Stringer and the Lost Tribe Read online

  He knew better than to dwell on that. He considered going back to the saloon and finding out how much beer he still had coming. But he knew that could piss old Watson off too. Smoking in a hayloft could be as dangerous as messing with another man’s woman. So he just tried like hell to fall asleep, knowing that that was about as tough a way to do it as there was.

  He knew it wasn’t as early as it had been, and he’d surely had a hard enough day. He’d hiked all over creation and put himself through more than one good scare since last he’d kissed old Lola and told her he’d be right back. He wondered who was kissing her now and grass-hoppered to other, more important considerations, one after the other, as he kept coming up with more questions than answers. Every time he started to relax, one of the ponies in the stalls below seemed to stomp a hoof, as if they knew a man was trying to get some damned sleep around here.

  He told himself he ought to feel good about ponies down below to serve as big dumb watchdogs. The mastermind behind all those attempts to slow him down had lost some pawns, but the game wouldn’t be over until both sides figured out what they were playing. That brought him wide awake again, of course.

  Then he heard more noise down there and heard Watson call out, “Are you sleeping comfortsome, old son?”

  To which the only sensible reply could be, “Not now, damn it. What time is it?”

  “Pushing eleven,” Watson called back. “We got Saunders buried, and the ponies them rascals rode in on to sucker us has been impounded as company property. I was outvoted by the site manager on planting that last rascal,. It seemed wrong to me to have three mysterious and sinister strangers buried next to pure little Mary-Jo. But, as it was pointed out by the boss, a settlement this size can’t hardly afford more than one burial ground. We picked the one we have because the slope was already clear and the ground was soft digging.”

  Stringer grimaced in the darkness of the loft and called down, “You picked a bulb field, then. Nice going. The Indians watching from the ridges must love to watch you planting corpses where their women dug up food.”

  Then he caught himself and shut up before he could give the company man any ideas about oak groves still standing in this half-wrecked valley.

  Watson called back, “Well, I mean to plant me for the night now. Jimbo told me my old woman took good care of you. But is there anything else you might want, old son?”

  Stringer replied, “Yep, sleep.” Which made old Watson chuckle and head for his back door across the yard. Stringer couldn’t help wondering wistfully how good that young wife of his would take care of the old coot.

  He found out a few minutes later when, over the muffled complaints of a woman, he heard Watson clearly shout, “I told you I was tired, damn it!” And then, after some door-slamming and the sound of breaking crockery, it got quiet again.

  Stringer waited until he was sure things meant to stay that way. Then he threw aside the top blanket, sat up, and hauled on his boots with an evil grin. As he eased down the ladder and got the gardening tools he recalled from before, he muttered to himself, “You sure are a sneaky little rascal, MacKail.”

  Finding the burial ground by moonlight turned out to be easier than he’d dared to hope. He’d already figured a good bulb slope had to face south. The whitewashed picket fence they’d enclosed their graveyard in was visible some distance away in the moonlight and would serve to confuse the casual eye about movement on the far side of the ghostly white pickets. He eased through the gateless opening and found four grave markers lined up neatly in the center of the mostly empty plot. He didn’t have to risk a match to surmise that the small slate gravestone marked the resting place of the miner’s daughter while the slabs of wood marked the graves of the three dead owlhoots. So he just got right to work.

  He began by leveling the mound of fresh dirt on the grave of the late young Saunders, fanning the loose soil far and wide in the ankle-deep summer-killed grass with the shovel he’d borrowed. Then he moved to the east of the little girl’s grave, at the far end of the line, and used more care as he cut out a six-foot circle of sod. He knew neat square edges attracted the human eye. He pie-wedged the sod into handy totes and used them to make the place where Saunders lay appear to be undug grass. Then he simply had to pull up the grave markers and shift each one grave east. The heavier slate stone of Mary-Jo got shifted to mark the bare soil—and nothing more—he’d exposed. Then, having done the easy part, Stringer took off his hat and jacket, nippy as the night air was, and proceeded to dig down to nobody. Some of the bulbs he uncovered near the surface were big and yummy-looking. He put them in his hat for now.

  He didn’t have to dig more than a yard or so down, seeing the soil was so soft and the edges so crumble-prone. He even raked some of the soil back into the hole to encourage the view that Indians might dig carelessly. Then he put his jacket back on, gathered up the rest of his gear, and headed back to the Watson place, feeling a mite shitty about the dead child’s parents but sort of pleased with himself nonetheless.

  He got rid of the bulbs in the sewer ditch. He put the shovel and rake back where he’d found them. When he climbed the ladder back up to the loft, he found he had company. Watson’s young wife whispered, “Where have you been? I’ve been waiting here at least an hour.”

  He could see by the moonlight filtering through a small grimy window at the far end of the loft that she’d been waiting long enough to get undressed, too. He gulped and asked the naked lady reclining on the blankets in the hay to what he owed the honor.

  “That old fool hasn’t touched me for months,” she said, “and a young woman like myself has needs, damn it.”

  Stringer shucked his hat and gun rig, but left everything else right where it was as he told her soberly, “I know. We all have to eat. Getting married up with a gent who has a good job may have working for a living beat.”

  She protested, “I married him fair and square. I like to screw, and he said he needed me. He never said he needed me to cook and sew and play with my poor self whilst he lay slugabed in another damned room. A woman needs a real man to pleasure her, not an old dog who just growls and snores at her. You look like a real man to me. I didn’t dare let on in front of Jimbo, but I could see right off that you was young and husky. So what are you waiting for? Don’t you think I got a nice body too?”

  Stringer sighed and said, “It would be hard not to notice, ma’am. Would it help if I told you I’m tempted as hell?”

  She patted the blanket by her bare hip. “Don’t just sweet-talk me. I don’t need romantical bullshit. I’m already hot as a pistol and ready to give you a ride you’ll long remember, cowboy. What are you waiting for? Let’s get to it!”

  He shook his head and said, “I’d sure like to, but I can’t. Your man has treated me decent. It would be indecent of me to repay his kindness by messing with his wife.”

  “Pooh, he treats me as his wife in name only. And he’ll never know, will he?”

  Stringer said, “We’d know, and however he feels about you and vice versa, you are his wife, in name or whatever. I can’t say I’ve never busted that particular commandment, weak-natured as I am. But at least I can say I’ve never busted it with the wife of a man I owed.”

  “Can’t you do it just this once? I’m just suffering like anything from pure neglect, and is it my fault I’m wed to a man too old for me?”

  “Yep. You could have said no when he asked you to marry him. You could still leave him. You got grounds for divorcing him under California statutes on such matters, if you ain’t trying to lead me astray with a mean fib.”

  She insisted he didn’t understand. But he said, “Sure I do. You’re not ready to leave his bed and board to make your own living, but you want to screw around on the side. That’s not the way your wedding contract reads, ma’am. There’s nothing in the fine print saying anything about forsaking all others unless you meet someone you’d like to play slap-and-tickle with. That’s one reason I’m still single. I’ve always felt
a contract was a contract, and I just said I have a weak nature.”

  She lay back and began to bump and grind in the moonlight as she moaned, “Show some of it to me, then. Show your weakness hard, and put it in me deep, damn it!”

  He already had a pretty good erection inside his jeans: he was human, and she was really built. But he insisted, “You’d best get dressed and back to the house, ma’am. This is just causing the both of us discomfort and chagrin.”

  She opened her eyes to say in an ominous tone, “If you don’t do right by me I’ll tell my husband, and he’s the law. “

  Stringer blinked and replied, “I noticed. What were you aiming to tell him? That you tried to get me to commit adultery behind his back, on his own property, and that I refused?”

  “I can tell him you’d snuck out someplace when I came out here to make sure you were comfortable. I can tell him you just came back with his digging tools like you’d been out highgrading or whatever. He’ll sure ask you lots of questions about that, if you’re not nice to me. So how’s about it?”

  Stringer didn’t answer. He had to study on her threat. He knew the sensible way out would be to just give in to her. That way, he’d have more on her than she had on him, and it wasn’t as if the poor gal wasn’t mighty tempting to begin with. He knew that even if he didn’t take her up on her offer for the sake of a good cause, he was surely going to wind up mad as hell at himself some future night when he was alone and hard-up and recalling all the naked ladies he’d ever seen. He started to reach absently for a shirt button. Then he caught himself and said, “You just go and tell your man whatever you want, ma’am. I’m sure he’ll understand your reasons for creeping out of the house to me after he was asleep. Tell him I tried to rape you, and then tell him why you didn’t call for help, with an armed lawman just across the yard. Then I’ll tell him he has a no-good wife, and we shall see what we shall see.”

  She called him a bastard and likely a fairy as she crawled off across the hay, dragging her nightgown with her bare ass flashing at him in the moonlight.

  He waited, but he didn’t hear the back door slam as she sneaked into the house, where she belonged. Stringer left his boots on this time, as he covered himself again and tried to relax. It seemed easier now. All that digging on top of all that hiking had left him bone weary all over. He didn’t recall falling asleep. He never did. But the next thing he knew he was in this big public library, looking through the racks, and Jack London had plagiarized his story about the Wild Bunch, the bastard. So he got down the book and carried it over to the Gibson Girl behind the library desk, hoping she wouldn’t notice he seemed to be naked as a jay. Nobody else in the library seemed to pay any attention to his naked body, even though they all had lots of duds on, and a couple of ’em were roller-skating across the marble floor. Then all hell seemed to be breaking loose outside. So he opened his eyes and woke up.

  The first thing he noticed, with pleasure, was that he had his shirt and jeans on after all. Then he saw it was daylight outside and that he had to take a leak. He crawled over to the window and pissed in the dry straw as he peered out to see folks running toward the hillside burial ground. He nodded, got back to his blankets, and quickly slipped into his hat, jacket, and gun rig. Then he dropped down the ladder and joined the general stampede at a more sedate pace, knowing what he’d see up yonder.

  As he joined the crowd around the raw hole he’d dug in the dirt to mark with the little girl’s headstone, others, bless them, had already trampled all the grass nobody was supposed to be under.

  The deputy called Jimbo caught Stringer’s eyes in the crowd and confided, “Now they’ve really gone too far! The son-of-a-bitching Diggers have dug up little Mary-Jo, casket and all!”

  Another man chimed in, “Watson’s up among the trees, scouting for sign. I sure hope he finds some. Why on earth would Indians want to dig up an innocent child’s bones? She never done them no harm.”

  Stringer shrugged and said, “Mayhaps they’re taking up saltu customs. Haven’t you boys been digging up dead Indians who never done you harm?”

  “That’s not the same at all!” Jimbo protested. In the first fool place, none of us ever dug any sort of bones up. That doc from the college or whatever is the only one around here interested in Indian graves. In the second place, the doc has scientifical reasons for collecting Indian bones. Them goddamned diggers don’t study science stuff, do they?”

  “Maybe they figure it must be heap strong medicine, seeing folk digging like gophers down here. Or mayhaps they’re just trying to get even. You can see how upset everyone is about little Mary-Jo’s missing bones. Perhaps Indians feel the same way about their own dead.”

  Jimbo swore and snapped, “We’ll just see about that. We was having enough trouble with them Indians just digging mercury!”

  So Stringer nodded, drifted back, and, having stirred up the hornet’s nest, strode off to warn the people who figured to get stung.

  At the anthropology camp, he found everyone eating breakfast a mite late, being mostly city folk. Nancy Gore waved him on in and offered him a seat at their long trestle table as she introduced him to her father and his two assistants, a white boy and some sort of breed. Dr. Gore himself was a distinguished-looking gent of about fifty. He had a firm shake and a friendly smile, at first. Stringer allowed he could use some breakfast. But before he touched the coffee or flapjacks served by their camp cook, a fat old Paiute woman in an apron and Mother Hubbard, Stringer felt obliged to announce, “I just came from the graveyard down near the mine. A lot of the townsfolk are upset and may be headed this way. Seems the headstone of a little white gal now marks little more than a hole in the ground.”

  Dr. Gore stopped smiling. His daughter, Nancy, gasped and said, “That’s awful! Who would want to desecrate the grave of a child?”

  Stringer dug into his flapjacks as he casually replied, “They seem to feel it was Yana work. They can’t even find her casket, let alone her bones. Maybe the Yana want to measure her skull to see if she was superior, inferior, or whatever.”

  Dr. Gore snapped, “That’s ridiculous! The Yana were, in fact, rather advanced. But not that advanced. The Diggers up this way now are unrelated to the extinct Yana, by the way. So revenge seems out of the question.”

  Stringer could see by the self-certain gleam in Gore’s eyes that the man just didn’t want to hear that the bones he admired and the neighborhood Indians he dismissed as mere primitives could be from one and the same tribe. Stringer washed down a mouthful of food with black coffee and said, “Either way, I’d hold off digging up any more Indian graves for now. I know you have a permit, and I understand your interest, but I’m not sure either the local whites or Indians do right now.” He sipped more coffee, which was waking him up just right, before he added, “I was telling your daughter here last night that there’s plenty of Indian skulls to study without getting anyone upset.”

  Dr. Gore shook his own skull and said primly, “Not the people I’m studying. The extinct Yana were a superior race, not at all related to the common tribes of the West Coast. Aside from having bigger brains, they ground stone tools at the level of the European Neolithic. I’ve yet to find a stone plowshare, but I’m certain I shall, if I keep searching. They seem to have reached the stage where our own ancestors discovered farming, and that means plowed fields, you see.”

  Stringer said, “Not hardly. The Aztec and such are on record as being farmers, where they didn’t live in big cities, but they never used any plows. The Spanish caught ’em planting corn with digging sticks. You might say they were Mexican Digger Indians. I hate to be the one who has to tell you this, sir, but the Yana are not extinct, and you won’t find any plowshares no matter where you dig around here.”

  Dr. Gore favored Stringer with a disgusted look and asked the breed down at the end of the table whether the Yana were extinct or not. The breed replied, “All gone. Years ago, before the Gold Rush even. My mother’s people were Shasta. The Shasta tell
tales of Yana fighting them in the Shining Times. They once had a big war over some oak flats. The Yana were all killed and never came back.”

  Dr. Gore shot Stringer a triumphant look.

  Stringer said, “All right. The Shasta were a big tribe. They chased some Yana from disputed gathering grounds. That doesn’t mean all the Yana were killed. Is this a Shasta valley?”

  The breed shook his head. “No. The few people around here are stray Maidu, I think.”

  To which Stringer replied, in a surer tone, “They’re Yana. You don’t have to take my word. At least two English-speaking Indians I’ve spoken with recently, told me they were Yana. You don’t have to poke about in Yana graves to study ’em, Doctor. I could get you some live Yana to study if you’d be willing to put all those Yana bones back where you found ’em.”

  Dr. Gore commenced to give him a lecture on lost tribes instead. He’d just gotten wound up when old Watson rode in on a bay, leading a buckskin by it’s reins. He dismounted to join them, holding a sheet of yellow foolscap in one hand. He handed it to Dr. Gore, saying, “This just came in for you over our private wire. We keep telling Western Union we ain’t a branch of their fool company, but will they listen?”

  As Gore read the message, the lawman turned to Stringer and said, “This buckskin is your’n for keeps, since Saunders won’t be using it no more. I hope you don’t mind the Mex saddle, and you’ll note I lashed on a fresh bedroll and canteen lest you catch whatever was ailing him last night. We’re riding out after them Diggers. Seeing as you seem to know so much about ’em, we want you to come along.”