Desert Rendezvous by Walker A. Tompkins

Book Details

Desert Rendezvous – two stories of men and women of the West, coming together to take on  thieves, hijackers and murderers.

Desert Rendezvous (1953) – THE DEPUTY PACKED DYNAMITE — but he was too lazy to stop the high-graders from getting away with murder until a girl came along and set a match to him

Two Notches On His Gun (1955) – CHUCK FINLEY WAS caught in a neat frame-up and every step he took to clear himself just added to the evidence of his guilt

Walker A. Tompkins was born on July 10, 1909 in Prosser, Yakima County, Washington. Tompkins grew up on a wheat farm outside Walla Walla before moving with his family to Turlock, California in 1920. He sold his first western novel to Street and Smith of New York, at the age of 21, just before beginning college at Washington State.

Desert Rendezvous contains 14 illustrations.

Files:

1. Tompkins-DesertRendezvous.epub

Excerpt: Desert Rendezvous

THE night Oatie Simmons confided that he was a deputy U.S. Marshal on a man-hunt happened to be the tenth anniversary of Hamp Adams’ arrival in Ruby City. The news, totally unexpected as it was, ruined a record of ten years’ utter peace and freedom from worry.

They called Hamp the laziest cuss on the Mojave Desert, a tribute he was careful not to deny. It was true, though, that the surrounding California badlands had shielded Hamp Adams from worldly woes as completely as if he had been a monk cloistered in a monastery, instead of an ex-muleskinner from Death Valley.

Oatie Simmons had drifted down from Inyo County three months ago to “prospect,” he had told Hamp, which was a fishy excuse, looking back on it; two generations of prospectors had gleaned the last color from Ruby’s ore heaps, forty-odd years ago, and Hamp felt duty bound to tell Oatie so. But Oatie wasn’t impressed.

“I’ll make my strike,” Oatie had replied, and Hamp knew enough to keep his mouth shut after that.

Then, at supper last night, Oatie had sworn Hamp to secrecy, there in the stuffy kitchen of the Freighter’s Rest Hotel, and had shown him his law badge and mentioned a man-hunt. . . .

Hamp hadn’t slept very well last night, thinking about it. His own conscience was clear enough; but the thought that Ruby City’s tiny populace harbored a criminal was disturbing. Oatie had shut up like a clam when it came to details. “You’ll know who I’m after,” the lawman had hinted darkly, “when I spring my trap. It’s a big case, kid. Only reason I’m telling you this much is because I may need your help directly.”

This morning, Hamp was too fidgety to remain idle. Remembering he had some freight to pick up over at the Santa Fe depot, he hitched up his mule wagon and set out. At the crest of the south ridge he halted his rickety vehicle and peered back at Ruby City.

The inexorable assault of the elements had laid a punishing hand on the town, reducing it to a drab scatter of sun-baked shacks. To eyes less prejudiced than Hamp’s, Ruby was made insignificant by the sheer immensity of its wilderness setting, its ugly outlines accentuated by the Mojave’s austere grandeur and the beauty of far-seen California mountains.

There was soul-food to be had in the arid landscape which vaulted the purple Calicos and led the eye endlessly northward to where the Sierra snowfields glistened ephemerally in the heat-shimmer, giving an illusion that the malpais was one with the arching sky.

Time was—back in the ’60s—when Ruby had boasted a population of five thousand, evenly divided between miners and riffraff. Ruby had been a ghost camp even before Hamp was born. It was in the last stages of decay when Hamp had first seen its ramshackle shape looming through the lifting alkali dust stirred by twenty mules, hauling Hamp’s tandem-hitched borax wagons south from Windy Gap. Ruby was then, and still was, an overnight camp for mulewhackers freighting ore from Cerro Gordo and the Panamints, borax and phosphates from Death Valley. But for Hamp Adams, born twenty-seven years ago in distant Alabama, Ruby City was home.

TEN years he had lived here, and prospered. Going to seed, his kinfolks claimed. But what the hell? He was making triple the monthly wage of mule-skinners and swampers, and not working himself to the bone doing it.

Up until yesterday, when he had learned who Simmons was, worry was a word missing from Adams’ vocabulary. The kid from Dixie who had come west with a hacking cough and a doctor’s verdict that he would not live to see his, next Christmas was now a man who scaled close to two hundred without an ounce of excess tissue on his six-foot-some frame.

Hamp clucked his tongue and the lethargic mules got the buckboard started down the south slope toward the maroon and olive depot, hardly larger than a privy, which was Ruby City’s freight station on the Santa Fe.

A feather of smoke befouled the clean sky to eastward. At the vanishing-point of the twin bands of steel which led to Arizona, Hamp could see the crawling black dot which-was the Overland Express.

Backing his wagon against the plank loadings platform where he would pick up the freight which a passing train had deposited there a week ago, Hamp caught sight of Clede Vaspar lounging in the shade of the freight-house awning.

Vaspar was the most recent addition to Ruby City’s twenty-odd permanent residents. He was patently a tinhorn gambler, and did not fit his surroundings. Proprietor of the Golden West Casino—in Ruby’s heyday a-fabulous establishment with a mahogany bar inlaid with silver dollars—Clede Vaspar was a parasite who lived off the hard-won earnings of the freighters who played his roulette wheel or bucked his card game.

Climbing off his wagon, Hamp Adams gave Vaspar the same hearty greeting he bestowed on any fellow human. Whatever his personal dislike might be for the man and his way of earning a living, Vaspar was part of Ruby City—and Ruby City was home. Maybe the dry climate had brought Vaspar to the desert; the perpetual pallor of the man’s otherwise handsome face hinted at a deep-seated sickness.

Vaspar flicked aside his cigarette, ignoring Adams with his eyes. His greeting carried a surly impatience: “The station is locked, as usual. And Hix gave me his word this morning to be here at ten o’clock. Why does the railroad company keep that loafer on its payroll?”

Hamp Adams entered the belt of shadow under the awning and, reaching up to fumble between shingles and rafter, took down a brass key. He was always having to defend agent Todd Hix.

“Shucks, the agent figgers everybody knows how to open the freight shed,” Adams chuckled, unsnapping a padlock and trundling open the shed door. “There’s your whisky, Vaspar. If there’s any shipping charges due, Hix will collect ’em in due time.”

Adams never ceased to be amazed at the vast amounts of beer and whisky which Vaspar’s patrons consumed; shipments such as the one now awaiting the gambler’s pickup were dropped off at the railroad station every other week, it seemed.

AT THE opposite end of the platform was Vaspar’s rig, a democrat wagon drawn by a pair of matched bays. Vaspar had first showed up in Ruby City six months ago with that shiny equipage; he kept the bays at the Last Chance Livery and always insisted on grooming and graining them himself. A man who loved horseflesh, Adams figured, could be forgiven a lot of tinhorn traits. . . .

Adams had stowed the last of his own boxes and barrels in the buckboard by the time the 10:50 Express from Phoenix whistled for the Ruby City grade crossing. Clambering aboard his wagon, to hold the mules in check against the near passage of the locomotive and coaches, Adams was startled to see that the Overland was slowing down. Although there were no water tanks here, obviously the fast passenger was going to stop. Not in Adams’ memory had such a thing occurred; ordinarily the through trains whipped past the Ruby City station shack at better than a mile a minute.

That oversight on the part of Santa Fe’s route surveyors had always seemed a regrettable thing to Hamp Adams. On the other hand, it shielded Ruby’s naked ugliness from the scorn of passing travelers. . . .

The big diamond-stacked engine rumbled past in a cloud of wood smoke, momentarily revolting Hamp’s nostrils with the compounded stench of hot metal, lubricating oil and escaping steam. Brake shoes grated on metal; brake hoses gasped protestingly, hissing air like a winded animal breaking hard.

Hamp, busy keeping his snorting mules from bolting, saw the Overland Express come to a halt with its last coach directly opposite the Ruby City station shack. A blue-uniformed conductor emerged from the back platform, placed a foot-stool on the cinder roadbed apron, and reached up to address a passenger:

“Ruby City, ma’am. Is anyone here expecting you?”

Excerpt From: Walker A. Tompkins. “Desert Rendezvous.”