Free Stringer and the Deadly Flood by Lou Cameron Page B

who’s been dogging our hoof and wagon sign is welcome to get chilled to the bone, camped out among the soggy greasewood.”
    She asked, “Do you not think this rain will wipe out our trail by morning if it keeps up?” But before he could agree the rain might at least blur it, the sky above split open with a mighty crack of lightning, which they saw even through the wet canvas roof, and then it began to rain in earnest. Raising his voice above the drumming on the hopefully waterproof canvas, he said, “Yep. I’d say you could consider us lost in the desert.”
    He finished rolling and sealing his smoke. As he lit it, he saw she was propped up on one elbow, looking somewhat confused as well as surprisingly tempting to a man who’d just rolled off her. He said, “I didn’t mean we were lost, personal. I meant I doubt anyone but mayhaps a Digger Indian could read any trail we left betwixt here and El Centro, and I doubt we have any Indians after us.”
    She said, “Bueno. Pero, where do we go from here now that we have escaped those bad hombres who want poor Herberto’s papers?”
    It was a good question, and he wasn’t sure he had a good answer. “Well, I seem to have such a story as old Herb wanted to tell us, but I doubt my paper will run it on any front page.”
    â€œThe people he was working for seemed to think it was important enough. Why did they get so rough with all of us if you think there is nothing to it, Stuarto?”
    He blew smoke out his nostrils with a bare-shouldered shrug of annoyance. “Guilty consciences, I reckon. Hired guns don’t know half as much about running a newspaper as we do. To them, the fact they’re slickering settlers with an irrigation scheme that might not work, assuming I could prove that, must sound like the makings of a headline exposé. They just don’t know how cramped a newspaper is for space to print more solid news. I’ll type what I’ve found out once I get back to my old grasshopper. I may even get paid space rates for it. But if they run the few padded paragraphs I can manage at all, it’ll be as a filler on a back page. It’s simply not fresh news that slickers have been selling worthless western land to suckers since Jefferson beat down the price of the Louisiana Purchase.”
    She protested. “Pero, Herberto said it was a most important tale to be told. He said the water company was tampering with nature and that there was going to be great flood for to rival the one in the Bible.”
    Stringer inhaled another drag and let it out thoughtfully. “It would still take a heap of water and a heap of time to fill that natural basin Lockwood thinks he surveyed on his own. Nobody lives out in the heart of this desert. So how much damage could it do? A big fresh water lake betwixt here and Indio might be an improvement on all this dusty nothing-much, right?”
    Then he blew some more smoke out and mused aloud. “Hold on. It wouldn’t wind up a fresh water lake. It would pick up the salt from that dried-up earlier sea and.... All right, so we’d have California’s answer to the Great Salt Lake, only bigger. That would be worth a Sunday feature, if I knew for sure such a thing was ever sure to happen. But I’ve no way to prove it. The land and water mongers would be sure to deny it. It’s not a story worth the risk of a libel suit either way.”
    She lay back yawning and asked how soon he meant to return to the pet grasshopper he seemed so fond of. He laughed and explained. “I call my second-hand Remington typewriter a grasshopper. You’d have to see the way the roll bounces when I push the upper-case shift to understand the nickname. And I’m not that fond of it. It just pays a lot better than working cows. As to when I have to get back to it, I’m not in any great hurry if you have something more interesting in mind.”
    She