World, Chase Me Down

by Andrew Hilleman

  I guessed we’d traveled five or six miles when we ascended a low bluff and finally glimpsed a sunken valley that hadn’t been touched by fire.

  Wild sage and rye grass as green and glittery as Christmas tinsel. A green so vivid to my senses it was as if I were experiencing the color for the first time. I patted my clothes again to knock off more dust. I could have kept patting at my shirt for a week straight and still it would’ve let off a cloud with each whack, like an old rug.

  The mother squaw pointed and yapped like a pup.

  The young one leapt and clapped her hands and took off at a dash.

  I squinted against all the color. Even the sky was clear and my eyes adjusted to the brightness like coming inside a dark room after being out in the sun all day.

  At the bottom of the tableland was a migratory collection of skin tipis arranged in a circle. Maybe ten or so. Before setting off down the hillside, I checked the chamber of my revolver and dropped two shells into my short tom gun. The Comanche reputation preceded them. I was not about to wander into their campsite without being able to take out at least seven of them if I could still aim well enough despite the dizziness in my head from all the smoke I’d inhaled.

  Past the camp was a narrow band of the Cimarron River, its water reddened with clay deposits. I must’ve been close enough to Ingalls or Stillwater to make it there in a day’s travel, even by foot. But that valley was the unassigned land of all things wild. If I wanted to survive through the night, I’d have to trust that these Comanche would do me no harm and even welcome me as a guest for my deed on the plains, which saved two of their tribeswomen.

  I walked through the center of the tipi grounds, timid and wide-eyed and my fingers ready to draw pistol at the first sign of aggression. I’d lost sight of the two women I saved from the fire. A different pair of squaws were scraping a buffalo hide clean, using antlers like flensing knives. They stared at me as if I were a ghost from the moon. Dirty chickens wandered about without a pen, free as feral cats. Hung strips of meat and a whole armadillo smoked over a fire of dung chips. The fire pit was dug deep in the ground and lined with a buffalo stomach that held boiling water like a cloth pot.

  At least twenty good horses were tied up to a long rail, many of them a mix of breeds and colors. They’d most likely been acquired by accident or theft.

  By the look of the misshapen tipis, these were a nomadic people. They put as much care into the sloppy erection of their huts as a magpie would into a nest. Four travois fashioned from cottonwood poles were unloaded at the edge of the camp, ready to be packed up again at a moment’s notice and to haul their belongings like sunken wagons. If they’d been there three days, they’d be gone in three more, moving along the rivers in a caravan to chase buffalo around as ardently as street urchins might follow a penny-dainty man selling ice-cream scrolls from a pushcart.

  As I came into the hub of their settlement, one of the squaws started hooting. Soon I was surrounded by twenty-some Comanche. They did not appear ready for violence but were simply curious. Most of the men were shirtless and covered in paint as vibrant as berry juice. I raised my hand in a friendly greeting, hoping to be taken in as a guest. The circle of redskins pushed closer, as if inspecting a new type of animal they’d never seen before and were wary that it might be dangerous.

  A man wearing a long headdress approached. A large piece of chain mail was draped over his shoulders. He’d likely bartered it from fur trappers. He said something that I couldn’t understand, not even in context, but knew enough to gather that he was the chief. The two squaws I saved from the fire were standing behind him and croaking out words that sounded like they might be identifying me as the man they’d invited to follow them after their brush with death.

  The chief came forward and opened his arms. He directed me toward the edge of camp. I followed him over to where their horses were hitched. The chief used a series of gestures to suggest that I should pick one for myself. I selected a black gelding with a spirited disposition. The chief hollered out a command and one of the tribesmen brought over a buffalo hide saddle and fastened it on my new horse, cinching the girth snug under the belly. I thanked the chief by bowing repeatedly. We shook hands and came to understand we would always be friendly.

  That night I smoked the feathered stone pipe of peace with the old chief and six of his tribesmen. Together we shared in a feast of buffalo tongue, roasted armadillo meat, corn cake, and plenty of firewater. I’d never tasted anything that strong and was soon beaming drunk. I was given my own tipi for the night and, just as I was closing my eyes to have my best sleep in a month, the elder squaw I’d saved from the fire flipped open the flap and stood before me. She held a buffalo robe in her arms.

  These Comanche were the most hospitable people I had ever come across. Every rumor I’d heard about them now seemed as gross a slander as had ever been spoken.

  I thanked her and invited her to sit down. Instead she disrobed and crawled on top of me. I was hesitant at first. Surely this woman was past marrying age and belonged to one of the men, but I was unable to fight off her aggressive advances in my drunken state. Her lady parts had a gamey smell, and her torso was covered in old cracking paint, and her mouth tasted like decomposing animal matter or worse.

  Still, I didn’t care.

  I hadn’t had a woman without paying for it since Hattie.

  Being with the squaw was like the very first time all over again. Afterward, she curled up next to me, and we fell asleep together naked on the buffalo robe.

  When I woke in the morning the squaw was gone, along with the rest of the tribe. I staggered out of the tipi to see the entire camp had packed up and moved along, stolen away under moonlight with no indication as to which direction they fled out. The valley was as empty of signs of life as if undiscovered by man. There were no traces of the fire pits they’d dug in the ground or even footprints left behind. All that remained was my tipi and my new black horse tied up to a wooden stake in the ground.

  I dressed in my old suit of clothes, which were soiled with my stink. My gelding was covered in handprints of bright paint and stripes of clay down to its fetlocks. I lifted her left front leg. No shoes on her hooves. Most likely it was a wild breed stolen during a night raid. The Comanche also left me a parfleche pouch filled with mesquite beans, saskatoon berries, pemmican in an old meal bag, and a rawhide drinking gizzard the size of a cow udder. I collapsed the tipi and scrolled up the hide, along with my buffalo robe, into a pair of bedrolls and tied them off onto the back of my new saddle.

  Sunlight feathered out behind thin clouds.

  The sky lined with sunbeams like quillwork.

  I mounted my horse and had some trouble settling it down before it stopped bucking and spinning in circles. I orientated myself northward and started off at a brisk lope through the tall grasses. My head was still swimming from the firewater I drank the night before. After two days of riding I found a dogtrot trading post with a yellow tin roof and papered windows that kept the sunlight from fading the boxed products on the shelves. I bought a needlework shirt and a new ninety-cent hat and ordered a lemon phosphate at the counter.

  Where to go? Certainly not back to Omaha.

  There was nothing left for me there.

  I looked at a wrinkled map and thought: Montana. Give me a pair of reliable pistols and a calico with some getaway getup in her gallop and a sheet town with a bank way the hell out in the middle of nowhere and I’ll be a vibrant man yet, one who isn’t tuckered out on life.

  I sipped my phosphate and considered the map again.

  Montana.

  That’s where the Big Nose George Gang had hailed from, the same gang that visited my family farm in the days of my youth. I’ll never forget what Big Nose told me the morning he and his riders lit out for new terrain.

  “The simple, honest life? That game ain’t worth the candle, son,” he had said. “I�
�ll tell you one something I wished had been told me when I was a sprout.

  “Being miserable ain’t the same as being good.”

  XVII

  WEDNESDAY MORNING. THE day after Saint Valentine’s, nineteen-aught-five. The clock hands marked the time as ten minutes before nine. Both counsels were prepared to make their closing arguments. The courtroom was hushed as if in silent prayer. More hats and dresses waited down in the lobby and spilled out into the streets. Wagons and buggies were parked on both sides of the street for three solid blocks in every direction.

  Leaving his purple suit coat draped over his chair at the defense table, attorney Ritchie rose to address the court. His white canvas shoes squeaked across the waxed floor. He ran his thumbs along the inside of his suspenders and cleared phlegm from his throat and patted one hand against his stomach. He began:

  “May it please the court and gentlemen of the jury: I must congratulate you and congratulate counsel on the other side upon the fact that we are closing out this beast and that we may soon go to our homes and sleep the sleep of the righteous. I also wish to congratulate this defendant upon the fairness and kindness with which the public press of this city has treated him during the progress of this trial so that no prejudice might be created against him.”

  Black rose to his feet. “If the court please, I would request that no references be made to anything outside of this case.”

  “Mr. Ritchie,” Judge Sutton said, “the newspaper reports have not reached the jury, and the jury has no knowledge of what the press may have said about this case.”

  Ritchie tapped a pencil against his hand. “I hope I shall not again be interrupted by government counsel during my final statement to this court. I was only giving thanks to the press for their fair treatment of this trial and did not intend nor will I make any specific comments about the details of their reporting.”

  He continued, “If I may begin again, I would say that the kidnapping of children is not something that has occurred often. And it hasn’t occurred to Edward Cudahy Junior. Not by our state law, it hasn’t. In order to be considered a kidnapping in Nebraska, the captured person must be ten years of age or younger and must be transported across state lines. Neither applies to the young Mr. Cudahy. As you know well by now, he was sixteen at the time of his very brief disappearance and was never more than three miles away from his own home. By law, no kidnapping ever occurred. So I began to wonder what crime, if any, had been committed.

  “I have heard of the old crime of robbery. This is the crime that the state insists my client committed. Yet, I did not so readily distinguish that this was robbery and thought possible that it might not be. A charge of robbery as it applies in this case cannot be sustained under state law, either. For robbery, it’s necessary to show that the person robbed is in personal fear of violence and that the person robbed must also be close enough to the robber to be within his presence when the crime is committed. A man in Omaha cannot commit robbery of a man in Asia through written threats. Even if the person thus influenced sends the money through the mail or by messenger, it does not come within the robbery statute.

  “So this case is not one of robbery. And it’s not a case of kidnapping. The law of Nebraska, very clearly defined, wouldn’t allow for either. So I racked my brain all throughout this trial as to what crime I was defending my client from. I’m still not sure what the state prosecution, crack them that they are, wants you to convict Pat Crowe of. I was sure it was not arson. I was sure it was not murder. I was sure that it wasn’t any one of a number of crimes that I have heard of. So I am left to wonder, often gape-mouthed, what kind of offense you of the jury might be able to find Pat Crowe guilty.

  “And yet, over the past two weeks, when I heard the witnesses relate the story of gold being placed on Center Street, I was reminded of what my father told me about the rainbow in the days of my youth. He said if you go away over to where the rainbow touches the earth and hunt around you will find some pots of gold. Well, after I had my collegiate education I took the few little traps I had and tied them in a handkerchief, and I came out west, and I am still going west trying to find those pots of gold. It occurs to me now, at the ripe old age of forty-seven, that these are the same pots that Cudahy left out on Center Street, and they are the same pots that Pat Crowe was supposed to have found out on Center Street.”

  The audience erupted with laughter. It was not sustained for very long at the banging of Judge Sutton’s mallet. Ritchie smiled and wiped the glaze from his forehead with a pocket linen and wadded it back into his trousers. He said, “I get the idea from the district attorney that it is your duty to punish somebody because Cudahy’s child was stolen. He warns you that Cudahy is a rich man, and he asks if you will treat him just the same as you would a poor man. You say certainly you will. And I will treat him just the same as I would a poor man in my argument. Just exactly the same.

  “But these other people that live out there in the neighborhood of that cottage, these policemen and people like the Glynns and Chief Donahue and people of that kind, they won’t treat this case the same. They would not treat your child the same as they would treat Mr. Cudahy’s child.

  “Suppose on the nineteenth day of December 1900, a poor colored lady had gone to the police station in Omaha and said to the desk sergeant, ‘My poor littah Rastus has run away. He has gone somewheres, and I can’t find him. Please, surr, please, would you help me get back my poor little boy?’ Do you know what that policeman would say? He’d say, ‘We haven’t got any time, we are looking for the millionaire’s child.’ He would say, ‘If we find the stray, we will pick him up.’ Just as though it were a horse or a dog. But when Mr. Cudahy’s child is lost, everybody gets out and hustles to find him.

  “Mr. Cudahy came here on the witness stand and shed a few crocodile tears expecting to get the sympathy of this jury. Had the jury been comprised of millionaires, honorable Judge Sutton might have the pleasure of assigning Pat Crowe to a prison cell for a term of fourteen years or longer. But you are not millionaires. And, not being millionaires, you know that much more entitled to sympathy is the poor child who has no wealthy father. The poor child that must be fed on chuck steak and scraps and cannot eat real genuine meat and grow like young Cudahy Junior has into the sturdy, wealthy cattle buyer he is today. All the sympathy must be given to Mr. Cudahy, the millionaire.

  “Yet, not a hair on the boy’s head had been touched. He was uninjured. At first he was frightened a little and, according to his version of things, it was all over in little more than a day’s time. When it became known that Mr. Cudahy’s boy had been stolen and that he was the millionaire packer of South Omaha, people began to gather to tell what they knew or find out what they could say that would be favorable to the conviction of someone. They didn’t care much who.

  “Don’t you see that is just as natural as that water should run down a hill? Flies always gather on the sugar barrel. They never go near the vinegar. It turns out so in this case. Young Mr. Glynn rang the key note to this whole trial when he said, ‘Why, I am in this for the cash that there is in it, for the money that there is in it.’ They are all in it for the money that there is in it. Their testimony is colored by it. It’s natural that this should be so. We cannot blame these poor people very much for trying to get a little of Cudahy’s money. He has been trying all his life to get all they had!” Ritchie said with a thunderous assuredness, and his words were met with immediate applause that nearly broke out into a standing ovation while Judge Sutton slammed his gavel for silence.

  Ritchie turned to look at the courtroom audience for the first time since starting his final argument. He’d been so focused on the jury, he’d failed to see just how packed the room had become. Extra chairs had been brought in and filled the space inside the bar. Thirty or forty additional seats flanked the bench on both sides and occupied every inch of the room within the bailiff’s rail.

  He looked at me
soddenly. My eyes filled, my hands placed neatly on my lap. Ritchie stared at me and the pause was noticeable to every person in the court.

  Everyone was now looking at me sit silently and alone.

  “One day you might come to sit where Pat Crowe now sits,” Ritchie finally said. “Any one of us might find ourselves in his chair someday. It’s not an impossibility. The law says that if any man is brought in here and charged with a crime, that we shall not raise presumption against him. The law is that he shall be considered innocent until the state proves him to be guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The law has said further that no man shall be compelled to give evidence against himself. That he shall have a right to sit in court and hear the witnesses against him. These are the great principles which are thrown around you and around us all.

  “Are those great principles to be set aside and to be taken off like the plumes that the silly girl wears on her hat? Are they to be cast aside and put on at pleasure? Or are they real? Are they substantial? Are they the things that apply to the real issues of life? When men are tried for life and liberty, that life and liberty cannot be taken without due process of law.

  “We were not all right when we started. We had one little thing in our Constitution that was not right and is still not right. It was said that everybody was equal to everybody else. It was supposed that this earth was a place where every man was every other man’s brother and that God was the father of us all. But I warn you that the time is coming on apace where we realize that not every man is every other man’s brother.

  “Not every man is equal to everyone else. Here is a lie of the blackest and foulest disgrace to ever blot the pages of our history. How can we say everyone is equal to everyone else when, on one street in our city, children walk about in rags hoping for a stray apple to tumble off a produce wagon so that they might fight over it and almost tear the clothes off each other trying to get at it and, on another street not more than a few blocks away, children of the very same age dressed in fine department store clothing ride in painted carriages to elite schools where they sharpen their minds so that one day when they are fully educated and grown they might never worry themselves about anything more than which restaurant they will dine in and which they will not. They will never have to claw for an apple rolling toward a gutter, and they will never be brothers and sisters with those who do. Yet we still operate under the principle that all men are equal as if it’s an inherent truth when we all know it is the greatest lie ever penned in the history of our country.