The Long High Noon (3 page)

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While the buzzards were still sizing Frank up in Colorado, Randy Locke was fattening his bankroll in Wyoming. He had what happened to the buffalo to thank for it.

Its population swollen by the easy life of gorging on millions of skinned carcasses left to rot, the Great Plains Wolf crunched down the last overlooked bone and turned its attention to cattle. The ranchers objected, and offered hefty bounties for fresh pelts.

Randy, who was no stranger to wolfing, approved, and in the case of some white-muzzled veterans shrewd enough to avoid traps and poison, cashed them in for rewards worthy of a gang of human desperadoes. Soon he could afford to dine in the best restaurants in Laramie and Cheyenne and sleep between clean hotel sheets every night he wasn't working.

He could afford to, but he didn't.

The improvement in his finances didn't extend to the habits he'd acquired as a piteous drunk. Waiters served him only at back doors, where the stink of old guts on his rags wouldn't offend fellow diners, and hotel clerks refused him accommodation entirely. He slept in stables and out in the weather and practiced his draw for hours, wearing down the scar tissue that slowed his right arm. In his impatience he shifted back and forth until he could clear leather and hit his mark with either hand as well as most men did with the one they favored.

It wasn't the wolves he was practicing for. The local species was dying so fast it was getting so all a man had to do was give one of them a mean look and it would roll over and kick itself still. It had taken the white man a century to kill off the buffalo, but only two years to send the Great Plains Wolf to extinction.

Poisoning was the cause more than hunting. With meat herds falling prey to the packs, it was considered a breach of good manners to venture out on any sort of errand without including a bottle of strychnine crystals in one's gear. If a man came upon a carcass that still had meat on its bones, he tainted it. A single crystal killed more scavenging grays than an experienced hunter with a repeater.

People, too. A fellow down on his luck found out his fortunes hadn't changed when he fed his family a loin of windfall venison and watched them contort and die. The frontier was a hard place, harder still with the arrival of Man.

A great shift was taking place. The Indian problem was all but settled: President Grant had authorized the plan of General Terry, Captain Benteen, and Colonel Custer to bottle up the Sioux and Cheyenne nations in an obscure valley in Montana Territory, the wild beeves had been cleared to make room for domestic cattle, and predators were reduced to roving independent operators named Hardin, James, and Younger, with bounties on their heads like the wolves themselves. Homesteaders were fencing in the open range, building schools and churches on grounds formerly reserved for pagan worship. Soon the frontier would be as much a part of dead history as tricorne hats and powdered wigs. If a man stood still and pointed his ears toward the East, he could hear the earth turning.

But two men refused to stand still. When they had food in their bellies and full pokes on their hips, each had the other in his craw.

When Wyoming Territory ran scarce of lobos, Randy crossed into Utah, where he busted a jug of Old Pepper over a fellow's head for commenting on his odor and when the law came looking for him withdrew above the treeline to trap and shoot wolves. He gave his victim a month either to die or to get better and the tin stars to lose interest, then returned to the city on the big lake to sell his pelts, celebrate his prosperity, and ponder where to start looking for Frank Farmer.

Who was looking for him.

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The Latter-Day Saints were close-mouthed in the presence of strangers, particularly when they were asking about other strangers: The whole population seemed to deny any knowledge of English when Frank pleaded for help finding his long-lost brother, who couldn't be reached to be told of their mother's death, and kept its hands at its sides when he offered money.

Mormons weren't supposed to partake of hard liquor, but he found that not to be universal his first night in Salt Lake City when he lifted flat-brimmed hats off men sleeping in alleys, looking for a familiar round face with a squint. All he got was tangled beards, fermented breath, and best wishes on his salvation.

“Save the saving for yourself,” he said, dropping their hats back onto their faces.

He was about to give it up as a cold trail when a druggist he bribed with a double eagle, a skinny gentile with ears like a ewer and an Adam's apple that stuck out like a third elbow, told him he sold two bottles of snakebite medicine nightly to a tramp who answered Randy's description.

“As a rule I'd offer him a snake just in case,” said the pill salesman, “but he stinks up the alley. The cats are starting to complain.”

“Where's he hang his hat?”

“Don't know and don't care, just as long as it's downwind.”

The sun was sinking toward the flats, painting purple fingers on the brine.

“He been in yet tonight?”

“Never by daylight. He got into some kind of trouble a while back, but why he bothers to wait for dark I can't say. You can smell him before you see him.”

“Wolfers stink and no mistake.”

“Not like this one. He smells like his heart's corrupted clear to the center.”

“That's my man.”

“Why you'd want him is the question. I'd refuse him, even if the accounts wouldn't balance at the end of the week, but that blink of his gives me the fantods. He's crazier'n a foaming dog.”

Frank flipped another double eagle—his last—and held it out. “I'll have two bottles and your apron.”

“That all? You can have the skullbender for a half-dollar and my apron for free. I change 'em by the week, on account of the strychnine.”

“That and a seat by the back door for an hour or two.”

The druggist looked at the cracked butt of the Remington sticking out of Frank's belt. “I don't want no trouble.”

“This buys plenty.”

The jug-eared man worked his Adam's apple, then agreed to the bargain.

Frank smoked what was left of his tobacco sitting on a three-legged chair inside the door to the alley while the proprietor ground prescriptions and entered numbers into his big ledger up front. His boy came in from a delivery and he told him to go home.

“What about that case of codeine you wanted me to unpack?”

“I unpacked it. Things are slow.”

“Well, I left my schoolbag in back.”

“It'll keep. Tomorrow's Saturday.”

When the druggist came back to make sure his visitor wasn't stuffing his pockets with tablets and tongue depressors, he saw the bottles were still unopened.

“Ain't you going to take even a swig?”

Frank shook his head. “You don't mess with your bait.”

“It's getting late. Maybe he ain't coming.”

“You said he came every night.”

“I told you he's crazy.”

“Who told you I ain't?”

“You can have your double eagle back, and you're welcome to the liquor. I'm commencing to think that coin's jinxed.”

“Suit yourself, but I'm sticking.” Frank stretched his arms above his head, bringing the butt of the Remington into view.

“My mama told me I'd catch my death in Utah. I was just too full of piss and vinegar to listen.”

“A man should listen to his mother, then shut up about it when he didn't.”

The jug-eared man returned to his accounts and prescriptions.

It had been full dark three-quarters of an hour, and the druggist kept hauling out his turnip watch and looking at it, then at the front door, which was two doors down from the marshal's office, when someone knocked on the alley side.

Frank got up so quickly the chair tipped and almost fell, but he caught it before it could make a noise that might spook his quarry and set it carefully back on its legs. He bent, picked up the bottles, and cradling them in his left arm, used that hand to turn the knob while with the other he drew the secondhand pistol from under his apron.

He put it away in haste.

A young woman stood in the alley wearing a red wrap over tarnished sequins and feathers in her hair. Her face was painted and she smelled as if she'd fallen into a rain barrel filled with lavender and toweled off with verbena leaves. It wasn't the rank odor Frank had expected, nor the form and features to go with it, and when she smiled at him, showing a gold tooth, and thrust out a handful of coins, he reached for them automatically; he was broke, after all.

The woman stepped to the side then, revealing the leering, filth-smeared visage of Randy Locke with its leprous patch of frostbitten cheek, crouched behind her stinking to high heaven and fisting his Colt. Fire flew from the muzzle.

 

FOUR

A gentleman never sees his name in a newspaper.

The impact of the shot slung Frank on his back. Miraculously, the bottles were spared, rolling harmlessly across the pinewood floor to a stop at the base of a crate filled with headache powders, where the druggist rescued them and placed them back in inventory, snakebite apparently being very common on the shore of the Great Salt Lake and the source of a large percentage of his income. It was a cinch the customer who'd paid for them wouldn't have any more use for spirits where he was headed.

The doctor, a respected elder in the Church of All Saints, a Godlike fellow with snowy hair and beard and eyes as blue as the lake, despaired several times of his patient's recovery, from the moment a pair of solid citizens carried him in, with a fly crawling undisturbed on his face, through several relapses just when it looked like he might be turning the bend. At the finish he thought about submitting a paper on the case to the
American Medical Journal
in Boston, but on reflection he reckoned it smacked of pride.

The slug lay close to the heart, too deep to reach through the chest, and had to be extracted through the back with a sure and steady hand. Dr. Elgar was sure of his hand, but not of the network of nerves that propelled the fingers; he eschewed strong drink, being a man of deep faith and conviction, but he'd reached his threescore and ten and the copper bracelet he wore on each wrist didn't appear to have made much headway against creeping rheumatism.

Many hours of surgery were required. Fatigue and self-doubt on top of his swollen joints led to tremors and many breaks for rest were necessary. Much blood was lost, and although some discoveries had been made in the science of transfusion, blood types remained a mystery. Many a rabbit and white rat had sacrificed itself to no progress at all.

When at great length the bullet was free with no damage to the heart or spine, infection set in, complicated by pneumonia. This doctor had served with the Prussian Army in Jena, and knew rather more about enteric fever, and not enough about its treatment, than he cared to admit. Frank's temperature soared. The sheets he lay on were as hot to the touch as boiled linen, and poultices were applied and removed with no sign of success. Telegrams went out to leaders in the medical field. One suggested leeches; another suggested the leader who'd suggested them should be burned at the stake as a reverse heretic. A Viennese physician who was turning his attention to the health of the mind wired in favor of cocaine, then sent another cable canceling the first. During this exchange, Frank's fever broke; but whether the poultices and soaking his sheets in ice water had anything to do with this reversal of fortunes no one could say.

“Ach!” pronounced the doctor. “Perhaps there is a God after all, and He is less judgmental than advertised.”

During his long recuperation, in a makeshift hospital established in a back room of the ornate Mormon Temple, with a ponderous crucifix leaning out from the wall above his bed like the Sword of Damascus, the patient learned that Randy had caught wind of Frank's search, anticipated the trap he'd lain, and bought the services of a woman of dubious occupation to confuse him and slow his hand. Randy had ridden out of town directly his mission was accomplished, long before a citizens' commission could be appointed to pursue him.

In all likelihood, he thought his enemy was dead.

Upon regaining his strength, Frank worked off his obligation to the doctor by sweeping his office and scrubbing his medical instruments. It occurred to him that he'd spent most of his working hours paying out the expenses of his recovery from ailments related directly to Randy. This scarcely softened his opinion of the central fixation of his life.

By the time Frank's debt was dismissed, Randy's trail might as well have led across an icepack. He struck out in search of employment and a place to bide his time until news surfaced of the whereabouts of his ancient antagonist.

Seasons passed before Randy discovered that he'd failed to lift the burden of Frank Farmer from the world.

In Carson City, Nevada, he celebrated his victory with a long, blistering soak in a bath house, got a shave and haircut, bought himself a complete new wardrobe and a valise to pack it in, and secured first-class passage in a Pullman coach to San Francisco, that sinkhole of pleasure. He'd saved enough by eating simple fare and staying out of hotels to keep his wolfing profits largely intact, and there was no better place to burn money than the Barbary Coast. He leaned back against the plush headrest and dreamt about good whiskey, friendly cards, and accommodating women. It was his first holiday since Appomattox.

Unnoticed by the pair in their relentless determination to destroy each other, the West had begun to extract a deep fascination from the East: The faster it barreled toward past history, the keener the curiosity among those in a position to monitor it from a safe distance.

Custer's spectacular finish, gun battles in the gold camps and cattle towns, and the expertly managed exploits of a saddle tramp who called himself Buffalo Bill, had kindled a blaze of interest that demanded fresh fuel by the week. It was only a question of time before a running gunfight that had involved the same two men for more than a decade aroused journalistic notice.