by Lou Cameron
It would have been a mistake to lead with his right. But Lash wasn’t any better at ducking a left hook than Swede Larson was a right cross. So he went down with a split lip, rolled, and as Stringer stepped politely back to let him get back up, Lash did so, with a six-inch boot knife in his right fist.
So the fight might have gotten sort of serious if at this point Rimfire Rowena hadn’t pulled Stringer’s .38 from its holster and fired it straight into the tanbark between them. “That’s enough,” she announced, sounding as if she meant it. “If there’s one thing I can’t abide, its grown men behaving like schoolboys.”
Stringer smiled sheepishly at Lash and said, “I’m willing to call us even if you are.” So Lash said, “Jesus, can’t nobody take a joke around here?” and put his blade away.
But Stringer knew it might not be over. So he turned back to the girl and told her, “I’d be proud to buy you an ice cream soda if you’re headed back to town, ma’am. That’s where I’m going, as soon as I can have my gun rig back.”
She dimpled up at him despite herself and said, “Only if you promise to be a good boy. What are you doing with real bullets in your sidearm? Didn’t anyone tell you Frontier Days was supposed to be just play acting? You like to scared me half to death when I felt the kick of a solid round just now. I was expecting blanks.”
As he took the rig from her and strapped it on, Stringer said, “I was raised to treat guns with respect, ma’am. It’s just dumb to pack a gun without real bullets in it.”
He saw Lash was pouting off at a slow walk now and added, “Do you reckon that’s what made him think he could rawhide me in front of you, the notion that I was just a drugstore cowboy with a toy gun?”
She shrugged and answered, “That’s what I took you for. Half the gents packing guns in town right now have never fired one. As for that ice cream soda, maybe another time. I’m camped down the other way and you may as well know I’m not easy.”
Stringer gulped and said, “I don’t recall hearing anyone say you were, ma’am.”
She sniffed. “I know how men talk about me behind my back, and even in front of me, if I let on I got the double meanings.”
“Is that why you talk so tough, Miss Rowena?” he asked.
She shrugged, righting her ten-gallon straight on her forehead. Her soft black curls peeked out from under the rim. “I guess a girl has to learn to talk tough if she means to get ahead in this man’s world. The Sioux took my mother’s hair when I was maybe one year old. So I was raised by my poor old pappy as best he knew how, until he got run over by a stampede when I was maybe twelve.”
“That sure sounds mournsome, ma’am. Who looked after you when you ran out of kin entire?”
“Nobody. I looked after myself and one of the things I taught myself at my own knee was not to take no wooden nickles and not to be easy. I taught myself to shoot as well, and it’s a good thing I did. I bet you got no idea how hard it can be for a gal to be good—even when she owns her own guns.”
Things were still lively as Stringer got back to the more lit-up parts of Cheyenne. Most of the desperados he passed looked harmless as ever. But he found himself looking harder at them now. Since he’d just learned the first lesson about playacting at wild west notions. Lash Borden had taken him for a playactor wearing his sidearm just for show, and, to be fair, it was an easy enough mistake to make with so many harmless gents playing foolish wild west games these days. But as they had all just learned, the old ways hadn’t faded out entirely. They’d just gotten a lot more complicated.
As he passed a brightly illuminated moving picture gallery he could see by the posters that they were running a Pathé travelogue and that new dramatic offering, The Great Train Robbery. Stringer had already seen it and it wasn’t bad, even though you could tell they’d made it back East in some woods. It was meant as entertainment and the actors hadn’t known all that much about robbing real trains, in Stringer’s opinion. But this very summer the real Wild Bunch was robbing trains left and right on an almost monotonous basis. It was even possible, with so many folk in town this evening, that right this minute Butch and Sundance were sitting inside, watching The Great Train Robbery and no doubt enjoying a chuckle or more.
The times just felt out of joint since Stringer had come home from the Spanish American War. In fact, by now they were taking moving pictures of that new war down there in the Philippines, and if the Paiute didn’t watch out they’d wind up on film as well. Having sat out the earlier Indian wars, the Paiute had suddenly taken to raising hell over in the great basin, and the army was talking about using those newfangled machine guns on them if they didn’t stop.
As for old-time gunfighters, despite all the fancy new ways of this dawning century, a mess of them were still around. He’d just talked to one in the Cheyenne Jail. So as he saw a moody-looking gent approaching with a tie-down holster Stringer tensed a mite and hankered for the good old days, when a man could tell whether he was supposed to tense or not.
But as he passed the drugstore where he’d meant to buy Rimfire Rowena an ice cream soda, and saw a pair of perky Gibson Girls sipping the same at the marble counter, he decided he might not be in the Dodge of the ‘80s after all and moved on in restored spirits.
When he got back to his hotel it was still too early to turn in. So he strolled into the tap room off the other side of the lobby to see what else might be going on.
Nothing was going on at first. There was an upright piano in one corner. But nobody was playing it. He bellied up to the bar and ordered a schooner of beer. Nobody argued about it until he was about half through. Then a voice growled in his ear, “It has ever been my opinion that men who drink nothing stronger than beer sit down to pee.”
Stringer put down his schooner and turned wearily to the even taller stranger who’d apparently followed him in, since he hadn’t been there before. The somewhat older as well as taller man was wearing a black frock coat under a pancaked black Stetson. The coat was hanging open as if to offer Stringer a clear view of the two ivory-handled Colt Lightnings the gent was wearing as well. Stringer sighed and said, “Look, friend, I just had a fight this evening, and for the record, I won. So why don’t you go off and sniff at fire hydrants or something?”
The stranger smiled, almost pleasantly, and replied, “I can see you don’t know who you are talking to, Stringer. Does the handle Friendly Frank Folsom mean anything to you?”
The younger newspaperman shook his head and replied, “I can’t say it does. Since you seem to know who I am, why don’t you tell me what this is all about, Friendly Frank?”
The stranger said, “It’s your nose, amigo. How come it’s so big?”
Stringer wrinkled the object under discussion and said, “I thought you were sore at me for drinking beer. How did my poor nose get into this? I’ll allow it ain’t much. But it’s always struck me as a sort of average nose.”
“You’re wrong,” Friendly Frank said. “You keep sticking it in places it don’t belong, and I ain’t talking about fire hydrants. What makes you so nosy, Stringer?”
“I reckon it goes with my job. Where have I got it stuck right now to upset you so?”
“It ain’t me you’ve been upsetting, Stringer. I’ll tell you true I was ordered to pick a fight with you and sort of kill you in self-defense. But, as you may have guessed, I’m a professional, not a homicidal lunatic. So I like to kill folk more discreetly than in the middle of a damned old festival.”
Stringer said he was glad to hear that and added, “Maybe some other time and place, after the rodeo is over?”
Friendly Frank said, “They don’t want you in Cheyenne that long, Stringer. They told me they wanted you dead or run out of town—tonight. So what’s it going to be?”
Then he blanched and went sort of stiff-all-over as he found himself standing there with the muzzle of Stringer’s .38 lightly resting against the front of his vest. Stringer asked quietly, “Why don’t you tell me what it’s going to be?”
Stringer put his .38 back in its holster. “Want to see it again? I wasn’t always a newspaper man. Since I have been, I’ve discovered lots of folk don’t cotton to my brand of investigative reportage. I can’t do much about the son of a bitch who goes over my stuff with a blue pencil. But as I hope you may have surmised by now, I meet lots of assholes like you.”
“I can’t say I enjoy being called an asshole, Stringer.”
“That’s too bad. You sure act like one. If you don’t like it, slap leather. I don’t have to be polite to gents I don’t like, and unlike you, I feel perfectly free to blow you away in self-defense because I don’t have a record as a hired gun to live down. If you don’t want to fight, suppose you tell me now who sent you after me. Call it nosy or not, I want to know, just in case they send a real fighter after me next time.”
Friendly Frank shook his head and said, “You know I can’t tell you that. But if it’s any comfort to you, I’ve just decided to deal myself out. They didn’t offer me half the money they should have to take a gunslick like you, even if I still thought I could. So how about it, pard. Is the war over?”
Stringer shook his head and said, “Not yet. I’ll be proud to buy you a drink after you tell me who sent you. But if you still try to crawfish out with me in the dark, I’ll kill you.”
Friendly Frank’s face turned an even paler shade of frog belly. But he shook his head and said, “I reckon I’ll have to cover that bet. I don’t like the odds all that much. But the only other way to go means death for certain. They know where to find me and, worse yet, they know where to find my kin.”
Then he simply turned his back on Stringer and started for the nearest exit with his hands up.
Stringer’s own hand went for his gun as he snapped, “Hey, come back here, damnit!”
But he didn’t draw. Just like Friendly Frank was betting on, Stringer was simply too decent, and before Stringer could come up with any other alternative to shooting another man cold in the back, Friendly Frank was out the door.
The elderly barkeep heaved a sigh of relief and slid down Stringer’s way to ask what all that tenseness in the air had been occasioned by. Stringer shrugged and said, “It’s over and you can make my next one a boilermaker.”
The barkeep said, “Coming right up. I can see you’re a mite upset about something, son.”
“I got a right to feel upset,” Stringer said. “That other rascal I was jawing with just now left with his winnings, just as the game was getting interesting.”
CHAPTER
THREE
*
They’d changed shifts at the Cheyenne Jail since last he’d been there. So Stringer found himself talking with a new desk sergeant. He waited until Stringer had finished before he yawned and asked, “Do you have a permit for that sidearm, Mister MacKail?”
Stinger blinked in astonishment. “What’s that got to do with it? Just about every man in town is packing a gun right now. The one I just told you about was packing two when he told me to get out of town.”
The police sergeant shrugged and said, “Since nobody got shot, he might have just been playing Frontier Days like everyone else. We ain’t got no Friendly Frank Folsom on our yellow sheets. So he likely made that up to go with his cap pistols. That pistol you have on is real. And I can see real bullets in the ammo loops of that gun rig. Nobody’s allowed to wander about so ferocious in this town, even during Frontier Days, Mister MacKail.”
Stringer hauled out his wallet to show off his press credentials and gun permit. “That was issued by a California judge. It don’t cut no ice in this state,” the Wyoming lawman opined. “But I’ll tell you what I’ll do, seeing as I was brung up Christian. You just empty that .38 and take all them other rounds out of your ammo loops and we’ll call it playacting for the Frontier Days, hear?”
Stringer stared down at him dumbfounded and protested, “Are you loco? Drunks are shooting live rounds at light bulbs all over town right now and I just told you someone a lot more serious seems to be trying to run me out of town!”
The sergeant yawned and pushed some papers around his desk. “Well, there‘s a westbound U.P. passing through around midnight and an eastbound even earlier. Whether you want to go or stay is up to you, of course. But, either way, you’re going to have to surrender or empty that gun if you don’t aim to spend the rest of the night in jail. We don’t hold with armed and dangerous drunks in our fair city of Cheyenne.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, who says I’m drunk, Sergeant?”
“You, for openers. Nobody asked you to come in here with malt liquor on your breath and a wild story of an almost shoot-out at a respectable hotel, you know.”
Stringer took a deep breath and let it half out so that his voice might sound reasonable as he explained again, “I had to come here because the U.S. Marshal’s office here in Cheyenne has closed for the night. Whether you believe me or not, I feel it my duty to tell Marshal LeFors or some damned lawman that some damned body seems to be upset about me talking to Tom Horn this evening.”
The desk sergeant looked sincerely puzzled. “Now what could poor old Tom, back in the cell block safe and sound, have to do with your tale of woe and a mysterious two-gun man at your hotel, Mister MacKail?” he asked.
Stringer’s patience was wearing thin fast. “He said I’d annoyed someone hereabouts by being nosy. I’ve only been in town a few hours. So far, I’ve had a conversation with Tom Horn and fooled around with the boys over at the fair grounds. Add it up.”
The desk sergeant pretended to at least, then said, “There ain’t nothing Tom Horn could have told you that the rest of us don’t know. How do you know someone else don’t have a more reasonable bone to pick with you?”
Stringer was fair-minded enough to consider that before he replied, “The only possible enemies I could have made here in Cheyenne—since I’m new in town—just don’t strike me as gents who’d have the wherewithall to hire professional gunslicks, and I’m telling you Friendly Frank struck me as the real thing. He wasn’t even mad at me. He came across as a gent who was doing his job, and he backed off just as detached when he decided they might not have been paying him enough for the chore. Maybe if I was to have another interview with Tom Horn…”
“You can’t,” the desk sergeant cut in, adding, “We run this jail house professional, too. There’s other men locked up in the back and they got a right to sleep undisturbed after sundown.”
Stringer shot a glance at the wall clock above the officious bastard’s head. “It’s barely after ten and, no offense, if you listen sharp you can hear a harmonica playing somewhere in the back,” he said.
The desk sergeant shrugged again and said, ‘That would be an old boy we’re fixing to hang alongside Tom Horn. Don’t he play nice? I wish he knew more tunes, though. I’m still waiting for you to hand over them bullets or tell me you’d enjoy spending the rest of the night listening to harmonica music.”
Stringer put his wallet away and proceeded to thumb rounds out of his gun rig as he muttered, “I knew I shouldn’t have come here. Maybe I can get Marshal LeFors to pay more attention in the morning.”
The desk sergeant chuckled fondly. “I doubts that. Old Joe LeFors is over in the Hole In The Wall Country right now with the posse he’s leading to round up the Wild Bunch.”
Stringer sighed. “Just my luck. But no doubt I’ll be able to talk to one of his deputies at his office, right?”
The desk sergeant produced an empty cigar box for the surrendered rounds. “Wrong. LeFors ain’t the marshal here, even when he ain’t out after Butch and Sundance. His regular post is Omaha.”
“Oh, hell, you mean he got transferred after he arrested Tom Horn?”
“Not hardly. He was kind enough to bring the rascal back here to Wyoming because Wyoming is where Horn done the
deed. The U.S. marshals in these parts had nothing to do with the case. You still want to talk to ‘em about Tom Horn?”
Having emptied his belt loops, Stringer broke open his .38 to empty that as well into the cigar box as he growled, “I’m going to have to talk to someone, sooner or later, who gives a damn. I hope you know the fix this will leave me in if I run into someone like Friendly Frank when I leave here.”
The desk sergeant closed the cover of the box and shoved it in a drawer as he smiled thinly and said, “I think that eastbound pulls in around eleven-fifteen, if waiting on the midnight westbound makes you nervous. I hope you understand that if you pick up some more live ammo after you leave here, we might not be as easy going next time?”
The alley behind the jail house was almost pitch dark and, better yet, someone had parked a Panard two-seater under Tom Horn’s tiny window-grid. Stringer climbed up on the driver’s seat and whistled through the bars. He only had to do it once before the older man replied, “Who’s out there and how come?”
Stringer identified himself and added, “Keep it down. They wouldn’t let me visit you again, and I’ve got some more to ask you.”
Horn said, “Ask away, then. How come I can hear you so good?”
When Stringer explained he was perched on the seat of a horseless carriage, Horn said, “Bueno. See if you can find a place to tie one end of this rope I got in here and maybe we can jerk this grid out with all that horsepower.”
Stringer said, “I’m not here to bust you out of jail, and even if I was, there’d be no way to start this thing up without the key. Does the name Friendly Frank Folsom mean anything to you?”
Horn replied, “Can’t say as it does. What was that about a key, pard? I thought you just got in the fool things and drove off natural, save for not needing a horse, of course. We’re talking about a hanging here, old son.”
Stringer said, “I know. But I don’t think the rascals after me could be worried about me helping the state of Wyoming hang you. So let’s try her the other way. The gunslick they sent after me let slip that I was nosing into matters they didn’t want me to. You’re the only mysterious cuss I’ve had words with that they might have cause to worry about. So what do you reckon they’re afraid you might have told me, Tom?”