Stringer

by Lou Cameron

  Dotty came in to help her mother serve. It wasn’t hard. In honor of the occasion the lady of the house produced a small bottle of wine. She had nothing else to put on her table but a platter of tortillas and earthenware bowls for the soup. They hauled the old man to the table and made Stringer sit on his right. Old Hernan Garcia opened his eyes, saw there was food in front of him, and dug in. So Stringer and the others did, as well.

  Like Scotch broth, menuda was a hearty soup made from ingredients poor people could afford, such as pepper—lots of pepper—and a little tripe. Stringer had always liked it—he didn’t have to live on it. He went easy on the tortillas, knowing flour cost more. It dulled his appetite to know, as clearly as if it had been written on the nearest wall, that this once-proud Californio family couldn’t hope to hold on to the little land they had left. But young Tomas was concerned about more important family matters than survival. He asked Stringer how come they’d never gotten his big brother’s medals. He said it only stood to reason a dead hero had some medals coming.

  Stringer said he’d look into it. The old man next to him shook himself more awake and said, in Spanish, “Oh, there you are, Pedro. It is good you are out of the army at last. They have come back, you know.”

  Dotty said, gently, “This is not Pedro, Abuelo Hernan. It is his good friend, Stuarto MacKail.”

  Nonsense, my child. Don’t you think I know my own grandson? Attend me, Pedro, there were two of them out back the other night. I called out to them, but they ran away.”

  Stringer shot a look at Dotty. She murmured, “Chicken thieves, we think. Those Italians from El Dorado have no shame.”

  Tomas chimed in, in English, “I cut their sign. Two grown men, wearing store-bought boots like your own. I lost their trail at the back fence, where the grass gets thicker up the slope.”

  Old Hernan mumbled on, in Spanish, “They were who I said they were, you foolish children. Members of the old band, back for to find the strongbox from the El Dorado stage.”

  Tomas grinned and opined with the confidence of a nine-year-old that spooks from the beyond didn’t leave such a fine set of boot prints. Stringer said nothing. If the old man thought he was Pete Montez he no doubt believed in ghosts solid enough to have soup with. Stringer took a sparing sip of his wine, partly to save it for them and partly because it tasted more like red ink, and mused at Dotty, across from him, “There were two men, no more, no less, chasing you our way when we met up. I sort of doubt they were after chickens, either time. But two and two do add up.”

  She shrugged and replied, “I did not ask them what they wanted when they rode out of nowhere and hailed me. I thought I knew. I was closer to the M Bar K than here. So I rode that way without stopping for a chat. The rest you know.”

  Old Hernan mumbled, “Don MacKail is a good man, for an Anglo. I knew him when he was no older than Tomas, here. He was the son of a good Anglo, too. I think the MacKails must be part Spanish. One time, up near Murphys, a gringo accused me of riding his horse. One of the MacKails—it was Ewen, I think—took my part and told the others he knew me and that whatever I was, I was not a horse thief. I have never forgotten that day. More than one gringo was ready for to slap leather. But Ewen MacKail stood beside me and when he said they would have to fight us both they decided maybe that caballo was mine, after all.”

  Stringer swallowed, hard, and said, “That would have been my late father, sir.”

  But the old man growled, “Eat your tortillas and don’t make jokes about a brave man, Pedro.” So Stringer ate his tortillas and dropped the subject.

  The meal didn’t last long; it couldn’t. Dotty walked Stringer out to where he’d tethered his mount, saying, “I’m sorry about my poor old grandfather, Stuarto. He does not know where he is these days. You must forgive him for mistaking you for a Mex.”

  He said, “There’s nothing to forgive. Pete was a good man. Who do you reckon the they he keeps talking about could be, Dotty?”

  She shrugged and replied, “Quien sabe? One night he mentioned a Joaquin he’d known in his youth, but Joaquin is a common enough name and that Joaquin died before my mother and father had been born, no?”

  “Not before your grandfather had been born. He would have been in his twenties when they held up the El Dorado stage, right?”

  She nodded but said, “Working as a vaquero, for Mamacita’s family. It was she, not he, who inherited the land from her side. Abuelito was only a handsome young cowboy, not a desperado, if that’s what you’re getting at. One of the Anglo survivors of that old robbery still lives, if you wish for to ask if he recalls my grandfather holding him up.”

  Stringer chuckled and said, “I imagine the neighbors would have talked if a local cowhand had been riding with Murrieta or anyone half as ferocious. But I would like to talk to an old-timer who was really there, Dotty. Who might he be and where might I find him?”

  She said, “Try the Double B, the other side of El Dorado. He lives there off his in-laws. He’s old and gimpy and they say he drinks more than a man his age ought to. His name is MacSorley. Angus MacSorley, I think.”

  Stringer blinked and blurted, “Fionna MacSorley Brown’s grandfather was mixed up in that old stage robbery?”

  She nodded and said, “He was the shotgun messenger who claimed he’d winged one of Murrieta’s men after they’d gunned the driver. Do you know him, Stuarto?”

  He said, “Sure I do. He’s distant kin and I used to see him at church socials and such when I was a kid. Funny he never mentioned such a misspent youth. But come to think of it, gunfights aren’t the usual topics of conversation at a Sunday-go-to-meeting-on-the-green. You say he’s staying with the Widow Brown and her son, Buck, these days?”

  Dotty shrugged and replied, “Don’t know who else would take the old drunk in. Don’t know the Browns too well, either. Buck Brown is sort of fresh-mouthed and I don’t exactly move in the same circle as his mother. I hear she has a tedious temper.”

  Stringer untethered his mount from the porch rail without comment. As he forked himself into the saddle Dotty asked if he meant to ride next for the Double B. He shook his head and said, “Not hardly. There are limits to how much research I feel duty bound to do for space rates. So I’m heading back for the M Bar K to do some shorthand.”

  She said, “In that case let me give you the reata for that other caballero, Pronto.”

  He started to protest he had Pronto’s manila already tied to his hired saddle, but she was already in the house. So he had to wait, bemused, till she came back out with a heavy coil of mighty fancy braided leather. As she held it up to him he said, “I don’t follow you, Dotty. A reata like that would be worth a small fortune if anyone in Calaveras County still took the time. Pronto just loaned you his rope to lead your goat. There was no mention of a one-sided swap.”

  She insisted, “One good turn deserves another and my goat was not the only thing I was in danger of losing, Stuarto.”

  He took the gift, feeling a little left out, and told her he’d see Pronto got it. As he rode away she called after him, “When we have more time, we’ll talk about how I may repay you, Stuarto.”

  He rode on, grinning, even though he knew she couldn’t have meant that as sassy as it sounded.

  As long as he was over this way, he rode first into El Dorado. The general store was open. As he’d hoped, a telephone line ran off from one corner of the false front. He dismounted and went inside, where the storekeeper was arguing with another customer, in Italian. Stringer busied himself with reading the labels on some feed sacks. Italian was close enough to Spanish for him to sort of follow the drift whether he wanted to or not. The would-be customer had been laid off and wanted some liquor on credit. The storekeep was taking the reasonable position that he’d let the man charge more groceries for his wife and kids but had a set policy when it came to charging booze. When the laid off family man left, sober and cussing, Stringer asked the storekeep if he could use the phone and paid him. He cranked Central an
d asked the operator-gal to connect him with the sheriff in San Andreas.

  The sheriff hadn’t made it back from his creek-drag yet but he’d called in along the way and they were expecting him any minute. Stringer hung up, thanked the storekeep, and left his mount where it was to kill half an hour or so with Miss Gina.

  As he was passing the bitty frame post office between the general store and bigger ‘dobe a big bumblebee buzzed past him to take out a windowpane of the post office. He dropped to his knee in the scanty cover of a clump of wild anise, with his gun out. But there was nothing to be seen worth shooting back at, near or far. There was nobody in the horse pasture across the street and the open slopes overlooking the hamlet all around looked innocent in the bright sunlight. A little old lady came out of the post office to ask him, “Aren’t you a little old to be busting windows, young man?”

  He rose, putting his gun away, to inform her, “It wasn’t me, ma’am. Someone long gone and far away by now was either careless with a deer round or mad about something.”

  She said, “Oh, dear, were they shooting at me or thee?”

  He said, “Hard to say. They came closer to your window than my head. On the other hand, you were out of sight. That’s more’n I can say. Do you get your windowpanes shot out on a regular basis?”

  She said, “Not this far from Halloween. If I were you I’d take cover, young man. For that’s what I mean to do.”

  He agreed it was hot out in the sun at this hour and strode on to Miss Gina’s before the postmistress could ask him to pay for her glass.

  Inside, he found the cavernous main room mostly empty. The vapid gal behind the bar told him Miss Gina had gone into San Andreas on business and wouldn’t be back until later that night. So that left beer as the only way to kill time until he could phone the sheriff some more.

  As he carried his schooner to a corner table an older man joined him, saying, “I’ll be whipped with snakes if you’re not Ewen MacKail’s boy, Stuart. What brings you back here to the land of cow shit and opportunity, old son?”

  Stringer grinned at the older man and said, “I was hoping I might run into you, Uncle Angus. What are you drinking these days?”

  Old Angus MacSorley held up the bottle he was toting and said, “I keep this handy to save running back and forth to the bar. She’s ugly and don’t put out in any case.”

  They both sat down. The old man took a sip from his bottle and said, “I heard about you and my great-grandson, Buck Brown. I heard so much about it I been avoiding the Double B. The boy’s all right. Gets his looks from his father, Jeff, and his quick temper from my Fionna. How come you ain’t come calling on her, Stuart? She’s been sort of expecting it, since Buck told her it was you he was helping in a whorehouse brawl. It calmed her considerable, once she gave Buck a chance to explain the fight.”

  Stringer said, “I’ll try to get out your way before I have to leave. But I’m glad I got a chance to interview you alone.”

  “Inter-what? I ain’t done nothing worth mention of late, old son.”

  “That may be true. But weren’t you the man riding shotgun the night Murrieta held up the stage?”

  Old Angus looked uneasy and took a good long swig from his bottle before he gasped and wheezed, “That stuff ain’t got the punch it used to come with. It wasn’t Murrieta that night, old son. I know everyone’s always said it was. But if you ask me, it was only a mess of ragged-ass Mexican kids. They acted too wild and unprofessional to have been the real thing. I don’t care what you may have heard about it being an inside job set up in advance by Joaquin Murrieta and Three Fingered Jack. It wasn’t like that at all.”

  Stringer had never heard anything about it having been an inside job. But a good reporter didn’t ask dumb questions, so he said, “I’d like to hear your version, Uncle Angus.”

  MacSorley sucked more booze from his bottle, wiped his mouth, and said, “Hell, boy, it was fifty years ago when I was younger than you’d be, now. Did you know my Fionna sort of made herself a mistake when she married up with Jeff Brown?”

  “That’s ancient history, too, Uncle Angus. You were riding shotgun messenger that night, right?”

  “Fionna tried, Lord knows, and they must have had some good times, or I wouldn’t have me a great-grandson, ugly as he may be. But my Fionna just wasn’t cut out to spend that much time with a man like Jeff. He wasn’t mean to her, you understand. Jeff didn’t have a mean bone in his body. But I often suspected he’d been standing ahint the door when brains was passed out. He was good with a throw-rope and had a way with livestock. But that sort of tested the limits of his imagination. I doubt he ever read a newspaper all the way through, and my Fionna read Fair Maid of Perth from cover to cover when she was no more’n ten or twelve. I know it’s wrong to speak ill of the dead, but had Jeff not died young we might have had the scandal of divorce in our family.”

  Stringer sipped his own beer awkwardly and insisted, “You were telling me about the night they stopped the stage, remember?”

  Old Angus looked confused, as well he might have, drinking that heavily so early in the day. He took another unhealthy swig and said, “There ain’t nothing to tell as ain’t a matter of public record, old son. It was all writ down at the time. You can look it up if you like. I’m old and I don’t remember things the way I used to.”

  Stringer said, “I can’t look it up, Uncle Angus. The stage company went out of business long ago and the county records are missing. You say the robbery seemed poorly planned to you?”

  The old man stared into space and mumbled, “Oh, it was planned, all right. Planned as slick as only the young and wild can plan such things. They knew we had that mine payroll in the strongbox. Real money, not the paper stuff they use today. They was waiting for us at that road cut less than two miles west of here. The no-good trigger-happy sons of bitches!”

  He took another swig from his bottle, put it down again, and just sat there, staring into space, till Stringer said, “Go on. They stopped you. Then what?”

  The old man’s already watery eyes filled with tears as he sobbed, “They shot Gus, without no reason at all. Gus would have reined in. He had a wife and kids. But they just shot him and I can still hear him sort of choke and mutter, ‘Aw, you didn’t have to do that,’ afore he let go the reins and rolled down into the boot at my feet.”

  “Is that when you opened up on ‘em with your scatter-gun?”

  “Not hardly. They had the drop on me and I was just sitting there sort of numb all over. Gus was my best pal. We’d rid through a lot together, and there he was coughing his life out all over my boots.”

  He took a heroic swallow, slammed the bottle down, empty, and sobbed, “The wages of sin are death, boy. Don’t you never let nobody tell you different!”

  “What happened then, Uncle Angus?”

  “Like I told everyone at the time. One of the sons of bitches rode closer, said he was sorry about my amigo, and asked for the strongbox in that snotty polite way some of ‘em act when they figure you’re too scared to argue with ‘em. I gave it to him. I had to. Then, as he rode back to rejoin the others, one of ‘em gave that rooster crow of their breed and I reckon I just saw too much red to consider the odds. I hauled my shotgun back up from where it lay atop poor Gus and just let fly. I got the oily bastard with the strongbox. I saw him sway in the saddle and figured we’d both be going down together. But he hung on and despite the odds they just rode on like the bananas they was.”

  “Bananas, Uncle Angus?”

  “Yellow, in a bunch. They was out of range afore I could fire again. But I fired anyways. It was all over quicker and more confusing than it takes to tell about it. There was no passengers in the coach that night, so I picked up the reins and druv back here to see if they could do something for poor Gus. They could not, they said. They didn’t even send for a doc. The next day they fired us, the sons of bitches.”

  “Us, Uncle Angus?”

  “All of us working outten this station, from
manager to the Miwok who cleaned the stables. Some sassy-ass paper-pusher in the head office figured the robberies we’d been having sort of regular had to be inside jobs. They couldn’t prove it, of course, but they said they didn’t have to. They said a new broom sweeps clean and put in a whole new crew entire.”

  Stringer took a thoughtful sip of beer and said, “Hmm, they do say there were no more robberies for a spell. Were you riding shotgun messenger when any of the earlier ones took place?”

  The old man looked away and said, “A couple or more. But nobody got hurt. We just throwed the strongbox down and they let us go on our way. That was the way road agents was supposed to stop the stages. Lord knows where they found that rooster-crowing trigger-happy son of a bitch!”

  “I’ll allow that doesn’t sound like the way Murrieta was said to Robin Hood a stage line. Do you think any of the more professional gangs could have really been his, Uncle Angus?”

  The old man shook his head, muttered, “The wages of sin are death,” and lowered his head to the table.

  CHAPTER

  EIGHT

  *

  Stringer finished his beer and rose to go telephone and see if the sheriff had made it to San Andreas yet. He had. Stringer told him, “I’ve got more than enough to finish my feature on Murrieta. With your permission I’d like to head back to Frisco before I get murdered or engaged, sir.”

  The older man at the other end of the line replied, “I’d like you to stick around till we have a better grasp of what’s been going on, MacKail. You’re sort of a material witness, you know.”

  Stringer asked. “To what? I don’t know anything you don’t and—no offense—the law’s been chasing Butch Cassidy some time to no effect. It could take you forever, if then, to catch the sneaks behind Helen Marsh’s murder, and I’ve got a deadline to make.”

  The sheriff said, “Let’s not shit each other, son. One of the neighbors says you knew that gal better than you saw fit to tell me.”

  “God damn it, Sheriff, I was in David’s with old Kate when they shot up the library!”