Stringer on Dead Man’s Range

RANGE

CHAPTER

ONE

It was one of those rare and lovely mornings when the Frisco Bay lay Caribbean blue under a smiling cloudless sky. But there was no joy in the press room of the San Francisco Sun. The feature editor, Swearing Sam Barca, was carrying on in a manner that threatened the frosted glass of his corner cubicle and had just caused the society editor working fifty feet away to insert an obscenity that hardly belonged in the wedding announcement he was trying to type up. Inside the glass box the object of Swearing Sam’s wrath was calmly rolling a Bull Durham smoke as he waited for the storm to let up. Swearing Sam Barca was short, dark, and ugly. The target of his editorial integrity was living proof that while one could take a cowhand off the range, it was harder to take the range out of the cowhand. Stuart MacKail, ace stringer for the Sun, was a lot taller, less dark, and a lot prettier than the ferocious little Sicilian swearing at him. He was dressed as city-slicker as the business district of the city by the bay required since the vigilantes had cleaned up the nearby Barbary Coast. But he still looked as if he was ready to fork a bronc and ride, if he had to. He’d worked his way through Stanford working stock for a local cattle spread.

As he licked the neatly wrapped tan paper to seal it, the man on the far side of the feature desk snapped, Don’t you dare light that infernal cornhusk in here. It would stink bad enough if I had a window to open. Why can’t you smoke cigars or, hell, tailor mades like everyone else?

Stringer, as they called him half in admiration and half in jest, said, At the space rates you pay me, I’m lucky to be able to afford any tobacco at all. Could we get back to the feature you seem so upset about? There’s not a word I turned in that I can’t document, Sam.

Barca rolled his eyes heavenward to stare at the pressed-tin ceiling through his green eyeshade as he groaned, Oh, Jesus H. Christ, here we go with that insane notion that the truth and the news are the same thing! He pointed a bony finger at Stringer and thundered, "Not a one of those heathen Chinee along Grant Avenue subscribe to the San Francisco Sun. Those who do, in considerable numbers, consider Chinatown a blight on prime real estate as well as a disgrace to their fair city!"

Stringer struck a match head afire with a horny thumbnail and lit his smoke before he said, That’s the point of my expose, Sam. The machinations of certain real estate interests to move Chinatown down to the mud flats near Hunter’s Point are a shortsighted attempt to make things disgusting for everybody. You don’t have to admire chop suey or give a damn about them who cooks it to see that any kind of shantytown on them mud flats will ruin those flats for the shrimp and oysters now gathered there in considerable numbers for the enjoyment of Frisco folk who hate Chinese cooking. This town was built by the bay because the bay made it a good place to be. What’s the sense of building a city by a bay if quick-buck rascals are allowed to fill said bay in?

Old Sam looked wistful despite himself, and replied, "I used to buy a whole bag of them bitty shrimp for a nickel when I was young and foolish. There was this old chink who sold ’em off the hulk of a stranded schooner near the foot of Mission Street. He’s gone now. The hulk he was squatting on would be a couple of blocks inland, if it’s still there, under the railroad yards. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed anything I could buy so cheap as I enjoyed them little popcorny shrimp on a raw day after school. But the developers who hate to see mud flats wasted on seafood advertise regular in our real estate section. Until such time as oyster tongers, clam diggers, and shrimp netters see fit to pay for space in this newspaper, we are not, repeat not going to run any features insulting those who do."

Stringer said, Damn it, Sam. I was counting on the money for that piece.

Barca picked up a wire service dispatch from the mess atop his desk as he said, "Count again. I told you before, you’d do better if you waited for me to assign you a feature I could use instead of typing at windmills on your own. I got one here that ought to be right up your alley. The front office was pleased with that wild west shootout you just covered up in the Mother Lode."

Stringer protested, "Damn it, Sam. I wasn’t old enough to write-up anything the year Billy the Kid and Jesse James was both put in the box forever. This is the twentieth century. I want to cover modern times, not that wild west crap you so admire."

You grew up in a mighty wild west, didn’t you? growled the man who stood between Stringer and the payment of his rent.

Stringer took a deep drag on his smoke to get his own temper under control before he replied, We were doing our best to calm things down as I was growing up in the Mother Lode cow country. Had I wanted to stay that rustic, I’d have never worked my way through college.

Barca smiled crookedly at him and said, They may have taught you to write, but you still talk like a trail driver. As to how wild some parts of our modern west might be, Butch and the Sundance Kid are still at large, and have you read that new best-seller by Owen Wister?

Stringer nodded and said, "The Virginian is all right, I reckon. But you have to go some today to find parts of the west where things are still so informal."

Barca said, I’m sending you to one. In Arizona Territory. I have it on good authority that the tough little cowtown of Holbrook Arizona was the site of the original Bucket of Blood Saloon, and that furthermore, said Bucket of Blood is still in business.

Stringer looked pained and said, Hell, Sam, Holbrook ain’t been wild in years. It was tamed years ago by a firm but fair lawman whose name escapes me.

Swearing Sam looked pleased with himself, and said, The man’s name was, and still is, Commodore Perry Owens. Commodore isn’t a title. It’s his Christian name. You would have been too young at the time to pay attention to distant range wars. But I wasn’t. So I got to cover some of Perry’s town taming as a reporter. He did have a way of taming towns. A lot of penny dreadfuls have since been written, based on his real adventures.

Stringer groaned and said, I suspect I’ve read them. Not even you could be so cruel as to send me out in the field in summer to rehash gunfights old enough to vote, for God’s sake!

Barca nodded, but said, I don’t want too much on what Perry did in his glory days. Just a little background to show how ungrateful or forgetful the voters of Navajo County have just acted in their infinite wisdom.

Stringer raised a questioning eyebrow. So Barca nodded and continued, They just voted him out of` office—after all his years of service to a now much more civilized community. I want you to go find out why.

Stringer protested, All the way to Arizona, in high summer? Surely you jest. It’s a free country, Sam. Why can’t the voters choose a new sheriff if they want one?

Barca insisted, The man they elected to replace Perry has no rep as a lawman. If we assume he kisses babies just swell, it’s still sort of fishy. I’ve followed old Perry’s career over the years since he commenced to risk his life for those ingrates, way back in ‘86. He may have bent the Constitution a few times as he strove to restore law and order to country too tough for Apache to mess with, but in all the years since, not one whiff of scandal or corruption ever stained his good name. He’d be in his early fifties now. That’s way too young to send such a fine lawman out to pasture. I want to find out what really happened.

Stringer said, You sound like you’re taking his election loss sort of personal, Sam.

Barca replied, I am. One night in the Bucket of Blood some uncouth Hash Knife riders took it in their heads to make a young wop reporter dance the Tarantella for them to the dulcet notes of their six-guns. Commodore Perry Owens made ’em stop and bought me a drink to steady my nerves. My teeth were still chattering, but he told me I’d acted like a man when I refused to dance, even with one boot tip shot off. I never forgot that, or him. If he was crooked out of his job, I mean to print an expose indeed. So what are you waiting for, a kiss goodbye?

Stringer rose to his considerable height, but said, Arizona is quite a walk from here, and I’m down to a modest jingle in these pants.

Barca thought a moment, then said, I’ll tell you what. I’ll sign a voucher for that feature you wrote about the mud flats. I’m allowed to pay for stories we don’t have space to run, if I don’t overdo it. You go home and get packed, and by the time you get back they may have the check made out for you.

Stringer swore softer but no less dirty, and added, Damn it, old hoss, that’s my own money, not expense money we’re speaking of so loosely!

Barca shrugged and pointed out, It’s your own stubborn desire to work free-lance in the field that keeps you so broke, you know. If you’d take the staff job I’ve offered you, more than once, you wouldn’t have to worry about travel expenses.

Stringer looked disgusted. Have it your way, he said. I’d eat all the mud off Hunter’s Point, raw, before I’d risk getting old and ornery as you, chained to a fool desk.

Stringer was still feeling used and abused, but by the time he got to his boarding house on Rincon Hill, south of the Slot, he was less morose about the satanic pact he’d been forced to make with his goat-faced feature editor. Arizona Territory at this time of the year was hardly the place he’d have picked to spend a weekend in the country, even on someone else’s money. But it would be good to get out of these sissy duds and prissy town for a spell.

As he climbed the stairs to his furnished digs under the mansard roof, he saw that the gal on the second landing was home from her night job as an artist’s model at the school on Russian Hill. He nodded as politely as one could nod to a naked lady reclining on a brass bedstead with her door wide open. She blew a cloud of violet-scented tobacco smoke at him, saying, I don’t have an escort for the Artist’s Ball this evening, Mr. MacKail.

He was trying to keep their boarding-house relationship formal as well. So he called her Miss as he explained he had to leave town before anything so interesting was likely to take place. He didn’t know her real name. The title the other boarders had given her hardly went with Miss, even if it fit.

He hoped it didn’t as he went on up to his lonely little room to change and pack. His grasshopper typewriter was too heavy and too antique to pack. He left it where it sat near the window and settled for a notepad and a couple of extra pencils instead. The story Sam Barca wanted didn’t sound complicated, and as long as a reporter spelled all the names right, nobody fussed if he missed a detail here and there in shorthand.

Knowing Arizona in the summer, he packed a sheepskin against possibly cold desert nights, and a yellow rain slicker against the even more unlikely event of such an astounding event. He got out of his city duds and into a thinner well-broken-in, once blue-denim range outfit. He knotted a black sateen kerchief in place of the shoestring tie he’d just tossed over a bedpost, and stomped into his worn, soft, but still too-tight black Justins. They might have been easier to get into if he hadn’t shrunk gunmetal spurs to them with soaked and stretched rawhide. But it made no sense to wear spurs that had any chance of coming loose at an awkward moment aboard a bronc. He considered his gun rig before he packed it in with the other possibles in his battered gladstone bag. He knew it wasn’t considered civilized to wear a gun on the streets of Frisco these days. But even these days the bitty town of Holbrook was situated in a sort of uncivilized neck of the woods.

He tossed in some socks and a spare blue-collar work shirt and sat on the gladstone to lock it. Then he put on the once pearl-gray Rough Rider’s hat he’d brought home from the Spanish American War and headed back down the stairs.

As he passed the open door of the gal on the second landing again, she called out, You don’t know what you’ll be missing, cowboy.

He didn’t answer. He had a pretty good idea what he was passing up each time he passed her door. For even if she didn’t live up to that dreadful nickname they’d given her, he could see what else the shameless model had to offer. It was a wonder even the prissier art students managed to sketch half of those Junoesque curves without dropping their charcoal. He’d heard they carried on even wilder at those Artist’s Balls, and that sure sounded a sight to see. But a man who messed with women where he worked or boarded was asking for a colder gray Monday morning than any Saturday night could be worth. So he managed to get back to the office as pure as he’d left.

When he did, the head bookkeeper who signed the checks was out to lunch and not expected back until after the banks shut their doors for the day. Swearing Sam Barca was sore about that too. He took Stringer aside and growled, Don’t you dare let this get around. But here’s enough to make it to Holbrook, and I’ll wire you a money order for that otherwise-useless exposé once you get there.

Without counting it, Stringer pocketed the wad of silver certificates the older man had slipped him. But he could tell that even if they were all singles, Swearing Sam had dug into his own pocket pretty deep. Stringer nodded and said, I’ll catch the next S.P. Coaster south and see if I can make connections with the eastbound Santa Fe this evening in L.A. You must be in one hell of a hurry to get me to Holbrook if you’re paying for it so personal, Sam.

Barca nodded grimly and said, I told you Sheriff Owens was an old drinking pal of mine. I want his side of the story, and if those damned Republicans screwed him out of his job by crooking the election, I mean to shout it from the rooftops in banner headlines!

Stringer said that sounded fair, but added, "Correct me if I’m wrong, Sam, but ain’t the San Francisco Sun owned by Republicans, with an editorial policy to match?"

Barca nodded. It is. What of it? It’s our duty to print the truth and let the chips fall where they may, right?

Stringer frowned down at the peppery little Sicilian and said, "I thought you were trying to