The Long High Noon (11 page)

“San Francisco, December eleventh,” he read …

 

THIRTEEN

There is no better way of determining a friend's true character than to spend three days under the same roof.

San Francisco had lost nothing of its ability to separate a man from his capital; if anything, it had refined the process since Randy Locke's visit.

As damp, foggy winter melded into foggy, damp spring, the rates at the Palace had hollowed a deep gouge in Abraham Cripplehorn's Chautauqua earnings. Frank Farmer's more modest poke was reduced to the same state by the demands of the lesser hotels near the crumbling harbor. After some palaver, the two pooled their resources and went partners on a rented house occupied until recently by a shanghai agent known locally as Black Louie, and more recently still as a guest of the gallows. The walls were sufficient to hold up the roof, but held out neither noise nor drafts, and the roof itself had the unique property of releasing rusty water onto the tenants' heads even when the sun shone.

“How the devil is such a thing possible?” complained Cripplehorn, when a fresh gout teeming with iron particles and live wigglers suddenly seasoned his soup.

“A proper roof don't slant to the middle,” Frank explained. “This one leaves pockets. Think of 'em as unplanned cisterns. If this was New Mexico, you'd be happy to have 'em.”

“Well, it isn't, and I'm not. What's your reasoning on the rats? This morning I found a litter of them in my valise.”

“Half this town's built of busted ships. I reckon the critters just come along with the timbers.”

“What's keeping your friend? Updegraff says that piece went out on the wires two months ago. Maybe he's turned into that yellow skunk after all.”

“I didn't say them words. That was pure Jack Dodger fiction, and if you remember right I was agin it. Randy's a lot of things, but he never tucked his tail 'twixt his legs and he ain't dumb enough to believe I ever said he did; not that it would keep him from coming here shanks mare if he had to. Either he's so far out in the high country he hasn't got the word or he's dead.” Frank finished a game of Patience and peeled the dirty pasteboards off a dirtier oilcloth, one by one. “Either this table needs a new cover or I need a new deck. One more hand and I'll want a spatula.”

Cripplehorn upended his last bottle of peach brandy into a tin cup that had come with the house. He ran a finger around the inside of the neck and sucked on it. “I entered this venture intending to clear enough to meet all the crown heads of Europe. Instead I'm incubating vermin and eating nail soup.”

“Don't forget the baby meskeeters. A man needs meat.”

“Do you really think he's dead?”

Frank shuffled the deck; or to be more precise, broke it free of itself from time to time like a batch of sliced bacon and rearranged the rashers.

“Nope. I know Randy better than anybody. He might let himself be swallowed up by a grizzly, if he got bored with the contest, but he'd come out that bear's ass with his Colt in his fist, asking after me.”

“Can I quote you on that? It would read so well in
Harper's Weekly.
”

Frank pasted a jaded queen of hearts to the disreputable oilcloth. One of her eyes, thumb-smeared and stained with soot, appeared to be winking at him, with the tired automatism of an overqualified whore. “You come out here looking for color, you said. You wasn't specific as to the picture it got painted with.”

Cripplehorn drained his cup, wobbled the last taste of civilization around inside his mouth, plucked his last cigar from his waistcoat, which needed mending at the seams, and lit it off the greasy flame from a coal-oil lamp that smoked like a rendering plant. Frank Farmer, he'd discovered, was less than the ideal roommate. He kept to his grooming, barbering his imperials, brushing his suit of unmatched pieces, and bathing when necessary, but as to the rest, living with him was like sharing quarters with one of those wild men one read about, raised by wolves. The outhouse was only ten paces from the back door, but when nature called, the nearest window would do: All the whitewash was eaten off the wall beneath every fenestration on the premises. He seemed to regard passing gas the supreme compliment to a meal well prepared (Cripplehorn considered himself a passably good cook, a condition forced upon him by self-sufficiency), scrubbed out his long-handles in the same sink where Cripplehorn washed his vegetables, and hung them from the same hook that supported the big frying pan in which most of their meals were prepared, dripping onto the iron stove and leaving circles of rust and essence of Frank Farmer on the surface.

It was about as far a cry from the crown heads of Europe as could be imagined.

Frank, in his turn, found Cripplehorn fell short of pards he'd lived with in past times. His coffee was so weak a fly could swim around on the surface, practicing its dog-crawl and floating on its back like some Oriental put'n'take, and it wouldn't wake a man up from a daydream. When the man retired, hanging up his clothes and fiddling with them so the pleats were just so, taking out his Dutch eye and polishing it with a little cloth and sinking it in a glass of water, he thought he might as well be living with a high-toned woman, only without the expected benefits.

The worst of it was that eye. On nights when the fog didn't stand between the house and the moon, a shaft passed through the window and lay on that glass. Ivory didn't sink, and so the eye floated on top, drifting this way and that, the way a real eye did in a human face, and lighting on Frank where he lay on his bunk. He couldn't shake the feeling that Cripplehorn was in charge of it and what it saw, and he couldn't sleep with a man staring at him wide awake from the bunk next to his.

This night he turned away from it onto his back. He stared up into the darkness beyond the red glow leaking from the poorly joined barrel stove and prayed to the Lord for Randy's safe conduct.

 

FOURTEEN

No man who has someone he can call upon for help is truly poor.

WANTED

Randolph Locke

is Sought for Assault and Robbery in Elgin, A.T.

A REWARD OF $1,000

is offered for information leading to his arrest and conviction.

Randy spotted the shinplaster tacked to a corkboard in a combination general store and post office in San Diego. His description—height below average, thickset, full-faced—was right enough, but his own mother couldn't identify him by the pen-and-ink sketch that accompanied it. If he were the manhunting type he could keep pulling men off the street with vapid expressions and faces traced around the bottom of a whiskey bottle all day long and come away empty-handed. The storekeep, who was also postmaster, gave him not a second glance when he filled his order.

Not that being wanted signified anything. The more miles he put between himself and Arizona Territory, the less economically feasible it was for anyone to attempt to claim the thousand. He'd burned off most of the wages he'd had coming to him for refusing to shoot a Chinaman just getting that close to San Francisco and Frank. If he wanted to arrive with any stake at all he was looking at better than three hundred miles in a cattle car.

But worse was to come.

The guards aboard California trains had no regard for tramps. They made a thorough examination of the rolling stock before it moved, which meant jogging along and grabbing on outside the yards before the cars got to moving too fast. With his bedroll slung by a rope across his back, he missed on the first try and was falling behind when someone already aboard hung halfway out the open door of the car by the handle and stuck out a hand in a sooty fireman's glove. “Grab on, brother!”

Randy lunged for the hand, but he was at his limit, stumbled, and would have had to wait for the next train if another man aboard didn't take part. He got a grip on the edge of the door, linked hands with the first man, and hung on while the first man leaned out another six inches, grasped Randy's outstretched hand, and with the added strength of his friend jerked Randy off the ground, through the door, and into a sliding skid across the straw-strewn floor that knocked the wind out of his lungs. He was still scratching for breath when the two men, aided by a third, robbed him of his bedroll, his Colt, and his poke, snatched him by his belt and the back of his collar, and slung him back out the door. He felt the first rib let go when he struck ground and lost count before he stopped rolling.

*   *   *

He was discovered by a kindly tramp who'd grown too old to ride the rods, scraping out a living picking up lost or discarded items along the cinderbed, fixing what could be fixed, and selling it in town. The old man loaded him aboard his wheelbarrow and delivered him to a free hospital run by a Mexican doctor who hadn't a license to practice in the United States. Felipe Guzman—“Doc Flip” to his white patients—stitched up his gashes, bound his rib cage with thirty yards of bandage, gave him a bottle of laudanum for the pain, and discharged him, apologizing that he couldn't spare the bed.

Standing on the boardwalk in front of the hospital, which still had part of a cow painted on its bricks from its butcher-shop origins, Randy went through all his pockets and came up with a dollar and change. He spent it in a Western Union office.

*   *   *

Abraham Cripplehorn went to the Palace Hotel on a daily basis, hoping for some word from Randy Locke. He was in the act of turning away from the marble-topped desk, having gotten the usual answer, when the clerk said, “Don't you also go by Dodger?”

STRANDED IN SAN DIEGO STOP NEED CASH TO GET TO FRISCO STOP WIRE GENERAL DELIVERY

R LOCKE

“It could be a scheme,” Cripplehorn told Frank. “Somebody read my article and is using his name to raise easy money.”

“It ain't.” He was still looking at the yellow flimsy.

“What makes you so sure?”

“On account of I can't afford not to be.”

“He does have fifty coming. Trouble is, I don't have it.”

“How much you got?”

Cripplehorn opened his wallet, cordovan with gold corners, and got out two banknotes, a twenty and a five. A search of his pockets turned up a dollar in change. Frank found two limp singles and a cartwheel dollar.

“That should get him as far as Los Angeles.”

“If he don't starve first. Hold on.” Frank sat down on the wheezy old mattress, pulled off a boot, and went to work on the inside with his pocket knife. He came up with a twenty-dollar gold piece.

“Holding out on me?”

“I near forgot I had it. I had it stitched into the lining for when I tapped out again. It's from the fifty you gave me up front.”

The entrepreneur took it and laid it on the tacky oilcloth with the rest. “I can get twenty for my watch; twenty-five if Goldfinch is in a good mood. He's my local bank when I need a stake.”

“If I know Randy he'll need fresh duds. They're always last to go. He ain't the dress hoss I am.”

“We don't make rent this month.”

“If you ain't full of sheepdip, we'll be in the Palace before it's due.”

*   *   *

The gunsmith in San Diego, a Swiss whose blond beard encircled his face like a wreath, handed the customer a Colt with most of the bluing gone. It was a .44 like the conversion he'd lost, only chambered for cartridges at the factory, and with a four-inch barrel.

“Got anything full-size?”

“That Smith and Wesson there on the wall.”

“I mean a Colt.”

“Just that custom piece in the case.”

Randy looked at it through the glass. It had a stag handle and gold chasing on the nickel plate. The tag said fifty dollars.

“I'll get used to it.” He turned from the counter, extending the short-barreled pistol from the shoulder, cocked it, and snapped the hammer on an empty chamber. “Trigger pull's tight.”

“I can fix that. Dollar and a half extra.”

He'd bought decent clothes and booked a day coach. He could just cover it and the purchase. “How soon?”

“Come back around three. I have two ahead of you.” The gunsmith indicated a stockless Winchester in his vise and a Derringer in pieces on his bench.

Seeing the carbine gave Randy an idea. “Buy much off the street?”

“From time to time.”

“Anybody come in trying to peddle a Ballard rifle?”

“Just yesterday. I turned him down. I didn't like his look.”

“Leave his name?”

“No, but his kind generally hangs around the Sisters of Charity down on Ash.”

“He didn't by any chance have a Colt to sell.”

“No.”

“How much to hang on to that short-barrel?”

“Five.”

He put a banknote on the counter. “Hold off on that trigger till I get back.”

*   *   *

He didn't entertain much hope. That train had been heading out of town. The bunch that jumped him wouldn't likely have circled back to turn his gear into cash. But men weren't as predictable as wolves and buffalo.

The neighborhood was worse than he'd seen in any dirty mining camp: lawyers with smut under their nails handing out cards on the corners, tramps sleeping in doorways, the kind of whore that was last to leave when a vein played out, ugly as half-broke sin. The buildings looked ready to fall down when a rat farted; they made a man want to walk down the middle of the street and take his chances with the drunken wagon drivers. He identified the Sisters of Charity by the line of unwashed men waiting for handouts.

One caught his eye, leaning without much hope against the iron railing of the front steps. Randy hadn't gotten a good enough look at those tramps to pick one out of a crowd, but this fellow was the only one carrying a bundle big enough to contain his Ballard. It was wrapped in an overcoat holier even than his clothes. He smelled of all kinds of human corruption, with an overlay of boiler soot, and someone had taken exception to his face sometime and tried to take it off with an axe or a big knife; the scar was old and puckered and ran from temple to chin. He had on dirty fireman's gloves, which rang a bell somewhere in the murk, but you couldn't kill a man just for what he wore on his hands.