Free Portlandtown: A Tale of the Oregon Wyldes by Rob DeBorde

Nothing had changed. He still saw the same fear staring back at him, the same truth.
    The damned thing was in this world again.
    Andre knew it was true. He should have suspected as much after the first wave struck him in the street, but the thought had never occurred to him. After a third pounding brought him to his knees while speaking to a group of civic leaders in the Palace Hotel’s Grand Ballroom, he had been able to think of nothing else. He must have looked a sight, because their initial reaction had been to hail one of the many doctors in attendance, thinking Andre had taken ill. He’d played along for a time, hoping a fever would rise to lay claim to his affliction, but it never came. He would not escape so easily.
    Andre used a hotel washcloth to dry his face and then carefully folded and placed it on the small dressing table next to the sink. Once more he took stock of the man hunched over in the mirror. The patches of gray above his ears were nothing new, but he was sure they’d been smaller when last he checked. He tilted his head forward and was pleased to discover no discernible change in the thickness or color of the hair on top of his head. It was a small victory, but he would take it.
    Standing up straight, Andre felt each vertebra snap into place as his spine realigned itself. At six feet eight inches tall, he often had to bend at the waist to clear a doorway, duck into a carriage, or descend into the flooded underground. Such height, along with a startlingly muscular frame, had proven useful in certain situations, particularly those involving conflict. After forty-eight years, forty of them above six feet, Andre had participated in few physical altercations, despite his penchant for “rilin’ up the locals,” as his mother was fond of saying. He’d walked away victorious from every one.
    Andre preferred to match his less obvious but perhaps more impressive wits against anyone foolish enough to challenge him intellectually. Though he’d had no formal education—not a surprise given the color of his skin—Andre had learned to read at the age of five, a talent he used to devour every book, paper, and periodical that crossed his path. This included all subjects scientific, mathematical, historical, cultural, and mythological. That there was so much conflict to be found in the interpretation of the written word came as no surprise to Andre. Still, after four decades of bending, Andre was regularly thankful for high ceilings and low expectations.
    It was his intellectual pursuits that had initially brought him to San Francisco, specifically his time spent studying and living with the Indian tribes of California, Oregon, and the Washington Territory. Andre was fascinated by the myriad of cultures and customs and had made it his mission to share his findings with a populace largely ignorant of the people he considered the original Americans. Accepting Lieutenant Jacoby’s invitation to speak on the effects of Western expansion before the U.S. Pacific Railway Commission had provided just such an opportunity. The lieutenant’s true motivations had not become clear until after Andre arrived.
    The novelty of a Negro man speaking on behalf of the American Indian was not lost on Andre. He had encountered more than a few freemen living in the West who found it odd that his considerable gifts of persuasion were being put to use for a people who were not his own. Andre rejected such arguments. His cause was to educate, enlighten, and hopefully pass on something about the nature of mankind. That he chose to stand up for another race of people reinforced the fact that a dark-skinned man could be on equal footing with other scholars.
    Andre’s prior pursuits, those that had dominated three-quarters of his life, rarely came up now in casual conversation.
    Andre exited the washroom, ignoring the unpacked trunk beside the door. The preceding day’s edition of the San Francisco Examiner lay on the bed, the front page