A Stranger Here Below

by Charles Fergus

  “I know all about horses. I like ’em, can’t say as I trust ’em, on account of some of them is always looking to kick you into next week. Been around horses all my life. You have any questions, ask away.”

  “I am looking for a dun gelding, a big, strong horse with a long back, looks like he could run all day and half the night. Do you know a horse like that?”

  “That would be George’s gelding.”

  The boy standing beside the man tilted up his moony head. “Edgar,” he squeaked at the man, “you weren’t supposed to tell.”

  Gideon looked more closely at the small male person, whose coarse features and wrinkled face suggested that he was, in fact, not a boy but a stunted adult.

  The sturdy-built man reddened and thrust his hands into his pockets.

  “Not supposed to tell?” Gideon said.

  The man’s mouth slacked open. He whipped his head from side to side.

  “Why not?”

  “Mr. Thompson said so,” the owl declared.

  Gideon tapped his badge. “Gentlemen, this badge identifies me as the sheriff of Colerain County. As citizens, you are bound by law to answer any and all questions that I ask you.”

  The sturdy man directed a vindicated expression at his smaller friend, who shook his head before lisping, “Mum’s the word.”

  “I’m looking for the man who owns the dun,” Gideon said. “In his early twenties, a talkative fellow. Calls himself George England. He may be wearing a red vest.”

  “That’s George, all right,” the sturdy stable hand said. “But it’s George, not ‘Chorch,’ like you just said. He stayed with us last night. Slept up in the hayloft. You are so right, he loves to gab, why, he’d talk the paint off a door. Goes on and on so’s you can scarcely get a word in edgewise, which it can be very annoying at times.” He nodded vigorously. “Got him a red vest, just like this one.” The man unbuttoned his coat and swelled his chest to display a red vest with a green paisley pattern. “George didn’t get his at the company store, where I got mine. His girlfriend give it to him for his birthday. Which she lives in Chinclaclamoose. That’s where George comes from. Chinclaclamoose is a Injun name. George said it means ‘no one tarries here.’” The man slapped the tops of his thighs and guffawed. “That hits me in the funny bone, so it does. ‘No one tarries here.’ Could be it’s not be much of a place. Plagued with swarms of gnats, maybe. Or unfriendly people. I never been there, but with a name like that, I ain’t sure I need to go.” The man guffawed again.

  “Where is George now?”

  “Left a couple hours ago. I told him, George, I said, you oughtn’t to travel. You see that red sky this morning? Means there’s a storm coming. My leg says so, too.” He hiked up his pantleg and exposed a hairy shin with a large pink knot. “Got kicked by a horse a few years back. Ever since then, I have felt pains in this leg whenever a storm is on the way. I call my leg my weathervane. Durn thing aches right now, so it does. Pretty useful, wouldn’t you say, bein’ able to predict the weather with your leg?” He let his pantleg fall. “I’m glad that hoof didn’t hit a couple feet higher up and betwixt my legs, which is where a horse kicked Edwin when he was a little sprout. Ruined his balls. He never did grow up proper, still got him a high voice, and he can’t beget. Ain’t that so, Edwin?”

  The owlish man kicked the ground.

  “Where is George England now?” Gideon felt frustrated at having to fight through this thicket of jabber.

  “Mum’s the word,” the owl squeaked again. “Mr. Thompson finds out you told, Edgar, you’ll get raped over the coals.”

  “Now Edwin,” the low-browed man said. “This here is the county sheriff. You can tell by the badge he has on. Though if you ask me, he looks a bit wet behind the ears to be a sheriff. Anyway, fellow says we are bound by the law to answer his questions.”

  “George went off on iron company business,” the owl piped up.

  “What kind of business?”

  He shook his head. “Ain’t permitted to say.”

  Gideon looked at the sturdy man, who stood shifting from one foot to the other. “Edwin?”

  “I’m Edgar,” the man said. He pointed an elbow at his companion. “That’s Edwin. George is supposed to go find somebody.”

  “Who?”

  “A tramp,” the owl said. He looked up triumphantly at the sturdy man. “An old tramp with a white beard and a buck tail hat.”

  Gideon felt like a fist had slammed into his stomach. “Where can this old tramp be found?”

  “I heard Mr. Thompson telling George, ‘Go to the logging camp at the head of Egypt Hollow,’” the owl said.

  Gideon turned Maude and touched her with his calves. She shot ahead. Then he stopped and walked her back. “Where’s Egypt Hollow?”

  ***

  Maude cantered. Gideon felt sick to his stomach. If only he’d known about this stable before he went to the ironworks this morning. Now George England had been gone for a couple of hours. And all because of what I said to the ironmaster, Gideon thought.

  Rain began to fall, heavy drops in stuttering bunches. The clouds’ bellies smudged the ridgetops. Gideon pulled on his slicker. Maude ambled through the rain on the road down Panther Valley. They passed gleaned fields and brushlands. The way led through a wood of twisted locust trees, their trunks black and thorn-studded and blotched with yellow lichens. Gideon looked for a tall lightning-struck pine that marked the turnoff to Egypt Hollow. A half hour later he found the pine, a pale vertical wound where the bark had been blasted away by lightning spiraling up the tree’s trunk.

  The branch road led steeply upward. The rain swept across the hollow in sheets. Foam collected at the bases of trees. The wind shook the treetops. Gideon tilted his head forward, sluicing water off his hat brim. His hands, gloved in sopping leather, were numb.

  The dun came trotting toward him on the muddy road. Its rider never hesitated. He put the dun into a gallop and raced past. With no time to draw his pistol or pull the rifle from its scabbard, Gideon leaned toward the rider and lashed out with his arm. The inside of his forearm struck the man in the head. George England yelped and his hat flew off. He lost a stirrup and lurched sideways. He clasped his arms around the dun’s neck and scrambled back into the saddle and booted the dun in the ribs.

  Gideon watched him gallop away down the hollow. Should he chase after him? Or ride on to the camp?

  He had to know.

  The slab-sided lumber camp loomed black in the rain. He jumped off Maude. The cabin’s door was half-open. The feeling seized him again, pins and needles racing across his shoulders and back and up his neck. It stopped him in his tracks. He bent over and fought to draw breath. He balled his hands into fists. He put his fists on the tops of his thighs and pushed downward and straightened and lifted his head. He gulped in air. He forced himself to go in through the door.

  In the dim light he made out an overturned chair and a big dark spot on the puncheon floor. A dark smear led across the room and out through a back door. Outside on the ground, the smear showed red. He followed it to a patch of brush.

  The tramp lay on his back. His face was white. His mouth and beard and the front of his shirt were soaked with blood. Hack marks covered his hands. His throat had been cut so deeply that the severed windpipe hung out the side of his neck.

  Gideon fell to his knees. His shoulders knotted hard as wood. Pain throbbed where his shoulder had been clubbed. A feeling of evil overwhelmed him. Again he saw his memmi, her face, the cuts on her hands, the stab wounds on her breasts. He turned aside and vomited. He looked at the tramp again. He heard a high keening coming out of his mouth, a cry that was both a wail of anguish and a roar of rage.

  ***

  He sat on Maude, walked her down Egypt Hollow. The rain fell. He arrived at the main road. In the fading light he could barely see the dun’s tracks.

  He turned and followed the tracks west down the Panther Valley in the direction of Chinclaclamoose.

  Life is t
he hour that God has given

  To escape hell and fly to heaven

  Thirty

  He rode down the squelching main street of the town. The night before, he had terrorized the residents of a cabin along the road by banging on their door in the middle of the night and demanding they let him in. He had caught a few fitful hours of sleep curled up in a blanket next to the hearth. He had left the cabin before dawn, with directions on how to get to the town with the strange-sounding Indian name. He had made up his mind to go on to Chinclaclamoose in case George England indeed lived there, in case he had decided to go home. There was only one way to get to the town, along a poor road up a steep hollow that notched through the Allegheny Front before debouching onto an expansive plateau. The road led straight to Chinclaclamoose.

  It didn’t matter how far he had to ride, Gideon told himself. It didn’t matter how elusive or dangerous George England was. He would capture the man. He would catch the murderer, or he would die trying.

  He wondered again who had attacked him in Hammertown. Had it been George England, and had he done it at Adonijah Thompson’s behest? If his assailant had used a gun, Gideon figured, he might already be dead. Or if he’d used a knife—Gideon shuddered as he pictured the old tramp, then imagined a blade slicing through his own neck or plunging into his back or breast.

  He had failed to keep the old tramp alive. It was no one’s fault but his own. After finding the body, he had dragged it back inside the lumber camp. A hasty search of the tramp’s clothing and the inside of the cabin turned up nothing—no papers or possessions that might point to his identity. Just some food, the poor fellow’s knapsack and walking stick, and that fancy hat hanging on a peg by the door. Now, with the tramp dead, it seemed to Gideon there would be no way of finding out if Nat Thompson had come back to Colerain County. Unless George England knew who it was he had killed; knew and was willing to tell.

  The rain dripped off the roofs of the buildings lining the street. It overflowed rain barrels and ran down the few windows of the mostly unpainted and dilapidated stores on either hand. Gideon passed two huge brindled hogs wallowing in the mud. They pointed their ears in his and Maude’s direction but did not bother to open their eyes or lift their heads.

  A man picked his way catlike across the morass of the street. Gideon asked him if anyone upheld law and order in Chinclaclamoose. The man directed him to James McGee, constable, who owned the dry goods store.

  The whitewashed false front of McGee’s store gave it a stature and an appeal beyond those of its neighbors. Even though it was Sunday, the door was unlocked. No customers inside. A small, trim-looking man with a white shirt and black sleeve garters was perched on a ladder restocking shelves.

  “I wonder if you can help me,” Gideon said.

  The man looked down at him. “Maybe so.”

  “Would you please get down off that ladder?” Gideon said. “I don’t like being looked down on when I talk.”

  “Well, all right, then.” The man climbed nimbly down.

  “I am Gideon Stoltz. The sheriff of Colerain County.”

  McGee smiled. “I’ve heard about you.” He stuck out his hand.

  “I am chasing a fugitive,” Gideon said. “I believe he killed two men.”

  McGee ushered Gideon in to a room that doubled as a storage area and an office. He got out two chairs.

  McGee appeared to be in his mid-thirties. He had dark eyes, dark hair pomaded heavily and parted in the center of his head, and a moustache whose tips curved downward below the corners of his mouth before curving up again to end in pointed tips. Gideon thought he looked more like a cardsharp than a shopkeeper and even less like a constable.

  “Tell me about your fugitive,” McGee said.

  “He is a young man. Maybe nineteen or twenty. He’s been using the name George England, though that may be an alias. I met him once on the road in Panther Valley, and he told me that he hailed from this place. From Chinclaclamoose. And I saw him again yesterday, near a cabin where a murdered man lay. I tried to stop him, but he got away.”

  “You say he killed two men?”

  “The first one was a clerk, a young man about the same age. In Adamant, outside of a saloon. He smashed in the man’s skull and then emptied his pockets.” Gideon paused, unsure how much to reveal about the second murder. “He also killed an old man, a tramp. Yesterday. He stabbed him to death in a cabin near the ironworks at Panther.”

  “And you think he rode on to Chinclaclamoose,” McGee said. “This is not a very big town. I know everyone who lives here.”

  “That’s what I’m hoping.” He described George England as closely as he could—he’d gotten a better look at the man during their brief encounter in Egypt Hollow, but he could describe him with no more particularity than having a lean build, light-colored hair, and fair skin. “He has a good horse. A dun. Long body. A strong horse, and a fast one.”

  McGee nodded, and sat back in his chair.

  Gideon felt sleepy. His throat hurt, and his cheeks and forehead burned. He closed his eyes and saw the corpse of the old man pitched into the brush behind the logging camp. The old tramp who could have supplied answers to the questions that rioted in Gideon’s brain.

  “George England,” McGee said. “Don’t know the name. But you say the horse was a dun? That’s an uncommon color, sure enough. Will you excuse me for a minute?” He went into another room. Gideon came out of a doze as McGee returned holding a tray with a teapot and two mugs. Gideon accepted a mug. The tea, scalding, warmed his mouth and gullet and chest.

  “I believe I know who you’re after.” McGee drank from his own mug, then patted his moustache with a napkin. “There’s a young buck lives here in town. I’d bet my bottom dollar he’s behind a rash of thefts we’ve had over the past couple of years, though I haven’t been able to catch him at it.

  “George Baker is his name. Goes by his initials—G. I. B. ‘Gib’ Baker. He’s the right age and fits your description. He more or less lives with his mother. The father ran off years ago; the father is from bloody old England, talks with a Johnny Bull accent. The son doesn’t. He’s as American as you or me. I haven’t seen young Gib for a while. He has a good dun horse.”

  Gideon put his mug down. “What are we waiting for?”

  While McGee closed up the store, Gideon drew the charges in his pistols and loaded and primed afresh. He told McGee it was of the utmost importance that the suspect be taken alive. “I think someone paid him to kill the old man,” he said. “I need him as a witness.”

  Gideon, McGee, and McGee’s brother-in-law, a heavy, splay-footed man who must have stood six and a half feet tall, slogged through the mud to Baker’s house. The house stood by itself on a bare lot that encroached on the surrounding forest. The big deputy went around back. McGee and Gideon knocked on the front door, then went inside with their pistols drawn. They received a steady stream of invective from a gap-toothed woman as they moved quickly from room to room. A cat ran off and hid beneath a bed, then vacated that spot when Gideon crouched and peered under it. Cellar to attic, McGee and Gideon searched and did not find Gib Baker as the gap-toothed woman followed them from room to room showering them with abuse.

  “There’s one other place,” McGee said as they went back outside.

  The second house was on a back alley. They rushed in without knocking. In a downstairs room Baker and a girl were in bed. Baker woke up as Gideon grabbed him by one arm and pressed his pistol against the man’s neck. Baker gave a loud yell and tried to pull loose. McGee hit him with a blackjack across the back of the head. He fell down half in the bed and half on the floor, his bare white buttocks in the air. The girl screamed. A voice from upstairs yelled at her to shut up.

  Gideon felt weak and out of breath. Sweat striped his sides beneath his long johns. His hands shook as he let the hammer down to half cock and put the pistol back in his belt.

  They got clothes on Baker and manacled his hands behind his back. The constable and the t
all deputy frog-marched the groggy man through the mud to the dry goods store as residents of Chinclaclamoose came out in the pouring rain to watch, holding catch-as-catch-can items above their heads—a wooden platter, a folded newspaper, a frying pan.

  McGee put irons on Baker’s legs and shut him in a closet. He said he would keep a watch on the prisoner and get a boy to take care of Gideon’s horse. Gideon thanked McGee and shook his hand. He supposed he should feel good about capturing Baker, but instead he felt low and wretched. He went back out in the rain. It was late in the day. The light in the sky was almost gone. He trudged down the street toward the tavern that McGee had pointed out. The hogs still lay in the mud, except now, instead of just two, there were four of them, all equally immense, all covered with mud and immobile. Gideon wondered if he was seeing double.

  The tavern was low and rambling and sided with rain-darkened rough-cut lumber. In the main room a man got up out of a chair, blinking and scratching himself under one arm.

  “I want a beefsteak,” Gideon said. “And some fried potatoes. A bottle of good whiskey if any is to be had in this place. And when I’m done with the meal, I want a bath. Make the water as hot as you can.” He looked around. Though he saw no sign of anyone else lodging in the tavern, he added, “And I want a bed all to myself.”

  Jesus whispers consolation

  And supports your fainting soul

  Thirty-One

  “I was going to tell you not to turn your back on this rattlesnake, but then you couldn’t drive this rig,” McGee said. “I think we have him secured good and proper.”

  Gib Baker wore the wrist and leg manacles that Gideon had brought. The restraints were chained to an iron eye-bolt sunk into the borrowed wagon’s bed. The prisoner wore a new hat, slightly too large for his head, and a rain slicker wrapped around his shoulders, both of which Gideon had purchased from McGee’s Dry Goods. In a storage area under the wagon seat, wrapped in oilcloth, was a written statement from Baker’s female companion and a sack filled with gold coins—along with a gold pocket watch with the initials YK engraved on the underside of the lid.