The Long High Noon (7 page)

The manager, who'd demanded time to think over his proposition, turned him down the next day, and he was ejected from his hotel at the end of the week for nonpayment, minus his luggage. In due course he found himself in an establishment not unlike the one where he'd met Locke, and after he pawned his silver pocket watch to finance his stay there, he faced the fact that the street would be his next place of lodging if something didn't happen soon to reverse his situation.

Walking around the block to consider the matter, he stopped on a corner to wait for a brewer's dray to pass and read an engraved brass plaque attached to the four-story brick building at his elbow:

REDEMPTION HOUSE

Not being one to fail to recognize an opportunity or an omen, he climbed the front steps and rang the bell. A woman in black bombazine with her hair in a bun answered, frowning at his gaudy waistcoat, high-heeled boots, and dramatic hat brim.

“Pray, madam, what is the nature of this establishment?”

The woman adjusted her rimless spectacles. “We are a charitable institution affiliated with the First Unitarian Church. Our ambition is to reform the drunkard and close the temple of blue ruin for good and all.”

He let fall his crest. “I took it for a pawnshop. Do you know of one in this neighborhood?”

“Certainly not.” She began to close the door.

He plucked out his ivory eye and held it up. “I intended to barter this for the price of that blue ruin you mentioned; but perhaps it was the Lord, and not my infernal thirst, that led me to your door.”

Which thereupon opened wide.

*   *   *

For an incentive, the desk clerk at the Palace Hotel brought out an old registration book from the back room and found a forwarding address for Abraham Cripplehorn: The Palmer House, Chicago. Frank cursed his luck, and while he was at it Sheriff Gunter Dierdorf and the range manager's wife in Colorado. His money wouldn't cover the cost of a wire to ask if the man was registered there, much less a trip that far east; and even if it would, he'd sooner spend it looking for Randy direct.

In any case, the fellow might be just a chance acquaintance. There was no surety he knew something Frank didn't.

The desk clerk said, “You might try your luck around November. Mr. Cripplehorn often spends the winter in San Francisco, and he always stays here.”

Frank thanked him for the information. November was three months off; but what was that against the years he'd put in already? It wasn't as if he hadn't another pursuit to occupy him in the meantime.

*   *   *

Cripplehorn was a gifted speaker. He'd discovered the fact in Deadwood, where a run of cards no one quite accepted as accidental had forced him to talk his way out of a short rope and a long drop. Not long after in St. Paul, Minnesota, when his capital was almost as low as at present, he'd stepped in at the last moment for a lecturer on personal hygiene who'd been detained for lewd and lascivious conduct. He'd sent the male half of the audience in the Gaiety Theatre running for the nearest bathhouse with his tale of a Union infantryman whose masculine member had fallen off at Gettysburg for lack of attention to the foreskin.

The ladies of Redemption House, once they'd obtained his pledge never again to partake of strong drink, asked him to address the congregation at the First Unitarian Church, laying open his sordid story and assigning the credit for his reform to the efforts of the organization; for there is a little of the confidence man in us all, when everything's said and done. No remuneration was offered, but when some twenty of his listeners came forward after the final hymn to sign the Pledge, a charter member of the charitable society pressured her husband, a booking agent for Chautauqua, to send him on tour with a salary and all expenses paid. (Coincidentally, he shared his first bill, in Des Moines, Iowa, with Dr. Morris Fassbinder, that well-known advocate for a humane penal system.)

His narrative always started out gently, as if in private conversation. When he came to his sad, riveting story, his voice fell to a murmur, as if he hoped to obscure the shameful details. (His listeners, in fact, were forced to lean forward in their seats and strain their ears during this portion of the address, and therefore captured every word.) Finally he built to a proud and powerful annunciation of his faith in the Lord and the dramatically improved situation that had come of finding Him.

He used just enough of his own story—the spoliation of his innocence, his father's pipe wrench, the horrors of the road—to lend weight to the presentation; he left out evading Mr. Lincoln's draft as impolitic, assigning his injury to an alcohol-influenced incident during army training leading to a medical discharge. The rest of it he'd drawn from a slim volume he found in a bookshop in Cincinnati, purporting to be the privately published confessions of its author. The low point—his attempt to trade his artificial eye for temporary oblivion—was the most popular feature. In time it came to consume the greater part of his oratory. It was his
East Lynne.

He had a rich tenor, pleasing to men and women both (although to a greater degree in the case of women), which he obtained by seasoning his vocal cords backstage with a pull at a flask filled with peach brandy. In lecture halls, tents, open-air arenas, and melodeons from the Ohio Valley to the High Sierras, the Hon. Abraham Titus Cripplehorn (he added the Titus halfway through the circuit, assuring himself two lines in the playbills), Deacon of the First Unitarian Church of Cincinnati, Ohio, and the Voice of Redemption House, railed against the devil in the bottle, shared in the box office proceeds, and put away a little each week to finance the extravaganza he regarded as the venture that would allow him to retire to a lifetime of presidential suites and champagne cocktails.

The tour finished in San Francisco, just in time for winter.

“Mr. Cripplehorn?”

He turned from the register in the onyx-and-marble lobby of the Palace Hotel, expecting a word of praise from an attendant of his lectures, and found himself facing a long-legged man in a town suit that despite recent brushing had absorbed more than its share of dust, sweat, and wood smoke, with a sunburn that looked as if it went all the way to the underside of his skin. He had a pink left ear and visible traces of wax where it had been attached.

 

NINE

Winter: when Mother Nature doffs her bright autumn fashions and dons soft white flannel.

“Cookie, your right name's Locke, ain't it?”

Randy was fishing for a fly that had dropped into his kettle of stew. “Who's asking?”

“Hell, it's me, Shorty. We been in the same bunkhouse near a year now.”

“You're all Shorty or Slim or Stretch or Simp. All of you start with
S
and you all got the same jug ears and monkey face. I stopped trying to cut you out a long time ago.”

He'd been working on the Lazy Y spread in Nebraska since last fall; his predecessor, also called Cookie, had confused loco weed with wild asparagus, took a taste, saw a thousand Sioux mounted on ten-foot ponies, and run smack-dab into the smokehouse stone wall, breaking his neck.

“It's a big outfit,” said the foreman, a man as brown and wrinkled as a tobacco pouch made from buffalo scrotum. “Think you can feed it?”

“I already got a leg up over the last. I hate asparagus.”

And now this.

“Well, is it Locke or ain't it?” Shorty pressed. “Rudolph, right?”

He cornered the fly against a floating piece of bacon fat, scooped it up with the wooden spoon, flung it back over his shoulder, and stirred the stew with the spoon. “Randolph. I'm Randy to foremen and better. Mr. Locke to you rannies.”

“Sandy Ross bet me a cartwheel dollar you're the Locke shot a fellow named Farmer in Texas and again in Utah.”

“He left out Kansas.”

“You saying you're him?”

He said nothing, concentrating. One fly generally led to another.

“What'd he do to you, you wanted him in the ground all this time? He steal your girl or what?”

“Why steal 'em? You can't trade 'em later for a saddle.”

“Well, then, what?”

“Don't like him.”

“I don't much like Sandy, but we don't go gunning for each other.”

“You never met Frank.”

“You're fooling me. You're no pistolero. That leg of yours always gets into camp five minutes after the rest of you. Why is it all you cookies are stove up?”

“What whole man wants to shake out while the rooster's still snoring and get a fire going just to keep a bunch of worthless tramps from starving to death?”

“Aw, you're full of sheepdip. Do I get that buck out of Sandy or what? I—”

Before the stubble-face cowhand could react, Randy swept his Colt out from under his bloodstained apron, cocked it, and sped a slug past his left ear.

“You're lucky you ain't Frank. I took that same ear clean off with just a chamber pot.”

Randy hadn't the born talents of a chef. He was a good enough man with a skillet or a kettle, and his coffee was strong without being bitter, but he could never find tracks in a biscuit. They always came out burned on the bottom and doughy inside, and as a hot biscuit smeared with lard was the first thing a man sank his teeth into on the range, the men of the Lazy Y began each day out of sorts. But when the story of what happened to Shorty Cochran got around, they stopped griping.

The world was turning still, faster west of St. Louis. The Comanches had been whipped in Texas, Sitting Bull was a federal prisoner, and the only hostiles anyone had seen lately outside Apache country were the ones who had chased the last cookie into the smokehouse wall. Abilene was closed to cows and cowboys. People were roller-skating in Dodge City. When the Lazy Y sent its beef to market, the drive ended after two miles, where the bawling Herefords were loaded aboard the cars in Lincoln. If the tourists didn't waste their money on silver belt buckles shaped like longhorns, Randy might have forgotten what the flea-bitten bastards looked like. Homesteaders were fencing the open range into little-bitty squares where hogs rooted and sugar beets swoll up in the ground the buffalo had trod hard as iron, cutting off the cattle outfits from water. In the last year alone, the Bar 9 in Wyoming and the Double Diamond in New Mexico had broken up and sold all their equipment at auction; every time the wind blew east, it brought with it another dusty band of hands looking for work that wasn't there. A man got up in the dark to heat up his Dutch oven and when it got dark again he didn't know if there'd be a ranch still there in the morning.

Then came winter, and it was all gone in a season.

*   *   *

September and October were mild, more like spring than autumn. The grass stayed slick and green, and the syndicate based in Indiana that owned the Lazy Y was considering expanding next year and taking over acreage belonging to smaller competitors less equipped to weather the changes in the industry. Christmas was snowless, the sky scraped clean of clouds; Randy put on his mackinaw to start breakfast and by the time it was served had shucked it off, the lining sodden with sweat. On New Year's Eve, those hands who'd drawn the short straws and stayed home from Lincoln and its saloons sat outside around a fire, pouring whiskey into their tin cups and passing the bottle. At midnight, under a sky punched through with stars and a three-quarter moon as bright as a new Morgan dollar, one of them produced a firecracker from his shirt pocket; the explosion set the horses rustling in their stalls and left behind a stench of brimstone.

Around 1:00
A.M.
someone drew a gray sheet overhead and wrung out a drizzle that rattled against the galvanized iron roof of the bunkhouse like bits of shattered crystal. An hour later the sleet became snow: big, downy, wet flakes at first, floating aimlessly and sizzling when they touched down, then turning to powder, coming faster, swept along by a mad coyote wind from the north whose howling drowned out the panes rattling in their frames. Standing at the windows, staring out between hammocks of white in the corners into the leaden dawn, the hands of the Lazy Y could not know how many others were doing the same at that moment, in a line of bunkhouses stretching from as far up as Dakota to as far down as southeast Texas, and from the bootjack of the Platte in northern Colorado to St. Louis. Somewhere in the heavens a massive flour sifter moved from west to east, dumping two feet of powder over drift fences and buffalo wallows, and behind it a bellows blew it into eight-foot drifts, obliterating sharp contrasts in the earth's surface and smoothing it all into a gently undulating mass dense as fresh-poured cement.

A peaceful sight, when the storm ran out of steam after three days and three nights; until a rider kicking his horse through chest-deep snow moved from solid earth to a hidden swale and found himself buried to the crown of his hat, or a herd of cattle bunched together tight for the heat and froze, to be found still standing in a stiff mass of a hundred when the snows receded in the tragic spring. The mercury dropped to twenty below and ran out of thermometer at the bottom. Cottonwoods burst from the relentless contraction. Locomotives and the string of cars behind them stood motionless, their wheels invisible so that they appeared to have been abandoned unfinished, only the smoke from their stacks showing any sign of activity as their firemen struggled to keep the boilers from cooling and cracking apart. Wood parties wrapped in bearskins and mackinaws trudged out in snowshoes and brought back frozen limbs that snapped and spat as they thawed in the flames and sometimes put out the fire with the sudden release of water. The mail could not go through and the telegraph wires were down, so the men of the Lazy Y couldn't know the situation was the same in Waco and Wichita, Rochester and Rapid City.

The cattle that didn't freeze died of starvation and thirst; thirst, with snow to their chins because the knot-headed beasts didn't know it was frozen water and could be eaten. A schoolgirl outside Omaha didn't return home from school and her body was located when someone spotted a green hair ribbon almost buried in snow, a hundred yards from her house. A Lazy Y cowboy named Shag, nineteen years old and in good health, burst his heart trying to get hay to a stranded herd across four miles of drift; his snow-blind horse was found helpless beside his body, the pallet of feed behind it, still tethered to its saddle. The ground was too hard to bury him, and so a rick of wood was moved in order to get to the insulated earth beneath.