Stringer and the Deadly Flood (21 page)

She didn't argue. She just sprang up to go with him, one of her arms linked through his left one. They made it down the dark stairs without incident. But, as they reached the lobby, Cactus Jack Donovan rose ominously from where he'd been half dozing under a potted paper palm to growl, “I knew it! Stand aside, Miss Maria. Me and this back-stabbing Romeo have serious things to settle!”

Stringer shoved Maria to one side and then smiled as sincerely as he could at Cactus Jack. “You got it all wrong, pard. I was just now taking the lady home to her family.”

Cactus Jack growled. “After the two of you spending all this time up in your room, you rat? I'll pard you, if you'll just be good enough to fill your fist, you two-faced, lying sweetheart-stealer!”

Stringer tried again. “Simmer down, for Pete's sake. I've always been able to get my own gals. You scared this one and sent her running to my room, where I promise you she found me out on my own business. You're scaring her even more with all this romantic nonsense. There's nothing to fight about, you damned fool!”

Maria sort of whimpered, “Es verdad, Juan. This other man saved me in the desert. I shall always be his friend for saving me. But nothing more. I told you I was fond of a man of my own people. I swear there is nothing like that between this man here and me but my eternal gratitude.”

Cactus Jack flexed his fingers stiffly as he snapped, “Is gratitude what you call what you've been giving old Stringer all this time up in his room?”

Maria snapped,
“Idioso!
He just told you I was alone up there! I tell you he has never treated me with anything but the most gallant respect! Can you say the same, you pawing ape?”

Cactus
Jack said, “I got nothing further to say to nobody right now.”

Stringer stiffened but said softly, “I don't want to fight you. You're drunk and there's nothing to fight about, damn it!”

Maria crossed herself and pleaded, “Oh, no, somebody stop this, por favor!” But the desk clerk had ducked out of sight, and the three of them had the lobby to themselves.

Cactus Jack snarled, “I ain't too drunk to deal with rats like you. So I'm counting to three and then I mean to draw. You just go on and do whatever you have the mind to, you bastard!”

He started counting as Stringer tried to wake up. For the situation struck him nightmarish as well as mighty dumb. He saw it was getting down to him or Cactus Jack now, whether the loco-in-love as well as reverted-to-type killer had saved his life that time or not.

Then, just as Stringer was tensing to draw, a shot rang out from the dark doorway behind Cactus Jack. The startled Stringer instinctively drew and put a round in the drunken brute's chest before the bullet in his back could drop him with a knuckle-white grip on both his holstered six-guns. He already had one drawn as he hit the floor face first and just lay there. So Stringer quickly kicked it across the waxed floor as he trained his own smoking muzzle on the ominously dark front door.

Then Maria was running over to wrap both arms around her father as Herrerra stepped into the light, his own .45 still smoking. He nodded at Stringer and said, “Forgive me if I interfered in a fight you wished for to finish yourself, señor. Pero, the name of my daughter entered into the conversation and you did seem to be taking far too long for to draw.”

Stringer nodded, “That's true. Now, Mister Herrerra, get Miss Maria out of here pronto and let me handle things here.”

The older Spanish-speaking gent nodded gravely and told Stringer they would always be in his debt. Then he led his daughter outside saying, “Come, my child, this is no place for those of our people to be when the gringo law arrives.”

Stringer expected it might not be such a comfortable place for him either, as the county deputy charged in. Stringer was sedately seated in the chair Cactus Jack had vacated, his own gun reloaded and put away. The deputy cautiously approached the body sprawled between them, rolled it over and grunted. “Always knew Cactus Jack
would
wind up like this sooner or later,” he commented. “Might you know the gent he pushed his luck too far with at last?”

“I cannot tell a lie,” Stringer confessed. “It was me. I've already explained, over at your courthouse, why I had to shoot it out with the gents he was working for. I thought it was over. I hope it is now.”

The deputy straightened up, putting his gun politely away. “I hope so too. Good riddance to bad rubbish. But I reckon we'd best go over and give 'em some sort of statement at least. Then I'd be proud to buy you a drink. How did he start it, this time?”

Stringer got to his feet. “Oh, you know how a gent with a chip on his shoulder and guns on his hips might say just about anything, as long as it's ugly,” he explained. “I could say this was sort of an argument over a lady. But since the lady's not here, I won't.”

CHAPTER
FIFTEEN

Stringer found himself free to leave town before midnight, but since there wouldn't be another train out before morning he enjoyed the novelty of a good night's sleep between clean sheets, alone, and had a hearty breakfast in the morning.

By the time he was ready to board, the dinky but now overstuffed town of El Centro seemed to have more law and order than it really needed, with a National Guardsman stationed at all the halfway important intersections and a machine-gun set up behind sandbags in front of the bank.

Stringer was unable to verify the rumors about the hanging of at least three looters or a column of Mexican raiders turned back near Calexico, with heavy losses on both sides. He knew from his stint in Cuba as a war correspondent that there seemed to be a latrine orderly posted to every company who was not averse to pulling extra duty as a bullshit artist. So, since the emergency as well as the flood seemed to have passed its crest, he boarded the crowded westbound with his S&W .38 wrapped in its belt inside his battered gladstone.

A few hours later he got off to change trains in L.A., with his gun still in that position. He began to wonder if he might not have been hasty when two moose-like individuals fell in step with him on either side and told him someone wanted to talk to him, right now.

He didn't think it prudent to ask what would happen if he told them to go to hell, so in silence they frogmarched him off the platform, through the waiting room, and into a part of the depot that wasn't open to the general public. Then, as one of them moved ahead to open a door, the other nudged Stringer from behind and commanded him to enter. So he did as he was told, not seeing much alternative.

He was only mildly surprised to find himself facing old H.E. Huntington again. The railroad magnate was seated behind an acre of expensive desk in an oak-paneled
office.
Through an open archway to his own right, Stringer could see part of a less luxurious layout he took to be a drafting room. At least one draftsman wearing a green eyeshade was in there working a mile a minute at a slanted drafting table.

Stringer nodded down at Huntington. “Howdy, Hank. These apes of yours said you wanted to see me.”

Huntington looked as if he was trying to make up his mind whether he wanted to laugh like a hyena or froth at the mouth like a mad dog. In the end he settled for snarling, “You crazy son of a bitch! Who gave you the right to publish that whopper to the effect that the Southern Pacific was already hard at work to dam the rogue Colorado and put it back in its old course?”

Stringer explained, “The
San Francisco Sun
did the publishing. Us writers can only submit stories for publication. You'd be surprised how often they turn us poor working stiffs down. You see, the publisher can even fire the editor so...”

“Never mind all that bullshit!” Huntington cut in. “I collect rare books as well as oil paintings and statuary. You were the one who wrote that obscene as well as total lie about our position regarding that damned flood! The Southern Pacific is a railroad, not a water company. We bear no guilt and we don't owe a wooden nickel for the mistakes of others, damn it!”

Stringer nodded agreement. “I know. I put that in my report. Didn't you read the part where I praised you and your engineers for being such swell gents? How often can it be said a big hard-fisted tycoon like you is willing to help the little fellow in such an unselfish way, Hank?”

As he hoped, the nephew of the once-feared and hated Creep Huntington didn't seem to mind being called a big hard-fisted anything. But his voice seemed to soften more than his heart as he insisted, “You're going to have to print a retraction. I told you I'd
think
about it, not that I'd
do
it, you damned troublemaker! My slide-rule boys tell me the job would take two or more years, if we were lucky, and nobody's dared to name a figure as to how much it would cost us!”

Stringer shot a sardonic glance at the nearest hired tough before he shrugged. “Well, far be it from me to refuse to file a story even more exiting than the first one, Hank. I can see the headline now,
OCTOPUS BACKS DOWN
? That ought to be worth an extra edition, don't you think?”

H.E. Huntington answered flatly. “You print it like that and I swear I'll have
your
job, if I have to buy your paper outright to enjoy the pleasure of firing you myself!”

Stringer shrugged off these words. “It wouldn't be much pleasure working for you in any case, Hank. But let's say we do it your way, or at least try. Let's say the
Sun
publishes a humble retraction, explaining that a dumb field stringer mistook you for a public-spirited gent in the heat of the moment and allowing it's not your fault that all that grant land the S.P. sold to a lot of poor suckers is fixing to slide under the Salton Sea. Let's even quote you to the effect that you've studied how you might have been able to help and that you just decided it was too big a job. Have you ever held a straw out to a drowning man and then snatched it back from him, Hank? We're talking about hundreds of farm folk who figure to lose everything they own. Way more than the number of nesters your uncle screwed in Tulare County during the Mussel Slough incident. That was more than twenty years ago, and by now a whole generation of kids have been raised to spit when they hear the letters S or P.”

Huntington looked pained. “I had nothing to do with the so-called Battle of Mussel Slough. I never would have approved it. I know my late uncle could be stubborn when he thought he was in the right, but...”

“Just like you.” Stringer cut in. “I never settled on uncleared title in Tulare County. So I can see how the Southern Pacific was in the right, from a purely legal standpoint. The little folk who lost land they thought was their own have yet to forgive the Octopus to this day.”

“This is different,” protested Huntington.

Stringer only nodded pleasantly. “Many a beaten wife would agree it's at least a mite different every time she winds up bruised. Let's say we let your own public relations department write up as oily a self-serving retraction as they know how. Let's say I toss in a full apology of my own for misunderstanding your intent. How many California readers are going to take it as anything but another slimy slither of their favorite hate, the one and original Octopus?”

Huntington banged his fist on the desk and roared, “You goddamned country slicker, you knew you'd be putting us in this spot when you wrote that goddamned story, didn't you?”

Stringer grinned sheepishly but not particularly apologetically. “I sure was hoping it would and that you'd be smart enough to see it. You see, I really feel sorry
for
those nesters in the soon-to-be liquid Colorado Desert, Hank.”

Huntington growled, “I ought to have you killed. I would if I thought it would do any good at this late date.” Then he rose from his desk and added, “Come on. Maybe this time we can see that you get the story right for a change.”

He led Stringer into the nearby drafting room, where Stringer could now see half a dozen men hard at work over drafting tables. A bigger chart table occupied the center of the room. Huntington led Stringer to it and pointed down at the big contour map of the country he'd just visited the hard way.

Huntington said, “The reason I'd sure like to get out of it goes like so.” He pointed with a pencil eraser as he continued, “To begin with we have to lay new tracks, this way, to restore cross-country service before the effing Santa Fe takes it away from us. We'd planned on that in any case. My boys tell me we could pile drive a causeway across the running water. They say the river won't mind as long as the piles are well spaced in its bed. That's all it would take to run my trains across on a live-and-let-live basis. But the infernal Mexicans below Yuma are already accusing me—
me
of all people!—of stealing their damned drinking water. The old bed is full of salty tide water all the way north of the border.” He snorted in indignation. “How do you say ‘octopus' in Spanish?”