The Long High Noon (17 page)

“Are you saying you're taking the show abroad like Buffalo Bill?” asked the man from the
Call,
around a mouthful of liverwurst.

“I can't take the risk of putting Locke and Farmer on the same boat. I'd rather avoid the complication of arranging separate crossings with so many other preparations to be made.”

“Where, then?” The
Chicago Tribune
.

Cripplehorn swallowed peach brandy and responded with two words.

“The Strip.”

 

TWENTY-ONE

Education begins with books and instruction and ends with travel. It is a rolling classroom.

I suppose some desperadoes, all tucked into their hideout beds, say their prayers before sleeping. Contrary to the assumptions of the editors of the
San Francisco Examiner,
there are Christians on the run from justice. When a damned soul prays, I don't reckon God ever gave him a more satisfactory answer than the Cherokee Strip.

Although I'm no more an authority on how the Congress works than the senators and representatives themselves, I imagine the discussion went something like this:

THE HON. CONSTANT FLAPDOODLE:
What do we do with that piece of the Indian Nations? It just kind of sticks out like a gingham patch on a Sunday shirt.

SEN. EVERLASTING PETTIFOG:
What's it got? Gold, silver, timber?

FLAPDOODLE:
Just red clay and scrub, far as I can tell.

SEN. FENCE STRADDLER:
How come we ain't give it to the injuns?

FLAPDOODLE:
Which tribe? We divvied up the rest of the territory among 'em.

PETTIFOG:
Hell, let's just toss it up in the air and let the bastards fight over it amongst themselves.

FLAPDOODLE:
Makes sense to me. Second the motion.

FENCE STRADDLER:
All in favor?

It was a rectangular slice of the Indian Nations, about the size of Greece. As to woods and prairie and rocky outcrop, it was a fair example of the rest of the frontier. Flapdoodle, Pettifog, and Straddler didn't know it from darkest Africa. Declaring it the communal property of the area tribes meant it was officially unassigned, the only piece of the United States left up for grabs, and therefore no one's property at all. It stood outside the law, federal, territorial, and local, which made it a bolt-hole for every wanted fugitive in America.

The fugitives took notice. Before Fence Straddler's gavel stopped ringing, the Strip filled fit to bust with murderers, rapists, wife-beaters, train robbers, and common road agents who'd worn out their welcome everywhere else in the civilized world except on scaffolds. Since there was no reason to lay low with no one looking for them, they helped themselves to whatever was handy and seldom left witnesses. The grittiest of U.S. marshals hesitated to go there except in armed convoys. Policemen appointed from among the Five Civilized Tribes—Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, Choctaw, and Chickasaw—done their damnedest to keep order, but their authority was limited and they were scattered like buckshot.

An army fort might have helped contain the atrocities. However, through an agreement between the Indians and Washington that no one really understood, the military was banned from the territory. In any case, there was no precedent for the cavalry protecting Indians from United States citizens; generally the situation was opposite. It was No Man's Land, utterly lawless.

Where better, Cripplehorn reasoned, to stage an outlaw entertainment?

*   *   *

“It's a fair piece off,” said Randy, “and aboard a hot train. Where's Frank stand on the matter?”

“I wired him in Montana. He asked the same question about you.”

“Hell, I'd go clean to China to have it out with him for the last time.”

“I felt certain you would. I answered him along those lines, and he said just what you did; only in his case it was Russia.”

“I'm surprised you didn't just crack us both on the head like you done me in Oakland and dump us aboard a fast freight.”

“There are a thousand things to be done. I haven't time to waste running back and forth carrying messages. There's no telling when Washington might change its mind and annex the Strip, placing it under civil authority.”

“Can we stop on the way for a bottle of Old Pepper? That fruity horse piss of yours gives me the two-step worse than cooking grease.”

*   *   *

It was a hot ride as predicted, and hotter still as they chugged down the eastern side of the Divide and stopped in Pueblo, a town noted for its salubrious climate—but not in September—to take on water. Randy sat in a wallow of sweat, screwing up his face against the glare through his window, and allowed as how he'd had his life's portion of dusty towns, burnt grain served up as coffee, and sour women.

Cripplehorn got up from the seat beside him. “I won't be a moment.”

“What for, you want to borrow a cup of dust?”

“I need to send a telegram.”

“Give Frank my regards and tell him to keep breathing till I get there.”

“He's already on his way. I'll fill you in later.”

Randy felt he was in the Nations before he saw the place: a brief whiff of brimstone, a tightening in the chest, a sickness in the stomach carried by old miseries not necessarily his. The territory had been born in tears and irrigated by them ever since.

Then again, he might simply have been train sick.

“You've been staring out that window for miles,” Cripplehorn said. “What's wrong?”

He turned his head away. “My mother said I had injun blood back on her side; Iroquois, I think she said. I reckon some great-great grandpappy just walked acrosst my grave.”

“It never occurred to me you had a mother.”

“She died when I was fourteen and I ran away.”

“Because of your father?”

“No. We never met.”

“You're lucky.”

In the town of Cimarron, named after the river separating the white and red territories, the entrepreneur excused himself again. The place was built of new yellow wood just waiting for a spark to come along and burn it to the ground. Randy watched through the window as Cripplehorn shook hands with a fat man in a suit too heavy for the climate and a hat with a rolled brim, bright metal doodads dangling from his watch chain. He accepted a cigar from a battery of them in the man's breast pocket, wagged his chin little, and nodded lots. From his gold-cornered wallet Cripplehorn slid a fistful of banknotes, folded them into a little square, and shook the man's hand again, coming away with nothing in his. He got back on board just as the whistle blasted its first warning.

“We're stopping here.” He took his carpetbag down from the overhead rack and reached for Randy's bedroll.

“Don't touch my gear.” Randy sprang up and fetched it himself. “What's in Cimarron, besides a dose of clap?”

“Our home, for the time being. It's all arranged. We've got a two-month lease on a farmer's field not two minutes from here.”

“What we fixing to put in, oats or potatoes?”

“Neither. Planting's done. I just sealed the deal with the banker who foreclosed on the place. He's the one I sent the telegram to from Pueblo, to arrange this meeting. The Choctaw who worked it put in corn, but the hot summer burned up his investment: The stalks grew tall enough, but the kernels wouldn't form, and he ran out of extensions.”

“I don't know why he thought he could raise anything in this country.”

“Just a cry of despair. We're going to plow under what's left and stake a great big tent to discourage freeloaders.”

“Whose working the plow, you?”

“The farmer himself. Banker Anderson says he's willing to do it, and whatever other odd jobs come up, just for letting him and his family stay in the house through the winter.”

“And I reckon his wife will knit us the tent.”

“That's the beauty of the plan. We'll sell advertising on the canvas, inside and out. With the house we're expecting, any smart merchant would chase us all the way down the street to stuff our pockets in return for space. It will cover our overhead and more.”

“We're selling empty space?”

“That's how it works.”

“I'll be damned.”

“That's foreordained.”

“Don't leases and such need signing papers? I didn't see nothing change hands but cash money.”

“It's that kind of deal. A case might be made for conspiracy should the situation change. A trail of paper could prove an embarrassment.”

“Well, we wouldn't want to embarrass a banker. How do you know he won't crawfish?”

“That part called for diplomacy. I reminded him there would likely be one gun man left standing when the thing was done. That whole business of honor among western gentlemen has always been based on the lead standard.”

“You draw me and Frank like a gun.”

Cripplehorn fixed him with his good eye; though Randy had the strange impression there was life in the one carved from ivory, cold as it was. “You were what you are before I met you both. Don't pretend I'm worse than either one of you.”

The whistle shrilled twice as the train prepared to pull out.

“I ain't renting no place with you, if that's what you're thinking.”

Out on the platform, Cripplehorn stopped and turned. Randy leered.

“Didn't think I knew about that, did you? Frisco's nothing more than small towns all bunched together. Folks talk. Frank must of got soft not to of shot you weeks ago. I almost done it on sight last year.”

The promoter raised his voice above the plunging pistons, holding down his hat against the suction of the departing train. “It's not the Palace, or even the Asiatic. The Cherokee Rest is the best Cimarron has to offer.”

“As opposed to what else? I didn't count but four blocks, counting the town pump.”

“A boarding house or two, but there's no privacy there. I can't promise a private bath or even hot water, but there won't be any false eyelashes in the basin.”

“I'm sorry to hear that. It was my only female companionship that whole time. What about Frank?”

“Oh, I'm putting him up in an adjoining room so I can sleep in the crossfire.” Cripplehorn mounted the steps of a wooden front porch and opened a door, jingling a set of sleigh bells strung from the inside knob.

Dust motes hung motionless in the sunlight slanting in through the front window. A squaw rug, most of its color gone, lay on a plank floor and the moth-eaten head of a boar tusker glared down from the wall above the stairs.

A loud smack sent Randy groping for his Colt. Then he saw a clerk scraping a dead fly off a rolled-up newspaper against the edge of the desk. He let his hand fall from the pistol.

“Wherever he is, it better not be no Eldorado, that's all I got to say.”

 

TWENTY-TWO

The theater's unrespectable reputation is undeserved. The amount of labor and dedication involved in preparing a production is a test of character.

The dilemma of what to do with Frank was as vexing as any of the arrangements necessary to ensure the success of Crip's Folly, as the press had christened the enterprise. (It was coined by John Clum, editor of the
Tombstone Epitaph,
as a way of drawing fire away from that city's sinister recent history, and spread from paper to paper like smallpox.) Wherever he wound up, his inability to resist attention was bound to announce his whereabouts, and the situation had increased to the point where anywhere in the Nations was too close.

The solution was so simple it's no wonder a confidence man whose train of thought ran in twisted circles took so long arriving at it: Cripplehorn told Frank to stay put. He could hold court in the Copper Palace as much as he wanted, and distance alone would prevent Randy's native impatience from boiling over.

The reporter who covered the Strip for the
Fort Smith Elevator
was a bandy-legged rooster with a horse-collar beard who looked like Walt Whitman and swore like Jo Shelby. He wore an out-at-the-elbows morning coat, Confederate trousers with a stripe, and a Union forage cap. He was a veteran war correspondent whose thirst for action had led him down to Mexico to cover the revolution, and when that ended too soon he'd come back north and traveled from one boomtown journal to the next, mostly on foot, before finding satisfaction in the worst part of the Nations. None of his colleagues would willingly roam those caves and thickets poking into other folks' affairs, so he enjoyed a freedom of movement unprecedented in his profession.

Caleb Munch interviewed Abraham Cripplehorn in his room overlooking Cimarron's main street. The visitor sat in the room's only chair with his legs crossed. It was hard to tell where his limbs left off and the spindle legs started. His subject sat on the bed with his back propped against a pillow and his legs stretched out in front of him to keep his trouser creases straight. He was smoking the cigar he'd gotten from banker Anderson.

“You spend most of your time separating your clients like a couple of fighting cocks,” Munch said.

“More like a pair of unruly children, which is worse. Where is your notebook?”

“I kept losing them, so now I just remember.” Munch was an unsmiling man who had no patience with humor, a clutter in speech as it was in written copy. “You stand to sacrifice your whole investment if Locke and Farmer tangle too soon.”

“Is that a question?”

“I never ask them. Around here you get out of the habit.”

“Doesn't that make it hard for you to conduct an interview?”

“It hasn't yet.”

“These next three weeks will be the most difficult. But the closer we get to the event, the easier it will be to keep them under control. They've been out to kill each other so long, another day shouldn't matter. Tempers tend to cool when money becomes imminent.”