The Hider

by Loren D. Estleman

  “George Crook receives an annual allotment from the federal government for arms and ammunition, but no one ever sees it,” he said. “Most of his men supply their own.”

  Jack looked from the gun belt in his hands to me and back to the gun belt, then shook his head. He said, “Boy, it’ll take a heap of beans and bacon afore you can wear this without it falling down around your knees. You better be satisfied with your Winchester.” That suited me fine. I wasn’t looking forward to buckling the gory mess around my waist anyway. Slinging the gun belt over his shoulder, Jack reached down again and lifted the Indian’s rifle out of the tall grass. It was a Henry with the initials CPD carved crudely into the buttstock. He jacked out all the shells and tossed it to Logan, who caught it in one hand. “Here, injun,” said Jack. “If you run into trouble, point it and maybe they’ll run away.”

  “And if they don’t?” asked the other, detaching the wilted white banner from the muzzle.

  “Then hit them over the head with it and run yourself.”

  I heard a strangling noise and looked up to see a pair of turkey buzzards flapping and wheeling about the sky in wide circles. I reckon they were about two hundred feet up and coming closer with each pass. How do they always know?

  Jack noticed them too. He held up a hand to shield his eyes from the sun’s glare and watched their gyrations for a silent moment.

  It was a mistake. While the hunter’s back was turned, Logan let go of his captured horse and ran at him, swinging the Henry by its barrel so that the butt came around and smashed Jack in the side of the head. That’s what I thought happened. In reality, Jack ducked at the last instant so that the club only swept his hat off; at the same time he brought the butt of his own rifle around in a scooping motion and punched it hard into the Indian’s stomach. Logan’s breath came out in a woof and he doubled over and just sort of wilted to the ground. The buzzards, startled by the sudden activity, departed in a flurry of wings. Logan was still lying there gasping for air when Jack placed the muzzle of his Sharps beneath the Indian’s nose.

  “Injun,” he said calmly, “I’d be obliged if you don’t do that again. I ain’t killed two men in one day since the war, and I ain’t sure my conscience can handle it.”

  I felt pretty foolish standing there with my Winchester in my hands without doing anything to help Jack. In order not to call attention to this idleness on my part, I went over to get the masterless horse before it wandered too far away and brought it back to the front of the shack. I heard more squawking and flapping overhead, but this time I didn’t bother to look up. It was obvious that our friends the turkey buzzards had returned, and, what’s more, that they’d brought some friends with them. They were just waiting for us to leave so they could swoop down and begin their feast.

  By this time, Logan had recovered enough of his faculties to climb to his hands and knees. His body shook some and his face was dead gray, but at least he was breathing easier. Jack watched him in silence.

  “You know this injun Crook better than me,” he said at last. “What you reckon he’ll do now?”

  “One of two things.” Logan was standing now, unsteady but straight. His color was returning. “He’ll either make for the nearest telegraph office and wire for reinforcements, or else decide to take after us alone. I think he’s just mean enough to try it without help.” He was looking at Jack with unconcealed hostility. I imagine he was devising some new plan to get hold of that Sharps or Clyde’s Colt. He wasn’t the kind to give up easily.

  I said, “Well, there are three of us and only one of him. What’s to stop us from laying back somewhere along the trail and bushwhacking him when he comes by?”

  Logan favored me with a tolerant smile. It reminded me of a schoolteacher who had just heard a wrong answer from one of his students. “That’s been tried before,” he said. “All that will gain for us is three graves. Our best bet is to put as many miles between ourselves and here as we can before George decides to come back.”

  “That’s just great,” I rejoined. “Except that we’ve only got one horse.”

  “Not any more,” said Jack. Something in the tone of his voice made me turn and look in the direction in which he was gazing. After a moment I saw Jack’s mule come trotting out of the shadow of Quartz Mountain, the little burro scrambling to keep up, its packs jiggling on its back. Behind them, a little more hesitantly, followed my bay. “Told you they’d be back,” my partner reminded me.

  Jack’s mule came up to him readily enough, but I had to chase my horse for a couple of hundred yards before I could get hold of its reins and lead it back to the scene of Clyde Pacing Dog’s violent death.

  “Come on, injun,” said Jack, mounting.

  Logan, who had been inspecting the corpse, abandoned it and swung on to the back of his new mount. A moment later we were back on the trail heading north. We had barely reached the top of the hill when the first of the buzzards came flapping down, then another and another. I turned to look back, but by that time all I could see of the dead Indian was a mass of heaving black feathers.

  Chapter Six

  “You’re hunting what?” The astonishment in Logan’s voice unnerved his horse, which gave a little whinny and shied sideways as if it had come close to stepping on a snake. The Indian kept his attention on Jack’s chiseled profile.

  Jack said nothing. He seldom repeated himself, and never when he was sure the other person had heard him the first time. His eyes never left the trail ahead. Logan turned to me.

  “Do you want to explain that, or are you as crazy as he is?”

  “It’s not so crazy,” I said, and related the incident of Bullock’s cornfield and barbed-wire fence. When I had finished, Logan smiled that funny smile of his and shook his head slowly.

  “My whole life’s been one joke after another,” he said. “A buffalo hunt isn’t going to spoil my record.” Those were his last words on the subject, and we proceeded in silence.

  We’d been traveling for almost an hour. In order to save time in returning to the old buffalo trail, Jack had plotted a northwesterly course straight across country that I call the “up-and-down” portion of Oregon. I think there are more hills in that area than I’ve seen anywhere else. Because most of the going was uphill, and because Jack’s mule and my horse were already lathered from their riderless run that morning, we got off after the first half hour to lead them and give them a rest, and had only just gotten back into our saddles when Logan asked us our reason for being there. It was during that walk that we had introduced ourselves to him by name.

  We had gone another mile when Jack spoke again. “You want to tell me the whole story?” he asked.

  “What story?” countered Logan.

  “About you and George Crook. And don’t tell me again about you hitching up with his woman. I ain’t never seen no injun that would cross state lines for the sake of a squaw.”

  Logan nodded. “I guess you’re entitled to an explanation.” Then he told us everything. As he spoke, he divided his concentration between the trail ahead and the undulating horizon. Before he was finished he had me doing it as well.

  “George Crook owes his position in the Nez Percé Indian police to the simple fact that he’s the best tracker in the tribe,” he began. “In the three years that he’s been the head of the unit, not a single fugitive from the reservation has avoided capture for more than a month. Nor, for that matter, has a single one of those captured been brought back alive. This was all right for the first two years, while the chief was well and able to keep George in his place. But the chief is an old man. When he fell sick last year, George took over the reservation. He explained that he was declaring a kind of martial law to prevent things from falling into disorder, but he wasn’t fooling anybody.”

  He paused, as if expecting comment, but I was too engrossed to interrupt and Jack went on riding in silence as if he weren’t listening. I knew better: he’d heard every word.

  Logan continued. “For ten months he
’s held that reservation in the grip of fear. If you have a job, he threatens your home and family unless you turn half your earnings over to him. If your woman is pretty, he takes her for his own. If you stand up to him, he kills you and claims you were trying to avoid arrest. Escape is impossible. Even if you could get past the armed guard that rides patrol on all the approaches of the reservation, George will track you down sooner or later, and then you’re as good as dead.

  “The Nez Percé were blessed with an honest Indian agent, Sam Dailey by name. When he got back from Washington last month and heard what was going on at the reservation, he came to talk with George Crook. He demanded to know if the rumors were true. George chose not to answer him, so Dailey stalked out of his hut, muttering something about notifying the army. He was in his buggy and halfway across the reservation when George and five or six of his men caught up to him on horseback and surrounded him. George himself did the killing. Dailey turned to ask him what he wanted and he shot him in the face with a rifle.”

  Again he stopped. There was a long silence, and I began to wonder if he were going to continue. “Where do you come in?” I prodded.

  He said, “I wasn’t lying when I said I’d married George Crook’s woman. This was two weeks after I bribed one of his guards to let us through the cordon long enough to find a justice of the peace and make it legal. It was second best; the situation on the reservation made the squaw-taking ceremony impossible. George didn’t do anything at the time, but after he killed Sam Dailey, he saw his chance for revenge. He reported to the local army post that he’d overheard me threaten the agent for refusing to sell me whiskey shortly before the murder. When they searched my hut, the soldiers found the rifle that had been used in the killing, right where George had planted it.

  “I was hunting on the east side of the reservation when I heard they were looking for me. Knowing how a white judge feels when an Indian kills a white man, I didn’t stop to explain myself. I grabbed the chief’s horse—the fastest animal in the camp—and charged straight through the mounted guard. They fired at me, but I was going too fast for them to draw a bead. I’d still be going if the horse hadn’t stepped in a rabbit hole north of Diamond Lake.”

  “What about your squaw?” asked Jack. It was the first he’d spoken since Logan began his story. “If I was George Crook, I’d put a pistol to her head and promise to squeeze the trigger if you didn’t come back nice and peaceful.”

  “The chief is her uncle,” said the Indian. “Even George wouldn’t dare threaten her, for fear of uniting the entire tribe against him. She’ll be all right.” He spoke with conviction, but I caught a little note of worry in his voice anyway.

  Jack said, “That still don’t explain why he’d chase you across three states.”

  It took Logan a minute to reply to that. He hadn’t forgiven Jack for that rifle butt in the stomach, and I could tell he didn’t like answering his questions. At last he said, “George has always been a little afraid of me. I think it’s because I don’t push as easily as most of the others. It was all right when I was on the reservation where he could keep an eye on me, but now that I’m out of sight he’s begun to worry about his back. I think he’d track me all the way to Mexico if it meant his peace of mind.”

  A clump of bushes to the right of the trail rustled suddenly, and Logan had his knife out and ready to throw before I even saw any movement. I cast a glance in that direction just in time to see a rabbit dart out of the bushes and race across the open field to the north, its feet thudding the ground loudly. Only then did the Indian return the knife to its sheath. Suddenly I knew why George Crook was afraid of him.

  “Did anybody see the murder?” asked Jack. Judging by his silence of the last few minutes, I had thought he’d lost interest in the subject, but now I realized that he’d been thinking about it all this time.

  Logan laughed bitterly. “Half the tribe stood by and watched it happen,” he said. “That’s how bold George has gotten. He knows there’s not a one of them with enough courage to testify against him. That’s why he— What’s wrong?”

  Jack had dismounted and strode over to where a worm-pitted old telegraph pole was leaning at a precarious angle from the pile of stones that held it up. It had not been in use for a long time; its lines were frayed and broken and hanging in great tangles with the ends buried beneath an inch of dirt. One side of the pole was worn more than the other, rubbed smooth and slightly concave. It was this side that Jack was busy examining.

  “What is it, Jack?” I asked.

  Jack started back. “Shedding season,” he said. “When all that buffalo hair starts coming off it makes them itch. Lots of telegraph lines went down when them big brutes started rubbing their hides against the poles. That one’s seen more wear than most.” He mounted up and urged his mule forward along the trail.

  “Did our buffalo rub that pole?”

  He shook his head. “Hard to tell. There’s tufts of hair caught in the wood, but it ain’t fresh.”

  “Do you think we’ve lost him?” I asked. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear the answer.

  “Possible,” said Jack, and I felt a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. “But it ain’t likely,” he added. That made me feel better.

  Thought of the buffalo had driven all memory of the Indian and the story he had told us from my head. When he spoke, it all came rushing back and I was reminded of the danger we were in. “Does this trail pass near any water?” he asked.

  “We’ll be at the North Umpqua River afore sundown,” said Jack in reply.

  “Then there’s no reason for the buffalo to leave the trail, except to take a shortcut to the river.”

  “He’s heading for water,” said Jack, “but he’ll follow the trail to get there. Nothing short of dynamite will turn a buffalo off of the run he’s following. Nothing, except maybe man.”

  This exchange between two experienced outdoorsmen lifted my spirits considerably. I wasn’t about to let things slip back into their pattern of gloomy silence if I could help it. “Jack,” I said, “how did you used to hunt buffalo?”

  His expression remained unchanged. His eyes were intent on the trail ahead. He said, “That’s like asking how you make possum stew. There ain’t no one way.”

  “What was your way?”

  “When I was working for the Union Pacific, I’d get five or six good men together, the best I could find from all the outfits, and we’d head out towards buffalo country with enough ammunition to invade Mexico. We took turns cooking so’s nobody could complain about the food. One of us drove the wagon.

  “A good hunter could drop a hundred, sometimes a hundred and fifty head a day once we found a good-size herd. But there’s more to it than just that. You better make that first shot from high ground, else you’ll get caught in the stampede. That’s what happened to Bart Campbell in ’82. Herd just sort of carried him off. We didn’t find nothing to bury excepting his hat, so I fixed up a cross and stuck it in the ground and we hung the hat on top. Poor old Bart.” He shook his head sadly. “Anyways,” he went on, shrugging it off, “once we downed what we was after, we stripped off the hides and loaded them into the wagon. Boy, you ain’t worked till you tried skinning a buffalo. You yank and rip and sweat, but that hide won’t budge till it’s good and ready. And even when you finally get the hide off and lug it back to camp, you still got to stake it out to cure it, and that’s almost as hard as skinning it off in the first place. At the end of the first day you’ll swear you just plowed six hundred acres of solid rock.”

  “Good pay?” I asked.

  “It don’t seem much for the work, but for the time you put in it’s high enough. I cleared seven hundred dollars one winter, not counting what I got for the meat I sold to the army and the railroad.”

  I whistled. “All for just a few months? Seems a man could retire in a couple of years.”

  “It does seem that way,” Jack agreed.

  “Why didn’t you retire?” I studied his profile, b
ut I could learn nothing from his expression. “Why’d you stick with it so long?”

  He rode another fifty feet before answering. “I asked myself that,” he said. “More than once. I guess I just never wanted to stop. The money sort of disappeared after a while. I kept on hunting.”

  Logan made a disdainful snorting sound. I looked at him quickly. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “Oh. nothing.” He was smiling and his eyes were almost closed, like a lizard sunning itself on a flat rock. “I’m just having trouble swallowing these confessions of a great white hunter.” His body swung lazily with the motion of his horse.

  Jack said nothing. I reckon that after three years of being called a liar and a fool he had acquired a hide almost as thick as that of the animal he was hunting. I hadn’t.

  “Well, suppose you tell us what it is about my partner’s words that bothers you so much?” I snapped.

  The Indian retained the mocking expression. I got the feeling there was something else behind it, something I couldn’t see. His face was as hard to read as Jack’s, but in a different way. “I find it hard,” he said, “to see the nobility in a profession that had for its purpose the extermination of an entire species of creature. Ask your friend if he wasn’t hired by the federal government to hunt the buffalo to extinction so that the Indians would starve. Get him to tell you about the thousands of tons of meat that lay rotting in the sun while Indian children cried for food. He was killing a lot more than just buffalo. He was killing a whole people.” He was raging, but there was no emotion in his voice. There was just nothing.

  “There’s some truth in that,” said Jack. He couldn’t have surprised me more if he’d said he was the Emperor of Germany. “Though none of us figured that’s what we was doing. And we didn’t do it alone, neither. We had help.” He leaned to the right to miss a rain gully that snaked its way down the grade up which we were climbing. The mule responded readily and sidestepped it.