Rider was just a few miles outside of Tahlequah when he turned his horse off onto a rocky trail going south. It was barely wide enough for a wagon to pass through, and it was canopied over by the branches of tall oak and walnut trees. The woods were thick with a heavy undergrowth of brush and brambles that extended to the sides of the road. The trees came alive with the scolding chatter of gray squirrels and the songs of cardinals, blue jays, and mockingbirds. Now and then the insistent, overbearing ga ga of a distant crow sounded above the other noises. He rode a couple of miles down this road and stopped in front of a small log cabin. Beside the cabin was a brush arbor. In this arbor an old man sat.
“Come in,” said the old man, speaking in Cherokee. “I’ve been waiting for you here.”
Rider dismounted and hitched his horse to a small cottonwood beside the road. Close to the cottonwood was a large tree stump. Rider pulled the Colts out of his waistband and laid them on the stump. Then he walked into the arbor.
“ ’Siyo, White Tobacco,” he said. “I need your help.”
“Sit down.”
The arbor was hung around on all sides with a variety of plants in various stages of drying, and on the ground under the roof were baskets, jugs, crocks, and boxes filled with tobacco, herbs, and other curiosities stashed in disarray. There was a small table in the center and on each side of the table, a chair. White Tobacco sat in one chair, smoking a corncob pipe. Rider sat in the other chair.
“What’s your trouble?” said White Tobacco.
“A man is missing,” said Rider. “I have to find him.”
White Tobacco puffed on his pipe for a long while. Clouds of blue-gray smoke hovered around his head, half concealing his grizzled old visage from Rider’s view. Finally he spoke again.
“You’re the sheriff,” he said. “You get paid for these things.”
“Yes,” said Rider. “I know, but this one is very important to the Cherokee Nation. There’s an urgency to the situation. The Council is meeting, and the missing man is a councilman. If we don’t find him soon and get him back to the meeting, the others may vote for the railroad to come into Tahlequah.”
Again White Tobacco sat and puffed and thought.
“What is the man’s name?” he asked.
“The missing man is Mix Hail.”
“Wait,” said White Tobacco, and he got up from his chair and moved slowly and methodically around the small space in the arbor, rummaging through baskets and boxes. Finally he went back to his chair and sat down. From his wrinkled, leathery old hands, he poured onto the table some colored beads, a crystal, and a lump of red ocher tied to a length of string.
“Now,” he said, “we’ll see what we can see.”
After he had walked the length of Muskogee Avenue and back again, George rejoined Earl Bob on the capitol grounds. Beehunter had not yet returned. He decided that he could be just as useless and not nearly so conspicuous in the office. He told Earl Bob where he would be, took his horse back to the sheriff’s barn, and went into the office. The fire in the stove was nearly out, so he built that up enough to boil water, and he made some coffee. He tried to make it just the way he had seen Rider do it. Then he settled down at his desk to wait. After he had gone through about half of his fresh pot of coffee, which, he immediately decided, was not nearly as good as the one Rider had made earlier, Earl Bob came into the office. George stood up, he thought, a little too quickly, too anxiously.
“Is Beehunter back?” he asked.
“Yeah. Josie said, yeah, old Mix has been staying with her, but she was worried, she said, ’cause he didn’t come by last night. She fed him breakfast yesterday morning, then she never seen him again. She’s worried.”
“You know where she lives, right?” asked George.
“Yeah, but like I said before, she won’t talk to us.”
“I don’t want to talk to her,” said George. “I want you to walk me to her house—from the capitol.”
Earl Bob shrugged, and the two deputies left the office and walked to the capitol, where Earl Bob said something to Beehunter in Cherokee. George thought they were probably talking about him.
“Let’s go,” said George.
Earl Bob started walking north, parallel to but east of Muskogee Avenue. George’s first thought was that if people had seen Mix Hail leave the capitol and walk toward the livery, which was south from the capitol on Muskogee, then Mix could not have been going directly to Josie Wicket’s house. He had to have gone somewhere else. Still, George let Earl Bob lead him all the way to the woman’s house. It was on the northwest edge of town—really just outside of town. George could see how Mix Hail might have been able to spend some time discreetly at this place. It was off the road, accessible only by a footpath through thick woods, and only a small area was cleared around it for a yard. It was not likely that anyone would just happen by. Anyone coming to Josie Wicket’s house would have to be either lost or a deliberate visitor. George wondered how Beehunter had known that Mix Hail was staying there.
“Be a good place to waylay someone,” he said.
It was not long after George had left Earl Bob back at the capitol and gone back to the office that Rider returned. He walked in and went straight to the coffeepot on the stove. George was glad that he had made some fresh coffee, but he wondered if Rider would notice that it was not as good as his. Rider poured himself a cup and went to his desk.
“What did you find out, chooj?” he said.
“Well,” said George, “Mix Hail had been staying with a woman named Josie Wicket.”
Rider put down his cup and looked directly at George, his face registering surprise.
“You sure about that?” he asked.
“Beehunter knew, but I sent him up to question her anyway. Earl Bob said that she wouldn’t talk to us. According to Beehunter, she confirmed it. She also said that he had breakfast with her yesterday morning, and she hasn’t seen him since then. She’s worried about him, so she must have expected him to come back last night. Course this is all secondhand with me. It was Earl Bob who told me what Beehunter said.”
“Yeah,” said Rider. “Okay. So old Mix was shacked up with Josie Wicket. I’ll be. I wonder how I missed out on that bit of news.”
“I didn’t ask,” said George, “but I wonder how Beehunter knew.”
“Josie’s his sister-in-law,” said Rider, “his wife’s sister.”
“Oh,” said George. He still didn’t understand why Beehunter would automatically know about a clandestine affair between his wife’s sister and a respected councilman, but the explanation obviously was sufficient for Rider. He let it go.
“Anything else?” asked Rider.
“I had Earl Bob walk me to Josie Wicket’s house. I didn’t see anything along the way, but two thoughts came to my mind. One was that the trail to that house would be a likely spot for an ambush. But the other is that the people who saw Mix Hail leave the capitol yesterday said he was headed toward the livery. He wasn’t going in the direction of Josie Wicket’s house.”
“Good thinking, George. You’re going to do all right here.”
George stood up and walked to the stove with his cup. He poured himself some more coffee, then turned to face Rider.
“I spent a lot of time today doing nothing,” he said. “I walked down the street and back, and I sat in here waiting for Beehunter to get back and after that just waiting for you. I didn’t know what else to do.”
Rider smiled.
“George,” he said, “you just learned something about police work. Lots of times you just sit and wait. You’ll learn to live with it, not worry about it. You done good today. You found out more than I did.”
“What did you find out?” asked George.
“Just that old Mix stopped by Cholly’s house—that’s his brother—when he first got here, ate a meal with them, and told them that he was going to be staying in town this trip. They ain’t seen him since then.”
“So what do we do from here?”
“Somebody had to see old Mix go somewhere,” said Rider. “He left the capitol walking toward the livery, but he didn’t go to the livery. Come on, let’s take a walk.”
Rider, with George following along, walked over to the capitol and started from there toward the livery barn where Mix Hail’s horse and buggy were stashed. He stopped at every business along the way, asking the same question: “Did you see Mix Hail walk past here last evening?”
Some of the businessmen said they had been too busy at the time to have noticed anything, but several did say that they had seen him pass by. The last one to give that positive response was Alfred Kirk of Al’s Eats, just about halfway down toward the livery.
“Sure,” said Kirk. “I was getting ready for my busy time, you know, dinner hour. So I was kind of watching out in the street to see who might come in. That’s how come me to remember. Mix walked up like he was in kind of a hurry, but then he stopped. Right out there. I thought sure he was coming in, but then he walked on.”
“Did you see where he went?” asked Rider.
“Naw, he passed on by my window there, and that’s all I seen of him.”
Al Kirk had been the last of the Muskogee Avenue merchants to have seen Mix Hail.
“Well,” said Rider to George, standing back out on the sidewalk, “we know he got this far, but we still don’t know where he was going. He either turned east or west off of Muskogee, or somebody stopped him, or someone’s lying to us. Now we got to figure out which one.”
“If anyone had stopped him here against his will,” said George, “that is, by use of force, someone would have seen it. It was still broad daylight.”
“Yeah. You’re right. Listen, George, Exie’s going to have our dinner on the table here in a minute, and all these folks along here will be closing up to go home, too. You go on up to the house and tell Exie for me that I’ll be along directly. I need to stop by and see the chief. I know he’s worried about this Mix Hail case.”
Later that evening, following their meal, Rider and Tanner were again out in the dog run with coffee. Rider was smoking his pipe.
“George,” said Rider, “first thing in the morning we got to approach this thing from another direction. I’m going to pull all but two of the boys off of the capitol detail. We’re going to question everyone between the capitol and Al’s place, and then east and west from Al’s. We’re going to ask them to recall everything they saw last evening. Who was out on the street? Did they see anything unusual? Like that, see. We find out who else was out there on the street, then we track them down and ask them the same questions. Somewhere along the line someone’s going to tell us where Mix went to. I’m putting you in charge of that. I’ll tell the boys in the morning.”
“Yes, sir,” said George.
Rider took a sip from his coffee cup, set it aside, and puffed contemplatively on his pipe for a long, silent moment. Somewhere in the night a whippoorwill sounded its lonesome call.
“While you’re doing that,” said Rider, “I’m going to start to harass those railroad fellows.”
The evening was still young when Rider had finished his pipe and was thinking about having another cup of coffee, when Delbert Swim came walking up to the dog run, a little winded from having just walked up the hill to Rider’s house.
“’Siyo, Del,” said Rider.
“Go-Ahead,” said Swim, speaking Cherokee, “you better come down.”
“What is it?” said Rider.
Swim then noticed Tanner seated across the dog run from Rider, and he decided to switch to English in deference to the new deputy.
“They just brought in Mix Hail,” he said. “He’s dead.”