The Long High Noon (6 page)

He was carrying his Colt and his old Circle X Ballard rifle, its stock scratched many times over with pawnbrokers' identifying marks. He wasn't the hand with a long gun Frank was, but if you got close enough to an animal like Ike to shoot it with a revolver, you might as well sprinkle its tail with salt.

He was close now, he could tell. The wolf kept climbing, headed for the treeline, where prey was scarce. It knew it was being followed. Its best hope was to draw him far enough from his own kind to even the odds.

Randy smiled at that. Even a smart wolf was too dumb to count, and too ignorant of his pursuer's situation to know he lived his life far from his own kind.

He was thinking these thoughts, when what he ought to be thinking about was wolf only, when snow squeaked and he turned and looked up in time to see two rows of fangs and red mouth surrounded by a halo of pale muzzle and two sets of claws streaking his way, the whole foreshortened against blue sky, as if it had dropped from a hot-air balloon: the drop a good sixty feet straight down from a rocky outcrop square above Randy's head. He could feel the heat of the animal's desperate breath when he stuck the Ballard straight up and fired.

*   *   *

A Cheyenne dog soldier named Bending Bough found them, so tangled together he thought at first he'd discovered one of the half-men-half-beasts of tribal legend. After he sorted them out he treated the man's frightening wounds with mud and dried herbs, fed him soup made from White Ike's liver, and brought him across the back of the mule to the nearest settlement.

It was a place of clapboard and canvas, hanging by its fingernails to the side of a mountain the settlers were systematically hollowing out in search of a vein of silver that came and went like a broken line on a map. Everything appeared to be held together by soot, including the miners. The rigorous toil and inescapable filth had made them surly and suspicious of strangers, particularly those who came in strange colors.

Bending Bough tried to pass as the wounded man's guide and sell the dead wolf's pelt, but the Indian had gotten himself as confused as Randy, thinking himself in Canada: It was Montana, and the locals considered any red men coming from the north to be fugitives from justice following the Little Big Horn massacre. The mercantile owner to whom he'd offered the pelt sent word to the citizens' committee, who hanged the Indian in the livery stable. For a time, Randy was kept under guard in a back room of the assayer's office as a suspected turncoat, his wounds tended by a barber who was the closest thing the town had to a medical man, but when he was well enough to give an account of himself they argued over the matter, then decided one hanging would hold them for a while. They loaded him aboard his mule, aimed it south, and gave it a hard smack. White Ike's pelt stayed behind, to be sold and the five hundred divided among the miners.

 

SEVEN

In order to speak to a lady for the first time, an introduction is required, either by a relative or by a mutual acquaintance if no relative is available.

After he was voted out of office on account of age and deafness and he was left all on his own, Gunter Dierdorf didn't blame his widowed state for his loneliness, nor his daughter's desertion, nor even Frank Farmer, who had probably hastened his wife's death and certainly had deprived him of his only child. If there was one mortal soul in this world he hated—hated as much as Frank and Randy hated each other—it was Morris Fassbinder, professor emeritus from the Utica College of Engineering. If the old gentleman was still living and wandered inside range of the sawed-off Greener the sheriff had carried throughout his tenure and which now hung above the stone fireplace in his retirement shack, the burial service would need Mason jars.

*   *   *

If a man had to be incarcerated, he could have done worse than the jailhouse in the county seat where Frank served out his two months for persuading the range manager's wife to pay him what he'd earned as a Regulator. The cells were clean, the sheets laundered and placed on a real bed (iron thing, might have been built from a cemetery fence, with a ditch down the middle of the mattress, but a bed just the same), and a lamp provided for reading the week-old newspapers from Denver after the sheriff was through with them. The meals were bland—Mrs. Dierdorf skimped on salt, which was not included in the official budget—but they were hot and never undercooked, and best of all they came in a picnic basket covered with a checked cloth hung on the slender arm of Evangeline Dierdorf.

The sheriff's daughter had attended a presentation by Doctor the Professor Morris Fassbinder in the Masonic Hall, a major stop on the Chautauqua lecture circuit originating in New York State. The elderly scholar, a scarecrow in a clawhammer coat, stiff collar, hard black hat, pinchnose spectacles, long white hair, and dandruff, had served on the parole board in Elmira, and circumnavigated the country pressing for prison reform.

“Contrary to conventional belief,” he told his audiences, “unfortunates placed under lock and key for their offenses against the statutes are not there to be punished or reformed, but rather for storage. Society simply does not know what to do with them, and so when the offense is not of a capital nature it shelves them out of sight, and too frequently out of mind. When they have paid their debt, what course is left to them but to return to old habits? They offend, they are captured, tried, and placed once again on that remote shelf, to begin the process all over again when they are released.

“Surely a Christian nation can do better.…”

The Fassbinder System (as it was advertised in playbills and on a large pasteboard sign propped on an easel downstage) involved humane treatment for these overlooked individuals. It was based upon the parable of the Good Samaritan, and although it offered no guarantee that he who was done unto as others would have done unto them would pass along the favor, the present system of penalty through neglect was a virtual promise that the cycle would repeat itself “
ad infinitum, ad absurdum,
world without end.”

The lecture came with statistics demonstrating the sad percentage of recidivism as it stood, and projected figures based on the professor's exhaustive studies of the behavior of certain wild animals kept in captivity and the docility of those that were provided with a healthy diet, their cages cleaned regularly, and treated overall with patience and kindness, as opposed to those that were not. (This part of the programme was the only one wherein the speaker referred to notes printed in his neat hand on three-by-five cards; the fact that the projected figures were his own invention did not impose itself upon the mesmeric rhythms of his sentences or the melodiousness of his voice.)

“Surely”—his favorite adverb—“a man built in God's image and a woman fashioned from the First Man's costal cartilage, whatever his or her transgressions, is worthy of the same gentle treatment as a bear or a lion.”

Evangeline was impressed, as much by the presenter's erect bearing and sonorous tenor as by his central theme, and returned to her parents' home from the evening with her handsome head filled with ideas about reading lamps, clean sheets, and good food delivered with a charitable word and a sweet smile. The sheriff and his wife doted on their daughter, whose three siblings had died in infancy. The elder Dierdorfs never stood a chance: The reforms were put into effect.

Moreover, she was a graceful creature, long-necked, with a high intelligent brow, a straight nose, agreeably curved lips, and a waist a man's two hands could encompass without effort. Her eyes were brown, clear, and required no spectacles to see that the prisoner was a man pleasingly formed (his artificial ear brought sympathy for his unfortunate past rather than revulsion), clean in his habits, and sufficiently well-bred to rise when a lady approached his cell.

Evangeline Dierdorf was twenty-two when Frank Farmer walked out of that cell a free man and ran away with her to Denver.

*   *   *

The couple did not remain long in that town.

Although Frank considered that the sheriff would not be long in tracing them (he arrived a week later), that eventuality didn't bother him so much as the time that had elapsed since the last news of Randy. He was still carrying around the piece he'd torn out of the newspaper in Colorado, worn gossamer thin and the print nearly rubbed away from taking out and rereading. It was too much to hope his enemy was still in San Francisco, but that was the place to start looking. Randy's new notoriety would certainly leave a trail in the memories of those who had encountered him.

Evangeline was thrilled. The delights of Denver, piled atop the discovery of her body, were sufficient to spin the head of a sheltered young lady; the City on the Bay had always seemed as far away and as drenched in romance as Mecca.

With Evangeline's life savings, together with what he got from selling his horse and the long-range rifle, Frank booked a coach to the coast. But long before the train rolled into the station he grew weary of the company, and slipped away in the confusion of people on the platform. Evangeline spent the rest of the money she'd brought on hotels she got little good from, wandering the streets most of the time hoping to glimpse Frank, then dropped out of the lives of all who knew her. Scant months later, a woman answering her description was found in a rented flat overlooking the railroad tracks in Carson City, Nevada, dead of an overdose of laudanum, and buried in an unmarked grave in potter's field. The local marshal was a former deputy of Gunter Dierdorf's. The Colorado sheriff, wearing a mourning band for his recently deceased wife, came in person to arrange for the disinterment, identification, and transportation home.

*   *   *

On the day Frank had arrived, a loafer holding up the porch over the platform with his shoulders saw a man threading his way through the crowd, moving on the double. He passed close enough for the loafer to spot his gutta-percha ear.

He hadn't seen the man who'd promised him a reward for that information in months; but if it was worth something to him, the fact that he was interested in that ear might be worth something to the man who wore it. He pushed his dirty hat determinedly forward to his eyebrows and followed on the man's heels. On the way he passed a pretty young woman with a parasol, anxiously peering around herself in the middle of the throng. He hesitated, sensing an errand there, and pocket money in it, then resumed his pursuit of the man with the ear, shaking his head. It was either drought or downpour in his work.

*   *   *

Frank went first to the Eldorado Hotel, but the desk clerk couldn't find Randy Locke in the current register. Further inquiries led finally to his last-known stop in town, in a hotel not reputed for its elegance, equipped with roaches the size of cigar butts, two sheets of wallpaper separating each room from its neighbor, and a woman's false eyelash stuck to the basin in the dry-sink. He thought he could smell Randy on the sheets; which may not have been pure fancy on his part. For three days he lay on the bed his old acquaintance had slept on, hoping to draw intelligence from the contact; but apart from the attention of bedbugs he drew nothing from the experience.

“I was glad to see the last of him,” said the manager, contemplating a bale of hair he'd plucked from a nostril. “He was starting to attract reporters.”

“Any other visitors?”

The manager dislodged the hair from his fingers onto his lapel, staring at Frank. Frank stuck a banknote across the desk.

“One-eyed jasper in a ten-gallon hat.”

Frank got out another banknote. The manager looked at it regretfully and said he never got the man's name. His guest checked out.

“Frank Farmer?”

He spun, dropping his valise and dragging the worn revolver from its holster.

“Steady, feller!” A man wearing a dirty coat and dirtier plug hat stood on the boardwalk with his hands in the air.

“How'd you know my name?”

“When somebody says there's money in it, I ain't likely to forget it, nor the name of the one offering.”

“Well?”

“Feller called Locke.”

“When?”

“A spell back. Last fall it was.”

“That's no good to me.”

“Maybe no, maybe yes; but it was right there in that hotel I talked to him. There's generally always somebody needs some sort of favor in places like it. I make it a point to keep it on my rounds.”

“I already know he stayed there.”

“What you don't know's the name of the man I seen coming down from his room before that. Had him on good boots and a pretty hat. I asked him if he needed any errands run. He gave me a dollar and told me to bring him a bottle of peach brandy at the Palace. This here's what he gave me instead of cash when I showed up with it,” he said bitterly. “I been carrying it since I seen you at the station. You lost me, but I reckoned you'd turn up here sooner than later.”

Frank looked at the scuffed cover of the book the loafer had pulled from his hip pocket:

BRIMSTONE BOB'S REVENGE,

or

GUN JUSTICE IN ABILENE

Being a True and Authentic Account of Robert Turnstile's Quest for Bloody Vengeance on the Chisholm Trail

as told by

JACK DODGER,

an Eye-Witness

“Who's this Turnstile?”

“Never heard of 'em, nor Dodger neither. He said it wasn't even his name.”

“What was?”

The loafer grinned at him. Frank grunted and fished out another banknote.

 

EIGHT

A firm handshake and a pleasant way of speaking are the working capital of the successful businessman.

Abraham Cripplehorn was suffering the longest string of bad luck of his career.

He laid it to Jack Dodger.

The elusive Jack had always been his rabbit's foot: Those copies of
Petticoat Betsy, the Bandit Princess
he'd found in his hotel room had brought direction to an aimless life, but the association had not been so rosy for The Mercury Press of Cincinnati, Ohio, which had declared bankruptcy in 1876, leaving five hundred copies of
Brimstone Bob's Revenge
unclaimed at its printer's. Cripplehorn had happened upon this information while visiting that city, and had obtained them by settling the bill. When he gave the last one to a St. Louis theater manager he'd hoped to persuade to advance him money against a public duel to the death between Randy Locke and Frank Farmer, his fortunes turned sour.