“By the description. What else? A man with a mule, a burro, a kid, and a injun. That fits you.”
“Description like that could fit a lot of people I know. But I reckon it was enough to get a warrant.”
“You know damn well there ain’t no warrant,” snarled the other. He was losing and he knew it.
“No warrant?” asked Jack.
“There wasn’t time.”
My partner held up a hand in a farewell salute. “So long, Bud,” he said. He swung his mule westward.
“Hold it!” said Fowler. “You don’t think I’m gonna let you go just like that!”
“Way I see it, Constable,” said Jack, sauntering away along the lake shore, “you got no choice.”
Reuben’s chief peace officer spluttered and fumed and blew out his moustaches.
“Want me to stop him, Bud?” Sweeney unswung his long-barreled rifle and stood with it cradled in his hand.
“Oh, shut up.
I left them with Otis Ledbetter’s body and caught up with Jack. Ilse and I made quite a load for the little mustang, but it bore us with little complaint. I have to admit that I was getting used to the little troublemaker by now. “I wish there were something we could do for Otis,” I said to Jack.
“Ain’t nothing nobody can do for him now,” he replied.
“He turned out to be quite a man.”
“I expect he always was.” Jack watched the trail ahead. “Reckon I know who it was killed them two outlaws down in Juárez.”
Ilse, riding sidesaddle in front of me, opened her eyes and looked around. She had been asleep since I’d put her there and this was the first time she’d stirred.
“How are you feeling?” I asked her gently.
“Sleepy.” I could barely hear her. “I want to go home.”
I was about to tell her that’s where we were going when I heard a groan near me and turned just in time to see Logan fall out of his saddle and crumble into a heap on the ground.
“Jack!” I exclaimed and started to dismount. But he was already off his mule and kneeling beside the Indian and he motioned for me to stay where I was. Swiftly he pulled his kerchief from around his neck and tied it as tight as he could around the upper portion of Logan’s arm around the wound. He trust the handle of his skinning knife into the knot and twisted it inside the makeshift tourniquet until the flesh bulged.
“Get a doctor,” he said. “Hurry! Leave the girl here.”
I hesitated, looking at Ilse. She was wide awake now. “He is right,” she said, and slid down to the ground before I could stop her. “You will find Doctor Richter four houses north of my home on the west side of the road. I will be all right here.”
It took all of Jack’s strength to hold the tourniquet in place. “Get going, Jeff! He ain’t got much time.”
I broke into a gallop then, and I was halfway back to the settlement before I realized that he had called me Jeff.
Chapter Fifteen
I practically had to kidnap Dr. Richter to get him out to where Logan lay near death. A middle-aged man with a long, sober face and sidewhiskers that connected with his moustache, he was just getting ready to go out on his rounds when I came upon him climbing into his buggy. He didn’t understand a word of English; in order to get my point across I was forced to act out what had happened to the Indian and point frantically in the direction of the mountains to the east. Even then he was reluctant. Maybe he thought I was some new kind of outlaw who was trying to lure him into the woods where the rest of my band was waiting to rob him of his purse and carriage. Finally he nodded and motioned me forward while he followed.
We met Eric Morgenmueller at the end of the driveway. The farmer was in his hunting clothes and seated astride the bare back of a muscular workhorse. He had seen me going past his place, he explained, and quite naturally wanted to know what had happened to his daughter. I hardly need add that he was in a highly nervous state. When I assured him that Ilse was all right and that the doctor was for Logan, he asked how he could help, and I told him that we might need his buckboard to get the Indian back to the settlement. He quickly agreed and withdrew to hitch it up.
Richter’s buggy was still bouncing when he scrambled down with his black bag in hand and hurried over to examine the wounded man. Jack or Ilse had torn away the bloody sleeve and one of them, probably the girl, had filled Jack’s canvas bucket with water from the lake and used it and a scrap of material from her skirt to cleanse the arm of blood. Logan lay with his head propped up on a bed of leaves and pine needles. His face was so ashen that for a moment I was afraid we had come too late. I watched him for several moments before I could make out the slight rise and fall of his chest, and even then I wasn’t sure if I were really seeing it or if it was just my imagination. The hand Jack was using to hold onto the tourniquet was red with blood—his own, for he was grasping the skinning knife’s razor-edged blade in his fist. But he refused to let go as the doctor took out a large bottle of something (hydrogen peroxide?) and finished cleansing the wound.
It was an ugly sight, a ragged mass of blood and meat and bone splinters with here and there a scrap of cloth from where the bullet had passed through Logan’s shirt. Richter barked something to Ilse in German, whereupon she got up from her kneeling position beside the Indian and trotted off toward the wooded section near the lake. While she was gone, the doctor splashed alcohol onto a gauze pad, applied it to the wound, and wound a cotton bandage tightly around it.
“What happened to the lawmen?” I asked Jack during the operation.
“Lit out,” he said. He switched hands on the tourniquet and wiped the blood off on his shirt. No sooner had he done so than the cut hand began to bleed again. “Throwed Ledbetter over George Crook’s saddle and headed south. Reckon they’ll hire a wagon in Cascadia to take the body the rest of the way back to Reuben.”
“Fowler didn’t offer to help?”
He shook his head. “Weren’t none of his business.”
Ilse returned, carrying two stout pine boughs which she had broken off the trees. Each one was about two feet long. Richter placed the sticks on either side of Logan’s wounded arm and bound them in place with bandages from shoulder to wrist. All the time he babbled away in his native tongue while the girl translated.
“Dr. Richter wishes to transport him to his office, where he will remove the bone chips and attempt to reset the arm,” she told us. Her face was pale but composed. “It is possible that he will have to amputate.” She paused. “He also says that by applying the tourniquet, Mr. Butterworth may have saved Mr. Sleeping Bow’s life.”
As if by an act of Providence, Eric Morgenmueller chose that moment to arrive with his buckboard. His wife was with him. Seeing Ilse, she gave a little squeal of mixed relief and joy and hopped off to take her in her arms.
“Geht’s gut, Mama,” the girl asserted, but still her mother smothered her against her breast and murmured what sounded like a string of prayers in German. Ilse told her something in which I recognized my name and Jack’s.
When she was finished, Katerina left her and came over to take me in an embrace nearly as energetic as the one she had given her daughter. Over her shoulder I saw the girl smiling at me shyly. She had a smudge of dirt on her cheek that made her look much younger than she was.
Jack was next to receive Mrs. Morgenmueller’s gratitude, but by that time he, Richter, and the farmer had succeeded in laying Logan on the blankets spread out in the bed of the wagon, and he was too busy watching the Indian for any sign of change to pay much attention to her words of thanks.
The doctor climbed into the buckboard beside Logan and removed the tourniquet from around his arm. “Schnell!” he shouted to Morgenmueller in the driver’s seat, and Katerina and Ilse barely had time to get on before the farmer gave the reins a snap and the two-horse team leaped forward with a clatter of hoofs and a jolting and squeaking of springs.
“Follow!” called Ilse, just before they rattled out of sight around the ba
se of the mountain.
I looked to Jack for confirmation. He was already in the saddle and gazing down at me, his kerchief-turned-tourniquet now serving as a bandage around his right hand. “I reckon you heard her,” he said, and struck out in the wagon’s rutted path.
I tied the mustang to the back of the doctor’s buggy, which everyone appeared to have forgotten, and drove the rig back.
The doctor’s office took up two of the three rooms in his house, one of which, lined with German medical books and reeking of alcohol and various medicines, was used for consultation while the other answered for an operating room. Richter slept in the third. The Morgenmuellers were all seated on a wooden bench in the consulting room when we got there. Ilse slept with her mother’s arm around her shoulder. Eric told us that the doctor was at work on Logan in the next room, and Jack and I took seats in the two captain’s chairs near the door. He was asleep in less than a minute.
Not me. Despite my sleepless night, my mind was too full of the events of the past twenty-four hours for me to feel the least bit tired. I said once before that the smell of the plant Logan called yarrow put me in mind of a doctor’s office; that works both ways. The minute I had stepped into the consulting room with its hodgepodge of pungent odors, I was catapulted back to a long-unused cornfield north of the Umpqua River, where I had seen a fugitive from an Idaho Indian reservation crush a strange herb into a green paste and apply it gently to the injured thigh of my pa’s bay. Now I sat here waiting while another practiced a similar brand of magic on the fugitive himself. Life is strange.
When the operating room door finally opened, I had watched the hour hand creep twice around the dial of the big clock that stood between two rows of medical journals atop the bookcase opposite me. I looked from it to the drawn, moist face of the doctor. Everyone in the room was awake now, and all eyes were on him.
He delivered his message slowly, with frequent pauses in between words, and with an awful sinking sensation I thought, Logan’s dead. But when I looked to the Morgenmuellers to confirm my fears, I saw their faces were alight.
“He says,” translated Ilse, whose expression hardly fit the care with which she spoke, “that the Indian is going to be all right.”
Everyone looked at me. I suppose they were waiting for me to say something, but I’m afraid I disappointed them. I fell asleep.
I slept most of the day. I have a dim recollection of someone shaking me awake, and of stumbling down the road to the German farmer’s house, but that’s all I can remember until the moment I came awake and found myself lying in bed staring up at the rafters in a sloping roof. Sunlight slanted in through a window next to the bed. Not being sure where I was, however, I had no way of knowing if it was coming in from the east or from the west. Had I been asleep for twenty-four hours?
“About time you stirred.” It was a familiar voice, dry and caked with dust. A lot of years have passed since I last heard it, but I’d recognize it now. I sat up.
Jack, looking as tall and as rail-thin as he had the first time I’d seen him, stood just inside the doorway. He had his campaign hat pulled low over his eyes and his Sharps in his hand. “We got four good hours of daylight left,” he said. “Let’s ride.”
Mr. and Mrs. Morgenmueller were waiting at the bottom of the stairs when we got there. The living room had been restored to its former neat appearance since the night before. Frau Steiner, a bandage affixed to the side of her head (we had thrown a lot of business Dr. Richter’s way), smiled and nodded at us from her place in one of the upholstered chairs. Her attention was centered on Jack.
“I’m sorry we got to leave you holding the bag like this,” Jack told the Morgenmuellers. “I reckon you’ll be hearing from the authorities in Idaho afore long.”
Eric shook his massive head like a bull besieged by flies. “I fear they will learn little from me. My English, it is not so good yet.” His blue eyes twinkled.
The farmer’s wife must have noticed me looking around, because her eyes sought mine and she smiled. “She is in the barn.”
I came upon Ilse speaking German to the white-faced milk cow in soothing tones. In the sunlight coming in through the window in the loft, her hair matched the hay that was heaped everywhere. She didn’t look up as I approached.
“Where’s Herman?” I asked her.
“He is repairing the corncrib.” She stroked the cow’s nose. The animal watched me indifferently, its jaws working from side to side at a mouthful of hay.
“Your mother said you wanted to see me.”
She nodded. “I wanted to thank you for saving my life.”
Summoning all my courage, I said, “The best way you can do that is to give me permission to visit you from time to time. I live quite a ways south, but—”
“I cannot do that.” She kept her attention on the cow. I guess I looked pretty silly standing there with my mouth open. I closed it.
“Please don’t be angry,” she said. “It is Papa’s wish that I marry Karl Richter, the doctor’s son. I cannot see anyone else.”
“I see,” I said, but I didn’t. “Do you like him?”
“He is very nice.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
“Yes, I like him.”
“Enough to marry him?”
She didn’t answer for almost a minute. “It doesn’t matter,” she said at last. “It has already been decided.”
“Where is this Karl Richter now?” I bit off my words.
“Away at school. When he comes home we will be married.”
“And when is that?”
“Next spring.”
“You can’t get out of it?”
She shook her head. “It is Papa’s wish. I cannot disobey.”
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. With it went my anger. I felt empty. “Well, good luck,” I said, and turned to go.
“Jeff!”
I turned back. She went up on tiptoe and kissed me on the cheek. “Danke,” she said.
Our mounts were saddled and waiting for us in front of the farmhouse. Jack shook hands with Eric before climbing up onto his mule. “Reckon we’ll say our good-byes here,” he told the farmer. “We’ll stop by and visit the injun, but then we got to be going.”
“The settlement is owing you a hundred dollars for the mad dog. Where shall we send it?” Morgenmueller shielded his eyes from the declining sun to look up at him.
Jack said, “Keep it. You’re going to earn it when you talk to the law. I ain’t got no address anyway.”
The little burro brayed impatiently at the end of its halter. I mounted the eager mustang, and, after accepting a wax-paper-wrapped package of duck sandwiches from Mrs. Morgenmueller (“It will put good German meat on your bones”), we said our good-byes and left.
“What was that about them keeping the money?” I asked Jack after we had passed out of earshot. “How are you planning to operate without cash?”
“What makes you think I ain’t got cash?” he encountered.
“But, you said—”
“What’s that look like?” Out of his back pocket he hauled a roll of dirty bills big enough to choke—well, a buffalo. I decided not to press the point.
The sunlight glittered on a tiny gold chain hanging down from his left saddlebag. “What’s that?” I said.
“What’s what?”
“That.” I leaned over and seized the chain in my fist before he could stop me. Pulling it out, I saw that a locket of some kind dangled from the other end.
“It’s just a good-luck piece,” he said, and made a grab for it, but by that time I already had it open. The portrait inside was that of an attractive woman with dark hair and a strong chin. It had to be at least thirty years old, but it didn’t take much imagination to figure out what the woman looked like now. I laughed.
“Gretchen Steiner! I knew she was sweet on you from the start.”
He snatched the piece of jewelry out of my hand and stuffed it back into his saddlebag. “Bel
onged to her dead husband,” he growled, eyes glued on the road ahead. “She give it to me to say thanks for helping bring her granddaughter back safe and sound. That’s all.”
“If you say so,” I replied, with a straight face. Ilse was already a dim memory.
Logan was sitting up in the bed Dr. Richter kept for his convalescent patients when we got to the operating room. His injured arm, newly splinted and swathed in fresh bandages, lay on top of the blanket. “About time you got here!” he snapped at us before we had even set foot inside the room. “I might as well be talking to myself as to this butcher who calls himself a doctor.” He indicated the sober-faced physician taking his pulse beside the bed. Richter ignored him.
A rare grin flickered over Jack’s countenance. For the second time since I had known him, I saw the flash of gold teeth he usually kept hidden as if afraid somebody might try to steal them. “Glad to see you’re better,” he said. He tossed the package the farmer’s wife had given us onto the Indian’s stomach.
“At last!” said Logan, tearing off the wrapping and sinking his teeth into the first sandwich. “This quack’s been starving me.”
I’ve often wondered if Dr. Richter might have understood a little English, or if he’d just picked up the drift of his patient’s speech by the tone of his words. At any rate, it was with exaggerated grace that he snapped shut the face of his watch, bowed to the Indian, and departed. Jack chuckled.
“He’s just doing his job, you know,” he said. “Ain’t no need to act like a heathen injun.”
Logan finished his sandwich in silence.
“How’s the arm?” asked Jack.
The Indian shrugged his good shoulder. “It’s still there. I doubt that I’ll ever get much use out of it, but it’s better than an empty sleeve.” He looked at Jack. “That was some shooting.” It was the closest he came to thanking him for saving his life. But it was enough.
Jack said, “Weren’t much to it. With the Big Fifty, all you got to do is point it and fire. If anyone deserves a compliment, it’s Rufus Brinker. I wouldn’t make a jump like that to save my own mother. Even if I had one.” There was a little silence. I broke it. “How long are you going to be laid up here?” I asked Logan.
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