The Long High Noon (12 page)

Not with so many others present anyway.

Randy crossed the street to a boarded-up building and took a position in the doorway.

The line moved slowly, but in twenty minutes the man with the bundle was inside. Randy gave him twenty more to get to the front of the line, give Jesus His due, and eat his soup, then another twenty when that twenty ran out. His bad leg began to throb from all the standing; before long the pain would be fierce and constant.

But he forgot about it when the man came out and descended the stairs with a little more spring in his step than he'd had going in. Randy waited for him to hit the pavement, then crossed the street and fell in behind. They were two blocks from the charity house in a section empty of people when he quickened his pace and drew abreast.

“I'll have a look at that bundle.”

The vagabond had better instincts than anticipated. Without pausing to look at the stranger he made a move for the inside of his torn overalls. Randy backed up a step, but he still had his bowie. The blade parted the man's shirtsleeve and carried away flesh from his elbow to his wrist. The bundle fell from under his arm, but Randy caught it and shoved the tramp the rest of the way off balance with his other hand.

There was something hard inside the holey overcoat. He grasped it, fingers closing around the familiar pistol-grip stock, and shook his rifle free. In the same motion he smashed the barrel across the man's face just as the man was scrambling to his feet, doubling the force of the collision. He went down hard on the ground, stunned.

Randy bent and searched his reeking clothes—not forgetting the pockets of the coat the tramp had used to swaddle the Ballard—but there was no sign of his Colt, just the clasp knife he'd intended to plunge into Randy. He threw it into a patch of weeds across the street.

He made a cane of the rifle, leaning on it to brace his bad leg, kicked the man in the side, snapping ribs, and went back to the gunsmith's shop for his new sidearm.

 

FIFTEEN

A man needs a close companion, if only to spare him from his baser instincts.

“Mr. Cripplehorn, may I expect payment this time in reasonably short order?”

The tailor, a tall Levantine with a scholar's stoop, wore the standard uniform of open-necked lawn shirt, striped trousers suspended by braces, and yellow tape measure around his neck. Pearl-headed pins glittered like captain's bars on his collar. He was on one knee beside the carpeted rise before the triptych mirrors, making chalk marks where the entrepreneur's uncut deckle-edged trouser leg crumpled at the instep.

The customer narrowed his working eye at his image in the basted-together morning coat; he prided himself on his ability to view himself with total objectivity. “Of course, my man. My allowance is due next week.”

The tailor made a small adjustment in a measurement and recorded it in his little notebook, abandoning the discussion as pointless. With the forty-niners dying out and their grown sons making the Grand Tour to visit Italian statues and order suits in London, much of his business came from wayward progeny supported by payments from their respectable eastern parents to stay away. Since North America ran out at the Pacific, San Francisco was where they lighted. It was a generation that favored silk next to its skin and considered it bad form to settle a tailor's bill in less than a year. Meanwhile the Levantine's daughter wore hand-me-downs and his son was reduced to shaming his father in public wearing suits from Monkey Ward's.

His fitting completed, Cripplehorn resumed his last good suit and stepped out into a rare patch of Barbary Coast sunshine, absently groping for his silver-plated watch before he remembered. A glance at a tower clock told him he had an hour before the 3:45 got in: time enough to meet with his other partner.

“I was beginning to think you fell in the bay.”

One glance at Frank Farmer said he was drunk and in a foul mood. The saloon, on Mission Street near the harbor, was a bare-bones affair aimed at mariners, with whitewashed walls naked but for a poorly wrought painting in a chipped gilt frame of a schooner caught in a storm at sea and shelves of whiskey cut with salt water from the Pacific, a beneficial combination, as it turned out: The liquor burned the throat, the brine cured it. Frank sat red-eyed at a corner table with a smeared glass in front of him and a nearly empty bottle at his elbow.

“Our arrangement was informal.” Cripplehorn hung his Stetson on the hat tree and pulled out a chair. “If my session ran long, I would go straight to the station.”

“I reckoned you'd growed dependent on that stem-winder and lost all track of time. In another fifteen I was fixing to meet the train myself.”

Cripplehorn frowned.

“We agreed you're not to set eyes on each other until the contest. It's been years, and one or the other of you might lose sight of our objective in the heat of the moment.”

“You saying I can't keep a hobble on myself?”

Not in your present condition.
Aloud he said, “I'm less acquainted with Locke, based on our one conversation. We've a long way to go before the event. We need financial backing, and the legal matters will require money and time.”

“Right now you can't raise the price of a drink even in this pisshole. What makes you think you'll find someone who can?”

“I've my eye on a young fellow I met at my tailor's. He's the man who gave me the idea to identify myself as the prodigal son of a wealthy and exasperated family, to forestall inconvenient questions about the condition of my finances: textiles, if I understood him correctly. He was in an inebriated state at the time, but he ordered three separate suits of evening wear and a half-dozen shirts made in Paris. He's a sporting man as well. I managed to separate him from ten dollars at euchre while we were waiting for a fitting. With a bit of finesse I hope to interest him in an investment that will grant him a measure of independence and a healthy return on our labors.”

“Well, you just spent five times that ten in words. I lost a dollar to a man running a shell game in Denver during my Regulating time who I reckon swallowed the same dictionary.”

“Then you see the value of my intentions.”

“I knocked him flat and found the pea that belonged under one of them shells in his watch pocket. Being the nearest thing to law in that room I took back my dollar and fined him five more for being a tinhorn.”

“You haven't met Sheridan Weber; of the Rhode Island Webers. He couldn't knock flat a blade of grass. Research the history of any one of these second-generation robber barons and you'll find his father strained him through a sheet.”

“The cattlemen's association I worked for in Colorado was run by a fellow with consumption and a geezer couldn't hear a powder charge going off in the next room. You calculate this Sheridan wouldn't hire five men like me to take his investment out of your hide?”

“I think you should leave the business part to me and stick to your target practice.”

“I'll take it up with Randy. He's a buffalo turd, but I'd rather sit downwind of him than listen to you gab about all the textile millionaires you met standing around in your long-handles.”

Cripplehorn stretched himself, studying the men lined up at the bar out of the corner of his eye. He felt inside a pocket, counting coins. He pushed out his chair and stood. “We're talking in circles. Why don't I get you something to soak up that skullbender and see if that bartender has a bottle of peach brandy he's keeping for medicinal purposes?”

“I ate yesterday. Just fetch me another one of these here, seeing's you're so good at euchre.” Frank poured the rest of the whiskey into his glass.

A city policeman in his tight blue tunic and postman's cap stood with his foot on the green brass rail, drinking beer. As was the way of such establishments he had his end of the bar all to himself. Cripplehorn came up next to him and asked what varieties of liquor the bartender had on hand.

That individual stopped polishing a glass with a rag that left the glass in worse shape than when he'd started. He looked as if he'd stepped out of a sporting print, by way of too much butter and too many eggs. His nose was turned west ten degrees of his face and his apron hung straight down from his hard belly. “You got two choices, mister: bottle or glass.”

“Glass. Not that one,” he said, when the man set down the one he'd been working on and picked up a bottle. “One of those behind you.” The pyramid of one-ounce glasses standing on the shelf looked as if he'd started them earlier in the rag's ruination.

“Ten cents.”

He pushed a dime across a resistance of spilled whiskey turned into mud from the grit on the bar and leaned in close to the policeman, who was staring into his beer and chuckling quietly at the exchange. Lowering his voice to a murmur, Cripplehorn said, “Officer, do you see that fellow sitting at the corner table?”

“I saw him. I don't miss much. This is my first drink today.” He might have brought his brogue straight off the boat.

“What do the local statutes say about carrying firearms in the city?”

“They're to be checked at the station upon arrival and picked up upon departure, on pain of fine or incarceration.” He appeared to have memorized the official language. “It's a peaceful place, mister, mostly. Anything you heard about road agents and vigilantes is way out of date. We confine all that truck west of Montgomery Street, where we know where to find the bad element when required.” A pair of gray eyes set in a young hard face with black sidewhiskers took in the man making the inquiry. “What's your interest? You look like a hideout man to me.”

Cripplehorn smuggled a look over his shoulder. Frank sat with his hands wrapped around his glass and his face almost touching it, his hat entirely obscuring his features. The entrepreneur knew the danger posed by men who appeared to be in torpor. But he wasn't looking in the direction of the bar.

Carefully, Cripplehorn unbuttoned his coat and spread the tails for the officer's inspection. “I don't have use for percussion weapons. The knife is for my personal protection.”

“The ordinance don't say nothing about knives, so long as they ain't put to use. I'm waiting for an answer.” He was standing straight facing Cripplehorn, his beer forgotten.

“I suspect that man I pointed out of wearing a pistol under his coat.”

“Ain't he your friend?”

“It's for his own protection I'm asking. If he could be placed in a cell until he's sober, you'll find him a model citizen upon release.”

“Gus, see to them at the other end.”

The bartender had moved to within earshot of the low conversation. He nodded and carried the bottle to where a group of men dressed like teamsters was staring at the schooner in the painting waiting for it to sink.

“You see the pistol?” asked the man in uniform.

“No, but I can't imagine him without one.”

“What's his name?”

“Frank Farmer.”

The stiff-visored cap moved back, propelled by the muscles in the officer's forehead. “The gun man?”

“Retired.”

“I never heard of such a thing happening this side of a churchyard.”

“He's not wanted anywhere, if that's your concern.”

“Farmer, huh?” He tugged at his sidewhiskers. Cripplehorn could read the man as easily as an amateur card player: No one wanted to be a street patrolman forever. Finally the officer threw a coin on the bar.

“Keep him here if you can. I might need help.”

“Try not to hurt him. He's a white fellow when he isn't in his cups.”

 

SIXTEEN

Partnerships are based on personal regard and mutual trust. Where one is missing, the other is inconsequential.

He spotted Cripplehorn's exaggerated hat before the train rolled to a stop. Alighting, he avoided shaking hands by carrying his bedroll by its strap with one hand and his Ballard with the other. “Where's Frank?”

“He's arranged accommodations. Have you?”

“I ain't got the price. I'll camp outside town. I sure do hope you wasn't lying in that newspaper story.”

“There's no need to worry about that.”

“I like to worry, Dodger. It's got me this far.”

“It looks like you took the rocky road.”

“I ran into some excitement, but I'll heal. I won't ask you again about Frank.”

“You'll have to accept my word he's in town. I can't take the chance of old associations come to grief before their time.”

“That's a fancy way of saying I can't keep a fence on my own self.”

“I never doubted it, but I'm not so sure about Mr. Farmer.”

“You like to light both ends of the match, Cripplehorn.”

“I'd consider it a favor if you'd call me either Cripplehorn or Dodger; not both. I'm told the vigilantes are inactive at present, but aliases have a way of exciting old passions. Are you hungry?”

“I could eat the stink out of a skunk.”

Randy checked his gear in the station. They went into the Harvey House, where a hostess in a crisp white apron offered to help Randy into an alpaca coat from a rack.

“No thanks. I ain't cold.”

Cripplehorn said, “It's a house rule. They won't seat you otherwise.”

“What else do I need, a plug hat and a monkey stick?”

“Just a coat.”

He thrust an arm into a sleeve. “Place sure has got toney since I was here last. Next time I'll have to bring along a brass band.”

“I think you'll find the food's worth it.”

“I won't appreciate it. I been eating my own cooking so long I can't tell a potato from buffler hump.”

They were seated in a clean bright room with checked tablecloths. Another young white-aproned woman took their orders and moments later set roast sirloin and boiled sweet potatoes in front of Randy and a pile of blue-point oysters before Cripplehorn. Everything was on Santa Fe Railroad china. Randy watched his host pick up a half-shell and slide an oyster into his mouth. Cripplehorn noticed him staring and raised his brows.