Stringer and the Hanging Judge

by Lou Cameron

  The next-to-last car from the rear was only three-quarters full, and better yet, he found a whole seat empty on the shady side. He could think of two reasons. A lot of pilgrims liked to admire the ocean views to their right, and to hell with the afternoon sun, while others, having made it back this close to the club car, had no doubt decided to spend the long tedious train ride bellied up to the bar.

  It was too early in the day to start drinking, if he meant to change trains at twilight in the confusion of the L.A. yards. So Stringer shoved his pack under the seat and sat down. He cracked the window to his left a few inches. It started to feel better at once, and if the brown coast ranges rising that way were less interesting than the wide Pacific’s breakers, so be it. He’d been smart enough to pick up more than one magazine in the Frisco depot before boarding.

  He hauled the rolled-up reading material from a hip pocket and spread it on the vacant seat beside him. He decided to get a smoke going before he checked out the competition. Stringer could read faster than most, if he had to. Killing time, he enjoyed or perhaps just teased himself by editing the work of other writers. A lot of them sure wrote stuffy, even for the current Edwardian fashions. Stringer knew he was expected, himself, to lard on the Sir Walter Scott bullshit his own editor called “descriptive.” Sam Barca still gave him hell for not describing everyone in a news item down to every pimple they might or might not have on their ass.

  So Stringer was thinking about descriptive phrases, rolling his Bull Durham, when the nearby rear door slid open and a big moose wearing a checked suit, a derby, and a handlebar moustache came in from the club car to glare down at Stringer, or the seat he’d grabbed, before moving on with an annoyed shrug. Playing old Sam Barca’s game, Stringer thought, prehistoric brute, tamed to modern manners by the simple fact that his type hardly ever makes it to his forty or fifty years unless they get some common sense.

  He couldn’t see the middle-aged but obviously still dangerous cuss now. It made the hairs on the back of Stringer’s neck sort of tingle to consider anything like that behind his back while his own S&W .38 was riding in his kit bag, wrapped in its gun belt. That leathery hard-eyed face had been familiar. Stringer couldn’t place it. But it connected up, somehow, with mighty grim details, if only he could remember ‘em. If the surly old rascal wasn’t packing a gun under that checked jacket, he sure liked to carry a heap of loose change in his right pants pocket.

  As Stringer was licking his cigarette paper to seal it, he heard a deep voice growl behind him, “You’d be sitting in my seat, amigo pequeño.”

  Stringer didn’t answer as he stuck the smoke in his mouth and considered his options. On the one hand it was sort of dumb to argue with any man over a railroad seat he might well have just claim on. But on the other hand, Stringer didn’t see why anyone had call to belittle him in Mex as “little friend.” The middle-aged tough was mayhaps forty pounds heavier but no taller than Stringer, and a lot of that was likely lard. So the only question before the house was that bulge riding the big tough’s right hip.

  Then another male voice, a nervous one, said, “Oh, I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t know this seat was occupied.”

  Followed by a growl announcing, “I was only out of it long enough for a beer and a piss. So what’s it going to be, pilgrim?”

  Stringer had the other passenger placed now. He’d noticed the little squirt in the bow tie and derby, just behind him, as he was settling down. Then he’d dismissed the harmless-looking little dude. Stringer had been raised Christian and hence saw no reason to rawhide harmless strangers just because they seemed harmless. The one in back of him tried, “There’s plenty of room for both of us, sir. I’ll be pleased to let you sit by the window if you like.”

  The much bigger man replied, with a nastier edge to his growl, “I’ll be pleased to sit in that very own seat of mine all by my very own self, you claim-jumping son of a bitch.”

  Stringer wasn’t too surprised to hear the frightened little dude vacate the disputed seat poco tiempo. Even dude boys were raised to know that when a man called you a son of a bitch, it was time to lay him low or run like hell.

  As the burly bully sat down behind him, Stringer became aware he’d been holding his breath, and so enjoyed a lungful of salty and smoky Pacific air before he lit his Bull Durham and reached for a magazine. He had the dangerous-looking man behind him sort of figured now. He still couldn’t place that hard albeit likely once handsome face. But he’d met the type often, and had even been scared of the breed when he’d been a very small boy.

  The cuss was not only a natural bully, but the disgusting kind who sized up his victims first. Remembering that hard-eyed glare when they’d locked eyes for just a moment, Stringer knew that had his own eyes betrayed a flicker of fear, he’d be the one who had to find another seat right now. Stringer didn’t practice glaring at himself in the mirror, but he’d often been told his own eyes, an odd shade of old gold, could look warm and friendly as a contented cat’s or cold as the eyes of a sincerely pissed-off mountain lion, depending on how he felt about who or what he was staring at. He’d been told that most of the time his golden eyes stared out at the world unreadable. It seemed to make some folk nervous. So he’d learned not to stare hard at anyone or anything that he didn’t want to kiss or fight. That short mutual size-up he’d just had with the bully in the checked suit hadn’t lasted long enough for Stringer to glare. So it was safe to assume the bully didn’t feel up to messing with anyone half his size who didn’t seem downright worried about it.

  Stringer knew himself well enough to know that if he didn’t put the matter out of his mind, he’d wind up calling the big asshole before this infernal train got to L.A. It was a. long trip with plenty of time to brood, and Stringer had always hated bully boys with a ferocity his Uncle Don back home had warned him of as a family curse, explaining, “The MacKails was a fighting clan in the old country, Stuart, and there’s a mighty thin line betwixt a natural fighter and a damn fool searching for a fight when no fight’s called for. That’s how us MacKails all wound up in this here land of the free, after the English kicked the crap out of us at Culloden in the Rising of 1745. We had no call to follow Bonnie Prince Charlie. He was a prissy Frenchified boy who barely spoke English, let alone the Gaelic, and nobody had been messing with us in our highland glen. But like I said, it’s hard to draw the line betwixt fighting sensible and just fighting to be fighting. So leave that bully boy at your school alone. You’ve taught him not to bully you and the other twelve-year-olds, and once you’ve licked a fifteen-year-old halfwit more than once, you start to look like a bully yourself if you just go on chasing him home after school.”

  Stringer had tried ever since to keep those words of wisdom in mind. It wasn’t always easy. But at least he’d learned not to beat up bullies who weren’t messing with him or anyone he knew. That sissy little dude would have likely fainted at the sight of two grown men fighting over him like they were both after his fair white body.

  Stringer read the first article in the copy of Scientific American he’d picked up. It was over his head, or maybe his head was on the past instead of the rosy future they were predicting for the horseless carriage, once they got some damned roads paved between towns. He wondered why the writer had left out the obvious contribution the current bicycle craze back east was making to modern transportation. Nobody had ever given a hoot if some old farmer lost a hay-wagon wheel on a busted-up wagon trace. But let one pretty little Gibson Girl go crying to her daddy about a front rim busted up by rural bumps, and if her daddy had a lick of political pull in the county, that rude road figured to get paved. For after all, it was the taxpayer’s money, not Daddy’s, and how many times is a man expected to buy his dear child a new bike, for God’s sake?

  The next article was even duller. It attacked the notion of flying machines with purple prose, in an apparent attempt to prove the obvious. Everyone knew the Smithsonian Institute had looked dumb as hell with that flying machine that dove strai
ght into the Potomac and damn near killed its pilot. Even earlier, a German scientist had managed to kill himself entire, leaping off hills with a sort of oversized box kite. Anyone with a lick of sense could see the notion was downright dangerous, even if they ever got it to work and—

  Had it been in Cheyenne he’d seen that hard-cased cuss in the seat behind him? There’d been a mess of lawmen and bounty hunters gathered in and about Cheyenne that time the Sundance Kid and his gal, old Etta Place, had been spotted leaving the Nickelodian after the premiere of The Great Train Robbery. But no, that hadn’t been where he’d met old checked suit.

  He stared out at the passing chaparral, eyes squinted, as he pictured that mean face without turning to look at it. He nodded to himself as he decided, Morgue photograph, in black and white. If he was on the run at this late date, he wouldn’t be acting so troublesome. He must be an old baseball player or something. An athlete gone soft and creaky would likely feel cranky as well. Maybe he used to be a boxer. He’s big enough. Never boxed bare fisted much, though. His nose is still straight.

  Stringer was able to spit out the bone his curious mind kept gnawing to no good purpose when he came to an article by Professor Percival Lowell about the planet Mars. Stringer had asked Sam Barca for a chance to interview the professor at the new observatory he’d stuck atop an Arizona mountain near Flagstaff. But Sam had insisted Stringer was not a science writer and that even if he had been, all Lowell’s notions about Martian folk digging a network of canals all over their red planet only went to show how much trouble a rich kid could get into by choosing to chase stars instead of gals, like anyone with a lick of sense and a lot of money ought to.

  Stringer still found the article interesting, though, and by the time he’d finished, he was at least as worried about whether anyone lived on Mars as he was in the just as mysterious puzzle behind him. So he was able to finish his science magazine and start a new Sherlock Holmes with no further thought about the big loudmouth back there.

  By the time Stringer had read all his magazines and smoked his mouth good and thirsty, he could see they were slowing down for Santa Barbara, with the sun a lot lower and the greater part of the trip just an unpleasant memory. A mess of passengers got off when the train stopped there. Stringer couldn’t and he saw the mean son of a bitch behind him wouldn’t. But what the hell, the next stop but one or more would be L.A. Stringer sure wished he didn’t have to catch an eastbound there. Maybe he could swing a Pullman berth, if the prices hadn’t gone up again.

  He was ready for that beer now. But as the train started up again, Stringer stayed put. Leaving a seat empty with passengers just climbing aboard could lead to conversations like the bully behind him had had with that priss…. Jesus, six or more hours ago.

  It didn’t work. With the weekend coming up, a lot more passengers than usual seemed to have boarded at Santa Barbara. But at least when a lady in a big picture hat asked him if the seat next to him was taken, she was pretty.

  Stringer rose gallantly to let her have the seat nearest the window. That required them to make eye contact. It was too late. She’d recognized him. It would have been insulting to light out for the club car right after a lady asked, “Why, Stuart MacKail, what on earth are you doing aboard this train?” She’d talked that dumb the time they’d met up on the Klondike, he recalled with a good deal of dismay. Stringer didn’t mind a pretty gal bending his ear, even dumb, if or when she was up for grabs. But this one, cuss her astoundingly beautiful face and figure to match, was taken.

  As they sat down together, Stringer replied, “I got on this train to ride it to L.A., Mrs. Earp. How come I find you on it without old Wyatt? He never let you go anywhere unescorted when we were all panning gold along the Yukon, that time.”

  She dimpled at him. “Heavens, nobody with any sense tried panning gold in the rush of ‘99, Stuart. You know very well you were up there warning people not be suckers in those newspaper articles you insisted on writing, and that my Wyatt was fixing to clean your plow until he saw it didn’t seem to hurt our business ventures, even when reporters like you told the truth. I’m so glad you decided to be friends in the end.”

  Stringer shrugged that off. It would have been rude to tell a no-longer-young saloonkeeper’s child-bride what he really thought of her husband. She had to be young enough to be Wyatt Earp’s daughter, and damn it, what was the fool woman’s name? It was something exotic she’d likely made up to go with her sort of Arabian Nights features. He knew she had theatrical ambitions, so he preferred the legend that Wyatt Earp had met her, after his Dodge City wife died, as a young gal working at the Birdcage in Tombstone. The other things said about her were just silly. He didn’t care whether she was Jewish, as some said, or some kind of Arab, as others held. He decided, since she was a married woman, it was safe to call her ma’am, even if she was an infernal teenager.

  As if to confuse him further, Mrs. Earp said, “You have to come out to our house on Western Avenue when we get to L.A. I know Wyatt will be thrilled to see you again, and I have something to show you.”

  “Western Avenue is a far piece from the downtown depot for me to manage between trains, ma’am,” Stringer answered. “What was it you had to show me, a boy or a girl?”

  She poked him with a jolly finger. “Silly. I’m not ready to settle down that much yet. Wyatt and me are in the real estate business now, and you’ll never believe how easy it is to make money down around L.A.”

  “Yes I do,” Stringer said. “That once sort of dry scrubland is selling for more than it’s worth these days. If what you wanted to show me is a city lot or a yet-to-be-developed orange grove, I’d best warn you I’m still drawing space rates from my paper, when I’m lucky.”

  She laughed. “Pooh, Wyatt is the realtor in the family. I’m an aspiring authoress these days. I’m dying to have a real author like you go over my manuscript.”

  He managed neither to laugh nor moan aloud. It wasn’t easy. “The last person on earth a budding writer should ever show a manuscript is another writer, ma’am. I know it sounds logical. If it didn’t, it might not happen so often. But it makes no more sense asking one writer’s opinion of another writer than it would to ask one shoemaker what he thought of a pair of high-buttons a would-be rival had just cobbled up, see?”

  He could see she looked more hurt than enlightened. So to soften the blow, he added helpfully, “Do you have a buyer lined up for your, ah, novel?”

  “It’s not fiction,” she explained. “I’ve written the true story of my famous husband, Wyatt Earp. I intend to title it, ‘Me and Wyatt Earp.’ What do you think?”

  “Catchy,” he said. “They’ll change your working title on you nine times out of ten. The problem is neither the title nor even the spelling. It’s getting someone to read it, I mean someone who might buy it—that’s the problem.”

  “Mr. Dumbell says he’ll read it, once it’s done,” she said. Stringer blinked and repeated, “Mr. Dumbell?”

  “I can’t recall his real name,” she said. “It sounds like Dumbell. Anyway, he’s just built a moving-picture studio right up Western Avenue from us. Wyatt met him and his eastern friends, selling lots to them. Mr. Dumbell has asked him to be a tective adviser when they get to making moving pictures. They mean to make lots of Wild West ones because L.A. is already out west and they don’t need to build much special stuff to make it all look real and—”

  This time Stringer laughed despite himself. “Are you trying to tell me they’ve asked Wyatt Earp to be a technical adviser, on the subject of the Wild West?”

  She nodded, big-eyed and sincerely. “They have to have someone who knows all about the Wild West to tell them how to make Wild West moving pictures, don’t they? I just told you they’re all eastern dudes. It all came about when a direction or something Wyatt was selling a lot to asked if he’d seen The Great Train Robbery. He was ever so upset when Wyatt started to point out all the things wrong with the story the Edison crew made back east with all those a
ctor boys who couldn’t ride worth spit.”

  Stringer nodded and muttered half to himself, “Well, fair is fair. At least old Wyatt knows what Dodge looked like when the herds were in town, while he was tending bar there.”

  It would have been impolite to mention they were discussing a time before she could have been born. He didn’t see how she could have met old Earp in Tombstone, seeing he got run out of town in the ‘80s, unless she’d run off with a dirty old man indeed. But he knew better than to dwell on a lady’s exact age. So he asked her, “Is that what gave you the idea for your book, listening to Wyatt and the others jaw about his glory days in Tombstone?”

  She nodded but said, “Heavens, Wyatt was a famous lawman long before his famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Stuart. Why, he’d been marshal of all sorts of towns before they begged him to tame Tombstone. I’ve got the part about him arresting the Thompson brothers and killing Curly Bill in that duel all worked out. But I just can’t figure how to start or end the story, see?”

  “You can’t end a biography while someone’s still alive,” he said, too polite to point out that her beginning was a lot of bull as well. Mayhaps when an older man had a pretty young wife to pleasure, he was entitled to bullshit her about how good he’d been in his misspent youth. Wyatt Earp would be, let’s see, about fifty-five by now. If he lasted another twenty years as a Hollywood technical adviser, and given the hero-worship of an attractive young third or fourth wife with theatrical and literary aspirations, Western Avenue figured to crank out some mighty confusing moving pictures in the near future.