“That must be the Shoshone Falls Morgenmueller told us about,” Logan observed. Even though he was shouting at the top of his lungs, his words were nearly drowned out by the rushing water.
Jack took a swig from his canteen and handed it to the Indian. “There’s a falls like this in Montana,” he shouted. “Friend of mine was driving a wagonload of hides along the bank upriver when it hit a rock and tipped over, horses and all. All we found at the bottom was a tattered hide and a bunch of splinters.”
“Don’t any of your friends die of natural causes?” asked Logan.
“Depends on what you call natural,” said Jack.
An hour before sundown we came across a trail of dog tracks on the south face of Mount Jefferson that were so fresh I swear they were still warm. “Weather’s cooling,” said Jack. “He’s headed back down to the settlement.”
The trail became easier to read as we left the rocks and started across the softer soil at ground level. Here trees and bushes of every description threw long shadows across the ground and made it seem as if we were advancing through a dark tunnel. Our pace slowed considerably.
“Ease up.” Jack’s voice had dropped to a whisper. “He knows we’re trailing him.”
It was dusk when the pale half-moon shared the sky with the waning sun and every shadow carried a menace of its own. I became acutely conscious of every sound beyond that of our boots slithering through the dew-dampened grass. Crickets chirped, then fell silent as we drew near them. Two miles behind us the waterfall was a steady but muted roar. Other than that it was still.
Suddenly the air rang with a bellow of animal fury, and, eyes blazing in the red sunlight, jaws horribly agape, a four-legged monster came galloping straight toward us through the aisle formed by the surrounding trees. For a crucial instant I froze and so did Logan. But Jack lifted his Sharps to his shoulder and fired just as the dog was leaping for his throat. The bawling roar changed into a shriek, the animal exploded six feet backward in a cloud of smoke and blood, and dropped, a lifeless, broken thing, to the ground. It was all over in less than a second.
For a long time we stood over the twisted form lying in a litter of its own guts and nobody said a word. The stink of spent gunpowder hung like a dirty shirt over the entire scene. Finally Jack spelled out the dead creature’s epitaph.
“He made somebody a good dog once,” was all he said.
We were still a good half mile from Morgenmueller’s house when the word spread that we were bringing the mad dog in dead, and farmers and their families began to crowd around us, bombarding us with questions in mile-a-minute German. We had used the length of rope Jack had brought with him to lash the bloody corpse to a tree limb, and now Logan and I carried it between us while Jack cleared the way ahead. The dog’s head bounced with each step and dripped blood and foam from its grinning mouth.
Morgenmueller must have heard the commotion, because when we got to his place the front door opened and threw a shaft of light across the yard and he stepped out to meet us. He hadn’t beaten us back by much; he was still wearing his knee-length Prussian army boots and canvas hunting jacket. Ilse appeared in the doorway, but he waved her back into the house. “I heard the shot as I was coming in,” he said, once he was sure his daughter had pushed the door shut with her inside. It stayed open a crack, but I didn’t bring this to the farmer’s attention. He bent down to examine the dead animal. “Ha. That is him.” He straightened. “You had trouble?” His eyes were on Jack’s shirt front. In the light coming from inside the house I noticed for the first time that the buckskin was spattered with blood.
“Dog’s blood,” Jack assured him. “Not mine.”
“It could be no other,” said the farmer. Nevertheless he looked relieved. He barked something in German to two of his neighbors standing nearby, after which they moved in and took the dog from Logan and me. Carrying it between them, they tamped around the corner of the house.
“Make sure they burn that there corpse,” said Jack.
“Such will be done.” Morgenmueller regarded him with admiration. “You have earned more than a hundred dollars this day, Herr Butterworth,” he told him. “You have earned also the respect and gratitude of this settlement. I insist that tonight you will sleep beneath my roof.”
Jack cast a sideways glance at Logan, where their gazes met, then shook his head. “I thank you kindly, Eric,” he said, “but we got a schedule to keep. I reckon we’ll just be moving on.”
The German looked disappointed for a moment, but then his face brightened. “As you wish, sir. But I would be a traitor to my faith if I allowed you to leave without supper. Do not argue with me on this, because my mind, it is made up.”
“Well, when you put it that way, I reckon I can’t rightly refuse,” said the hider.
“Schön gut. I will have Katerina bring to you a clean shirt as you wash.”
Jack said, “That won’t be necessary.”
“But it is no trouble,” argued the other.
“You don’t rightly understand,” Jack pulled out the blood-stained front of his shirt and frowned at it. “This shirt and me, we been together near fifteen years. If it’s all the same to you, I’ll just give it a scrubbing and put it back on.
“And what will you wear while it dries? Come, my friend; allow me to lend you one of my shirts, if only for a little while.”
Jack’s reply was tolerant but firm. “Like I told the boy, you got to let buckskin dry on your body or you’ll never wear it again. I’m obliged to you for the offer, but it just ain’t necessary.”
The farmer shrugged. “As you wish,” he said defeatedly. “But I must advise you to be very careful when you wash the garment. The blood of the mad dog, it can be as dangerous as his bite if it is allowed to penetrate the skin.”
“It’ll have to get through thirty years’ worth of calluses first,” said Jack.
Steam was rising from the pitcher of hot water Katerina Morgenmueller had left for Jack’s use on the back porch when we got there. He poured some of it into the basin and pulled his shirt off over his head. The sight of Jack Butterworth without his shirt on was not one you’d be likely to forget. Lean and corded, his torso was a map of old scars, some of which were as big and as blue as the weals that were left on his mule after it had tangled with the grizzly. At least one of them, now a healed-over semicircle about two inches below his heart, was unquestionably the mark of a bullet. It must have been less than a memory to him now, but at one time the wound that had made it had nearly cost him his life. It was one thing to shrug off Jack’s stories as exaggerations when he was telling them; it was quite another to do so when faced, as I was at that moment, with the hard evidence that the events he reported had indeed taken place.
I wasn’t the only one who was fascinated by the spectacle. When I looked over at Logan leaning against the porch railing, I saw that he was staring at him too, and with a wide-eyed wonder that drew Jack’s attention when he finished washing his face and looked up from the clean towel he had used to dry off. “What’re you looking at?”
“I’m not sure,” the Indian replied. “It looks like a battlefield.”
Nothing more was said about it. Jack crumpled his shirt into the basin and began kneading it. The water took on a pinkish tint.
Logan left the railing. “I’ll check on the horses,” he said, and started walking toward the barn.
“I’ll go with you,” I said.
That seemed to surprise him. He stopped and half-turned, fixing me with a suspicious expression. “Keeping an eye on me?” His tone was accusing.
“No,” I retorted, meeting his gaze. “Should I?”
“That depends.” His back was toward me and he was crossing the yard in healthy strides. “If you think you have to, you have to.”
I fell into step beside him, carrying my Winchester. I was never without it these days. “I just wanted to talk. Is there anything wrong with that?”
“What do you want to talk about?” He pull
ed open the big barn door and led the way into the silence inside. Morgenmueller had left a lantern burning for us on a nail beside the door. Its uneven yellow glow created a protective womb of light that kept the shadows in the building’s corners at bay.
“Things,” I said, and hauled myself up into a sitting position atop the stall that was occupied by Logan’s dun. I heard Jack’s mule shuffling around in its assigned place next to it, and once my mustang gave the side of its stall a kick so that I’d be sure to notice it. The burro’s jaws munched resignedly at a mouthful of oats in the stall across the way. “Why did you say that your real name is Sleeping Bow?”
I was hoping that by springing the question on him suddenly I’d catch him off his guard, but it didn’t work. His movements remained casual as he squatted beside the dun and lifted its right front hoof. “That’s because it is,” he answered calmly. He used his knife to pare away the hoof where it had grown over the shoe. Unlike George Crook, his late partner had ridden a shod pony.
“I still don’t understand.”
The scraping sound continued for several seconds before he went on. “Among the Indians,” he explained, inspecting his work, “one has two names during the course of his life; the one he is given by his parents and the one he earns when he is older. My father was a man of action. He named me Sleeping Bow in a fit of bitterness because when I slept, which was often, he thought I resembled an unstrung bow, limp and useless. Finally he decided to do something about my laziness. On my tenth birthday he handed me a knife and told me to go out and bring back some game. I was not to come back, he said, until I had something to show him.”
He paused to brush the scrapings from his jeans, then continued. “I’m not as good a storyteller as Jack, so I won’t go into details.” His knife struck sparks against the steel shoe. “But when I returned to the hut three days later, grimy and covered with blood, I dragged behind me a buck deer that weighed in at a hundred pounds on Sam Dailey’s meat scale. That’s when my father told me to choose whatever name I wished to be called.” He let go of the horse’s hoof and stood up.
“But why Logan?” I asked. “Why not an Indian name?”
“John Logan was the Christian name taken by a Cayuga Indian chief in Pennsylvania during the last century,” he said, smiling cryptically. “Four years after he moved to the Ohio River, his family was murdered by a gang of white renegades at Yellow Creek. Logan is said to have personally taken thirty scalps before his revenge was cut short by a drunken brawl that ended in his death.”
I made a face. “It seems to me you could choose a better namesake than a drunk and a murderer,” I said.
The smile remained. “You could be right,” he replied. “Perhaps my choice was colored by the fact that my father died of pneumonia in a white man’s prison before I could decide what name to take.”
His words had little time to sink in, because scarcely had he finished delivering them when a shot exploded outside the barn. It was followed immediately by a second, and then there was an awful wrenching sound, as of a door being torn from its hinges. Logan was running after the first report. It took me a little longer to react, but I was right behind him before the second had died away.
The night was a mass of confusion. Jack, his wet shirt flapping outside his pants, had tipped over the washbasin in his haste to get to the corncrib behind the barn, where the shots had originated, and was now eating up the distance between the house and the rickety little building in long-legged strides. He had his Sharps with him. The back door of the house banged open and Eric Morgenmueller came running out carrying the old-fashioned fowling piece he had used in hunting the mad dog earlier. I caught a glimpse of his wife standing in the doorway and of Ilse standing behind her, and then I stopped watching and took off in the others’ footsteps. I shifted my Winchester to a two-handed grip, for I had no idea what I was racing into.
There was enough moonlight for me to see the door of the corncrib as I rounded the barn, or at least to see where it should have been, because the door was no longer there. In its place was a gaping black hole. This came as no surprise; I had already determined that the wrenching sound I had heard was that of the door being ripped loose. But that didn’t stop a chill from overtaking me when I saw that my suspicions were right. I knew what that missing door meant.
“He’s loose!” Herman, the sullen young farm hand, came running out of the corncrib, a lighted lantern dangling from his hand.
“There he is!” Logan, who had reached the building two steps behind Herman, raised his Henry and fired away off to my right. Fire streaked out of the barrel. The report was answered almost simultaneously by a howl of brute anguish mixed with fury. I turned toward its source—and then something clubbed me hard on the right temple and I went down in a swirl of red fire and popping blue lights. Something vaulted over me with a grunt, something hot and wet splattered onto my face. I wondered confusedly if it were my blood, and if I’d been shot. There were more shots, but they were too rapid, fired in frantic haste and with little hope of hitting their target. Jack’s Sharps boomed once. I rolled over groggily, just in time to see a flash of plaid shirt in the moonlight as the thing that had knocked me down came loping back in my direction. Rufus Brinker’s breath heaved painfully in and out of his diseased lungs. I drew a bead on the plaid shirt with my Winchester, and, just as he leaped over me for the second time, fired. He gasped and came down knee-first on my stomach, knocking the wind out of me. A length of chain fell across my face. Then he was up again and stumbling off into the night. I hoisted myself up onto one knee and snapped off three more shots, but by that time he was out of sight and I was only throwing lead into a black void. I climbed unsteadily to my feet.
“You all right?” It was Logan. He had been running to my aid when the madman had gotten up and made his final dash for freedom. A plume of smoke twisted out of the barrel of his rifle.
“I think so,” I said. I put a hand to the side of my head and it came back dry. That was a relief. The blood that had splashed on my face had not been mine. “What happened?”
“Someone turned Rufus Brinker loose,” said the Indian.
Herman came by, studying the ground within the circle of light shed by his lantern. “He has been hit once at least,” he informed us. “There is much blood here.”
“Are you sure he didn’t escape on his own?” I asked Logan.
“We’ll know soon enough. Let me have that lantern.” He held out his hand to Herman, who turned over the light, then led the way toward the open corncrib. The rest of us followed. Jack and Morgenmueller brought up the rear.
Inside the building, the lantern threw weird shadows across the slat walls as Logan held it up to show us the post to which the madman had been chained. The rust-colored iron staple that had secured his manacles was broken and twisted. The metal shone dully at the fresh break.
“That explains the shots,” Logan said. “He must have slid his rifle in between the slats and aimed at the moonlight showing on the staple. It took him two shots, but it’s a thick piece of metal. Rufus did the rest.”
“But, why?” Morgenmueller’s face was a study in astonishment. “Who would do something like this?”
The Indian looked over at Jack. “Are you a betting man?” he inquired.
“Not on this,” said the other, shaking his head.
The German farmer glanced from one face to the other. “Was ist los?” he asked sharply. “There is maybe something I should know?”
There was a pause, during which Logan and Jack exchanged glances. Jack nodded. The Indian seemed to be about to speak when a scream pierced the silence.
“Katerina! Mein Gott!” Morgenmueller forced his way past Jack and took off at a run toward the house. He was vaulting over the threshold of the back door by the time the rest of us rounded the barn.
We found Katenna Morgenmueller on her knees on the floor of the living room, administering to her mother, who was stretched full length across the faded rug. She
was sobbing hysterically. Two of the upholstered chairs had been overturned. Her husband stood over the scene, fowling piece in hand and a scared look on his face. “What has happened?” he demanded. “Where is Ilse?”
“He took her.” Katerina’ s voice was shrill. “He came in the front door and took her. Mutter tried to stop him. He hit her with his rifle.” She burst into tears and rocked back and forth with Frau Steiner’s head in her lap. The older woman began to moan faintly.
“Who took her? Rufus?” Morgenmueller’s face was dead white.
His wife shook her head frantically. “He was an Indian. His face—it was schrecklich—horrible. He grabbed Ilse and hit Mutter and went out the front door.”
“Did he say anything?” It was Logan who spoke. “He—he said to tell someone named Logan that he would be waiting for him in the mountains. I did not understand what he meant. He said Logan would know.”
“Logan?” said the farmer. “Who is Logan?”
The Indian didn’t answer him. He spun on his heel and began striding toward the back door.
“Where you going?” asked Jack.
“For ammunition.” Logan was already outside and halfway to the barn. He raised his voice. “You were right. It’s time to stop and turn.”
Chapter Thirteen
The right thing for me to have done, of course, would have been to try to stop Logan from going, to warn him that that was exactly what George Crook wanted him to do, but I didn’t. All I could think of was pretty Ilse in the clutches of that misshapen savage. I dug into the sack of shells I carried in the pocket of my canvas jacket, reloaded Pa’s carbine, and followed Logan out to the barn. That left poor Jack alone to explain things to the bewildered and frightened Morgenmuellers.
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