The Long High Noon

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Ach!” pronounced the doctor. “Perhaps there is a God after all, and He is less judgmental than advertised.”

  During his long recuperation, in a makeshift hospital established in a back room of the ornate Mormon Temple, with a ponderous crucifix leaning out from the wall above his bed like the Sword of Damascus, the patient learned that Randy had caught wind of Frank’s search, anticipated the trap he’d lain, and bought the services of a woman of dubious occupation to confuse him and slow his hand. Randy had ridden out of town directly his mission was accomplished, long before a citizens’ commission could be appointed to pursue him.

  In all likelihood, he thought his enemy was dead.

  Upon regaining his strength, Frank worked off his obligation to the doctor by sweeping his office and scrubbing his medical instruments. It occurred to him that he’d spent most of his working hours paying out the expenses of his recovery from ailments related directly to Randy. This scarcely softened his opinion of the central fixation of his life.

  By the time Frank’s debt was dismissed, Randy’s trail might as well have led across an icepack. He struck out in search of employment and a place to bide his time until news surfaced of the whereabouts of his ancient antagonist.

  Seasons passed before Randy discovered that he’d failed to lift the burden of Frank Farmer from the world.

  In Carson City, Nevada, he celebrated his victory with a long, blistering soak in a bath house, got a shave and haircut, bought himself a complete new wardrobe and a valise to pack it in, and secured first-class passage in a Pullman coach to San Francisco, that sinkhole of pleasure. He’d saved enough by eating simple fare and staying out of hotels to keep his wolfing profits largely intact, and there was no better place to burn money than the Barbary Coast. He leaned back against the plush headrest and dreamt about good whiskey, friendly cards, and accommodating women. It was his first holiday since Appomattox.

  Unnoticed by the pair in their relentless determination to destroy each other, the West had begun to extract a deep fascination from the East: The faster it barreled toward past history, the keener the curiosity among those in a position to monitor it from a safe distance.

  Custer’s spectacular finish, gun battles in the gold camps and cattle towns, and the expertly managed exploits of a saddle tramp who called himself Buffalo Bill, had kindled a blaze of interest that demanded fresh fuel by the week. It was only a question of time before a running gunfight that had involved the same two men for more than a decade aroused journalistic notice.

  Randy had made the rounds of San Francisco’s saloons, music halls, opium dens, and bordellos for weeks. It was like attaching a hose to his pockets and reversing the pressure, sucking out coins and paper currency with marvelous speed. His capital was so low it had to stand on tiptoe to peer over the gutter. He’d moved his baggage to a hotel far less lavish than he’d grown accustomed to, with roaches the size of cigar butts, rooms separated from their neighbors by two sheets of wallpaper, and a woman’s false eyelash cemented to the basin in the dry-sink. He stretched his funds by rescuing yesterday’s Examiner from a trash barrel and came upon the following paragraph in the local section:

  It has come to our editors’ attention that Mr. Randolph Locke, the notorious Texas pistoleer, is visiting our city and at last word was stopping at the Eldorado Hotel. Readers familiar with our telegraph columns will recall that Mr. Locke and Mr. Frank Farmer, also originally of Texas, have been taking target practice upon each other across the map of the western states and territories since the spring of 1868. Mr. Farmer was last reported in Salt Lake City, U.T., taking the salt air and recovering from the most recent mortal attack upon his person by Mr. Locke.

  The maid assigned to Randy’s room—the widow of a forty-niner, Henrietta by name—complained to the hotel manager that she’d been forced to pick up hundreds of torn fragments of newspaper that had been flung about the premises before she could begin dusting.

  The manager yanked a bale of hair from a nostril and examined it against the sunlight coming through the painted glass in the lobby door. “That’s your job, if I recollect correctly.”

  “Sure, and I wouldn’t mind it so much if I didn’t hear the man that done it taking the Lord’s name in vain all the way down the stairs.”

  Randy’s chagrin upon learning that he’d failed to finish the job in the drugstore was exacerbated by the army of newspaper reporters who tracked him to his current lodgings, each crying for an exclusive interview. Wearing their trademark bowlers and ripe unwashed linen, they laid ambush for him in the lobby, loped at his heels as he climbed the stairs, and bribed hotel personnel to let them wait for him in his private room. He ran them out at pistol point and directed the house detective to prevent any more such visits if he preferred walking without bullets in his kneecaps. That fellow nodded eager assent; and so Randy was greatly annoyed when within hours of their conversation a fresh knock came to his door.

  The small man who greeted him when he tore it open was dressed better than the shabby gentlemen of the press, in a printed yellow waistcoat, striped trousers, velvet lapels, fine boots with tall heels, and a pearl-gray Stetson. His left eye was varnished ivory, with the painted-on iris a shade darker brown than its living mate. He introduced himself as Abraham Cripplehorn, originally of Atlantic City, New Jersey, and in lieu of a calling card presented him with a volume slightly larger than a banker’s wallet, bound in scarlet and goldenrod pasteboard and titled:

  BRIMSTONE BOB’S REVENGE,

  or

  GUN JUSTICE IN ABILENE

  Being a True and Authentic Account of Robert Turnstile’s Quest for Bloody Vengeance on the Chisholm Trail.

  as told by

  JACK DODGER,

  an Eye-Witness

  “Who’s this Jack Dodger, at all?” asked Randy.

  “He is I, sir: a nom de plume, to spare typesetters the chore of constructing my born appellation. The original Dodger made good on his surname by departing his hotel room in St. Louis, by way of the fire escape, leaving behind an unpaid bill and twenty-five copies of Petticoat Betsy, the Bandit Princess, by Jack Dodger. I sold them to a local lending library, which was eager to have them, as Buffalo Bill was appearing locally, and thus financed the rest of my North American tour.”

  “Which one of these is you?” He pointed to a pen-and-ink drawing on the paper cover of two men in range gear firing pistols at each other at point-blank range, their weapons held out at shoulder length.

  “Neither. The fellow on the left is a reasonably accurate likeness of Brimstone Bob Turnstile. His opposing number traveled under the name Creek Morgan until that slug put him six feet under in Kansas. A reputable journalist never places himself in the story.”

  “I had my fill of writers this day.” He started to close the door. A highly polished toe held it open three inches; wide enough for Randy to poke the Colt’s muzzle through the space.

  Cripplehorn’s reaction was to smile under his brush moustache.

  “I’m not interested in penning merely another dime novel commemorating a long-standing feud between dangerous men; that would be an expenditure of valuable resources toward too small a reward.”

  “That’s a lot of big words. Which one you want to be your last?” He drew back the hammer.

  The visitor was cool in the face of a threat; the reasons behind it I’ll go into later and at length. His mission, he explained, was to produce an extravaganza that would pit Randy Locke and Frank Farmer against each other before a paying audience.

  “Firing blanks and gibbering like a couple of monkeys in the circus. I ain’t interested, and unless Frank’s changed since I put a bullet through his chest wall, neither is he.”

  “I’m not suggesting a Punch-and-Judy show. The arenas are filled with those. This will be a unique exhibition. A duel to the death.”

  “The law won’t stand for it.” But Randy held his fire.

  “Allow me to worry about that. There are ways and ways; which is w
hy you need me, and why I am not hesitating to share a valuable idea as this free gratis with a man I’ve just met. I propose to charge two dollars a head for the privilege of witnessing two genuine frontiersmen engaged in mortal combat; the take to be divided equally between myself and the survivor—or his designated heirs in the event he expires soon after.”

  “Compared to cash in hand, money in the mouth’s worth less than a penny on the dollar.”

  The man’s smile remained as fixed as his ivory eye.

  “I’ll stand the expense of advertising and promotion. Your only obligation will be to show up on the day, loaded and sober.”

  “Look around you, Mr. Dodger.”

  “In informal conversation I prefer Cripplehorn.”

  “Whatever your name is, look around. This ain’t exactly the honeymoon suite in the Bella Union. I’m bust. Gunsmiths don’t trade ammunition for tickets to a show.”

  “I read of your arrival in San Francisco in the telegraph column of The Chicago Herald. The fare and accommodations were princely, and I am still awaiting a bank draft from New York City for delivery of my most recent manuscript. I can have a hundred dollars for you in a month.”

  “I got enough for but two more days, and there ain’t no fire escape. A month from now I’ll be back in Wyoming, skinning wolves to eat. You can reach me in Sheridan, care of Western Union. Wire me fifty and we’ll talk.”

  “That’s a gamble.”

  “You saying I can’t be trusted?”

  “If these past ten years have proven anything, it’s that you’re a man of your word, Mr. Farmer too. But what if he decides not to cooperate?”

  “He will, if it’s a chance to get at me.”

  “The only obstacle,” Cripplehorn said, “is the difficulty of locating him.”

  “If that piece in the paper went out on the wire, he’ll come here under his own steam.”

  “What if one of you kills the other before I can raise the money?”

  “It’s a fair possibility. Risk like that, I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes.”

  FIVE

  Good businessmen are invariably polite, patient, and in step with their customers’ best interests.

  The intriguing thing about the man who walks in the footsteps of the adventurous is he exposes himself to the same adventures, except in his case with his eyes wide open. Which one is the more courageous and determined, the one who stumbles into hazard or the one who knows of it based on the other’s experience and goes on anyway?

  Abraham Cripplehorn would hardly have held himself a man of courage. Like any successful salesman, he never bought his own merchandise.

  He lost his left eye trying to stay out of the army. Intending to deal himself out of Mr. Lincoln’s draft, he took aim at his off foot with an old Paterson, but loaded it with the wrong size ball and it blew up in his face. For a time he wore a piratical patch, but it was anathema to his chosen line of work, which depended on the illusion of comfortable reliability. Blown-glass eyes fell outside the budget of a twenty-year-old entrepreneurial hopeful, but after alighting from a freight in Baltimore he won ten dollars in a game of euchre with a yardman named Tingley, who was short on funds but had an uncle who made pianos. This uncle fashioned an eye from the ivory he used to manufacture keys. It was an improvement over the patch, but the blank white orb still made people feel uncomfortable. With the profits from selling two gold bricks to a naïve postal clerk in Boston, he hired a woman who painted miniatures to add an iris. It didn’t fool many people, the color being off a shade, but it made them feel more at ease, and when he told them he’d received the injury at Cold Harbor, it actually worked to his benefit.

  “People want to believe a good lie,” he said to a companion under the relaxing influence of a bottle of peach brandy, his spirit of choice. “They’ll meet you halfway if you show effort in it.”

  He never repeated the remark. The young man he told it to did, cocking up an enterprise he’d invested a month in preparation, and turned up in a rubbish bin in Pittsburgh with his throat cut. His father, who owned part interest in a coal mine, decided that he’d fallen in with gypsies. Two days later a group of miners attacked a bunch of them in a local camp with pickaxes and burned their tents and wagons. Cripplehorn read about it in a week-old copy of the Picayune in a train station in Buffalo, and shook his head.

  “Poor rag-headed bastards.”

  He himself was the son of an Atlantic City plumbing salesman who lived on the road, raised by a succession of aunts who were always coming and going and never seemed to run out of reinforcements. One, who claimed to be a Creole from Louisiana (although he was fairly certain she was Greek, and not the classic variety with a long straight nose and intelligent forehead but a woman with big red hands and a moustache), took his virginity when he was twelve. He thought it was their private secret—illicit lovers sharing a special bond—but after she told his father, describing the cute face little Abie made when he came, the plumbing salesman broke his cheekstrap with a pipe wrench and threw him out of the house.

  A neighbor who went to the door to investigate what sounded like a wounded animal moaning on his front porch found him and took him to a doctor, who set the broken bone and put him to rest on a cot in the room behind his office. When the bone had knitted sufficiently for the patient to speak, he said he’d fallen down the back steps of his house, and since his father was on the road with his samples he was on his own. While the doctor was away delivering a baby, Abraham got his clothes from a cupboard, found cash in a tin behind a row of medical journals on a shelf, and crawled into an empty cattle car in the railroad yards, where he fell asleep. When he woke, the world swayed beneath him. He had no idea which way he was headed until the train slowed down approaching the station in Wilmington, Delaware.

  Years later, when Abraham had made his way in the world, he traveled back a thousand miles looking for his father with a Stevens shotgun, only to find a granite-and-marble bank sprung up where the house had stood. None of the neighbors remembered anyone of that name. He placed an advertisement in several newspapers, offering a reward for information on the whereabouts of Noah Cripplehorn, with a description. He received nothing but the odd rambling answer from people patently hoping to collect on vagary alone. He gave it up when his money ran out, but he refused to abandon its purpose. As many cities as he visited throughout the years, and as often as he crisscrossed the continent, he never stopped asking after the man, and he kept the scattergun clean and lubricated.

  Abraham Cripplehorn never forgot an insult or an injury no matter how slight, and had the patience to wait months or years to even a score.

  Stopping in St. Louis in 1872, he got into a scrap with a store clerk over the coloring of a twenty-dollar banknote and cut the man’s arm to the bone with a clasp-knife, his preferred weapon of self-defense; he was saving the Stevens for his father. A policeman happened to be present. Cripplehorn came to in a cell with a crusty bump on his head from the officer’s nightstick, pleaded guilty to the reduced charge of aggravated assault, and spent six months in the state penitentiary in Jefferson City. His cellmate, an elderly confidence man named Mike Hurly, told him he was wasting his time unloading gold bricks on the gullible and trying to pass counterfeit currency. A young man of his obvious intelligence ought to try his hand at selling trust.

  Cripplehorn smiled. “Trust, what’s that?”

  “Only the difference between going to the customer instead of having him come to you.”

  “I don’t just have the capital right now to rent a storefront.”

  “I’m talking about personal transactions, not real estate. You can sell pomade to a bald man if you know what you’re about.”

  “That the sound policy that put you in here?”

  Hurly’s smile was beaming; as opposite to his cell mate’s as blue sky to overcast. He was a redheaded Irishman with a nose full of shot veins and ruddy skin pulled all out of shape by a lifetime of beaming. He was thirty-two at the tim
e of their meeting.

  “I got drunk celebrating a score and stole a horse and buggy that happened to belong to the mayor of Springfield. It don’t count against what I’m telling you.”

  “Telling or selling?”

  “Just now I’m fresh out of merchandise, so you can believe what I’m saying. Under other circumstances I’d be fleecing you out of that Dutch eye. I don’t like to see a young man squandering his potential on store clerks without a pot to piss in. How much time you got left?”

  “Five months, sixteen days, eleven hours, and change.”

  “I got another four beyond, on account of I bust that mayor’s yellow-wheeled wagon against a telegraph pole misjudging a turn. That’s plenty of time to turn you out from Hurly University.”

  “Does it come with a key I can hang from my watch chain?”

  Hurly tapped the other man’s chest. “You wear it in there, and it’ll open every door this side of St. Peter. Where you go from there depends on what you learn after you leave here.”

  * * *

  It was in that cell that Cripplehorn learned the best way to sell a man something he didn’t want was to refuse to offer it to him.

  He learned also to dress consistently and with dash; nothing so tawdry as a gold tooth, but an article of clothing that set him apart from the bowler-hatted drummer and the sharp in the straw boater. In Jefferson City after his release, he picked a pocket hanging on a peg in a barber shop, bought a readymade suit, and booked a coach to St. Louis. On the platform, a fellow in a cloth cap and mackinaw smoking a cigarette thrust a flyer into his hands, printed in square-serif letters on coarse stock: