The Hider

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Not more than a couple of days, if I can help it,” he replied. “I’ve a hunch there’ll be a circular with my name on it waiting on Bud Fowler’s desk when he gets back to Reuben, and I’d rather not be around after that. Besides, I have a new wife to get back to.”

  “Reckon it’s safe?” asked Jack.

  “My first stop will be at the army post to turn myself in. I’m sure the tribe will speak for me, once they hear George Crook’s dead.” He wrapped up the remainder of the sandwiches and put them on the instrument stand next to the bed. “The Nez Percé police are due for a flushing out.”

  “What happens then?” I inquired.

  Logan said, “I’m thinking of California. I’ve had enough of life on the reservation, and my wife has relatives there. After that….” He shrugged again. “But that’s in the future. I’ll be in Idaho for some time yet, so I’d appreciate it if you’d drop me a card to let me know how the hunt comes out.”

  “Under which name?” Jack regarded him with a faint smile.

  The Indian looked at him, and presently he smiled too. “Try Sleeping Bow,” he said.

  Jack offered his right hand and Logan—or Sleeping Bow—took it in his left. “It’s been interesting,” said the hider.

  Logan laughed. “You ought to have been on this end.” Then he looked at me. “Stay off those cliffs, okay?”

  I flashed him a grin. “Okay.”

  Back on the road, I asked Jack which way we were going. His gaze swept the mountains to the east.

  “By now he’s circled the settlement and come back to the trail. Reckon we’ll just keep going the way we are and pick up his tracks on the other side.”

  That wasn’t as easy as it sounded. The road had been built right on top of the old buffalo trail, and its surface was so hard an elephant carrying a full load of rocks on its back could have stomped right down the middle without leaving so mucn as the outline of a footprint to mark its passing. But that didn’t slow us down. Several times Jack dismounted, spent some time wandering head-down around the road’s grassy bank, then, his confidence recharged by something he had seen, swung up onto his mule’s back with a new energy and pushed on. I don’t know what he saw when he made these stops, and I didn’t ask. I could tell he wasn’t in an explaining mood.

  Afternoon bled into evening, and we were still moving. The idea never occurred to me to suggest making camp. Even without the threat of George Crook behind us, the hunt retained an air of excitement, something like a throbbing heartbeat that grew louder and louder with each step we took. I could feel, deep within me, that we were nearing our quarry. I think this feeling emanated from Jack. Rock-steady as ever on the outside, he must have been ready to bust apart from within. To ask him to stop when he was so close would be nothing less than a crime.

  At length, though, we did stop. The sun was only a memory in the blue-black of the night when we fixed a starvation meal and climbed into our bedrolls thirty yards from the road. We were up again in less than five hours, and I got the idea as I stumbled through the motions of breaking camp that the only reason we had stopped at all was to give our mounts a rest. Since yesterday’s trek had not been a particularly hard one, that meant rough going up ahead. It was still dark when we pulled out.

  Those next few hours seemed to flit by like telegraph poles at a fast gallop. Jack said little, perhaps preferring to save his energy for the hunt. He was on his mule most of the time, stopping only to squat on the ground (the road dead-ended fifty miles north of Mount Jefferson) to check some tiny sign in the rock-hard earth. As always, he saw tracks I didn’t, smelled scents I couldn’t. The mule flared its nostrils frequently when it was moving, drawing in and puffing out hot air like a bull in rut. It seemed that it, too, had caught the scent, and with it recaptured the spirit of its youth when buffalo ruled the plains. As for me, I was swept along like a leaf in a twister. I could not have freed myself even if I had wanted to, things were happening that fast.

  An hour before noon, in a region full of hump-backed hills west of the Hood River, we came to a full stop at the top of a mound covered with timothy and wild wheat. I was about to ask why we had halted when Jack cut me off with a slashing movement of his left hand. He seemed to be listening. I followed his lead.

  The air seemed silent at first. But after we had sat still a few seconds, I became aware of the life that throbbed all around us. A slight breeze rustled in the nearby treetops and skimmed through the grass at our mounts’ feet. Somewhere close, a small creature thumped along the ground unseen. Above us, a handful of small birds climbed and swooped busily, calling to each other in distinctly nonmusical squawks and peeps. Other than that I could detect nothing that would claim my partner’s interest. “What is it?” I asked, my voice scarcely above a whisper.

  “Birds,” said Jack. “Hear them?”

  I listened to the birds’ abrasive barking for another moment. “Starlings,” I said.

  He nodded. “Starlings, but more than that. Buffalo birds.”

  When I didn’t comment, he went on. “Buffalo hide’s full of ticks. Them’s what the birds live on. They used to follow the herds by the thousands in the old days. You could hear them squawking from here to Texas.”

  My heart was thumping against my chest. “Does that mean we’re there?”

  The wide hat brim twitched in a manner of curt decision. “Near.”

  We sat quietly for a moment. I guess maybe we were both a little awestruck at the idea that we had come to the end of the hunt.

  “Ride like hell!” The shout exploded from Jack like a case of dynamite in a house afire. His mule shot forward. He was halfway up the slope of the next hill before I could collect enough of myself to follow, and then I slapped the startled little mustang on the rump with a blow that would have killed a snake. My teeth snapped together with the jolt and we galloped off in Jack’s dusty path.

  We topped that hill, followed it into a hollow, and clattered up the next. We didn’t have roller coasters in those days, but if we had, the swelling, undulating sensation this caused would have reminded me of one. After we had gone over three or four of these low swells, the ground flattened out, leaving only one long, gently graded slope up ahead. It was crowned at the top by a huge spreading oak. I remember this last detail especially well because I saw Jack standing in its shade as I came over the top of the last hill. Away over his head, the noisy birds that had inspired our haste were circling and playing tag with each other in the clear blue sky. The racket they made was deafening, or at least it seemed so under those circumstances. Jack’s mule stood motionless beside him.

  I came to a skidding stop at the top of the grade and bounded off in the same motion. When I joined him, Jack had already slid his Sharps from its scabbard and was stretched out on his stomach on the ground, sighting down the barrel at something in the lush green valley below. “Look at him, boy,” he said, and his voice sounded funny, like I’d never heard it before. “Ain’t he a sight to see?”

  I got down beside him and looked in the direction his rifle was pointing. At first I didn’t see much of anything. It was a pleasant place, full of tall grass of one shade of green and bushes of another, with here and there a tall elm or a grove of poplars to break up the monotony. A creek meandered more or less through the middle of the scene—a tributary, I imagine, of the mighty Columbia. I wondered with a shrinking sensation in my chest if three years of expectation were making Jack see something that wasn’t there.

  And then I saw it too.

  It had come out from behind a tangle of blackberry bushes, where it had most likely been drinking from the creek. Big, dark as walnut stain, it started out huge in the bearded head and shoulders and great bulging hump, then tapered back to a rump almost as narrow as my own. The black horns that curved out and around from its woolly pompadour were a perfect match. As it walked, it twitched its tail at the cloud of flies that surrounded it and tossed its mammoth head as if spoiling for a fight, or, the next best thing, a cow
in heat. Its chest was deep and its hocks were shaggy. It was indeed, a sight to see. It would have been the chief of its herd had it not been the last buffalo in the United States.

  “As good-looking a animal as I ever did see,” Jack was saying. He set the Sharps’ action with a click of the rear trigger. “Better. Killed me a old bull big as that south of the Platte in Nebraska, but that was at the end of the shedding season and its coat wasn’t near so full. Yes, sir. This one’s worth three years.”

  He fell silent as he drew a bead on the monstrous bull. I waited for the report. In my mind’s eye the beast was already hit, folding to the ground like Pa’s old corncrib had done in the big wind of ’93. To my surprise, I didn’t feel elated. I had been anticipating this moment ever since Jack had agreed to take me along, looking forward to it as one of the high points in my life. But it didn’t feel so high. I realized then that this was the same feeling I’d had when George Crook had Logan trapped above Shoshone Falls and Jack told me he didn’t dare shoot for fear of hitting Ilse. I felt sick and helpless. I didn’t close my eyes, but I cringed in expectation of the big gun’s roar.

  And then a funny thing happened.

  There are moments in your life that stand out so clear in your memory that years later you begin to wonder if they really happened, or if you wanted them to happen so badly that you fool yourself into thinking that they did. This was one of those moments. I was lying there on my stomach feeling sorry for that old bull, and mad at myself for feeling that way, and Jack was bearing down on him with that Sharps that never missed, and I was waiting for the report and for the bull to go down like a sack of potatoes, and then it looked like the barrel of the Sharps moved to the left ever so slightly and fire leaped from the end of it and roared and the buffalo jerked up its head and turned tail and galloped out of sight over the next hill, its tail twitching, before Jack could reload.

  There was a long pause while the thunder of the report echoed away into the distance and Jack lay there with a fresh cartridge in the chamber and nothing to shoot at.

  “I missed, goddamnit,” he said at last, but he didn’t sound as disappointed as he should have.

  Chapter Sixteen

  I never found out for sure if Jack missed that shot on purpose or by accident. It’s hard to believe that a man who could hit his target dead-on from a distance of over five hundred yards one day could completely blow a shot at another from less than two hundred the next. In any case, I like to think that at the last second it occurred to him how wrong it would be to pick off the last living remnant of the life he knew best, and that he did move his rifle just enough so that it fired two feet to the animal’s left. If he did, though, I doubt that he would have admitted it to himself, just as he hadn’t after he’d missed a similar shot two months before he met me.

  Jack and I parted company that day. I didn’t explain why I was leaving, and he never asked. He didn’t even seem surprised. Deep down I guess he knew the reason. I took enough of the supplies to get me back to Citadel, but when I offered to pay him for them, he told me to get the hell out of there.

  I swung up onto the mustang’s back and looked down at him from the saddle. He had extracted his bore mop and can of gun oil from his saddlebags and was unloading his Sharps prior to cleaning it. He treated that gun like a sick baby. “Where do you go from here?” I asked him.

  “East a ways.” He saturated the wad of blackened cotton at the end of the wooden rod with the yellow oil and thrust it down inside the barrel. “Buffalo ain’t about to cross the Columbia here because it’s too wide, and there’s too many towns over to the west. I’ll catch him up in the mountains.”

  “Where then?” There was no need to speculate on whether his aim would improve between here and the mountains.

  “Reckon I’ll head over to Portland. Friend of mine used to run a shop there that sold fifty-caliber ammunition. Hope he’s still around.”

  I guess I should have stopped there, but I just couldn’t let it go. “And then?”

  He looked up from the rifle between his knees, squinting at me in the bright sunlight. “Boy,” he said patiently, “do I look like a fortune-teller to you?”

  It was a dismissal. I said good-bye and swung the star-faced mustang south. The last glimpse I had of Jack was of an old man standing on a hilltop beside a big mule and a mangy little burro, cleaning the barrel of a Sharps buffalo rifle. His face was all but hidden beneath the downturned brim of his broad campaign hat. Just before I passed beneath the crest of the next hill, I thought I saw him raise his long right arm in a wave, but I couldn’t be sure. He might have been adjusting his hat.

  I stopped in Reuben on the way home to see if I could buy back Pa’s bay, but the scrawny old man who ran the livery stable told me he had sold it two days before to a farmer who wanted to give his fourteen-year-old son a horse for his birthday, so I was stuck with the mustang. I didn’t mind that too much, though, because by then I’d grown used to the little troublemaker and every rotten trick it pulled on me. I reckon you could get used to being punched in the mouth if that’s the way you were greeted every morning before breakfast. How else can I explain the way I felt that November morning in 1905 when I shoveled a path out to the barn through three feet of snow to find the mustang dead in its stall, frozen stiff as a wooden horse on a merry-go-round?

  The stable owner had some big news for me, though. Billy Granger was dead. It seems young Rick looked up from his dime novel the morning after Bud Fowler and his posse had left town to see the youthful bank robber choking at the end of his shirt, the other end of which he had braided and tied to the bars in the window of his cell. Rick rushed in and cut him down, but by that time it was too late. Two days later Billy’s mother came and took his body back home for burial. It must have seemed like high time to her; as far as she was concerned, he had been dead for some time. I asked the stable owner how Fowler had reacted to the news. His unshaven face crinkled in a grotesque grin.

  “Just don’t get in his way when he spits,” he warned me. “He’ll burn a hole right through you.”

  Not only did I not get in the constable’s way, but I made it a point to take the side streets out of town so that I didn’t bump into him and give him an excuse to lock me up for assaulting an officer. That week had not been a particularly good one for Reuben’s most respected citizen.

  The north and south branches of the Umpqua had receded quite a bit since the rain, and I had little trouble crossing them. I got back to Citadel in plenty of time to take Theodora Corcoran to the Memorial Day dance. Soon after that, I sold the farm to a land speculator from New Rumley, Ohio, who was looking to make a killing out of what he called the “undeveloped West” and used part of the proceeds to pay Pa’s debts. Next came Uncle Jake, whom I suspect was disappointed to see my debt to him resolved so easily. What was left went into the bank to gather interest while I proposed to Theodora Corcoran.

  This last act came as much as a surprise to me as it did to Theodora and her mother, who had just about given up hope on me as a possible match for her daughter. Looking back on it, I guess you might see it as a logical result of my rejection by Ilse Morgenmueller, but at the time this wasn’t so clear and it caused me a great deal of thought between the time of my betrothal and the informal ceremony at the Presbyterian church in August.

  By that time I had made a down payment on some better farm land north of town and we moved in right away. I couldn’t make a go of it, though—it takes a special breed to be able to cope with Oregon’s unpredictable climate—and after eight years of pure heartbreak we picked up and moved to Kansas, where I bought a house ten miles outside of Topeka.

  Life was pretty good there. Say what you like about marriages on the rebound. Theodora and I had a good one going right up until the night she died of scarlet fever in February of 1926. By then she’d presented me with three strong sons. That about ends my story, except for one last thing.

  One day late in 1912, my youngest son, Ted, talked m
e into taking him to the movies. I remember the year because it was right after his namesake, Teddy Roosevelt, had disrupted the Republican National Convention in Houston by opposing his former Secretary of War, William Howard Taft, for the presidential nomination. I had been one of Mr. Roosevelt’s staunchest supporters ever since he had collected Spain’s bloody debt to the United States on San Juan Hill, and I voted for him both times he ran for president, including the time he ran at the head of his “Bull Moose” party and lost. Anyway, it took six-year-old Ted most of the day to coax me into taking him to the boxlike theater on Topeka’s west side; I’d been to the movies, or flickers as we called them in those days, once before, and found them frivolous in comparison to the live plays that had once been presented in that same building. But I went again. Like the man for whom he was named, Ted could talk a rock into turning over so he could collect fishing worms from beneath it without scraping his hands. I’ve always thought that he could have gone into politics had he not chosen to be a better farmer than his father ever could be. Of his two brothers, Jack, the eldest, went to pharmaceutical school and opened up a drugstore in Hays, and Joseph Pulitzer migrated down to Oklahoma in 1915 to work in the oil fields. I haven’t received a letter from either of them in over a year. But to get back to the theater.

  The place was heated by coal, and coal must have been cheap that year because it was stifling. What was worse, every seat was taken. You haven’t suffered until you’ve sat in a room crammed with fifty or sixty hot, sweating people and tried to keep your mind off your discomfort by looking at a jumble of yellow-tinted images fluttering across a four-by-six-foot screen erected in the front of the room. Little Ted was enjoying it, but then kids are easy to please.

  It was a Western. The heroine, a girl with dark tousled hair and big eyes, was firing a rifle out the window of a log cabin at a pack of whiskey-crazed Indians galloping around on the backs of paint ponies and shouting (I assume, for there wasn’t any sound) bloodcurdling war cries while they poured arrows into the building from all sides. The rifle was a 1903 Springfield, which struck me as funny because modern weapons and wild Indians just didn’t mix. Meanwhile, the hero, carrying a single-action Colt .45 revolver that never seemed to run out of bullets, crouched atop a rock outcropping about sixty yards from the cabin and picked off the savages one by one at rifle range. I looked around me to see if anyone else had noticed these details. No one had. Everyone else in the room watched the actions on the screen with looks on their faces as if they thought they were seeing the real thing. I turned back to the screen.