If they’ve gotten so tuckered by the heat this close to grass and water, how do you expect to punch „em out across the real desert between here and the Still waters?”

  Ben shrugged and said, “I told you ours was not to reason why. Look, Stringer, we got us a piss poor herd, just starting out. I’ve told Chuck and he agrees most of the so-calt bargain stock we’ve added to what was scrub in the Sacramento yards ain’t likely to make it to that mining camp in any shape to eat. But we’re getting paid by the head, if n we deliver it to Wagon Springs anywheres this side of dead and rotten. I told the boys who druv that last batch into town that they ought to be ashamed of themselves. You’d think riders more used to this range than us would know better than to drive stock at a trot in daylight. But the pure brutes will have all day to soak up some rest and plenty of water. Thanks to them tank wagons we won’t have to punch any of „em more than ten to fifteen miles a night and the map allows the worse stretch is no more than eighty miles of total nothing.”

  Stringer said that sounded cheerful as hell and moseyed on up the tracks to where, sure enough, he found the wagon hands called Reb and Lefty hosing down four massive wooden vehicles. When he asked how come, seeing they’d surely get as dusty again where they were heading, Reb went right on squirting his rubberized canvas hose at the same long tank mounted on a Conestoga chassis as he explained, “We don’t want „em leaking and wood sure dries out under this Nevada sun. We want to make sure the staves swell good and tight afore we fill the tanks for the cows.”

  Lefty chimed in, “You shoulda been here when we started. Spiders chasing crickets outten half the cracks. Railroad worker told us these tank cars been standing here as lonesome as haunted houses for a good three years. They used to haul water betwixt here and a mining camp further out with no wells. Wasn’t it smart of the beef company to know they was here, for sale, cheap?”

  Stringer agreed it was and then, since he wasn’t invited to play in the water with them, he went back to the saloon to wrap himself around something wetter than the air they grew in this town with all that sunlight.

  He didn’t see Chuck Tarington. He hadn’t expected to. He’d just found a cool corner with a cold bottle of beer when he was joined by a gent with even less call to be there. As Joe Lefors sat down across from him, uninvited, Stringer nodded and asked, “Where did you leave Lord Baltimore and your railroad car full of deputies?”

  Lefors got out a Havana Claro and lit it without asking whether Stringer might want a cigar or not. He said, “We travel in two railcars. The horses don’t get to sleep and eat with us. Since you ask, I got my boys up the line, awaiting my pleasure. I took a local to the end of the line here, hoping I might meet up with old friends. Lord Baltimore ought to be along directly. He picked up a solo trail he feels he’s followed once before and you know how Indians like to track alone. Makes „em feel less dumb when they get stuck for where they lost it.”

  Stringer nodded, inhaled another swig of suds, and said, “You’d tell me, of course, if there was any reason at all for me to know who, what, or why that poor Indian’s at it again?”

  Lefors blew an octopus cloud of blue smoke at Stringer and asked, “You mean you ain’t heard? Where might you have been when that train was robbed just north of the Walker River Indian Agency the night before last?”

  Stringer blinked in surprise, then answered, “I can assure you I was nowhere near any Indian agency. Nobody else riding with me could have been involved, either. That would have been the first night drive I made with Chuck Tarington, out of Fernley. You say you think the train robbers headed this way, too?”

  Lefors shook his head and said, “Lord Baltimore did. Says it’s rare to see tracks of a pony shod Anglo on three hooves and by some old-fashioned Mex herrero on the one near forehoof left. Didn’t you buy that roan you’ve been riding off an old-timey Mex back in Dutch Flat, MacKail?”

  Stringer snorted in disgust and said, “I’d have noticed if old Diego had been running a forge as well as a corral. If you’d like to admire the way that roan’s been shod you’ll find her in a stall at the town livery. There’s no sense baking her in the sun with the rest of the Tarington remuda before I have to.”

  Lefors rudely blew another cloud of smoke his way and said, “Lord Baltimore checked your mount out back in Fernley. I checked with the Justice Department on the rest of you. They tell me you seem to be riding on the side of justice and that some damn fool in the Secret Service vouches for you as well.”

  Stringer shrugged modestly and decided, “Sounds like the time I rode with President Teddy Roosevelt, up Yellowstone way. You know what fussy jaspers they are about anyone who gets within pistol range of old Teddy. He’d still be just the vice president if they’d been a mite more careful about President McKinley, you know.”

  Lefors looked pained and said, “Whatever. My point is that you have to be at least as trustworthy as half the old boys in my posse. Good help is hard to find and we have to overlook a certain amount of youthful indiscretion.”

  Stringer swallowed his beer and asked what Lefors wanted to trust him about. The surly deputy marshal flatly replied, “The truth, with no bullshit about playing cards close to the vest in hopes of some fool newspaper scoop!”

  Stringer laughed and said, “There’s no such thing as a foolish scoop. It’s considered smart as hell. You’re not paying me as much as Chuck Tarington, his cook serves swell coffee and swabs real butter over flapjacks. I don’t like your ugly face and smug attitude, either. But since I’ve nothing to hide and would like to see justice done, even by the likes of you, I take great pleasure in informing you that I don’t know shit about any of those recent train robberies. My boss told me to cover this cattle drive and I find that mysterious enough.”

  Lefors growled, “So do I. So does Lord Baltimore. He picked up that one odd set of hoofprints he’d spied over on the far side of the pass right after that first of the many recent train robberies. This time he concentrated on the one that was a cinch to follow and it led him north from that Indian agency, in line with the railroad spur down that way, to where you, Tarington, and all them damned cows crossed the tracks, the trail, and totally blotted everything out!”

  Stringer whistled softly and said, “I can see why we’re having this conversation after all. But you’re sniffing the wrong lamp post if you suspect anyone riding with us of train robbery. We’ve got our own problems. I wasn’t there when your tracker lost the trail, but can’t you see that the rider with the oddly-shod pony had to be riding ahead of us? Any tracker worth his salt would pick up such an odd hoofmark, hither and yon, if such a mount rode over the trail any number of cows might leave, right?”

  Lefors said, “You sound just like that fool Indian. Of course the train robber with the oddly-shod pony got there first. My question is whether he ke
pt going, or maybe joined up with Tarington to ride off innocently, leaving no tracks worth reading amid all the others.”

  Stringer finished the bottle and gave the matter some honest thought before he shook his head and said, “Nice try, Joe. But while I can’t account for every minute of Tarington’s drive since he left Sacramento, he and his boys were on the wrong side of Dutch Flat during that first robbery and I was with them in the honest flesh when that last train was stopped. What did they get on a train bound for an Indian agency, by the way?”

  Lefors said, “Silver dollars, a lot of „em. Pesky Paiute won’t accept paper money on allotment day. Would you be willing to swear in court that Tarington and his boys didn’t even entertain, say, a saddle tramp just passing through with maybe some saddle bags he could have stored for safe keeping in one of the wagons?”

  Stringer shook his head and said, “I just told you it was a nice try. I’ve been with „em since before and after. I’d have noticed if we’d met anyone along the trail at all this time of the year in such uninteresting country. You’ve checked the local blacksmiths, of course?”

  Lefors nodded grimly and replied, “Both of „em. It reads that at least one train robber rode out here to the end of the line just ahead of you, letting the herd obliterate his tracks. I ain’t the tracker Lord Baltimore is, but I ain’t blind, neither, and if that same rider’s headed back since you and some other cows come in, it couldn’t have been on the same infernal pony!”

  Stringer leaned back in his bentwood chair and reached for the makings as he opined, “Oh, I don’t know. He could have left that pony most anywhere, with or without that incriminating set of horseshoes, and simply caught the first day coach train back to civilized parts with his share of the loot in, say, a stoutly locked carpet bag.”

  Lefors pursed his lips thoughtfully and decided, “Or left it here with the same ones minding that pony. They told us down by the Indian agency that we’re still after four men who entered the baggage car with feed sacks over their heads and guns and nitrosoup for the safe in their clever little hands. Say there were others outside in the dark with all the ponies, it still adds up to each share of silver being heavier than you’d want to tote about on foot, with or without locked baggage.”