Stringer and the Deadly Flood (2 page)

“Shut up and pay attention to your elders,” Barca growled. “God has nothing to do with this tale. The Southern Pacific bridged that dry, dusty two or three days of wagon travel with rails a spell this side of '49. To encourage them to do so the government gave 'em the usual railroad grants, every other section or square mile alongside the track in a sort of checkerboard ribbon. The government no doubt figured it could afford to be so generous with public land in the Colorado Desert. It gets two inches of rain in a wet year, and it's so hot even this early in the year that nobody ever had to fight any Indians for it. Creep Huntington had no more use for acres and acres of mummy dust than the Indians. He simply had to lay his tracks across that desert to move his trains on over to Texas. But being an octopus by nature, he naturally accepted every square inch the land office offered.”

Stringer blew smoke out both nostrils in bored annoyance and sighed. “Sam, you're still talking ancient history. I've taken that line to Arizona Territory and beyond. I wasn't the only passenger. So I suspect a lot of other folk know there's a railroad across the Colorado Desert now.”

Barca snapped, “That's not the whole story. Just keep in mind that the Octopus owns one hell of a lot of flat and fairly fertile desert land, if only it ever rained out yonder.” He paused to light an Italian cigar that rather resembled a twisted length of grape vine before he continued. “Around the turn of the century a land speculator called Charley Rockford took a ride on that same railroad. It didn't take him long to notice how much open land there was and that half of it was still free for the claiming, sun-baked as it might be. So he put together a flim-flam holding company with more than one name on its stock certificates and a sort of vague mailing address. Then, as soon as he had other men's money to work with, he enlisted a well-known irrigation engineer named George Chaffey, and put him to work. Then they dubbed the dead
heart
of the desert the Imperial Valley and promised to make the desert bloom like a rose as they set about selling it off as prime farm land. Naturally the railroad proceeded to do the same, in cahoots with the quick-buck artists. They had Chaffey run a diversion canal from the Colorado River out across the greasewood flats.”

Stringer nodded, “Now that you mention it, I recall some construction going on, over by the Chocolate Mountains, the last time I passed through. But that was some time ago, Sam. So I'm still waiting for the news angle.”

Barca blew smoke back at him and explained. “New homesteads are not news, provided nothing interesting happens after anyone drills in the first crop. The water lords and land mongers gave assurance to their suckers that the irrigated mummy dust of the so-called Imperial Valley would grow two crops a year of asparagus to zucchini squash—and maybe it would, given all that water they promised. But it's easier to promise watering the desert than to do so.”

Barca irritatedly chewed on his half-smoked cigar. “Things went well enough at first. Chaffey's main channel was easy enough to dig in soil that's soft as baby powder. They ran branch lines off to the north and had close to two thousand settlers and a hundred thousand acres more or less under irrigation within a year or so. Well, let's say they claimed the ‘more' part, but the settlers say it was a hell of a lot less in their spanking new Garden of Eden 'cause the irrigation canals silt up almost as fast as they can be dug. The Colorado is one mighty muddy river. It drains mostly higher desert, so it packs at least a quart of solid mud for every gallon of water. And it drops a steamship load of that mud per diem. The whole damned Colorado Desert was spread across the north end of the Gulf of California in the first place by the Colorado and Gila as a sort of combined delta. So in no time at all the main diversion channel wound up full to the brim with fresh dry land.”

Stringer whistled softly, then commented, “Leaving all those poor suckers high and dry indeed. Is that the story you want me to cover, boss?”

Barca shook his head. “We ran that last summer, had you paid attention to page three. It gets trickier than that. The water lords and the railroad still have many a dusty desert acre to sell. So as a stopgap, while Chaffey hopes to clean out the main channel, they've subcontracted to run emergency channels on the north and south of the sink. The main diversion channel will drain spring flooding, they hope, south through the Mexican parts of the desert to sea level. Such water would hardly grow much
asparagus,
of course. So they have another subcontractor running a more modest amount of river water in line with the railroad, feeding the irrigation grid to the north.”

Stringer frowned at the rather confused mental map he was forming in his head. “Hold on, Sam. How could they drain river water from the east, which is on its way to the sea,
north
into higher country?”

Barca waved his crooked cigar impatiently and barked, “That's not the mystery. When the mud from the Gila and Colorado spread clean across the upper Gulf of California it left a heap of salt water stranded inland. It dried up in no time, forming Salton's Sink which lies a few feet below sea level. The fact that it's a big salt flat is just a fact of nature and has no bearing on the angle I want you to check out. Even an honest irrigation scheme would have to drain north because of the lay of the land out there. And there's no money in trying to sell water or anything else to the few Mexicans down south. Anyways, the irrigation water dries up before it can even make it down to the salt flats, provided there's any water at all. I want you to talk to a man in El Centro about that.”

Barca rummaged again through the papers cluttering his desk until he found the letter he was searching for. He handed it across to Stringer. “Read it later. It's from some gent calling himself Herbert Lockwood. Says he's a hydraulic engineer. In essence the subcontractor he was working for fired him, and he's mad as hell about it. I'd have dismissed it as just another crank letter if I hadn't just heard from the wire service that Chaffey, the head engineer of the whole fool project, has just quit in a huff and walked off the job. He's dropped out of sight, after issuing a statement that the assholes he was working for don't know what they're doing and that he's getting out before things get worse. Since Chaffey failed to say what could be worse than trying to grow crops this coming spring with no water, we can only hope this other browned-off hydraulic engineer, Lockwood, might be able to tell us, and that there's a story in it somewhere for the paper. By us I mean you, of course. Even if I wasn't busy in this box, rank has its privileges and the desert down yonder will be hotter than I like, even this early in the year.”

Stringer snuffed out the remains of his own smoke and raised one eyebrow. “I always suspected you loved me, Sam,” he drawled ironically. “Anyway, the desert's not that bad in late winter if you dress sensible. And how do I find this Lockwood gent once I get to El Centro?”

“You
ask, of course,” Barca retorted. “He sent his letter of complaint via General Delivery, El Centro. And while El Centro seems to be the county seat, you can likely shout his name from any rooftop with a fair chance of his hearing you. The town is little more than a Southern Pacific water stop. Wire me by Western Union as soon as you find out what's going on down there.”

As Stringer rose, he asked, “And what if nothing's going on?”

Barca replied in a disgusted tone, “Come back without wasting money on any damned wire, of course. Western Union charges us a nickel a word, you know.”

Stringer nodded and observed morosely, “I know. I sure wish I could get you to pay me that much a word, you tight-fisted old cuss.”

CHAPTER
TWO

The day's ride down to Los Angeles was tedious. Although Stringer had dressed more comfortably for field work in his jeans and blue denim jacket, he'd left his gun rig packed out of sight in his gladstone traveling bag. But he got stared at anyway by fellow passengers who acted as if they'd never seen a beat-up Rough Rider hat or spurred Justins before. Stringer managed to amuse himself during the boring journey by philosophizing how surprising as well as somewhat discomforting it was to consider how sissified the West Coast had become in the past few years.

Stringer decided it was too late to catch the night train to San Diego, where he would get the connection to El Centro the next day. So he booked a room at the hotel across from the Union Depot. Then, seeing it was too early to turn in, he hired a worn-out bay gelding and an even older stock saddle at a nearby livery to ride out to the new suburb of Hollywoodland. He'd been invited to visit more than once by his old acquaintance Wyatt Earp. More importantly, though, while he took some of old Wyatt's frontier yarns with a grain of salt, he needed the savvy of a real estate agent right now. And whatever he might or might not have been in Tombstone, Wyatt Earp was said to be a pisser of a real estate agent.

Stringer found the old windbag with his latest and much-younger wife, Sarah, rocking on the porch of their bungalow off Western Avenue. While the pretty brunette worked on her needlepoint, the former frontiersman was cleaning a Winchester as if he expected buffalo to stampede up the paved street any minute.

The old lawman and his lovely but flutter-brained wife had met Stringer up in Nome during the Alaska Gold Rush and had run across him a time or two in the current century, and now they both greeted him like long-lost kin. As he tethered his hired mount to their picket fence, Sarah dropped her needlework and ran across the Bermuda grass to give him a big and not too sisterly hug. Old Wyatt didn't seem to
mind
though, and as he put his gun and cleaning tools aside he called out, “You just missed supper. But we can coffee and cake you, MacKail. You'll be staying the night, of course.”

Stringer joined his gracious host on the porch, with his gracious hostess still clinging to him like a cockle burr. He shook his head and replied, “Not hardly, thanks just the same. I'm bound for the Colorado Desert—or Imperial Valley, take your choice—to see if I can find out what's going on over there. Being I'm between trains, I thought I'd ask for the words of an expert on dry and dusty real estate, Mister Earp.”

The old-timer responded, “Call me Wyatt and don't make rude remarks about Hollywoodland. You see that line of genuine palm trees over yonder? They get watered regular, and our neighbor two doors down has a real lemon tree growing in his back garth. Ain't that a bitch?”

Stringer turned to stare dubiously at what looked more like a line of giant feather dusters with their handles buried in the white gravel of the Los Angeles Basin. Then he shrugged diplomatically. “They must be young palms, if you say so. I can't come up with anything else that grows so silly. Ain't palm trees supposed to have trunks, though?”

Wyatt Earp sniffed. “Give 'em time. My point is that they've taken root. Dang near anything will grow in this fine climate as long as you can get some water to it.”

Sarah Earp untangled herself from Stringer to announce she had a gardening book she was working on and ran in the house, apparently to fetch it for him. Stringer sat on the steps near the old lawman's rocker and got out the makings as he explained the little he knew about events in the desert to the southeast.

When he'd finished, Wyatt Earp pursed his lips and said, “I don't know, son. I once drove a stage over yonder in Salton's Sink. It never struck me as prime farm or even grazing land. Come high summer it gets too hot for buzzards to even fly over. You say the Southern Pacific owns that stretch of mummy sweat?”

“Half of it, leastways,” Stringer explained. “I reckon old C. P. Huntington was in a hurry to lay his tracks across that hellish stretch and just took the land titles because they came free.”

Earp nodded sagely and agreed. “Creep Huntington was a greedy son of a bitch. Did I ever tell you about the time I shot it out with his hired guns at Mussel Slough, boy?”

Stringer
acknowledged he had heard the story before, but added slyly, “You sure must have been a traveling man in those days, Wyatt, considering what you say you did at the O. K. Corral in Tombstone a year later.”

Earp smiled modestly. “Me and my brother, Morgan, spent a lot of time on the road riding shotgun for Wells Fargo.”

Stringer knew better. But he'd been raised to be respectful of his elders, so he just said, “I'd rather talk about Salton's Sink. Is it true we're talking about a lot of salt spread over the garden spot of the Colorado Desert, Wyatt?”

The older man chuckled. “Enough salt to scrape up off the dirt and sprinkle in your stew, if you don't mind a bit of grit. Of course, the salt's only that bad in the low places. I reckon you could get prickly pear or even mesquite to grow in the higher greasewood ground if you could get water to it now and again.” He pointed at a distant greenish blur a few streets over. “That's a genuine pepper tree, yonder. Comes all the way from South America. You see, we do have some water, here. It runs down offen the Santa Monica Mountains a month or more each winter and settles here under the basin, not all that deep.”