The Long High Noon

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Not for me. Not the way I want to live.”

  “I want to sit down with Locke.”

  “I don’t advise it. Reporters rank just below Farmer on his list.”

  Munch untangled himself from the chair. “I think I’ll knock on his door. You don’t object.”

  “I never step between another man and a mistake.”

  Fort Smith, Oct. 1—Caleb Munch, our correspondent in the Indian Nations, inquired of Randolph Locke, the prominent duellist, as to the nature of his antipathy toward Frank Farmer, also of that profession. He was unable to obtain an answer, but both Munch and Locke are recovering at present from injuries sustained during the interview.

  “I got thirty-one bad teeth, and that fellow with the whiskers knocked out the good one.” Randy, standing with his braces down before the mirror above the washbasin in his room, inspected the gap. His upper lip was puffed up twice normal size and he had sixteen stitches above his right eye, swollen also.

  “How’d he get that close?” Cripplehorn asked.

  “I opened the door to shoo him out and he hit me square in the mouth.”

  “Where was your gun?”

  “I dropped it out of pure astonishment. Nobody’s crazy enough to hit a man holding a pistol.”

  “I saw him coming out after the commotion. He had a sleeve torn off and there was blood in his beard.”

  “Next time it’ll be a slug in his chest. Maybe not, though. It’s bad luck to kill a crazy man.”

  * * *

  The tent was the biggest thing the local wagon-sheet maker had ever attempted. He stitched together most of his stock, solving the problem of waterproofing by overlapping and understitching, and staked it out in the field where the exhibition was scheduled for the printer to stencil the advertising. When a team of laborers erected it, it stood taller than any building in town and encompassed almost the entire plowed patch of ground. Trumpeted the Elevator:

  DEATH TENT BIGGER THAN

  CODY’S WILD WEST.

  Locke v. Farmer

  Arena Compares to Madison Square Garden.

  Largest Construction in the Nations.

  “Blood Coliseum,” Declares the Hon. Isaac Parker.

  Our Famous Jurist Decries

  Official Inefficacy to Prevent Barbarous Display.

  A squad of carpenters abandoned construction of an Episcopal church to build bleachers for the spectators, who could read of the miraculous properties of Edison’s Elixir, consider the Blue Plate Special at the Kickapoo House, admire a giant shoe illustrating the wares of Gabriel & Sons, Cobblers, and ponder the marble monuments available from C.C. Cox, Stonecutter. There were notices printed on both sides of the canvas.

  Cripplehorn spent more time with the printer than anyone else. He had tickets made with legal waivers on the backs, indemnifying the exhibitors against damages in the event of injury or death as the result of a stray bullet, and designed posters to be placed in every shopkeeper’s window for miles around (EXHIBITION OF THE CENTURY! A DUEL TO THE DEATH! FRANK FARMER AND RANDY LOCKE, TOGETHER FOR THE LAST TIME! NOV. 10, 1882. TICKETS $1.00 [ONE DOLLAR] Jack Dodger, Programme Director).

  “What kind of stock?” asked the printer, holding the sheet scribbled by his customer.

  “Something that will take this.” Cripplehorn handed him a stiff-backed photograph of Frank, looking the proper bad man with his ivory-handled Remington poking above his belt and the butt-plate of his Winchester planted on the floor, the Matterhorn for some reason in the background.

  “Take good care of it. I had to send for it all the way from California. I want Farmer’s name underneath in twelve-point type. I’ve been spending a lot of time with newspapermen, and know the lingo.”

  “What about the other one?”

  “He’s camera shy. Do what you can with this.”

  The printer took the wanted poster with the bad sketch of Randy. “This reward still good?”

  “It won’t be after the tenth.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  Philosophy is just another word for regret.

  Frank’s train got in late. The station was dark, and the few people left to greet the passengers looked like phantoms in the light leaking from the windows of the coaches.

  “What happened?” said Cripplehorn.

  “Tree fell across the tracks forty miles back. We sat in the dark two hours waiting for the crew to chop it loose. Some folks will do anything to keep this here extravaganza from happening.”

  “Impossible. No one knew you were on the train.”

  “I sort of let it slip in Billings. I reckon there was a fellow or two from the press mixed in amongst the regulars. News sure spreads these days. Hard to believe it took a month for some to hear Lincoln got shot.”

  “Just out of curiosity, what would it take to make you keep your mouth shut?”

  “Hell, I thought you’d be pleased. You spent most of our stake advertising this shindig. I got you the same thing and it didn’t cost a cent. Where’s Randy?”

  There was no reason not to tell him. The Cherokee Rest had been in all the papers after Randy’s interview with Caleb Munch. “In the hotel. He gave me his word he’d stay away from you until the day after tomorrow. I want yours. Thirty-six hours, that’s all I ask.”

  “I stayed in jail longer than that. I reckon I can wait a day and a half out of sixteen years.”

  “Your word?”

  “You got it.”

  “Seems to me I had it once before. You know how that turned out.”

  Teeth flashed in Frank’s whiskers. “You ever broke a bone?”

  Cripplehorn touched his cheekstrap, an involuntary gesture. “Yes.”

  “Then you know oncet one’s broke and knitted back together it’s stronger than it was.”

  “You westerners and your homilies. You can’t shoot the moon, it’s unlikely you’ll ever see an elephant, and a promise isn’t a bone.” He shook his head. “I never will understand this regional concept of honor, especially when it might get you killed.”

  “That’s easy. You go back on it, you’re kilt for sure.”

  They stopped before a shallow two-story house, whitewashed with green trim. BED AND BOARD read a wooden sign suspended from the porch roof. It was dark but for a coal-oil lamp burning in a ground-floor window with a furious moth batting at the glass.

  Cripplehorn said, “I took the precaution of arranging a separate accommodation. I hope you’re not offended. I’ve played the percentages all my life, and human nature being what it is—”

  “The trouble with you slick talkers is the words come too fast and too many.” Frank shoved his valise into the other’s arms. “You carry it the rest of the way. I’m as tuckered out as if I was swinging an axe right alongside that crew.”

  “You’d better get your rest. And go easy on the whiskey. That legal waiver won’t stand up in court if an innocent bystander stops a bullet fired by a drunk who can’t shoot straight.”

  Frank shook his head. “There ain’t no such thing as innocent bystanders.”

  * * *

  “I’m curious about the Swiss backdrop.” Caleb Munch crossed his legs in a bent-arm rocking chair, circles of sticking-plaster on his forehead, one cheek, and a pink patch shaved out of his beard. He looked like Walt Whitman after a run-in with John L. Sullivan. He showed Frank the photograph from Butte.

  “It was hot. My boots was so full of sweat they squished when I walked. The fellow with the camera kept pulling down canvas sheets from rollers, asking which I liked. When I got to that one it was like a north breeze. Greek temples sure didn’t do it, nor palm trees on a pile of sand.”

  “I don’t suppose you’d care to tell me what it is about Randy Locke gets your back up.”

  “I ain’t just sure, only I took a dislike to him the minute we laid eyes on each other. Hell, you catch my loop. I read where you went to get his story and wound up dancing with him Texas style.”

  “I’m conducting this interview. Not likin
g a man seems a poor reason for murder.”

  “It wouldn’t be murder. We neither of us never made a play without warning and without both of us was heeled.”

  “Cripplehorn says in Oakland you shot at Locke from cover, without announcing yourself first.”

  “That was the announcement. It was to get his attention.”

  “Readers of the Elevator will need some assurance of that.”

  “Hell, he’s alive, ain’t he?”

  * * *

  “Old Gideon.” Cripplehorn stood the quart bottle on the pinewood chest of drawers. “It’s the closest thing to sipping whiskey you can get down the street. Did you know saloons are illegal in the Nations? Not that it matters in the Strip, where everything’s so far outside the law it’s a law unto itself. Just tonight I’ve seen two men threatened with death and had to sprint to avoid being tackled and raped by a lewd woman who’d dress out at three hundred pounds.”

  “I know Maude. You should of let her catch up.” Randy, busy with one hand disassembling his Colt on the nightstand, pulled the cork with his teeth and spat it in the general direction of nowhere. “Want a snort?”

  “Lord, no. The last time I drank liquor that hard I woke up in Juarez with a burro in my bed.”

  “I hope it was a jenny. How bad’s the news? Every time I get a gift from you it costs me.”

  “I want you to pose for a photograph.”

  “We had this conversation. You just wasted the price of a bottle.”

  “Hear me out. That half-ass sketch of you in Arizona must have been made by a demented child. The proof the printer showed me demonstrated the contrast. It was ludicrous. Surely you want to come off as well as Frank.”

  “I will and more, oncet he’s in hell.”

  “You haven’t heard the rest.”

  “There’s more?” He took a swig, put down the bottle, and thrust a pipe cleaner through a chamber. The acidy stench of the solvent warped the air in his room.

  “I want you to pose with Frank.”

  Randy paused in mid-thrust. Then he chuckled.

  “You got yourself a deal, Mr. Cripplehorn. I never miss an opportunity to catch up with Frank.”

  “There’s one condition.”

  “There usually is, and mostwise more than one.” He extracted the pipe cleaner and blew through the chamber. A low whistle resulted.

  “No loads in your weaponry. I’ve petitioned the town council for a deputy marshal to be on hand to inspect it.”

  Randy finished his cleaning and started in with the oil. A pleasant scent of vanilla took the edge off the acrid odor of the solvent.

  “Hell. I was afraid you’d have me strip to the skin in case I had a belly gun stuck up my ass.”

  Cripplehorn reacted as he usually did once his fish was on the hook; pushing his luck. “You’ll need a new wardrobe. That hat of yours wouldn’t even make a good bucket, filled with holes as it is, and your trousers look like a band of gypsies moved out of them.”

  “My hat keeps the sun off my skull and the pants cover my ass. That’s as much as any man can ask of his personal gear.”

  “You’re right, I suppose. Frank ordered himself a new suit of clothes from Montgomery Ward, and a bootmaker named Bluewater is fixing him up with a custom pair made from the indigenous cottonmouth. He’ll come off a clown next to you in your honest rags.”

  Randy started putting the Colt back together. He paused to pull from the bottle.

  “I won’t wear a chimney tile like Ben Thompson, nor a beetle hat like that dude Luke Short. Maybe a good Texas crown with a plain band, and a coat that don’t make me look like a tinhorn or an undertaker. I reckon I could use a new pair of boots. Bluewater, you say his name was?”

  “Still is, I imagine.”

  “Well, I sure don’t want no snake; its mate might come looking for him. There’s a yard or two of buffler hide left, I wouldn’t mind wearing it. Them shaggies kept me in tall corn.”

  Cripplehorn felt that old orgasmic thrill of conquest, head to toe. “I’ll ask.”

  * * *

  The camera was a big wooden box propped on a steel tripod in a small studio smelling of caustic chemicals, with men’s and women’s clothes hanging from a pipe rack on casters, hats enough to open a haberdashery, a forest of walking sticks in a bamboo umbrella stand, and various items of weaponry from a Confederate officer’s sabre to a large-bore rifle that fired elephant rounds; although many of those who booked a session provided their own costumes and props. One wall was covered with pictures of grim-faced wedded couples, firemen gathered around pump wagons, a locomotive laboring up a grade, and a twister, a spectacular composition.

  The photographer, a young Osage named Andrew Fox, ducked under his black cloth to inspect the focus. Refracting mirrors gave him an image of two men suspended upside down, one in an upholstered chair with a floral print, the other standing beside the chair with one hand resting on the back.

  Randy and Frank had watched the Osage pulling down landscapes painted on canvas attached to rollers, rejecting a pagan temple in Rome, palm trees, Versailles, and the Pacific Ocean before agreeing on a meadow shaded by tall oaks.

  “Looks right peaceful,” Randy said.

  Frank said, “I clumb trees just like them back in Pennsylvania.”

  “Too bad you didn’t fall out of one and bust your neck.”

  “Gentlemen,” said Cripplehorn, in a warning tone, nodding toward the two off-duty city deputies he’d hired to observe the session. They stood at opposite ends of the room, wearing heavy-handled Colts in stiff holsters. One had a ten-gauge shotgun broken open over the crook of one arm.

  “You said there’d be just one. We got no rounds.” Randy bit off the words.

  “That bowie of yours is too picturesque to leave out, but it’s more than just a stage property. I know about Frank’s clasp knife.”

  “That’s just for whittling,” Frank said. “We don’t settle our scores with cutlery. We ain’t Mexicans.”

  “These men are here merely to protect you both from those base instincts we all possess in some form.”

  Frank said, “I never been insulted in such pretty words.”

  As the shorter man, Randy posed standing, wearing a stiff new Texas pinch hat, a striped waistcoat over a lawn shirt with plain garters gathering the sleeves, and whipcord trousers tucked inside knee-length glossy brown boots, his worn old spurs on the heels. His Colt hung in his soft leather holster and he held his Ballard with the stock resting on the floor. Frank, in his new suit, fancy flap-toed boots, and tall-crowned sugar-loaf sombrero, sat with his Winchester across his lap. Both flinched when Andrew Fox raised a hod heaped with magnesium powder and touched it off with a candle, plunging the room into bright dazzle followed by acrid smoke; but the shutter was faster than even their reflexes, capturing them in the moment, calm and resolute.

  For a time, the original plate was on display among other assorted hardcases in a museum in Guthrie, but it was destroyed in a fire soon after Teddy Roosevelt turned the Indian Nations into the State of Oklahoma. But you can still find a print in a junk store if you’re looking, or pick up one of the posters Cripplehorn had made, all curling and fly-specked with the faces faded to blank ovals.

  You can get a good price, too. The men are forgotten now, like the buffalo and the Great Plains Wolf and the range where they all wandered.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Avoid cards and spirits, or stand in the crossfire of ruin.

  The day of the event, Abraham Cripplehorn sat at a campaign table in front of the gargantuan tent with several rolls of tickets and a strongbox, the off-duty deputies posted to see no one ran off with either. He set up at 9:00 A.M. and by noon had sold out, with two hours to go before the tent opened for business. There wasn’t a room to be had in Cimarron, whose streets were filled with strange horses and buckboards and carriages from throughout the territory and places beyond. He’d hired a brass band made up of volunteer firemen and a talented local stock cler
k to juggle bright rubber balls to open the show.

  At quarter to two, Cripplehorn sent the two deputies to escort the featured players from their rooms. He inspected his new gold watch several times, listening to the band playing “The Garryowen,” before the deputies returned without them.

  * * *

  The Rusty Bucket Saloon operated openly and illegally on the south side of the tracks, where from time to time a satisfied customer was run over by the Katy Flyer while weaving across the rails. It was the original railroad station before the new brick one was built on the north side, a fine solid construction of lath-and-plaster, and long enough to accommodate a paneled mahogany bar and scrolled backbar that had been brought in, dismantled, in freight wagons before the coming of the railroad. It offered two gaming tables with green baize tops and steel-engraved pictures in frames chronicling the triumphs of George Washington. The owner was an Irishman married to a Creek woman, who bought his stock from whiskey runners who managed to elude Judge Parker’s marshals by entering the territory directly from the west and north without crossing their jurisdiction.

  Today it was deserted except for the Irishman and a short-coupled customer in new clothes with a Colt on his hip. Everyone else, apparently, was either in Cripplehorn’s big tent or on his way there to take in the show.

  “You’re fixing to be late, Mr. Locke,” said the man behind the bar, a fine-boned example of lace-curtain stock who kept order in the place with two feet of billiard cue and a shotgun nearly as short.

  Randy directed his scowl first to the bartender, then to the poster with his and Frank’s picture on it propped up in the front window. “Well, they can’t start the ball without me.” He thumped his glass twice on the bar. The man came his way with a bottle and filled it to the top. “You know this John Barleycorn doesn’t mix with shooting.”

  “You might be right. I disremember even asking you for the advice.”

  “Holy Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.” The bartender stood with the bottle in one hand and the cork in the other, staring at Frank coming in the door.