Stringer in Tombstone

by Lou Cameron

  They moved on up the trail. He spied a rusty corrugated tin roof above walls of whitewashed ‘dobe. The unhappy mule was in a pole corral out back. Stringer could see at a glance it was in bad shape. A horse would have been dead by now. The poor brute had been surviving on pear pads until it had eaten all the cactus it could get at over the top rail of the corral. Stringer called out, “Hello the house! Is anybody home and, if so, can’t you see your critter needs watering?”

  There was no answer. Stringer spurred Blue Ribbon forward, around to the back, and dismounted to climb through the corral poles and get at the rusty hand pump by the dry and empty water trough. The mule already had its thirsty muzzle down in the rust and dust of the trough. Springer worked the pump handle and got nothing but an excuse to curse as the dried-out leather valves brought up nothing but Arizona air. He rolled back through the corral poles as the poor mule brayed and tried to follow him. He got a canteen from his saddle and got back to the pump as fast as he could. The fool mule tried to bite the canteen and the hand holding it away from Stringer. He punched its muzzle away and pouted half the contents in the trough. As the mule tried to wet its whistle with the little that didn’t soak right into the crud, Stringer primed the pump with what was left in the canteen. It took a full minute for the leather gasket and flutter valve to soften and swell. By then the mule was arguing with him about the now-empty canteen again. But that was soon put to rights by the sputtering stream of pump water. As the trough began to fill, old Blue Ribbon forgot her vaquero training and dragged her grounded reins over to stick her own head through the corral poles and help the mule drink all the water in sight. Stringer pumped until he felt sure there was enough for both, albeit not too much; then he left the two brutes there and went off to find out why on earth the mule’s owner treated livestock so disgusting.

  As he opened the back door of the one-room ‘dobe, gun drawn, he forgave the old man stretched out on a corner bunk. From the color of his shrunken face, and the way it smelled in here, it seemed obvious he’d been dead some time. The exact time was hard to judge in such dry country. Folk tended to dry up and mummify if left where the birds and bugs couldn’t get at them. Stringer left the back door wide, then opened the front door and all the windows. It helped, some, but he knew that if he shut the damper on the potbellied stove in one corner, and let some newsprint sort of smolder, he’d feel better about breathing and thus might be able to stay in here long enough to figure out what had happened.

  But as he moved to what he’d taken at first to be bales of old newspaper aboard a packing box in another corner, he saw that while some of the paper had gone buttered-toast brown with age, the stacks were neatly divided with pasteboard markers. Some had been bound like notebooks with brown butcher’s paper, and some few darker-brown bundles, deeper in the piles, were in fact actual scrapbooks, with old newspaper clippings pasted neatly to their now-dry-and-crumbling manila pages. Stringer ignored the odor of dry death—it was fading some by now in any case—and scouted an old army garrison trunk at the foot of the dead man’s bunk. He only had to see a few old mail envelopes to know who he was talking to as he told the wrinkled corpse, “I’m sure sorry about this, Dutchy Steinmuller. I wanted to talk to you about a heap of things and now you can’t even tell me why you’re dead.”

  He moved closer to the old man’s partly mummified face. The yellowed teeth were bared in a ghastly grin and the eye sockets stared back at him with what looked like a pair of dried prunes. The body wasn’t mummified enough to move without stinking the whole place up again, and in any case Stringer was hardly qualified as a medical examiner. It was no doubt wiser to let the county figure out how old Steinmuller had died. Meanwhile, Sam Barca, back in Frisco, still wanted to know whatever could have possessed the old-timer to dispatch a news lead that made little or no sense.

  As Stringer rolled a smoke, staring about at his humble surroundings, he found it less mysterious. The wire services paid just enough for tips to make sending them in worthwhile. The old ex-newspaperman would have known that, and the two to five dollars the wire service had paid him, if it had paid him yet, would have been big money to anyone living this close to the bone. Stringer went back to paw through the contents of the trunk. There was only the mail in the lift-out drawer atop a mess of old clothes. He didn’t find any envelopes addressed to the old man from any wire service. That was easily explained by the simple fact that they paid at the end of the month. But it asked another question. There should have been a mess of payments from more than one wire service if the old-timer had been one of those fool pests who sent in tales of two-headed calves and haunted houses. Ergo, old Steinmuller had considered his tip real news. But news about what? There was nothing new about abandoned mine shafts filling up with ground water. The pump out back had just proven the water table wasn’t half that deep in these parts.

  Stringer lit the smoke he’d built and told the dead man, “I’d best carry your mule and the news of your demise back to town and let them tidy up whatever needs to be tidied. Sam Barca won’t be able to say I never tried.”

  But he decided, as long as he was there, he’d have a look-see through those carefully saved old newspapers. He hoped to find a few items of interest. What he found was a gold mine. The old-timer had not only saved back issues of all four Tombstone papers, he’d indexed them by date of publication and pasted up separate scrapbooks dealing with ongoing items of local interest. A lot of back issues were missing, of course. Stringer could see at a glance the old man hadn’t tried to store twenty years’ worth of back issues. None of the papers kept simply as papers had been cut up with scissors. It was safe to assume the old man had put anything left over from his scrapbook building into that old stove. Nine out of ten issues of any paper published in a small town wouldn’t have been worth saving to begin with. But, as it was, there was a quarter ton of moldering newsprint here. So Stringer simply dug out the dozen or so scrapbooks, figuring they’d be the cream of the old man’s collection. They still made quite a load. But he was sore put to decide which, if any, he’d want to leave behind. Old Steinmuller had collected a heavy tome on the Earp family, another on the Clantons and their pal, old Sheriff John Behan. Some of the thinner volumes seemed to detail the deadly doings of lesser mortals like Curly Bill and Johnny Ringo. But the old-timer had been interested in the politics and economics of the mining town as well. Stringer hauled his trove out in two loads and lashed them with latigo leather to ride like saddlebags behind him. Then he closed all the doors and windows the way he’d found them, to keep critters out, and let the mule out of the corral before he mounted up to ride back to town.

  The mule followed like a pup for about a mile. Then all of a sudden it wasn’t back there anymore. Stringer didn’t worry about it. He knew mules, ponies, and, hell, some said camels the army had experimented with out here before the Civil War, could get along on their own in these parts. How they managed was their own problem.

  Knowing where he was and where he was going, it seemed to take him far less time to get back to Tombstone. It was just as well. It was warming up again by the time he made the city limits. He stopped first at the library and lugged his two bundles of scrapbooks in to show Annie. He found her fussing at a pair of dirty-faced little boys about the condition they’d returned a picture book in. She seemed less than thrilled to see Stringer, even after she’d gotten rid of the kids. She said, “Darling, you’re going to have to quit pestering me night and day. People are bound to talk.”

  “I didn’t come to pester you,” he protested. “I want to leave these scrapbooks here with you for safekeeping. I got them out at Steinmuller’s place. I found him dead. So now I have to report that to the law.”

  She gasped, “How dreadful! But isn’t the law likely to consider anything you took from out there evidence, or at least part of his estate?” Stringer said, “That’s why I don’t want ‘em on me when I stop by the marshal’s office. The law’s likely to impound everything from his water pu
mp to his socks and just store ‘em all some place and forget ‘em. I want to read through the old-timer’s collected wisdom as soon as I have the time. I figure as long as my feature editor wants yet another version of the deadly doings in old-time Tombstone it’s about time somebody got things right. Thanks to old Steinmuller’s saving ways, it ought to be a snap.”

  She looked away. “I don’t know, Stuart,” she murmured. “You know how I feel about you, but I’m not sure I want to get mixed up in anything that might be against the law.”

  “That’ll learn me to tell the truth to a woman. Don’t worry. I was dumb to ask and they’ll likely be just as safe at my hotel.”

  She nodded, but then she shot him a thoughtful look. “Oh? Were you planning on staying there, later this evening?”

  He shot a thoughtful look back at her as he replied, “I got to stay somewhere till Knuckles Ashton makes up his mind whether to live or die. Your move, Annie.”

  She hesitated before she said, “My head’s telling me one thing, in the clear light of daytime. I know what other parts of me are sure to feel like, after dark, if we quit while we’re ahead. So, yes, I want you to come by my place, later tonight, but can I trust you to be discreet, dear? The neighbors, you know.”

  He chuckled fondly. “If I’m checked into the Cosmopolitan, official, and don’t come calling on you with a brass band, we might not wreck your rep entire.”

  But as he picked up the bundles of scrapbooks he added, in a more sober tone, “Don’t count on me showing up early, if then. I might wind up in jail, or worse, between now and then.”

  She gasped, “Oh, heavens, maybe you’d best not tell anyone anything about what you found out at Dutchy Steinmuller’s.”

  He said, “I got to. It’s one thing to bend the law a mite. It’s another to bust it entire. I doubt I’ll have any trouble when I report the old gent’s death. If I’m not at your place by, say, ten or eleven, feel free to start without me.”

  She laughed and called him a big goof. By the time he’d ridden on to his hotel, scrapbooks and all, he was beginning to agree with her. Men as well as women thought more sensible in the daytime, and how on earth was he supposed to whip up that Sunday feature for the Sun if the horny but cautious gal wouldn’t allow him to darken her door with Steinmuller’s scrapbooks?

  When he got to the Cosmopolitan he stabled Blue Ribbon and lugged the two bundles in through a side entrance. The clerk on duty seemed surprised to see him again. He told Stringer, “We have your bag here, under the desk. When you didn’t come back last night we assumed you’d checked out.”

  Stringer growled, “I’d have come back to get my possibles and settle up if I was leaving town. I sure hope you’ve cleaned up the same room? It saves asking for a new key.”

  The clerk seemed a mite dubious. He went back to get the hotel manager, a priss who fussed at Stringer about his uncouth habits until Stringer told him to stop fussing and figure the damages. Then they got to be pals again. The manager said the blown-out windowpanes had cost eight dollars to replace and that while the bedstead, being brass, had survived the blast, the extra bedding and mattress added up to another ten bucks. Stringer handed over a double eagle and demanded a receipt with his change. There was an outside chance his paper would allow the outlay as legitimate travel expenses. He could just see the bookkeeper’s face when she got to the part about dynamite.

  Having squared accounts with the Cosmopolitan, and enlisted two bits’ worth of assistance from a bellhop, Stringer got all his stuff back up to the same room and stored the scrapbooks in the closet atop his gladstone. The new bedding looked a mite used, and they’d missed a few feathers in the corners, but what the hell. He locked up again and went back down to get the harder chore over with.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  He found Wes Rhodes in his office, gnawing a ham on rye, and told the town law he’d found old Dutchy Steinmuller dead.

  Rhodes put down his sandwich with a sigh. “Curly Bill and Buckskin Frank were before my time, here. But you sure seem out to become a legend in your own right, MacKail. What makes you so unsafe to be around? You don’t look all that dangerous.”

  Stringer snorted in disgust. “Hell, I never said I’d killed the old man. I just said I found him dead. I don’t know how he got in that unpleasant condition. But all you have to do is look at him to see he’s been dead some time. I just got here; Steinmuller’s been dead since before I arrived and all the time since.”

  Rhodes wiped some grease from his mouth, his eyes staring thoughtfully up at Stringer. Then he shrugged. “Or so you say,” he said. “Where’d you find the old man, MacKail?”

  Stringer said, “In bed, at home, out on Turkey Creek Road. He was too shriveled up for me to guess whether he died on his own or with somebody’s help. He was lying there natural. There was no sign of a struggle, and a mule worth stealing was still out back.”

  Rhodes decided, “I’ll send some boys out there with a buckboard, a tarp, and some quicklime. I know where it is. I also know old Dutchy was seventy if he was a day and wouldn’t have put up enough of a struggle to matter. You still at the Cosmopolitan, MacKail?”

  Stringer said, “I’m still checked in there, if that’s what you mean.”

  “That’s just what I mean,” Rhodes confirmed. “If someone’s dead, total, I’m going to have to wire the sheriff down in Bisbee about it. Whether he wants to let you wander about loose until we can figure out why so many folk get hurt around you or not is up to him.”

  “My conscience is clean as a whistle as far as that old man I never met, alive, is concerned,” Stringer vowed. “I take it from your tolerant attitude that Knuckles Ashton is still with us, alive and well?”

  Rhodes said, “I can’t say how alive and well he might feel, right now. I know he ain’t with us. One of the fancy gals attending to him found his bed empty this very morning. We’ve asked around town. Nobody’s seen hide nor hair of him, since. I don’t suppose you’d know where he might have gone, MacKail?”

  “I didn’t know he’d even got up, until just now. Maybe he just felt mortified and rode out of town on his own.”

  “With a bullet wound in his ass?” asked the town law, dubiously, before demanding, “By the way. They say you didn’t spend the night at your hotel last night, either. I don’t suppose you’d want to say where you was when the gent you shot, more than once, sort of vanished off the face of the earth?”

  “I can’t,” Stringer said. “Since I assume you to be a man of the world, I reckon I can ask you what you’d think of a man who’d ask a lady he’s not married up with to alibi him.”

  Wes Rhodes raised an eyebrow. “In my opinion, a man who’d kiss and tell would eat shit off a shovel. On the other hand, that’s a mighty time-worn excuse and you’re better known in Tombstone as a gunfighter than a lover.”

  Stringer smiled thinly. “That’s the first good news I’ve had all morning. Am I free to go, Wes?”

  The town law said, “I’m still thinking about that.” Then they both blinked in surprise as a railroad whistle moaned loudly close by. Wes Rhodes got to his feet, muttering, “What the hell?” as he headed for the door. Then he added, “You better tag along, MacKail. I’ll figure out what to do about you once I figure out why there seems to be a railroad engine somewhere in town.”

  The two of them stepped out in the harsh sunlight. They could both tell by the others running that way, even before they spied the pillar of smoke above the closed-down Tombstone depot, that a train had indeed steamed up from the main line along the out-of-service spur.

  As Stringer and Wes Rhodes joined the puzzled throng down the street a parade of curious-looking dudes marched out of the depot, squinting around in the bright sunlight as if they’d all just arrived in a mighty exotic part of the world. From the way some of them were dressed, they had. Wes Rhodes muttered, “I give up. The opera house is closed and none of them look like sopranos to begin with.” Then he spotted someone he knew in the crowd and move
d over to demand, “What’s going on, here, Lawyer Lumford?”

  The local lawyer, if that was what he was, struck Stringer as a jolly fat man in a seersucker suit and straw skimmer. His sensible riding boots saved him from looking as greenhorn as the others in his party. He smiled at the town law and said, “Pilgrims to the Promised Land, Wes. Investors, anyways. We just got the S.P. to run us a special over from L.A. so’s these gents could have a look at the Lucky Cuss.”

  Wes Rhodes frowned. “How come? That vein pinched out no later than ‘99 and it’s full of water besides.”

  Lawyer Lumford looked smug as he replied, “A lot you know. A syndicate has been formed to open the mine again. They might open all the shafts again if the Lucky Cuss pans out.” He shot a friendly glance at Stringer. “I don’t believe I know this young gent, Wes.”

  The town law said, “He’s a murder suspect. His name’s MacKail. What are you trying to pull on these poor dudes, Lawyer Lumford? If there was two bits’ worth of silver left in them hills they’d have never pulled up stakes and abandoned every shaft, owing a lot of bills here in town.”

  The portly lawyer insisted, “The old-timers weren’t scientific. They gave up when the ore got harder to produce, not when it was all gone.”

  Stringer asked, “Isn’t that the same thing?”

  Lumford replied, expansively, “Not at all, son. Modern machinery can keep the shafts dry, a lot cheaper as well as better than the old steam pumps. Modern extraction methods can leach bullion from ore too low grade for the old-time gut-and-gitters to mess with. The big bonanza days may be over. Gone are the days when a drifter with a miner’s pan could get rich, easy. But even if the cream’s been skimmed, there’s still a lot of silver and, who knows, even gold in them there hills.”

  Wes Rhodes looked disgusted. “You’ve been out in the sun too long, Lawyer Lumford,” he decided. “In the best of times there was never no gold in the Dragoons.”