The Long High Noon (15 page)

“You Miller?”

“I favor Lyle. Miller's my father. Yep, he's still alive. Ninety-eight last month.”

“Maybe he's dead and you just didn't notice. Where's the farm, Lyle?”

“Oh, the name? That's just for the customers. No one wants to buy milk from a factory. I get my stock from all over the county, depending on who's selling it cheap. You looking for a job delivering? You don't look like much of a milk drinker to me.” His merry old eyes took in the rifle and belt gun all over again fresh. He chuckled.

“I'm through having anything to do with cows. I need a horse if you're selling.”

Lyle took a short yellow pencil from a row of them in his bib pocket just to scratch his temple with the eraser.

“I'm considering pasturing Mabel. She's getting so old she practically has to deliver by the glass.”

“She stand a rider?”

“Sure. A man ain't a load of full milk cans.”

“I'll have a look.”

The white mare was huge, with thick shaggy cannons and teeth worn down to brown stubs, but there was muscle under the loose and shifting skin. She'd do until a proper mount came along; or for that matter an ox with spirit.

“I'd sell you a stepladder if I had one,” Lyle said, watching Randy make his inspection. “She's Percheron stock. That's the closest thing you'll find to royal blood around here.”

“How much?”

“Ten dollars.”

“I'll go six. She may be the nag queen of England, but in horse years she's older'n your old man.”

“I could get eight from the dog food people in San Francisco; but my heart ain't in it. I started with Mabel and fourteen customers. She's family.”

“She's barely a horse. Six.”

“Make it seven and I'll throw in a pair of blinders.”

“Six and you can keep the damn blinders. I ain't fixing to sell butter and cottage cheese. It's a saddle horse I'm after.”

“Oh, you'll need the blinders. She wouldn't know what to do without 'em. You can kick her all day long and she'll just stand there like a knot on a fence.”

“You don't know much about horse-trading, Lyle. I'm about to go down to five.”

Lyle stroked the mare's broad face. “Don't you listen to him, old girl. You're going out more dignified than I will.”

Randy gave him a banknote and a cartwheel dollar.

“Where's your saddle, mister?”

“I sold it in San Diego. You can't carry one and hop a freight too.”

“Bareback, hey?” Lyle shook his head, stuffing the money behind the pencils. “Ride 'em, cowboy.”

Mabel clopped down the wooden ramp with Randy hanging onto the reins as much to stay upright as to steer the horse. He hadn't ridden bareback in years, not since before he hurt his leg, and riding the tall mare was like sitting on the driver's seat of a stagecoach; the ground looked far away. It made him feel like a stunted boy his first time aboard.

On the road outside town he tried to spur the old girl into a trot—a gallop was too much to count on—but apart from blowing indignantly through her nostrils she showed no result, plodding at the same pace that had taken thousands of gallons of milk from door to door. For once in his life he hoped he wouldn't run into Frank. Seeing his old foe sitting a giant draft horse with blinders on might just kill him with laughing, which would be an unsatisfactory end to their contest.

He could make as good time on the soles of his own feet, but he had too much cowboy in him to choose walking when anything at all was available on four legs.

“Whoa!”

The mare, a tribute to obedience, stopped so abruptly he almost fell off. He drew the rifle from the bedroll he'd strapped across Mabel's neck and shouldered it, but held off on the trigger when he recognized Abraham Cripplehorn's Pike's Peak of a hat on the head of the man standing between the tumbledown house and barn where he'd staked his camp. A horse about half the size of Randy's stood between the traces of a two-wheeled buggy on the side of the road.

“What's that you're riding?” asked the entrepreneur as Randy approached him. “It looks like something from Homer.”

“It's from Lyle, and I'll thank you not to disparage a man's mount. You must of hit paydirt, all dressed up and renting that town rig.” The man was wearing a stiff new suit, royal blue almost to the point of purple, with yellow piping, and oxblood boots with flaps over the toes. The hat was the same, but freshly blocked and brushed. He looked like the circus had gone off and left him behind.

“I have, after a fashion: a mother lode named Weber. I thought you might be running low on money for supplies and provisions.” He slid a sheaf of banknotes out of his inside breast pocket.

Randy was swinging his good leg over, figuring how to drop to the ground without landing on his bad one, when something made the decision for him. It passed so close to his face that his first thought was someone had struck a match off his nose. The sound of the shot came cracking after, by which time he'd thrown himself all the way onto gravel.

 

NINETEEN

When your rosebush grows nothing but thorns, don't condemn your bad luck. Pierce them and sell them as needles.

“Get down, you ignorant son of a bitch.”

Cripplehorn had remained standing, staring toward a line of chestnut trees to the east. When Randy, already flat on the ground, snatched the nearest ankle and jerked it out from under him, he went down hard enough on his back to knock the wind out of him. Comically, his absurd Stetson came floating down afterward like a child's handkerchief parachute.

The entrepreneur wheezed, reinflating his lungs, and rolled over onto his stomach beside Randy. “Who is it?”

“Who you think?”

“No. He wouldn't be that rash. I gave him more money just this morning.”

“You tell him where I'm fixed?”

“Of course not.”

“Then he followed you. The trouble with you easterners is you never turn around and look where you come from. You might as well of been borned with no swivel in your neck.”

“You said there was a reward from Arizona for your capture. Maybe it's a bounty man.”

“If it is he's a fool. They want me alive, which we sure won't both be if he tries to wrassle me all the way back there.”

“But you said Frank would never use a rifle on you because of the unfair advantage.”

“Maybe he's changed.”

“I don't believe it. Yours has always been an affair of honor.”

“I wouldn't put it as toney as that, but I agree it ain't like Frank. Then again, that slug missed me. Could have been just his way of announcing himself. There's one sure way to find out.” He planted his palms on the ground.

“What are you doing?”

“Getting up to fetch my Ballard.”

Before Cripplehorn could put words to his astonishment, Randy stood, brushed himself off, and slid the rifle from the bedroll strapped to the mare. He patted her big neck. Muscles rolled beneath his palm. “I talked you down some earlier. I'd be obliged if you'd forget it. I never had a horse stand so close to a bullet without jumping. On the other hand, maybe you're deaf.”

Mabel blew again, contemptuously.

“Or lazy. I don't reckon no milk horse gets shot at regular.” He checked the load in the breech, then rested the barrel across the mare's slightly swayed back. The smoke had drifted away from the trees, so he addressed the whole bunch at the top of his lungs.

“Frank, I ain't got all day!”

Silence stretched; Cripplehorn hugged the earth and wished for a hole. When the answering shout came from the trees he flinched as if it were gunfire.

“How do I know you won't plug me when I show myself? I reckon I owe you that.”

“Horseshit, Frank. If you meant to put me under with that Winchester, I'd be under. So howdy right back at you.”

“You're lucky I sold the rolling-block I had in Colorado. I could of shot you from there and let it fester till I caught up.”

A breeze damp with bay combed the distant leaves. Then a figure appeared, moving slowly their direction, small against the towering chestnuts. A brass-action carbine dangled from one hand, muzzle pointing groundward. Randy socked the Ballard back inside the bedroll.

Curiosity got the better of Cripplehorn's sense of self-preservation. He rose to his feet, sidling until the horse and buggy stood between him and the approaching figure. After what seemed an hour, Frank Farmer stopped just inside pistol range. The tail of his frock coat was swept behind the Remington in his holster. Randy stepped out from behind the big mare.

“How do, Randy. That a horse or you shave a buffalo?”

“Shaving it weren't the hard part. The hard part was slapping on the bay rum after. I heard you taken up with a woman.”

“It didn't stick. I heard you turned down the opportunity to shoot a Chinaman.”

“I didn't think that was knowed outside the camp.”

“I still got friends with the railroad. There ain't much to do in a roundhouse but play cards and jabber. I heard that spur went bust.”

“Did it? It don't surprise me. That jasper I knocked flat with a powder keg wouldn't stop talking about the Irish going on strike. No wonder the line put up so much reward over one skinny foreman.”

“It wasn't striking done it. The Apaches came back, meaner'n bloody turds. Though I can see why they'd take on so about your claiming six months' pay for one day's work; if that's what you call caving in the straw boss's head.”

“It was six weeks, not months. I'm surprised it isn't ten foremen by now, and there was powder in that keg.”

Frank nodded, rolling a cigarette, with the Winchester cradled in the crook of his arm. “You ready?”

“God's sake!” Cripplehorn. “You're undoing the work of years! Can't the pair of you control yourselves for two more months?”

Randy slid his Colt out of its holster, cocked it, and thumbed the cylinder around, checking his loads. “Ready.”

Frank stooped to lay his carbine on the ground and checked his Remington. When he was standing with his feet spread and the pistol hanging at his side, Randy adopted the same pose. He was raising the Colt when Abraham Cripplehorn jerked the buggy whip from its socket next to the driver's seat and, holding the ironwood handle by the whip end, hit him on the back of the head with all his might. Randy dropped, out as cold as his pistol.

BLOOD FEUD COMES TO SAN FRANCISCO.

by Jack Dodger

Randy Locke and Frank Farmer, who are well-known to these columns, brought their enmity to San Francisco yesterday when Farmer made an attempt from ambush on Locke's life.

Locke narrowly escaped death when a ball fired from cover passed within inches of his head as he was dismounting at his campsite west of Oakland.

The incident might have ended in tragedy had not an uninterested party, Abraham Titus Cripplehorn by name, took action, disabling Locke with a blow before he could return fire. His opponent, observing that the match was over for the time being, made the following statement to Cripplehorn:

“You tell that little skunk when he comes around I'll fight him anywhere, anytime, out on the desert with only the scorpions to bear witness or on stage at the Bird Cage Theatre in Tombstone.”

“‘Bear witness,' he said that?” Major W. B. Updegraff, resting his stiff leg on a leaf of his heaped rolltop, looked up from the pages in his hand.

“Something on that order. I wasn't taking notes at the time.”

“It seems to me you hinted months ago about a public contest between Farmer and Locke. Are these desperadoes always so accommodating, to advertise your intentions in the press?”

“It isn't as if they ever made a secret of their antagonism.”

“You made yourself a part of the story?”

“Fortunately I always write under a
nom de plume
. I was told once journalists should remain in the background.”

“There's a simpler way.” The man in the cinder-burned waistcoat found a stub of orange pencil behind one ear and scratched out the byline. “This is straight news, not human interest. I don't assign credit. I see you've annexed Oakland to San Francisco. I thought that authority belonged to the city superintendents.” He struck San Francisco from the lead paragraph and crossed out the headline entirely. “I don't like it, Cripplehorn, or Dodger, or Puddin' ‘n' Tame, or whatever you're calling yourself Tuesdays and Thursdays. After that first piece ran, I received a visit from a member of the Committee of Safety.”

“Vigilante, I suppose.”

“You suppose right, and you wouldn't be so smug about it if you were here in '77. The only reason you still see Chinese in town is there were more of them than Denis Kearney and his Pick-Handle Brigade had hickory handles. Back then it was the Tongs had the Committee running about reading the law at the end of a stick; now it's pledged to keep blood sports out of town, like cockfights and bear-baiting and public duels. If they get the notion I'm encouraging barbarism, they may just decide to bust up my press and me along with it.”

“I'll take it to the
Bonanza
then, on the assumption the publisher hasn't been threatened yet.” Cripplehorn held out his hand for the pages.

“People only buy Ted Sullivan's rag to start fires. I didn't say I wouldn't run it. Kearney's star has set, and this new litter skeedaddles when a cat yowls in a black alley. Even if they were a blister on the arse of the original Committee, I wouldn't let 'em tell me what I can print and what I can't. That's my name on the flag on Page Two:
W. B. Updegraff, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief.
I don't see any of their names there.”

“I'm glad you see it that way. I was bluffing about Sullivan. He turned me down the first time.”