The Hider

by Loren D. Estleman

  Logan bore his part of the burden in silence. I think he was still disturbed over having been called an “Indian gentleman” and considered apart from the rest of us, but that he was also a little surprised that he had been invited to this table at all. He wasn’t the only one who was disconcerted by his position. Even Jack had trouble concentrating either on his conversation or on his meal, because every time he looked up from his plate, he saw Frau Steiner watching him from her place across the table with the eye of a shopper weighing in her mind the merits of the item she is considering buying. As for me, I don’t think I tasted a bite of what must have been a delicious meal because of the constant realization that pretty Ilse Morgenmueller was sitting at my left elbow. She smelled of lemon verbena, and to this day I can’t come into contact with that sweet aroma without thinking of that meal. I expect it affected the flavor of the duck I was eating as well.

  Once Ilse said something to her mother across the corner of the table in German, and her father disengaged himself from his conversation with Jack to stare at her in disapproval. “Ilse,” he said, “I have raised you better than this. You know that it is not polite to speak in the language of our home when we have guests at table who do not understand.”

  The girl lowered her eyes. “I am sorry, Papa.”

  “That is not good enough,” he said sternly. “Now you must repeat what you said in English so that our guests may hear.”

  She reddened. “Papa, I cannot!”

  The farmer’s brow grew dark. “Is this how you obey your father? Do what I have told you to do, Ilse!”

  She was looking down at her plate. Her face was bright red and tears glistened on her long eyelashes. The silence after her father’s harsh words hung heavy in the room.

  “Very well, Papa, if you insist.” It was Katerina Morgenmueller who had spoken. Her daughter turned a pleading face on her and shook her head, but the woman laid her work-roughened hand on Ilse’s slender white one atop the table and gave it a reassuring squeeze. She looked at her husband. “Since you must know,” she said, “Ilse was asking me if I did not think the American boy was very handsome.”

  Morgenmueller looked as if someone had struck him in the face with the barn door. Jack eyed me curiously, but no real change came over his normally placid features. Logan suppressed a smile. Frau Steiner glanced from face to face, trying to learn from them what she could not from the words that had passed between her daughter and her son-in-law. Ilse stared at her plate as if trying to see through it to the table. Her mother tightened her grip on her little hand. I suppose I should say I was as embarrassed as she was, that I hadn’t felt this way since the time the teacher intercepted the love note I had been passing to Gail Donaghue in the first row and read it aloud to the class, but it wasn’t true. Not entirely. I was red-faced, sure, but the thought that someone like Ilse could consider a scrawny scarecrow like me handsome made the sting unimportant. The only shadow was the way it had affected the girl at my side.

  But Ilse’s mother was not finished. “You broke in, Papa, before I could answer the question.” She looked at me and smiled. “Yes, Ilse, I do think he is very handsome. A bit too thin, perhaps, but, Himmel! We cannot have everything.”

  She was still looking in my direction. I knew what was expected of me. “Thank you, Ilse,” I said, rising to the occasion. The girl kept her head down, but I saw that she was watching me out of the corner of her eye. “I think you are very pretty.”

  “Ja. Well.” The farmer had recovered from his shock. “We will talk no more of this.” Immediately he resumed his conversation with Jack from the point where he had left off, but not before Ilse favored me with a shy but grateful smile. It was soon gone, but it was enough to get me through the rest of the meal with the feeling that I had done something Sir Galahad would have been proud of had he seen it.

  When dinner was over, Jack complimented Mrs. Morgenmueller on the food and pushed his plate aside so that he could lay his forearms before him on the table. “Let’s hear some about this here mad dog.”

  Morgenmueller was in the midst of filling his pipe, a charred briar with a curved stem, from a can of tobacco he kept within easy reach atop a cabinet near the table. He frowned. “It is what you would call a mongrel,” he said, speaking through clenched teeth as he lit the pipe. A cloud of blue smoke drifted across the table. “We are thinking it belonged to someone in Cascadia, and it was turned loose because it was too big and ate too much. It has been wandering about the settlement for the last year, begging scraps of food in the daytime and sleeping under porches at night. Everyone in the settlement has given it Imbisse—handouts—at one time or another. It was always a friendly dog. Even the children played with it when they were not in school or at work in the fields.

  “Then, early last month, Alfred Schumann next door shot a skunk that killed one of his wife’s chickens in broad daylight. Two weeks later, Schumann’s young son Fritz was playing in his backyard when the dog slunk out of the bushes and stood there staring at him. It is a big yellow animal, shaggy, and marked by a foot-long scar along its right side. Fritz went over to pet it, but it started growling and he stopped. Just then Schumann came back from plowing. The dog was just beginning to foam at the mouth. He ran inside the house, took down his shotgun, and fired at the dog, but he was afraid of hitting his son and he missed.

  The dog yelped and ran away. Since then it has been seen almost every day, and shot at several times, but always it returns. We are thinking that the skunk Schumann shot was rabid, and that it must have bitten the dog. We do not wish to have the same thing happen to our children, Herr Butterworth. Hence the one-hundred-dollar bounty.” He pulled on his pipe.

  “Who got bit?” asked Jack.

  The German took his pipe out of his mouth and stared at him in surprise. “How did you know?”

  Jack said, “I heared a lot of stories in my time. I know when something’s left out.”

  “I see,” said the farmer. He clamped the stem between his teeth and rose from the table. “Come with me, sirs.”

  He led us to a corncrib that stood on the other side of the barn, a long building with a slanted roof and walls made of slats nailed an inch apart from each other to allow plenty of light to enter. I heard a snarling sound as we approached, and wondered with a twinge of fear if the dog were inside. I was sure Morgenmueller heard it too, but it didn’t slow him down any as he took a key out of his pocket and sprang the steel padlock that kept the door shut. He swung it open and stepped aside to let us enter.

  I went inside first—and backed up so fast that I bumped into Jack, who was coming in behind me. At the far end of the building, chained to one of the four stout beams that supported the roof, a balding, middle-aged man strained at his shackles and stared wildly at us, snarling and snapping like a captured wolf. His plaid shirt was shredded and soaked with sweat, his blue jeans covered with old corn silk from scrubbing around on the shuck-littered dirt floor. Thick saliva formed at the corners of his mouth and dripped grotesquely onto the front of his shirt. The building shook with his exertions.

  “Rufus Brinker,” intoned Morgenmueller, in a flat voice. “Until last week, he was the best hand I’ve ever had. He was fixing a fence in the potato patch when he saw the dog on the other side and jumped over to try and hit it with his axe. He missed and it bit him on the wrist. He did not bother to tell us about it for days. By that time it was too late to do anything about it. He has been like this since Monday.”

  “Can’t anything be done for him?” I asked. I stared in morbid fascination at the thing that had once been a man but which was now nothing more than a wild animal.

  The German shook his head. “I have seen this happen in my country, where bats carry the dread disease from place to place. His breathing muscles, they will work with more and more difficulty, and finally they will cease to function. Then he will die. All we can do is keep him in chains so that he does not infect others.”

  Jack said, “The dog’s bette
r off. Him we can shoot.”

  Morgenmueller nodded agreement. “The law is a strange thing, sirs,” he said. “It protects a man from everything but himself.”

  “Let’s go hunting,” said Jack.

  The first chance I had to speak to Jack alone came when he, Logan, and I separated ourselves from the rest of the hunters to head up the mountain. We were on foot. This, the hider explained, was to eliminate the possibility of our mounts panicking at the sight of the hunted beast and throwing us straight into its jaws. Each of us had his rifle in hand.

  “Why are we doing this?” I asked. “Seems to me there are better ways to pay for a meal, ways that won’t take up so much of our valuable time.”

  Jack paused to inspect a possible sign on the barren ground at his feet, then continued leading the way up the steep grade that wound around the mountain. “We got to go this way anyway,” he replied. “And we might as well do it for a hundred dollars as for hide and meat.”

  “Since when do you care so much about money?” I challenged.

  “Since I used the last of it to pay for our grub back in Reuben.”

  “I have money.”

  “I don’t.” That was the end of the conversation.

  To Logan, I said, “How did you come up with a name like Sleeping Bow? It sounds like something out of a dime novel.”

  He shrugged. “I can’t help that. It’s my real name.”

  I wanted to delve deeper into that mystery, but we had come to a flat expanse of ground covered with green bushes and tall poplars, and Jack signaled to us to spread out and advance through it much as John B. Hood’s infantry must have done when combing the countryside for Yankee stragglers. The foliage grew thicker as we strode forward, and soon the others were out of sight beyond a clump of trees. That’s when I heard something moving in the brush thirty feet to the right of me.

  I stopped. The leaves were still rattling where they had been disturbed. I stood waiting, my rifle aimed toward the bushes. My heart pounded. There was a prolonged period during which I heard nothing but the wind moving sluggishly through the treetops, and I began to think that whatever it was had gone away. I lowered the rifle.

  Then the bushes shook again and George Crook stepped out into the open.

  Chapter Twelve

  He was leading a paint pony by its regulation U.S. Army bridle when he emerged from the bushes. A spare man, leaner than Logan though not so lean as Jack, he wore a Sam Browne belt strapped over a hip-length military jacket of a light brownish color and carried an 1895 lever-action Winchester carbine in his right hand. The butt of an army revolver showed above the top of his holster. His hair was long and black like Logan’s, but unlike Logan’ s it was topped with a tall-crowned hat of the same color as his jacket with a wide flat brim and four egg-shaped dents around the top. I was not to learn until much later that this was the official uniform of the men who were fighting for the United States in Cuba, and that George Crook had somehow gotten hold of it before it was even issued to the soldiers at the Lapwai army post. Under the jacket his chest was bare.

  You’ll know him by his twisted face, Logan had said, but it wasn’t until he stepped into the sunlight that I realized the two sides of the Indian’s face didn’t match. In putting him back together after the mishap with the four sticks of dynamite, his doctors had failed to properly line up his features, with the result that the right half of his face was cocked a full half an inch lower than the left. His right eye, cheekbone, and even the right side of his mouth existed on a different plane from that of their mates on the other side of his nose. This irregularity, while far from horrible, made for an uneven countenance that was as sinister as it was disturbing. I confess that for at least a full minute after he stepped into the clearing I did nothing but stand and stare at him.

  I reckon he was used to that reaction by now, though, because instead of demanding to know what I was gaping at, he just smiled. That is, he tried to smile, but the best he could manage was an upward twist of the left side of his mouth while the other half remained motionless. It came home to me then that that whole section of his face was dead, and that all he could ever hope to accomplish with the good side was a grotesque parody of intelligent expression.

  “Howdy,” he said. His voice was neither shrill nor deep, but halfway in between, and tainted with a slight western twang.

  I said nothing. I was in such a state that he could have walked up and taken my rifle away from me without any danger of my pulling the trigger. No such thought occurred to him, however, and his next words came as such a surprise that I forgot my shock as their full meaning became clear.

  “I’m looking for two men,” he told me. “An Indian and an old man. They got a boy with them too, about your age or maybe a little younger. Old man rides a mule. Maybe you seen someone who answers to that.”

  It slowly dawned on me that he had no idea who I was. He’d never seen me up close before, and now, finding me out here alone and apparently running away from no one, he had obviously assumed that I was one of the settlers who lived in the area. I wasn’t about to let him think otherwise. Thinking quickly, I fell back on a phrase I’d heard one of the German farmers use earlier when Jack had tried to strike up a conversation with him. “Ich spreche kein Englisch,” I said, in as thick a European accent as I could muster.

  Irritation flickered over the good side of his face. “Three people,” he said slowly, letting go of his pony’s bridle to hold up three fingers. “An Indian, an old man, and a boy.” He used those same fingers to indicate first feathers at the back of his head like an Indian might wear, then lines of age on his face, and finally to describe a person of short stature, such as a child. I didn’t much like that, being as tall as he was, but I composed my face into a blank expression to let him know that I didn’t understand what he was talking about.

  “Ich spreche kein Englisch,” I repeated.

  “Bah!” He turned his back on me and mounted the paint. I saw then that, in addition to the rifle he carried and the gun he wore on his hip, he also had a Colt Peacemaker thrust into a scabbard near the front of the saddle. “Stupid goddamn foreigners,” he muttered, and spurred the pony forward down the slope. It was only then that I noticed he was wearing spurs—the big Mexican kind with spiked rowels which, used wrong, could scar a horse’s flanks for life. I had always thought that no Indian would be caught dead wearing them.

  I suppose I should at least have given some thought about shooting him as he picked his way down the grade, but I didn’t. Even if I had, I would not have done so. To me, a man who would shoot another man in the back is the blackest villain that walks God’s good earth, and there is nothing you can say about self-preservation that will change my mind on that score. I have no wish to go down in history with the dirty little coward who shot Mr. Howard. Anyway, I stood there watching him until his pony’s little black and white rump disappeared among the trees that clustered around the bottom of the mountain, and then I hightailed it to find Jack and Logan.

  “Did he say where he was going?” asked Jack after I had breathlessly spilled out my story to them on the other side of the copse of trees that had separated us.

  I shook my head. I was out of breath and my chest was heaving.

  Logan looked angry. I would have expected him to look scared, but he didn’t. He turned on Jack, fists clenched around his rifle. “Are you satisfied?” he demanded. “Now you’ve landed us right in his lap!”

  “What do we do now?” I asked Jack between gasps for air.

  “Keep hunting, I reckon.” He took his rifle in both hands and resumed the long climb to the top of the mountain.

  “And what will we do when we get back and find George Crook waiting for us?” asked Logan belligerently, falling into step beside him. I followed at a pace that would allow me to catch my breath.

  “He won’t be.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Ain’t never sure about nothing,” said Jack. “But the injun
’s too smart to jump us with witnesses around.”

  “That didn’t seem to bother him where Sam Dailey was concerned,” argued the Indian.

  “And because of that he’s chased you across three states. He won’t make that mistake again. No, he’ll bide his time till we’re alone with nobody else around. Then he’ll swoop down on us like a hawk on a chicken the minute the farmer leaves the barnyard.”

  “Like now,” said Logan.

  Jack shook his head. “He don’t know we’re here yet. Give him time.”

  Once we found a clear set of paw prints in the soft alluvium that had washed down from the top of the mountain, but these were two days old at least and there were no fresh signs that the dog had been in the area since then. From there we took a path down on the other side and followed it through thick undergrowth to a pocket between the peaks, where we stopped to rest. You hear a lot about the oases of the Sahara, but I can tell you right now that you will never find a spot more beautiful than the one we stumbled upon by accident in the northern part of the Cascade Range. Below us, its shores ringed by pines that stretched as high as two hundred feet into the cloud-sprinkled sky, a broad blue lake with a surface like a polished mirror curved lazily westward around the rocky base of the mountain we had just crossed. Beyond it, to the north, where clouds enshrouded its jagged summit, a waterfall white with the rage of its torrent spilled over the top of a fluted wall of rock and plunged six hundred feet straight down to a boiling inlet from which the lake was fed. Here the water crashed and gurgled over a jumble of angular rocks until, tamed at last, it wandered dazedly into the placid waters beyond the grotto. Even from a distance of a quarter of a mile, which was as close as we could get to it without actually swimming the lake, the roar of the falls was deafening.