The Hider

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Stay here,” said the Indian. He slung the Henry with its fresh load over his shoulder and hoisted his saddle onto his horse’s back.

  “Nothing doing,” I said. “I’m going with you.”

  He yanked the cinch tight. “You and Jack can’t leave. You’ll be needed here in case Rufus Brinker comes back.”

  “He won’t. He’s too badly wounded. He’ll just crawl off somewhere to die, like an animal.” I saddled my mustang. The little troublemaker blew out its belly when I tried to cinch up, but I gave it a kick and pulled the strap tight and buckled it before it could happen again. “I’m not doing it just to help you,” I added. “I don’t want anything to happen to the girl.”

  “Nothing will happen to her.” Logan took the dun by its bridle and led it out through the barn door. I left the unbridled mustang where it was and followed him out. “He’s just using her as bait,” he said, mounting up. “He’ll let her go as soon as he sees me.”

  I said, “How can you be so sure?”

  He looked down at me from his superior position astride the horse. “It’s my fight, Jeff. The best way you can help is to stay out of it. I’ll bring Ilse back if I’m still alive to do it.”

  “And if you’re not?”

  He was silent for a moment. “She’s a big girl,” he said at last. “She can take care of herself until you come to get her. Either way, she’ll be safe.” He looked as if he were going to say something else, then seemed to think better of it and gathered up his reins. He gave the dun a kick and cantered off into the night.

  Things had quieted down in the Morgenmueller household when I returned. Jack and the German farmer were standing much as they had been before, firearms in hand, but Katerina had succeeded in getting her mother into a chair and now she was dabbing a wet cloth on the spot where blood had dried into a cake on the old woman’s gray hair. Frau Steiner was pale but conscious. The foreboding calm that had settled over the occupants of the room told me that Jack had explained everything.

  “He’s gone,” I told the hider when he turned to look at me. “Headed for the mountains.”

  “He say anything?” asked Jack.

  “He wants us to stay here.”

  He nodded. “I reckon we ought to respect his wishes.” “I suppose so,” I agreed.

  “Horses saddled?”

  “Mine is,” I said eagerly. “Between the two of us, we can get your mule ready to go in a couple of minutes.”

  “Let’s go. Them mountains ain’t easy to cross in the best of light.” He started toward the back door.

  “Take another step and I’ll splatter your guts all over the room.”

  The toneless voice was familiar. It was one I had hoped never to hear again. Jack and I stopped and turned slowly.

  Bud Fowler, his broad, seamed face tight with fatigue, was standing just inside the front door, his shotgun leveled at both of us. He was wearing a knee-length yellow slicker over his dark gray suit and his black boots were coated with dust. It was obvious that he had been riding hard for some time.

  “Hello, Constable,” said Jack.

  “Cut the small talk,” snapped the other. “I been up a long time and I’m tired and my nerves are shot. It won’t take much more than a wrong look to make me pull this here trigger. Drop your guns.”

  We did as directed. Our rifles hit the floor with a double thud. Only then did Fowler step farther into the room. “You gents near lost me when you cut from the road,” he said, stopping a few yards away. “Lucky I decided to double back and check.” He glanced at me. “I’m obliged to you, son, for dropping your hat when you went down that there bank. Beats reading signs all to hell.”

  Fouled up again! I cursed myself inwardly.

  “What is the meaning of this?” boomed Morgenmueller. He had traded his look of concern for a pompous expression. In a pinch, he turned out to be as good an actor as Jack and Logan. “I demand to know what is happening!”

  “Who are you?” asked the constable in a bored tone. His eyes flickered over the antiquated scattergun in the German’s hands.

  The farmer told him. “What right have you to burst into a man’s house and threaten his guests?” he countered.

  “This right.” Fowler flipped open his coat to show off his badge, then let it fall back into place. “I’m an officer of the law and these here are my prisoners. You’d be smart to stand aside, else I’ll arrest you for interfering with the course of justice and for harboring a pair of wanted fugitives. What’s it gonna be?” He spoke tonelessly. It was a speech he had delivered many times before.

  Morgenmueller said nothing. The lawman reached behind him underneath his slicker and drew forth a pair of manacles linked together by a short length of steel chain. “Turn around and put your hands behind your back,” he told Jack.

  “What about me?” I asked belligerently.

  “I got a pair for you, too.” He snapped the cuffs onto Jack’s wrists with the speedy efficiency of long practice and stepped back. “Sweeney!”

  A moment later the big deputy whom I had last seen talking to Otis Ledbetter in the constable’s office came in through the back door. He was carrying a bolt-action rifle with a long barrel; it may have been a Mauser, but in those days I was not enough of an expert to know for sure. One of his homemade cigarettes dangled from the corner of his mouth unlit. His eyes passed rapidly over all the occupants of the room, noted the entrances and exits and the steep staircase leading up to the second floor, and finally settled on his superior. “Yeah, Bud?”

  “Cuff him.” Fowler inclined his head toward me. The deputy pulled a pair of manacles similar to the ones Jack was wearing from his hip pocket and approached me with his rifle thrust beneath his right arm. He gestured for me to turn around.

  “Where’s the rest of your posse, Constable?” asked Jack while the cold metal was enclosing my wrists behind my back. The cuffs snapped home with a single click.

  “Sent most of them home this morning,” said Fowler. “Otis took off after your injun friend. He was pulling out just as we come in.”

  I started, rattling the chain that linked my hands together. Now Logan was in twice as much danger as he had been.

  Jack said, “You boys are making a big mistake. There’s a little girl up in them mountains with a killer. You’ll be leaving her at his mercy if you take the injun afore he can get to her.”

  “Mister, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The lawman had his eyes open for possible tricks. “But even if I did, it wouldn’t make no difference, ’cause it ain’t none of my business. So let’s make ourselves comfortable while we got the chance. We got a long ride ahead of us when Otis gets back.” So saying, he sank down onto the sagging sofa, dusty slicker and all, and threw his shotgun across his knees. He fixed us with his commanding eyes. “Sit down.”

  “I would rather they remained standing, Mr. Officer of the Law.” Eric Morgenmueller’s voice was guttural. Standing behind him, he pressed the muzzle of his fowling piece against the back of the constable’s head.

  “Papa! Was machst du?” Katerina rose from her kneeling position beside the chair in which her mother sat. Her expression was terrified. I sneaked a look at Frau Steiner, but I guess she didn’t understand what was going on, because I thought I detected a smile on her normally stony face.

  “I know what I am doing, Mama,” said the farmer. Then, to Fowler: “You will please to ask your deputy to unlock the manacles of my friends.”

  Sweeney stood awkwardly across from the sofa, covering everyone with his rifle, not sure what to do. Fowler sat like a statue and glared straight ahead at the wall.

  “I knowed I should of took that there piece away from you the first minute I seen it,” he said. His hands clenched and unclenched the shotgun lying across his lap.

  “Regrets are not actions, Mr. Officer of the Law. The manacles.” The muzzle pressed tighter.

  Sweeney’s eyes sought those of his superior. “Bud?”

  “Don’t do
it,” said the constable. He bit off his words.

  “Do not be foolish.” A note of desperation crept into the German’s ponderous accent. “I do not wish to—what is the colorful phrase?—decorate the room with your brains.”

  “He’s bluffing.” Fowler glared at his deputy as if willing him to shoot.

  “I do not know this word, ‘bluffing,’ ” said Morgenmueller. “But if it means that you are betting that I will not do what I say, then the stakes, they are very high, are they not? Perhaps too high.”

  These words were directed at Sweeney. All eyes were on him now. He shifted his gaze about the room, squirmed beneath his superior’s scrutiny. Finally his shoulders sagged. He lowered his rifle and dug a thumb and forefinger into the pocket of his vest for the key to the handcuffs.

  “You blamed idiot!” Fowler shook with rage.

  “Sorry, Bud.” The big deputy undid my manacles, then inserted the key into Jack’s.

  “I know, I know,” I said, before Jack could speak. “ ‘Get their guns.’ ” I collected the firearms from Sweeney and then from the constable. Fowler was no more anxious to give up his shotgun now than he had been in Reuben, but eventually he let go. I stood back with a weapon in each hand and turned the show over to my partner.

  Jack rubbed his wrists to force the circulation back into them. “I’d be obliged, Constable, if you stood up.” He spoke matter-of-factly and without malice. The lawman got to his feet. His eyes looked as deadly as the barrels of his shotgun when he was standing behind it. “Stand next to your deputy,” Jack directed. “Boy, keep them covered.”

  When the two officers were close together, he told them to put their hands up and patted them all over. They were carrying no other weapons. From Fowler’s vest pocket he took the key to his cuffs and thrust it into his own side pocket. Then Jack made them put their hands behind their backs and manacled them so that the chain of Sweeney’s cuffs passed inside the chain of the constable’s. “Now sit down,” he said.

  The only way they could do so comfortably was to sit on the sofa with their backs toward each other and one leg stretched out before them on the cushions. All the time they were settling themselves, Fowler cursed a blue streak at Jack and Morgenmueller and each of their ancestors as far back as Adam. Nobody paid him much attention. Jack bent and scooped my Winchester and his Sharps from the floor.

  “Eric, I reckon you’ll keep an eye on these two while we’re gone,” he said to the German.

  “But I am going with you,” he protested.

  “Won’t work.” Jack tossed the carbine to me and I caught it in my arms. I had already placed the lawmen’s guns on the table in the dining area. “You’ll only slow us up. Besides, you can’t expect your wife and mother-in-law to guard these laws alone.”

  “Why not? They are securely shackled.”

  Jack regarded Fowler, glaring up at him from his awkward position on the sofa. “I wouldn’t be too sure about that,” he said. “Let’s go, boy.”

  I nodded to the Morgenmuellers, cast a final glance at the two trussed-up lawmen, and went out on Jack’s heels. I could still hear the constable cursing as the door closed behind me.

  Five minutes later we were sitting on leather and galloping through the darkness in the direction of the mountains. The little burro, bored with its hours of inactivity, had brayed pitifully when we left without it, but we had no use for a pack animal on this trip. It was the fastest we had moved since our escape from Reuben. This time, however, we were not running away from trouble, but toward it. The moon flashed like streaks of lightning through the branches of the tall trees as we left the level ground and started the long climb upward. Only then did we slow down to look for signs of Logan’s passage.

  The alluvial soil on the western face of Mount Jefferson gave us what we wanted. Jack was puzzled about the freshly shod look of the hoofprints in the bright moonlight until I told him that Logan had spent part of the evening paring away the extra growth. After that his confidence didn’t lag as we followed the trail deeper into the range. But there was another set of prints as well. These, larger, uneven where the hoofs had grown over the shoes since they had last been changed, overlapped and obliterated Logan’s clearer trail. He was being followed, and it didn’t take much thought to figure out who was doing the following. Otis Ledbetter was earning his salary tonight.

  “The injun’s a good tracker,” Jack pointed out once. “There’s a third trail here, fainter than either of these others. The injun law’s leading him in deep.”

  For the next two hours we followed the tracks through the mountains; at times, when the trail passed over rock or into the shadows where it was impossible to see, we went ahead by dead reckoning. But always Jack’s instincts led us back to where the tracks showed up again. At the end of those two hours we came to a halt at the top of a steep rise and Jack spent some moments gazing back the way we had come.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Take a look.” He pointed a long arm over the rugged countryside.

  I scanned the ghostly scene for a long time without seeing anything of interest. Then the bottom dropped out of my insides. In a patch of moonlight showing beyond the belt of trees at the base of the mountain, a patch in which the grass itself was tinted a ghastly silver, I spotted two men on horseback racing in our direction. They were going so fast that within the space of a heartbeat they were out of sight, swallowed up in the great forest of pines that resembled a ragged strip of black felt against the moon-washed background of the flat country.

  “Do you think it’s Fowler and Sweeney?” My voice was hushed. I didn’t want to hear the answer.

  “Don’t reckon it can be anyone else,” said Jack. “How could they get loose? We left them trussed up like a pair of Christmas turkeys!”

  “Reckon one of them had a extra key to them cuffs.”

  “But you searched them!”

  “That don’t mean it wasn’t there.” He swung his mule back onto the trail. “They’re still a good two hours behind,” he said, urging the big animal forward. “A lot can happen in two hours.”

  I stayed where I was for another moment. Men chasing men chasing a man chasing a man chasing a man, I thought. It would have been laughable if it weren’t so serious. I turned and cantered to catch up with Jack.

  “Sergeant I knowed got hisself killed when I was at Fort Dodge,” he was saying when I got there. “Searched a renegade Shoshone afore he went to put him in the stockade. Injun stabbed him to death with a knife he had hid in his hair. Pays to be careful.”

  Some parts of the Cascade Mountain Range are straight up and down and completely impassable. Others are kind of saw-tooth—shaped, each tooth a little steeper than the one before it, and impassable to all but fools and madmen. The part we were attempting to cross falls into the second category, and if the seven men who were following each other across that treacherous country were not what you would call fools or madmen, then you must have another name for us that means the same thing. At the end of the third hour I reined in near a thick stand of poplars and asked Jack if he had any idea where we were.

  He nodded. Despite the chill of the mountain air at night, the moonlight glittered on a drop of sweat snaking down his cheek from under his hat. “This is where we first seen them paw prints this afternoon,” he said.

  I stared at him, wondering if the strenuous ride had shaken his brains loose. And then I heard it. A steady roar, muffled but unmistakable. The roar of water pouring from rock to rock. Without my knowing it, we had made almost a complete circle since leaving the Morgenmueller homestead, and now we were less than an hour’s ride from Shoshone Falls. “Why?” I asked. “What good’s it do George Crook to lead us back to where we started?”

  “He’s trying to throw everybody but the injun off of his trail,” said Jack. “Or maybe he’s just having fun. Can’t go on much longer, though; his horse is slowing down.” He started forward again.

  Dawn was a pale promise over the mountain
s to the east when we came within sight of the tree-lined lake with its towering source of water sparkling in the moonlight. By night the surface of the lake was gun-barrel black. A single streak of reflected moonlight slashed white across its middle; aside from that, it was hard to distinguish the flat body of water from the hulking black shapes of the trees that crowded its shores. The ceaseless gush of the falls provided the only sound.

  I saw it first. I was running my eyes over the spectacular scenery, trying to figure out where we could go from there, when I spotted a bit of movement two thirds of the way up the fluted rock wall at the top of which the falls began its six-hundred-foot drop to the inlet below. I called Jack’s attention to it. We dismounted to get a better look.

  For fifteen minutes we watched the lighter splash of color against the gray of the granite as it crawled diagonally up the wall. Only then, when the first fingers of light fumbled their way over the jagged horizon, did we recognize the figure as Logan’s. He had his rifle slung over his shoulder and was using his hands to steady himself against the craggy stone as he followed a narrow ledge that curved its way up to the top of the wall. At its end, about six feet from the summit, a shallow cave worn by a million years of wind and rain yawned a sullen invitation to all those hearty enough to try to reach it. It was obvious that this was Logan’s destination. I cupped my hands around my mouth and prepared to shout at him.

  A vise closed around my left arm and I gasped. I looked at Jack. He was gripping my arm in one knobby fist, but he was staring at a point below and behind the Indian. I followed his gaze. Despite Jack’s precautions, the sight that awaited me there brought a strangled cry from my throat.

  To the right of the falls, where the ledge began its downward swing toward the shore of the lake four hundred feet below, George Crook stood with his Winchester carbine in one hand and his free arm around Ilse Morgenmueller. With a length of rope he had tied her hands behind her back and hobbled her ankles so that she could barely move. She teetered on the edge of the shelf. The only thing that kept her from tumbling into the boiling grotto at the foot of the falls was the Indian’s muscular forearm thrust across her throat. He kept the rifle steady by balancing it along his right arm with the barrel resting on a jagged feature of the wall. He had chosen the spot well.