by Lou Cameron
Stringer said that sure sounded poetic and climbed down from the driver’s seat as Rhodes moved in, covering him every step of the way, to reach for the Panard’s starting crank and hurl it way the hell off and down Pikes Peak with a backhand throw Stringer hadn’t known the little shit had in him. As the crank rang tauntingly in ever-softer tinkles, somewhere in the no-shit distance, Stringer smiled crookedly and said, “Well, that sure tears it for the two of us. You say the others are waiting on us just a few yards up? I doubt it would count if I foot-raced you the rest of the way. So you just go along and I’ll be along directly.”
As Dusty Rhodes nodded and started up the rocky trail ahead of him Stringer was sorely tempted, now that the little rascal had his own gun muzzle down to even things a mite. But Stringer just wasn’t up to gunning little shits without warning and as things turned out, Rhodes had likely been told as much about him, earlier, for when Stringer called out, “I hope you know I feel it my Christian duty to tell the others you only forced this race to a draw by drawing a gun on me!” Rhodes just laughed back at him like a wolverine leaving a pissed-on trap he’d just sprung, and hurled the cheap pistol down the mountain after Stringer’s starting crank, calling out, “Gun? What gun might anyone have drawn on you, MacKail?”
Then he strode on, his back to Stringer as if daring the man he’d slickered to murder him in cold blood, with others within earshot if not in full sight. The now rather pleased with himself driver kept going over the hump until he spied the cog railroad’s upper terminal and the massive stone and timber brutality of Summit Lodge just ahead of him. A distant figure seated on the front steps spied Dusty about the same time, so as the driver crossed the tracks he was met by most of the high-rolling sports of Cripple Creek. All of them seemed as surprised to see Dutch Ritter’s driver on foot. But Dusty waited until Ritter asked, himself, before answering, modestly, “I did get a few yards higher than that MacKail gent in the Panard, but to tell the truth, the mountain was just too much for the both of us. MacKail should be along directly. We both stalled just down the slope a piece.”
Then one of the taller gents there gasped and said, “The hell you say, Dusty. If that ain’t MacKail coming at us in that black and tan Panard, I’d like someone here to tell what I’m staring straight at with my own two eyes!”
Nobody could argue, not even the dumbfounded Dusty Rhodes, as Stringer drove across the few flat acres of frost-shattered stone atop Pikes Peak, risked the rope-filled red tires on the gear teeth of the cog railroad, and braked to a stop smack in front of the lodge to call out, “Howdy, gents. Howdy, Dusty. I see you got here all right, after all. I’d have offered you a ride, had not you scampered like so in the middle of our conversation. Did you think beating me to the top on foot was going to cut the mustard, old son?”
The treacherous Rhodes stared at the throbbing hood of the Panard as if he expected snakes to crawl out of it. He tried to meet Stringer’s sardonic smile with a brazen grin of his own, looked away, instead, and murmured, “But how, damn your eyes?”
Stringer chuckled and said, “You’re the one who may need specs, Dusty. For while it’s true I needed me a crank to replace the one I, ah, lost, I was able to find another before you were all the way out of sight. But let’s not worry the boys up here with such mundane details, now that we’ve both done our best with results no man here can deny, if he knows what’s good for him.”
Dusty Rhodes didn’t answer, even though he was staring in utter horror at the robin’s egg blue crank Stringer had used to start up the black and tan Panard again. Stringer had hoped he’d know what was good for him.
Nobody but possibly a few other sneaks in the crowd could have had any idea what Stringer found so amusing, but he didn’t get to savor his own dry humor long. For just as someone was saying something about them all getting on down to sort the bets out with Bert Carlton, a member of the M.O.A. who’d just come out of the lodge yelled, “Bert won’t be there! He just telly-phoned he’s on his way back to Cripple Creek and wants us to follow, loaded for bear and anarchy. Harry Orchard was just spotted in the gold fields again and you all know what that can mean!”
CHAPTER TWELVE
It meant all-out war to the M.O.A. and Sovereign State of Colorado, judging from the way both the national guardsmen and suddenly deputized “Company Police” had set up sandbags and barbed wire all over town by the time Stringer had his hired mount safe again in the livery and himself prudently upstairs at the Cripple Creek Palace with a fine view of the main street from his corner window. He’d left the lights off so he could watch with neither the blind nor risky glass between him and the right-now tense but silent center of town. He’d been offered one of those deputy badges on the train coming back. He’d declined the chore of pulling other men’s chestnuts from the fire they might have made for themselves, of course, but he’d seen enough of the tin man-killing licenses to be impressed. As a man who’d been around the rougher parts of a still-rough West, he’d long known there were tin badges and then there were tin badges. Almost any small-town bullyboy could wangle himself a mail order badge that said he was some sort of lawman. Even Billy The Kid had been deputised as a so-called Regulator for a spell. But as had so often been the case, the real law had inquired by just whose damned authority The Kid had started gunning other young louts, once he’d taken to doing it so freely.
The badges Bert Carlton had somehow wrangled for his own big crew of hired guns had the backing of at least the state government behind them, meaning no judge and jury this side of the distant state lines of Colorado were about to convict or even question anyone gunning anyone in defense of the lives and property, repeat property, of the powerful M.O.A.!
Stringer was glad he wasn’t one of the union friends of little Glynnis tonight, even as he wondered where the sweet little thing might be. A gasoline driven armored REO with a machine gun muzzle sticking out of its water-heater turret rumbled by below, and as Stringer watched them swing concertina wire out of its path to let it get at someone he hoped he didn’t know, he decided the less he knew about Glynnis right now, the better it might be for all concerned.
It got dull and quiet again. Too dull and quiet for a healthy young gent who hadn’t had supper to just sit there, listening to the rumble of his own guts while nothing else made noise enough to matter. So he put on his hat, strapped on his six-gun, and went downstairs to see if the hotel kitchen was still open after midnight.
It was and, even better, nobody seemed to pay half as much attention to his work duds and side arm this evening. It was easy to see why. Cripple Creek had reverted to its younger ways, before the big fire, now that gents who’d recently taken to boiled shirts had got out their own six-guns and work duds a man could fight in. Stringer was still a mite surprised when one of the gents he’d last seen over on Pikes Peak dressed like a preacher, sat down at his table with him, uninvited and looking like a saddle tramp he’d never been introduced to before. Stringer was about to say he never gave drinking money to bums who packed guns when the cuss handed a fat envelope to him, saying, “Bert Carlton said I was to give this to you. You won that side bet on yourself fair and square, so Bert sends his congratulations. But he hopes you’ll understand he ain’t able to celebrate with winners or losers, tonight.”
Stringer put the money inside his denim jacket for now. Where he’d carry it back to the coast was his own damned business. When the M.O.A. messenger asked if he didn’t meant to count it, Stringer shook his head and said, “Not hardly. I’ve about figured out who can be trusted and who might not, on both sides. I don’t suppose there’s any way the more decent owners and more sensible union men could get together and work things out before anyone gets hurt, huh?”
The M.O.A. man shrugged and said, “They know where to find us, if they want peace. Come to study on it, they know where to find us if they want war. We ain’t like them red rascals, holding secret meeting in cellars or turning on our own kind like mad dogs just to show how tough we thin
k we might be.”
Stringer cocked an eyebrow and said, “I did observe something that might have been a secret meeting, down in Colorado Springs the other night. Have I missed any shoot-outs, up this way?”
His informant grinned wolfishly and said, “Let ’em try. We got every rooftop and back alley covered. To tell the truth, that story about Harry Orchard and some of his boys spotted up among the miner’s shanties may pan out no more than a story, after all this excitement, for both our boys and the guard have combed the slopes all around for one stinky whiff of the sneaky bastard, to no avail.”
Stringer caught a waiter’s eye but still had time to observe that Harry Orchard was said to be slippery as an eel if not downright invisible. As the waiter came over, the M.O.A. man across the table insisted, “We’d have caught an eel, if one was here in Cripple Creek with evil intent. For it ain’t enough just to hide from honest men when you’re out to be dishonest. You got to slither out from that hidey hole long enough to do something! Big Bill Hey wood can send an army of anarchists up here for all the good it will do him, as long as they don’t anarch nothing. We’ve got every mine shaft and machine guarded like an old maid guards her virtue, whether anyone’s after it or not.”
Then he saw Stringer was more interested in supper than old maid’s virtues and got back to his feet, saying something about setting up trip wires around his own stamping mill.
Stringer ordered elk steak and mashed spuds, since that was cheaper on the menu than cow steak up here in the mountains, and when it came you couldn’t tell much difference if you cut it small and chewed hard enough. The cherry pie a la mode was really made with service berries but when he asked how come, he was told few dudes knew what service berries were and, hell, they were good, weren’t they?
He forgave them once he’d tasted the home-cranked ice cream and coffee strong as one might be served in any cow camp. As he pushed away from the table, the overhead light winked off and then back on. He heard a distant rumble, then things seemed same as ever, but he still hurried back upstairs to his room, concerned about that window he’d left wide open, for while the evening had commenced dry and balmy as it ever got up here in the Rockies in High Summer, the thunder storms the Front Range was famous for could blow in horizontally and suddenly, and wet hotel rugs smelled just awful.
But as he let himself in and strode to the open window, he could see stars winking above the upwind rooftops to the west. He got there in time to spy what all the commotion down below was about. A puffer-billy fire engine, drawn by six white horses, was spewing smoke and raising dust as it tore past the hotel, followed by men and boys afoot or astride and moving with considerable enthusiasm either way. Stringer leaned out to holler down, demanding some explanation for such a stampede at this hour. Hardly anyone down there seemed to notice. But a kid who’d had to stop running with a stitch in his side yelled up, “The durned old W.F.M. really done it, now! They just blowed up a dozen poor souls over to Independence with an anarchist infernal machine! They say the whole town’s on fire and the anarchists are feeding women and children to the flames, alive or dead!”
He might have offered more such information, but Stringer had already spun away from the window to cover the story right. He ran downstairs and over to the livery, where he saddled and mounted the bay to ride over to the neighboring camp the radical wing of the union had targeted while everyone had braced for an incident in or about Cripple Creek itself.
When he got to the scene of the outrage, it wasn’t easy with so many rescuers, would-be rescuers and national guardsmen yelling for revenge blocking the debris-strewn streets of the mining camp. There was little to see by torchlight, but one hell of a hole in the ground where, it was said, the new trolley depot had been standing earlier this evening.
As Stringer slowly put it together with the help of witnesses, military and civilian, somebody who had obviously had it in for the nightshift at the nearby Finlay mine had wired two fifty-pound boxes of dynamite to go off under them as they crowded into the depot after getting off after midnight. The guardsmen had already traced the wire to a nearby abandoned cabin. The killer had simply waited until he had as many nonunion men as possible at his mercy and then shown them no mercy. Twenty-six men were known dead. Perhaps twice that many had been hauled out of the ruins alive, although some weren’t expected to make it and others would be maimed for life if they did. Nobody still alive and full of fight in the vicinity of the Finlay mine expressed any doubt as to who might have done the deed. Bert Carlton had already gathered a posse to ride out after the sons of bitches, so Stringer didn’t have to go. He’d found Carlton a decent enough specimen of the rugged individualist, and knew how he himself would feel in the mine owner’s place. But he sensed the trial would be short and not-too-sweet, conducted under the rules of Judge Lynch, when they caught up with Harry Orchard. Stringer never doubted it had been Harry Orchard, either, but he’d have had to insist it was wrong to hang a man without a fair trial. So he was just as glad he didn’t have to watch the final outcome as he filed the brutal basic facts from the Western Union office back in Cripple Creek. He knew he was scooping all the other big town papers with his almost eye-witness report. But he still felt shitty as he handed page after page over to the male night clerk behind the counter. He knew why the pretty blonde who worked there had telephoned she was feeling poorly. He didn’t know if her fellow workers knew about her mining man, so he couldn’t even ask if the poor bastard was dead, alive, or maybe crippled for life.
By the time he got back to his hotel, the night was about shot and somewhere an early bird was tweeting. But Cripple Creek was as wide awake as it ever got, with clusters of men and even women standing on every corner, murmuring fretful muttering and casting suspicious looks at Stringer as he passed, but he didn’t get into any real trouble until he strode into the dimly-lit and almost deserted lobby of the Palace.
Most of the lights were out because nobody cared what a moose head looked like in the wee small hours. It was mostly empty because most of the other guests were either slugabed upstairs or out on the crowded streets making war talk. But as Stringer crossed the lobby, three figures rose as one from the fern-shaded lobby chairs they’d been waiting in. Stringer wasn’t as surprised to see little rat-faced Dusty Rhodes in the company of Dutch Ritter. But he found it odd to see his own backer, T.S. Murdstone, so thick with other thieves, until he thought about it a moment. Murdstone looked worried as well as red-faced as he blurted, “MacKail, I want you to tell these gents whose notion it was to stuff them flat tires with rope and how much trouble you had getting the motor to turn over, earlier today.”
Stringer smiled dryly and replied, “It was yesterday afternoon, now that the sun’s fixing to pop up any minute. Have you been accused of double-crossing your, ah, business partners, T.S.?”
Murdstone didn’t answer. Dutch seemed to think he was speaking for everyone there, including Stringer, when he sort of purred, “You cost me money with your cowboy ingenuity, MacKail. There’s not much I can do about the bets so many marks placed on you, save to wait for Murdstone, here, to make it good. But Ben Carlton was holding our own little wager for the winner and it’s my understanding you picked up your winnings, earlier. So how’s about being a good sport and giving me my money back?”
Stringer smiled pleasantly, considering, and replied, “I am a good sport, Dutch. When I win money, fair and square, I consider it my own. Didn’t your momma let you play marbles for keeps when you were a kid?”
Ritter stared poker-faced at him for a long thoughtful moment, then he said, softly, “Dusty, get me my money.” So Dusty attempted to produce yet another nickel-plated whore pistol, but this time Stringer was expecting it. So the lobby wound up filled with gunsmoke and the dangerous little Dusty wound up running for the front entrance with a bullet-shattered forearm clutched to his breast like a baby, as if he thought he was Eliza crossing the ice with all those mean bloodhounds after her.
Dutch Ritter
ran after him, yelling not too brightly about not paying good money to watch someone show a yellow streak on him and then Murdstone yelled, “Shoot him, too, MacKail! Don’t let him get away!”
Stringer had no intention of doing any such thing, of course, but Dutch Ritter must not have known how sensible other gents could be, even after you’d been surly to them, so he ran after his small henchman, making all sorts of odd noises, as Murdstone repeated, “Don’t let him get away! He’s mad-dog-mean and you’ll never get a better crack at him!”
But Stringer just stood there, reloading, as the clerk showed his bald head above the counter top ahead, bleating at them sort of like a sheep, to be assured, “It’s over, amigo. Do you need a desk-gun, free? Seems someone just left a two-dollar pistol on the rug over here.”
Then they all heard a woodpecker rattle of gunshots, somewhere outside. Stringer glanced at Murdstone and said, “Sounded like an army machine gun. You come along with me, T.S. It’s my duty as a newspaperman to have a look-see and I owe it to my personal self not to turn my back on you before you tell me more about the con game you were helping old Dutch run on the sporting crowd of Cripple Creek.”
Murdstone explained some of it as the two of them went out to the street and drifted toward the crowd gathering near the corner. Stringer was able to fill in embarrassed gaps in the small town big shot’s story, as the main points fell into place. Murdstone was, or had been, a minor mine owner with a big mouth and a gambling habit. Dutch Ritter was a pure professional whose more socially acceptable business holdings in these parts had been won in various games of chance he’d rigged to avoid any chance of the sucker winning. Having cleaned Murdstone out, and then some, Dutch had offered to forget the markers Murdstone simply couldn’t pay, and even grubstake him to a new, if modest start, in exchange for help in rigging yet another skin game.
Stringer said, “Let me see if I can guess the rest, you poor simp. You agreed to throw that unusual race up Pikes Peak, yesterday, only the two of you couldn’t seem to drum up much interest because few mining men know all that much about the unusual sport and not many men of any breed have ever gotten that rich making even-money bets. When I fixed your engine for you that time, you bragged on me to all the friends you were out to fuck, hoping some might figure your horseless carriage, with my help, might have the edge. Once you had most of the money riding on your motor car and driver, all you had to do for Dutch was throw the race. Only you forgot to tell me, so I can see why Dutch was so sore.” Then they were close enough to ask a trooper blocking their path with his rifle at port arms what all the fuss up ahead was about. The weekend warrior told him, officiously, “We’re supposed to clear the damned streets. You can’t go up that side street. Two poor unfortunates just did and the meat wagon will be here directly to carry their mortal remains to the morgue.”