Stringer and the Deadly Flood Read online

  She told him he wasn’t going anywhere without a proper breakfast. So he stayed put, wondering idly just how long it was apt to take before she got down to the serious nagging that tended to dry the dew from the rose and remind a man of all the thorns that went with such delights. But when she suggested sex al fresco for dessert he decided she hadn’t meant to sound so bossy after all.

  They were just starting to climax together when a gentle rain swept across the desert floor to inspire them to try again and left them laughing, feeling clean but a mite chilled. So they got dressed, broke camp, and continued to move north through alternate spells of soft rain and bright but not too hot sunshine. Even the mules seemed to enjoy such unusually decent desert weather. So they made good time until Stringer, scouting out ahead, reined in and raised his free hand to halt Juanita and her cart. As he rode back to her he said, “I want to have another peek at that barometer. It looks as if we’ve come to a sort of fossil beach.”

  She climbed down and moved forward to see what he was talking about while he dismounted and climbed up into the back of her cart.

  The needle on Herb Lockwood’s barometer read 29.98, or a tad below or above mean sea level, depending on the weather. He climbed back out and walked over to join Juanita. He found her holding a bitty prehistoric conch shell to her ear. She smiled at him and cried, “I hear it. I can hear the sea, inside, just like they say!”

  He stared curiously around, replying, “Any sea that ever made a sound around here is long gone, indeed.” Certainly there was no actual beach to be seen cutting east and west across their path. The desert winds and rains had long since done away with any traces of wave action and the knee-high, slate-gray greasewood had marched right out into what must have been a very shallow sea in its time. The old waterline was there to be seen only because of the sun-bleached seashells spread out across the bare silt. Stringer was no expert on the topic, but most of the shells seemed to be those of saltwater mussels. The conch shell Juanita had found just didn’t go with fresh water. So, all right, there’d been a time when anyone standing here would have been staring across open blue water to the north horizon, with the vast inland sea cradled between the bare brown mountains, east and west, perhaps thirty to fifty miles apart. He started to turn back to Juanita. Then he spotted a chalky conch shell bigger than the one she’d found, and he bent to pick it up for her.

  The son of a bitch drawing a rifle bead on Stringer must not have expected him to duck like that. His .30-.30 round buzzed right through the air Stringer’s back had just been filling. Stringer did a forward somersault as the rifle squibbed again, winding up prone in a clump of greasewood with his own gun drawn. He spit out curses and pungent twigs while he tried to figure out what in thunder was going on.

  He lifted his hat on his six-gun barrel. But the unseen marksman didn’t fall for that. So he tried sticking his bare head up a few feet and almost got it blown off. He ducked at the sight of the muzzle flash before the sound and the bullet could cover the quarter mile between them. The bastard was good, Stringer decided. This was going to take some study. He started by crawling toward the gypsy cart and his Winchester, grateful that the recent rain had made the ground less dusty and trying to think like a lizard as he slithered through the knee-high brush, being careful not to move any of it. He heard another shot. It sounded as if the cuss was lobbing rounds into his old position for luck. He’d left his hat atop a bush back there. The bastard might be good but he sure was stupid, Stringer thought—nobody with a lick of sense would have put a light gray hat back on at a time like this.

  The rear of the cart, Dutch door and all, was exposed to the sneaky bastard who’d cut their trail. He’d have to get into the wagon from the driver’s seat. Juanita’s mule was tethered between the poles, and it showed him the white of one eye as he slithered out of the shrubbery toward the animal with a reassuring whisper. Fortunately, Juanita had tied it to a stout clump, so it had to just stay put, kicking its big hooves more in uncertainty than lethal intent as Stringer crawled under it. Nevertheless, Stringer took a couple of half-hearted kicks before he could get to the wagon and haul himself up over the dashboard to roll over Juanita’s seat to the inside.

  He scooped up his Winchester, levered a round in the chamber, and eased back to the rear door. He opened the bottom half just a crack and spotted two Spanish mules half a mile out. He had to stand and crack the top door before he could make out the two hats just visible above the slate-blue brush. His attackers were both hunkered smart from the point of view of anyone at ground level, but in the cart he was standing a good yard higher. One hat was Anglo, a peaked Arizona rider. The other was a more Mex sombrero. Even as he watched, both were moving in, spread about ten yards apart. He took a bead on the Anglo farthest away. Then he fired and levered his weapon to fire again as the one in the Mex hat made the mistake of rising to fire back at him. The other rifleman’s bullet thunked into the doorjamb near Stringer’s head. But from the way that sombrero went skyward, Stringer knew he’d aimed better. Heads seldom jerked that hard unless a gent had been spine-shot.

  That left the Anglo he’d first fired at, who was hit or playing possom but in either case out of sight. So Stringer swung the door wide open and dropped out and down. The rifle round that whizzed over the cart told him the bastard was still in business out there.

  Stringer started crawling again, with the Winchester cradled across his forearms. Had not it been for a similar incident down Cuba way one time, Stringer might have tried crawling in on the bastard’s last known position. But he didn’t. He’d learned as a war correspondent who hadn’t expected to fight but then had to, that one-third to fifty percent casualties inspired most men to retreat, and the average bushwacker wasn’t as brave as most men. So Stringer made for the mules he’d spotted tethered farther out.

  It worked. When the man he’d shot out from under the Arizona hat figured he’d crawled far enough with a .44-40 slug in his left shoulder and got up to make the last dash for his mule and other parts, Stringer rose between him and said mules to snap, “Freeze!” And, when that didn’t work, he nailed the cuss again at closer range.

  Stringer bulled through the brush to where he’d dropped his man, lest the son of a bitch have time to recover some spunk if he was still alive. But he wasn’t. He was just spawled there with a kind of smile on his ugly face and what looked like blueberry jam all over the front of his black shirt.

  Stringer shot him again to make sure. The muzzle blast set the black sateen to smouldering, but Stringer didn’t care. He hunkered down to go through the dead man’s pockets. He wound up with forty-three dollars and one of those mail-order private detective buzzers that went with company dicks. A wilted card assured anyone who might have cared that the rascal had been a water outfit security man called Wordsworth. Stringer got to his feet, putting the money away, and muttered, “I didn’t think much of your namesake’s poetry either.” Then he went looking for the Mex he’d downed.

  As he approached the fossil beach once more he called out to Juanita, “It’s over, honey. I got the rascals.” There was no answer. She’d likely started running when she’d heard that first rifleshot, he decided. He just hoped she hadn’t run too far.

  It took him some minutes to find the dead Mex and, when he did, the dead face staring up at him looked more Indian. He nodded and told the moon-faced cadaver, “I didn’t think we’d left enough sign for your average white man to follow.”

  There was no identification on the dead Indian. Stringer took charge of the twenty-dollar double eagle and silver quarter he’d found on that one and headed back to the cart, calling out to Juanita some more.

  He finally found her not far from where he’d last seen her, lying on her back with the fossil seashell still in one hand. She looked as if she was sleeping, but he didn’t try to wake her up. There was a little blue hole in her forehead and a thread of blood had run out her ear, soaking into the shiny black hair spread all around her pretty face like a pe
rverse halo.

  Stringer walked back to the cart and slammed his free fist into the side of it, hard. It didn’t help. He dropped his rifle and clung to one of the red wheels, puking up the breakfast she’d just served him along with her sweet little self. Then he got control of himself again and rummaged in the tool box under the wagon bed to break out a short-handled spade.

  He buried the sweet, harmless little gal on the fossil shore of the ghost sea, wrapped in a tarp with the pretty shell she’d admired clasped in her dead hands. Stringer wasn’t much on religion. But as he smoothed the last soft silt over her he took off his hat to murmur, “Vaya con Dios, querida. I sure hope that there’s a heaven and that they’ll take you in. You have my word that if there’s a hell I mean to send the sons of bitches who started this there.”

  Then, seeing there was more to be done, he got to work. He knew both Juanita’s mule and the two the killers had been riding could get by on their own once he unsaddled, unbridled, and got them started with bellies full of water and oats. He didn’t give a damn about the two dead company men, but he buried them as well, lest the buzzards disturb Juanita’s final resting place or, worse yet, lead anyone else to the dirty sons of bitches.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  By the time he’d tidied up around the forlorn little gypsy cart he’d cooled down a mite and the desert had heated up a heap. The sky was still cloudy, but as the noonday sun lashed down through gaps in the overcast it served to remind him just how hot and dry it could get in these parts and that there was only so much water a mule could carry along with its rider and his gear. So before he mounted up to ride he spread all of Lockwood’s doodled charts flat on the ground in the skimpy shade of the cart to consider his options.

  He had his story. Or such a story as there was, at any rate. Of course, the smartest move would be a beeline back to El Centro and the first train out. He could report the murder of Juanita to the law and let them worry about it. But he knew they’d take as much action about the death of a doubtless illegal immigrant as they had about the shooting of Herbert Lockwood in front of witnesses. Nobody was allowed to duel in public in Frisco or even Dodge these days, but the west was as wild as ever in some of its more primitive parts.

  He knew he was thinking more primitive than smart as he made his decision and rolled up the charts again. He was a newspaperman, not a professional killer. But somebody had to bring the sons of bitches to justice, and he was likely the only man in these parts with a fast draw and a steady aim who wasn’t on the payroll of the railroad and the water lords. So he forked himself aboard his mount and beelined for the work camp of the water outfit, loaded for bear and mad as hell.

  He had his own pocket compass and there was nothing in his way but a heap of empty miles. How many miles depended on just how accurate Lockwood’s spidery scribbles panned out. The engineer had left the forward diggings some days ago. By this time, even at pick and shovel speed, the more innocent laborers of the outfit should be farther west. But since how far west was up for grabs, Stringer made for a spot on the map where Lockwood had told him to Remember the Alamo. Stringer had only a fuzzy notion of what the ill-fated Lockwood must have had in mind. Since he’d been fired, about the time he’d shown his notations to somebody, that somebody might still be found in or about the work camp. Perhaps the rascal would tell him, when they met, why he’d fired Lockwood and, when that hadn’t shut the poor cuss up, had him murdered.

  There was no doubt in Stringer’s mind now that the so-called shoot-out with a notorious gunslick had been murder, whether the victim had known he was being murdered or not. The average man, even an outdoors man with some experience at shooting cans off fence posts, had as much chance against a hired gun as a pussy cat against a bulldog. Nobody hired guns unless they were good. As Stringer had just had to prove, there was a lot more to gunfighting than just standing there pretending you were Wyatt Earp at the O.K. Corral. Having covered that story, Stringer knew it had been more complicated than old Wyatt now boasted at that classic shoot-out years ago.

  Unless he was lucky as hell, the winner always had some edge in a fight. The thing that distinguished the true gunslick from his average victim was that from the beginning he could see who had the edge and knew exactly when and how to act on it. A lot of nonsense had been written by recent pulp and nickelodian “experts” about some so-called “Code of the West.” And men who’d never heard a shot fired in anger were prone to enshrine homicidal lunatics like Clay Allison or nasty little back-shooters like Billy the Kid, even as they scoffed at braver men than they’d ever be who’d used common sense when the odds were against them.

  It was probably true that James Butler Hickock had declined an invitation to a main street one-on-one with James Wesley Hardin that time. Who but a suicidal maniac would want to step outside into who-knew-what when he was forted up so good in a saloon with his back to the wall and two guns between him and the door. The wise-asses neglected to add that Hardin never chose to come in through that barroom door, for all his claims about wanting to have it out with Wild Bill. They just didn’t know how the real thing was. A shoot-out was not a game between kids with cap pistols. Nobody who’d ever lived through such a gut-churning spell of sheer terror felt any need to offer anyone a sporting chance the next time he found his fool self betting his own life on the outcome.

  Poor old Pat Garrett had good reason to turn morose and bitter in his declining years. Penny dreadful writers who’d never been west of the Big Muddy had used Garrett’s own truthful account of his Lincoln County adventures to pillory the poor old lawman for nailing the notorious young killer a lot more fair and square than the Kid had done when he shot the previous sheriff from ambush. Garrett and the Kid had met face to face, in Pete Maxwell’s dark bedroom, and the only edge either had was that the Kid had spoken first and had given his location away when he asked Garrett who the hell he was. Garrett had openly admitted doing what anyone else with a lick of common sense would have done. He’d fired his six-gun instead of his mouth. The Kid had still managed to draw his own gun on the way down with a bullet in his heart. It was stupid to consider the notion that the Kid would have given old Pat “a fair chance” had their positions been reversed, and Lockwood had been stupid if he’d really expected a fair chance from Cactus Jack. Stringer hadn’t been there, of course. But he could picture a dozen ways it might have happened. He knew a lot of gunslicks who enjoyed a rep for shoot-outs didn’t exactly announce their intentions ahead of time. It was just as easy, and a lot safer, to simply engage a man in conversation out in the street, out of earshot of any witness, and then simply draw and drill him without warning. With the dead man in no position to dispute the killer’s own version, it was easy enough to make the argument leading to the resultant “fair fight.” Stringer made a mental note to hold any friendly discussion about the weather when and if he met up with Cactus Jack. For while he was madder about the way they’d treated poor little Juanita back there, he knew the death of Lockwood was tied in with hers. The same mastermind had to have given the orders. Neither Cactus Jack nor those two he’d just had to plant would have wandered about killing total strangers just for the hell of it.

  The day on the desert wore on. He didn’t seem to be getting anywhere as he walked, trotted, and rested his mule hour after hour. The jagged crests of the Sierra Chocolate to the east seemed to recede as fast as he approached them. Juanita’s gypsy cart had slowly shrunk to a tiny dot and then winked out of sight behind him. But the flat expanse of greasewood all around looked just the same. If the Colorado Desert didn’t kill a man, it sure tended to bore him to death. The Mojave had Joshua trees to ride past and the Sonora had all sorts of interesting cactus. The Colorado was just tedious and hence perhaps more dangerous. Ominous tales were still told of wagon parties who’d taken “short cuts” off the known and occasionally traveled trails. Every now and again some prospector came across an old sun-bleached wagonload of mummified ’49ers, or even an earlier prospector, dried-up bu
rro and all. The almost uniformly level greasewood shimmered like a sea, from slate-blue to black, making anything less than a mile away hard to make out. And there were an awful lot of miles out here.

  Hence, when Stringer first spotted an unusual dot ahead of him he had to ride almost another hour before he made it out as a sunflower windmill, its new galvanized blades turning lazily in the tricky light of the overcast sunset. He resisted the impulse to spur his mule to a quicker pace. On the desert, it was always better to get there than to get there sudden. As the windmill grew with maddening slowness, he could make out the new tin roofing of the house and barn beside it. His mule smelled water and began to press forward. Stringer wasn’t about to ride out of the desert at full gallop and likely scare some poor nester spitless. So he reined in, fired a shot up at the overcast sky, and rode in at a more polite trot.

  As he reached the cleared door yard of the spread he found a man, a woman, three kids, and a couple of Mex or Indian hands lined up out front for his inspection and, judging from the casual rifle cradled in the nester’s elbow-crook, vice versa.

  He reined in. “Howdy. I’d be, ah, Don MacEwen. I’m trying to get to that big water outfit’s work camp in case they may still be hiring.”

  The nester informed him, “I doubt you’ll make it this side of sundown and change on that jaded mule. We’re talking close to fifteen miles cut up with fencing and irrigation ditches. You and your mount are welcome to bed down in the barn for the night.”

  His once-pretty but now sun-bleached wife chimed in. “We’re the Coopers—Fred and Doris. Our kids, here, answer to Sarah, Betty, and Fred Junior. These other gents would be the Gomez brothers. You’re just in time for supper. Iffen you like, you can wash up by our kitchen door after you see to your mule, Mister MacEwen.”