Stringer on the Assassins' Trail

by Lou Cameron

  She sighed. “You make it all sound so complicated. Maybe I should just go home, if it’s a choice between being a damned old schoolgirl or a cow-town whore.”

  “Yep, Judith Ann, maybe you should.”

  But she didn’t leave before morning, and her baked trout left him with a nice clean taste in his mouth as well.

  By late the following afternoon Stringer was missing more than trout baked in clay and served in bed. He hadn’t seen a living soul all day, and would have considered himself lost in an endless sea of bare rock hogbacks and wooded draws if he hadn’t been following the same zigzag trail Judith Ann had put him on as they’d parted friendly.

  He had no idea how far he’d ridden since then. By counting the spells they trotted as walking, to make up for the times he had to rest his paint, he figured they’d been setting an hourly pace of four to six miles. As if that hadn’t been a tedious way to cover so much distance, there was just no way to beeline in such rough country.

  He was cursing himself for being such a slowpoke when he rounded a bend and spied a more interesting view ahead. A broad valley lay across his route from east to west, mostly cleared, with a tree-lined stream draining the parklike valley as it ran west. The trail he was on ran down to join a more substantial wagon trace running more or less in line with the valley stream. Where they met, a cluster of frame buildings had sprouted. Stringer promised the paint some oats, if they had any, and he spurred him down the slope at an easy lope to find out where the hell they were.

  The settlement was called Valley Stream, which was sort of original when one studied on it. He found this out when he bought a sack of oats at the one general store cum post office. Then he watered his mount at the trough out front and left it with a nose bag of oats to console it as he walked across to the one saloon. There wasn’t any telegraph office in the settlement, cuss their backward ways. But the schooner of beer he ordered tasted fine, after all that time on the dusty trail without anything more tasty than chocolate and canteen water. They didn’t have a moose head wired for light bulbs over the bar. They had the glass-eyed head of a buffalo bull. It was just as well. There wouldn’t have been room for a rack of moose antlers between the stuffed head and the pressed-tin ceiling. Stringer asked the bald barkeep if he’d shot it himself.

  The other man shook his head. “It was here when we bought the place,” he said. “Don’t know where it come from. No buffalo left this side of the Divide. Plenty of mule deer, though. You looking to do you some hunting, stranger?”

  Stringer shook his head. Before he could go into who he was or what he was doing there, a third man sidled up to his right side. “Howdy, old son. I’m Dan Getz, the law in these parts, as this brass star on my vest might indicate. Now I want you to place both palms flat on the bar and hold ’em there while I have a look at that gun you rid in with on your hip.”

  Stringer did as he was told, saying, “I didn’t know you had a city ordinance on sidearms, Sheriff.”

  The older man lifted the .38 from Stringer’s holster. “We don’t,” he replied, pleasantly enough. “Nice gun. Smith and Wesson double-action, I see. I don’t suppose you know anything about that bunch of strange gun slicks said to be holed up in Lost Mule Gulch a few miles south of here?”

  “I was told about them by some, ah, nesters I run into,” Stringer replied, “so I went around ’em. That is, I think I did. I never laid eyes on such a valley or its mysterious visitors.”

  Getz shrugged. “I reckon you’d want to tell us that whether it was true or not, no offense. Has anyone ever told you before that you sort of describe like the Sundance Kid?”

  Stringer nodded. “He has a ferocious moustache, even though we’re both young and pretty. If it’s any comfort to you, Harry Longbaugh, better known as the Sundance Kid, was last seen back east with his handsome doxie, Etta Place. He came from Jersey State to begin with, and they were photographed by a New York photographer who recognized Sundance and a good thing when he had the negative plates. Some say Harry and old Etta got married back east and went straight. Others say they left the country entire with Butch, also known as George Leroy Parker.”

  Getz stared soberly at Stringer. “You sure seem to know a lot about the Wild Bunch, and meanwhile, you just rid in from a sort of suspicious direction, if you follow my drift.”

  Stringer nodded. “If you promise not to get spooked by sudden hand movements,” he said, “I mean to reach for no more than my wallet. So I can show you some I.D.”

  The town law kept his own hand casually in place on the grips of his own Colt ’74 as he told Stringer to move slow indeed. But once he’d studied Stringer’s credentials and press pass, he seemed to breathe more regular. He asked the barkeep for a slip of paper and stub pencil and had Stringer sign his name twice, the same way.

  Then Dan Getz slid his .38 in front of him on the mahogany and told the barkeep, “His next one goes on my tab, Tom.” He turned to Stringer. “I hope you can see I have a job to do, Mr. MacKail.”

  The feature writer put his gun away. “I can see you know your job,” he replied with a smile. “It’s true that a forger has a time signing someone else’s signature fast, twice. My friends call me Stringer.”

  “Then you’d best call me Dan,” Getz said. “But don’t offer to buy the next round whilst I’m on duty. What in thunder brings a newspaper man to our fair city, Stringer?”

  Stringer sighed. “I didn’t know it was here. I’m starting to feel like that gent in the message to Garcia.”

  “You mean that scout they sent through the Spanish lines down to Cuba that time? How come?”

  “He had so many misadventures getting through with his message to Garcia that nobody remembers what the message was, and the war was half over before he could deliver it.”

  Getz nodded. “Yeah, them’s the best kind of wars. My sister’s oldest boy was with the Rough Riders, and it seemed we’d no sooner seen him off with a big party than he was back with a medal and the Yellow Jack. He says had he known the war would be over in four months, he’d have asked ’em to hold it in the winter, when the Yellow Jack down there ain’t so bad. He says they lost more old boys to fever than to Spanish bullets.”

  Stringer nodded soberly. “I noticed. I was there. But getting back to the here and now, how far would you say I was from Yellowstone Station this evening?”

  Getz whistled softly. “By pony, on the back trails? You got some traveling ahead of you, old son. I make her a good hundred miles or more by crow. Don’t you, Tom?”

  “More than a hundred,” the barkeep replied, “and I ain’t sure a crow can get there from here. It would make a lot more sense to head west, half a day’s ride, to the regular railroad.”

  Getz shook his head. “The man’s got a pony with him. They don’t allow kids that big to ride half fare, and even if they did, he’d play hell flagging down the U.P. between stations. By now the railroad dicks have got word of that spooky bunch to the south. Would you stop a locomotive for a rider you didn’t know personal, on a mountain grade, far from the nearest help?”

  The barkeep said he’d never driven a locomotive and asked how else anyone could get to Yellowstone Station in less than three or four days, even if he hated his mount.

  The lawman nodded morosely at Stringer. “He’s right. You could make her in say a day, riding across flat open country, Pony Express style, changing mounts along the way. But even if you was willing to kill that paint tied up across the street, there just ain’t no way to figure less’n three days on the mighty bumpy trail betwixt here and there. What the hell are you in such a hurry for, old son?”

  There was nothing they could do to help him get his warning through ahead of him, and he feared too many folk already knew more than he wanted them to. So he said, “I want to see if I can interview President Roosevelt for my paper before he leaves the park up there.”

  “I didn’t even know he was up there,” Getz said. “But look here, Stringer. What goes up must come down, rig
ht? Why don’t you just wait somewhere along the U.P. line to the west until old T.R. gets through shooting tourists and photographing the bears or whatever? He’s got to come back down as far as Granger, if he even meant to go anywhere else by way of the main line, and Granger ain’t as far as Yellowstone Station. You might be able to beat him there easier.”

  Stringer grimaced. “I’m beginning to know what that gent with the message for Garcia must have felt like, this far along. I’d as soon get to T.R. before he changes trains at Granger. I might be able to save him some considerable discomfort in say the switch yards down there. Did I hear something about the U.P. being the regular railroad, just now? What other sort of railroads might there be running in these parts?”

  His two companions exchanged blank glances. Then Getz said, “Oh, he must mean that narrow gauge over to Rimrock. Funny, I don’t recall mentioning it in the first place.”

  “You didn’t,” the barkeep said. “It would have been dumb. The man says he has to get to Yellowstone Station, Dan. That narrow gauge would take him out of his way, even if they’d let him ride it, which hardly seems likely.”

  The town law saw Stringer had no idea what they were talking about, so he explained. “Rimrock is a mining camp, say a six-hour ride west, up the wagon trace. They do run their own private narrow gauge, and it do run more or less north and south with a mess of hairpin turns throwed in. But it don’t take ore or anything else anywhere’s near Yellowstone Station.”

  “They ship their ore over the Divide,” Tom said, “south of the Yellowstone Park. Even if you could bum a ride with ’em, you’d have to get off more than fifty miles from Yellowstone Station, with most of the park catty-cornered between you and there.”

  “Wait a minute. Are you saying that narrow gauge runs as far north as the southern border of the park?”

  “More like ten or twelve miles than just. That’s one big park you’re talking about too. Once you was in it, you’d still be a good ride from where old T.R. got off.”

  Stringer nodded. “Got off to ride into said park, you mean. He and his party are sure to want to see Lake Yellowstone and the geyser area. How far are we talking now?”

  Tom said he didn’t know. Getz said, “I’ve been there. I got off at the regular station like everyone else, of course. We rid southeast a hell of a ways by open coach, as I recall. I wasn’t driving. But I’d hazard thirty miles afore we got to this steamsome open place and our hired guide throwed some soap in a hot spring. Lord have mercy, you never seen such steam and soap bubbles fly. The soap is what makes them geysers gush, you see. It’s a pure puzzle how they ever discovered that. For how could old Colter have knowed he was in such funny country if there was nobody there to tell him to throw soap down a steam hole? Colter was just a beaver trapper, and the Indians never had soap to begin with, right?”

  Stringer nodded but wasn’t really listening. He finished the one beer he’d ordered and offered to pay before Tom pointed at the law and waved him off. Then he said, “It’s been nice talking to you gents. But I’d like to see if I can make Rimrock before it gets too dark.”

  They didn’t try to stop him. But as he was leaving, Tom said, “It’s a waste of time. They don’t let nobody ride with their ore. It’s high-grade gold ore, and they’ve heard about them other strangers lurking about these hills too.”

  Stringer kept going. They weren’t the gents he had to argue the point with. He hoped the ones in Rimrock would be half as friendly. But friendly or not, they were going to give him that train ride.

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  *

  The sun had been down a while, but hardly long enough to account for the rosy dawn Stringer seemed to be staring into as he rode east through the boulder field the wagon trace was winding across. He realized what it had to be, if he hadn’t been dozing in the saddle a whole night, and clucked his paint to a faster pace.

  A few minutes later, as he topped a rise, he saw the mining complex of Rimrock laid out along the bottom of a steep, walled north-south valley. Most of the artificial sunrise seemed to be coming from a smelter halfway up the far slope. But the trackside main street of the small but bustling mining town was well lit with street lamps and the light spilling from saloons, shops, and whatever. He followed the wagon trace down to where it met the wider main drag, and swung right for the switch yards and roundhouse he’d made out from up on the rim rocks.

  Nobody seemed to care, although a drunken miner reeling down the center of the street called out, “Howdy, Butch. Come to rob the train?”

  Stringer didn’t answer. He wondered why, if everyone in these parts seemed so worried about that gang holed up in Lost Mule Gulch, nobody seemed to want to ride down there and ask the rascals their intent.

  The flickering light of Rimrock, despite its intensity, was tricky. More things stood in shadows than the overall orange glow, and the shadows were black as octopus puke. He rode up the tracks until he made out a dinky low-slung Shay locomotive near a loading platform with a shed perched on the far end. He dismounted, tethered the paint to a steel-pipe hitching rail provided for visitors, and strode on to what he hoped to be the dispatcher’s office.

  He’d guessed right, he saw, when he found a wiry little gent dressed in railroader’s pinstripes seated on the far side of the desk that took up most of the room. There was a mess of paperwork and a bottle of rye on the desktop. Stringer suspected from the hue of the older man’s nose that he’d been working on the bottle more than any paperwork. The mining company’s dispatcher seemed cheerful and friendly enough as he listened to Stringer’s polite request and then politely told him to fuck himself. “Company rules,” he said, by way of explanation. “Even if we was allowed to provide passenger service to the general service, you’d still be asking at a piss-poor time. The next combo out is carrying a couple of day’s production, semirefined to say worth five or six dollars an ounce, and at the risk of sounding boastful, we ship processed ore outten here by the ton.”

  “I noticed your smelter,” Stringer said. “Let’s try her another way. You must have your own telegraph line, and there has to be another dispatch office like this closer to where your narrow gauge swings east over the Divide, right?”

  The half-sober railroader shook his head. “Wrong. We ain’t required by federal law to run such a complicated railroad operation, so we don’t. There ain’t no switch points to communicate with once you leave these yards. We don’t have to worry about meeting another Shay on the single track because we only send the one Shay we got, both ways. Who did you want to send a wire to in the first place, Stranger?”

  “It was likely a dumb notion to begin with,” Stringer said. “I doubt the gents I’m trying to catch up with would be near a telegraph office right now. But look here, I’m willing to pay for the passage of my pony and me on a flat car, and we don’t expect a redcap to help us on or off.”

  The man behind the desk shook his head. “Can’t you get it through your head that outsiders ain’t allowed to ride with us? Do you see a roll of railroad tickets on this desk?”

  “No, but I have discovered in the past that some train crews are willing to settle up for cash, and I have never seen fit to inquire whether they feel obliged to pass all or any of such informal fare receipts on to the front office.”

  The dispatcher looked uncertain as well as wistful. “It ain’t for me to decide such matters,” he said, shrugging. “The one in charge of the brakes is in command of the combo. I don’t expect Red Fagan would go along with such an infraction of company rules.”

  “It’s worth a try,” Stringer said. “Where would I find this Red Fagan at this hour?”

  The dispatcher thought, enjoyed a swig of rye without offering, and replied, “Try the Lady Luck across the way, just north of the gunsmith. Old Red’s a born fool for gambling, if that’s what you want to call the house rules of the Lady Luck.”

  Stringer thanked him and turned to go. But the dispatcher called after him, “If Red
says no, don’t press it. Next to being a good sport about losing at faro, Red is sort of famous for putting folk in the hospital, or would be if we had us a hospital here. If Red busts both your legs, you’ll be on your own, seeing you ain’t on the company payroll.”

  Stringer promised to remember that and politely closed the door behind him. He left the paint tethered where it was and strode across the cinder-paved street to what had to be the gambling hell the brakeman was said to hang out in.

  As he parted the batwings, nobody in the crowded honky-tonk paid any attention to him. It was as much a saloon as a betting establishment, and judging from the two hard-eyed gals leaning against a back wall, Lady Luck provided other services as well.

  Stringer didn’t see how the bull buffalo he’d seen down at the saloon in Valley Stream could have beaten him all the way up here, even if it did seem to be staring down at him from above the bar. As the fat barkeep moved down to take his order, Stringer asked for draft and placed a reassuring quarter on the mahogany between them. “Someone must be offering a good buy on buffalo heads in these parts,” he remarked.

  The barkeep made his change as he replied, “Oh, that? Yeah, it do add to the decor. I think somebody got it over on the far side of the Divide. I’ve never seen buffalo in these parts, even when there was still such critters to be seen.”

  Then he was gone. A gray-haired gent bellied up next to Stringer. “There used to be a few buffalo on this side of the Divide,” he said. “Never many, though. The Indians got ’em about as fast as they wandered over the South Pass.”