Stringer on the Mojave

By Lou Cameron

Dead men don't tell tales. Neither do dead women or children. And when their corpses have been dryin' out in the desert sun for fifty years, there's nary a whisper left of what happened. So when the six Mojave mummies are found near Esperanza, it's up to Stringer to get the story. But someone in Esperanza wants him to just plain git.

First, there's that invitation to "butt out," signed with a skull. Then, the town welcome wagon wants to give him a buckshot bouquet. And when a hired gun tries to back-shoot him, Stringer knows he's up against a varmint as slick and deadly as a desert snake.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
• Release date: Nov 3, 2013
• ISBN: 9781620641620

Lou Cameron

Lou Cameron (1924–2010) was a prolific American novelist with over three hundred titles to his credit, from adventure, science fiction, crime, and war to movie novelizations, Westerns, and more. In addition to the Stringer Western series, he created the Longarm character, writing under the name Tabor Evans, as well as the Renegade series, writing as Ramsay Thorne. Cameron won the Western Writers of America Spur Award for Best Novel in 1976, and he was also an accomplished comic book illustrator.

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CAMERON

CHAPTER ONE

It was just as hard to dislike Frederic Remington as a man as it was to respect him as a reporter. So when the overgrown Teddy Bear in the dapper derby grabbed Stringer in a grizzly hug on the corner of Market and Montgomery, growling something about a drink to the memory of San Juan Hill, the younger and leaner employee of the San Francisco Sun perforce allowed himself to be half-led, half-carried to one of the few downtown saloons open for business during the morning rush hour. But even as the burly New Yorker deposited him in a booth, Stringer felt obliged to say he had to get to work sometime that morning.

Remington signaled one of the two waitresses leaning against the bar for service as he replied, That’s what I wanted to ask you about, MacKail. You’re still doing those, ah, Wild West yarns for old Sam Barca at the Sun, right?

Stringer cocked an eyebrow and reached for his makings as he dryly replied, They pay me to cover such items from my vantage point as a Californio raised in cow country. I think it was our mutual pal, Richard Harding Davis, who wrote that whopper you got to illustrate down Cuba way, that time.

Remington winced and got out a pack of Fatima tailor-mades in time to prevent Stringer rolling his own. He said, Please don’t smoke that cowshit, MacKail. My digestion's shot as it is. Have a real cigarette and I'll show you why.

Stringer took a Fatima with a shrug. As he was lighting the more expensive and cloyingly sweet smoke, the waitress took Remington's order for a brace of boiler makers. Remington was like that. He never asked what anyone else wanted. He served them what he wanted and never doubted the whole world shared his own somewhat expensive tastes. He lit a cigarette for himself, then handed Stringer a small envelope. Stringer took out the blank card inside. Someone had written in blood or perhaps iodine Drop the story if you know what's good for you! and signed the warning with a crudely drawn skull with a dagger driven in one eye socket and out where the ear might have been, if skulls came with ears.

Stringer put the card back in its envelope and handed the results back to the pudgy illustrator, saying, I get lots of crackpot mail, Fred. What are you covering out here this spring?

Remington said, That’s what's so unsettling. I'm not covering anything for anybody. I still do some illustrations for Harpers and Hearst, but to tell the truth I've been concentrating more on art for art’s sake, now that I’ve made a name for myself as a painter and sculptor.

The waitress brought their drinks. Stringer ignored the shot of bourbon and simply sipped the beer chaser, lest he show up for work walking funny as well as late. Remington downed his own shot murmuring, Waste not, want not, and downed Stringer’s before he went on, soberly, I just came out here to see about doing a life-sized bronze of Portola. You remember him, of course?"

Stringer chuckled dryly and replied, A mite before my time if we’re talking about the Spanish gent who settled Frisco Bay. I don’t see why anyone would be at all concerned with you or even Richard Harding Davis reporting on the Portola Expedition of sixteen-whatever. They must think you’re out here to draw pictures of something else.

Remington sighed and said, Tell me something I might not have already guessed. You’re covering the news regular, here, MacKail. You’d know if anything big was breaking out this way, right?

Stringer nodded but said, I doubt I’d share it with William Randolph Hearst, for free. But to settle your mind, for old time’s sake, I can’t think of anything wilder than the troops over at Fort Mason embarking for the Philippines. I don’t think that’s supposed to be a secret. Our old pal, Teddy Roosevelt, keeps sending the boys off with speeches about the white man’s burden. I just can’t see him sending you warnings not to report the story or, hell, draw pictures of naked ladies striding up the gang planks.

Remington grimaced, swallowed a vast gulp of suds, and wiped his dapper waxed moustache with a silk kerchief as he growled, "That was a low blow, MacKail. I never knew those illustrations I drew for young Hearst were based on pure bull. I don’t think he did, either. We got it from hitherto reliable sources that the Spanish were stripping and searching American women on the Havana docks. In any event, I’m not doing that sort of work now. These days, the public seems to demand photographs instead of sketches of big news events.

He finished the last of his beer and added, I don’t know why. Even when a photographer happens to be right on the scene the results are so blurred and muddy, next to a good line drawing.

Stringer said, I know. I saw your sketches of the events at Wounded Knee, next to some pictures an army photographer took. You’re right about how glamorous your version looked, next to smudgy black and white prints of dead Sioux in the snow.

Then he got to his feet, saying, I’d be proud to sit here longer and discuss art with you, Fred, if I didn’t have to worry about next month’s rent. I’ve no idea who could be trying to keep you from drawing pictures out here, this spring. Frankly, I feel someone’s out to green you. For, no offense, I do have a certain rep as an investigative newspaperman, and if there was anything all that important up, I’d have likely got my own death threats by now.

They shook on it and parted friendly. Stringer made his way to the cast-iron front of the San Francisco Sun, just up Montgomery. They kept his boss, Sam Barca, in a frosted-glass corner-box lest he frighten the younger members of the staff with his leathery hatchet face and mule skinner way with words. Stringer had to negotiate the length of the press room to get there, and this morning a sweet young thing busting a gut to look like the Gibson Girl, and not quite making it, stopped him en route to hand him an envelope, saying, This seems to be for you, Mister MacKail. It would surely simplify things if they gave you a regular desk of your own around here.

He found it easier to agree with her as he took the envelope. A lot of men didn’t seem to understand why he preferred to work as a field stringer when he could have a staff job, and the fool desk that went with it, for the asking. Trying to explain to a woman was impossible as well as tedious. He tore the envelope open as he walked the rest of the way to Barca’s cubicle. So he was stepping inside as he snorted in disgust and said, Aw, shit, this is just stupid!

Sam Barca blinked out from under the green eye-shade he wore over his brown bald head to ask, severely, Is that any way to talk to your elders, even when you get here on time?

Stringer said, I was late because another famous newspaperman got one of these dumb things, and then he handed the message to his boss. He’d already seen that it warned him to butt out, and that it was signed the same way, with a dagger-pierced skull.

Sam Barca said, You’re right. It’s stupid. I don’t know what story you’re working on next, myself. So how could this asshole?

Sam Barca listened, wry-faced, as Stringer rolled a Bull Durham and recounted his earlier conversation with Frederic Remington. As Stringer ran out of things to say and lit the smoke, Barca decided, Some people collect stamps and some people send loco notes to newspaper men. Whether the crank who likes to draw such crude skulls is out to hide something serious or not, he’s added one and one to get something like five or six. Remington’s not covering any local story and I’ve got an out of town feature for you that nobody could be interested in covering up.

He rummaged through the clutter atop his desk, found the wrinkled yellow telegram he was after, and growled, Here we go. I’d write this off as a silly season tip if I didn’t know the small town newspaperman who put it out on the wire. You know about old Francis Borax Smith, of course?

Stringer nodded when he answered, The cuss who discovered borax near Death Valley, right?

Sam Barca said, Wrong. A lot of old boys knew the salts of those dry lakes were valuable before Borax Smith figured out how to haul it out of the desert with those big twenty-mule rigs. The slick part was hitching water wagons to the rear of the big borax wagons. For there’s just no way to carry a decent load and enough water for its team on anything with four wheels.

Stringer took an impatient drag on his smoke before he said, Sam they’ve been hauling borax across the desert to the rail line that way for a good twenty years, and you want me to cover Smith’s operation as news?

Barca shook his head and said, Nope. I want you to cover what one of those twenty- mule crews just found, half a day’s ride out from the trail town of Esperanza. The grim discovery was hub-deep in the caliche of a shallow draw with a screen of Joshua and high greasewood between it and the trail. Nobody but a mule skinner perched atop a two-story borax wagon might have ever spotted the wagon hoops and, even so, it took some curiosity to inspire a closer look-see, the second or third time they passed by, near the end of a mighty dry stretch.

Stringer shrugged and said, I give up. You say they spotted wagon hoops? To which Barca replied, soberly, Hoops of an old Conestoga wagon that could have been considered too old-timey and heavy at the time. The canvas cover was sunbaked and wind-shook dry and brittle as wasp-nest paper, of course, and had fallen down betwixt the hoops to cover the contents of the wagon like big squares of torn-down wallpaper. When the borax crew lifted the old dry canvas away they found a wagon-load of folk. A man, two women and three kiddies, bound for the coast back around 1849, judging from their duds and the old Hall carbine the man still held across his knees. Jed Miller, the publisher of the Esperanza Monitor, says the mummies are so well preserved you can see that one of the women and the little girl were pretty, even though all of ’em are sort of prune faced right now.

Stringer grimaced and asked, Where’s the story? A lot of the forty-niners got lost, strayed, or stolen on the way west, Sam. I can see maybe a column at the most, milking it for pathos. There are abandoned wagons and dead bodies in various stages of preservation along all the old wagon trails, now. I don’t have to go all the way down to the Mojave to tell you what happened to that party. They got separated from their train, probably because they had such a heavy wagon. If there were two adult women, there ought to have been two men. So let’s say one of them led the stock on for the wells at Esperanza, afoot, while his pard stood guard over the women and children with that old single shooter.

Barca objected, The wells at Esperanza weren’t drilled nearly that early. To which Stringer replied, with a shrug, I just said one man went looking for water and never got back. Did your pal, Miller, say whether they had a name to go with any of those unfortunates hung out to dry all these years?

Barca shook his head and said, No such luck. When the borax haulers reported their find in town, the local deputies rode out for a closer look-see, naturally. Miller says they’ve hauled the mummies into Esperanza with a view to putting them on exhibit or something. They found no identification or anything of value on the scene, or in their pockets. I can see how you could play it for pathos. The half-dozen of them lost in the desert all these years, waiting in vain for just one sip of cool clear water and all that sob-sister stuff.

Stringer looked disgusted and asked, Do I look like a sob sister? You’ve got a point, though, Sam. You’d be better off assigning the feature to one of our suffragettes. Type up such a tale in a matter-of-fact way and all you have is that fifty-odd years ago some unknown greenhorns strayed from a wagon train that was maybe following the Spanish Trail across the Mojave, bogged down in soft caliche, and died of their own thirsty foolishness, end of story.

He blew smoke out of both nostrils with a bullish expression to go with the gesture and insisted, It’s a long dusty trip without much of a story at the end of it, Sam. I’d rather hang around and find out who sent love letters to Fred Remington and me, and how come. I can think of a dozen local scandals someone might be suffering a guilty conscience about and...

I can think of two dozen, Barca cut in, adding, That’s why I don’t want you wandering around town as a moving target before my pals on the Frisco P.D. can determine whether those notes were sent by a harmless crank or a dangerous loon.

Stringer started to object. Barca raised a hand to silence him and insisted, Hear me out, damn it. All you and Fred Remington have in common is a rep for almost photographic memory. I like Charly Russell’s cowboy sketches better, myself, but Remington sketches tighter and gets every detail, so if I was trying to cover something up I wouldn’t want either of you in town.

Stringer grimaced and said, Hell, I’m a writer, not a damned old artist.

But Barca insisted, Same difference as far as your reportage goes. Why do you think I send you to cover rodeos and Mexican revolutions, Stringer? Your boyhood up in the Mother Lode cattle range and your experience as a war correspondent left you with an eye as well as a nose for news. You and Remington both spot details at a distance that the average reporter might not. Do you recall how you, alone of all the many reporters covering the big rodeo in Cheyenne, spotted crookery only an ex-cowhand ever could have?

Stringer smiled wistfully and observed, It damn near got me killed, but I sure met some nice ladies up yonder. Then he brightened and said, That story started out a lot like this one, now that I study on it. I might never have noticed the way the crooks were trying to screw those rodeo riders if they hadn’t expected a reporter with my rep to expose them and taken the first shots at me. There’s nothing like an attempt on a man’s life, or even a nasty note from mysterious strangers, to concentrate his mind.

He took a last drag on his smoke, snubbed the rest out on the sole of the cowboy boot he wore under the business suit he wore in town, and decided, "That’s it. Someone’s worried Fred or me might spot something all the other newspaper men in town might not. Since he’s not a local boy, it couldn’t be anything as subtle as the water company’s scandal or the real estate pricks who’ve been out to relocate Chinatown on the Hunter’s Point mud flats. It has to be something with a sort of western or military angle to it. Old Fred drew blatant propaganda pictures when we were down in Cuba that time, but I have to say he got every seam on every uniform