by Lou Cameron
There were limits to how hard even a lost and desperate man afoot and unarmed should push himself. So when the moon set in the wee small hours and Stringer found himself in a suddenly inky pine forest, he flopped down on the spongy pine duff for a catnap. It wasn’t easy to fall asleep, even though he was tired as hell. He kept thinking about the way that poor little waif had screamed, falling to her death; and when he wasn’t thinking about that, he was thinking wistfully about the brace of .44-40’s she’d carried down with her and cursing himself for not having insisted on wearing that gun rig. It didn’t help to tell himself old Opal would have been in just as bad a fix if he’d been the one to fall off that cliff. He tried to tell himself that last time they’d made love hadn’t been the cause of her demise. He was still here, and he’d done most of the work.
He finally used a trick he’d long since discovered. He tried to think about something else that mattered less. He’d once managed to fall asleep down in Cuba with the Spaniards lobbing harassing rounds all night by considering how high was up, how long was forever, and which was more important. He tried it now, but was so tired and his brain so choked up with worries that it just scared him.
He finally lit on the gal on the second landing, back in Frisco. He generally tried not to think about her because he knew his own weak nature and that a man who messed with shemales where he lived or worked was just plain stupid. But the gal on the second landing sure was something to think about. She was an artist’s model at that art school on Russian Hill. So she was no doubt used to letting people see her bareass. Only she sort of brought her work habits back to the boardinghouse they shared south of Market Street, and anyone could see those art students liked to draw her because she was built even better than that well-known brick edifice.
Stringer didn’t recall her name or anything else about her, since he’d always made a point of just nodding politely and going on up the stairs to his own garret room when he passed her open doorway, where she posed bareass on her big brass bed like she thought she was Cleopatra and he was at least old Mark Anthony. He’d never been dumb enough to ask, of course, but he’d often wondered if she even noticed when she was naked or not, seeing she made her living that way.
This time he decided to go on in when she invited him so slinky with her great big bedroom eyes. He hung his Rough Rider hat on a brass bedpost and sat down beside her on the satin spread as she purred, “What took you so long, bashful?”
But then, just as he was trying to get it in, old Sam Barca was yelling at them from the doorway. The crusty, bald features editor didn’t seem to notice both of them were naked or that Stringer sure had to piss bad. Old Sam yelled, “You were due at the office with that obit on Miss Calamity Jane Canary hours ago, and we had to go to press without it. You’d better have a good excuse for missing your deadline, Stringer!”
“I’d forgot all about her dying as the Widow Burke just recent, Boss,” Stringer explained. “I thought you sent me to write up Pearl Hart, the bandit queen. This ain’t her, neither, and excuse me, ma’am, but I just have to take a leak before I wet my jeans.”
The girl on the second landing said, “You men are all alike, and you’re not wearing jeans right now, you fool.”
He proved her wrong by waking up, just in time, and watering a nearby pine. He shook his head wearily, deciding he’d been right about that sassy gal on the second landing. Even when you give in to her, she could still be a nightmare.
He was wide awake by the time he’d rebuttoned his jeans. He was just as glad, because whether the moon had decided to back up or whether the sun was sneaking up the other way, it was getting lighter now between the trees.
He put his hat and canteen back on and started walking the stiffness out of his bones. He was hungry as well as chilled. When he came to a grass-lined rill of sweetwater, farther down, he was still goose bumped under his denim duds, but he found some wild onions by the water, at least. They were more like bitty scallions than the onions one bought for serious eating at the grocery. But there were plenty of ‘em, and they tasted sweet as real bermudas. So he ate a mess of them, drank the last of his water, and began to refill the canteen from the rill before he wondered why. The rill was running southwest through some trees and a lot of good green grass. He’d circled wide enough if he’d lost them and not far enough if he hadn’t. Either way, the running water figured to lead to some town or at least some spread. He knew it was safer to follow it than to wander about in broad daylight until he ran into the Wild Bunch on foot without even that busted .32 handy.
He started to discard the canteen as useless weight. Then he had a better idea, and cut the strap free with his pocket knife. This left him almost six feet of supple leather to play with. It was smooth on one side and rough on the other. As he followed the running water, he kept running the leather through his hands, trying to remember that trick an Indian playmate had shown him so long ago in the sweet by and by of a Mother Lode childhood.
By experimenting with his knife while he kept walking, he was able to split the strap a little over halfway down its length, and yep, when he dunked the leather in the rill and worked a water-rounded rock into the split, it formed a sort of half-assed pocket. He kept walking and forming the leather over the stone until it began to dry in that shape. He’d put more muscle than water into the effort. He still didn’t know if it would work.
The next time he paused to rest his legs, he sat on a boulder and split one end of the strap, forming a sort of wrist loop. He slipped his right wrist through it. He had to stand up again to find out if he knew what he was doing. It turned out he did, sort of, albeit old Larry Blue Basket had it down a lot better, even at the age of ten.
Stringer held the loose end of the thong in the same hand as he swung the rock in the pocket midway down the leather like a pendulum, until he could see it was willing to stay put. Then he took a deep breath, whirled the whole invention up over his head, and commenced to twirl the crude slingshot like a show rope until it was humming like a monstrous bee. He had no idea how Larry Blue Basket had aimed, but when he let go the free end, the pebble shot across the rill and into the trees on the far side almost faster than the eye could follow. Stringer grinned, stopped, and gathered a hip pocket full of pebbles from the rill, trying to keep them about the same size and to hell with the color.
As he moved on, firing rock bullets in every direction including some that surprised him, he could see why the ancient Romans as well as young David had thought so highly of this sport. For while no boys had bothered with this sort of slingshot since old Charlie Goodyear had learned how to make rubber back in the 1830’s, the old-fashioned kind sure shot ferocious. Rubber bands could only store so much energy. A good-sized man whirling a good-sized pebble at the end of a yard-long loop could store up a hell of a lot more. When he accidently hit an aspen trunk at well beyond pistol-fighting range, Stringer walked over to regard the results and whistled. Then he muttered, “Poor old Goliath. He must have been dumb as hell if he went up against a Hebrew slinger in no more than a suit of brass armor!”
The quail-egg-sized pebble was embedded deep in the green bark and white wood of the aspen, and when Stringer tried to pry it out with his fingers, it didn’t want to come. He decided it was easier to find another rock in the Rocky Mountains than to dig one out of a tree, and moved on, muttering, “Now, if only there was some damned way to aim.”
He’d walked quite a ways and shot many a rock before he began to get the hang of it. It would have taken him longer if he hadn’t already been a good roper. But he began to see that it was something like casting a loop of throw rope at a target, only different. You aimed a loop of rope above a cow to let it drop as it slowed down. Stones fired by a sling flew straighter and hardly slowed down enough to matter. When he passed through an open glade, he experimented with long range and whistled again, for he saw he could lob a stone about as far as a pistol would shoot, and you couldn’t hit anything with a pistol at long range to begi
n with.
All that slingshot practice had at least taken his mind off his legs for a few miles. But both were starting to tire by the time the rill led him into a thick tangle of alders and black willow. He stopped in the heavy cover, sat down by the water, and hauled off his boots.
The mountain water, born in the snowfields of the Rabbit Ears to the northeast, was so cold it numbed his tired feet. That had been the general idea. He lay lengthwise to drink some of the same, upstream from his feet. It wasn’t as easy as it looked. He had to take off his hat and press his cheek to the grassy bank to get at the water with his lips. When he did, it tasted better than some wine he’d drunk in his time. Then he noticed the ear he had to the ground was picking up dull thuds. Unless he’d discovered a species of earthworms that used picks and shovels, someone was coming, mounted, fast.
Stringer swore, hauled his bare feet out of the water, and scooped up his hat and boots to move back into the alders. He dropped his load and armed his sling. He’d of course have never risked really using it had the approaching rider simply passed by. But to Stringer’s dismay, when a rider he recalled from the bunch who’d kidnapped him from that club car came into sight, he sighted the sign Stringer had left by the streambank and reined in to dismount and study it. Stringer didn’t know if the sign he’d left by crushing streamside grass led anywhere more important, but he knew he could sure use that rascal’s pony and Winchester right now. So as the train robber hunkered down to poke at bent grass stems, Stringer wound up his improvised weapon.
He would never know whether the bandit had spotted more sign or reacted to the odd whir of a spinning slingshot. Either way he was rising, and drawing, when Stringer let fly.
He knew he was dead if he missed. That may or may not have inspired his aim. The quail egg of white agate had an even more awesome effect on a human head than that other had had on a more solid aspen tree. The sound was that of a pumpkin hit by a blacksmith’s hammer. The victim’s eyes shot out of his skull to the end of their stalks. Then he was dyeing the stream red with his shattered head, and the pony he’d been riding was off and running.
Stringer ran after it, barefoot, yelling, “Come back here, horse!” Even as he saw that saddle gun and something less tedious to travel with was tearing upstream at a dead run. When they vanished from sight, Stringer sighed, moved back to where his victim lay half awash, and bent down to grab the dead man’s boots and haul him out of sight amid the alders. Then he put on his own boots, hat, and the tie-down-holstered .45 Colt ‘74 old Larry Blue Basket’s childhood skills had worked so well against. Stringer wondered if old Larry had used that trick in Cuba before Spanish shrapnel killed him near Santiago that time.
Stringer favored double-action for his own use, but the Colt ‘74, or Peacemaker, still had its admirers for good reason. It had a nice balance, and there was almost no way to bust up such a rugged sidearm. He put the few dollars the poor cuss had gotten for his part in the train robbery away, along with the slingshot. There were five rounds in the wheel and thirty-three in the loops of the gun belt, but as he’d just proven, a man just never could have enough weapons when the going got rough.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Knowing the rider he’d just killed had come up the rill, Stringer didn’t think it was a good idea to go any farther down it. He knew what the country he’d come down out of was like. He moved upslope the other way along the tree line in hopes that if the next draw over wasn’t prettier, it would at least be farther from Kid Curry’s hideout.
The ridge was more wooded than rocky along the top. There was a game trail following it. There almost always was. Deer and elk stayed among the trees by day and came out in the open at twilight to graze. He didn’t want to meet any deer, elk, or outlaws scouting the local trails. So he moved down into the grassy park beyond, leaped the inevitable rill running down it, and worked his way to the tree line on the far side. Then he started south some more.
The trees hadn’t been planted by anyone, let alone straight, between field and forest. So the cover zigzagged in a most annoying way for a man trying to get anywhere in a hurry. He cut some corners by bulling through prongs of the woods, mostly aspen or spruce, or by risking a short walk across open fingers of grass. Some patches of grass had been grazed recently, but none of the clumps or nettles had been cropped. That added up to cows instead of sheep. As he worked farther south, he saw ever more signs of grazing and knew he had to be approaching a cattle spread. A small one or a mighty distant one, judging by the sign. The grass was shortest down along the stream, where it would have grown longest and greenest, left to its own notions.
He worked his way through an aspen thicket to see that, sure enough, a dozen odd heads of scrub stock were lazing on the sunny open slope ahead. The tree line hairpinned way the hell up to the ridge line. He decided to beeline straight across. As he broke cover, a chongo-horned bull that had hitherto been reclining among its harem got to its feet to regard Stringer with interest.
Range stock of any lineage tends to consider a human being on horseback as something to run from while a human afoot can strike the bovine species as a novelty to have fun with. The chongo out yonder looked part longhorn and part Jersey, and as many a farmer or his widow can tell you, milk cows have been bred for producing lots of milk, not for sweetness of temper, and no Spanish bullfighter with the brains of a gnat would mess with a Jersey bull.
Stringer hoped the mongrel out yonder would take after its longhorn ancestors as he swung upslope to pass the critters sort of polite. Longhorns were as likely to spook as charge, and no bull likes to run uphill on a warm day. But the chongo must not have found the morning that warm or the slope that steep, for it put its tail up, put its head down, and came at him leatherbent for killing.
Stringer started to draw on the brute. Then he had a better idea and whipped out his slingshot. He didn’t have time to swing it more than a couple of times, which was just as well for the both of them. The bull got a sudden headache and ran off bawling like a calf. So Stringer knew he wouldn’t have to explain dead stock to its owner. As the cows jumped up to follow their lord and master to wherever the hell he seemed to be going, the relieved Stringer read a couple of brands as S Bar Diamond. The brands had been stamped, not worked in with a running iron. That read as an honest, businesslike outfit. Folk inclined to increase their herds more casual still favored running irons, no matter how the Cattleman’s Protective Association frowned on the practice. So it seemed unlikely the S Bar Diamond, whoever they were, were in league with the Wild Bunch.
But the spread was harder to locate than its cows. Stringer passed more beef on the hoof, albeit not as ornery, and might have passed their owner’s spread entire if he hadn’t spied faint wood smoke rising above some treetops up the slope.
He headed into the trees a ways and had to circle some before he saw a cluster of low-slung log structures nestled in a semicircle of granite outcrops. He could see at a glance the layout took advantage of the lay of the land. The rocks shielded the main cabin and outbuildings from the winter winds, while the aspen out front shaded the spread in summer and went bare in winter to let such sun as there was warm the dooryard and corral. He didn’t see any horses in the corral. But as he came closer, some chickens commenced to bark at him.
Pussyfooting up to an isolated cabin could be injurious to one’s health. So Stringer waved his hat at the front windows in case anyone was staring out ‘em, and strode across the dooryard to the long front veranda. As he got one foot up on the split logs, the front door opened a crack, the barrel of a ten-gauge poked out at him, and a feminine but determined voice told him he’d come just about far enough.
Holding his hat in his gun hand, Stringer told the shotgun muzzle, “My name is Stuart MacKail and I write for the San Francisco Sun, ma’am. I got kidnapped off a train by the Wild Bunch day before yesterday. Then I escaped, and now I don’t know where I am.”
“That well may be,” the woman inside the cabin said, “but I’m a
woman alone with both my hands off riding with the posse. Anyone can say they’re anybody. But if I was you, I’d just keep walking south until you come to the railroad tracks. Once you find ‘em, you can head either way. The creek running down this valley runs under the tracks about midway betwixt stops about fifteen miles apart.”
He asked how far the tracks were and when she said half a day’s ride he said, “I’m not riding, ma’am. Might you have a pony you’d be willing to sell?”
“I got one mount on the place right now,” she said. “It’s out back in the stable and it’s mine. I can cover the stable door from my back window, so it’s neither for sale nor for stealing, if you know what’s good for you.”
He sighed. “I can see how you wouldn’t want to be this far from civilization without a mount, ma’am. I know it’s been vexing me a heap. So let’s study on the fix we could both be in. I know for a fact some armed rascals are out hunting for me, and you say your menfolk rode out and left you here all alone?”
She sniffed. “They ain’t my menfolk. They work for me, or they did. I told ‘em not to waste time with that fool posse when we’ve got chores to do around here. But some young rascals would far more chase after outlaws than help a poor old widow woman run her spread, I reckon. You could make the rail line before dark, if you started moving on about now.”
“I don’t think you’ve been paying attention to me, no offense,” he said. “I know for certain that one of the Wild Bunch, at the least, was just over in the next valley, an easy ride from here, since I just walked it. I don’t know where any posse might be just now, but the only one I know about was riding the wrong way. The best bet for the two of us would be to hole up in this cabin and wait until your hands get back. Sooner or later someone has to come by, and whether it’s the law or the outlaws, we can greet ‘em safer from inside, see?”