The Long High Noon (16 page)

“I know. He told me over whiskeys at the Bella Union after I ran it. Did you really coldcock Locke, or was it something on that order, like that Farmer quote?”

“There wasn't anything heroic to it. I hit him with a buggy whip handle when his back was turned.”

The Major showed yellow teeth around his cigar stump.

“Too bad Kearney didn't know you five years ago. He drafted the city ordinance against carrying firearms, but he liked his bludgeons.”

“It's a pleasure doing business with you, Major. When I've made all the arrangements I'll place a full-page advertisement in the
Spar.
”

“Like hell you will. I don't approve of your design any more than the Committee. If you come in here waving money in my face promoting murder, I'll throw you out through my one and only window.”

 

TWENTY

The success of any venture is measured by the size and number of obstacles overcome.

Cripplehorn had said nothing to Frank while Randy was senseless. Where reason was missing, recriminations accomplished nothing. Frank withdrew, leaving the entrepreneur to await Randy's awakening.

“What in hell did you hit me with?” He sat up, feeling gingerly the knot on the back of his head.

“Does it matter?” Cripplehorn was seated on the driver's seat of the buggy, drinking peach brandy from a silver-and-pigskin flask.

“Where is he?”

“Gone.”

“Gone where?”

“Why, so you can finish what he started? I always heard you cowboys were as good as your word.”

“Talk to him. He's the one broke it.”

“As would you have, given the opportunity. You two are worse than a philandering husband. He can't keep his pecker in his pants and you can't keep those hoglegs in their holsters. I'm splitting you up until the time of the contest.”

“Where you sending me?”

“I'm putting you up at the Asiatic for now. The reporters will be looking for you at the Palace and the Eldorado. I know how that annoys you.”

“Hell, I thought you was going to say South America or somesuch place.”

“Frank's the one broke the bargain. I'm sending him out of the state until I can get things worked out in Sacramento. There will be resistance, but I'm counting on Weber's money to soften it up.”

*   *   *

But secrecy was a luxury infamy could not afford. An old acquaintance from his cowhand days recognized Frank on a railroad platform in Boise, and by the time his train crossed into Montana Territory, reporters were gathering at every station clamoring for his comments. He avoided them by staying aboard until the engine gushed to a stop in the mining town of Butte, where he stepped down carrying his valise and his Winchester in its scabbard.

“Frank, you running away from Randy?” asked an unpressed gentleman of the press from Chicago.

“Say that again and I'll drop you where you stand.”

The representative from the
Billings Gazette
asked him if it was true he intended to shoot Randy in broad daylight in public.

“I'd shoot him in the dark if I could see in it.”

“Aren't you concerned you'll be arrested for murder?”

Frank, bathed, brushed, and barbered, smiled in appreciation at this vision from the
Omaha Herald,
a trim young woman in a becoming traveling suit and a flower patch on her straw hat. Spots of color appeared on her cheeks.

“I'll cross that crick when it counts.”

The reporter from the local
Miner,
in pinstripe suit and stovepipe boots, asked him what he thought of Butte.

“I'll let you know once I find it under all this muck.” Every surface in sight bore traces of smoke from the smelting plants: A finger left a track through the grime.

“Where are you stopping?” asked the same journalist.

“Someplace clean, I hope.”

“Good luck with that.”

Frank registered at the Copper Palace, a four-story hotel decorated almost entirely with material from the local mine: The ceiling in the lobby was made up of pressed sheets of copper, all the hardware and even the chandelier were copper, and copper covered the desk, behind which stood a clerk who might have been fashioned from the same reddish metal, although this was probably an illusion created by reflection from all that copper. That evening Frank dined in the hotel restaurant with the comely female reporter from Nebraska Territory, who after he said his good-byes in a voice that carried, followed him up to his room as the waiters were clearing the tables.

*   *   *

“Abraham Cripplehorn?”

The entrepreneur took in the small, fussily dressed man standing outside the open door of his room at the Palace. On his waistcoat hung a brass star attached by tiny chains to an engraved plate containing his title of office. “You have the advantage, sir.”

“I'm Connie Post, sheriff of San Mateo County. I'm here to serve you.”

“How very generous.”

The irony of this response found no purchase on the little man's spade-bearded face. He handed the guest a roll of parchment covered with Spencerian script and embossed with a seal.

“This is an injunction, signed by Judge Webster Bennett, prohibiting you or anyone else from conducting a murderous exhibition in this county. You've been served.”

“Indeed I have. Bennett, you said?”

“Webster Bennett, district judge.”

“Thank you.”

That individual, horse-faced with white sidewhiskers combed out to shoulder width, entertained Cripplehorn from behind the desk in his chambers in a county courthouse dripping with limestone gewgaws and bronze statuary, some grafter's dream of wealth come to life. The glass eyes of antelope heads stared down from the walls. Going by his obvious threescore and ten, the jurist had bagged the creatures back when San Francisco was still in swaddling clothes.

“Don't think I'm ungrateful for your offer, Mr. Cripplehorn. I'm retiring at the end of this term and do not intend to seek reelection. Mr. Cable, the prosecuting attorney, is running for my party, but he isn't in a position to reverse the injunction I ordered. Any donation from you would come entirely from your interest in good government.”

Appeals were telegraphed to all the other counties in California. Some were rejected by return wire, others after local debate attended by concerned citizens, many of them women. (“Supporters of the event should not hold their husbands accountable for opposing it,” wrote the correspondent from the
Examiner
. “Faced with overwhelming numbers, a wise general withdraws from the field.”) Still others were considering the request when Sacramento intervened:

B
Y ORDER OF THE
G
OVERNOR OF
C
ALIFORNIA, NO CONTEST INVOLVING HUMANS THAT IS DESIGNED TO CONCLUDE IN THE DEATH OR SERIOUS INJURY OF ONE OR MORE OF THE PARTICIPANTS SHALL TAKE PLACE ANYWHERE IN THE STATE.
A
NY ATTEMPT TO STAGE SUCH AN EXHIBITION WILL BE MET WITH THE FULL WEIGHT OF THE LAW.
T
HE STATE MILITIA IS HEREBY ORDERED TO STAND READY TO DEFEND IT, IF NECESSARY WITH DEADLY FORCE.

“Please correct me if I'm mistaken in my understanding of this proclamation,” Cripplehorn told the press in the conference room at the Palace. “Is it the governor's intention to prevent killing by killing?”

Badinage, however, was ineffective, and after conferring with Sheridan Weber (“Don't ask me about politics, Abe; I haven't voted since Grant”), the entrepreneur looked into substitute venues.

However, no sooner did the news enter the telegraph columns than representatives of the neighboring states and territories declared that they would not host so callous a display of savagery. Oregon, Nevada, Arizona, and Utah warned that all three principals would face arrest the moment they crossed their borders.

“Arizona wasted its breath,” Randy said. “It's my neck to visit the place anyway.”

The rest of the country followed suit. In the governor's office in Albany, New York, Grover Cleveland signed a bill banning the event by name, the first law in that state's history aimed directly at three U.S. citizens in particular.

Cripplehorn was indignant. “This kind of thing wouldn't have been possible before the Rebellion.”

Randy was bemused. “I wisht my old man was alive. He'd be proud to think his son had been declared war on all on his own.”

“We just lost Rhode Island in the
Bulletin.
”

“We lost Delaware and Ohio in the
Call.
I'm almost afraid to look at the
Examiner
.”

“I can't see why you find this so amusing.”

“You're the one wants to be the Cornelius Vanderbilt of gunning folks. All I want is Frank in the ground, and that always was against the law.”

Mexico and Canada came next. Under pressure from Washington, President Diaz mobilized the
federales
to turn Cripplehorn & Company back at the Rio Grande. Ottawa, not to be outdone by the rest of North America, announced that the Northwest Mounted Police would eject them from the Dominion of Canada as undesirable aliens. In Butte, Frank bought a round of drinks for some journalists and remarked that he felt downright hurt: “I never wanted to go till they told me I couldn't. Now I got a hankering to ride up there and shoot some moose, and maybe a Mountie or two. I seen a picture once of British soldiers in a history book. Those red shirts make an easy target.”

Unlike Randy, “the dandified gentleman from Texas” not only didn't mind the attention, but sought it out. He couldn't stand five minutes at a bar waiting for someone to recognize him without identifying himself, and didn't have to pay for a drink the rest of the visit. He bought a new suit and a pair of boots with fancy flaps like he'd admired on Cripplehorn, had a gunsmith replace the old cracked grips on his Remington with ivory ones, and had just left the shop when his gaze fell upon a frame building with photographs on display in the front window.

Butte, M.T., September l6
—Mr. Frank Farmer, the notorious Southwestern gun man, had his picture struck last week in O. C. Nordstrom's studio on Silver Bow Street last week. He posed before a Swiss alpine backdrop with pistol and rifle on display, and most who have seen it agree that he is a fine figure of a man for an assassin. Straightaway several of the local citizenry offered to buy prints of his likeness for souvenirs, and by the end of the week they were selling for a quarter apiece. It is rumored that should the mines play out, the city fathers can increase revenue by inviting all of the celebrated frontier pistoleers to come in and have their likenesses made for sale to tourists.

“That's something you and I should consider.” Cripplehorn looked up from the telegraph column in the
Bulletin
at Randy, stretched out in his sock feet on his bed in the Asiatic. “All the famous bad men have sat at one time or another. People would take it against your reputation if you don't.”

“How do I know you won't sell it to the papers?”

“They can't use them; they bleed, Updegraff says. The paper's too coarse and absorbent.”

“You asked him.”

“We can't all hole up in a hotel breaking wind all day. Someone has to keep up the momentum.”

“I ain't doing it. Some son of a bitch in Arizona's sure to put it on a shinplaster and double the reward on account of I'm famous.”

“You get more mileage out of that old business than any bounty man. For all you say about disliking the attention, I think you enjoy being wanted.”

“Well, I don't like reporters. They ask impertinent questions and they all smell like moldy cardboard.”

Randy was using the name George Purdy, borrowed from the mule-headed Circle X foreman who'd fired him for shooting Frank the first time and leaving the outfit shy one man; thereby doubling the deficit. He was unwilling to leave the hotel except to walk the stiffness out of his leg, and then only after dark. But in the midst of all the world telling him how unwelcome he and Frank and Cripplehorn were, he got restless and went out for a ride, looking all around for journalists when he exited out a side door and keeping his head down with the brim of his old weather-stained hat obscuring his features.

The man who operated the Golden Gate Livery left off his whittling and said, “That horse of yours died last night. You owe me for a week plus the cost of dragging out the carcass.”

Randy went into the stall to see for himself. Old Mabel lay on her side with her eyes gone glassy and flies crawling on her.

He patted her side. “Damn if I ain't sorry. I used you for a shooting stand and you didn't even blink. The army lost a good mount when they hooked you to a damn milk wagon.” He went back out and asked how much to put her under.

“There's a dog food place downtown'd give you cash for it.”

Randy gave him a banknote. “I'll be asking 'em if they bought an old white mare from the Golden Gate Livery. If the answer ain't no I'll come back and kill you.”

San Francisco, Sept. 22
—The Spanish governor of Cuba has informed the U.S. State Department that he will arrest anyone intending to stage a blood duel in his jurisdiction. This is undoubtedly a reference to the Messrs. Locke, Farmer, and Cripplehorn, whose search for an arena in which to work out the fatal differences between the first two men has appeared regularly in these columns. With President Arthur having banned the contest from these United States, this brings to a total of four countries, thirteen individual states, and eight territories to declare they would not host so callous a display of savagery. The editors of the
Examiner
note that the principles of the good Christian faith still prevail in these uncertain times.

Asked by reporters over liquor and sandwiches in Cripplehorn's suite in the Palace if this latest blow meant the end of his plans, the promoter smiled. “The Cubans sacrifice a bullfighter every few months and I've never heard a word of protest from Santiago. Still, it's a big old world.”