Curly Bill and Ringo: They Rode to Hell Together

by Van Holt

  Doc Holliday headed a long list of Ringo’s enemies. Curly liked to think he headed a very short list of Ringo’s friends. Ringo didn’t make friends easily. You’d think he would have been nice to the few friends he did have, but that wasn’t the case. It was awful easy to get the impression that he didn’t want any friends, not even a few. It often seemed to Curly that Ringo was harder on his friends than on anyone else. He was reserved and polite with strangers and sometimes even with his enemies. With his friends he was usually reserved and rude.

  Curly could not have said why he liked Ringo above all other men, because even at his best Ringo was never easy to like. Curly’s affection for him would have been as hard to explain as his preference for certain colors of horses.

  Curly got up and went out into the lobby. The desk was deserted and he decided to have a look at the register, already grinning even before he saw the last signature written in it. There was no address, not even a first name. Just Easter.

  Then Curly’s dark face grew sober. Why had Ringo decided to use the name Curly had given him as a sort of joke? Was this his way of admitting that he was in fact the one who had killed those three men over in New Mexico? The name there in the register looked almost like a warning of some kind. But a warning of what?

  Chapter 3

  Curly left the hotel thoughtfully puffing his cigar, and who should he see just climbing down off his horse but Uncle Willy Gibson. Uncle Willy was getting old and fat and long in the tooth and climbing on and off his horse was no easy matter. There was a sort of whine in his voice nowadays and he was not at ease around Curly since Curly had started rustling his cows and selling them back to him, after first selling them below the border to give the Mexicans a chance to change the brands before they were retaken and resold.

  “Just the man I wanted to see,” Curly said, grinning as he crossed the street. “I was about to ride out to see you, Uncle Willy.”

  Uncle Willy didn’t believe a word of it, but he said anyway, with the usual whine in his voice, “Well, I’d a been plumb glad to see you, Curly. You’re always welcome at the Lazy G, you know that.”

  He kept his back to Curly as he tied his sleepy-eyed roan to the rail in front of the general store, which he owned in partnership with Grady Bascom. But Uncle Willy usually stayed out at his ranch. Cows and horses were all he knew. He had only started the store as a convenient supply point for the prosperous ranching empire he had envisioned when he first came to southeastern Arizona from Texas. Instead, he had watched his neighbors and his own hands run off his stock until there was scarcely anything left for them to steal. It was easy to understand why he was sore about it.

  “You ain’t sent for no stock detective or gunslinger, have you, Uncle Willy?” Curly asked.

  Uncle Willy looked around at him in alarm. “Now why would I go and do a fool thing like that, Curly? You know I don’t want no stock detectives nosin’ around here. Most of them cows you boys sold me wouldn’t pass no brand inspection, and I could get in trouble for buyin’ them, even though most of them was my own cows to begin with.”

  “There’s a stranger in town with a tied-down gun,” Curly said. It seemed almost natural to call Ringo a stranger, because that was what he was, everywhere he went. “I thought you might of sent for him.”

  “No, I don’t know anything about it, Curly. You think the county sheriff over at Tombstone might a sent him?”

  “More likely a hired gun someone’s brought in.”

  “Who’d want to do a fool thing like that?” Uncle Willy asked.

  “You’re the only one I can think of who might,” Curly said, studying the rancher’s long sour face. Uncle Willy often had a sour look on his face these days, but his voice was always soft and almost apologetic, like a man who hated arguments or any kind of unpleasantness. “You sure you ain’t sent off for anyone?”

  “You got my word on it, Curly. You know I wouldn’t cause you boys no trouble.”

  “I don’t know,” Curly said. “Your hands have been acting tough lately.”

  “Well, they shore ain’t got no room to. Them boys is stealin’ me blind, their own selves.”

  Curly squinted thoughtfully at him, wondering how long he’d known about it, and why he’d picked this moment to make it public. “I swear, Uncle Willy,” Curly said, flicking the ash from his cigar, “you sure have all the luck.”

  “Ain’t it the truth. Course, I reckon you knew about it all along and just never said anything.”

  Curly’s strong white teeth flashed in a grin. “Well, I didn’t have much room to talk, Uncle Willy.”

  “No, I reckon you never, at that, Curly,” Uncle Willy said. He looked down at the ground and his long horse face was grim. “I guess the next thing I know, you boys will be fightin’ over my cows.”

  Curly could have told him he was probably right about that. The Lefferts boys and their pals seemed to think that because they were still working for Uncle Willy, they had a right to steal his cows, and that Curly and the Hatchers didn’t have any right to, because they had quit. Every time Curly ran off a bunch, it got that much harder for Pike Lefferts and his boys to find any to steal, and they were swelled fit to bust about it. It was almost as if Curly and the Hatchers were stealing from them.

  “Course, I know you and the Hatcher boys has been runnin’ off a few head along,” Uncle Willy was saying, “I ain’t said nothin’ about it, but it can’t go on much longer, Curly. Too dang many people is tryin’ to get fat on my beef, while I’m poorer than the day I was born. I had five thousand head when I come here from Texas, and I soon won’t have a head left, the way things is goin’.”

  “Is that why you sent for Easter?” Curly asked.

  Uncle Willy raised his head and gaped at him. The movement was so sudden that the loose sagging flesh of his cheeks and throat trembled, “Who?”

  Curly hesitated, remembering Ringo’s request. “I ain’t sure who he is. I called him Easter as a sort of joke, and that’s the name he signed in the hotel register. I reckon he liked it better than his own, or figgered it was safer.”

  Uncle Willy bent his head and seemed to think for a moment, repeating the name to himself. “Easter. Ain’t that the name of the fellow who killed all them men in a gun battle over in New Mexico a coupla weeks back?”

  “That’s the one.”

  Uncle Willy looked toward the hotel and bared his long yellow teeth in a grin. “And you callin’ this stranger that. You’re a caution, Curly, you shore are. But ain’t Easter just a name somebody else uses part of the time? Ringo or somebody?’’

  “Ringo’s dead.”

  Uncle Willy dropped his glance and felt in his pockets for something. Whatever it was, he didn’t seem to find it. “Well, you’d know more about that than I do, Curly,” he said. “I heard both of you boys was dead. But after you turned up, it wouldn’t surprise me if he was still alive too. Seems like somebody said they found him sittin’ under a tree. Don’t seem like no dead man would be sittin’ under a tree, does it? Maybe one who was shot up purty bad, but not one who was dead. When people die they usually thrash around some.”

  Curly’s pale gray eyes, the color of smoked glass under the heavy black brows, narrowed slightly. Funny he had never thought about that himself. “You sure you didn’t send for him, Uncle Willy?” he asked again.

  The rancher took out a dirty bandanna and wiped his face.

  “I already give you my word, Curly. Ain’t much else I can say.”

  “All right, Uncle Willy. I just wanted to make sure.”

  Uncle Willy changed the subject. “How’s old Parson and Ma Hatcher gittin’ along?”

  “About the same.”

  Uncle Willy nodded. “I shore miss them, and the boys too. Old Parson was the best foreman I ever had. Worked for me for years in Texas ‘fore we even come
to Arizona. They was all like my own family. Course, I can’t blame them for wantin’ a spread of their own.”

  He looked down and studied the scuffed toes of his boots, his long face sad and bewildered. He hadn’t said what was really on his mind, which was that he couldn’t understand why the Hatchers would take to rustling his beef, after all he had done for them. Even old Parson and Ma Hatcher were in on it, and seemed even greedier than the boys, who had no thought of the future.

  To add insult to injury, they had moved into the abandoned house of a small rancher that Uncle Willy had bought out, or rather paid off, and then told to get out of the country and stop rustling his beef. Curly and the boys had taken over a similarly vacated shack just outside of town, without bothering to inform Uncle Willy. He owned several other empty shacks that had once belonged to small ranchers who were in reality just rustlers preying on the Lazy G. He had bought them out rather than fight them. But the rustling hadn’t stopped. In one way or another, either directly or indirectly, everybody around Boot Hill lived off Uncle Willy’s beef. He hadn’t said much about it up till now, but he had showed signs lately that he was getting tired of it.

  Naturally, Curly regretted this alarming change in Uncle Willy, but he hid his uneasiness behind a cloud of cigar smoke and grinned at the rancher’s long sour face. “You’ve got so many cows you won’t even miss a few head along.”

  Uncle Willy’s lips pulled down over his eroded yellow teeth and he studied the ground with narrowed eyes, while at the same time his gray brows were raised in a way that made Curly uncomfortable. “It’s got to stop,” he said. “I didn’t mind so much as long as it was just you and the Hatcher boys. But now my own hands is tryin’ to clean me out. I guess they’ve been doin’ it all along, when I thought it was them dang Mexicans. That’s what they kept tellin’ me. Course, that’s the main reason I hired you and Pike and them. The hands I had before didn’t want to tangle with them Mexican rustlers. So I hired you boys to go down there and steal my cows back, and now Pike and them know I can’t call in the law without gettin’ in trouble my own self. But they ain’t takin’ no chances. They’ve as good as told me what would happen to me if I tried to put a stop to the rustlin’. It looks like I’ll just have to turn the ranch and everything over to them and leave with nothin’ but the clothes on my back. Lately I’ve been thinkin’ about tryin’ to sell out and go back to Texas, but who’d buy a ranch the shape that one’s in, with most of the stock run off and the rest branded so many times you can’t tell who they rightly belong to?”

  “Well, at least you’ve still got the store,” Curly said, trying to cheer him up.

  “That’s what I come in to talk to Grady about, to see if he’ll take it off my hands,” Uncle Willy said. “He already owns half of it, and to hear him tell it we been losin’ money now for months. Hell, I reckon he’s stealin’ me blind, too.”

  Curly looked silently at the rancher and saw him looking off down the street with damp eyes. “The livery stable is losin’ money too,” he said. “I don’t see how I can afford to keep it open much longer, the way things is goin’.”

  By then he had Curly feeling so bad about rustling his cows that the big outlaw couldn’t think of anything to say. He just sighed and threw his expensive cigar away. He hated for a poor man like Uncle Willy to see him indulging in such a luxury—especially since Uncle Willy knew where the money for it had come from. Curly was also a little embarrassed by the fact that he was wearing a new suit of clothes while Uncle Willy had on the old range garb he always seemed to wear. Once or twice Curly had caught him studying his outfit through hard narrow eyes. It was plain that Uncle Willy wasn’t as fond of him as he had been, or else he had just decided that he couldn’t afford his friendship any longer.

  The rancher turned and went into the store, saying with his back to the rustler, “Well, I’ll prob’ly see you again ‘fore I head back for the ranch, Curly.”

  Not if Curly saw him first. He had already spoiled a fine morning with his self-pity and his long sour face. And Curly still didn’t know for sure whether he had sent for Ringo or not. You could never tell about Uncle Willy. He hardly ever told you what he was actually thinking or what he actually planned to do. His talk of selling out or abandoning his ranch might have been just to throw Curly off.

  Curly went to the restaurant and ordered coffee and apple pie for himself and Virgil “Zebra” Duncan, who hung around there all the time and helped Shorty Mack out when he needed it. Virgil showed Curly his pictures of zebras that he had torn out of various books and magazines and told him, for the hundredth time, that he was going to Africa just as soon as he could save up some money and catch him one of them striped horses. Virgil had no interest in ordinary horses, and Curly had never seen him on one, but he thought about zebras all the time.

  “Don’t you think they’d make smart riding animals?” he asked, not for the first time.

  “I don’t think anyone’s ever been able to break them to the saddle, Zebra,” Curly said. “I never heard of it anyway, and somebody must of tried it before now.”

  Virgil carefully put his pictures away in his pockets. “Them foreigners don’t know nothin’ about riding zebras,” he said. “I’ll bet you could ride one, Curly. You can ride anything. And train them too. I wish you’d go with me. We could bring back enough to start a zebra ranch. Think of it, Curly! The only one in the country, maybe the only one in the world! People would come from everywhere just to see them zebras, and they’d pay money to ride them. We’d be rich and famous in no time!”

  Curly kept his attention on his apple pie, scarcely listening. He had heard it all before and knew nothing would ever come of Zebra’s rosy dream. But Zebra was watching him and waiting for some reply, so he said, “Let me know when you get ready to go. By then I may be ready to go with you.”

  Zebra’s eyes lit up like a child’s on Christmas eve. “Would you, Curly? You ain’t just trying to make me feel good?”

  “I’ll think on it,” Curly said, as he finished his pie and washed it down with the last of his coffee.

  “You do that, Curly,” Zebra said. “Don’t forget, now.”

  Curly waved and headed for the door.

  As he was leaving the restaurant he saw Uncle Willy going into the hotel, and he thought sourly, I bet old Darius won’t try to run him out. That was a funny thing about Uncle Willy. Almost everyone laughed at him behind his back, but everyone respected him to his face, except for his own ungrateful hands. Most people around here knew that if it wasn’t for him there would be no town. If he did pull out, Boot Hill would become a ghost town overnight, for without the Lazy G, the town would have no reason to exist. So the smug townspeople did their grinning behind his back.

  Then it occurred to the rustler that Uncle Willy might have gone to the hotel to see Ringo. Uncle Willy was a sly old fox, and not the fool a lot of people thought him. And Curly suddenly remembered the old rumors that Ringo was secretly working for the Earps when he had ridden with Curly and the Clantons.

  Chapter 4

  Curly walked down the street to the livery stable, a tall rugged shape in the morning sunlight, and not unaware of the figure he cut with his broad shoulders, proud arched neck and big curly black head topped by the soiled wide-brimmed white stetson.

  The Bishop kid appeared wearing his pearl-handled gun that looked a little showy with his baggy old clothes. He shook his head, a slight frown in his pale eyes. “I already started to saddle your horse twice, Curly,” he said, “once when I saw you leave the saloon, then again when I saw you leave the hotel. I figgered both times you’d be right down. Then when I saw you head for the restaurant, I said the hell with it and put him back in the stall.”

  Curly bared his big white teeth in an unsympathetic grin and leaned against the corral bars to admire Ringo’s sleek black gelding. The black was a beauty, with a white star in its foreh
ead and three white stockings. But it was the strange brand that drew his attention. He knew all the brands in southern Arizona, a big part of New Mexico and West Texas, and this one wasn’t familiar. Also, the black, though in good condition, looked like he’d come a long way. There was no telling where Ringo had spent the last eight or nine months, while he was recovering from his wounds.

  Billy Bishop led out Curly’s saddled horse—an unusual leopard Appaloosa that from a distance looked like a white or light gray horse with a black mane and tail. The small dark spots scattered over him weren’t noticeable at more than forty or fifty yards. It was a fine, spirited animal, and the best horse Curly had ever managed to steal in his entire life.

  The Bishop kid watched as Curly checked the cinch from habit. Billy was around seventeen, a tall skinny kid with big hands and feet and straw-colored hair growing out over his ears. He looked awkward and clumsy, but as usual appearances were deceiving. Once out in the steep rocky hills southeast of town he had demonstrated that he was as sure-footed as a goat. And he could do all kinds of tricks with his pearl-handled Colt and break bottles or puncture tin cans tossed into the air. In his spare time he was always practicing with that gleaming, nickel-plated gun, which had led Curly to call him Billy “the Kid” Bishop. That pleased him like a new pony, but most people still just called him the Bishop kid. His folks were dead and Uncle Willy had given him the job at the stable because he liked horses and didn’t seem to mind shoveling manure.