The Long High Noon (14 page)

“This won't take long. It's only two pages, and the wording is the same on both.” He thumbed the sheets in his hand to demonstrate their brevity.

“Your last will and testament? Am I to witness the division of your worldly acquisitions?”

“That would be even briefer.”

Weber tossed his dumbbells onto the bed, mopped his face on the towel draped around his neck, and took the sheets. From the lines of concentration on his forehead his visitor realized he was one of those men who had difficulty reading when someone was watching them. Cripplehorn strolled out onto the balcony, gazing out over the city spreading out from Telegraph Hill and across the bay; from his perspective, a handspan alone separated Frank Farmer from Randy Locke. He'd felt far more at ease when half a continent stood between them.

“Excellent!” said Weber, when he came back inside. “I'd thought these frontier types never put their names to anything.”

“It took some convincing.” Cripplehorn privately prided himself upon his ability to make two signatures appear as if they'd been written by different hands; he'd even thought to use two different colors of ink. He was grateful that actual specimens of the men's script were unavailable for comparison. “What about your end?”

“What sort of expenses are we talking about?

“A thousand, to start.”

“Indeed, that much?”

“The situation is unique. On top of printing, advertising, travel, and accommodations, we're bound to encounter resistance from the authorities.”

Weber returned the contracts and took a shirt off a hanger in the wardrobe. “My father is always entertaining public servants in Providence. My observation is they're sporting men.”

“Many of them are, but they answer to the public. Wives in particular are opposed to exhibitions involving violence. You can't stage a legal cockfight in Texas, whose state bird ought to be the one-eyed rooster. In Washington there's a move afoot to outlaw prizefighting anywhere in the country. You can imagine the hue and cry when we propose a duel to the death.”

“Women can't vote.”

“Their husbands can. You'd be surprised to know how much influence a domestic arrangement can exercise in the privacy of a polling booth.”

“You propose to bribe the authorities?”

“A man who can be bribed is a man who can double-cross you. He must be bought.”

“And you think we can do this with a thousand dollars.”

“I'll do the horse-trading. That's my end.”

Weber stepped into a pair of checked trousers, tucked in his shirttail, and pulled braces over his shoulders, observing the effect in the full-length mirror on the wardrobe. “Just how much do I stand to clear from this arrangement? After all's said and done, it doesn't seem as if it will be enough to earn independence from my father.”

“Mr. Weber, I think you want his approval more than anything else; to prove to him that you, too, can be a self-made man. The fact that the opportunities aren't as plentiful as they were in his time enhances the success. In addition to attendance fees, I intend to charge newspapers and magazines for interviews with my clients and will offer an exclusive with the survivor—if there is one—at auction before the event. I have contacts—subscriptions, anyway—with several of the major eastern newspapers, as well as
Harper's Weekly, Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper,
and
Ned Buntline's Own,
and expect to hear from others once the news gets out. I estimate our enterprise will clear at least a hundred thousand once all the dust has settled.” He twisted his face into a mask of concern. “I must warn you that there will be an inconvenience.”

The young man—he was thirty, but a chronic adolescent—paused in the midst of tying his cravat. He watched Cripplehorn's worried reflection in the mirror.

“I know you're a modest man, Mr. Weber, who would go to any length to avoid sensation. That may not be possible in this case. I'm very much afraid that the journals will attempt to portray you as the greatest promoter of entertainment since P. T. Barnum. Your likeness will appear in the vulgar press, your every movement recorded: the entertainment venues you visit, the men and women who accompany you. Reporters will gather around you wherever you go. Your opinion will be sought on every subject. I'll understand completely if in the light of this intelligence you decide to abandon our business arrangement and avoid the nuisance.”

There was always risk involved; a man pushed his chips into the center of the table and fought the urge to hesitate before taking away his hand. It was like standing on a bridge railing and looking down into a creek that didn't appear nearly as deep as it had before he'd accepted the boyhood dare to jump. A rocky bed and a fragile tailbone spelt disaster. Sometimes he wondered if that wasn't why he lived the way he did, for that heart-stopping moment when fate could go either way, and that the money was just another way of preserving it in a scrapbook. It was a test of courage, and it made a man understand what drove a Randy Locke and a Frank Farmer.

The time for the shakes and self-recrimination would come later, after the moment passed. And then he would plan his next.

The moment this time was briefer than usual. He saw the light of glory in Sheridan Weber's dull eyes.

“Barnum, you say?” He resumed dressing. “Coarse bounder. They say he lived openly with Jenny Lind.”

“They say a great many things. It's all very vulgar, and so—public.” Cripplehorn almost shuddered, then thought better of it. A man could go too far even with the idiot son of a pompous ass.

“Indeed. But I suppose one must take the lemon along with the sugar.”

“You're most unselfish. Now, I may be able to keep your name out of it. Mind you, these journalists are tenacious, and can be thoroughly unscrupulous. I can't promise to be successful, and I wouldn't want to influence you with false—”

“That would be an expenditure of effort far beyond its worth. There's too much else to be done if this venture is to succeed.” He shrugged into a Prince Albert coat cut for a younger man, put on a gray bowler, and selected a gold-knobbed stick from an assortment in a hollowed-out elephant's foot beside the door. “The money's downstairs in the safe.” He reached for the knob.

Cripplehorn beat him to it. “Allow me.”

 

EIGHTEEN

The human element is the open question in any transaction; one cannot allow for it, only prepare for difficulties.

I'm back; did you forget me?

No reason you shouldn't. My life would make a diverting book, but not as fast reading as Mr. Locke's or Mr. Farmer's. I wouldn't be its hero, only its narrator.

I'm the fellow who brought this whole affair to your attention, back when the West wasn't anyone's never-mind but the two men at the center. I reckon I should have took out the copyright when I had the chance.

Apart from a couple of wranglers working the Wild West crew, I'd had no contact with any of my fellow Circle X hands in sixteen years, and nearer seventeen. They didn't remember me, for which I was grateful, given the extent of my contribution to the outfit.

That season I'd helped birth a foal—getting in the way mostly, ranch work and me being casual acquaintances at best. It's a wonder that critter isn't still in there.

I think of that colt from time to time: scrawny thing, more leg than anything else, and not sure what to do with them except try to stand, and for the first half-hour or so he found that challenge enough, doing splits like an acrobatic dancer I paid a nickel to see in a shack in Dry Fork they called the Opera House. He's dead now, most likely, or worse, tied up to some damn tinker's wagon, hanging his head and waiting to be rendered down for glue to stick a heel on some lady's pumps. I hadn't any contact with Randy or Frank in all that time, but I sure knew what they was about.

The Buffalo Bill outfit was touring Europe. For those of us in the press corps—what manager Nate Salsbury called it, after the crew in Washington that was writing down everything President Arthur had to say, which for pure interest wouldn't fill anyone's idea of a book worth peddling—the time dragged. A man got his fill of empty palaces, fallen-down temples, and busted statues in museums, and after a while even the spectacle of plains Indians chasing pigeons around St. Mark's Square for supper lost its charm. What time I didn't spend embroidering on Cody's career for press releases and souvenir pamphlets I whiled away reading newspapers, for whom Farmer and Locke never seemed to lose appeal. They came in bundles by ship from the States; but even the journals in London and Paris and Rome picked up items of general interest by way of the Trans-Atlantic cable. I still have cuttings in which
Monsieur
Locke and
Signor
Farmer are prominent. I can't read them myself. How those old emperors and popes managed to take over so much of history talking gibberish is beyond me.

See, nothing much of real interest had happened in the creaky Old World since
Herr
Bismarck whupped Louis Napoleon more than ten years ago, and what with “Bison William” and Annie Oakley and their passel of red Indians splashed across posters on every vertical surface from Buckingham Palace to the Parthenon, it seemed Europeans couldn't get enough of scalpings and gunfights and other colonial truck; it reminded them of Guy Fawkes and other excitements they'd got too civilized to let happen again, and missed, for all the pettifogging in Parliament and the Hague. Scuttlebutt said Salsbury approached Cody with the idea of inviting Frank and Randy to join the excursion, but Cody was agin it; seems he'd had his fill of taming such folk after Wild Bill Hickok shot out an acetylene spotlight from a Chicago stage because it hurt his eyes, showering sparks over the paying customers.

I was sorry to hear it. I'd grown weary of injecting nonexistent Indian battles and physically impossible feats of marksmanship into the official record, and could have done with some unadorned anecdotes from the Genuine Article. So I took my excitement from pallid, third-person accounts of that contest that had been going on since before the smoke had cleared from the War of the Rebellion.

That pair was about as hard to track as a grizzly through dry cornstalks. They left their sign on every scrap of newsprint those tramp steamers could carry without sinking. I reckon them that sank, when they're discovered and raised, will be found to have ferried their share, all clumped together like Spanish coin. Frank and Randy would shake their heads at the places their names had gone where they never did; some places they probably never heard of.

I knew about Abilene and Salt Lake City, though I craved for details I wouldn't know for many years, when I was able to collect them from what the legitimate historians call “primary sources.” When all the pomp connected with placing the whole business before a paying audience came about, I learned the name Abraham Cripplehorn (and made up my mind about that fellow's character based just on the scanty evidence presented between the lines; I was on a personal basis with Ned Buntline, that unprincipled sot, and had built my opinions on that model). I followed his efforts to settle their differences—for the price of a ticket—before the court of public opinion, and thought about it long and hard when my company visited the Coliseum, hoping to stage the exhibition on the site where all those gladiators had made their last bloody stand. Nothing had changed except the tin hats.

And I read about that business in San Francisco, where the impetuous behavior of the principals nearly brought it to an abrupt end.

*   *   *

A fellow had to travel a fair piece from the city of Oakland—and on foot to boot—to find a place to set up camp. The whole state was settled worse than Ohio. Randy had begun to think he'd have to walk clear to Nevada for unclaimed country when he found a grown-over vineyard with a weathered house and barn leaning towards each other like a couple of drunks looking for support and a sign in front where a bank had slapped its brand. He busted up the sign for firewood and after he'd cooked and eaten some beans and bacon and drunk coffee he found a cozy spot inside the barn among some old straw. The barn looked as if it would fall down about the same time as the house, but he had a cowboy's superstition about empty houses and ghosts: No one ever heard of a haunted barn. He lay on his back on his blanket, watching blue twilight steal in through the loft, and shot the first bat that showed itself, for the practice. The odor of sulfur and cordite lingered and lulled him towards sleep. A night like that made a man feel in harmony with existence. When the thing was done and Frank was in the ground, he reckoned he'd spend his cut on a grand house on top of some mountain and camp out in the backyard every night.

In the morning he walked a mile into the town the bank belonged to, all brick with a school and a library and even a Catholic church, and sent a wire to Cripplehorn letting him know where he could be found. He asked the clerk for the location of the livery.

“There isn't one.”

“What kind of town don't have a livery?”

“Our kind. Most folks have their own horses. We're carriage trade here. I can't remember the last time I saw a man sitting smack-dab on top of a horse.” His eyes flicked over Randy's range gear.

“Well, what do you do when you need a carriage pulled?”

“You might ask Lyle Miller if he's got a horse to spare.”

“Where's his spread?”

“He's not a rancher. He owns the local milk route.”

He got directions to a windowless building with wide double doors at the top of a wooden ramp. A sign reading
SIERRA FARMS FINE DAIRY PRODUCTS
ran across the front.

The doors were spread open. Randy climbed up the ramp into a place that smelled like a well-kept stable. Horses occupied ten stalls and five wooden milk wagons stood in a neat row along the back wall with the company's name painted on their sides. Tall milk cans gleamed spotlessly in a ten-tiered wooden rack erected across from the horses. In a little office built from two partitions in a corner, a squint-eyed old runt wearing a white shirt and necktie tucked inside clean overalls and a by-God Panama hat looked up from a ledger on a tall desk that was designed for standing behind, grinned, and said, “Howdy, cowboy. What can I do you for?”