Winding Stair (9781101559239) (23 page)

“What authority have you got for asking me all this horseshit?”

“I'm a special deputy marshal from Fort Smith.”

“Special for what?”

“That's none of your concern. Would you rather I rode off from here and left you for a Creek court?”

Smoker Chubee looked around at the men standing near us, all watching closely. He did it almost casually.

“No, I think I'll take my chances with Parker.”

“All right. Where were you the first week of June?” I asked.

“I don't keep track of such things,” he said. “Probably in Seminole country or maybe up in the Cherokee Outlet. How the hell would I know?”

“It may be to your best interests to prove you were somewhere other than the Choctaw Nation during that week.” I took the last of the Winding Stair John Doe warrants from my jacket and served it on him and he stood listening to me, smiling, looking squarely into my eyes. His teeth in that dark face seemed the whitest I had ever seen. There was something disconcerting about his manner, something at once infuriating yet admirable. Johnny Boins had been flamboyant. Smoker Chubee was confident and direct, almost insolent. He acted as though we were all some lower form of life beneath his serious consideration.

Moma July had brought back two weapons. One was a Marlin rifle chambered for .44–40 ammunition he said Chubee had in his saddle boot. The other was a Colt single-action .45 found at the Furnace. It was a handcrafted weapon of outstanding workmanship, with walnut grips into one of which the initials
SC
had been carefully burned. I had never seen such an excellent weapon in this part of the country, where such things were generally taken for granted and treated like plows or empty coffee cans, thrown about carelessly on woodshed or pantry shelves. I concluded that Smoker Chubee was a thoroughly dangerous man, the most dangerous we had taken, and it amazed me that it had been done so easily by one stocky little Creek policeman.

Everything moved quickly then, because Moma July and Louie Low Hawk made it so. It was obvious that they felt to keep Chubee here long would be to invite some ugly reaction from the local citizens who had held Burris Garret in such high esteem.

“And besides,” Low Hawk said, “there will be some who think he ought to be tried in a Creek court because all the people killed were members of the Creek Nation.”

“But a federal marshal was murdered, and that's reason enough to take him to Fort Smith,” I said.

“You let him get into the hands of a Creek court,” Moma July said, “and you won't have anything to take to Parker but a dead man.”

“He'll be tried in a hurry—you can count on it. Anybody who kills one of Parker's marshals gets quick attention.”

“You get your subpoenas for witnesses back here, and we'll be ready to testify,” Louie Low Hawk said.

“Yes, and keep your eye on this Orthro Smith at the Furnace. We want him.”

“He'll be there.”

Moma July rode with us a short distance, along with a number of other Creek policemen. But he said he would like to get to Okmulgee and see to it the funeral was done properly. We paused along a row of thorny hawthorn trees bordering a cultivated field, seeking such little shade as there was in the growing heat.

“Garret never had a wife,” Moma July said. He took off his hat and wiped his face with a red bandanna. “But he's got brothers and sisters and an old mother. I'd like to be there. These men can ride on with you.”

“That won't be necessary,” I said. So long as Joe Mountain and his brother were with me, I felt confident in getting our prisoner back to Fort Smith.

“All right. Now, if I was you, I wouldn't go to Muskogee. The people there knew Burris, too. Slip around it to the north and head for Fort Gibson into the Cherokee Nation. Get clear of Creek country fast and catch your train at Fort Gibson.”

“What about your horses?”

“Leave 'em at Fort Gibson. They're Creek horses and the police there will hold 'em until I send someone to pick 'em up in a day or so.”

“There's a thing I wish you'd do for me,” I said.

“I'll do it.”

“Get a telegram off to Oscar Schiller. Send it to George Moon, at Hatchet Hill, down in Choctaw. Tell him we've killed Milk Eye and we've got another Winding Stair suspect we're bringing in to Fort Smith.”

“Yes. I'll do it.”

“And tell him Marshal Garret's been killed.”

“I'll do that, too.”

I held out my hand to him and he took it.

“Moma,” I said, “you've done a lot for us.”

For a moment he stared at me, and I thought he was about to smile, but then he shrugged and took his hand away and slapped his hat back on his head. I watched him ride off and thought about him dashing out into the night alone after a man who had just proven his deadliness. It was a strange sensation, this admiration for a man with whom I had so little in common, and had he appeared at my home in Saint Louis, I suspected my mother would feed him at the back door and send him quickly away.

We rode on for a while and Joe Mountain turned to me and grinned.

“You're gonna make one damned fine marshal, Eben Pay.”

“I have no intention of continuing in the work,” I said. “When this is all finished, I'm going back to Missouri and take my bar examinations.”

But I recognized it for a rare compliment and found myself liking it very much. And I thought of Oscar Schiller. I knew he would view the killing of Milk Eye Rufus Deer as a mixed blessing. Because the little Yuchi's family had taken the body, we would not have to pay his burial expenses out of travel money, as was usually the case. But neither would anyone collect the reward money offered by the Creek chief. There was a stipulation in that about a conviction in court, and now Milk Eye would never get his day in court.

The sun lifted before us as we rode northeast into its glaring light, headed for the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas railroad bridge across the Arkansas outside Muskogee. Only a few miles beyond that would be the Cherokee Nation and Fort Gibson and the tracks of the Kansas and Arkansas Valley line into Fort Smith.

At first, there were gnats and flies whipping around our sweating faces, but soon the heat was enough to drive them to shade. We rode the edges of plowed fields and through clover pastures where cattle grazed. On the higher ground, there were patches of hop hornbeam, the ironwood trees used by the old prairie and plains tribes for lances. Along the small streams we crossed were black willows and redbud trees, their lavender blooms long since replaced by the delicate heart-shaped leaves. All around us were meadowlarks and quail, and above us the turkey vultures and Cooper's hawks, hunting.

We pushed the horses hard, but had to stop often to breathe them in the heat. Mostly, we were silent, each man with his own thoughts. For myself, it seemed incredible that only a few hours before, when we'd found the dead Tar Baby behind Louie Low Hawk's barn, I had despaired of ever settling the Winding Stair case. Now we were going into Fort Smith with the last member of the gang. I was sure, and it was finished. Except for the trying.

I
t was almost August. Outside, the sun beat down with a merciless glare on the compound and there was no breath of wind stirring. In the courtroom, people sat in shirtsleeves or cotton blouses, busily waving before their wet faces cardboard fans with large black letters proclaiming the benefits of Indian Blend nostrum for rheumatism and neuralgia. They had come early, anxious to see what the trial newspapers were heralding as the preliminary show to the Winding Stair case. Some had lunch pails or brown sacks filled with sandwiches, unwilling once they had a seat to give it up if the proceedings went beyond noon.

As yet, Evans had not gone to the grand jury with the John or Thrasher cases. We had heard twice from Oscar Schiller in Choctaw Nation, but he had not located Mrs. Thrasher. I had begun to despair that he ever would. At least the boy Emmitt had identified Smoker Chubee as the “dark man who just sat on his horse and grinned.” When we showed him the Colt .45 found among Chubee's things at Smith's Furnace, he told us it looked like the big pistol the dark man had fired at him when he ran from the scene on Hatchet Hill Road.

During those long, hot days after we brought in Smoker Chubee, I had been working on unrelated cases. Evans explained that he wanted me to have no further part in Winding Stair in view of my being a possible prosecution witness. I had not seen Jennie Thrasher throughout that time, but had talked with Zelda Mores. After the Cornkiller and Grube hearings before the commissioner, Zelda said, Jennie had stayed close to the jail, seldom leaving her room on the top floor. She had asked for books and spent her time reading. I could imagine, as the days grew hotter, how miserably uncomfortable she must have been. I had, on many occasions, given Zelda money to buy Jennie ice creams from one of the Rogers Avenue shops, and had secretly hoped the girl might ask to see me. But she made no response to these feeble overtures. Twice I dreamed of her, but her features seemed to be slipping from my memory, and that made me all the more eager to see her once more.

Merriweather McRoy, the Little Rock attorney, had been in town throughout much of this time, working on his defense for Johnny Boins. He had volunteered his services to Smoker Chubee for nothing more than the nominal court fee paid appointed defense counsels. It bothered me that he wanted this case, but Evans was unperturbed.

“Old Mac just wants to test me in court. He doesn't give a damn about Chubee. But we haven't been adversaries since right after the war, in central Arkansas. He wants to get the feel of me before we get into the John and Thrasher thing.”

The Smoker Chubee trial would be my first opportunity to observe Judge Parker preside in court. On that sweltering July morning, only he and Evans were wearing coats. And over his coat, Parker wore the black robe of office. My first impression of him was his intensity. His blue eyes followed each witness to the stand and he seemed to listen with total concentration to every word spoken. From time to time, he pushed a pair of steel-rimmed glasses onto his nose and made pencil notes in a large pad before him. But generally, he held the spectacles in his hand, and sometimes as he became impatient he tapped them lightly on the green felt top of the bench. Now and again he lifted a gavel and seemed to fondle it with both hands as he listened to exchanges. At his side were a number of law books, most of them the statutes of Arkansas. For, like most federal courts of that period, in cases not specifically covered by federal law, precedents followed were those of the old English common law and sometimes of the state in which the court sat.