The Saga of Henry Starr Read online

  3

  The new job was just fine, too. Henry liked Charles Todd, and he got along well with all the cowboys on the Todd Ranch, even though they were all, like those on the Roberts Ranch, white. He began to think that perhaps he would be forced to revise his opinion of white men. Perhaps, after all, C. N. Walker and Clint Chambers were not the typical ones. Anyhow, Henry liked the life and work of a cowboy, and he was happy with the job at Todd’s. Mae was pleased, too, for she hadn’t liked seeing Henry footloose. She was glad to see him back at work and still close to her. Besides all that, it was branding time, and Henry particularly liked branding.

  He was at work with a small branding crew, holding onto the hind legs of a hefty young calf while two other cowboys held down the front end. A fourth brought the red-hot branding iron out of the fire and pressed it against the side of the calf. Henry listened to the calf bawl and smelled the burning hair. Then his two partners turned loose of the head and front legs, and Henry let go of his hold. The calf struggled frantically to its feet and ran bawling for its mother. As Henry was about to turn to his next chore, Charles Todd rode into the branding camp.

  “Howdy, Mr. Todd,” said Henry.

  “Henry,” said Todd, “ride over to that east pasture. There’s a couple of stray horses in there. Someone will probably be looking for them pretty soon, so let them through the gate to water. We can hold them there until we find out who belongs to them.”

  Henry found the strays with no problem and let them through the gate as Todd had instructed him to do. He noted that they were fine-looking animals. Todd had been right, he figured. They were bound to be missed by their owner. At least he would find them well cared for. That was just one of the things that Henry liked about the ranch life. People looked out for each other—even in a case like this where they didn’t know whose horses they had found. It didn’t matter, really, he figured. It was like the Golden Rule. You did for the other fellow what you hoped that he would do for you if you wound up in the same kind of fix.

  It was a couple of weeks later when Henry, lying on his bunk in the big bunkhouse that housed all the cowboys, and playing on his fiddle some old tune he didn’t even know the title of, was visited by Charles Todd. Todd had brought another man along with him. It was unusual enough for the boss to come into the bunkhouse in the late evening, but it was a rare occasion indeed for him to bring a stranger. Henry stopped sawing on the fiddle, and all the cowboys quieted down so as to overhear what they could. It wasn’t exactly eavesdropping. They were just curious about so rare an occurrence, and, after all, the bunkhouse was their home.

  Todd had led the stranger directly over to Henry. Henry put aside the fiddle and stood up.

  “Henry,” said Todd.

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Todd?”

  “Henry, this here is Hank Eaton. He asked me to bring him in here to meet you.”

  Henry extended his right hand, wondering who this stranger might be and what possible interest he could have in Henry. The other man took it warmly in his own.

  “Mr. Eaton owns them two horses you penned up a while back,” said Todd.

  “Oh,” said Henry. “Well, how do you do, Mr. Eaton?”

  “I just wanted to thank you, young man, for watching out for them two horses the way you done,” said Eaton. “I been missing them for near a month, and I sure am pleased to find them in such good shape. I’d like to pay you something for your trouble.”

  Eaton reached into a pocket, but Henry stopped him before he could dig out any cash.

  “You don’t owe me anything, Mr. Eaton,” he said. “I was drawing wages from Mr. Todd, here, when I put them in. I’m not out anything. Just glad to help.”

  Eaton thanked Henry again and left with Charles Todd. Henry picked up the fiddle and watched while the two other men left the bunkhouse. He lay back down on the bunk with a good, warm feeling inside.

  But it was only a few days later when Todd sent Henry with a wagon into Nowata to pick up some supplies. Henry had parked the wagon in front of the grain store and gone inside to pick up the supplies Todd had ordered. It was going to take several trips out to the wagon to load everything up. He hefted a grain sack up onto his shoulder and hauled it outside. As he rolled his shoulder to pitch the sack into the wagon bed, a man he had never seen before approached him.

  “Henry Starr?” he said.

  Henry looked up at the man. He was a bit short, perhaps five feet six or seven, and paunchy. A shaggy moustache covered his mouth. He wore what would have passed for dress clothes had they been cleaned and pressed, but they were wrinkled and covered with dust. His dusty hat looked as if it had been thrown in the street and rolled on. His trousers were stuffed into the tops of his high black boots. There were two cartridge belts around the man’s wide waist, and into the belts were stuffed two big revolvers. A badge was pinned carelessly to the coat.

  “Yeah?” said Henry.

  The man pulled a paper out of a coat pocket and casually waved it in front of Henry’s eyes.

  “I have here a writ,” he said, “charging you with the larceny of a horse belonging to a Mr. Hank Eaton. I’m a deputy United States marshal, and you’re under arrest.”

  Henry was too startled to give an immediate reply. He looked at the deputy with unbelieving eyes for a second or two. He knew he had broken no laws and wondered how such a mistake could have been made.

  “Wait a minute,” he finally managed to say. “There must be some mistake. I took care of two strays for Mr. Eaton, but other than that, I’ve never laid eyes on his horse. He’ll straighten this out. Him or Mr. Todd one. I work for Mr. Todd, and he was there when Eaton thanked me for taking care of his horses. He even offered to pay me. You ask him.”

  “This here writ is signed by Hank Eaton,” said the deputy. “Come along.”

  The ruddy-faced, paunchy man grabbed Henry by a wrist, and before Henry could take in what was happening, he was wearing a pair of handcuffs and being pushed along the road toward a nearby hotel. He could feel the stares of the curious onlookers as he moved along the street, and he wanted to turn and yell at them all that he hadn’t done anything wrong. This deputy was making a bad mistake.

  About halfway to the hotel from where he had left the Todd wagon, he spoke to the deputy again.

  “Let me send word out to the ranch where I work,” he said, “so they’ll know where I’m at.”

  The dusty man gave him a rude shove toward the hotel.

  “You move along, boy,” he said.

  Henry knew that something was terribly wrong, but he couldn’t think of anything he could do about it. He walked ahead of the deputy, who gave him an occasional push to maintain his pace and direction. Soon the deputy had shoved him through the front door of the hotel and, ignoring the desk and the sleepy man behind it, on up the stairs. There in the hallway before a door to one of the rooms, Hank Eaton stood, looking nervous and sheepish.

  “Mr. Eaton,” said Henry, “what …?”

  Eaton turned his head to avoid Henry’s look, but he needn’t have bothered. The deputy didn’t allow Henry to finish his question, and Henry had gotten a good enough look at Eaton to see on his long, thin face not only embarrassment, but also shame and guilt. The man obviously knew what he was doing. Henry wished that he knew. The deputy shoved Henry through the doorway into the room.

  “Get inside, boy,” he said.

  Staying out in the hall with Eaton, the deputy closed the door and locked it, leaving Henry alone and handcuffed inside the shabby hotel room. Henry stood just inside the door, feeling thoroughly bewildered and helpless, and through the door he heard the voice of the deputy.

  “You stand guard here until I get back.”

  Alone and pacing the floor, Henry had plenty of time to get over his initial bewilderment and become indignant. He knew that he had done nothing wrong. In fact, Henry Starr took pride in his strong sense of honor and of right. Though the Starrs were a mixed-blood family, the Cherokee concept of duyukduh was firm
ly ingrained in their sense of values: duyukduh—a word that the English “right” or “justice” does not begin to translate adequately. In Henry’s mind, a man who had been arrested had brought shame and humiliation not only on himself but on his family. And here he was locked in a hotel room by a deputy United States marshal and wearing handcuffs like a common criminal. He was angry and embarrassed at the same time. His original notion concerning the general worth of the white race was coming back stronger than ever.

  Henry was left a good long while to stew. It was beginning to get dark before he heard a key turn in the lock on the door. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, and he decided not to jump up and appear anxious as the deputy entered the room. He sat and glared at the man, waiting for him to make any next move. He felt almost certain that the deputy was about to make an abject apology to him and try to explain how he had made such a terrible error. He was disappointed, for the paunchy lawman said nothing to him at all. Instead, he simply walked indifferently across the room to Henry and shoved a tin plate under his nose. Henry took the plate. It had on it a hunk of sausage and a few crackers. Henry thought briefly of shoving the plate back or of tossing it to the floor, but he was hungry. The sausage was cold and greasy and the crackers were stale, but he ate them. The deputy watched without saying a word, until Henry was finished, then he walked back over to the bed, took the empty plate away from Henry, tossed it aside, and reached into his vest pocket for a key. He unlocked the cuffs from one of Henry’s wrists, and locked the other wrist to the iron bedstead. Then he went back out into the hallway, locking the door behind him once again.

  Henry wondered if the man was somehow worried that he might drag the whole bed through the doorway and thus escape. Through the door, he could hear low voices, the deputy’s and Eaton’s, he supposed, but he could not make out anything that they were saying. After a while, in spite of the circumstances, he drifted off to a fitful sleep, filled with images of criminals, lawmen, cheap hotel rooms, and dank jail cells. But worst of all, he found himself walking down the main street of town, the sidewalks on either side of him lined with people he knew, his mother and C.N., the Morrisons and Mae, Mr. Roberts, Mr. Todd, and as he walked past them, each one turned his head away in shame.

  4

  Henry slept fitfully, and he was awake the following morning early when the deputy arrived. He heard him in the hallway, kicking and talking loudly to someone, presumably Eaton.

  “Wake up,” Henry heard him say. “We got a long ride ahead of us.”

  Then Henry heard the key turn in the lock again, and soon the door opened and the deputy made his appearance. He wore the same wretched clothes he had worn the day before. Henry figured the man had slept in them. He wondered how long it had been since this white man had taken a bath. He seemed as unconcerned as ever as he brought out his key to the manacles and approached Henry.

  “Where are you taking me?” demanded Henry.

  The deputy unlocked the wrist that was fastened to the bedstead and hooked Henry’s two wrists back together.

  “The court at Fort Smith,” he said nonchalantly.

  Henry had heard of the court at Fort Smith and the famous hanging judge, Isaac Parker. He didn’t think that Judge Parker would hang him, but the knowledge of where he was being taken did put fear into his heart, and he had learned that he would get nowhere with this great clod of a man by demanding justice or by protesting his innocence, so he followed along quietly.

  Soon the three of them—Henry, the deputy, and the sleazy Eaton—were riding horseback across the prairies of the northern Cherokee Nation. Henry maintained his silence for a good, long while. He was riding on his own horse and in his own saddle, and he wondered how the deputy had obtained them, as Henry had driven into Nowata in the wagon, leaving his horse and saddle back at the Todd Ranch. Finally he could no longer contain himself.

  “I’m telling you,” he shouted as they rode along the trail, “I haven’t done anything. Mr. Eaton, what’s this all about?”

  Eaton kept his eyes straight forward. He didn’t answer. Henry thought that it appeared as if Eaton didn’t have the guts to look him in the eyes. At least that was some indication that the man had a semblance of a conscience, but Henry couldn’t figure out a motive for what Eaton was doing to him. Eaton didn’t answer, but the deputy did.

  “Listen, boy,” he said, “I don’t know what you’ve done or what you ain’t done. All I do is serve the writs. The court decides whether you’re guilty or not.”

  “How did you get my horse?” said Henry.

  “That’s all right,” said the deputy. “I got him, didn’t I?”

  Once again Henry resolved to remain silent, and he maintained that silence the rest of what seemed to him to be the longest day of his life. Eventually the deputy called a halt to the ride and made a sloppy camp beside a stream for the night. He heated up some beans over a fire that Henry thought was large enough to roast a good-sized hog over, and he gave Henry a small dab of them. He also boiled some coffee and served it around. Eaton had still refused to speak to Henry and continued to avoid his gaze. After finishing his coffee, the deputy suddenly decided to move around the fire and sit down beside Henry. He spoke with what sounded to Henry like feigned concern.

  “You ever been to Fort Smith before?” he said.

  “No.”

  “You ever been arrested?”

  “No.”

  Henry’s second negative reply was louder than the first and filled with obvious and intentional indignation. The deputy sniffed loudly and spat toward the fire. He leaned back on an elbow.

  “Look, boy,” he said, “like I told you before, I don’t know if you stole that man’s horse or not. I’m just doing my job. But I can see that you’re scared, and you got a reason to be. Young fella like you—never been in trouble before. Don’t know your way around with courts and judges and all that. Hell, you could be innocent and still wind up in jail and never know what happened to you.”

  The deputy paused to let his words soak in. He settled back even more and groaned as he did. He glanced at Henry to see if he could detect the impact of his words on the young man’s face. Seeing nothing there, he continued.

  “Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll do this much for you. When we get to Fort Smith, I’ll stop off with you at a lawyer’s office—that is, if you want me to. You’re going to need someone on your side. Especially you being Indian and all. I tell you what. I sure wouldn’t want to be going up in front of Judge Parker. No sir. Not me. Not Isaac C. Parker.”

  The deputy’s speech had made its impact on the young cowboy, though Henry had been careful not to let it show. He found himself, for the second night in a row, tired, bewildered, afraid, and unable to sleep. He supposed that he would have to let the deputy introduce him to a lawyer. What other recourse had he? He knew no one in Fort Smith, and, so far as he knew, there was no one in the world besides his two unwanted companions who knew where he was. He wondered, even if he could manage to extricate himself from this outlandish mess, whether or not he would have a job when he got back to the Todd Ranch. Guilty or innocent, he thought, it really didn’t matter much once a man had been arrested. Being in jail is no excuse for missing work.

  Once they arrived in Fort Smith, the deputy, true to his word, took Henry directly to the office of an attorney-at-law. They tied their horses to a hitching rail in front of the building, and the deputy led Henry, still manacled, into the office. It was small, cluttered, and dusty. A fat, perspiring redheaded man sat puffing a cigar behind a desk. He looked up when Henry and the deputy came into his office, and, ignoring Henry, he smiled and stood up to greet the deputy.

  “Oh, hello, Bernie,” he said.

  “Howdy, John.”

  “You look like you’ve had a hard ride,” said the lawyer, puffing smoke.

  “Not too bad,” said the deputy. “I may have a customer for you here.”

  “We call them clients, Bernie,” said the lawyer. “What did
he do?”

  “I didn’t do anything,” said Henry.

  The lawyer didn’t seem even to acknowledge Henry’s protestation, though he did rephrase his question.

  “What is he alleged to have done?”

  “He’s supposed to have stole a horse,” said the deputy.

  “Any evidence?”

  “The man that owns the horse signed a writ against him. I got it right here.”

  The deputy showed the document to the lawyer, who studied it hastily, puffing all the while.

  “Well, boy,” he said, “it appears to me that you sure do need some legal representation. You got any money?”

  Henry reached into his pocket with some difficulty because of the handcuffs and pulled out all his cash, which he dumped onto the lawyer’s desk. The fat man counted it quickly and greedily.

  “Twenty-two dollars,” he said. “Is that all you got?”

  “Every last penny,” said Henry.

  The lawyer scraped it off the desk into a fat palm and pocketed it. He looked up at the deputy.

  “Whose horse is he riding?” he asked.

  “That’s my horse,” said Henry. He was beginning to be sick of these two talking about him as if he were not even in the room.

  “It’s his,” said the deputy.

  “Well,” puffed the lawyer, looking out his office window toward the hitching rail, “he’ll fetch a few dollars. What about the saddle?”

  “It’s mine,” said Henry. “It’s nearly brand-new. I paid forty dollars for it.”

  The big redhead moved back around behind his desk and dropped with a heavy sigh into his well-worn office chair. He leaned back with a creak and puffed out great clouds of smoke.