Winding Stair (9781101559239) by Douglas C. Jones Page B

ham.
    Oscar Schiller drew me along the breezeway to the front porch and we stood close together in the dark where the rain made a thick dampness in the air.
    â€œMr. Pay, come morning, me and these men are going to see if we can find anybody who might have seen the ones we’re after,” he said. “I don’t think people are going to say much at this point, but we need to try. I want you to stay here with that girl.”
    â€œStay here?”
    â€œYes, and when she gets some sleep and some food and feels safe again, she’ll begin to talk. You find out what you can. What she saw. I don’t know what happened here, and I don’t know what might have happened to her. Not much, I’d suspect. Else that bunch wouldn’t have left her alive. I doubt they knew she was here.”
    â€œShe doesn’t seem very talkative,” I said.
    â€œYou just be around when she gets talkative.” We stood silently for a long time, my legs aching. I was very tired. Schiller may have sensed it. “You get some sleep, too,” he said. “We’ll be back in a day or so, and whether we catch anybody or not, we’ll all head back to Fort Smith. I’ll send a few of these men back to Hatchet Hill with those three bodies. And I’ll have one of them get a telegraph off to the marshal’s office to pass the word all through The Nations to be on the lookout for Milk Eye, and for that black horse.”
    He turned, leaving me standing there, but stopped and looked back. I thought I detected a smile.
    â€œI’ll leave a couple of the men here, too, in case they come back.”
    The thought that the marauders might return had not entered my mind until then. I doubted that Schiller thought they would, but if his purpose was to make the night more chilling than it already was for me, he had succeeded.
    We heard no more from the Choctaw woman in Jennie Thrasher’s room that night except once when she handed out the chamber pot and Charley Oskogee carried it off into the rain. After he brought it back, he looked inside the door for a moment but his wife closed it again. He said Miss Jennie was sleeping. Policemen by then were sleeping on the porches and all over the house, except in the kitchen, where Oscar Schiller sat with his hat off, studying what he’d written in the little book. I had not seen him before without the palmetto and his hair was straight and strawlike, cut short around the ears and neck. He was graying, but the gray was hard to detect because, one way or another, it was nearly colorless. He looked like some schoolboy, intense of mind, bent over his forms.
    I found a place in the breezeway and was shivering with cold when Joe Mountain appeared with a thick cotton quilt. He squatted beside me, eating a baked potato, hull and all. I was too tired to accept a bite when he offered it. As I rolled myself into the quilt, it occurred to me that only a few hours before I would have found my situation incongruous. Here I was in the wilds of Choctaw country, at the scene of a brutal murder, wrapped in a homemade quilt and refusing to eat when asked, not because the offer came from a man my friends in Saint Louis would have considered a heathen savage, but because I wanted sleep more than food. My mind stumbled through the events of the day, a day such as I had never spent before in all my life, but sleep came quickly with the warmth of the cover and the knowledge that the big Osage was there beside me in the night.
    Sometime during the dark hours before dawn, I woke to a sound other than the monotonous drumming of rain. It was a quavering wail, high-pitched for a moment before dropping into deep guttural moanings. It came from somewhere beyond the house and cut through the rain to the senses like a knife blade passed along the finger, unnoticed for a few seconds until the sting begins. I sat up, the quilt falling off my shoulders, the chills starting up my