Stringer and the Border War

by Lou Cameron

  So they just spooned for awhile on the platform, until, in the end, it was her idea to duck inside and see if the coast might be clear.

  It was. Aside from the Filipino asleep in an arm chair, the main salon was deserted. Before anyone could come back for a nightcap, Stringer and Claudette were in her compartment and it didn’t take him long to verify that lots of other things they said about French loving were true, unless Claudette was a mite more adventurous than other French gals. She’d obviously been anxious to wind up this way with him, as well. For, despite what she’d said about clochards, the street gypsies of Paris, she never bothered to shuck her long black stockings or lacy black corset before she had him pinned down with his bare behind to the bed covers and her long black hair unpinned to sweep his bare chest when she impaled herself on his overanxious erection. She just chuckled fondly and kept going when she felt him ejaculate almost at once. He didn’t mind. He parted the curtain of soft wavy hair between them to admire the view of her bouncing breasts by the moonlight that shone through the window beside them. Her moonlit charms inspired him to greater heights, and after she was inspired to moan, “Ooh la la, I am arriving!” he rolled on top to make her arrive some more the old-fashioned way. But if there was one thing Claudette was not, it was an old-fashioned girl. For, when they finally had to stop and see if they could catch their second wind, she proceeded to strip down all the way and demand, not suggest, that they cut out this kid stuff and get down to some serious sex.

  CHAPTER

  FIVE

  Not even Stringer could last a whole night making love to Claudette, bless her backbreaking gymnastics, so they were both asleep in each other’s naked arms when a beam of desert sunlight shot through the grimy glass above them to jolt them into wakefulness. As Stringer muttered, “What the hell… ?” the French girl murmured, “We are not moving. Mon Dieu, draw the shades before some species of rude railroad worker peeks in at us!”

  Stringer told her to hold the thought as he propped himself up on one elbow for a thoughtful stare outside, saying, “This window shouldn’t be facing any sunrise if we’re aimed east. So where could we be aimed?”

  He stared soberly out at miles and miles of knee-high grease wood, adding, “This has to be the Colorado Desert. There ain’t another desert half as tedious. So how come? At the rate we were moving we should have been in cactus country by now, only we ain’t. We can’t even be on the far side of the Colorado River, and we should have crossed it no more than four or five hours out of L.A., even by freight train.”

  Claudette sat up, her pert nipples peeking through her long hair at the same scenery as she marveled, “The sage flats of Nevada may have looked so monotonous, coming the other way, mais wherever we may be, it can’t be New Mexico, hein?”

  He told her he’d just said that as he swung his bare feet to the deck and proceeded to grope his way into his clothes. It took him a while to find one sock, which was under Claudette’s striped dress. They’d both undressed the night before in a hurry, in pitch blackness. When he rose in his boots, jeans and shirt to get down his gladstone and open it near her knees, she asked him why he seemed to be going for his gun. He strapped the gun rig around his hips as he told her, “I ain’t sure, yet. If there’s a town on the far side of this car it could be a tough one. If there ain’t, we could be in even bigger trouble.”

  He saw they were in bigger trouble as soon as he strode to the forward platform and stepped out on it. There wasn’t anything on either side but miles of empty landscape. Their one car stood alone like a dead cigar butt in the middle of a vast wool blanket of greasewood gray. It wasn’t even an interesting shade of gray. The Colorado Desert was like that. The single track spur they were on ran north, not east, toward a distant clump of dark objects already heat-shimmered by the morning sun. He got down and circled south to see the tracks that way just drew together at the vanishing point near the horizon. As he stood there cussing, some of the others came out on the rear platform to stare about in wonder. Old LaRoche demanded to know where they were. Stringer was doing his best to explain when Claudette came out, fully dressed and demure as ever, to translate. So he told her, “We’ve been sidetracked, literally. Sometime during the night they stopped that freight, backed it up this spur, and uncoupled us. I’m still working on the reason.”

  Once LaRoche had it straight in his head, he opined he and he alone had been sabotaged by the Edison Film Trust, if not the Communards who hated him for being an aristocrat despite his fervid loyalty to La Republique. Stringer told Claudette, “I have to allow someone surely done us dirt, for whatever reason. We have to be miles off the main line. They build these spurs to serve mining camps, sawmills and such. I can’t see a sawmill out here amid the murmuring greasewoods. But there’s some buildings to the north, a lot closer than we are to anywhere else. So, I reckon I’ll just mosey up there.”

  When Claudette explained this to her companions, an older cameraman objected that the tracks on which they were stranded could hardly be out of service if said town was still in use. Stringer nodded but explained, “Ghost towns are sometimes haunted by old-timers left behind when the company as built ‘em pulls out. I might be able to at least find out where in thunder we are. At worst, there ought to be water wells up yonder and, sooner or later, we’re going to run out of it. No matter how much you folk think you have in this car’s water tanks, go easy on it ‘til I get back. I figure an hour or less each way.”

  Then he got his hat and jacket and started up the spur as everyone waved to him from the shade of the front platform. They were no fools. It was already getting hot enough to sizzle spit on the sun-baked cross ties. But he didn’t spit. That was dumb in desert country. He’d only been guessing when he said there could be water up ahead. Sometimes, when an outfit pulled out, they pulled up the tube wells while they were at it.

  It was a long, dull trudge. Even the bugs were hiding in the meagre shade offered by the slate gray greasewood. The center of this dull desert was as quiet and about as flat as the carpet in a funeral home. It seemed to be taking forever, but it was more like the better part of an hour before he made it to the few sun-silvered buildings still standing and wondered why he’d bothered.

  Foundation blocks left scattered among the encroaching gray brush hinted at a once-sizeable operation. The dirty white film of crude borax in the storage shed near the end of the rails told him why anyone had ever wanted to build anything here to begin with. Desert borax wasn’t mined. It was scraped from the dry mud bottoms of long extinct lakes. He didn’t really care just where such a playa might have been, around here, before they’d scraped away the top few inches of root-killing salts and given it all back to the greasewood. He found a water pump behind the husk of a dead saloon. It seemed to be in working order. A black widow spider dripped out of the spout on a silvery thread as he tried to work the valves. From the way the handle pumped up and down, he suspected it only needed to have its leather flap valves primed with water. They could likely use wine if all else failed. Using water for anything that experimental could be fatal, if this or some other pump around here couldn’t be made to work. A smaller shed across the way had also been left standing. He headed for it, then whipped out his .38 S&W as the door of the shed creaked on its hinges. He called out a couple of times, got no answer, and fired a round through the dry planking to see what would happen.

  Nothing did. Another vagrant desert breeze swung the door the other way. He decided that had to be what was haunting the shed. He still moved in fast and low. But once he’d kicked the door open and found the place deserted, he muttered to the cobwebs all around, “So I’m acting proddy? I got a right to be and what have you spiders been up to in here, all this time?”

  That was easy enough to see. The only furnishings consisted of a built-in bench, with some shelves above it. A telegraph key was screwed to the work bench. Like the pump across the way, it seemed to be in working order. There was nothing to it but a flexible spring that made
or broke contact between two electrodes and the wires connected up about right. After that, it got more tedious. Like the leather valves of the pump across the way, the acid in the battery jars above the key had long since evaporated in the mummy’s breath of the desert. He stepped back outside to see if that was even worth thinking about. It was. Wires ran up from the shed to a single-line strung across the desert in the general direction of the main line. It looked intact as far as he could follow it against the cobalt sky. He nodded and began to reach for his makings as he muttered, “Right, it was a gut-and-git borax operation. They left stuff behind that could be bought again cheaper than it could be taken out. If they never bothered with this end of their telegraph line, the other end ought to be in as good condition. Now all we have to do is tote some liquid refreshment up here from that infernal car.”

  It took as long getting back to the stranded Pathe party as it had to reach the abandoned mining operation, and once he did, nobody wanted to help him. They’d been at the wine again and Claudette’s explanation of his words seemed to lose something in the translation. LaRoche seemed to feel he was too important to ever die and insisted that if anyone was out to murder them outright they’d all have been murdered in their sleep the night before. Stringer swore and insisted, “I don’t know what they were out to do to us, because I don’t know who done it. But I do know this desert figures to murder us for them, unless they send help and, somehow, I don’t trust such sneaky bastards enough to leave our lives in their hands. So I reckon I’ll just have to save all you dumb frogs before you waste all the damned water!”

  He went into the kitchen and told the two-man crew there what he wanted. They either didn’t follow his drift or didn’t want to. He still helped himself to a potato sack by spilling the contents around the feet of the wailing Chinaman and patted the grips of his .38 at the Filipino when the latter reached for a cleaver as he was stuffing the sack with bottles. They both went out to tell on him. Stringer hefted the sack after he’d filled it with bottles of wine, fancy French vinegar, and some bottled water. It was heavy, but he knew he might need more. Claudette came in to ask him what he’d done to make the Filipino cry. He explained he had better use for the stuff where he was going and that he’d pack more if only he could. She said, “C’est bon, allow me to help, then.”

  He almost said no before he nodded grudgingly and said, “Right. I don’t see why they’d need a translator with me way off in that ghost town.” Then he filled a lighter flour sack for her and told her to get her shady hat. She did so, as they carried their booty up the corridor, and he helped her down from the front platform. As they started up the tracks, LaRoche came out to demand some explanation. Stringer said, “Screw him. We’ve already told him, and he says it won’t work.”

  Claudette dimpled and replied, “Mais non, I would rather screw you some more. You said there is some shade at that most ghostly town ahead?”

  He laughed and told her to just keep walking, explaining, “There’s not enough left to qualify as a ghost town. I might want to give you a big old kiss if this works.”

  “And should it not work, Stuart?” She asked. To which he could only answer, “I may as well kiss you anyway, before our spit dries up totally. Don’t look so morose, little darling. It takes a good two days to die of thirst out here, and we’ve still got water enough for at least three.”

  She sighed and said, “Alas, by the time we all perish, that Mexican war will be over, non?”

  He sighed back and said, “Non. At the rate they’re going at it, they’ll likely still be slaughtering one another after we’ve both died of old age. I’d rather go that way than any other I can think of. So let’s hope my high school science teacher knew what he was talking about.”

  Back in high school, Stringer had been a lot more interested in Miss Beverly Breen who’d sat across from him than the droning of poor old Mister Smiley’s lectures on general science, which only went to show how dumb most boys are in high school. For he’d never gotten anywhere with Miss Beverly Breen, while a lot of things Mister Smiley had droned at him had come in handy from time to time. Getting to the deserted borax works was a lot less tedious, this time, even though the sun was even hotter and the stuff they were packing got heavier with every step. When they finally got there. Claudette sunk wearily to the back steps of the abandoned saloon, but watched with interest as Stringer primed the pump with wine. She said the species of rusty machinery could hardly deserve the vintage of ‘93 but he told her, “Water of any vintage is worth more out here. In dry country, liquor is for fun and water is for fighting over.”

  He let the dry leather soak up more wine to make sure it was wet through before he risked cracking only half-soft leather as he reached again for his makings, remembered again that he was out of tobacco, and asked if she’d brought along any tailor-mades. She said she hadn’t. Stringer sighed and said, “Oh, well, I was trying to cut down. Let’s hope I don’t have to cut out all my bad habits, like drinking, at once.”

  He primed the pump again with the last of the bottle, screwed the cap back on, and gingerly started pumping. The valves felt right, but nothing much seemed to be happening and Claudette was saying rude things about American plumbing, when all of a sudden, a clot of spider webbing and dead bugs shot out ahead of a flood of stinking inky-black water. She gasped, “Merde alors! Do you expect us to drink that filth?” So he just kept pumping and, sure enough, crud gave way to mud and then the pump was watering the dust with clear cool water. He wet his Stetson under the spout and put it back on, letting go of the pump handle as he said, “So far so good. Now all we have to worry about is starving to death. Let’s see what we can do in that telegraph shack.”

  She tagged along with her own bottles, like a sport, but as she stood in the doorway watching him pour vinegar into the dry battery jars, she repeated the opinion of her associates that his droll notion was not practique. He took her sack from her to get at more vinegar as he growled, “Mister Smiley said adding acetic acid to sulfuric made it stronger. Lord knows, the acid in these jars lost its water long ago. But the dry crud left is still supposed to be acid and that’s what we need right now. You see these metal plates I had to haul out to replace the liquid? Well, half of ‘em are zinc and the others are copper. I forget just how Mister Smiley said it works. I do know he said that when you hang zinc and copper in acid it sets up an electric current between the wires connected to ‘em. This battery of jars looks old-timey, which is why they may have been left behind. But you only need a weak current to work a telegraph set, and that’s likely just as well. I don’t see how we’ll manage a strong one.”

  But manage they did and, Stringer was as surprised as Claudette when the set on the table commenced to buzz at them like a brass sidewinder. He flipped the receiving mode off and muttered, “That sounded like railroad sending. Nobody’s trying to talk to us, yet. The last gent who used this set just left it open to the line when he wandered away. Let’s see if I can get somebody’s attention.”

  He could, albeit it took a long time for someone to notice the halting signal corps code he was sending, and wire back for him to cut the comedy and get off the line. Stringer just kept sending S.O.S. until someone at the other end relented and asked him who might be in trouble and where.

  After that, it was easy. The Southern Pacific Railroad had no idea why someone had deposited paying passengers in the middle of the Colorado Desert, agreed it seemed a hell of a way to run a railroad, and said that help would soon be on the way.

  When Stringer explained this to Claudette it was she who kissed him and, once he had her pinned against the inside wall of the shed, confided that she’d always wondered what it might feel like to do la zig zig like the naughty clochard girls under the bridges of Paris.

  So they found out, and it wasn’t half bad. But they both agreed it was better in bed and that they’d best stop, after this one more time, lest Pathe News leave without them.

  CHAPTER

  SIX<
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  There was another argument when a lone locomotive finally showed up late that morning. The engine crew agreed it sure seemed odd to find a private car up a spur that hadn’t been used for a coon’s age. But they wanted to haul the Pathe car back to the L.A. yards until Stringer asked them how well they knew the brakeman of that overnight highball. When they both confessed they hardly knew the cuss at all, Stringer said, “That’s good. For I know the one and original Henry Huntington better, and I doubt that brakeman will be working for him anymore. I still have to think about a certain dispatcher. It works either way.”

  When the engineer growled that he wasn’t about to help anyone get a fellow member of the Railroad Brotherhood in trouble Stringer told him, pleasantly enough, “He got himself in trouble. Before you boys even consider anything dumb, I’d best warn you I’ve already been on the wire to your company headquarters and that you’re hauling us at least to Tucson and hitching us up to another eastbound with no ifs ands or buts!”

  The fireman protested, “We ain’t authorized to move off our own section!” To which Stringer replied, curtly, “I just said not to if, and or but me. You’ll do as I say, or I’ll see nobody who reads the San Francisco Sun will ever hire either of you again. I know I don’t know your names, yet. Would you like to bet I can’t find out? There has to be someone working for this line who isn’t in on some sort of plot to keep cash-paying passengers from getting to where they paid to go. On time.”

  They both assured him he had them all wrong, as they had never heard word one about any such intentions.

  He nodded curtly and said, “I’ll buy that when and if you get this car where it’s supposed to be by now. If there’s any more of this bullshit, you can commend your souls to Jesus because your asses will belong to me!”

  And so, Stringer and his French friends found themselves parked on a more sensible siding of the modest Columbus yards, albeit well after sunset. Since all the noise was coming from the usually sleepy little cowtown, it was safe to assume nobody had gotten around to a battle yet, in the brooding darkness to the south.