The Long High Noon

by Loren D. Estleman

  The world was turning still, faster west of St. Louis. The Comanches had been whipped in Texas, Sitting Bull was a federal prisoner, and the only hostiles anyone had seen lately outside Apache country were the ones who had chased the last cookie into the smokehouse wall. Abilene was closed to cows and cowboys. People were roller-skating in Dodge City. When the Lazy Y sent its beef to market, the drive ended after two miles, where the bawling Herefords were loaded aboard the cars in Lincoln. If the tourists didn’t waste their money on silver belt buckles shaped like longhorns, Randy might have forgotten what the flea-bitten bastards looked like. Homesteaders were fencing the open range into little-bitty squares where hogs rooted and sugar beets swoll up in the ground the buffalo had trod hard as iron, cutting off the cattle outfits from water. In the last year alone, the Bar 9 in Wyoming and the Double Diamond in New Mexico had broken up and sold all their equipment at auction; every time the wind blew east, it brought with it another dusty band of hands looking for work that wasn’t there. A man got up in the dark to heat up his Dutch oven and when it got dark again he didn’t know if there’d be a ranch still there in the morning.

  Then came winter, and it was all gone in a season.

  * * *

  September and October were mild, more like spring than autumn. The grass stayed slick and green, and the syndicate based in Indiana that owned the Lazy Y was considering expanding next year and taking over acreage belonging to smaller competitors less equipped to weather the changes in the industry. Christmas was snowless, the sky scraped clean of clouds; Randy put on his mackinaw to start breakfast and by the time it was served had shucked it off, the lining sodden with sweat. On New Year’s Eve, those hands who’d drawn the short straws and stayed home from Lincoln and its saloons sat outside around a fire, pouring whiskey into their tin cups and passing the bottle. At midnight, under a sky punched through with stars and a three-quarter moon as bright as a new Morgan dollar, one of them produced a firecracker from his shirt pocket; the explosion set the horses rustling in their stalls and left behind a stench of brimstone.

  Around 1:00 A.M. someone drew a gray sheet overhead and wrung out a drizzle that rattled against the galvanized iron roof of the bunkhouse like bits of shattered crystal. An hour later the sleet became snow: big, downy, wet flakes at first, floating aimlessly and sizzling when they touched down, then turning to powder, coming faster, swept along by a mad coyote wind from the north whose howling drowned out the panes rattling in their frames. Standing at the windows, staring out between hammocks of white in the corners into the leaden dawn, the hands of the Lazy Y could not know how many others were doing the same at that moment, in a line of bunkhouses stretching from as far up as Dakota to as far down as southeast Texas, and from the bootjack of the Platte in northern Colorado to St. Louis. Somewhere in the heavens a massive flour sifter moved from west to east, dumping two feet of powder over drift fences and buffalo wallows, and behind it a bellows blew it into eight-foot drifts, obliterating sharp contrasts in the earth’s surface and smoothing it all into a gently undulating mass dense as fresh-poured cement.

  A peaceful sight, when the storm ran out of steam after three days and three nights; until a rider kicking his horse through chest-deep snow moved from solid earth to a hidden swale and found himself buried to the crown of his hat, or a herd of cattle bunched together tight for the heat and froze, to be found still standing in a stiff mass of a hundred when the snows receded in the tragic spring. The mercury dropped to twenty below and ran out of thermometer at the bottom. Cottonwoods burst from the relentless contraction. Locomotives and the string of cars behind them stood motionless, their wheels invisible so that they appeared to have been abandoned unfinished, only the smoke from their stacks showing any sign of activity as their firemen struggled to keep the boilers from cooling and cracking apart. Wood parties wrapped in bearskins and mackinaws trudged out in snowshoes and brought back frozen limbs that snapped and spat as they thawed in the flames and sometimes put out the fire with the sudden release of water. The mail could not go through and the telegraph wires were down, so the men of the Lazy Y couldn’t know the situation was the same in Waco and Wichita, Rochester and Rapid City.

  The cattle that didn’t freeze died of starvation and thirst; thirst, with snow to their chins because the knot-headed beasts didn’t know it was frozen water and could be eaten. A schoolgirl outside Omaha didn’t return home from school and her body was located when someone spotted a green hair ribbon almost buried in snow, a hundred yards from her house. A Lazy Y cowboy named Shag, nineteen years old and in good health, burst his heart trying to get hay to a stranded herd across four miles of drift; his snow-blind horse was found helpless beside his body, the pallet of feed behind it, still tethered to its saddle. The ground was too hard to bury him, and so a rick of wood was moved in order to get to the insulated earth beneath.

  Randy Locke kept his fire stoked all day and all night, feeding the hands as they straggled in to refuel, change horses, and then go back out, trying to contain the damage. No one complained about his biscuits.

  Three hundred died, some homesteaders frozen in their shacks when firewood ran out and all the furniture had been broken up to feed the hearths. It was futile to attempt to count the cattle that had perished; the original inventories were based on speculation, much of it over-optimistic; few had any idea of how many they had in the fall, but could guess at how many they had in the spring; they were that easy to count now. Teams of workhorses hauled tons of rotting carcasses into buffalo wallows and covered the common graves to prevent plague. Wolves, at least, found an advantage. With meat available for the picking in greater amounts than any since buffalo days, the packs swelled. An experienced wolfer could make a fortune—if only there were any big ranchers left to pay the bounty.

  The blizzards of the 1880s ended the open range—without debate, and almost without complaint; those immediately affected had already shouted themselves hoarse against un-maternal Mother Nature. Fences were required to keep the herds from drifting before the blasting winds, away from ranch headquarters and moving with the storm rather than out of it. The annoyance of it was having to stop every couple of miles and open a gate. The tragedy of it was looking out on a land once untamed, now cut into squares like a pan of dowdy, and proud, sprawling feudal estates gone on the block.

  “Where do you go from here, Cookie?” The foreman with the wrinkled brown skin of a scrotum tobacco pouch counted out his wages from the scratched green strongbox on the butcher-block table he used for a desk.

  “Where do you?” He scooped the banknotes into his sweaty old hat and swept it onto his head swiftly, to avoid spilling; it was like flipping a flapjack.

  “Hartford, Connecticut. My daughter’s been after me to move in with her and her husband since I turned fifty. She’s scared I’ll fall off my horse and bust my hip. You got any kin?”

  “I had a brother. He was born dead, with two heads. They got him in a jar of alcohol in a museum in Michigan. I don’t allow as he’s much company. I reckon I’ll turn west and keep on riding till my bones thaw if ever.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Thirty-six or -seven. Nobody ever wrote down the date that I know of. They probably thought I’d wind up in a jar myself.”

  The foreman chuckled, working the rheumatism out of his knuckles. “Your bones’ll thaw, don’t you worry about that. You figure Texas?”

  “Nothing for me there. San Francisco. I got enough to put me up in something better than that bug hatchery I was in last time.”

  TEN

  True friends are always close, no matter the distance that separates them.

  The West was a big place, sure enough; but not yet settled. There was a relative handful of lively venues where a rootless man could find work or fun or both, so it was never a coincidence when two men who knew each other well kept crossing paths. While it was true a visitor to New York City, stacked twelve-deep as it was so that when someone came in from outside
someone else was pushed out to make room for him, could spend a winter there without ever bumping into an old acquaintance, Tombstone and Fort Griffin and even a sprawl like St. Louis weren’t any of them big enough to get lost in.

  Randy Locke, however, had managed to step square off the face of the earth.

  Wires to ranches in all the places he and Frank had worked came to nothing, beyond a tinhorn gambler going by the name of R. Lockwood, who’d been drug bare naked through mescal outside Las Vegas, New Mexico, from slipping up and dealing two queens of clubs during a friendly game in the Bloody Dog Saloon; but that hideless fellow didn’t sound like Randy, who’d been known to cheat himself inadvertently in a game of Patience and invest his last ten dollars in the cowhands’ Christmas fund as a self-imposed fine. Frank submitted that Randy was made out of honester clay than he himself.

  It was as obvious as finding a trout in one’s whiskey that he was out wolfing, which was solitary work and anonymous, encompassing a piece of North America roughly the size of western Europe, with parts as big as the Hebrides that no two could agree on as to their topographical nature. The rangy critters had got cagy of late, withdrawing higher into the mountains and deeper into the wilderness, where a man’s footprint in the fallen pine needles was as rare as a whorehouse blush. Frank reckoned he’d have to wait for the thaw for the old thorn in his side to fester out.

  (As it happened, Randy had come down from the mountains almost a year earlier, joining the Lazy Y in the middle of its last true trail drive after its cookie brained himself escaping phantom hostiles, relieving the boy who scrubbed his frying pans of his temporary promotion; such brevet appointments rarely reached the general record, and even the foreman scratched his head over Cookie’s right name.)

  Frank meanwhile took work as an officer for the local Committee of Public Vigilance, breaking up dens of vice and corruption in that part of San Francisco known as the Barbary Coast. The committee, headed up by clergy and the respected sons of forty-niners, was sworn to beat out the vermin like trod-down dirt from a very old rug, in the interest of saving the city from the whole reason their fathers had come to it in the first place. When an establishment known for entertaining certain pleasures came under special scrutiny—an heir dead of too much opium here, an old reprobate vanished through a trapdoor into the bay there—whereupon he metamorphosed into “an elderly gentleman fallen upon difficulties beyond bearing”—Frank went in with a squad of “reserve officers of the Metropolitan Police” and, armed with truncheons, brass knuckles, and bulldog pistols, cleaned the place out of everything fragile, portable, and potable. It was volunteer duty, paying only in the warmth of the Lord’s work well-fulfilled and whatever collateral benefits resulted. Frank sold half a dozen cases of confiscated skullbender the day after his first raid, and paid off his bill outstanding at the Hotel de Paris with change to spare. The next week, he led a raid on the establishment that had bought it, reclaimed half what he’d sold along with a case of genuine French champagne (bottled in San Diego), and sold it next day to the Bella Union, with a tinge of regret; the proprietor was a large contributor to the vigilance committee, and enjoyed a clean bill as a consequence.

  These were palmy days for Frank. A man could do the Lord’s work, and be comfortable in the bargain. He only regretted he hadn’t seen the light years earlier.

  On his third week on duty came a revelation.

  In a hovel built entirely from wrecked ships—ancient barnacles clinging to the timbers looking like dried-up onions—an old Chinaman, himself built entirely from burlap stretched over weathered canvas, a rusty black mandarin’s cap pasted to his skull, looked up at the intruders with a butcher’s cleaver clutched in one hand, stained with something that was not rust. A young Chinese woman whom it developed was his daughter lay at his slippered feet with her head nearly clean off her body. As Frank reconstructed the situation, she had taken up with a twenty-year-old white man, scion of a fortune struck in ’49 or thereabouts, in direct rebellion to a match that had been agreed upon in Shanghai before her birth. Her father had acted from honor—“Good faith,” in his broken English. “Send my bones home, please, sir.” Frank put a bullet in his skull, wrapped him in an old blanket reeking of opium and other filth, and dragged him over the nearest pier and into the greasy water in the harbor.

  The local tong would go on looking for the white man in the pointed beard until the industry of the vigilance committee directed its efforts toward personal protection.

  Frank made arrangements for the girl’s burial in a Buddhist cemetery. During the religious ceremony, not a detail of which he followed, he thought of Evangeline Dierdorf.

  “I didn’t serve her well,” he thought; “no, not at all.” And began efforts to trace her movements from San Francisco. In time, with help from the Pinkerton National Detective Agency until his capital ran out, he received a clipping from a newspaper in Carson City, Nevada:

  Responding to a complaint from an unruly house in this city Thursday last, police removed the remains of a young woman known only as Angie, dead of an abuse of tincture of opium; associates reported that she’d sought relief from pain owing to an extraction of eight badly impacted teeth, misjudging the dosage. She had been a resident of the house for some weeks. Burial has taken place in the cemetery for indigents.

  Frank “sought relief” from a contraband bottle he’d held out from the general lot, and was ejected from his hotel for vandalism. A number of furnishings were smashed beyond repair, including a basin with a woman’s eyelash stuck to it.

  He found a billet not demonstrably different from the one he’d just left, submitted his resignation to the committee, and inquired at the Palace, as he’d done on and off throughout the autumn, about Abraham Cripplehorn. The clerk, a fair-haired consumptive from Wisconsin, sighed—Frank’s was a familiar face across that marble-topped desk—and consulted his registration.

  “Not checked in yet, sir; but he sent a wire reserving a suite. We expect him Monday next.”

  * * *

  “Mr. Cripplehorn?”

  The man signing the register, small in stature but well setup in a silk waistcoat, gabardine suit of clothes, high-heeled boots, and a Stetson that had never held a horse’s fill of water, regarded him with one working eye; the other was store-bought, like Frank’s ear. Frank, sensitive about that feature, knew when it was spotted.

  “Would your name by chance be Farmer?” asked the man.

  “It would, and not by chance. I’m told you know a fellow name of Locke.”

  Cripplehorn picked up his valise. “We’ll talk in my suite.”

  There was a sitting room connected to the bedroom, with fresh flowers in a copper vase, deep leather chairs, and a Gainsborough print leaning out from a wall. Through a half-open door gleamed a brass bed piled high with pillows in tasseled shams. From inside his valise the guest of the hotel withdrew a matching leather case that opened to reveal three cut-glass decanters held in place with leather straps. Brass tags hung from tiny chains around their necks were engraved BOURBON, RYE, and BRANDY. Frank asked for rye and watched him unstop one of the decanters and pour golden liquid into a hotel glass. He paused two inches from the top.

  “Shall I ring for ice?”

  “I didn’t come here to skate.”

  Cripplehorn smiled and filled the glass the rest of the way. He poured brandy into another.

  They sat. Frank’s host watched with amusement as he flipped half his drink down his throat. “You’re the authentic article, that I can see.”

  “You’re partial to that word. I read your book.”

  “I sometimes forget the literacy rate out here. I know the owner of a highly successful manufactory back East who can barely write his name.”

  “It’s either learn to read or bonk yourself on the head with a rock from boredom. Things ain’t as various out here as it says in your book. I’m a mite surprised I never heard of this Turnstile. I counted eighty-two dead by his hand.”

  �
�Eyewitnesses will embellish. His mistake was to go on killing after all his grievances were addressed. The good people of Virginia City broke him out of jail while he was awaiting trial for killing a popular bartender and hanged him off a railroad trestle. Three wives showed up to claim the body.”

  “I’d of kissed the ones with the rope for pulling me out of that.” Frank put down the rest of his drink. “About Randy.”

  “About Randy indeed.” Cripplehorn sipped brandy and set his glass on a low table between them. “He gave me a general delivery address in Wyoming, but all my letters came back for inability to deliver.”

  Frank stood. “I won’t be taking any more of your time.”

  “I’d be grateful if you’d let me take some of yours.”

  “Who’s asking, Cripplehorn or Dodger? I get jumpy around fellows with more than one name. It’s like carrying two sets of dice.”

  “The former. I find it easier to get around without dragging the burden of fame behind me. In certain places Jack Dodger is better known than Charles Dickens.”

  Frank didn’t doubt that, not knowing who was this Dickens. He refilled his glass and sat back down.

  Abraham Cripplehorn told him of his plan to charge admission to see Randy Locke and Frank Farmer settle their affairs in public.

  “I don’t see how far we’ll get, seeing as how we’ll all be in jail the minute what we’re about gets around.”

  “I’m surprised you gentlemen are so concerned about the law, given your method of resolving your differences. However, dealing with such obstacles will be my contribution. I didn’t just come up with this idea. I’ve had two years to think about it since I spoke with Locke.”