Free Lonesome Animals by Bruce Holbert Page B

crimes, or if so, weren’t inclined to share it with the Bureau’s police.
    Under the crime report was a list of suspects. Rutherford B. Hayes, a six-foot-six Hoosier, had cut a wide enough swath in
his thirties to acquire the moniker Pale Horse. Strawl had arrested him three times, the last ending in an eighteen-month stint in Monroe. The time didn’t tame him as much as it put him off people. He constructed a commendable house from logs and sod, stealing the shake shingles from the mill yard, only because he didn’t have tools to fashion his own. Strawl refused to investigate the matter, citing deficient evidence, though the cedar on Hayes’s roof was inarguable.
    A thornier issue was the land upon which he built it. The house clung to the lee side of Granite Mountain. At issue was whether Hayes owned the land or not. Actually, there was not much dispute : he had neither deed nor bill of sale. The land was claimed by both the tribe and the forest service, however, and Strawl refused to serve notice without a plaintiff with legal standing. The house stayed. Hayes raised a brood of mastiffs that he managed to keep as owly as himself. Their bays carried miles, and it was rumored they had killed the last brown bear in the country.
    Hayes had the capacity to murder, Strawl thought, but the kind of attention these murders drew contradicted the man’s last twenty years. Still, without contradictions, no crime would go unsolved.
    Next on the list, Jacob Chin, Taker of Sisters, was still in his prime, however. A Chinese Indian, Chin had first earned what money he came by honestly, as a cowhand. But he broke horses in such a brutal manner that they often ended up crippled or so skittish they bolted at the wind shifting. He was better suited for felony. He ran what passed for a black market on the reservation, peddling opium to the coolies and dried coca leaves a cousin mailed to him from Venezuela. He owned two clapboard houses in Inchelium and turned out a spindly Indian woman from each at three bucks a throw. He hadn’t built up a head of steam until well after Strawl retired, so all he knew of the man was word of mouth. His crimes intrigued Strawl less than his predisposition toward
Indians. At fourteen, he’d beaten his San Poil uncle to death with a shovel. His record showed eight assaults, all on Indians, and in country where fisticuffs rarely were reported, that was a bevy.
    The notes listed one of the Bird boys, as well ; they ran in herds and Strawl could not sort this one’s name from the others he knew.
    The Bird boys, an assortment of uncles, nephews, cousins, and brothers, stuck together and weren’t inclined toward town. They raised their share of hell when they visited, and gossip linked them to the death of a Tar Evans, a trapper who didn’t know when to stop drinking or talking, but Evans had been running headfirst and downhill toward his grave for twenty years. His death was less a crime than the product of his nature and he’d been felled by a blow to the head with a two-by-four, which made intent unlikely; the man for whom Strawl was searching had more intent than a porcupine had quills.
    Strawl himself was part of their list. They’d attributed no opportunity, no weapon, and no motive, other than history and meanness. He was not surprised. It was the reason they’d refused to share the files. If the accusation were true, he’d be tipped off, and if it were false, they would have to contend with his spite. Anyone hunting grizzly faced the fact that the bear was hunting him, too, and was better suited for the endeavor, and so it was with Strawl and their police, and he was armed to boot. The BIA wanted to keep downwind.
    There were no interview notes, and Strawl surmised the Indian boys had been disinclined to put their theories to the principals and risk blows or worse, their recent encounter with Strawl proved their caution not unreasonable.
    Strawl