Stringer and the Deadly Flood by Lou Cameron Read Free Book Online Page A

“I’m Stringer MacKail of the San Francisco Sun. I came here to look up a gent called Lockwood. Irrigation engineer. I don’t suppose you’d know where I could find him?”
    The barkeep sighed and said, “You just missed him. Passed you in that hearse, outside. Been dead no more ‘n twelve hours. We like to plant ‘em pronto out here on the desert.”
    Stringer accepted the beer but left it untasted for the moment. He whistled softly and replied, “Now that’s what I call timing. What did the poor old gent die from?”
    The informative barkeep nodded sagely. “Bullets. He wasn’t all that old, leastways not from where I stand these days. No more than forty at the most.”
    Stringer sipped some beer. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t exactly up to Frisco Bay standards either. He tried to keep things casual as he quietly asked, “Does anybody know who murdered him, or why?”
    The old-timer replied just as casually, “He wasn’t murdered, unless you want to get picky. Lockwood and Cactus Jack Donovan got into an argument over cards, back yonder at the last table as a matter of fact. The shoot-out took place later, out front of course. We don’t allow no fighting in here. I didn’t see the shoot-out myself. But those who did told the law it seemed a fair enough fight. Cactus Jack rode out anyways. The sheriff had warned him more than once about his nasty disposition.”
    Stringer sighed and inhaled some more suds. “That’s that then. With the man I was sent to see shot and the man who shot him long gone as well, I don’t see who on earth my paper might want me to look up here now.”
    The barkeep thought on this a moment, then offered, “Well, there’s that young gal Lockwood was shacked up with if she’s still here in town. I wasn’t at the funeral, so I just can’t say.”
    Finishing his beer, Stringer thanked him for the suggestion. “I’d best hear what the late Lockwood’s play-pretty has to say, as long as I’ve already come so far on little more than a vague news tip.” He pushed back from the bar. “Would you by any chance know where I could find the lady?”
    â€œI never said she was no lady,” the barkeep sniffed. “More like a Mex if you ask me. Don’t recall her name. But she and Lockwood was camped in a sort of gypsy cart, red wheels, down to the north end of Main Street. You can’t miss it. Just look for a red-wheeled cart in the shade of some half-dead cotton woods.”
    Stringer paid, leaving his change on the mahogany with a nod of thanks, and strode back out into the blinding sunlight to see how well the old-timer’s directions worked.
    He could see the treetops down that way and he could also see the old-timer didn’t know beans about botany. The trees the old barkeep had described as cottonwoods were really desert willows, which had little more business being this far from a seasonal stream than cottonwoods. But they drooped because they were willows, not because they were dying.
    As he ambled along the shady side of the walkless street, a gent riding a dusty roan tore past him, oblivious to the dust he was churning up in the middle of the already dusty enough settlement. Stringer held his breath a good ten paces to let the dust settle back on the street instead of in his lungs, although there wasn’t much he could do about the dust in his eyes but blink and bear it.
    Stringer had almost forgotten the annoying cuss by the time he passed the last frame shack and its fenced-in garden to spy the gypsy cart parked on four red wheels under the dusty, drooping willow branches. A mule was grazing in a weed patch beyond on a long ground tether. Stringer’s amber eyes focused thoughtfully, however, on the lathered pony tethered between him and the gypsy cart. It was the same dusty roan that had passed him just moments before, and