The Hider

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Jack!” I whispered.

  “Shhh!” Although he was motionless in his bunk, I could tell that he was watching the scene too. It reminded me of the night he had kept a silent vigil at the window of the old line shack while an intruder prepared to enter our presence; the night we met Logan.

  The fat deputy reached into the desk drawer, took out the keys to the cells, and stood up. His voice grew louder as he approached our cell.

  “We sure didn’t expect you this early, Officer Crook,” he said, the keys jingling in his hand. “You must be powerful anxious to get these two back to stand trial.” He inserted the key in the lock. As he did so, the Indian came over to join him, crossing through the light to get there. I suppressed a gasp.

  The Indian was smiling a funny kind of half-smile that I recognized. I should have. It belonged to Logan.

  Chapter Ten

  I don’t know if Jack had suspected the identity of the other man before he stepped into the light or if he was as surprised as I was when it turned out to be Logan. If he was, you couldn’t tell it by looking at him. His expression remained as wary as if the man wearing the shield were the real George Crook. On the other side of the bars, the Indian kept on smiling and stood back with his rifle leveled at Jack’s chest like any conscientious officer of the law who was determined not to give his prisoners any slack. As for me, don’t look for my name listed among the actors in my church’s next Bible play, because it won’t be there. I don’t pretend to have talents that aren’t mine. That’s why I kept my face in shadow so that Otis Ledbetter couldn’t read the elation that I am sure was stamped on every feature.

  “Out,” said the deputy. He swung open the cell door and stepped back to give the Indian a clear field of fire in case anything went wrong. It didn’t. We obeyed meekly and stood there with our hands raised over our heads.

  “If you can wait till the constable gets back,” Ledbetter told Logan, “I’m sure he’ll be glad to lend you a couple deputies for the trip back to the reservation.”

  “That won’t be necessary, Deputy,” said the bogus policeman. “I can handle these two.”

  A glint of suspicion dawned in the old lawman’s eyes. “Don’t make no sense, one man ridin’ herd on two criminals. We didn’t even do that in the old days, unless there weren’t no other way around it.”

  Logan said, “I’ve done it before,” and motioned to us to walk ahead of him. We didn’t waste any time; Ledbetter’s remarks were growing uncomfortable. The Indian nodded to the fat deputy. “Obliged for your help, Mr. Ledbetter. Look me up if you ever get to Idaho.” He took a step toward the exit.

  “Ain’t you forgettin’ something?”

  We froze. He had remembered the warrant. There was nothing to do now but act. Logan was turning to pull down on him when suddenly he stopped. Nothing happened for a couple of seconds. I sneaked a look.

  Otis was holding Jack’s buffalo rifle in both hands. “Bud took this from the old man,” he said, smiling behind his moustache. “It’s a right handsome weapon and I’d sure like to have it, but likely you’ll be needing it for evidence.” He offered it to the Indian.

  Logan covered up his relief by returning the smile. “Thanks,” he said, taking charge of the big gun. “Remember what I said about looking me up.” He resumed herding us toward the door.

  We were halfway there when it opened to reveal Bud Fowler’s stout solidness standing on the threshold. His stormy eyes took in first Jack and me planted there with our hands up, then the Indian holding his gun on us, and finally settled on his corpulent second-in-command standing in front of the cells. He had his shotgun in both hands, ready but not threatening.

  “You must be George Crook,” he said, looking past us at Logan.

  The Indian picked up on it quickly. “That’s what they call me,” he replied after a beat. “I guess that makes you Bud Fowler. Pleased to meet you, Constable. Your name comes up a lot around the council fires of the Nez Percé.”

  The constable nodded but appeared unmoved by the flattery.

  Logan cleared his throat, a little nervously. “Well,” he said, “as I told Mr. Ledbetter, Constable, I’m thankful for your efforts. I’ll see that the commanding officer at the Lapwai post sends you a letter of citation. Now, if you’ll excuse me….”

  But Fowler held his ground. “Otis, I reckon you got a look at Officer Crook’s warrant like I asked you.” He looked over in his deputy’s direction.

  There was a tense silence while the naked question lay where Fowler had dropped it. I heard the watch tick in the pocket of the constable’s vest, once, twice. Then everything happened at once. Logan pulled down on Fowler with the Henry in one hand while he threw the Sharps to Jack with the other. In that same instant Jack spun around, caught the big gun, and leveled it at Otis Ledbetter, who was already within three steps of the gun rack beside the door. “Stop right there!” he shouted. His voice sounded like the roar of the Sharps itself in the closeness of the office. The deputy froze. So did Fowler, but by that time he had the shotgun pressed to his hip and his finger was on the trigger. One twitch and you wouldn’t have been able to scrape up enough of the three of us to make a decent-sized mince pie.

  Logan said, “I know you’re too smart to try for two men with that shotgun, Constable.”

  “Yeah? Try me.” The scattergun remained as steady as a rock. If Fowler had rheumatism as his deputy had said, it wasn’t present now. His watch ticked once, twice, three times.

  “I know you won’t,” said Logan. “If you do, I’ll pull the trigger on you and my friend will do the same on Mr. Ledbetter. You don’t want to leave this town without experienced lawmen.”

  “Lawmen come a nickel a hundred. I’ll die if I got to, but I ain’t about to turn three murderers loose on Oregon if I can help it. I’ve knowed Otis enough years to know he feels the same way. Right, Otis?”

  “Right, Bud.” The deputy’s voice was stern. “I’m in for the whole pot.”

  Tick. Tick. Tick.

  Logan said, “If it’ll make you feel any better, Constable, we’re not murderers. George Crook is. He’s the one you’ll be turning loose if we die here.”

  No answer. I had lost interest in everything but the black hollows inside the twin bores of Bud Fowler’s shotgun.

  Jack said, “Funny thing about killing outlaws, Fowler. Do it twice in one day, town where it happened gets a reputation. Draws trouble. You want somebody like young Rick in charge when that trouble comes?” He kept his attention on Otis, but his voice rang out clearly in the taut stillness.

  The speech had an effect on the old lawman. His brain was working behind the stony façade, sifting through Jack’s words, separating the wheat from the chaff. Suddenly I knew that everything was going to be all right. He stood his ground a few more moments, but his decision had already been made. He lowered the shotgun.

  “Get his gun, Jeff,” said Logan.

  I put my hand on the shotgun and after a brief resistance Fowler let go of it. I handed it to the Indian.

  “I got a fifteen-man police force here,” the lawman told him. “You won’t get far.”

  Logan shifted the Henry to his right hand and broke open the captured shotgun with the other. “I’m betting that we will,” he said, removing the shells from both barrels and putting them in his pocket. “In any case, Constable, you’re out of the game. At least for now.” He snapped shut the gun and handed it back to Fowler.

  “Speaking of the game,” Jack prodded, “it’d be a good idea if we grabbed our winnings and lit out afore George Crook comes to cash our chips in for us.”

  Logan agreed, and after a little threatening he and Jack succeeded in getting the two peace officers into the vacant cell and locking them in. I glanced at Billy Granger in the adjacent cubicle, half expecting him to try to talk us into taking him along, but he just sat on the edge of his cot and stared at the wall opposite him. He was so preoccupied with his mother’s failure to visit him that I don’t think he even k
new what was going on outside his cell.

  “What are we riding?” asked Jack as we were hurrying out.

  “Take a look,” answered the Indian.

  The first sight we saw as we were stepping out the door of the constable’s office was that of the four animals tethered to the hitching rail in front. They consisted of a big mule, a dun horse with a white blaze, a spirited mustang, and an overloaded burro.

  Logan said, “My first stop was the livery stable. I got there just as the owner was starting to unload the burro, and that’s when he told me that its owner was in jail. He tried to claim that he’d had the animals for three days. I talked him out of that, but I had to pay him for a day’s care before he’d turn them over.” He pulled the slip knot on the dun’s reins and mounted up. Jack and I did the same.

  “Where’d you get the money?” Jack wanted to know.

  “The same place I got the badge,” said the other. “Clyde Pacing Dog had a lot more on him than guns. You never know what might come in handy.” He gave his horse a gentle kick and led the way down the street, taking his time so as not to attract attention. I followed his example, but it wasn’t easy with my stomach tied up in knots the way it was. I wanted more than anything to gallop. So, for that matter, did the little mustang. I had all I could do to keep it to a brisk trot. Anybody watching us at that moment would have thought that it was just another bunch of drifters pulling out if it weren’t for the fact that the man in front and the man in the rear rode with their rifles held ready across the horns of their saddles. Still, nobody bothered us.

  Then all hell broke loose.

  The front door of the constable’s office flew open with a bang and a shotgun bellowed, blasting the darkness with a jet of blinding red flame. A window on the opposite side of the street disintegrated into a thousand pieces. The horses screamed and bolted. There was another roar. Shot skidded past within an inch of my left cheek. I gave the mustang free rein and the lights blossoming in windows on both sides of the street blended into unbroken streaks of yellow as the little stallion broke into a run. I left Jack and Logan clattering along two lengths behind me.

  “Did you think to take them keys off of the deputy?” Jack shouted to Logan above the drumming hoofs.

  “No,” shouted the Indian. “Did you think to unload the shotguns in the rack?”

  “No.”

  “I guess that explains it.”

  We were just drawing abreast of the four-story hotel and restaurant when the double doors opened and the rest of the deputies who had been guarding the dead Grangers earlier poured out into the street, shotguns in hand. One of the original two lawmen—Fowler or Ledbetter, I don’t know which—shouted something to them, and then the echo of his words was drowned out in a deafening volley. But by that time we had cleared the last of the street lamps and were galloping through darkness, beyond lethal shotgun range.

  After several minutes of hard riding, the mustang regulated its pace to a steady gallop. That’s when Jack’s mule took advantage of its longer legs to catch up, and we rode abreast like that for a long time, with Logan bringing up the rear on his slower but equally reliable dun. Even the fact that the little burro was still attached to the mule did little to hinder its clean, scooping, long-legged run. Well, this wasn’t the first time it had been called upon to pull its master out of a scrape, if there was any truth in the stories Jack told.

  “Posse coming,” he growled once. I listened, and, after a moment, I heard the faint rumble of pursuing hoofs a quarter mile behind us and coming up fast. “What now?” I asked. My heart was keeping time with my own horse’s hoofs.

  “Follow me.” Jack kicked his mule and it lurched ahead as if the mustang had come to a sudden stop. From then on I was hard put to stay within a half a length of the bigger animal.

  At length the ground beneath me changed from the even surface of the road into a grassy bank. From there, it plunged downward at a sharp angle; I had to draw rein hard to keep the mustang from losing its footing and tumbling straight down to the bottom. As it was, we half stumbled, half slid for several hundred feet until the slope leveled out into a shallow basin between ridges that had been left behind when the glaciers carved through Oregon. Thorny bushes raked my legs. Tree branches whipped my face and snatched my hat off my head. At the bottom of the incline, we stopped and waited. For a long time the only sounds were the panting of our mounts and the whine of mosquitoes homing in on the scent of horse and man just as the buzzards had homed in on the body of Clyde Pacing Dog. Then we heard it. A low rumble like far-off thunder, growing louder as it drew near, and then they were right above us, twenty to thirty men on horseback racing along the high ridge of the road, bridles jingling, coattails flapping in the wind of their passage. They seemed to go on and on, and then they were gone, rumbling away into the distance, leaving only clouds of dust swirling black against the scarcely lighter gray of the sky to remind us that they had been there.

  The dust had long since settled before anybody made a move. “Let’s go,” said Jack, and he urged his mule forward across the bowl-shaped dale. Logan and I followed.

  The threat of capture was still fresh, and we alternated between galloping and cantering for the next five miles. After that we slowed to a walk to give our mounts a rest. Only then did Jack ask the Indian how he had decided to come to our rescue.

  Logan chuckled, a humorless ripple deep in his throat, somewhat like a growl. “When you didn’t show up after two hours,” he said, “the odds were that something had gone wrong. It didn’t take much thought to figure out what it was. That’s why I went straight to the livery stable; when someone’s arrested, that’s where they usually put his horse.”

  I said, “Why’d you do it? You could have been halfway to Canada by now without us.” It was an unnecessary question. I knew why, just as I knew why he had taken the time to treat my bay’s wounded thigh. I just wanted to hear it from him.

  The Indian’s smile was back, mysterious and diabolic. He didn’t look at me. “I was getting lonely,” he said after a moment. “Besides, I’d kind of like to find out how the buffalo hunt ends up.”

  “The buffalo hunt!” I laughed. “I’d forgotten all about that.” I turned toward Jack to see if he was smiling too. He wasn’t. He hadn’t forgotten.

  The hours crawled by on the backs of turtles. It was the first extensive bit of night riding we’d done since the hunt had begun, and I had never realized how much harder it could be than the daylight kind. I tried to calculate how late it was. If I’d only slept for half an hour or so back in the jail, it must have been about nine o’clock when we left. We had probably been riding for at least three hours. Yet we showed no signs of stopping. Despite my short nap, my eyes burned in their sockets and my muscles stung as if I’d been plowing since sunup. Once I nodded off, only to be jerked awake by what I would swear was a deliberate lurch on the part of the double-crossing little mustang. I guess it figured that if it had to stay awake, then so did I. After that I kept alert by making up little dramas wherein we would run out of food out in the middle of nowhere and have to eat the star-faced little troublemaker to stay alive. Pleasant thoughts always make the time pass a little more quickly.

  Finally, at what had to be about one o’clock in the morning, we crossed the McKenzie River at a narrow point and camped on the north bank. I didn’t realize until I got down from the saddle that I was as hungry as I was sleepy; it had been nearly eighteen hours since we’d last eaten, and for the first time since Jack had told me the story of his lion hunt in Texas, I began to get some idea of how he’d felt after several days without food. Time dragged again while Jack fixed a simple supper of salted beef and potatoes which he baked in their skins at the bottom of the fire. As an added treat he used his knife to open up three of the four cans of peaches he’d purchased in Reuben and handed one to each of us, along with a spoon. I thought it was the most delicious meal I’d had in my life. After days of nothing but beans and bacon, anything had to be an
improvement. I’ve always suspected that the only reason Jack had decided to take along such spare provisions for the first few days was to test my endurance as a camper, because I saw neither another hunk of bacon nor another bean for the rest of the trip.

  With my stomach full, the need for sleep returned, and I’m afraid I did little more than go through the motions of washing the plates and utensils in my eagerness to get to bed. At any rate, when I staggered out of my bedroll before dawn the next morning, eyes swollen from lack of sleep, the ghost of last night’s beef was crusted around the inside of the skillet in the form of blackened grease. Jack had to chisel it away with the point of his knife before he could throw in the slices of canned ham he had ready to cook. He didn’t say a word about it, but it was painfully obvious that he was making no effort to conceal my mistake either from myself or from Logan. I made a mental note right there that, come hell or high water, from then on I would do nothing else until my duties were completed.

  We were riding again by the time the sun showed itself above the jagged peaks of the Cascade Mountains to our right. The trail we were following was old and overgrown with weeds and bunch grass, but its sunken state was evidence that it had seen much use over a long period of time. It was with something of a shock that I came to realize what sort of creature had worn that path. Until then I had taken it for granted that Jack had chosen his erratic pattern of flight to throw the posse off our track, but I had been wrong. The reason we had left the road was not merely to elude our pursuers, but also to stay with the buffalo run where it wandered from the beaten track. For Jack Butterworth, the hunt came before everything else.