Stringer and the Deadly Flood Page 16

  Huntington looked pained. “I had nothing to do with the so-called Battle of Mussel Slough. I never would have approved it. I know my late uncle could be stubborn when he thought he was in the right, but…”

  “Just like you.” Stringer cut in. “I never settled on uncleared title in Tulare County. So I can see how the Southern Pacific was in the right, from a purely legal standpoint. The little folk who lost land they thought was their own have yet to forgive the Octopus to this day.”

  “This is different,” protested Huntington.

  Stringer only nodded pleasantly. “Many a beaten wife would agree it’s at least a mite different every time she winds up bruised. Let’s say we let your own public relations department write up as oily a self-serving retraction as they know how. Let’s say I toss in a full apology of my own for misunderstanding your intent. How many California readers are going to take it as anything but another slimy slither of their favorite hate, the one and original Octopus?”

  Huntington banged his fist on the desk and roared, “You goddamned country slicker, you knew you’d be putting us in this spot when you wrote that goddamned story, didn’t you?”

  Stringer grinned sheepishly but not particularly apologetically. “I sure was hoping it would and that you’d be smart enough to see it. You see, I really feel sorry for those nesters in the soon-to-be liquid Colorado Desert, Hank.”

  Huntington growled, “I ought to have you killed. I would if I thought it would do any good at this late date.” Then he rose from his desk and added, “Come on. Maybe this time we can see that you get the story right for a change.”

  He led Stringer into the nearby drafting room, where Stringer could now see half a dozen men hard at work over drafting tables. A bigger chart table occupied the center of the room. Huntington led Stringer to it and pointed down at the big contour map of the country he’d just visited the hard way.

  Huntington said, “The reason I’d sure like to get out of it goes like so.” He pointed with a pencil eraser as he continued, “To begin with we have to lay new tracks, this way, to restore cross-country service before the effing Santa Fe takes it away from us. We’d planned on that in any case. My boys tell me we could pile drive a causeway across the running water. They say the river won’t mind as long as the piles are well spaced in its bed. That’s all it would take to run my trains across on a live-and-let-live basis. But the infernal Mexicans below Yuma are already accusing me—me of all people!—of stealing their damned drinking water. The old bed is full of salty tide water all the way north of the border.” He snorted in indignation. “How do you say ‘octopus’ in Spanish?”

  Stringer said, “Pulpo, I think. I guess they published that book by Frank Norris in at least one Spanish edition after all, Hank.”

  Huntington swore and said, “I sure wish they hadn’t. It hurts enough to be called a greedy squid in your own lingo.”

  Then he pointed at the old bed of the Alamo, now the new bed of the Colorado, on his big chart and continued. “My boys tell me they can use free brush off the surrounding flats to jam down to the river bed between their piles. That means that every foot or so we narrow the mid-channel, the water figures to rise at least a few inches and move that much faster through the gap. If we wait for slack water after the last spring rains, we may be able to finish our big beaver dam before the next high water. If we get a wet summer… well, lots of luck. You could be costing us years of profitless beaver work, Stringer.”

  The younger man shrugged but looked straight at Huntington. “Wouldn’t you rather be called a beaver than an octopus, Hank? You know you can do it, sooner or later, and once you have the Colorado back in its old bed you’ll have all that railroad grant land instead of a salt marsh to peddle, once the water syndicate’s back in business again, right?”

  Huntington looked like he’d just been caught with a hand in the cookie jar as he muttered, “If and when the water trust goes back into business it’ll be under new management. Charly Rockford had so many process-servers after him that he filed for bankruptcy and ran for higher ground.”

  Stringer shot the savior of Southern California a sharp look, adding caustically, “We may have spoken in haste about old Creep Huntington spinning in his grave. How much did it cost you to corner all the shares at say ten cents on the dollar, you sly dog?”

  Huntington just smiled. “Well, somebody had to take the fool project in receivership, didn’t they? I’ll still be surprised as hell if the Southern Pacific breaks even in the end.”

  Stringer sarcastically agreed. “So will I. Selling water to all those farms and owning the only railroad that can take their produce to market, east or west, is going to be one hell of a cross for you to bear. I take back all I may have said about you being but a puny shadow of the one and original Octopus, Hank. You’re a hell of a heap smarter than old Creep, as well.”

  Huntington grinned like a mean little kid who’d stuck a gal’s braid in the ink well and wanted all his classmates to notice. “It’s about time I got some respect around here, damn it. Next to being called an octopus, there’s nothing that riles me half as much as being called a pale shadow of my less-refined old uncle.”

  Stringer nodded solemnly. “I promise not to call you a sissy when I report that this time the Southern Pacific is out to save so many little folk instead of screwing ’em. I might even be willing to call you a decent old tough if you’d like to explain how come you just made me sweat so much out front. You knew all the time you meant to go through with damming that rogue river, right?”

  Huntington growled at him. “You deserved some sweating. You made me sweat like hell before I could see anything but red on the books of my poor railroad. Now get out of here before you talk me into endowing every brat in California with a damned lollipop, you slick-talking rascal!”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The tedious trip up from L.A. to Frisco on top of the previous day’s haul across the desert from El Centro, had more than tired Stringer out. But as he got stiffly down from his Coaster at the Mission Street Station he knew Sam Barca would still be at his news desk.

  The day shift was starting to pour out the cast-iron classic front of the mostly brick building when he arrived. He ticked his hat brim to another brace of pretty stenographers and limped inside, crossing the pressroom and dropping his gladstone near the opening of old Sam’s frosted glass cage. As he dragged a chair in and sat down, Sam Barca looked up from the copy he was editing. “It’s about time you got back,” he growled in way of greeting. “Can you verify that last report you filed about the National Guard and those Mex bandits?”

  Stringer retorted, “Not hardly. But I figured you wanted all the local color I could come up with.”

  “Some of the stuff you wrote on the flood victims working together so bravely reads pretty good,” Barca admitted grudgingly. “Our readers like to know they’re not the only ones who ever offered a helping hand and might not have been suckers after all. I had to cut some of it of course. I sent you to get a story, not to write a novel. But, all right, even if it pains me to say it, you got us a story, indeed.”

  Stringer tried not to show his surprise at the rare compliment. “Thanks, Sam. I’m sorry the damned Examiner scooped us on the first report of the breakthrough. I was dumb enough to trust a woman. So naturally she done me as dirty as usual. I’m glad my follow-up with more details left you in such a good mood.”

  Sam Barca frowned across the desk at him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. How do you figure Kathy Doyle doublecrossed you, as I gather that’s who we’re talking about.”

  Stringer frowned back and said, “Hell, Sam, it must have been close to eight hours before I could catch up with her first wire with one of my own. We were both stuck with rescue work first and reporting second. But she was able to get into town way ahead of me and, damn it, don’t you even read the headlines of rival papers?”

  Barca reached impassively for the pile of earlier editions on a nearby shel
f as he muttered, “That’s something else we have to talk about.” As he handed yesterday’s Sun across to Stringer he went on, “I had to work out the money with my opposite number at the Examiner by telephone. He found it confusing too, since you work for us and she works for them. But the little lady seems to have a will of iron so they agreed, just this once, that as long as they only had to pay her and we had to pay you, both papers could run what you see on page one.”

  There was more than one story under the screaming headlines about Southern California vanishing under water. When he made out the joint bylines above the subheading he was searching for, his jaw dropped and he murmured, “Well, I’ll be damned.” The credit line read, “Exclusive from the Imperial Valley by Miss Kathy Doyle of the Examiner and Stringer MacKail of the San Francisco Sun, on the scene together when the disaster first began”!

  Sam Barca said dryly, “It would have been rude to print our own man’s name ahead of a lady’s. I thought the two of you wrote it together. What’s this stuff about a doublecross?”

  Stringer waved him off impatiently. “Hold it, I’m reading!” As he did just that, he could see that Kathy’s style was a lot more florid than his own. She’d no doubt felt she needed some phrases Jack London would have been hard put to equal as she described the first horror of that deadly deluge. She got most of the facts right, though, and now that he studied back on it, Maria Herrerra had looked something like “A once-proud member of the Spanish Hidalgo class reduced to a piteous state of mud-plastered hysteria.”

  Once he’d read it all twice, he gravely handed the paper back to Sam Barca. “Forget what I said about a doublecross. I guess we all live and learn.”

  Sam Barca replied brusquely, “Let’s hope she’s learned not to be content with a news break without following up on it. That’s all she got on the story, good as it was. I saw no reason to share the scoop you filed on H.E. Huntington, of all people, charging to the rescue. So she’s probably sore she didn’t stick around, and I’m not at all sure I’m delighted with this sudden change in the public image of the Southern Pacific. I liked it better when they had no redeeming virtues at all. We could always get a Sunday filler out of taking another crack at the ever-evil Octopus. What do you suppose Huntington could be acting so noble for? The S.P. has to be making something on the deal… hmmm, that might be worth following up on, right?”

  “Wrong,” said Stringer. “Old H.E. Huntington may be out to change his public image by doing a good and unselfish deed for a change.” Then he added, “And you can’t fault any man for that.”

  Sam Barca muttered, “Shit, I like my big business tycoons just plain down and dirty. I guess we’ll have to find another target. How do you feel about Pacific Gas and Electricity? John Muir says they’ve been treating his pet redwoods mighty awful.”

  “Not just now, Sam,” Stringer protested. “I need a hot tub, a shave, and fresh duds at least as much as anyone needs a redwood tree.”

  Barca had to agree. “You do look sort of like a cowboy who got bucked off and shit on. Why don’t you try to relax and have some innocent fun this coming weekend?”

  Stringer swore that he meant to do just that. Then he somewhat spoiled the effect he was trying to create of having only innocent fun when he asked Sam if he had Kathy Doyle’s address on file.

  Sam Barca growled, “I do not. I have enough trouble keeping track of folk who work for this paper. Still, I think she lives up on Telegraph Hill. If she has her own Bell telephone, she might be in their directory. Why do you ask?”

  Stringer got back to his feet. “I owe the lady an apology, for openers,” he explained. “If she’s not shacked up with a sailor, she may let me make it up to her with a seafood dinner over on North Beach.”

  Sam Barca grinned knowingly. “That’d be about the right distance between Fisherman’s Wharf and her place on nearby Telegraph Hill, if you order some dago red to go with all those oysters, you sly dog.”

  Stringer grinned back sheepishly. “Don’t talk dirty about fellow newspaper folk, Sam.”

  So Sam Barca said he was sorry as hell and asked, “If you’re not as fond of redwoods as me, what did you have in mind for the coming weekend? Mayhaps collaborating on the Great American Novel?”

  Stringer laughed. “I may have told you not to talk dirty, Sam,” he said as he headed for the door, “but I sure as hell never told you to talk just plain silly!”

  THE END

  You can find all of Lou Cameron’s Stringer series available as ebooks:

  Stringer (#1)

  Stringer on Dead Man’s Range (#2)

  Stringer on the Assassin’s Trail (#3)

  Stringer and the Hangman’s Rodeo (#4)

  Stringer and the Wild Bunch (#5)

  Stringer and the Hanging Judge (#6)

  Stringer In Tombstone (#7)

  Stringer and the Deadly Flood (#8)

  Stringer and the Lost Tribe (#9)

  Stringer and the Oil Well Indians (#10)

  Stringer and the Border War (#11)

  Stringer on the Mojave (#12)

  Stringer on Pikes Peak (#13)

  Stringer and the Hell-Bound Herd (#14)

  Stringer in a Texas Shoot-Out (#15)