Stringer in a Texas Shoot-Out

by Lou Cameron

  Nobody had, but Stringer smiled anyway, and confided, “I doubt even old Teddy would argue with you about that now. They had Henry halfway hung for hunting U.S. deputy marshals out of season when the Cherokee Tribal Council appealed for executive clemency during an election year.” He drained his schooner and chuckled before he added, “They learned a good lesson as well. One of the first banks their Henry hit when they got him out of jail had some uninsured tribal oil well royalties gathering interest in its vaults.”

  He was about to add that the good-looking nephew of Belle and Sam Starr, neither distinguished for their looks, was a pleasant enough young cuss to talk to, as long as you didn’t have enough on you to inspire him to say, “Stick ’em up.” However, just then he sensed a sudden tenseness in the crowd and hardly needed Windy to tell him, softly, “Oh, Lord, here he comes and you’re still wearing that damned gun!”

  Windy had said it softly enough. Stringer felt alone in the crowd as the space all around him seemed to spread out like a ripple. Since it felt even worse with his back to whatever was going to happen next, Stringer slowly turned, empty beer schooner in his left hand as his right hand hovered ready for just about anything, hoping nothing too awful was about to take place.

  Then, as he got his first good gander at the only other man in sight wearing even one gun, Stringer’s first impulse was to laugh incredulously, for if that was Buckskin Jack Blair coming through the batwings wearing a small tin star, a big .45, and an even bigger Texas hat he was an otherwise comical little cuss who couldn’t have stood tall as a grown woman without high-heeled boots aboard his prissy little feet. He looked as if he might have to shave once a week. As his watery, oyster-gray eyes met Stringer’s, the tiny town tamer looked as if he’d shit his pants if anyone popped a paper bag in his presence. Stringer kept his own face blank and made sure his gun hand made no proddy gestures. They said Billy the Kid had made much the same impression on bigger boys he met up with and, while it seemed dubious he’d really gunned twenty-one men before he reached twenty-one, he’d surely gunned enough to rate a certain grudging respect.

  While Stringer started out willing to offer some to the little shit, it got even tougher when the marshal piped up, in a tone midway between that of a school marm and a mouse, “They told me there was a stranger packing a gun in here, darn it all!”

  Stringer managed not to laugh outright, although it wasn’t easy, as he replied, “The boys were just telling me you didn’t approve of such goings-on, Marshal. I was just about to hand my gun over to the management and…”

  Then he drew and fired, not at Buckskin Jack Blair but at the other cuss throwing down on the tiny town tamer’s back from just inside the door!

  As Stringer’s round shoved the darkly dressed backshooter through the stained glass window of the Parker Arms, the short lawman went frogbelly white and, facing a man with his own gun already out, froze like a mighty scared statue ’til someone he must have trusted a heap better yelled, “Son of a bitch if old Chuck Woods didn’t just try to backshoot you, Buckskin Jack!”

  As others rumbled agreement or hung silent in an oddly sullen way, the skinny little lawman slowly turned from Stringer until he could see the limp, dead hand lying out on the plank walk amid shards of lamp-lit multicolored glass. Then he was outside like a shot, his own gun coming out pretty sudden for such a sissy-looking cuss and, while nobody else seemed to think it wise, Stringer strode on out to join him on the walk, reloading his one spent chamber as he did so. Buckskin Jack glanced up from the body sprawled on the planking to demand, in that same mousy voice, how Stringer had known the late Chuck Woods had been about to go for his own gun.

  Stringer said, “I didn’t know, ’til I saw him going for it with pure malice in his eyes, aiming at your back.”

  As Stringer put his own gun away, Blair didn’t look quite as reassured as he might have. He thoughtfully insisted, “You started to make your move after this brute commenced to draw?”

  To which Stringer could only modestly reply, “He wasn’t all that good. He didn’t expect it to be a quick-draw contest. He just saw what he took to be a good chance to nail you easy and, well, the rest you know.”

  The tiny town tamer’s voice sounded just a tad more manly, or at least more boyish, as he got his nerves more under control to state, “I thought I had this meanmouth cowed. He must have thought I’d be too busy with you, and to tell the truth, I would have been, had push ever come to shove. Has anyone ever told you before that you move faster than spit on a hot stove, cowboy?”

  Stringer replied, “I keep trying to tell folk in these parts I’m not so strange. I’d be Stuart or Stringer MacKail from the San Francisco Sun. My feature editor, Sam Barca, said something about wiring you in advance that I was on my way.”

  Buckskin Jack brightened in sudden understanding and smiled for the first time, saying, “Oh, sure, we were sort of expecting you, though nobody told us you were on your way to save my bacon from yet another would-be bad man!”

  Stringer nodded soberly and said, “We heard there seemed to be a lot of that going on for such an out-of-the-way place, no offense. Would it be too much to ask you for an interview, once you get things neater, here, if I was to let you hold this gun for me whilst I was in town, Marshal?”

  The shrimp he’d just saved said, “You’d best hang on to that gun for now, seeing the boys will surely have you down as one of my pals. I’ll tell you anything I know as soon as I rustle up some help with this dead rascal. Meanwhile, watch your own back, Mr. MacKail. I’ll be darned if I know why, either, but for some reason one mean cuss after the other seems to be headed for this wide spot in the road with the expressed intent of taking it away from me.”

  Stringer said he’d heard as much and asked if the squirt had any notion what the prize might be for the final winner. Buckskin Jack looked more like a pouty kid than a town tamer as he stuck out his lower lip and replied, “Nope. But whatever it is, they can’t have it. So there!”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  When one considered the size of the town, they’d paid a hell of a heap of deputies to work for Buckskin Jack, unless unpaid volunteers just loved to jump when he yelled “Froggy” in his falsetto voice. Stringer tallied over a dozen in the tricky light as they all tidied up after his six-gun.

  Buckskin Jack held a rep as a town tamer that made him too tempting a target for him to be drinking in public. So as things simmered down, the two of them went over to the marshal’s office in the town lockup to get better acquainted. The low-slung building was built of adobe, left Mexican-raw on the outside but whitewashed on the inside. The row of empty patent cells along the back wall looked spanking new or freshly painted that shade of landlord green that didn’t show whether it was dirty or just depressing. The office furnishings out front looked fairly new as well. Buckskin Jack indicated a cane-seated chair for Stringer, near the imposing oak desk gleaming under a fresh coat of orange shellac, as he broke out a fresh bottle of Maryland rye and a brace of hotel tumblers from the top drawer of a filing cabinet painted that same awful shade of green.

  Stringer noticed nothing in the way of chasers were offered with the neat whiskey as his shrimpy host sat down in the more imposing swivel chair on the far side of the desk. As a Scot himself, Stringer knew they were playing hairy-chested male drinkers, so he just raised his heroic drink, murmured, “Slainte!” and inhaled a slug. It wasn’t bad stuff, so it was as possible to enjoy neat as, say, tequila. Branch water wasn’t safe to drink in many border towns, either, come to study on it.

  His own recent adventures sounding less complicated, Stringer brought Blair up to date on himself and how he’d gotten there, leaving out the dirty parts about Ynez and her goats. As he’d hoped and expected, the saga of Buckskin Jack took up more than a page of shorthand in his notebook, and he was only taking down the vital statistics.

  Unlike the traditional breed of lawman in more rustic parts of this land of opportunity, hired more for size and growl than on a
ny other qualifications, John Blair, a.k.a. Buckskin Jack, was one of the new breed who’d actually had some training on a big town police force. He said he’d worked almost three years for the Dallas P.D.

  Stringer was too polite to ask whether he’d really pounded a beat or been a file clerk. The bantam cock of the walk in Comanche Woe obviously knew which end of a gun the bullets came out of.

  That got them around to the recent demise of Mysterious Dave Mather, if that had been the cuss Buckskin Jack had shot, over at the Parker Arms. Stringer wasn’t too surprised to hear the little lawman insist it was, after the delicate matter of Mather’s double ID as Pete Harlow had been raised.

  The diminutive but determined-looking Blair declaimed, “I was more surprised than you could have been to learn Pete Harlow was a wanted killer, MacKail. He was out there to the Tumbling H when I hired on here in Comanche Woe and, while I can’t say we were ever sweethearts, I never had just cause to even cuss the taciturn old-timer. He kept to himself for the most part. Only came in once or twice a week to get laid at Madam Maggie’s, enjoy a stirrup cup or more at the Parker Arms, and get on home in time to watch the stars come out.”

  “Then how come you wanted to shoot him?” Stringer asked soberly.

  The town law shrugged and said, “I never wanted to. I had to. He was wanted for murder and unlawful flight to avoid prosecution. If ever the matter should come up, Stringer, remember it’s ever best to leave town before the grand jury sets a date for your trial than it is to run for it, leaving a judge and jury chagrined.”

  Stringer sighed impatiently and replied, “I’ve covered some courtroom cases in my time. Where I’m stuck here is with how you got this sudden inspiration to shoot Mysterious Dave Mather if you had him down as a harmless old recluse called Harlow.”

  Buckskin Jack sipped more of his rotgut before he slid open a desk drawer, saying, “Someone who knew him better sent us one of them Nonsense Moses notes. I got it here some damned place, if only I could find it. I swear someday I’m going to kill that Mexican cleaning woman they stuck us with.”

  He rummaged around some more, slid the drawer shut with a racial remark, and continued, “At any rate, you don’t have to take my word, let alone the word of a poison pen writer too shy to sign his own name. Before I called Pete Harlow on being the long-lost David Mather, I naturally wired both the county sheriff and the nearest Ranger company over to Pecos Junction. The lazy old fart the county machine made a sheriff out of never saw fit to wire us back. We finally got a letter with postage due telling us not to be silly about twenty-year-old murder cases in other states, Yankee states, at that.”

  He opened yet another drawer, found a fair-sized envelope under a set of handcuffs, and hauled it out, saying, “The Rangers take such matters more professional. They wired back that the case was still open and sent us a copy of the outstanding warrant and a photograph of the wanted man by special delivery. I don’t mind telling you I had a time keeping my thoughts to myself until I had proof positive.”

  He handed the envelope to Stringer, saying, “The bigger of the two photographs was took here, after. I keep everything I know, which ain’t much, in the same envelope, see?”

  Stringer had noticed they seemed to keep the medicinal alcohol in their filing cabinet. He’d seen copies of the sepia-tone portrait made from an older tintype before. Mysterious Dave had been forced to hold that pose in Dodge longer than anyone had to say cheese these days. That no doubt accounted for the look of intent stupidity old-timers seemed to have worn, staring glassy eyed into the camera lens. Stringer had yet to figure out why everyone photographed on the far side of 1888 seemed to be wearing dusty duds of crumpled paper. He figured it had to have something to do with the film. It hardly seemed likely that even European royalty would have posed for pictures looking a lick more shabby than they had to and, even if one assumed everyone from Honest Abe to Prince Albert had been naturally uncouth, that still failed to account for the way most everyone photographed from 1890 on had suddenly taken to soap and laundry bleach. The current beauty standards owed as much to sepia-tone fashion plates of the Modern Miss as it did to the drawings of Charles Dana Gibson, he felt sure. However, as if in an attempt to revert to the bad old days of wet plate photography, the larger picture of a cadaver propped up on a cellar door to be snapped by harsh sunlight looked sloppy as hell.

  Some resemblance was there, allowing for twenty-odd years and forty or fifty extra pounds. Mysterious Dave had been skinny when he’d posed in Dodge that time. The cadaver on the cellar door with its duds disarranged and covered with crud had its eyes swollen shut and its puffy lips exposing its teeth, as if the poor cuss had received a good beating as well as a bullet or more in the heart. Stringer grimaced and said, “Must have been a mighty hot day. Naturally, the town didn’t see fit to spring for any embalming at all.”

  It had been more a statement than a question, but Buckskin Jack answered, innocently, “He could have been preserved good as jam jelly had anyone come forward to take his remains off our hands to do with as they pleased. But, they never. We kept him above ground on public view until, as you just noted, the heat commenced to get to him. Then we planted him, wrapped in his own bedding, with a numbered stake in case anyone ever shows up to claim his bones.”

  Stringer knew better, but he knew his feature editor, too. So, he asked if it was safe to report the late Mysterious Dave had been planted in Comanche Woe’s Boot Hill. Despite his prissy dude ways, the town law looked amused and said, “We can bury you Baptist, Methodist or Papist, should anyone come forward to so designate your mortal remains. Otherwise you get no other choice than the potter’s field set aside when they laid the place out back in the ’70s. Whoever started that shit about Boot Hill, anyways?”

  “Oscar Wilde, most likely.” Stringer had long since decided. He added, “I for one would have hesitated to tell the kith and kin of King Fisher or Clay Allison they weren’t refined enough to be planted alongside the more sedate citizenry of any town. Funny headstones that might or might not indicate a real grave have been sprouting up like weeds since tourists from back East have started carrying those Kodak cameras of late. They have Boot Hills in both Creede and Dodge that bear no relationship to any graveyards in either town’s history, but I digress. You were about to tell me how Curly Bill Brocius and Henry Starr got into this discussion, weren’t you?”

  Buckskin Jack blinked, then muttered, “Was I? I’m still biding my time on them two. The same any-ominous cuss or cussess who tipped us off on Mysterious Dave sent word on those two wants as well, but the Rangers say they don’t have photographs of either.”

  As the little lawman opened yet another drawer, lower down, Stringer said, “I know Henry Starr on sight. Met him not that long ago in Tulsa, when U.S. Deputy William Tilghman was expressing the desire to meet him there as well. I don’t find it surprising that old Henry saw fit to leave Tulsa so suddenly. You say he’s here, now?”

  Blair straightened up in his chair with a sheet of pale purple paper, saying, “He was, under the handle of Cherokee Miller, until he heard I’d been asking questions about him.”

  Stringer frowned thoughtfully and asked, “Isn’t someone who stayed missing a pinto and palomino?”

  The tiny town tamer soberly replied, “That’s what I just said.”

  Stringer mulled the assorted facts over in his head as he polished off the last of the rye in his tumbler. Then he put the empty glass on one corner of the desk and reached in his shirt for the makings, saying, “I told you about those cowhands pestering the wrong boys over similar mounts, and I reckon Starr had to get to Sierra Blanca some damned way if he was there when I was. What can you tell me about those two unfortunates in the Vista Linda bathing facility with us?”

  Blair handed him the anonymous letter, saying, “Bounty hunters, after him, not you, most likely. You can see for yourself no mention is made of anyone named Lawrence or Palmer in this note.”

  Stringer made a mental note
that Buckskin Jack had a lawman’s grip on names as well as guns. He’d only named those cadavers down in Sierra Blanca a time or more in passing. As he scanned the note the little lawman had just handed him, he saw it said just about the same things Blair had just told him. Written in a deeper shade of purple, the unsigned handwriting struck Stringer as that of a semi-educated or perhaps elderly woman. As he handed it back he said, “They say Hell hath no fury, and I can see a no-longer-young spurned lover of old Dave Mather writing this better than I can a doxy pissed at much younger Henry Starr.”

  Blair put the note away again, muttering that he needed some photographs more then he needed a handwriting expert. Stringer asked if the same person had tipped him off on Curly Bill, and Blair replied, “Same paper and purple ink. I just said that’s not half as important as what all these outlaws are doing in and about my town all at once!”

  Stringer asked to hear more about Curly Bill, who made a heap less sense than Henry Starr, hiding out in any part of the west right now. Blair explained, “He’s been playing possum in these parts for years as a sort of pipe salesman and water dowser. Don’t laugh. They tell me that, in the end, old Pat Garrett made more money as a water witch than he ever made as a lawman.”

  Stringer chuckled fondly and said, “That’s true. He told me when I interviewed him on a train one time that they’d screwed him out of the miserable five hundred posted on Billy the Kid because the reward had been posted for the capture, not the killing of the young cuss. Say, how did we wind up talking about old Pat Garrett? He’s never been all that wanted by anyone. The last I heard, he was raising goats up near El Paso since he lost both his job with U.S. Customs and his last bid to get elected as a sheriff some more.”

  Blair grumbled, “He ought to run for sheriff of this county, then. The one we have isn’t worth the day wages of a dog catcher. I only mentioned Pat Garrett in passing because they say for a while he was in the same business as a hitherto local cuss called Wet Willy Wallace. The same public-spirited letter writer who tipped us off on Mysterious Dave points out that Curly Bill vanished from Arizona Territory about the same time Wet Willy Wallace showed up in these parts, sinking tube wells and demanding full payment for the pipes whether there was water down at the far end of ’em or not.”