CHAPTER THREE

Stringer had to figure on an overnight trip and then some, Lord willing, and between L.A. and Langtry, Texas, he didn’t have to change trains at El Paso. As the conductor punched his ticket, the good news was that he was aboard a through-train with Pullman accommodations up front. The bad news was that while they had some empty berths and even compartments left, Stringer just couldn’t have any.

The conductor explained it was a new company policy. Sleeping accommodations had to be booked in advance. Too much blood had been shed over bunkings that two or more coach passengers had decided to spring for after they’d had enough in the club car to lie down a spell. Stringer informed the only railroad official he could find that it was a hell of a way to run a railroad, and grumped his way to a corner coach seat under an overhead bulb.

He knew all too well how much he might hanker for a place to lie down if he started drinking this close to sundown. Up until now he’d thought it was pretty slick to ride say five hundred miles, coach fare, before hiring a berth. Someone on the board of directors had no doubt been just as slick. The world was coming to a sorry state if railroads expected folk to pay for a damned old berth, in use or not, from point of departure to destination.

He’d naturally picked up more reading material during his layover in L.A. But he thought it best to save it until he got good and bored. Staring out the window to his left, he could see that might not take too long. Gazing at the passing scenery didn’t work so good at night since they’d started lighting up the innards of passenger coaches with fancy light bulbs. Save for a passing window now and again out there, he couldn’t see a damned thing but his own fool face.

He reached into his kit bag for the manila envelope of morgue clippings Sam Barca had given him on Langtry and the famous or infamous Judge Roy Bean. Leafing through them, Stringer failed to find few facts he didn’t already know. Earlier interviews with Bean’s friends, enemies, and Bean himself failed to jibe. Bean apparently never told the same tale twice. All that was certain was that sometime in the early 1880’s Bean had somehow been appointed a J.P. and commenced holding court on the porch of his saloon cum general store, named the Jersey Lily—his spelling, in honor of Miss Lillie Langtry, a sort of odd character in her own right.

The Jersey Island-born Miss Langtry was either a famous London actress or an infamous London whore, depending on just whom one might ask. That was the trouble with well-known folk, from the viewpoint of a newspaperman who prided himself on accuracy. Backyard gossip was bad enough about small-town eccentrics. Once a body got famous enough for all who knew-them-when to brag about, they commenced to turn into living legends, glorified by their friends and vilified or debunked by their enemies.

Stringer knew a lot depended on how likable well-known folk might naturally be. Old Wyatt Earp, and even his giddy young wife, were folk one had a hard time hating. When they’d first met up on the Klondike, Earp had struck Stringer as a puppy-dog friendly old boy with a firm shake and an endless supply of stories, clean, dirty, and mighty tall. It was easy to see how easy lots of folk found it to take old Wyatt’s tales of glory as at least possible. Yet as far as Stringer had ever been able to pin down, the one historical gunfight the sweet old cuss had ever been mixed up in involved him tagging along as a kid brother after his big brother Virgil, the only one wearing a deputy badge. While the true details of the fight that followed were no doubt forever garbled by the rival Tombstone papers, the Epitaph and Nugget, it was generally agreed the now-famous Gun-fight at the O.K. Corral had taken place in a vacant lot across the street from the same, and that after all the smoke cleared, exactly three men lay dying. The Epitaph and Nugget had yet to agree on whether Billy Clanton and the McLaury brothers had been gunned down with their hands in the air or not, or which side had started it. But if old Wyatt’s wife was right about him getting in good with those moving-picture makers along Western Avenue, it hardly seemed likely the Earp brothers or even their disgusting pal Doc Holliday would ever appear on the silver screen as the villains.

Poor old Pat Garrett, on the other hand, was a gent most folk found easy to dislike. Stringer liked him better now. But it was a plain fact he’d wanted to paste the cuss in the nose the first time they’d locked eyes, earlier. The big moose was sullen, rude, a natural bully, and no doubt one hell of a lawman, if half the things even his many enemies gave him credit for were at all true. Nobody had ever caught him with his hand in the till, and folk tended to watch the hands of an unpopular sheriff. Nobody alive dared claim he’d ever backed Pat Garrett down. Billy the Kid had been doing the running when old Pat caught up with him at the Maxwell spread and laid him low with a bullet in the heart, from the front, and the Kid armed with his own six-gun. Yet already folk who hadn’t been there were chipping away at Garrett’s rep with snide remarks about Garrett having the edge on poor Billy, despite the fact that Garrett was only chasing the little rascal after he’d shot three lawmen in the back in his Robin Hood career.

Stringer put the clippings aside and rolled a smoke as he told himself to stick to Judge Bean. Also, neither Earp nor Garrett seemed to be after him this evening, but someone sure was.

It was too early to say for sure whether that attempt on his life a few hours back had any connection with his destination or not. He’d been shot at before to keep him from handing in a news item someone just didn’t want to see printed. On the other hand, he’d been shot at just for the hell of it a few times as well. So the question boiled down to whether Bean and his pals had some dark secret they didn’t want a known investigative reporter delving into, or.... Someone didn’t want him to write nice things about the old fart?

He scowled at his own reflection in the window glass and muttered, “Try her this way. That fleet mysterious gunslick wasn’t after you or anyone as unknown.” He was out to be the man who gunned the man who gunned Billy the Kid, Stringer decided. He saw a chance to fire at Garrett mano a mano, if he never mentioned that car door he was mostly covered by. It wasn’t enough cover to take out an old pro like Garrett, who was only being modest or unimaginative when he assumed a stranger with his back to said door seemed the likely target.

Stringer liked that notion better. But as he started to turn from the window and see if he could get into Collier’s magazine, a reflected vision it might have been rude to stare so hard at hove into view. He pretended to go on gazing out at nothing while he admired the passage of a shapely blonde with her waistline cinched to mayhaps eighteen inches between her white blouse and side-button skirt. Some found those new side-button skirts mighty shocking. But she look refined enough. As she passed by, a taller man followed her under a sporty straw hat. It seemed obvious others had ridden far enough to crave liquid refreshments in the club car. Stringer rose to follow the early birds, lest there be no place next to a pretty lady by the time he gave into temptation. Next to drinking alone on a night train, there was nothing more miserable than drinking in a corner, watching all the other gents flirt with a member of the unfair sex.

Stringer slid open the door the man in the straw skimmer had just shut in his face and crossed the open platform between cars, enjoying a breath of cooler night air scented with grease wood and coal smoke. They were somewhere on the California desert by now.

As he stepped into the next car, he spotted the two of them ahead and moved a mite faster to close the distance between them. But they still made it out the rear door ahead of him, and again, the son of a bitch with the skimmer slid the door shut in his face. He shrugged, slid it open again, and stepped out on the open platform just in time to see the man grab the woman. They both seemed unaware of him as they wrestled back and forth on the swaying platform in the semidarkness. She was doing all the screaming, or trying to. She’d have yelled a lot louder if the brute hadn’t had a hand over her mouth. This time Stringer was wearing his gun, and he drew it. Then, since there was no way to shoot the lady’s attacker without risking a .38 slug through the both of them, Stringer pistol-whipped the old boy from behind, hard. As he let go of the blonde and began to fall away from her, Stringer grabbed the back of his jacket with his free hand, balanced the now hatless tough on his buckled knees, and asked the lady, soberly, “Does this belong to you, ma’am?”

She’d fallen back against the bulkhead to stare owl-eyed at Stringer and the groaning mess he was hanging on to. “Who is he?” she gasped. “Who are you?”

Stringer nodded, holstered his .38, and simply picked the ruffian up by the seat of the pants and the scruff of the neck to pitch him over the side chains and into the darkness beyond.

“Are you crazy?” the blonde sobbed.

Stringer kicked the straw hat over the side as well and replied, “Nope. He was. A man would have to be, trying to, ah, mishandle a lady on the platform of a club car, buttons or no buttons.”

“I don’t think that was what he had in mind,” she said. “It all happened so fast, but I got the distinct impression he was about to throw me off this train.” Then she stared soberly at Stringer. “My God, he would have, if you hadn’t arrived in the nick of time!”

He shrugged. “Forget it. It’s over. Would you take it personal if I commented on your British accent, ma’am?”

She smiled weakly. “I don’t consider the question rude. I am English. Do you suppose that was why that total stranger was so annoyed with me?”

Stringer smiled. “He hardly looked old enough to be a vet of the Battle of Saratoga, ma’am. The only war we still seem to be fighting these days is our Civil War, and you English folk didn’t ride for either side. I reckon he was just strange, like you said.”

She glanced sideways at the swirling darkness, gulped, and asked him, “Do you think he... made it?”

Stringer shrugged. “Sixty-forty, with the odds on our side. Either way, he won’t bother you anymore. I’d sure like to stand out here in the flying cinders with you some more, ma’am, but my original destination was the club car. My name is Stuart MacKail, I only dress this informal when I’m on the road, and I’d be proud to buy you some soda water or stronger. You sure look like you could do with something stronger.”

She didn’t move from her corner of the platform. “I’m Pamela Kinnerton,” she told him. “My friends call me Pam. You’re not the Stuart MacKail who writes for the San Francisco Sun, are you?”

He looked sheepish. “I used to be. Lately I’ve been using Stringer as my byline. It’s a newspaper joke too boring to go into.”

She dimpled up at him. “I know what a stringer is. I work for the Manchester Guardian on a roving assignment. I guess you could call me a stringer too.”

“It would be less confusing if I just called you Pam,” he said. “Now that we have that all sorted out, how do you feel about that soda water?”

She nodded, but asked, “Are you sure it’s safe?”

“It ought to be,” he said. “Unless folk out to murder newspaper ladies come in bunches.” Then he stopped, scowled, and went on, “Now that’s sort of odd when one considers odds. Have you ever noticed how, in real life, things seem to come in bunches no fiction writer would dare use in a novel?”

“Of course,” she said. “But how often do lunatics try to throw girls off moving trains, in or out of adventure novels?”

“Earlier this evening I met two well known people in a row,” he said soberly. “That was likely coincidence. Then, right after someone tried to murder this newspaperman, I caught another one trying to murder you. That’s stretching even bad luck out of shape entire. What’s the story you’re covering, Pam?”

“I’m on my way to a place in Texas called Langtry. The Guardian wants a piece on some notorious old western badman who seems to have a romantic fixation on our own notorious Lillie Langtry. You’ve heard of her, of course?”

“I have,” Stringer said. “We’d best pass on that soda water, after all. They may just be coming in bunches, unless that one I just tossed off was the same one who came after me earlier.”

He could see how puzzled she was. So he told her, “I’m covering the same story, albeit from another angle. I doubt Miss Lillie Langtry could be anywhere near Texas right now. But something is up in Langtry right now, and I don’t think newspaper folks are welcome. Do you have a good place to fort up until we get there?”

She nodded. “My compartment. I have some, ah, soda water there as well. I hadn’t planned on uncorking it this soon, and I don’t like drinking alone in any case. Just what do you mean by the term, forting up? Are you suggesting we lock ourselves in my compartment and dare them to come in after us?”

Stringer smiled and started to say that wasn’t exactly what he’d had in mind. But since that would have been a mighty stupid thing to say, he said, “Well, you got the soda water and I got the gun. So between us we ought to be able to stand off anything but Apache with a battering ram. Lead on, MacDuff.”

She led him on, to the forward section of the train. But as she ushered him into her tiny compartment, he learned he’d have to allow for her British sense of humor. Americans were just as dense getting English jokes they didn’t quite savvy because both sides made the mistake of assuming they were speaking the same lingo. As she waved him to a seat on her made-up bunk, the only seat in the place, she asked, “What was that about Apache, back there? I thought you Yanks had all your red Indians locked up these days.”

He laughed. “They’re neither locked up nor causing much trouble. A few scattered bands still raid stock here and there, now and again. But Wounded Knee was the last big fight, and that was over ten years ago. A mess of the old fighting chiefs are still around, but the last time I interviewed Geronimo, at Fort Sill, he was selling postcards of himself at the wheel of a horseless carriage. He told me he’s saving up to buy one personal.”

She’d rummaged a soda siphon, two tumblers, and a fifth of Glen Grant by now, and sat down beside him, saying with a wistful sigh, “It’s too bad your Wild West era is over now. Think of all the stories we never got to cover.”

She handed him one tumbler and commenced to pour scotch into it for him as he said, “They wouldn’t have let you report the truth in any case, and at least one reporter was with Custer at the wrong time and place. Ah, don’t you mean to leave any space at all for the soda, Pam?”

She shot a spit of siphon water in atop the heroic drink she’d served him and poured another for herself. “I still feel left out,” she said. “Do you think we’ll encounter many Mexican bandits, at least, where we’re going?”

“I sure hope not,” he said.

They clinked glasses, and he had to swallow his scotch almost neat, with no chaser, without letting on he was a sissy drinker compared to her. He could see it didn’t bother her at all, unless she was showing off too.

Having consumed a polite amount of what tasted sort of like iodine to his California tastebuds, Stringer said, “We’d best worry less about wild Indians than present possible company. Is that door locked?”

She assured him it was. He put his drink aside to take off his hat and gun rig, then placed the loaded S&W, raw, on the sort of end table built into the corner at his end of the bunk. “I doubt anyone would be dumb enough to try busting through that door at us,” he said. “Do you have any hardware of your own, Pam?”

She blinked at him incredulously. “Do you mean firearms? Good Lord, what would I be doing with a gun of my own?”

He sipped some more scotch, noting it tasted smoother now. “I thought we’d just met a rascal trying to kill you. Never mind. We can likely pick up a lady’s .32 for you at Langtry. You do know how to shoot, don’t you?”

She gulped. “I’ve been to a few grouse shoots in my time. I’ve never fired a pistol, if that’s what you mean.”

“That’s what I mean,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. I can show you which end the bullets come out of, and that’s good enough at close range.”

“You’re mad,” she decided, chasing the thought down with a healthy gulp.

“No I’m not,” he said. “You are. That rascal I had to pull off you just now wouldn’t have been able to get half as forward with you if you’d had even a garter derringer to call your own.”

She didn’t answer. That gave him time to reconsider. “Now that’s kind of odd, when you study on it. The one who tried to nail me used a gun. The one after you didn’t. Most of my kith and kin know I pack a .38, some of the time, at least. A man out to murder even a gal would have to know for certain she wasn’t armed. Lots of our uncouth Gibson Girls do pack some protection in our rougher neighborhoods. Add it up and tell me if you see what I see, Pam.”

She finished her drink and began to pour another. “You’re right. It adds up to someone who knows more about us than we know about him or them. But for God’s sake, Stuart, what could they be trying to hide from us?”

“If we knew that,” he said, “it would be too late for them to hide it. Do you always drink that much that fast, Pam?”

She looked away and murmured, “Not as a rule. If we’re going to be working together, beginning with this, ah, fort-up, as you put it so politely, we may as well get the sexual tension between us out of the way. I’m trying to get drunk first. I fear I’m just too proper to simply make love to even a handsome stranger cold sober.”

Stringer stared slack-jawed at her while she demolished yet more scotch. Then he shook his head to clear it. “Hold on. It can’t be ten o’clock yet, and to tell the truth such, ah, forward behavior hadn’t occurred to me yet.”

She started to pour another, sounding a mite blurry as she told him, “It will, before morning. This berth isn’t wide enough for us to sleep without touching, and sooner or later we have to get some sleep, right?”

He grabbed her wrist as she raised the tumbler to her lips, spilling some of it in her lap. “Wrong. Whether we want to make love or just go on living, this is no damned time for either of us to get drunk.”

“Oh, damn,” she said. “I’ve spilt malt liquor all over my skirt, and it’s sure to leave a stain.” And then, as he said he was sorry, she stood up, calmly unbuttoned one side of her skirt, and stepped out of it. She hung it on a door hook and giggled as she squirted soda water on it with her siphon, saying, “There. That ought to dry clean by morning. What do you think, Stuart?”

He stared soberly at her as she turned around. “I think I’d feel less need for self-control if you’d thought to wear any underwear under that skirt.”

She looked down, and giggled again. “Oh, dear, I seem to be stark down there, save for my silk stockings and shoes, I mean. What do you think we ought to do about that, dear?”

He set his tumbler by his gun and got to his feet. “I think switching off the light may be a good beginning. Every now and again this train stops for water, and I just hate to get laughed at by railyard crews.”

As the compartment was plunged into darkness, his first step back toward her warned him he’d had more scotch than he’d considered, unless they were rounding a turn. He laughed and made it back to the berth in the dark without diving on her headfirst. She laughed, too, when his exploring hands grabbed her instead of the firmer cushioning he’d expected. She lay atop the bedding without a stitch on above her garters. She asked how come he still had his own clothes on. He shucked out of them fast, and as he rolled aboard, her thighs were spread in welcome. So they got right at it. Or, at least, he did. He hadn’t had enough to drink to keep him from climaxing soon, in anyone that delicious.

“Oh? Again?” she murmured.

He stopped in midstroke to ask her, almost as coldly, “Do you think it would help if I had some chloroform handy, ma’am?”

She wrapped her arms and legs around him reassuringly. “Go ahead and satisfy yourself again, dear,” she told him. “I don’t mind.”

He muttered something it would have been rude to say to a lady right out loud, and climbed off both her and the berth to grope for the shirt he’d left somewhere on the infernal floor. She asked in a lost little girl voice what he was looking for, and he growled, “My makings. I’m not tired enough to sleep. So I mean to smoke awhile. You go on and do anything you’ve a mind to.”

He found his makings and sat at the foot end of the berth to roll as best he could in the dark. Now that his eyes were used to it, it wasn’t total darkness. There just wasn’t enough moonlight through the grimy window to keep from spilling half the Bull Durham on his bare sweaty thighs before he had it rolled and sealed. He struck a match to light up. That was when he noticed she was staring up at him with tears running down both cheeks. He shook the light out, took a drag on his smoke, and told her, “There’s no need to blubber up about it. I’m sorry if I treated you too rough, and what the hell, it’s over.”

“I don’t like being frigid, damn it,” she sobbed. “It cost me the only man I ever loved, and it certainly hasn’t been much fun since he walked out on me!”

Stringer took another drag before he asked her, in a softer tone, “Why do you do it, then? I didn’t exactly twist your arm, you know. I may strike you as an uncouth type, dressed cow and all, but I would have behaved if I’d thought you didn’t want it.”

“Oh, nobody understands me,” she said. “It’s not that I don’t want it. I just can’t seem, to enjoy it. I’ve always envied normal women so much. It’s not that I’m a prude, you see.”

He couldn’t help grinning in the dark. “I sort of noticed that.”

“All right, have it your way,” she said. “I wasn’t that drunk, and I did set out to seduce you, partly because of the pragmatic reasons I gave and partly because, well, I thought you might be able to... you know.”

He sighed. “Thanks. Do you always tell your, ah, gentlemen friends how swell you find ‘em in bed, Pam?”

“Of course, dear,” she said. “This is the twentieth century, after all, and it’s time to put all that Victorian hypocrisy behind us, don’t you agree?”

“Not hardly,” he said. “Queen Victoria and Prince Albert might not have made it though their honeymoon if she’d told him she didn’t like it all that much at first, and he’d told her he’d had better in his student-prince days. Men and women were never designed by nature to tell one another the truth in bed, Pam. I wasn’t there. But had I been, and had the Lord asked my advice on the blueprints of old Adam and Eve, I don’t think folk today would be built the exact same way.”

She asked what he was talking about. He snuffed out the smoke, rejoined her in a reclining position, and took the matter in hand, warning her, “Don’t offer comments on my efforts,” he explained. “Just enjoy the train ride with me a spell. Even hot-natured gals know better than to just fall down and take it cold.”

He kissed her and held her closer as he fondled her more gently than he might have been able to manage while hot. But since he’d cooled down some and she’d never been hot to begin with, he was able to tease her until she began to respond with her own sensual movements, murmuring, “Oh, my, that does feel interesting.”

“Castrating comments like that can cool interest almost as good as if you squirted a man, personal, with that soda-water siphon,” he said.

“Aren’t I supposed to say I don’t mind what you’re doing to me at all, dear?” she asked.

So he did it harder and said, “No. You’re supposed to tell a man you like it, or that he’s driving you loco en la cabeza, not that he’s for God’s sake interesting!”

She sighed. “Kiss me again and do that faster, then. For I don’t mind admitting I kind of like it.”

He kissed her, but warned, “Never say you kind of like anything. I’m not getting as much as you are out of this petting, and a man deserves some recognition for his honest efforts.”

She laughed dryly, told him he was ever so romantic, and added that she might not mind if he joined her, as long as she seemed to be, for God’s sake, climaxing. But he just kept petting her. “You women are all alike,” he said. “You think you own us, and then as soon as you’ve satisfied your own lust, you just turn over and go to sleep, leaving us feeling used and abused.”

That made her really laugh, and since the laughter served to distract her even more from whatever in thunder was ailing her, she moaned, “Ooh, stop teasing and do it right to me, damn it!”

But he knew what he was doing, though it felt sort of dumb to be breaking in such an experienced woman of the world. He kissed her hard and brought her to full orgasm before he mounted her again to satisfy himself.

It seemed to satisfy the hell out of her as well. So they went gloriously insane for a spell, in time with the clicking of the wheels below, and when at last all good things had come to an end, she yawned like a contented kitten indeed and marveled, “That was lovely, darling. But I’m not sure whether I’ve just lost my virginity or fallen in love with you.”

“Neither seems all that logical,” he said. “But you sure were right about it being a fine notion to bust any awkwardness betwixt us before we have to get off this train. We’re going to have to stay tight as ticks and watch each other’s backs once we get to Langtry.”

She hugged him tighter with her thighs and said she didn’t think she’d mind that at all.