The Long High Noon Read online

  “Randy Locke ain’t exactly in the Book.”

  But payment was delayed.

  By the time Frank was released from jail, Randy had returned to the buffalo hunt, conscious of the fact that his shooting arm needed time to recover before he took on anyone more challenging than a dumb brute. He was off to Nebraska, with a new skinner who wasn’t nearly as stimulating company as the old, but the other man had found work with another outfit while Randy was down. This time Randy didn’t hire a guide, the plains all being pretty much alike, down to the yellow-ocher grass and the same clapboard saloon, livery, and mercantile everywhere there was water enough to breed mosquitoes. He carried neither maps nor a compass. A man who couldn’t identify the North Star when he saw it might as well wear a stiff collar and live in town.

  Frank’s fine for disturbing the public peace emptied his poke, so he rode back to the railhead to shoot Indians and grade track. The first gandy dancer who kidded him about getting his ear bit off by a Texas Street whore got a slug in his foot for his joke; the foreman who bound the wound, a former medical orderly with the Fifth Mississippi Volunteers, told him he was fortunate that Frank was saving his homicidal impulses for Randy Locke. Their relationship, with some healthy encouragement from bored newspaper publishers, was by this time entering the country of frontier legend.

  The buffalo meanwhile were entering the country of the extinct.

  The bottom didn’t fall out of the market so much as it fell out from under the buffalo. Where the great herds had darkened the plains only a few years before, spilling over the nearest rise like thunderclouds rolling down from the Divide, little now remained but scattered bones. Soon even they were gone, scoured by pickers to sell by the ton to manufacturers to pulverize and run sugar through to remove impurities and to press and bake into fine china. Few easterners realized they owed their sweet pies and Christmas table dressings to a tick-ridden beast. Overnight, it seemed, the stacks of stiff green hides vanished from pole barns put up by buyers, and the buyers themselves disappeared into other enterprises, usually on one or the other coast by way of the new Transcontinental Railroad.

  Randy drank up half his profits in a succession of establishments given to that practice, gambled the other half away on games of chance, and took his meals and shelter serving time in various jails for drunk and disorderly. One early morning he woke up in an alley in Omaha with his boots missing, his pockets turned inside out, and a hangover the size of Texas.

  “Never too late to make a fresh start,” he said, fumbling for his watch and finding the silver chain snapped in half and the timepiece gone.

  But the ranches he applied to all had cooks they were satisfied with, and the work he picked up loading grainsacks into wagons and swamping vomit and sawdust off saloon floors staled after a week or so. For a time he panhandled for money for drinks, food, and lodging, in that order, but after a couple of months his clothes looked like livery rubdown rags held together by rotten thread, dirt crusted his face and hands, and he stank like spoiled potatoes. There were no women in his life to bail him out when he was pressed into a work gang for vagrancy, shoveling horseshit out of a stable in which the county sheriff had a half-interest and cutting the throats of steers for a butcher whose brother-in-law sat on the bench of the circuit court. It was a lot of sweat and time, and none of it brought him an inch closer to Frank Farmer and the end of their transactions. He reckoned at that point he’d hit stony bottom.

  * * *

  Frank wasn’t finding life any easier.

  After the buffalo ran out, the Indians returned to reservations to subsist on government rations, when they weren’t being embezzled by unscrupulous traders and Indian agents from Washington. The raids on survey parties and track-layers fell off, and with it the demand for sharpshooters to defend against them, particularly with the army taking up the slack, rounding up strays from the reservations and providing the same protection on the taxpayers’ ticket that Frank had supplied for wages. The Great Undertaking having been completed at Promontory Point, the railroads laid off men in hordes, including part-time graders like Frank.

  When he was offered work by the Santa Fe line as a common guard, dozing in some stuffy strong-car hoping for an assault by a gang of highwaymen just to break up the monotony, he demanded the time he had coming and rode to the nearest poker game. In a mining camp in Colorado he shot and killed a man over one pat hand too many and barely escaped a lynch mob when the deputy who’d arrested him, a naïve New Hampshire native lured West by dime novels, changed clothes with him and took his place in the cell while Frank left by a back door. (The mob, which had come there to lynch someone, strung up the deputy.)

  Frank got away on a wind-broken bay he’d managed to steal from a corral, without a firearm or a cartwheel dollar to his name, just the clothes on his back and his Saturday-night ear in his pocket. He camped out under the stars, avoiding towns where the Thunder Creek Committee of Public Vigilance might have shinplasters out on him offering a reward for his hide, and stoned jackrabbits to survive.

  His skill with a piece of shale did not measure up to his marksmanship with a carbine. In the wee hours of a frosty Colorado morning he started awake, convinced Randy Locke was standing over him aiming his Colt between his eyes, and in his panic kicked dust at a scrubby jack pine. When he recovered his senses he knew the vision for a hallucination caused by hunger, aided by a dose of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. Wasting away, his belt buckle scraping a gall in his spine, burning hot when his teeth weren’t chattering, skin bleeding where he’d scratched it raw, didn’t distress him so much as the prospect of squandering his last hours fighting ghosts instead of Randy.

  He calculated he was as low as low got.

  Then God opened a window.

  THREE

  A houseguest should never arrive empty-handed, nor should a host point out the fact.

  Two windows, actually.

  Frank’s sabbatical in the wilderness turned out to be a stroke of luck. A team of young prospectors found him close to death and brought him to their camp, where the old witch woman who ran the laundry nursed him back to strength with some remedies she’d learned in Albania. During his recuperation she told him, in broken English, of a drifter she’d treated for a fractured skull that had remained undiagnosed since he left Utah Territory weeks earlier. It seemed it had been laid open by a wolfer named Locke with a bottle in Salt Lake City over some difference of opinion the patient couldn’t remember. The description he’d given her matched Randy.

  The old woman let Frank repay his debt working the washboard, and when he was well enough to travel gave him a bear’s-claw necklace she’d made as a hex against bad luck. From there, walking and accepting rides from passersby, he went to Pueblo, where he traded the necklace to a greenhorn for a toothless roan, which got him as far as Grand Junction before it keeled over and died. He stock-clerked in a general merchandise store for a month, bought a decent mount and a Remington revolver with a cracked grip but not too much play in the action, and lit a shuck for Mormon country.

  * * *

  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 b
ack 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.

  * * *

  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.