The Long High Noon Read online

  “Surely a Christian nation can do better.…”

  The Fassbinder System (as it was advertised in playbills and on a large pasteboard sign propped on an easel downstage) involved humane treatment for these overlooked individuals. It was based upon the parable of the Good Samaritan, and although it offered no guarantee that he who was done unto as others would have done unto them would pass along the favor, the present system of penalty through neglect was a virtual promise that the cycle would repeat itself “ad infinitum, ad absurdum, world without end.”

  The lecture came with statistics demonstrating the sad percentage of recidivism as it stood, and projected figures based on the professor’s exhaustive studies of the behavior of certain wild animals kept in captivity and the docility of those that were provided with a healthy diet, their cages cleaned regularly, and treated overall with patience and kindness, as opposed to those that were not. (This part of the programme was the only one wherein the speaker referred to notes printed in his neat hand on three-by-five cards; the fact that the projected figures were his own invention did not impose itself upon the mesmeric rhythms of his sentences or the melodiousness of his voice.)

  “Surely”—his favorite adverb—“a man built in God’s image and a woman fashioned from the First Man’s costal cartilage, whatever his or her transgressions, is worthy of the same gentle treatment as a bear or a lion.”

  Evangeline was impressed, as much by the presenter’s erect bearing and sonorous tenor as by his central theme, and returned to her parents’ home from the evening with her handsome head filled with ideas about reading lamps, clean sheets, and good food delivered with a charitable word and a sweet smile. The sheriff and his wife doted on their daughter, whose three siblings had died in infancy. The elder Dierdorfs never stood a chance: The reforms were put into effect.

  Moreover, she was a graceful creature, long-necked, with a high intelligent brow, a straight nose, agreeably curved lips, and a waist a man’s two hands could encompass without effort. Her eyes were brown, clear, and required no spectacles to see that the prisoner was a man pleasingly formed (his artificial ear brought sympathy for his unfortunate past rather than revulsion), clean in his habits, and sufficiently well-bred to rise when a lady approached his cell.

  Evangeline Dierdorf was twenty-two when Frank Farmer walked out of that cell a free man and ran away with her to Denver.

  * * *

  The couple did not remain long in that town.

  Although Frank considered that the sheriff would not be long in tracing them (he arrived a week later), that eventuality didn’t bother him so much as the time that had elapsed since the last news of Randy. He was still carrying around the piece he’d torn out of the newspaper in Colorado, worn gossamer thin and the print nearly rubbed away from taking out and rereading. It was too much to hope his enemy was still in San Francisco, but that was the place to start looking. Randy’s new notoriety would certainly leave a trail in the memories of those who had encountered him.

  Evangeline was thrilled. The delights of Denver, piled atop the discovery of her body, were sufficient to spin the head of a sheltered young lady; the City on the Bay had always seemed as far away and as drenched in romance as Mecca.

  With Evangeline’s life savings, together with what he got from selling his horse and the long-range rifle, Frank booked a coach to the coast. But long before the train rolled into the station he grew weary of the company, and slipped away in the confusion of people on the platform. Evangeline spent the rest of the money she’d brought on hotels she got little good from, wandering the streets most of the time hoping to glimpse Frank, then dropped out of the lives of all who knew her. Scant months later, a woman answering her description was found in a rented flat overlooking the railroad tracks in Carson City, Nevada, dead of an overdose of laudanum, and buried in an unmarked grave in potter’s field. The local marshal was a former deputy of Gunter Dierdorf’s. The Colorado sheriff, wearing a mourning band for his recently deceased wife, came in person to arrange for the disinterment, identification, and transportation home.

  * * *

  On the day Frank had arrived, a loafer holding up the porch over the platform with his shoulders saw a man threading his way through the crowd, moving on the double. He passed close enough for the loafer to spot his gutta-percha ear.

  He hadn’t seen the man who’d promised him a reward for that information in months; but if it was worth something to him, the fact that he was interested in that ear might be worth something to the man who wore it. He pushed his dirty hat determinedly forward to his eyebrows and followed on the man’s heels. On the way he passed a pretty young woman with a parasol, anxiously peering around herself in the middle of the throng. He hesitated, sensing an errand there, and pocket money in it, then resumed his pursuit of the man with the ear, shaking his head. It was either drought or downpour in his work.

  * * *

  Frank went first to the Eldorado Hotel, but the desk clerk couldn’t find Randy Locke in the current register. Further inquiries led finally to his last-known stop in town, in a hotel not reputed for its elegance, equipped with roaches the size of cigar butts, two sheets of wallpaper separating each room from its neighbor, and a woman’s false eyelash stuck to the basin in the dry-sink. He thought he could smell Randy on the sheets; which may not have been pure fancy on his part. For three days he lay on the bed his old acquaintance had slept on, hoping to draw intelligence from the contact; but apart from the attention of bedbugs he drew nothing from the experience.

  “I was glad to see the last of him,” said the manager, contemplating a bale of hair he’d plucked from a nostril. “He was starting to attract reporters.”

  “Any other visitors?”

  The manager dislodged the hair from his fingers onto his lapel, staring at Frank. Frank stuck a banknote across the desk.

  “One-eyed jasper in a ten-gallon hat.”

  Frank got out another banknote. The manager looked at it regretfully and said he never got the man’s name. His guest checked out.

  “Frank Farmer?”

  He spun, dropping his valise and dragging the worn revolver from its holster.

  “Steady, feller!” A man wearing a dirty coat and dirtier plug hat stood on the boardwalk with his hands in the air.

  “How’d you know my name?”

  “When somebody says there’s money in it, I ain’t likely to forget it, nor the name of the one offering.”

  “Well?”

  “Feller called Locke.”

  “When?”

  “A spell back. Last fall it was.”

  “That’s no good to me.”

  “Maybe no, maybe yes; but it was right there in that hotel I talked to him. There’s generally always somebody needs some sort of favor in places like it. I make it a point to keep it on my rounds.”

  “I already know he stayed there.”

  “What you don’t know’s the name of the man I seen coming down from his room before that. Had him on good boots and a pretty hat. I asked him if he needed any errands run. He gave me a dollar and told me to bring him a bottle of peach brandy at the Palace. This here’s what he gave me instead of cash when I showed up with it,” he said bitterly. “I been carrying it since I seen you at the station. You lost me, but I reckoned you’d turn up here sooner than later.”

  Frank looked at the scuffed cover of the book the loafer had pulled from his hip pocket:

  BRIMSTONE BOB’S REVENGE,

  or

  GUN JUSTICE IN ABILENE

  Being a True and Authentic Account of Robert Turnstile’s Quest for Bloody Vengeance on the Chisholm Trail

  as told by

  JACK DODGER,

  an Eye-Witness

  “Who’s this Turnstile?”

  “Never heard of ’em, nor Dodger neither. He said it wasn’t even his name.”

  “What was?”

  The loafer grinned at him. Frank grunted and fished out another banknote.

  EIGHT


  A firm handshake and a pleasant way of speaking are the working capital of the successful businessman.

  Abraham Cripplehorn was suffering the longest string of bad luck of his career.

  He laid it to Jack Dodger.

  The elusive Jack had always been his rabbit’s foot: Those copies of Petticoat Betsy, the Bandit Princess he’d found in his hotel room had brought direction to an aimless life, but the association had not been so rosy for The Mercury Press of Cincinnati, Ohio, which had declared bankruptcy in 1876, leaving five hundred copies of Brimstone Bob’s Revenge unclaimed at its printer’s. Cripplehorn had happened upon this information while visiting that city, and had obtained them by settling the bill. When he gave the last one to a St. Louis theater manager he’d hoped to persuade to advance him money against a public duel to the death between Randy Locke and Frank Farmer, his fortunes turned sour.

  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.