The Sundown Man

by Jory Sherman

  We chewed on dried buffalo meat that was hard for me to swallow. We had no water and my throat soon grew parched. I carried the flintlock across my lap, having checked the lock, making sure the flint was set tight and that there was fresh powder in the pan. I wondered if we were going to stay in the high woods the rest of the way.

  We were gradually descending by late afternoon, still keeping to the evergreens above the foothills. We had long since left the game trail when it headed for a higher elevation. There was no sign of anyone following us, and I rode up alongside Blue Owl to talk to her.

  “Do you think One Dog is following us?” I asked.

  “He is drunk. All of the men are drunk.”

  “Good. Then we are safe.”

  “I do not know,” she said. “We must take care.”

  “Do you know how far it is to the two rivers?”

  “I do not know.”

  “One sun?” Two suns?”

  “Two suns perhaps.”

  We spent three suns riding to the confluence of the Cache la Poudre and the South Platte. We slaked our thirst in the Platte along the way, riding to it only at night, under cover of darkness. I wish we had thought to bring a water skin because I was always thirsty when we were away from the river.

  Blue Owl found a ford on the Platte and we crossed over. We passed that place where the Poudre emptied into the larger river, and I noticed there were log cabins near there. We also passed a number of deserted, dilapidated houses that seemed to have been abandoned for some time. It felt like riding through a ghost town, but I knew some of the cabins were inhabited. We passed them in the night to the yapping of dogs, but nobody lit a lamp or came outside to investigate.

  The next day, we saw the fort and the houses in the distance. My heart soared, as the Arapaho say, like an eagle. The fort looked to be a large settlement as we approached, nestled on the plain below the foothills that rose up to the west of it. And looming over it were the majestic Rocky Mountains, gleaming white with snow clear down to the lower levels.

  Blue Owl halted her pony.

  “You go to the fort?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I have fear.”

  “I will protect you, Blue Owl.”

  “I fear the white eyes.”

  “You do not need to have fear. I am with you.”

  She smiled at me. It was a weak smile, but enough of an encouragement that I signed to her that we should go on.

  “Do you have the shining metal?” she asked, and I knew she was talking about money.

  “No.”

  “You wait,” she said, and rummaged through her pouch. She brought out a smaller pouch that was bulging.

  “What do you have?” I asked.

  “You take,” she said, and handed me a small brown pouch that was closed tight with a leather drawstring that puckered the leather. I loosed the drawstring and looked inside.

  The pouch was filled with silver and gold coins, even some paper money.

  “Where did you get this?” I asked.

  “Blue Owl take. Belong to the woman of Little Blue Lizard.”

  “Where did she get the shining metal?”

  “Little Blue Lizard take from white eyes.”

  So, Blue Owl had stolen the money pouch, knowing we would need it. She was smarter than I had thought. I felt rich. I slipped the pouch inside my trousers, beneath the sash I wore. I grinned at her.

  “Food,” I told her. “We go.”

  “Yes,” she said, and smiled more warmly this time.

  The city was sprawled around the fort, which was itself a sprawl of buildings. In the center of the fort buildings, an American flag flew, flapping in the late afternoon breeze.

  I had no idea where to go, but I knew that the heart of the city would be our best bet to find food and lodging. People stared at us as we rode down the main street. Dogs barked at us. Children ran away from us in fright.

  That’s when I realized what we must look like to all those white faces. Two hated Indians, one with a rifle, riding into their town. Doors slammed shut and people peered at us from behind draped windows.

  We reached what I thought was the center of town, a large square surrounded by buildings that reminded me some of home in Kansas City. But these were newer and made of logs and sandstone and clapboard lumber. The largest of these was Avery House, which I took to be a hotel.

  I started riding toward it, when some men came out of one of the buildings, a tavern. One ran a few yards and disappeared into the sheriff’s office. One of the men from the tavern grabbed my bridle and the pony stopped. Another took Blue Owl’s bridle in hand.

  In a few seconds we were surrounded by men, all glaring at us. Some had pistols drawn. Others whispered to each other or muttered under their breath. The man who had my bridle in his hands looked to be flushed with drink. His face was ruddy, his nose shiny.

  “Well, well, what do we have here?” he said to the crowd. “A young buck and his squaw just ridin’ into town as pretty as you please.”

  “String ’em up,” one man yelled from the back of the crowd.

  “Scalp ’em,” yelled another.

  Fear almost choked me to silence. These men were about to become a mob. And a mob, I knew, was dangerous. Mindless.

  “Mister, we mean no harm,” I said. “We’re just looking for sanctuary.”

  “This ’un speaks English,” the ruddy-faced man said. “But he’s a damned Rappyhoe, sure as shit.”

  I looked around for any sympathetic face among the angry crowd, most of whom, I was sure, had been drinking in the tavern. I saw none.

  But just then, some men came out of the sheriff’s office and made their way through the crowd. Some were carrying rifles and one of them had a double-barreled shotgun in his hands. The first man, who wore a sheriff’s star on his shirt, was the first to reach us. Some of the crowd began to melt back.

  “Two redskins, Sheriff,” one man yelled from inside the cluster.

  “Rufe, what you got there?” the sheriff asked the man holding my horse.

  “These two red niggers just come a-ridin’ up. They must have run off from some reservation.”

  The sheriff snatched my bridle from Rufe and turned to the crowd.

  “You all go back where you came from. I’ll handle this. Now, go on, back to your own business.”

  There were a lot of aws and disappointed grunts from the crowd, but most of them began to disperse. Rufe stayed, but stepped back a few feet. He wore a Colt pistol on his hip and I think he was looking for an excuse to shoot me with it.

  “The buck speaks English,” Rufe said.

  The sheriff looked up at me. Then he looked at the rifle across my lap.

  “Let me see that rifle,” the sheriff said.

  I handed it to him. It was the worst thing I could have done right then. A half-dozen men drew their pistols and aimed every one of them at me.

  “You sonofabitch,” the sheriff said as he examined the rifle. He turned to one of his deputies and handed him the rifle.

  “Sure enough,” the deputy said. “I’d recognize that old flintlock anywheres.”

  The sheriff’s men surged forward. Arms reached out for me and before I could react, I was being dragged off my pony.

  Blue Owl didn’t make a sound, but as I was being carried away, I saw them go after her and I saw her eyes flare like some wild creature caught in a trap. I struggled to break free, but the men were too strong. One of them hit me in the head with the butt of his pistol. Hard.

  Dancing silver stars filled my brain, and then the darkness took them away and plunged me into a black pit. I lost my senses at the bottom of that well of liquid pitch.

  Twenty

  My head throbbed with a distant pain that I could not reach in the dream. It was as if my head had a heart attached to the back of it, a heart that was pulsing, beating, aching. None of the dream would make sense once I woke up, but while I was in its throes, it all seemed real.

&
nbsp; The heart became a hammer, and a large horse was kicking at the handle, sending shoots of pain through my body. I tried to get on the horse, but it kept sliding away from me until it became a buffalo running away from me, its hooves sounding like the beat of a heavy drum deep inside my head. Then the buffalo walked into a lake and sank, dragging me with it because I was holding onto its tail, a tail that kept getting longer and longer until it shrank, pulling me down into the water. I struggled to breathe, and bright lights danced in my head like a swarm of silver fireflies. The lake disappeared, leaving me on a dark island in the middle of an empty prairie where I heard a voice speaking to me in a strange tongue.

  That was when I awoke and saw a silhouetted figure standing behind a wall of bars.

  “You awake?” the voice said.

  I touched the back of my head, felt a small lump there. The bump was tender to my touch and I winced in pain. It took me several seconds to realize where I was. I was lying down on a cot of some sort. A mattress was underneath me. And the man I saw wasn’t standing on the other side of a wall of bars. I was the one who was behind bars. Gingerly, I sat up. My head hurt, and it took me another few seconds to focus my eyes on the man who had spoken to me.

  “You’re awake,” he said.

  “Where am I?”

  “You’re in jail. How come you speak English?”

  “I’m a white man.”

  “You don’t look like no white man. Where you from?”

  “Missouri. Kansas City.” I stood up, and the room spun for a moment. “I’ve got to pee.” I crossed my legs. “Real bad.”

  “There’s a chamber pot under your bunk.”

  I bent down, pulled out the chamber pot. I think it was made of iron. It was heavy. I peed, with my back turned to the man who was watching me. I tried to clear my head. It dawned on me that I was in jail. Locked up like a prisoner. I had escaped one prison and landed in another. I finished peeing and slid the pot back under the bunk. I walked over to the cell door and pushed on it. It was locked.

  “How come you locked me up?” I asked. “I’ve done nothing.”

  “You got some explaining to do. Ready to talk?”

  “About what?”

  “About that rifle we took off you for one thing.”

  “That old flintlock?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then, will you let me go?”

  “You hold on, boy.”

  The man walked to a door and left me standing there. I heard voices. I looked through the bars into another cell just opposite me. There was someone in it.

  “Blue Owl?” I called.

  She moved from the bunk and stood up. She looked small and disheveled.

  “My husband,” she said, and I know my face flushed with embarrassment.

  “Did they hurt you, Blue Owl?”

  “They gave me food. I made sleep. I have fear.”

  “Do not worry. They do not have bad hearts. They will let us go, these white eyes.”

  I was still talking to Blue Owl in Arapaho when the man returned, another man with him.

  “You come on out, boy,” he said. “We’ll do some talking. That a Rappyhoe you was talking to, that squaw yonder?”

  “Yes. Arapaho.”

  “I can’t get over how good this boy talks English,” the other man said, putting a large key in the lock. He turned it and the tumbler jangled. The cell door opened. I stepped out and the man who had opened the door looked me square in the eyes.

  “You try to run and I’ll shoot you dead. Hear?”

  I nodded.

  I spoke to Blue Owl as the two men led me away, into the next room. I told her that I would return. She never let out a sound and the door closed behind us.

  A man, the one who had first spoken to me outside when I was still on my pony, was sitting behind a desk. He waved me to a chair. I walked over and sat down. There were two other men seated in chairs on the other side of the desk, like a very small jury, I thought.

  The two men who had taken me from my cell stood behind me. The flintlock lay crossways on the desk of the man facing me.

  “I’m Sheriff Frank Hall,” the man said. “I understand you speak English. What is your name?”

  “Jared Sunnedon.”

  “Sundown?”

  “That’s close enough. It’s a Finnish name, I think. Or Swedish.”

  “You don’t look like no Swede. Except for those blue eyes you got.”

  “I don’t know what I am. An American, I guess.”

  “I want to know how you come by this flintlock rifle. Did you murder Pawnee Bob for it?”

  “Who’s Pawnee Bob?”

  “Don’t get smart with me, Mr. Sundown.” He turned and looked at the two men sitting next to him.

  “You’re sure about this, Clete? You, Davis?”

  “Yes, sir, Sheriff. That’s Pawnee Bob’s rifle all right,” Clete said. He was the first man the sheriff had looked at to answer the question.

  “Davis?”

  “I’d swear on it. Bob never let that rifle out of his sight. Got it back in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, he did. Kilt many a b’ar with it. Buffler too.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Hall said. Then he looked back at me.

  “So, how come you to have Pawnee Bob Fritz’s rifle, Mr. Sundown?”

  “I got it off an Arapaho brave named Speckled Hawk. I stole it from him. I don’t know where he got it.”

  “That would be hard to prove, since we don’t know any Rappyhoe named Speckled Hawk. We just got your word for it.”

  “Well, that’s all I have is my word. Look, Sheriff, I was captured by a band of Arapaho. They killed my folks, Sven and Hilda Sunnedon. We were in a wagon train heading for Oregon and the master, a man named Cassius Hogg, shot two Arapaho boys for no good reason. When my pa raised Cain about it, Hogg banished us from the wagon train and left us on our own. He scalped those two boys and put their scalps in my pa’s wagon. When the Arapaho came upon us, they found the scalps and thought my pa had killed those boys. They killed my folks right on the spot and kidnapped me and my sister Kate. I come here to Fort Collins looking for her.”

  The sheriff said nothing. He looked up at the two deputies standing behind me and then at Clete and Davis.

  “Whoeeee,” the sheriff said. “That’s quite a story, Mr. Sundown. I don’t know whether to believe it or not.”

  “You can believe it,” I said. My head had cleared and I was getting angry. My noggin still hurt, though, and that lump was still there.

  “Jesse, where’s that stuff them people brought in a few months ago?”

  “Out back in the shed,” the man behind me said. “They said they found an abandoned wagon, some white folks turned almost to skeleton.”

  “Was there any name in that stuff?”

  “Yeah, there was some letters and a Bible with writing in it. I think they was folks’ names writ down.”

  “Go see what you can find while I ask this feller a few more questions.”

  Jesse walked back into the jail. I figured there was a back door to the shed out back.

  “My folks had a Bible,” I said. “Their names were in it.”

  “We know this Cassius Hogg,” Sheriff Hall said. “Anybody with him on that wagon train?”

  “Yes. A man named Truitt. Rudy Truitt. Those two traded for my sister. Some Ota, some Utes, stole her from the Arapaho. I think Hogg sold my sister to a family named Pettigrew. I’m trying to find her.”

  The sheriff exchanged glances with the other men in the room.

  Seconds ticked by and I started to sweat.

  “You sit still, son,” Hall said. “Freddie, strip off the feller’s shirt.”

  The man standing behind me reached down and grabbed my sleeves. He pulled the buckskin shirt off me as slick as you’d skin a squirrel. I sat there bare-chested. Freddie walked around the chair to look at me, my buckskin shirt still in his hand.

  “Not a mark on him,” Freddie said.

  “Ma
ybe he is white,” Clete said. “He ain’t got no marks or scars on him.”

  The sheriff leaned forward over his desk and stared at my chest. I wondered if all the men in the room had gone crazy. Their eyes were as wide as boiled eggs. Clete even came over and put his face up close to my chest.

  “You know what a Sun Dance is, Mr. Sundown?” Hall asked.

  “I heard of it. Some kind of Indian ceremony.”

  “It’s the devil’s work,” Clete said.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “You really don’t know?” Hall seemed to be challenging me, trying to catch me in a lie.

  “The Arapahos were going to a place for this Sun Dance,” I said, “when they were attacked by some Utes. That’s when the Utes took Kate and two young Arapaho girls. One Dog hunted the Utes down and winter came on. They never did go to that Sun Dance.”

  “Humph,” the sheriff snorted. “I don’t know, boys. Where in hell is that bastard Cameron? Jim said he’d come over to the office to look this feller over.”

  “I don’t know,” Freddie said. “Jim should have been here by now.”

  “Who’s Jim Cameron?” I asked.

  “He was a friend of Pawnee Bob’s. He saw the buck what scalped Bob and took his rifle and possibles.”

  “He’s an eyewitness to Pawnee Bob’s murder, kid,” Freddie said. “He can damned sure identify you as one of the Rappyhoes what jumped poor old Bob and done him in.”

  “Well, I damned sure didn’t know any Pawnee Bob and I sure as hell didn’t kill him,” I said.

  “You watch your mouth, sonny,” Hall said. “You ain’t clear of this yet. Give him back his damned shirt, Freddie.”

  Freddie handed me my shirt and I slipped it on over my head. Which made my head start hurting again.

  I wondered what Jesse was doing out back in the shed there. Nobody spoke. They all just stared at me as if I was already a dead man. Maybe on my way to the gallows. I was sweating a lot by then. The quiet only made me sweat more.