by Lou Cameron
Stringer finished his beer. It made him thirsty just thinking about it. Then he nodded and said, “Someone with sinister knowlege had to be upset by the discovery of that old wagon. Say the one who robbed, or just abandoned the others made it to the river, and simply followed it upstream to San Berdoo, with water and graze all the way out of the desert. Say he never went back for the others because he already knew they were dead, or just didn’t want to face them after helping himself to their money. Say he grubstaked himself and prospered, over all these years, in San Berdoo or even closer. Then say he woke up one morning to hear those bodies had not only been found, but found in a state of ominous preservation.”
Hamp nodded thoughtfully and said, “The notion of a newspaperman with your rep for exposing crookery, writing about my crookery, would make me tense as an Apache squaw with the rag on, if I was nursing a guilty conscience old enough to be a grandad. That still leaves you and me a heap of old timers to suspicion. We’d be talking about someone at least sixty years old with enough money on tap to be taken serious by the likes of the late Calico Warren, right?”
Stringer nodded and said, “You’re right. That does cover a heap of ground when you consider there has to be a thousand old gents in Barstow alone, way more in San Berdoo and, hell, for all we know, the son of a bitch is a rich old-timer in Los Angeles these days. The warning notes Fred Remington and I received up north in Frisco were hand delivered. I can’t see spry old rich men scampering all about without being noticed and it’s a matter of record that the mysterious mastermind sent Calico and maybe a Mex street gang in to do the heavy work.”
Hamp made a wry face and said, “You’re giving me this picture of a sly old spider, way off in the center of his web, pulling the strings from out of sight. Don’t that worry you, none? It seems to me you’re the one he’s after!”
Stringer shrugged and said, “He, she, or it. Whoever lit out from that wagon party with their money and water had to have been treacherous by nature, even at an earlier age, so of course it worries me. Your old spider has all the advantages, with my cards all faceup on the table and nobody having clue one as to his or her identity. Meanwhile, I think it’s my turn to order a round.”
He did, as Hamp Dugan marveled, “I hadn’t even thought about it being a little old lady with a sweet face and a murderous disposition. If I was in your boots, I’d be making tracks with ’em by now, MacKail!”
“To where?” Stringer asked in a resigned tone, “They got a mash note scrawled in blood or whatever to the press room I work out of. Someone was running scared as hell of me before I even knew I was on my way down here. I only wish I knew why. If I was half as smart as someone’s afraid I might be, I’d be able to figure out who I’m after, and vice versa. I’ve gone over every word and deed of mine, right up to the time Calico slapped leather on me out at the death site. I don’t know what they think I know, but I know that if I just head on back, some warped mind is sure to think I’m on my way to tell all on my typewriter.”
As their refilled schooners slid across the mahogany at them he added, “So, I’m just going to have to figure it out here on the desert, where folk don’t stare at me so oddly for packing my six-gun.”
They clinked to that. But Stringer didn’t get to drink that one. An old-timer wearing a straw hat and a drinker’s nose nudged Stringer’s elbow and confided, “Lady would like a word with you outside, Mister Mac Kail. She asked me to tell you she’d wait around the south side.”
Stringer glanced over at the player piano. Skeeter Norris was still playing the perforated roll with his pumping feet. But the fancy gal who’d been leaning over him was no longer in view.
Stringer thanked the barfly, told Hamp he’d be right back unless he got lucky, and ducked out the batwings of the front door. But Stringer had grown up in a partly Hispanic culture, and Miwok breeds could get devious as well, so he eased north instead of south and circled the building entirely to approach the lady lurking in the south slot from behind, with his gun hand resting casually on the grips of his S&W .38.
He saw at a glance they had the narrow slot between the saloon and the general store to themselves, so he moved in and made her leap half way out of her lowcut dress when he howdied her politely from the darkness behind her.
As he’d expected, she was the gal who’d been inspiring old Skeeter’s ragtime pumping inside. She said her name was Jenny and that she was a pal of Tessie’s. He said he was, too, and asked if there was any point to this discussion. Jenny told him, “Tessie run off to Barstow with one of them mule skinners who passed through earlier this evening. She said she hoped you’d understand.”
He smiled thinly and replied, “I’d already noticed she’d lit out and there’s not all that much to understand. She told me she wasn’t happy here, and wanted to see the bright lights of Barstow. Are we talking about a good-looking young borax wrangler called Wally?”
She shrugged her bare shoulders and said, “I think that could have been his name. He’s got straw colored hair and he’s been trying to grow a moustache. Are you sure you ain’t sore?”
Stringer laughed incredulously and asked, “Whatever made you ask that?” To which she replied, in a worried tone, “Tessie was afraid you’d follow after them. She allowed you was a passionate sort of gent and anyone can see you pack a gun.”
He laughed louder and assured her, “Anyone can see old Tessie has a vivid imagination as well. I’d be fibbing if I said I never shook hands with her, but far be it from me to come between her and her truelove.”
She looked relieved in the dim light. Prettier than inside under the coal oil lamps, as a matter of fact. But he didn’t want to get started with yet another of Big Ben’s bar gals. So he said, “While we’re on the subject of white slaves making breaks for freedom, do you get beaten often by Ben Winslow, Jenny?”
She stared up at him, flabbergasted, to reply, “Good heavens, what a thing to ask! The boss is sort of fatherly to us gals, if you must know. As to calling us white slaves, you just bite your fresh tongue! I’ll have you know I’m a hostess, not a bad girl. There are some bad girls here in Esperanza. But French Lilly’s parlor house is down at the south end of town, off the main street, and do you want further directions?”
He chuckled fondly and assured her, “Tessie leaving hasn’t left me quite that desperate. But let’s see if I’ve got this straight in my fool head. Your version is that Big Ben Winslow only encourages the boys to spend in his saloon by having a few gals there to help them drink, for what, a percentage of the bar tabs you get them to run up?”
She looked away and softly allowed, “A girl has to live, and it’s not as if we’re doing anything really wicked, like French Lilly and her girls.”
He nodded and said, “I know how gals like you operate. I’m not just being nosy, or trying to judge anyone, Jenny. I’d just like to get a few facts or fibs pinned down. I was told Ben Winslow’s been known to beat you gals and worse, in order to make you go further with customers. True or false?”
“Crazy.” she said, “Who ever told you such a thing?”
So he told her, “A natural troublemaker, I reckon. Why do some gals like to stir up trouble between us already confused brutes? Does it make ’em feel like does in heat to see stags fighting?”
She replied, “You sure talk odd. I just hate it when men fight over me. I’m always afraid the ugly one might win.”
He laughed, assured her he wasn’t going to fight over either her or their mutual pal, Tessie, and headed back the way he’d come. He was moving through the gloomy gap between the rear of the saloon and the ’dobe stocked with mummies when the black bearded Skeeter Norris loomed out of the gloom at him to demand, “Where’s that dance hall gal and what have you two been up to, newspaper boy?”
Stringer had been raised to always tell the truth, unless the truth might hurt. He could see this might not be a time when honesty would be the best policy. But he was able to get around the big lout’s question without
a barefaced lie by simply saying, “I seldom piss in front of ladies, Skeeter. Do you?”
Skeeter growled, “I didn’t come out here to piss. I come looking for that Jenny Lee! I’ve been buying that pretty little thing hard likker all evening and she lit out on me just as I was getting my Injun blood and pecker up!”
Stringer soothered, “Well, the evening is still young. Maybe she just stepped out a spell to heed her own call to nature. You know they don’t get to piss standing up, just anywhere, like us lucky brutes.”
Skeeter grumbled, “I was worried you and her was doing something sassier, standing or how-somever. I’d just noticed she was gone when I seen you step out front. That’s where I went looking for you first. You sure she ain’t back here nowheres?”
Stringer shrugged and said, “You might try searching for her among the mummies in yonder ’dobe. It’s been nice talking to you, Skeeter.”
The almost as tall and heavier-built Skeeter didn’t try to stop him, but as he moved on, the burly and not too sober cuss called out, “If you do see Jenny, make sure you leave her the hell alone, hear?” And when Stringer didn’t answer he added, “I mean that. I got a lot of drinking money invested in that little gal.”
Stringer swung the corner of the saloon and moved out to the main street. He didn’t go back inside. The evening was young, the moon was high, and he didn’t really want to know how Skeeter or anyone else made out with Jenny Lee.
He got out the makings, grimacing with distaste at the picture of Skeeter Norris wallowing atop little Jenny or, hell, even an ugly gal. He doubted Skeeter got to wallow much with anyone, between the way he looked and how dumb he seemed to be about the unfair sex.
As he paused to neatly lay a line of Bull Durham the length of his folded strawpaper, Stringer recalled the first time he’d bought bourbon, or more likely tea, for that older woman of twenty-five in San Jose. He’d just left the Mother Lode range to further his education at Stanford, and one of the first things they’d taught him on the wrong side of the San Jose tracks was that unescorted ladies in seedy saloons could spend a fool’s money for him almost as fast as Three Card Monte. Yet Skeeter had to be somewhere in his thirties. So how could he have remained so dumb?
Stringer sealed his smoke with the tip of his tongue, lit it, and strode on, softly humming the old drover’s refrain, “I Ain’t Got No Use For A Woman!” as he was drawn to the not too distant sounds of a hammer on steel. It had to be coming from a smithy, open late, and next to small town barbers, there was nobody who gossiped as much as the local blacksmith.
But when he spotted the patch of red forgelight spread out on the dusty street ahead and homed in on it, he stopped at the edge of the light to stare bemused at the young blacksmith at work between forge and anvil, inside the gaping doorway.
To begin with he seemed to be a she, a gal somewhere in her twenties, working alone in tight jeans, a loose leather apron, and apparently nothing else. The top of the apron covered her otherwise bare breasts, save for an interesting view from either side, but her shapely torso and muscular but still feminine enough arms were covered by more than healthy sweat. Her chestnut hair was pinned up and bunned, her jaw seemed just a mite determined for a Gibson Girl, but otherwise, she was pretty as hell, staring down intelligently at the red hot strap iron she was reshaping with hammer and tongs.
As Stringer watched, she gave the hot steel a few more solid but well-aimed taps, then swung around to shove it back in the hot coals, asking, quietly, “What can I do for you? Or do you like to watch fire engines, too?”
Stringer grinned sheepishly and moved on into the light, saying, “You got me, pard. I answer to Stringer MacKail, I ride for the San Francisco Sun, and I’m paid to be nosy. I don’t suppose anyone’s ever told you, before, how unusual blacksmiths of the female persuasion are?”
She shrugged her sweaty albeit shapely bare shoulders and told him, “They have. I usually tell them I didn’t have much choice. My mother died young, my dad was a blacksmith, and I reckon he was planning on me being a boy.”
He nodded but asked if that was the whole truth. She shook her fine-boned head and replied, “If the whole truth would be known, I like to make things more solid than apple pies with my hands. I wasn’t exactly planning on growing old and gray as a village blacksmith, but life is just filled with surprises.”
She gave the crank of her cast-iron forge blower a couple of good turns, lighting up the smithy a mite more, then held out her work-hardened but slender hand to shake with him, saying, “I answer to Binnie Kellog. That’s my married name. I had to take over here when my man dropped dead of heatstroke right after we set up out here. I told him not to work the forge in the full heat of day, but… some don’t listen, and things will happen.”
Stringer said he was pained to hear of her misfortune and allowed it seemed smart to hammer hot steel after sundown in such a hot corner of creation. As she drew the reheated strap iron from her forge he moved around to man the blower handle for her, but naturally didn’t crank it just to waste charcoal as she got back to work. He let her pound a spell and then, as she shoved the whatever back in the coals, he gave the crank a few turns and stopped just as he knew she was about to tell him to. She nodded approvingly and said, “You’ve done that before, haven’t you?”
To which he replied with a sheepish smile, “Used to crank too hard for old Verdugo, our wrangler and smith on the homespread, when I was little.” He saw the small but ferocious fire could use more fuel, tossed a fistful of charcoal in, and gave the blower another thoughtful crank as he added, “I didn’t have to get cussed in Spanish all that much before I learned to keep the coals glowing just about right. Do you mind if I ask you whether you own this layout, or just work for Big Ben Winslow?”
She replied, “You already asked, and you’re right, you sure are nosy. But if it’s any interest to you, I own the business and rent the land under it from the Winslows. I buy my water, fuel, and just about everything else from Big Ben, so I have to say he was mighty smart to buy up all the desert around his bore well at a dollar an acre, when nobody saw much use for all that birdcage gravel. But I can’t say Big Ben’s treated me unfairly. You have to pay rent most anywhere you set up shop and nobody gives away food, fuel, or even water, in country as bleak as this. The Winslows were mighty decent when my man fell dead, owing money. They gave me time to bury poor Harry and get things going again.”
She drew the hot metal from the forge again and gave it just a tap or two before holding it up to examine and then lowering it to the anvil, saying, “It’s about ready to temper, now. As I was saying, my overhead’s affordable and hardly a mule train comes through here without throwing some business my way.”
He nodded and said, “Twenty mules in a bunch have to add up to many a cast shoe betwixt the borax flats and the railroad.”
She nodded but said, “Refitting wheel rims is more profitable. Wagon wheels shed rims like snakes shed skin out here. The hot dry air shrinks wood astounding, while the hot dry sun expands metal even more.”
He frowned thoughtfully, trying to recall whether the wheels of that bogged-down Conestoga were still rimmed or not. He decided it didn’t really matter at this late date. For, no matter what had made them stop out there, their pause on the desert had been long indeed, and only one living person seemed to know for sure, exactly what had happened way back when.
He knew Binnie the blacksmith couldn’t have been born yet. It seemed odd to consider that even the infant mummy lying silent in that dark ’dobe would be older than Binnie or even himself, right now, had it lived. He still felt sorry for it. Killing a baby, or letting it die, seemed just as wicked, no matter when and where one did it, and the one who’d killed or simply deserted those folk must still be alive, since nobody else could have anything to cover up!
Binnie held the hot steel up to the light again, blew softly on its now much darker surface, and plunged it into a small trough of oil near the anvil. It smelled like sperm oil t
o Stringer as the sizzling reek filled the smithy. He knew she’d reheat and quench the spring leaf a few more times before she had it tempered exactly to her fancy. He asked her, in as uncaring a tone as he could manage, if she’d like him to walk her home when she was through, here.
She favored him with a crooked smile, but said, “I mean to work past midnight, and when I do knock off I only have to cross the back yard.” So he had to just nod and mutter something about getting his fool self on down the road, in that case.
She nodded gravely and told him, “It was sweet of you to try, though. Us sweaty old widow women don’t get all that many offers, even though we’re supposed to put out.”
He smiled back, sheepishly, and said, “That was plain cruelty to animals, ma’am. I was already feeling dumb enough.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
It only took Stringer a few minutes to get back to the ’dobe Big Ben Winslow had loaned him, with or without the favors of old Tessie in mind. So he was still hurting from that friendly but frustrating goodnight handshake with Binnie the blacksmith. He wondered if she knew how yummy the rest of her shook under the front of that leather apron when she shook hands so firmly with a gent. Since she was a woman, she no doubt did. He’d never been able to fathom why females did everything possible to make themselves look tempting, and then wept and swore and tore their hair when a poor male tried to take them up on all that eyebatting and jiggle-walking. He hadn’t been able to keep from noticing that despite her tomboy trade and down-to-earth work duds, old Binnie had shaved under her arms and smelled sort of sugar and spice under all that honest sweat.