The Long High Noon (19 page)

“You said there'd be just one. We got no rounds.” Randy bit off the words.

“That bowie of yours is too picturesque to leave out, but it's more than just a stage property. I know about Frank's clasp knife.”

“That's just for whittling,” Frank said. “We don't settle our scores with cutlery. We ain't Mexicans.”

“These men are here merely to protect you both from those base instincts we all possess in some form.”

Frank said, “I never been insulted in such pretty words.”

As the shorter man, Randy posed standing, wearing a stiff new Texas pinch hat, a striped waistcoat over a lawn shirt with plain garters gathering the sleeves, and whipcord trousers tucked inside knee-length glossy brown boots, his worn old spurs on the heels. His Colt hung in his soft leather holster and he held his Ballard with the stock resting on the floor. Frank, in his new suit, fancy flap-toed boots, and tall-crowned sugar-loaf sombrero, sat with his Winchester across his lap. Both flinched when Andrew Fox raised a hod heaped with magnesium powder and touched it off with a candle, plunging the room into bright dazzle followed by acrid smoke; but the shutter was faster than even their reflexes, capturing them in the moment, calm and resolute.

For a time, the original plate was on display among other assorted hardcases in a museum in Guthrie, but it was destroyed in a fire soon after Teddy Roosevelt turned the Indian Nations into the State of Oklahoma. But you can still find a print in a junk store if you're looking, or pick up one of the posters Cripplehorn had made, all curling and fly-specked with the faces faded to blank ovals.

You can get a good price, too. The men are forgotten now, like the buffalo and the Great Plains Wolf and the range where they all wandered.

 

TWENTY-FOUR

Avoid cards and spirits, or stand in the crossfire of ruin.

The day of the event, Abraham Cripplehorn sat at a campaign table in front of the gargantuan tent with several rolls of tickets and a strongbox, the off-duty deputies posted to see no one ran off with either. He set up at 9:00
A.M.
and by noon had sold out, with two hours to go before the tent opened for business. There wasn't a room to be had in Cimarron, whose streets were filled with strange horses and buckboards and carriages from throughout the territory and places beyond. He'd hired a brass band made up of volunteer firemen and a talented local stock clerk to juggle bright rubber balls to open the show.

At quarter to two, Cripplehorn sent the two deputies to escort the featured players from their rooms. He inspected his new gold watch several times, listening to the band playing “The Garryowen,” before the deputies returned without them.

*   *   *

The Rusty Bucket Saloon operated openly and illegally on the south side of the tracks, where from time to time a satisfied customer was run over by the Katy Flyer while weaving across the rails. It was the original railroad station before the new brick one was built on the north side, a fine solid construction of lath-and-plaster, and long enough to accommodate a paneled mahogany bar and scrolled backbar that had been brought in, dismantled, in freight wagons before the coming of the railroad. It offered two gaming tables with green baize tops and steel-engraved pictures in frames chronicling the triumphs of George Washington. The owner was an Irishman married to a Creek woman, who bought his stock from whiskey runners who managed to elude Judge Parker's marshals by entering the territory directly from the west and north without crossing their jurisdiction.

Today it was deserted except for the Irishman and a short-coupled customer in new clothes with a Colt on his hip. Everyone else, apparently, was either in Cripplehorn's big tent or on his way there to take in the show.

“You're fixing to be late, Mr. Locke,” said the man behind the bar, a fine-boned example of lace-curtain stock who kept order in the place with two feet of billiard cue and a shotgun nearly as short.

Randy directed his scowl first to the bartender, then to the poster with his and Frank's picture on it propped up in the front window. “Well, they can't start the ball without me.” He thumped his glass twice on the bar. The man came his way with a bottle and filled it to the top. “You know this John Barleycorn doesn't mix with shooting.”

“You might be right. I disremember even asking you for the advice.”

“Holy Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.” The bartender stood with the bottle in one hand and the cork in the other, staring at Frank coming in the door.

*   *   *

“Well, if they weren't in their rooms, you should've gone looking for them,” Cripplehorn said. “The town isn't that big.”

One of the off-duty deputies, tall and rangy with handlebars and a little paintbrush beard, moved a plug from one cheek to the other. “My mama didn't raise me to go looking for no puma in no thicket. You wanted 'em to stay put, you should of posted guards at their doors.”

“The marshal didn't have any more men to spare and I don't trust civilians I don't know. Find them. Please.”

“That's better. It's a little-bitty word, don't cost nothing, and does so much.” He loosened his pistol in its holster, looked at his partner, and jerked his head over his shoulder. The other deputy, a Chickasaw half-breed with deep pockmarks on his face, slammed shut the breech of his ten-gauge and they moved off away from the brumping band inside and the clerk juggling bright-colored balls.

*   *   *

Randy's hand dropped to his weapon, but Frank spread his hands away from his leathered Remington, palms forward. Randy rested his hand on the bar and Frank hooked a heel on the brass rail next to him. He nodded at the bartender, who realized he was still holding the bottle and cork and filled a fresh glass.

“How many's that?” Frank asked, tilting his head toward Randy's and meeting his gaze in the mirror mounted on the backbar.

“My second. I stop at two now, just enough to take the sting out of my leg.”

“I do regret that. That horse you had throwed up its head or I'd of just kilt you instead of making you lame.”

“Well, I taken your ear. I know how much store you set in good looks.”

“It slowed me down some at the start, but since I got famous I ain't wanted for companionship.”

“What about that woman you stole from her sheriff daddy in Colorado?”

“I left her and she died. That's another regret. Whenever I think of you I clean lose my good manners. As I recall, you always had a way in that department. I seen the most looksome women with the ugliest toads.”

“They come, but they never stick. They expect you to put 'em first, leastwise when you're together. If it's another woman they can always scratch her face and pull out her hair, but they can't fight what they can't see. I never could commit to one like I do you.”

“You might send flowers now and again, seeing as how you're so sweet on me.”

“Go to hell, Frank.”

“You first.”

The tall deputy came in the door, his hand resting on his gun handle. His partner, the half-breed, stood on the threshold with his shotgun leveled. Frank and Randy turned to face them.

Randy said, “Gents, you better be as good as you think you are.”

The tall deputy took in the two men with their hands hovering near their pistols. “How good you got to be with a street sweeper at your back?”

Frank said, “That's the trouble with a long narrow room like this. If he cuts loose, we all three go down squirting blood with all our inwards outside. So that makes two of us you got to take down all on your own.”

The man with the paintbrush whiskers switched cheeks on his plug, switched back. He leaned over a little and shot a brown stream into the nearest spittoon. He caught his partner's eye in the mirror. The man with the shotgun backed out the door and turned away, followed by his partner, moving backwards also.

When they were alone with the bartender, mopping his face with his swamp rag, Frank said, “Can you get that pistol out of that soft holster in under two minutes?”

“If I hold the holster down with one hand and jerk hard.”

“Me, too. We ought to ask Cripplehorn where he got them slick holsters and tie-downs he writes about in his books. I reckon them boys are readers.”

“Hell, I don't believe he ever wrote even one. Got time for a hand?”

Randy jerked down the rest of his drink. “Always.”

They sat at one of the gaming tables while the bartender brought a deck of cards.

*   *   *

“I heard they grow their lawmen tough in the Strip,” Cripplehorn said. “Is there no end to these myths?”

The half-breed Chickasaw cradled his shotgun. “We chose badly.”

“I understand how you feel. You hear that?” The entrepreneur tilted his head in the direction of the tent. The band was still playing, but above the thumping brass and boom of the bass drum came the regular chugging beat of a freight train at full throttle. “They're pounding the bleachers with their feet. Before long they'll come streaming out screaming for their money back. The vendors have been plying them with beer all afternoon. I may be the first man ever strung up on a complaint of disappointment. What were they doing when you left?”

“I looked back in through the window,” said the tall deputy. “They were playing cards.”

“Locke and Farmer?”

“Yup.”

“Playing cards.”

“Yup.”

“What kind of place is this, where men are shooting at each other one day and socializing the next?”

The half-breed rolled his shoulders. “If you spend enough time out here, you get used to everything.”

“I've been crisscrossing the West for more than ten years. I'm not used to it yet.”

“You just need more time.”

*   *   *

Frank, who sat facing the window in the Rusty Bucket, shielded his eyes against the lowering sun. “Half-past two or thereabout. I forgot to wind my watch this morning; ain't used to wearing one after all them visits to pawnshops. Two cards.” He laid down two.

Randy dealt him two off the deck. “That's what's good about the sun. It don't need winding.”

“It's dependable, that's certain. Everybody knows when the sun'll come up and bed down; it's in the Almanac. But the moon comes and goes on its own and nobody knows when.”

“That's on account of God made the sun, and He's an orderly man. The moon's the devil's work. Dealer takes one.”

Both men raised the stake. The bartender came around with the bottle and a fresh glass for Randy, but Randy shook his head and Frank cupped his hand over his, preventing him from pouring. He returned to the bar and sat on a stool, dividing his attention between the
Fort Smith Elevator
and the Regulator clock clunking out the minutes on the wall opposite.

Frank asked Randy if he was thinking what Frank was.

“If I was, I wouldn't own to it.”

“I'm thinking Cripplehorn's got no leave to poke around in what's between you and me, and nobody else neither.”

Randy concentrated on his cards. “We gave him our word.”

“Till day after tomorrow, we said. That's today.”

“I never wanted this folderol to begin with,” Randy said. “I only went along with it because I needed money at the time.”

“Same here. It just feels like we're standing in downtown Denver in our long-handles with the flaps down. I don't figure he bought the right for that. Call.”

Randy spread his cards on the green baize. “Two pair, jacks and deuces.” The fifth card was the five of clubs.

Frank's teeth showed in his imperials. He laid his hand down faceup. He had two jacks and deuces and the five of hearts.

Randy said, “I've played poker all my life and watched a thousand games. I never saw such a thing before. I never even heard it could happen.”

“That tears it, don't it?”

Randy looked up and smiled. “Who invited God into this game?”

 

TWENTY-FIVE

Nature is a random force, disaster its close cousin.

They selected the railroad tracks for the contest, Frank on the north side, Randy on the south. That placed the sun to Frank's left and Randy's right and at a disadvantage to neither man. No trains were scheduled before early evening. They took off their coats and laid them on the ground, Frank folding his carefully according to the creases, Randy letting his fall in a heap; that gave their arms freedom of movement. Randy, unaccustomed to his new hat, took it off and dropped it on top of the coat to avoid distraction.

The band music and the noise of hundreds of customers pounding the bleachers reached them from a distance, as of a storm on the other side of a mountain range, lightning pulsing and thunder a dull thud, dumping torrents, while they stood in the sun, utterly detached from someone else's tempest.

They squared off, raising their pistols to shoulder height and extending them the length of their arms, hammers cocked.

“Drop your weapons or I'll shoot you both where you stand!”

The man who had stepped around the corner of the brick train station on Randy's side of the tracks was hatless, with his thick blue-black hair cut in a bowl and a bright star on his blue tunic. He held a Henry rifle braced against one shoulder, his other hand resting on the forepiece. He had features the color of brick, and with the sun carving caverns in his cheeks and the flat planes of his temples, seemingly as hard.

Frank and Randy faced off the way they played poker, allowing nothing to draw their eyes from the game.

“I'm an officer with the Cherokee Lighthorse Police and it's my intention to prevent murder on grounds entrusted to me. Drop 'em!” he roared.

Walter Red Hawk's reactions were slower than his sense of probity, and were no match for Randy's relentless practice or Frank's experience in the field. The Cherokee managed to fire only one shot before two pistol bullets struck him full in the chest. He went down, reflexively cranking a new round into the chamber, which was still in it unfired when he fell into the gravel off the edge of the station platform. His slug had passed between the two men as they wheeled his direction. The coroner's inquest the next day established death as instantaneous. Two rounds were dug out of the corpse, both of which had hit vital spots.