The Hider

by Loren D. Estleman

  The mule floundered a little, and for a moment it looked as if Jack, his mule, and the burro were going to be swept along in the powerful current. I had a vision of myself continuing alone on the hunt. But after much splashing and kicking, the huge beast found a footing and thrashed across to the opposite bank, its pygmy cousin swimming along in its wake. Once on solid ground, the mule stopped and shook itself mightily.

  Now it was my turn. Jack swung about and raised his long left arm in a beckoning gesture. I took a deep breath. Well, it was only water. Shrugging, I slapped my bay hard on its rump and we hit the river at a gallop. The water thrown up by the churning of my horse’s powerful forelegs lashed me in the face, burning my nose and blurring my eyesight. I could feel the current surging past the calves of my legs, could feel it trying to sweep the bay off its feet. I leaned forward and hugged its great neck in both arms. A second later we had cleared the water and were treading on muddy ground, slippery but solid.

  I admit that I was feeling pretty cocky. I’d crossed water before, but the rivers that ran through my property were creeks compared to the Umpqua. As far as I knew nobody had ever attempted to ford the Rogue River. Jack brought me down to earth fast.

  “If you liked that, wait till we get to the North Umpqua,” he said. “It’s twice as wide and near three times as fast.”

  If the sun had ever had the nerve to show itself on that wet day, I suppose it would have been past its high point by the time we finally drew within sight of the line shack Jack had mentioned when we were still south of the river. I can’t say it wasn’t a welcome sight after all those hours of riding through the pouring rain, but I did wonder if it was worth all the effort. From the outside it was a little square building with a roof full of curled shingles and weeds up to the windowsills, only one of which had any glass in it, and that a single unbroken pane discolored with age and grime. I was glad to see a rusty stovepipe sticking up from the roof, for that meant a stove, but I wasn’t too happy to note that the front door was missing. Judging by the shack’s run-down appearance, I concluded that it had been quite a while since Ford Harper had controlled his ranch with a firm hand, if indeed the ranch still existed, which I doubted.

  There was no stable, but a sort of pole barn had been constructed behind the shack which made use of five or six poplar trunks to support a roof of corrugated iron, the high side of which was nailed to the roof of the building itself. Although it sagged some on one side, Jack counted it sturdy enough to trust our mounts to its shelter. We used our saddle blankets to rub the animals down as best we could, including the burro, and then we covered Jack’s mule and my horse with a pair of musty blankets I had found inside the shack. We figured the burro could wedge himself in between the others to keep warm. Then we went inside.

  It wasn’t too bad, if you didn’t mind rats’ nests in every corner and the smell of mildew. There was even a rickety table with four chairs around it and a bed; the last was a homemade wooden boxlike contraption with one broken leg, and a rotted straw mattress from which the rats had taken the material to build their nests. I grabbed a broom I found in a corner and set to work sweeping the nests and other assorted trash out the door. I would have swept the floor, too, but that didn’t seem to make much sense since there wasn’t any. One of the nests turned out to be occupied. I jumped about two feet when a big gray old grandfather rat scurried out and ran over the toe of my shoe. I helped him out the door with a hearty kick that made him squeal when he hit the ground.

  Jack got a fire going in the little two-burner stove with straw from the mattress and fed it with wood that had been in the box beside it for neither of us knew how many years; with that, and with his buffalo robe hanging over the entrance in place of the missing door, the place lost a good deal of its gloom. I got out of my wet clothes and draped them over a chair in front of the stove. Then, wrapping myself in Pa’s old blanket, I huddled up as close as I could get to the stove without burning myself and sat down on the floor with my back against the wall. I asked Jack if he weren’t going to do something similar.

  “Nope.” He leaned on another chair, wobbled it to test its sturdiness, then swung it into position beside the one my clothes were drying on and sat down. I heard his buckskins rustle wetly as he stretched out his long legs toward the source of heat. “When you’re wearing hides and they get wet, you got to leave them on till they’re dry, else you’ll never get back into them. Nothing shrinks like wet skins.”

  “You’ll catch your death of cold,” I said.

  He scowled. With his damp white hair plastered back and hanging down past his collar, the expression made him look like an old Indian chief. I wondered idly if he had any redskin in his background. “Ain’t never got sick yet,” he said. “Onliest time I was ever in bed past six was the day a twelve-pounder slipped its chocks at Antietam and rolled over my left leg. I was back on the field the next morning, and I brung three Yanks to ground afore a ball from a Colt Dragoon snapped my crutch in half and sent me back to the hospital to get my leg reset.”

  I said, “I didn’t know you were in the war.”

  “I brung fifteen men with me from the gold camp in Columbia.” His voice was solemn. “They made me a captain. Three years later I was the only one left.”

  “What did you do after the war?”

  “Well, after three years on the losing side, I figured it was time to hitch up with some winners, so I went down to Mexico. Revolution was going full tilt by then. I seen some action outside of Durango, but it got over fast and I come back north. That’s when I picked up that little burro that took a sail off the Quitman Mountains.”

  “What side were you on down there?” I asked.

  A tired form of the grin I had first seen in front of my house flickered over Jack’s cracked and pleated lips. “The wrong one,” he said simply.

  He was in a storytelling mood. I took advantage of it. “Jack,” I said, “what made you take up hunting buffalo?”

  Again he smiled, faintly and with a trace of weariness. “We didn’t much call it hunting back then,” he corrected.

  “There was so many you didn’t have to hunt. We called ourselves hiders. I don’t know why I took it up. I reckon it was just something to do.”

  “I guess there were a lot of things to do back then,” I prompted.

  “Yeah. I reckon there was.”

  He had grown very quiet suddenly; I think I had found what it was that seemed to trouble him so, and I encouraged him to talk about it. “Things aren’t like that any more, are they?” I said. “There’s not much chance for a man to prove himself now, is there?”

  “There’s some things,” he said. He was staring at a crack in the base of the little stove through which the flames showed. Rain roared on the roof and splattered into the dusty old preserve jars we had found and placed under the numerous leaks. “There’s trouble brewing in Cuba. I reckon there’ll be plenty of ways for a man to prove hisself once them guns start rolling.”

  “It isn’t the same.”

  “No,” he agreed. “It ain’t the same. They say it’s pretty, with all the brass bands and parades and all, but it ain’t the same. Things change.” Suddenly, as if it took all his strength to do so, he tore his eyes away from the leaping flames and glanced out the window into the pouring rain. “Looks like it’s going to keep it up all day long,” he observed.

  That’s the way it was with Jack. Just when you thought you had him, when it looked like he was going to open up and let you see right into his soul, you came up against a blank wall. I knew I wasn’t going to get anything more out of him that day, so I shoved closer to the stove and thought about what he’d told me. It wasn’t much.

  I guess I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew it was dark in the room, and when I went to brush my hair out of my eyes I noticed it was dry. There was still some light: I could just make out the outline of the stove with its crack a glowing red crescent in the base and the window opposite me, the one with
the single remaining pane of glass, was a grayish square in the black of the wall.

  I looked up at the chair in which I had last seen Jack sitting. It was empty. I sat up.

  “Jack—” I whispered.

  “Shhhh!” He was crouching across the room from me, holding his rifle across one knee and watching something through a corner of the broken window. The flames showing through the crack in the stove made his shadow dance along the walls and ceiling.

  I had no idea how long he had been squatting there. Minutes crawled by like snakes awakened from their winter sleep, and still he remained motionless, long after my younger muscles would have given away beneath the strain. The rain had slowed to a steady drizzle. Every now and then a bolt of lightning would strike and throw the scene outside the window into blinding brilliance, then darkness would come rushing back in to fill it up and the sky would split apart with a splattering crack of thunder. I could see nothing out there during these times that would explain Jack’s alert condition, but I knew there was something, or he wouldn’t be there with his white hair falling all about his face and his finger resting on the front trigger of the big Sharps. I breathed as quietly as I could and listened.

  Then Jack’s buffalo robe was pushed aside and lightning was striking and a figure at least ten feet tall was standing on the threshold with a knife in its hand. Thunder crashed. I thought it was Jack’s Sharps and I scrambled to my feet, grabbing for the Winchester I had left to dry leaning against the wall on the other side of the stove. But there was no shooting. When I wheeled to bring my rifle into play, this is what I saw: Jack still in his crouched position beneath the window, his Sharps pointing toward the door; a slim man of medium height standing in the doorway with his hands raised over his head: and, lying on the floor where Jack had shouted for him to drop it, a hunting knife with a long blade. The intruder had shrunk a good four feet since coming into the shack, but that was about all I could tell of him in the poor light. I wouldn’t have seen the knife if it weren’t for the flames from the stove glinting on its polished surface. Thus seeing that my partner had the situation well in hand, I relaxed my stance, but I kept the Winchester trained on the stranger.

  “Boy,” Jack addressed me, his voice dead calm, “there’s a candle stub in my saddlebags. Light it and put it on the table.”

  I found it, a two-inch-long lump of wax about as big around as my thumb, and lit it with one of the matches from the saddlebag. A warm yellow glow bloomed over the table and on the faces of the two motionless men. I confess that I gasped when I saw the stranger’s features, but I think I covered it up well enough by turning it into a cough.

  The stranger was an Indian. He wore a faded calico shirt, denim pants held up by suspenders, and a pair of boots that were a size too big for him; white man’s clothes right enough, but his face and hair were straight out of Custer’s Last Stand. It was a round face, kind of flat and bony, and framed by hair that was long and loose and black and hanging wet about his shoulders. You’ve seen it a thousand times, staring out of pictures of adobe villages in parched deserts under a blazing sun, and never thought twice about it. Well, if you were there with us, standing with your gun in your hand in a shack in the rain and that face was in there with you, you’d think about it a second time. And a third. And a fourth. You’d probably go on thinking about it, as I did, until someone’s voice broke the crusty silence.

  That someone was Jack. Slowly, keeping the huge bore of his buffalo gun trained on the Indian, he rose from his crouch. Standing, he towered over the newcomer by almost half a head. “You savvy American?” he asked.

  “I speak English, like you,” answered the other. He said it with a kind of smile that made me mad to see it.

  “I thought so. Get his knife, boy.”

  I came forward and scooped up the knife. It was a handsome weapon with a steel blade and a bone handle that seemed to mold itself to your fingers. It hadn’t been made on any reservation. I offered it to Jack, but he kept his eyes on our guest. I withdrew it.

  Jack said, “Suppose you tell us who you are and what you was planning to do with that there knife.”

  The irksome smile was still on his lips. “I’m cold, and I’m hungry, and I need a place to rest,” he said. “When I saw the horses in the stable, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I came prepared.”

  “Sounds plausible. Too bad I don’t believe it.”

  “What do you believe?”

  “I believe the part about you being cold and tired and hungry,” said Jack. “But I also believe that you seen your chance to make off with some horses and grub and supplies, and that you come in with that knife just in case one of us didn’t see it your way. I believe you would cut your own mother if it meant your staying ahead of whoever’s after you. That’s what I believe.”

  The Indian kept quiet during all this, but as Jack went on, the smile faded and his eyes took on a narrow, furtive look, as if searching for an avenue of escape. I realized then that what Jack said was true. When the time came to answer him, however, the hunted look had fled and the smile was back. “And what makes you think I have someone after me?” he asked.

  “Someone learned you to talk American,” observed the other. “That means you ain’t no renegade, and nice, law-abiding injuns don’t wander around in the rain on foot and come into strange buildings with weapons in their hands. You’re being chased, all right. Question is, by who?”

  “How do you know I’ve been traveling on foot?”

  Jack sighed, as if the answer were obvious. “You don’t splash mud up to your knees on the back of a nice high horse.”

  The Indian’s eyes flickered downward toward his denims, which—do I have to say it?—were plastered with mud from the knees down, and the smile deepened. “You’ve a sharp eye, my friend,” he said.

  “You still ain’t told me who you are.”

  “I’d feel a lot more like talking if I had something in my stomach.”

  I couldn’t believe it. I said, “Will you listen to that gall!”

  But Jack only smiled and lowered his rifle. “I reckon we can oblige you there, stranger,” he said. “Boy, get yourself dressed and fetch me some water for supper.”

  I’d forgotten that I wasn’t dressed. I drew the blanket I was wearing tighter about my throat. “Aren’t you going to check him for any weapons?” I asked.

  “Why? You got his knife.”

  “But he might have a gun!”

  Jack gave me an exasperated look. “Now, why would he come traipsing in here with a knife in his hand if he had a gun?”

  I hadn’t thought of that. I went to get my clothes.

  Dressing was awkward, because I was unwilling to take my eyes off the Indian and I kept making sure that Pa’s Winchester was still lying on the chair where I’d left it, within easy reach of my right hand should our guest try anything. I use the word “guest” with only a little irony, because that’s the way Jack was treating him. He even let him warm himself by the stove while he prepared the skillet for supper. The only visible sign that this was not some social occasion was Jack’s Big Fifty leaning against the wall where he could snatch it up on an instant’s notice.

  “You’d be a sight more comfortable if’n you took off them clothes and let them dry by the stove, like the boy there,” suggested Jack.

  “Thanks,” said the other, but he kept his clothes on.

  Supper was a delicious concoction of beans mixed with big square chunks of bacon. I ate with the Winchester lying across my lap, Jack with his Sharps leaning against the table on the far side from the Indian. Afterward we all sat around the table drinking coffee which Jack had brewed in an old chipped enamel pot he said he had been carrying since the Battle of Pittsburgh Landing. Shiloh, he called it. We didn’t have any cup for the Indian, so he drank out of a preserve jar from which I had poured the rainwater and washed as best as I could with a grimy old rag. It didn’t slow him down any; he drained it while Jack and I were still blowing on ours to cool
it off.

  “My name is Logan,” he began, fulfilling his part of the bargain he had struck with Jack. “I’m from the Lapwai Reservation in Idaho. I stole a horse there last month and took off for California, but it went lame about five miles back, so I cut its throat and took off on foot. I didn’t know there were so few farms in this part of the country, or I’d be sitting a new mount and well on my way to Sacramento by now.” He poured himself another jarful of coffee and sat sipping it, his eyes on Jack.

  “Why’d you leave the reservation?” asked Jack.

  “For the same reason you’d leave a jail cell if someone left the door open.” The Indian set his jar on the table and held it between his hands as if to warm them. His eyes were hard. “You don’t know what it’s like being confined to a few hundred acres of ground just because your skin is darker than your jailers’. One morning I just couldn’t take it any more. When I saw that horse tethered in front of the chief’s hut, I just mounted it and rode off. I don’t think anyone even knew what I was doing until long after I was gone.”

  “You stole the chief’s horse?” I asked incredulously. He turned a poker face on me. “Why not? He’s just a sick old man. He won’t be needing it any more.”

  “Why California?” cut in Jack. “Seems to me Canada’s a lot closer, and no law can touch you once you cross that border.”

  “That’s what you think. The law in Idaho would just as soon shoot me in Canada as on the reservation. A line on a map means nothing to them.”

  “Who’s after you?” asked Jack.

  “Nobody in particular,” shrugged the Indian. “I saw a flyer they had out on me in La Grande. Since then I’ve been able to stay one jump ahead of it. I’m in no real danger as long as I keep moving.” He frowned. “That is, I wasn’t until now.”