Stringer and the Hanging Judge

by Lou Cameron

  The train went through a tunnel. “Oh, goody,” she said. “I think we’re almost there!” and on that, at least, Stringer could agree with her. He knew that if nobody met her at the depot, he’d get stuck with toting her baggage or even reading her infernal manuscript. He was still trying to figure some move that wouldn’t be cruel to either of them when she said something about freshening up and he had to rise to let her go to the lady’s room. He saw this as a chance to quit while he was ahead, and so as soon as she was out of sight, he hauled the kit bag out and headed the other way, toward the club car.

  It was nearly empty, this close to the end of the journey, as others returned to their regular seats to worry about their own baggage. But it wasn’t as empty as Stringer had hoped to find it. For the big bully in the derby and checked suit was leaning on the far end of the bar, as if he owned it all.

  Stringer knew he was asking for trouble. The gal he was trying to dodge only figured to bore him with her childish talk. The big brute staring thoughtfully at him was definitely packing something that could bore a man more seriously. The bottom of his holster was peeking from under the edge of his jacket as he leaned against the bar to Stringer’s right. Stringer imagined it was possible to carry buttercups in a gun holster, but he somehow doubted the sullen-looking gent handed out many flowers.

  Stringer nodded curtly at him and placed his kit bag on the bar between them, ordering a pint from the sleepy-looking old gent behind the same. As the barkeep poured, the stranger almost glared at Stringer as he said, flatly, “She ain’t his wife. She’s just a Jew-gal he met in Frisco. They calls her Sadie, but her real name’s Josephine Marcus. In her day she was best known as Tombstone Sadie.”

  Stringer was painfully aware his own gun was out of reach in the kit bag between them. He didn’t think this would be a good time to make any moves toward unpacking it. He still heard himself saying, even as a voice inside his head told him to shut up, “I can’t say I follow your drift, friend. If you’re talking so mean about the lady I was just jawing with, I met her up Alaska way a few years back as a mighty young gal, and Wyatt Earp told me man to man she was his lawfully wedded-up wife.”

  The sinister stranger shrugged. “Try checking into a hotel sometime with a gal you admit you ain’t married to. She ain’t half as young as she looks, neither.”

  Again the sweet voice of reason warned Stringer to let the fool talk all he liked. They were rounding the last spur of the Santa Monica range now, and they’d reach the end of the line any fool minute. But fair was fair, and foolish or not, Mrs. Earp had never called Stringer any bad names. So he found himself saying, with a certain edge to his voice, “I won’t argue that there may have been a similar-looking gal called Tombstone Sadie, when you and me and the world was younger. I’ve woke up with enough of the species in the cold gray dawn to agree makeup can do wonders for an older gal’s appearance. But wasn’t old Wyatt married to a wife called Bessie in his Tombstone days, and ain’t we talking about a good twenty years ago?”

  The stranger nodded. “Bessie Earp drank her fool self to death after that pimp got run out of Arizona. He got back together with Tombstone Sadie later, in Frisco, where she was sort of acting on the stage and making more money after the show, on her back. I got eyes. I can see she still looks just as young as ever. But that old bawd is forty if she’s a day.”

  “Well, far be it from me to call another man a liar,” Stringer said, and then the big moose had his coat open and seemed to be drawing his Colt ‘74, fast!

  Stringer knew he was dead. There wouldn’t be time to even ask why. But then, as he tensed to feel the first slug bore into him at close range, the big stranger fired past him, too wide to be meant to scare a grown man seriously, and then another shot rang out behind Stringer, and so as he saw the man facing him drop away from the bar in a gunfighter’s crouch, it seemed a good idea to hit the rug. Stringer did.

  As the sounds of gunfire faded away and Stringer found himself still alive, he risked raising his head. The big moose who’d just scared the shit out of him was standing straight in the center of the car. Nobody seemed to dispute his ownership of it as he reloaded his revolver and asked Stringer, conversationally, “Are you hit or just a good ducker, old son?”

  Stringer got back to his own feet as their train slowed down and the barkeep gingerly peeked over the mahogany at both of them. “It’s over and we just have time for one last round, if you make it two shots of red-eye,” the big man told the barkeep.

  Stringer assayed a glance at the forward end of the car as the gun smoke began to clear. There was nobody there. The glass had been blown out. The barkeep slid two shot glasses at them, with the assurance they were on the house. “I give up,” Stringer said. “If you weren’t slapping leather at me, who were you so mad at just now, Mister… ah?”

  “Garrett, Pat Garrett,” the man in the checked suit replied, adding, “I wasn’t mad. I don’t know why everyone thinks I’m so mad all the time. I was shooting at a rascal who was pointing a bitty whore pistol at you. I didn’t get him. But I reckon I made the back-shooting son of a bitch reconsider his manners some. How come he was out to kill you, newspaper boy?”

  “I don’t know,” Stringer answered. “What did he look like and who told you I was a newspaperman, Mr. Garrett?”

  “I didn’t get a good look at him,” the surly old lawman said. “When I see a man with a gun out, I don’t stop to count his damn buttons. Pasty face and dark duds. Harrington Richardson double-action .32 or smaller. Going after him now, with the train slowed down and everyone standing up to get off, would be a dangersome waste of time. As to how I knowed who you was, you told me. I was sitting right behind you whilst that old whore-gal told you all them whoppers. Lucky for you I couldn’t stand much more and moved back here to let her have you to her fool self.”

  Stringer said it was lucky indeed as he opened his kit bag. “I didn’t think I’d need my gun, this far from noisier surroundings,” he explained.

  “There’s no place that’s safe for a man with a rep,” Pat Garrett growled as Stringer strapped on his own gun rig. “I know this the hard way. For it was a good twenty years ago I had to shoot old Billy the Kid, and you’ve no idea how many damn fool kids I’ve had to straighten out since then.”

  “I’ve read about your term of office in Lincoln County, ah, Sheriff,” said Stringer. “I don’t think I’ll ever enjoy your rep as a gunslick, though.”

  “You won’t enjoy it at all if you last as long as me,” Pat Garrett replied. “Any man who’s well-known has a rep. I’ve read some of the stuff you’ve writ in the San Francisco Sun. I have her delivered to my spread on the Pecos. It costs extra, but I like the way you write. I don’t mind telling you I get mighty sick of the things some have writ about me and that sawed-off homicidal lunatic, Billy. That piece you done on the anniversary of his death a while back had things just about right.”

  Stringer shrugged modestly. “It was just pasted up, as we call it, from older reports in our morgue. Ah, are you going home to the Pecos tonight? It just so happens that’s about where I’m headed myself.”

  Pat Garrett shook his head. “Keep your eyes open, in that case. For day or night, somebody don’t seem to want you going anywhere. I’m getting off soon to spend a few days looking into irrigation. There has to be some way to water stock better than I’ve managed so far along the Pecos.”

  “The L.A. basin is the place to study watering pure desert,” Stringer said. “Would you like to tell me, now, how come you just saved my life, Mr. Garrett?”

  “Call me Pat,” the older man said. “I took you for the sort of gent I usually try to avoid, until I figured out who you had to be. Then I had to save you. You’re the only reporter who ever got that Shootout betwixt me and the Kid halfway right. I can’t afford to lose such an honest young cuss.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Stringer had to figure on an overnight trip and then some, Lord willing, and between L.A. and Langtry, Texas, h
e didn’t have to change trains at El Paso. As the conductor punched his ticket, the good news was that he was aboard a through-train with Pullman accommodations up front. The bad news was that while they had some empty berths and even compartments left, Stringer just couldn’t have any.

  The conductor explained it was a new company policy. Sleeping accommodations had to be booked in advance. Too much blood had been shed over bunkings that two or more coach passengers had decided to spring for after they’d had enough in the club car to lie down a spell. Stringer informed the only railroad official he could find that it was a hell of a way to run a railroad, and grumped his way to a corner coach seat under an overhead bulb.

  He knew all too well how much he might hanker for a place to lie down if he started drinking this close to sundown. Up until now he’d thought it was pretty slick to ride say five hundred miles, coach fare, before hiring a berth. Someone on the board of directors had no doubt been just as slick. The world was coming to a sorry state if railroads expected folk to pay for a damned old berth, in use or not, from point of departure to destination.

  He’d naturally picked up more reading material during his layover in L.A. But he thought it best to save it until he got good and bored. Staring out the window to his left, he could see that might not take too long. Gazing at the passing scenery didn’t work so good at night since they’d started lighting up the innards of passenger coaches with fancy light bulbs. Save for a passing window now and again out there, he couldn’t see a damned thing but his own fool face.

  He reached into his kit bag for the manila envelope of morgue clippings Sam Barca had given him on Langtry and the famous or infamous Judge Roy Bean. Leafing through them, Stringer failed to find few facts he didn’t already know. Earlier interviews with Bean’s friends, enemies, and Bean himself failed to jibe. Bean apparently never told the same tale twice. All that was certain was that sometime in the early 1880’s Bean had somehow been appointed a J.P. and commenced holding court on the porch of his saloon cum general store, named the Jersey Lily—his spelling, in honor of Miss Lillie Langtry, a sort of odd character in her own right.

  The Jersey Island-born Miss Langtry was either a famous London actress or an infamous London whore, depending on just whom one might ask. That was the trouble with well-known folk, from the viewpoint of a newspaperman who prided himself on accuracy. Backyard gossip was bad enough about small-town eccentrics. Once a body got famous enough for all who knew-them-when to brag about, they commenced to turn into living legends, glorified by their friends and vilified or debunked by their enemies.

  Stringer knew a lot depended on how likable well-known folk might naturally be. Old Wyatt Earp, and even his giddy young wife, were folk one had a hard time hating. When they’d first met up on the Klondike, Earp had struck Stringer as a puppy-dog friendly old boy with a firm shake and an endless supply of stories, clean, dirty, and mighty tall. It was easy to see how easy lots of folk found it to take old Wyatt’s tales of glory as at least possible. Yet as far as Stringer had ever been able to pin down, the one historical gunfight the sweet old cuss had ever been mixed up in involved him tagging along as a kid brother after his big brother Virgil, the only one wearing a deputy badge. While the true details of the fight that followed were no doubt forever garbled by the rival Tombstone papers, the Epitaph and Nugget, it was generally agreed the now-famous Gunfight at the O.K. Corral had taken place in a vacant lot across the street from the same, and that after all the smoke cleared, exactly three men lay dying. The Epitaph and Nugget had yet to agree on whether Billy Clanton and the McLaury brothers had been gunned down with their hands in the air or not, or which side had started it. But if old Wyatt’s wife was right about him getting in good with those moving-picture makers along Western Avenue, it hardly seemed likely the Earp brothers or even their disgusting pal Doc Holliday would ever appear on the silver screen as the villains.

  Poor old Pat Garrett, on the other hand, was a gent most folk found easy to dislike. Stringer liked him better now. But it was a plain fact he’d wanted to paste the cuss in the nose the first time they’d locked eyes, earlier. The big moose was sullen, rude, a natural bully, and no doubt one hell of a lawman, if half the things even his many enemies gave him credit for were at all true. Nobody had ever caught him with his hand in the till, and folk tended to watch the hands of an unpopular sheriff. Nobody alive dared claim he’d ever backed Pat Garrett down. Billy the Kid had been doing the running when old Pat caught up with him at the Maxwell spread and laid him low with a bullet in the heart, from the front, and the Kid armed with his own six-gun. Yet already folk who hadn’t been there were chipping away at Garrett’s rep with snide remarks about Garrett having the edge on poor Billy, despite the fact that Garrett was only chasing the little rascal after he’d shot three lawmen in the back in his Robin Hood career.

  Stringer put the clippings aside and rolled a smoke as he told himself to stick to Judge Bean. Also, neither Earp nor Garrett seemed to be after him this evening, but someone sure was.

  It was too early to say for sure whether that attempt on his life a few hours back had any connection with his destination or not. He’d been shot at before to keep him from handing in a news item someone just didn’t want to see printed. On the other hand, he’d been shot at just for the hell of it a few times as well. So the question boiled down to whether Bean and his pals had some dark secret they didn’t want a known investigative reporter delving into, or…. Someone didn’t want him to write nice things about the old fart?

  He scowled at his own reflection in the window glass and muttered, “Try her this way. That fleet mysterious gunslick wasn’t after you or anyone as unknown.” He was out to be the man who gunned the man who gunned Billy the Kid, Stringer decided. He saw a chance to fire at Garrett mano a mano, if he never mentioned that car door he was mostly covered by. It wasn’t enough cover to take out an old pro like Garrett, who was only being modest or unimaginative when he assumed a stranger with his back to said door seemed the likely target.

  Stringer liked that notion better. But as he started to turn from the window and see if he could get into Collier’s magazine, a reflected vision it might have been rude to stare so hard at hove into view. He pretended to go on gazing out at nothing while he admired the passage of a shapely blonde with her waistline cinched to mayhaps eighteen inches between her white blouse and side-button skirt. Some found those new side-button skirts mighty shocking. But she look refined enough. As she passed by, a taller man followed her under a sporty straw hat. It seemed obvious others had ridden far enough to crave liquid refreshments in the club car. Stringer rose to follow the early birds, lest there be no place next to a pretty lady by the time he gave into temptation. Next to drinking alone on a night train, there was nothing more miserable than drinking in a corner, watching all the other gents flirt with a member of the unfair sex.

  Stringer slid open the door the man in the straw skimmer had just shut in his face and crossed the open platform between cars, enjoying a breath of cooler night air scented with grease wood and coal smoke. They were somewhere on the California desert by now.

  As he stepped into the next car, he spotted the two of them ahead and moved a mite faster to close the distance between them. But they still made it out the rear door ahead of him, and again, the son of a bitch with the skimmer slid the door shut in his face. He shrugged, slid it open again, and stepped out on the open platform just in time to see the man grab the woman. They both seemed unaware of him as they wrestled back and forth on the swaying platform in the semidarkness. She was doing all the screaming, or trying to. She’d have yelled a lot louder if the brute hadn’t had a hand over her mouth. This time Stringer was wearing his gun, and he drew it. Then, since there was no way to shoot the lady’s attacker without risking a .38 slug through the both of them, Stringer pistol-whipped the old boy from behind, hard. As he let go of the blonde and began to fall away from her, Stringer grabbed the back of his jacket with his free hand, balanc
ed the now hatless tough on his buckled knees, and asked the lady, soberly, “Does this belong to you, ma’am?”

  She’d fallen back against the bulkhead to stare owl-eyed at Stringer and the groaning mess he was hanging on to. “Who is he?” she gasped. “Who are you?”

  Stringer nodded, holstered his .38, and simply picked the ruffian up by the seat of the pants and the scruff of the neck to pitch him over the side chains and into the darkness beyond.

  “Are you crazy?” the blonde sobbed.

  Stringer kicked the straw hat over the side as well and replied, “Nope. He was. A man would have to be, trying to, ah, mishandle a lady on the platform of a club car, buttons or no buttons.”

  “I don’t think that was what he had in mind,” she said. “It all happened so fast, but I got the distinct impression he was about to throw me off this train.” Then she stared soberly at Stringer. “My God, he would have, if you hadn’t arrived in the nick of time!”

  He shrugged. “Forget it. It’s over. Would you take it personal if I commented on your British accent, ma’am?”

  She smiled weakly. “I don’t consider the question rude. I am English. Do you suppose that was why that total stranger was so annoyed with me?”

  Stringer smiled. “He hardly looked old enough to be a vet of the Battle of Saratoga, ma’am. The only war we still seem to be fighting these days is our Civil War, and you English folk didn’t ride for either side. I reckon he was just strange, like you said.”

  She glanced sideways at the swirling darkness, gulped, and asked him, “Do you think he… made it?”

  Stringer shrugged. “Sixty-forty, with the odds on our side. Either way, he won’t bother you anymore. I’d sure like to stand out here in the flying cinders with you some more, ma’am, but my original destination was the club car. My name is Stuart MacKail, I only dress this informal when I’m on the road, and I’d be proud to buy you some soda water or stronger. You sure look like you could do with something stronger.”