The Long High Noon (21 page)

He was free, while Frank was removed to the Federal House of Corrections in Detroit, Michigan, to serve out the rest of his days at hard labor.

“That ain't fair,” said Randy.

He was back in Fort Smith to claim his belongings, including the Ballard and the Colt, which had been removed from three years in evidence.

MacElroy, a son of the Commonwealth of Virginia who smoked cigarettes in a long onyx holder to avoid staining his fair Van Dyke beard, nodded. He'd invited his client to his office, a cramped room smelling of dust and rotted bindings overlooking Garrison Avenue, to give him the news. A heating stove intended for a much larger room made the air oppressive.

“It's worse than unfair; it's indifferent. The implication is Frank's case was closed when he was taken off Death Row.”

“What you fixing to do about it?”

“Oh, I'll write letters.”

“That's it?”

“It was sufficient to save you both from execution. I might wear them down. You never know. I have a reputation for perseverance.”

“That son of a bitch Parker had us both measured for the rope. I still like him better than this bunch in Washington. You know he cried when he said we'd be hung by the neck till dead, him that'd said the same thing twenty-five times already?”

“He's a sentimental old ogre. Prays in the Methodist church for the souls of the men he sent to hell.”

“I bet Chet Arthur never shed a tear when he buried Frank alive.”

“Well, there's a new president. I doubt Cleveland would have granted my petition.”

“He's the sixth since Frank and I been fighting.”

“I expected you to be pleased. I've been through the transcripts of your double trial so many times I can recite them chapter and verse. I never read of a kind word passing between you.”

“Just because you want a fellow dead don't mean you want him locked up in Michigan.”

“I'm afraid your gentleman-duellist's ideas of honor don't apply to the criminal justice system.”

“It's criminal all right.”

 

TWENTY-SEVEN

Time is worse than a thief. It murders youth and hope.

Fifteen years plodded past, pulled by oxen. At times they seemed to stop utterly, caught in mire or forced to wait for water to recede. The pace was the same for both men, outside as well as in.

The world spun around them. It was like being stuck trackside with a busted wheel, watching trains hurtle past, all the faces in the windows a blur.

Geronimo, a great butcher and liar to his people, surrendered himself and his band of thirty Chiricahua to General Miles in a place called Skeleton Canyon, turning himself from a bloodthirsty savage to a celebrity overnight.

Another fierce winter, worse than the one that had closed the Lazy Y and most of its competitors in 1882, swept away the last of the open range, leaving behind fenced ranches, truck farms, and hundreds of tons of bloated cattle carcasses to be buried in mass graves.

The
San Francisco Examiner
ran out of gunfights and published a poem by Ernest Lawrence Thayer called “Casey at the Bat.”

The Indian Nations, now known as Oklahoma Territory, hosted a barn-burner of a horse race: Hundreds of would-be homesteaders whipping teams and mounts into a lather to claim 160 acres apiece in free land. The Cherokee Strip vanished overnight, its original settlers pushed aside and the scum of the earth fled to Canada and Mexico.

The Congress and President Benjamin Harrison sliced Dakota in two, bunched it in with Montana, Washington, Idaho, and Wyoming to bring the total of U.S. states to forty-four.

A gang of Oklahoma stick-up artists experimented with bank robbery in Kansas, and got themselves shot to ribbons for stepping outside their specialty, which was robbing trains. Four men paid for it with their lives, including two brothers named Dalton.

The first copies of
The National Geographic
found their way into barbershops, where the African issues wore out faster than the edge on a razor.

A nobody named Selman shot John Wesley Hardin to death in El Paso, prudently from behind.

A battleship went down off Cuba and that fool McKinley declared war on the whole goldarn Spanish Empire.

Meanwhile, Frank slept nights in an eight-by-five cell in Detroit and busted rocks days to pave the streets for automobiles, and Randy tried suicide.

*   *   *

It's difficult to say which man suffered more: Frank, because of the unremitting hardship and monotony of incarceration, or Randy, because the purpose of his existence—to end Frank's—had been stolen from him with the flick of a little wooden mallet.

In Sedalia, Missouri, he aimed his Colt at his temple, but owing to his drunken condition missed and shot off the end of his nose, resulting in copious bleeding but not death. The woman who ran the boarding house found him, and charged him for the ruined bedding after the bandages came off.

Suicide was against state law, although no one who'd succeeded had ever been prosecuted. Instead of jailing him, the city police put him in a lock ward at the hospital and strapped him to a bed. When after three days he promised a foreigner in a white coat with a billy-goat beard he wouldn't repeat the offense, he was released and his weapon returned to him. He'd sold the Ballard for grocery money a year earlier, the West being wolfed out and Randy so far outside rifle range. He kept the pistol to shoot rats and such, his usual accommodations not measuring up to the standards of the Eldorado.

One night, lying wide awake amongst the vermin in a five-cent-a-room palace in Jefferson City, his Colt out to protect his boots from the men snoring in the surrounding beds, he got a brainstorm from a pint bottle: Everybody was always trying to break out of prison, but nobody ever tried to break in. They wouldn't be expecting that.

Hopping trains wasn't as easy as it was once. The new coal-burners were greased lightning, and with the country going through one of its panics all the guards were on the prod for tramps. After several false tries he managed to grab a handle on a westbound, and to jump off when the train slowed for a curve outside Pawnee, O.T. There he walked into a hardware store run by a husband and wife from Wisconsin, place cluttered with rolls of barbed and baling wire, hickory axe handles, and Sears, Roebuck catalogues, shot a hole in a nail keg, and demanded cash. But the husband was unfamiliar with the new cash register, brass and bronze and big as a plow, and terrified besides. Randy was watching him fumble for the magic combination of keys and crank that would open the drawer when the wife crept up behind the desperado and swung an axe handle at his head, putting a crack in it and ruining his Texas hat.

In the Fort Smith courtroom, he fingered the lump where his head had been shaved, stitched, and plastered and waited for Parker to come in, adjudicate, and ship him off to Detroit. Once he was in the House of Corrections, he reckoned, any sort of makeshift weapon would save the nation the expense of boarding Frank Farmer for the remainder of his natural span.

But he hadn't read a newspaper in months and didn't know that Judge Parker had died in office after twenty-one years on the bench. The squirt who showed up looked like a little kid in the big horsehair chair behind the massive cherrywood desk. He gave Randy three to five years in the federal penitentiary at Little Rock, four hundred miles from his target.

Meanwhile, a letter arrived at a cramped overheated office overlooking Garrison Avenue in Fort Smith:

O
FFICE OF THE
A
TTORNEY
G
ENERAL

W
ASHINGTON,
D.C.

Dear F.S.T. MacElroy, esq.:

In response to your letters regarding Francis X. Farmer, please be advised that this office is considering your request for a hearing to determine whether parole is indicated.…

The honest Indians of Oklahoma Territory mourned Isaac Parker, who had brought swift justice so many times on their behalf. Not so the Congress. Its members picked over his carcass, divvied up what was left of his jurisdiction, and reviewed all his decisions starting with when Hector was a pup. Some were let stand, others reversed and the prisoners granted either new trials or a presidential pardon. Still others were paroled. On June 5, 1900, Frank Farmer walked into a mostly empty room where five men sat behind a long table from a Masonic lodge and walked out a free man.

*   *   *

The news got five lines from editors who vaguely recalled the drama of Locke
vs
. Farmer. The
Barbary Spar,
owned and operated still by Major W.B. Updegraff, bald now and stone deaf, made use of improved photograph reproduction and accompanied the piece with the picture taken of Randy and Frank in Cimarron, cropped to the size of a postage stamp. The one-column headline read:

FRONTIER ERA GUNMAN RELEASED.

Newspapers were banned in the Little Rock penitentiary, to avoid exciting the inmates with stories of crime and pictures of Russian ballerinas in tights; but if you had the contacts and had put back a little money you could get anything. Randy hadn't had much to put back, but what he scrimped on tobacco makings he saved for news from the outside world. With things moving so fast all around, you never knew when the status quo might make a square turn.

His stomach sank when he found the teeny piece about Frank in the telegraph column of the
Little Rock Gazette.
Luck and timing had been against him so long he reckoned the Lord had it in for him for all those times he'd taken His name in vain. But then his heart quickened. If he behaved himself, he, too, would be out in eighteen months; no time at all when you stood it up against twenty-five years.

 

TWENTY-EIGHT

An ocean voyage is the best remedy for the stagnant soul.

Frank Farmer thought San Francisco the biggest, fastest, loudest place in the world: the boldest whores, the busiest streets, saloons the size of cotton warehouses.

Then he saw Nome.

It was a sprawl bigger than Creede or Deadwood in their time. The beach was a sea of tents, enough canvas to make a thousand as big as Cripplehorn's show tent outside Cimarron. With nothing to separate them but duck stretched over frame, the tin-tack pianos, banjos, and string bands made a racket like a trainload of kettles tumbling down a ravine. The place had more whorehouses than Dodge City, Denver, and Tombstone combined, some of them honest-to-God cribs where a hostess entertained you in the little wooden rick where she slept, stacked one on top of the next in rows like crates in a warehouse, and you could track the progress of what was going on in each house from ten doors down. There was no escape from the bustle except the hop joints, where a man could crawl into a bunk and smoke up unobtainable women and colors that didn't exist.

Someone had stubbed his toe on a nugget in Alaska, and the rest of the world came running.

Back in Frisco, where the ships set sail, you couldn't cross a street without taking the chance of being run over by a carriage or a buckboard or a by-God automobile, squawking its horn and choking on its own exhaust with a bang that throwed your heart into your throat, thinking you'd been dry-gulched. You could walk across the harbor, stepping from schooner to steamship to tugboat to barge and never get your feet wet. It might've been that way clear to Alaska, but it wasn't. Frank bought a berth on a steamer called the
Pelican,
and found himself on the ocean for the first time in his life.

If Randy was alive—and he was sure he'd know if he wasn't—Nome was where he'd be found.

Neither man could resist going someplace where people gathered in herds. It was the best place to look. Big mining interests had claimed the gold fields of California and Colorado from under the feet of individual fortune-seekers, the silver mines had played out or flooded, and for all the annoyance they brought with them the ticking of horseless carriages was still too faint to excite much interest in the vast pools of oil slumbering beneath Texas and Pennsylvania. Best of all, Nome had few laws and fewer men still to enforce them. It was like the old Cherokee Strip without that pest Cripplehorn to spoil things.

It was a rough crossing. The sea stood up on its hind legs and pitched over onto its forefeet, arching and twisting, sunfishing like an unbroke mustang by Beelzebub out of a waterspout. Frank got right well acquainted with the lee rail of the
Pelican
and decided if Randy didn't get lucky and kill him he'd find his way back home on foot somehow.

*   *   *

His first day outside, Randy broke another law.

He spent the wages he'd made working the mangle in the prison laundry on a day coach and crossed the state line four hours later, violating the terms of his parole.

“Where you off to, old-timer?” asked the man in the seat facing his, a fellow in a striped coat and straw boater who looked like one-fourth of a barbershop quartet.

“North.”

“You caught the wrong train. This one's heading west.”

“It was the first one out of the station.”

“What's your hurry?”

He allowed himself a bitter grin. “Gonna get rich up in Alaska.”

*   *   *

It was a long way, a man had to eat, and the jobs didn't come in a straight line. He loaded bales of cotton and barrels of molasses aboard flatboats in New Orleans, spread tar on the streets of Houston, cleaned and polished cuspidors and swamped up vomit in a saloon called La Perla in the Spanish peninsula of Baja, California. The Mexican government appeared to have lost interest in banishing him from the republic. He slept in barns and stables and out in the open. He was a ghost, a figure of derision in rags with a short nose. He spent a night in jail in Yuba City for jerking his pistol on a gang of boys who pelted him with gravel and horse apples.

Randy hated boats and such truck; losing his horse and gear when that ferry capsized by Fort Benton in '77 was as close to a sailing man as he ever cared to get. But unless they built a bridge, he knew he'd have to put up with some ocean. There was too much of it between Frisco and Nome, so he set his sights on Seattle.