by Lou Cameron
So Hamp led the spade beard and most of the group around the north side of the saloon. Winslow, its owner, stayed put to see what he could do for the rest of them. Stringer had a better look at the gal from the historical society, now that she’d unbuttoned her duster and raised the goggles to wipe her face more or less clean with her neckerchief. She was younger than he’d pictured an antique collector. It was going to take some soap and water and a comb through her upswept dust-coated hair to determine whether she was pretty or not. As Remington introduced them, he smiled knowingly at her and said, “I’ll allow you folk made better time by horseless carriage than I ever made by horse, if you’ll allow it seems a mighty dusty way to travel.”
She favored him with a wan smile, saying, “Remind me to ride in the lead car on the way back. I haven’t eaten that much dust since I begged my way along on a cattle drive as a schoolgirl.”
He chuckled down at her and said, “I’ll bet you never asked to ride drag a second time.” To which she answered wearily, “You know it. But I suppose everyone should try everything at least once.”
He decided he liked her, no matter what she looked like with her face clean. He doubted she meant that last remark as it could be taken. She was built mighty fine for such adventures, but from her voice and carriage he could tell she was more likely a cattle baron’s daughter than an educated cowgirl.
Ben Winslow didn’t seem half as glad to see her or anyone else from the historical society. When she and the handful of gents with her mentioned mummies, Big Ben looked injured and told them, “If I let you look for free, do we have us an understanding?”
Stringer saw they didn’t know what he was talking about. He explained, “Mister Winslow feels a proprietary interest in those sun dried settlers. He holds and I have to sort of agree, that until such time as some kith and kin come forward to claim the mummified remains, he has as much right to exhibit them in glass cases as anyone.”
The girl nodded soberly and said, “My interest is only in learning exactly how and when they died and who they might have been.” She took a stub pencil and a small notebook from the side pocket of her duster, adding, “I’ve already found a few possible leads in our old records. A lot more pioneers got through than were ever lost. Most of them took the California Trail to the north to begin with. The Spanish Trail across this desert had such a dreadful reputation, even then, that most wagons rolling west avoided it. So we doubt a hundred souls were lost out here during the gold rush, counting those who were never missed. I’d like you to show me to the ones you just found, if you don’t mind.”
She sounded like she meant it. So whether Winslow minded or not he grunted, “All right. You can look, but don’t touch.”
As Stringer and Remington tagged along after Winslow, the gal, and the three gents with her, Ben Winslow asked her if it wasn’t true that Death Valley alone had claimed more than a hundred souls during the gold rush. She smiled softly to tell him, “Death Valley was named by people who got across it alive. Dead people don’t name anything. There were fewer than two dozen people in the party of forty-niners who took an unwise shortcut across the unmapped expanse and never got tired of talking about how dreadful it had been. Some of the people and most of their draft animals died on the way across, mostly from bad water. Tradition would have it that a woman in the party shook her fist back at the scene of their torment, as they were moving up the far slope, and yelled out something about a farewell to Death Valley.”
She added, “The name stuck. But because few people have ever gone down in Death Valley, since, without plenty of water and a good idea where they were going, a lot more have died in less dangerous sounding desert country.”
Stringer nodded in agreement but didn’t comment. He knew she might think he was only trying to horn in if he jabbered about the salt flats of the Great Basin or awesome flash floods of the lower deserts to the south. Ben Winslow grudgingly led them all inside his dimly-lit adobe museum. Stringer expected the gal to ooh and ah over the pathetic sun-dried kiddies. But all she did was nod and murmur, “Ahah! Hand stitched distelfinks on the infant’s embroidered gown, and look at the broad stripes of contrasting print above the hems of both women’s skirts. Someone added that trimming to those store-bought Mother Hubbards, I’m sure.”
Stringer saw no reason to argue. Now that she’d pointed it out, he could see someone had stitched tiny birds in once-white thread on the baby’s gown. The cloth was almost as brown as the little dried-apple face, now.
One of the prissy men with her looked as if she’d said something important and asked, “The Lowendorf party, then, Miss Grace?” To which she answered, cautiously, “Perhaps. The Lowendorfs were Pennsylvania Dutch, true enough. That Conestoga wagon these bodies were found in has the same accent. But let’s not leap to any conclusions. A lot of more German Germans, along with Irish refugees from the potato famine, arrived together just in time for the gold rush. We need something more solid than Germanic taste in dressmaking to pin these mummies down as the long-lost Lowendorfs.”
Stringer said, “There’s stuff they brought west with them under the trestles, Miss Grace.” Then he glanced at Ben Winslow who didn’t say yes or no, and rolled a keg of supplies out for her perusal, saying, “If I follow your drift, you need to find something made or purchased for sure in Pennsylvania to pin this bunch down as Lowendorfs. Were the Lowendorfs important, ma’am?”
She smiled softly down at the nearest mummied child as she told him, “Everyone’s important to somebody. Several letters from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, have been on file for many a year in Sacramento. Horst and Ludwig Lowendorf, two adventurous brothers of Amish descent, left for the west coast around forty-nine, wound up down around San Diego after trying their luck in the northern gold fields, and struck cinnabar, instead, in the Coastal Ranges.”
Fred Remington said, “I know what cinnabar is. It’s an oxide of mercury. We use it as a red pigment in my business.”
Stringer told him, “Mercury’s worth more in the mining business, about third down in value after gold and silver.” He turned back to the girl and said, “In other words, the Lowendorf boys struck it rich. But where do these women and children come in, Miss Grace?”
She consulted her notebook before she explained, “They married two ladies of German descent they met in San Diego. The older children add up about right. According to their relations back East, the brothers had decided to come on home and buy farms in Lancaster County with their small fortunes. They said so in writing, just before the civil war broke out, back East. When they never arrived, their relations assumed they’d postponed moving east with their families until the war was over.”
One of her male assistants was carefully placing things from the keg on the the dirt floor as Stringer stared down soberly at the mummy of the one adult male to mutter, “The war lasted longer than either side had figured on. It would have been a ’65 before the folk back home got to wondering why the boys didn’t even write. By then nobody on either coast could recall just when they’d lit out in an oversized wagon, heading home the dumb way, if you want my honest opinion.”
Ben Winslow brightened and said, “By gum, I see what must have happened, now. They would have come up the coast from San Diego, cut through the Cajon Pass, and followed the Mojave northeast a good ways, and then something happened. Whatever it was, they turned tail to head back to the river. One of ’em went on ahead with the team and… I wonder whether this poor jasper’s Horst or Ludwig.”
Fred Remington had a small sketch pad out and was penciling in a grim portrait as he objected, “I know the Pennsylvania Dutch country pretty well. Shouldn’t this poor gent have a sort of Abe Lincoln beard if he was brought up Amish?”
Grace said, “Neither brother married Amish wives. It must have been hard enough to find someone with whom they could enjoy pillow talk in German. The baby’s gown strikes me as clearly Amish needlework. Perhaps a loving aunt or grandmother sent a hand-sewn gift to a tyke sh
e’d never meet. The Germanic decoration of the two women’s skirts strikes me more as mainstream German peasant work. They may have been sisters. We’ll never know all the details at this late date. It’s going to be hard enough to identify this group at all, for certain.”
Ben Winslow asked suspiciously, “What if these folk do turn out to be them long-lost Pennsylvania Dutch?” Before Grace could put her foot in it, Stringer told him, “They get shipped east for proper burial and coast-to-coast publicity, of course.”
So Winslow said, “Oh,” grudgingly, and didn’t pursue the matter further. Stringer hoped he knew when he was licked.
The assistant hunkered over the stuff spread out on the floor held up what looked like a tin pillbox at first glance, saying, “Percussion caps, Miss Grace. Made in Ohio but stocked by a San Diego gunsmith, according to the gummed label still stuck to it.”
She took the box of caps from him to note the brand and the name and address of the San Diego gunsmith in her notebook while Fred Remington set his art pad aside to gently but firmly pry the old carbine from the dead man’s dry hands.
“Don’t you go busting that old boy up on me, now,” Winslow growled, “What are you after? Anyone can see he thirsted to death with that fool gun across his knees.”
Remington held the carbine at port arms, with the muzzle pointed safely at the overhead roof beams, and pulled the hammer back from the firing nipple. Then he nodded and said, “The cap’s been detonated. Lord knows when.”
Winslow asked what in thunder that was supposed to mean. It was the girl from the historical society who said, “That’s an interesting point, Mister Remington. I can think of a dozen reasons why a man stranded on the desert might have fired his carbine. For attention, just for openers. But it does seem he’d reload afterwards, if he could.”
Her hunkered assistant told her, “He should have been able to. Here’s half a box of .50 caliber rifle balls, with the paper cartridges to go with ’em. Odd that he didn’t have any on his person, though.”
She glanced at Remington, who obviously knew a thing or two about old guns. Stringer knew he collected them back East, both to keep his paintings accurate, and because he just naturally admired weaponry and riding gear. Remington told them, “I can’t say why this dried-out dead man has been holding an empty carbine all these years, but I’m pretty sure he has been.” Then he popped the whole breechloading action out of the Hall in one square block, hammer, trigger and all.
Ben Winslow wailed, “Now you’ve done it! You busted it clean, and it might have been valuable as it was!”
Remington smiled knowingly and said, “It’s still a mighty interesting weapon, if not exactly valuable. It was the first breechloader made for the U.S. Army at Harper’s Ferry, under the personal supervision of its designer, John Hancock Hall, just in time for the Mexican war.”
He held the action like a big clumsy pistol, adding, “Forget what they say about Eli Whitney inventing interchangeable parts. He never really got it right and Hall did. It cost, of course, so the war department went back to muzzleloaders for the big war, the cheap rascals. The Battle Of Bull Run might have gone a lot different if the Union troops had still been armed with these babies. The way the action comes out in one piece like this was a nice feature. You can see at a glance this chamber’s empty. You can see how easy it would be to reload, instead of having to stand there like a stationary target with your musket in one hand and your ramrod in the other, hoping to reload before you got hit.”
Stringer nodded and chimed in, “I heard that during the Mexican War, our boys packed along extra loaded actions for their Halls.”
Remington nodded and said, “You heard right. In a pinch, a trooper could fire his action, alone, as a sort of clumsy pistol. They generally packed half a dozen in a musette bag, so they could reload, hammer, trigger and loaded chamber all in a bunch, from behind a wall or cactus.”
The gal from the historical society nodded but observed, “That removable action is still empty. It seems to be the only one he had. So why didn’t he reload after the last time he fired that gun, good, bad or indifferent as it might have been?”
Stringer hesitated, then said, “He would have had to be alive to do anything with that carbine. Who’s to say he died of thirst with his weapon across his thighs, or mayhaps lost a shootout, to die faster?”
Everyone but Big Ben Winslow stared goggle-eyed at him. Winslow said, “We’ve sort of figured for some time that somebody helped his or herself to their money as well as their team. Stringer, here, found the remains of a shot-up lock out yonder and it stands to reason a couple of old boys headed home to buy land and retire must have expected to pay for the same.”
The girl stared down at all the mummies in dawning horror, as Fred Remington nodded grimly and said, “Having sketched my way across some battlefields in Cuba, I can assure you all that a human being shot dead lies in the same state of repose as that of someone who died more naturally.”
Grace swallowed hard and insisted, “Surely not the children!” So when Remington didn’t answer, Stringer told her, as gently as he could manage, “Let’s hope so. It would have been even more inhuman to leave the poor kids alive on the desert with their dead parents, when you study on it.”
Ben Winslow looked as if he really needed some fresh air as he said, “I wish we’d never found these folk, or at least that we’d never found out so much about them. It’s starting to take shape afore my eyes and, in God’s truth, it ain’t a pretty picture.”
One of Grace’s assistants asked her, “Is that the way you see it, ma’am?” only to hear her answer, “We can’t deal in imagination. We have to deal with solid facts. We can’t say for certain that any of these poor people were shot, or even that they died of thirst. We’d best go through their personal effects some more.”
Stringer hunkered down to help one of her helpers haul a soap box out into the dim light as the old spade-bearded gent from the county coroner’s outfit grumped in with his own team in tow. He shot a disdainful glance at the mummified remains against the far wall and muttered, “How untidy! Thank heavens these deaths were before my time.” Then he nodded at Stringer and added in a disappointed tone, “That man called Calico was shot twice in the back, at close range, with .45 shorts. One severed his spine and the other didn’t do a thing for his right kidney. Suffice it to say that since you and everyone else seem to agree you were wearing that .38 at the time, we’re going to have to issue a warrant for that other gent. I wish someone in this town could come up with a name. Kid sounds even dumber than John Doe!”
The girl from the historical society said, “I do wish you could give us your informed opinion on these mummies, Doctor Owens.” Which prompted the old cuss to cock an eyebrow and opine, “They’re dead. Been dead for some time, from the looks of them.”
She insisted, “Knowing just how they died might help us put the who and how of it together better, doctor.”
But he just hauled out his watch, stared down at it, and told her, “If we don’t all head back to Barstow before noon we’re apt to wind up mummified, ourselves. What difference does it make, at this late date, how some greenhorns crossing the desert died years and years ago?”
Stringer tried, “We may have an ancient murder mystery on our hands, here, Sir. Whether these are the remains of the Lowendorf party or not, we’ve reason to suspect they were robbed and…”
“Who cares?” Doctor Owens cut in, adding with an annoyed snort, “My office has enough of a case load without digging into ancient history. Who were these people, for certain? Who ever filed a complaint or made a criminal charge in all the years they’ve been out there on the desert? Who can say what they might have been robbed of, if nobody knows for certain who they were, or what they had on them worth stealing?”
Stringer nodded but said, “I follow your drift and I’d go along with it, if I didn’t suspect there was considerable connection with these dead folk and the fresh cadaver you just got through
examining. Calico Warren was backshot just as he was fixing to backshoot me. We were within sight of the wagon these mummies were found in and I’d just said or done something that must have made Calico think I knew more than I really did. It had to be something connecting these dead folk with someone in the here and now. Someone who knows more about the last moments of this mummified family, and who doesn’t want anyone else to know what really happened.”
The old spade beard was still smiling dubiously. So Stringer nodded at Fred Remington and added, “Both us newspapermen got threatening notes warning us not to cover the story of these dried-out and poverty-struck folk. Tell the doc, Fred.”
Remington looked just as snooty as the older spade beard as he replied with a shrug, “You’re wasting your time, MacKail. The man just told you he can’t cut the mustard. Why embarrass him further by insisting he try something beyond the level of his skills? It would take a real forensic scientist, not a small town M.D., to determine the cause of death after all these years.”
It worked. Doctor Owens snapped, “The hell you say! I’ll have you know I am a forensic scientist, and if you’ll all clear out and give my team and me some elbow room I’ll tell you within the hour whether these folk died of gunshot wounds or, hell, poison mushrooms!”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Neither Miss Grace nor in truth her male assistants looked man enough to hang out in the saloon. So big Ben Winslow led them all over to his sprawling adobe, where they got to sprawl on the veranda he’d been smart enough to build facing north.
Pretty Florida Winslow seemed pleased as punch to have such a fine excuse for getting gussied up and serving lemonade. Or, that is to say, to sit next to Grace while a Cahuilla chica they apparently only had working there in the daytime poured for one and all. Stringer wondered, idly, where they got the ice. He recalled them keeping bottled beer on ice at the saloon, as well.