The Lynching of Louie Sam (2 page)

“Mr. Bell!” I called again, but he wasn't budging.

The fire was traveling fast from the front room. We had to get him out of there.

“Hold your breath!” I shouted to John.

The two of us dashed inside. I suppose it paid to be brothers that day, because without having to plan it, we each grabbed hold of one of Mr. Bell's arms and dragged him out of there, like his limbs were branches on a log we were lugging to reinforce our dam. He was heavy enough that even with two of us we made slow progress toward the back door. A loud bang from the front room sent the taste of fear up from my stomach into my throat. I looked up to see burning timbers falling, and daylight where the roof used to be. I glanced at John. If he was as scared as I was, he didn't let it show. He just kept hauling Mr. Bell toward the door. I did what he did. Pretty soon we had Mr. Bell out on the grass and we were filling our lungs with good air.

John was a sight—his face streaked with grime, his Sunday clothes covered in ash and soot—and I reckon I was, too. My first thought was that Mam would have our hides for ruining our Sunday best. But that thought was chased from my head when I looked down at Mr. Bell. He still hadn't moved, and at a glance I saw the reason why—the back of his head was nothing but a bloody mess. John had gone pale. Annie and Will stood staring. Me, I felt my stomach rising. I'd chopped the head off many a chicken and watched the blood spurt, but this was different.

“What happened to him?” Annie asked, her voice high and frightened.

“Is he dead?” asked Will.

I knelt down and rolled him over. His eyes were wide open. His skin was gray against the white of his beard, and I could count what teeth he had left through his gaping mouth. The first thought that came into my head was,

“We got to fetch Doctor Thompson.”

“What the hell for?” John huffed. “Can't you see he's a goner?!”

“Don't be cursing in front of Annie,” I told him.

“He looks surprised,” she said.

“You'd be surprised, too, if your head got bashed in,” said John.

“How do you reckon it happened?” asked Will.

The three of them were looking down at Mr. Bell with unseemly curiosity, considering how recently his spirit had departed this world. I found a horse blanket on the woodpile and threw it over him.

“It's not for us to say,” I told them. “We need to fetch the sheriff.”

Chapter Two

M
R
. B
ELL'S CABIN WAS A COUPLE OF MILES
from Nooksack. John and I argued about which one of us should go for Sheriff Leckie to tell him about the violent end that had befallen Mr. Bell, and which one should stay with Annie, who had begun to blub and complain at the prospect of being left behind with a dead body.

“Stop crying,” John told her. “Nobody even liked the old coot.”

“Leave her be,” I said.

Annie buried her head in my chest, adding tears and snot to the streaks of grime on my jacket—and settling which one of us would be dispatched for the sheriff to deliver the biggest news that had ever happened in the Nooksack Valley.

“All right, you go,” I told John. “Take Will with you. And run.”

“I know to run!” John snarled back, needing the last word just like always.

The four of us walked together down the path to the trail. Annie and I watched our brothers take off at top speed toward town until they were out of sight. Now that she was a sufficient distance from the burning cabin—and from the body lying under the blanket—Annie calmed down.

“We should go home,” she said. “We should tell Father what happened.”

Mam is expecting a new baby any minute, and Father had stayed home from church to help mind Isabel, who's three. Father isn't big on churchgoing and preachers, anyway. He says he doesn't need a middleman between him and the Almighty. He's independent minded, and that's what attracted him to living in America in the first place. Mam's the one who makes us kids go to Sunday school. And she says that since we made the move to the Washington Territory, Father's taken up a little too much frontier spirit for his own good.

“We should wait here,” I told Annie. “We found the body. We're witnesses. Sheriff Leckie's going to want to talk to us.”

“John can tell him as good as you can.”

So now my little sister was arguing with me, too. I was beginning to think I did not command adequate respect from my juniors.

“You stay here,” I said, indicating a tree stump where she could sit down.

“Where are you going?”

“To investigate.”

“Investigate what?”

“To investigate what happened to poor Mr. Bell.”

“John says nobody liked him.”

“Just because a man isn't liked doesn't mean he deserved to die.”

People say Mr. Bell was strange in the head, starting with the fact that he chose for some reason to build his shack on the edge of a swamp instead of on decent farmland. Maybe that's why Mrs. Bell took their son, Jimmy, and left him. That, and because she's half the old man's age.

“Why would he deserve to die?”

“I just said he didn't!”

“You made it sound like somebody thought he did.”

“Just sit there!” I ordered, and walked away into the dogwood patch before she could squabble any further.

When I came out into the clearing, the heat from the cabin was enough to singe my hair. I gave the building a wide berth as I walked around it. The flames had pretty much eaten up the cabin inside and out and were making the leap to an open shed out back. I thought briefly about trying to save a wagon that was parked inside that shed, but the fire was moving too fast and with too much fury. As I watched the roof of the shed fall into the wagon's bed, it dawned on me: Where was Mr. Bell's horse?

“Get away from there!”

I spun around to see Mr. Osterman standing where the path opens from the dogwood into the clearing, motioning at me with his arm. Annie was standing beside him. Bill Osterman is the telegraph man for Nooksack. He is often to be seen riding the trail, checking the telegraph lines that follow it. He's barely thirty, but he's much respected hereabouts, for it's the telegraph that keeps us settlers connected with the states back east, and California to the south. I've often thought that one day I would like to be a telegraph man, like him, living in a nice house in town and not having to wake up with the cows.

“Come away from there, boy!” he yelled. “You'll be burnt as well as roasted!”

I obeyed him.

“We found Mr. Bell!” I told him, coming toward him. To my surprise, my voice cracked as I said it and my throat felt tight—as if any minute I might cry like a girl. I turned away from him while I got hold of myself, pointing to the blanket-covered body lying in the grass. “He's there.”

Mr. Osterman went over and raised the blanket only long enough to take in the situation before dropping it and backing away. He's a smart dresser compared to the farm men—maybe he didn't want to get his nice clothes dirty.

“You found him like this?” he asked. His face looked grim.

“He was inside the cabin. My brother John and I pulled him out.”

“And who might you be?”

“George Gillies, sir.”

He glanced over at Annie.

“You Peter Gillies's kids?”

“Yes, sir. We were on our way to church. John and Will went ahead to fetch Sheriff Leckie.”

He nodded. Then, “Church will still be there next Sunday. You should take your sister on home now, son. This isn't a sight for a little girl.”

Part of me knew he was right, but a bigger part of me wanted to stay put. I told him, “I have to wait for my brothers.”

“I'll wait here for them to come back with the sheriff, and I'll send them home after you.”

“I'd prefer to wait, if you don't mind.”

I don't know where I found the gumption. Mr. Osterman stared at me in surprise for a long moment. I thought he was angry, but then he let out a laugh.

“Well, Master Gillies, I can see you are a man who knows his own mind.” Then he became serious again. “Take your sister out by the trail, George. Give me a holler when you see the sheriff coming.”

I knew better than to argue with him any further. But I believed it was my duty to inform him, “His horse is gone.”

Mr. Osterman looked about Mr. Bell's narrow strip of land, at the small paddock squeezed between the dogwood and the swamp.

“So it is. Likely stolen by whoever did this to him,” he said.

“You think somebody killed him?” He didn't seem to hear me.

“Go on now,” he said. “Look after your sister.”

Annie and I waited by the trail like Mr. Osterman said. I kept my eyes fixed on the point where the trail disappeared into the woods ahead for the first sign of the sheriff. It was a mild day. The sun shone warm on my head. As the roar of the fire simmered down to the odd crackle, you could almost forget that something horrible had happened. But a picture of Mr. Bell's smashed-in head flashed into my mind.

Whoever did this to him
, Mr. Osterman had said.

Was he saying somebody had murdered Mr. Bell? If that was the case, the murderer could not be far away. It gave me the shivers just thinking about it, and made me keep a closer eye on Annie.

S
HERIFF
L
ECKIE ARRIVED ON
horseback a half hour later, without John and Will. The boys were following on foot. He had with him Bill Moultray, who runs the general store and livery stable at The Crossing, a shallow point in the Nooksack River where the Harkness ferry carries folks across. In a way, Mr. Bell was in competition with Mr. Moultray, selling provisions to the settlers, but Mr. Bell was like fly speck compared to Mr. Moultray, whose business is much bigger—supplying freight teams on the Whatcom Trail, the old gold rush route from the fifties that leads from the Washington Territory up to the Fraser River on the Canadian side of the International Border. Mr. Moultray is a big bug hereabouts, not just because he's rich, but also because he's been to Olympia many times, hobnobbing with the governor and the like.

When I saw the pair of them coming, I ran to fetch Mr. Osterman as he had bid me to do. I found him using a long stick to pick through the hot embers that were pretty near all that was left of Mr. Bell's cabin.

“It's the sheriff!” I called.

He swung around to me fast as could be with a startled look on his face.

“Didn't your pa ever teach you not to sneak up on a person?” he said.

By the time I got done apologizing and the two of us had walked back through the thicket to the trail, the sheriff and Mr. Moultray were pulling up their horses. Mr. Moultray is my father's age, not young and handsome like Mr. Osterman, but he dresses even finer—never to be seen without his gold watch hanging from his waistcoat. Beside Mr. Moultray and Mr. Osterman, Sheriff Leckie looked like a character out of the Buffalo Bill's Wild West show in his dusty hat and long coat. He talks as slow as he moves, as though he's worn out from a life spent in the saddle, facing down outlaws and Indians.

“What have we got, Bill?” asked Sheriff Leckie, climbing down from his horse.

“Looks like somebody fired a shotgun into Jim Bell's head,” replied Mr. Osterman.

Shot! Mr. Moultray looked as shocked as I was.

“Who would do such a thing to a harmless old man?” he asked, dismounting.

“I'll tell you what,” said Mr. Osterman. “I got a bad feeling I may have put Jim Bell in harm's way.”

The sheriff looked up from where he and Mr. Moultray were tying their horses off to nearby trees. His eyes went narrow.

“Why would you say that?” the sheriff asked.

Mr. Osterman glanced over at Annie and me with the same look my father gets when he wants to say something to Mam that isn't for our ears. Sheriff Leckie looked at us, too.

“You the other Gillies kids?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“You're the one who found the body?”

I'll admit I puffed up with pride to have the sheriff of Whatcom County ask me such a question.

“Yes, sir,” I replied. “I am.”

Sheriff Leckie turned to Mr. Osterman.

“Let's see what we got.”

The remains of the cabin were smoldering now and the smoke stung my eyes as we stood in the clearing. Sheriff Leckie, Mr. Osterman, and Mr. Moultray rolled Mr. Bell's body over to get a look at his bashed-in head. They knelt there for a long time in the grass, talking amongst themselves. They made Annie and me keep our distance, so it was hard to make out what they were saying, but I caught bits and pieces.

“… crazy old fool wouldn't keep a gun to defend himself …”

“… too trusting … always taking in strays …”

It was curious the way they blamed Mr. Bell for getting himself murdered. Still, I knew what they were saying. Many a time when we were passing by Mr. Bell's cabin on the way to or from school, the old man would be waiting out on the trail to offer us children a sweet or a drink of water. But there were things about him—his yellow teeth and sour breath, the smell of his unwashed clothes, the way he laughed like he had some secret joke—that made me make excuses and get my brothers and sister away as fast as I could.