15 Longarm and the Unwritten Law

Longarm knew that, strictly speaking, this was not true. But he didn't want to get into the complicated federal regulations giving the Indian Police limited authority on their own range. So as he stood there thinking hard, Ed Vernon got out that bottle some more to pour three more drinks as he said a mite uncertainly, "Quanah Parker has never tried to impose no import duty on the goods I sell to his own as well as these troops--at a fair price and modest profit. If ever a fool Indian did try to shake me down extra for the fees I already pay the government for my sutler's license, this child and all his goodies for sale would be long gone!"

Longarm said, "I'm sure the Army and the Indians already know that, Ed."

Vernon said, "I can tell you there's no Comanche police patrols along the western reservation line. That's Kiowa country, and not even Quanah can make Kiowa toe the line. They say it all goes back to when some Kiowa followed a younger and wilder Quanah up to Adobe Walls, along with some Arapaho and South Cheyenne. They say the experience made a Christian out of Quanah and disillusioned the Kiowa considerable. As the leader of the largest contingent, Quanah got to lay out the plan of attack, with the help of his private medicine man. But to make up for that he let the Kiowa under White Bear and Lone Wolf lead the charge, anxious to count COUP."

Longarm cut in. "We all know what happens when seven hundred riders charge across wide-open short grass dotted with prairie-dog holes at professional riflemen with telescope sights. If we could move it on up to the here and now, you're saying those police patrols are a sometime thing, with at least the one we rode into way closer to an open shakedown than I'd allow if I was running things."

Harry Carver shrugged and pointed out, "You told me when we first met that they'd sent you to straighten out an Indian police force. I don't see what's so mysterious about 'em needing guidance, old son."

Longarm grimaced and put a hand over his empty shot glass to decline a third shot as he said, "I'd best ask them about that in the morning then. Maybe they know something about those wild and woolly Kiowa we brushed with as well. Mean while, I reckon I'd best just sleep on it. So I'm callin' it a night if it's all the same with you gents."

Vernon simply bade him good night. But Harry Carver followed him out on the plank walk to say, "Me and my boys will be riding back to Texas tomorrow. So it's been nice meeting up with you if we don't meet for breakfast. What are you aiming to do about that kid who says he has it in for you, pard?"

Longarm said, "Nothing, the same as he figures to do about me for all his war talk. I must have missed a recent dime novel by Ned Buntline. For I met up with another such asshole in Amarillo not too many nights ago."

The grizzled train boss spat out into the darkness and opined, "There seems to be a lot of that going around since the papers first began to rank gunfighters as if they were competing athletes. Is it supposed to score higher if you beat a lawman to the draw instead of just another mean drunk?"

Longarm smiled thinly and replied, "War talk about a sober paid-up lawman is not only impressive but safer than, say, starting up with a morose cuss such as Clay Allison or Johnny Ringo. Either one would be delighted to blow you away and claim self-defense. But pests I keep bumping into seem to have boned up on what that High Dutch philosopher Nietzsche describes as the tyranny of the weak. That's the way women, servants, and hard-cases with a yellow streak get to sound off against gents they don't really want a fair fight with. A snotty schoolboy's safer sticking his tongue out at the teacher than the schoolyard bully. An armed and dangerous drunk in Dodge is safer challenging a sober lawman than another mean drunk. Neither that kid acting big in Amarillo a few nights ago nor this Quirt McQueen here on a dry army post really expected a grown man to slap leather on 'em just for acting like fool kids!"

Harry Carver thought, shrugged, and decided, "You must be right. I'd doubtless pistol-whup either one of the little shits if they was to talk like that about me!"

Longarm didn't want to go into all the bother it was after you got into a gunfight and won. He yawned on purpose and allowed he had to get a few winks before he rode over to the main Comanche agency in the morning. So they shook on it and parted friendly.

Longarm strode into the guest hostel to find nobody at the key desk. He didn't care whether the orderly had ducked out to take a crap or lit out for the night. He had his own key in a side pocket of his frock coat. So he just went on up to the top floor.

He found the hall dark, with the wall lamps trimmed or never lit that evening. As he groped his way along the doorways in the gloom, he decided someone had deliberately doused the lights. For someone was sure carrying on behind more than one door, and the place had been nearly empty when he'd arrived around sundown. He was paid to be nosey and would have been curious in any case. So he prowled about before he made for his own door. Moving quietly and listening sharp, he could tell almost every guest room seemed to be occupied, if not by a sudden influx of guests, then by couples who'd beaten him down here from that officers' club dance. He heard what sounded like male and female gaspings, male and male gaspings, and at least one set of female and female gaspings. It was small wonder someone had paid that desk clerk, or simply ordered him, to take the rest of the evening off!

When he got to his own room, he felt annoyed at himself for having taken that desk clerk for granted. Longarm had long made a habit, in strange hotels, of rigging a match stem in the crack of a locked door to warn him if it had been unlocked in his absence. But earlier that evening, anxious to make it to supper and unaware of that war talk about him on a damned old army post, for Pete's sake, Longarm had simply locked up and gone on about his business.

There was nothing he could do now but draw his.44-40 before, feeling like an old maid peering under her fool bed, he unlocked the damned door with his free hand and stepped into the darkness to slide swiftly along the wall as he kicked the door shut after himself.

He'd have shot the figure reclining across the room for sure if she hadn't giggled girlishly and whispered, "Where on earth have you been all this time? I was about to start without you, you slowpoke!"

Longarm laughed weakly with relief and whispered back, "Don't ever scare me like that again, honey. I figured you were gone and lost forever, like My Darling Clementine."

She started to ask who Clementine was, then giggled some more as she heard the distinctive sounds of a man undressing in the dark as fast as he knew how. As he hung his six-gun handy near the head of the bed, she started to explain why she was there instead of in her own quarters. But Longarm hushed her with, "Don't spoil the magic by excusing the feelings of a healthy young gal. I'll allow I felt a mite confused up the line at the dance tonight. But if you don't confuse me no more right now, we'll worry about the cold gray dawn when it gets here, agreed?"

She whispered, "Ooh, I was hoping you'd see it my way, you animal!"

So Longarm got rid of the last of his duds, and slid under the bed covers to find she was stark naked as well. He threw the fool covers down, lest they overheat, as he took her smooth nude body in his arms and hugged her tight for a welcome-home kiss.

Then, even though he went on kissing her, being only human, Longarm stiffened in surprise as it came to him that, whoever she might be, she couldn't be Godiva Weaver of the New England Sentinel!

The only other obvious suspect didn't work either. For the naked gal in his arms was neither as willowy as Godiva nor as short and plump as the colonel's lady. She was a gal of average height with a firm but junoesque figure. One suspected she hourglassed even better with a corset on. From the way she grabbed for his old organ-grinder with a skilled and friendly touch, one doubted she could have been one of the younger wallflowers looking so neglected at the dance earlier. That meant, no matter how you sliced it, he was in bed with some officer's lady and already stiff as a damned poker, with her cocking one long leg across him and crooning, "Ooh, is all this I have in my hand for little old me?"

It sure seemed to be as Longarm, seeing he was damned if he did and damned if he didn't, allowed her to impale her warm wet self on his raging erection, moaning, "Oh, yesss! You're everything they said you were and, praise the Lord, I knew I'd get to do it at least once with a real man before I died."

There was only one way a gent could respond to such a flattering lady. But when he rolled her on her back and spread her long legs with an elbow hooked under either of her knees, she sobbed, "Oh, not too deep! Give a girl a chance to get used to all this! I've only been married to a mortal human long enough to sense I was missing something, and to be frank, the few times I've done this with someone else, I've been bitterly disappointed!"

Longarm had to move faster in her to keep from going soft as he growled, "I thought I asked you not to spoil the magic. I don't want to share this moment with other men. But since you brought it up, I can't help feeling curious about this they you were jawing with about my physical endowments. I don't recall disclosing them to any of you Fort Sill ladies."

She wrapped her long legs around his waist and purred, "That's where you're wrong, you naughty tomcat. When Elvira Howard came in to tell us you'd broken up with that newspaper woman, a certain member of our little group who used to be somebody else in Denver volunteered how sweet you were when she told you she'd gotten the chance to marry a certain cavalry john."

Longarm thought back and silently nodded as that meshed with what had once been a henna-rinsed barmaid who'd doubtless changed some in the past few summers. Since this one dismissed a lieutenant as a john, it was safe to assume her man was at least a captain.

That was all he needed, after being sent all this way to avoid a showdown with a coal miner over a wife he'd never trifled with. He told himself this was as far as he wanted to go with any fool captain's wife, but then they were coming and, try as one might, it was tough to keep from saying stupid things and making empty promises while you pounded the rolicking rump of the most beautiful gal in the universe against the rosy clouds of heaven with a host of angels singing dirty to the both of you. He realized he'd been humming in time with their humping when she began to croon in his ear, to the same frisky tune:

Oh, some folk'l say he is a knave, Some folk say he can't behave, He screwed a virgin to her grave, With that old organ-grinder!

Then she pleaded for him to screw her to death because she was coming some more, and so he did his best until, as all good things must, it ended for now in a great gasping shudder of painful pleasure and they just floated down from the stars like thistledown, too satisfied to say anything until, still soaking in her, he asked her if she smoked.

She murmured, "I dip snuff too. But I don't want you to strike a match, darling. I've been thinking about what you said about magic."

He kissed her soft throat and gently protested, "That's not fair. You tracked me down to commit premeditated fornication knowing all my secrets, and I don't know your name or even what you look like!"

She kissed him back and moved her hips languidly as she murmured, "Just think of me as your fairy godmother, you good little boy. I'm not sure I'm ready to tell you who I really used to be. I'm afraid you may have just turned me into somebody else."

He said he didn't follow her drift.

She hugged him tighter with her crossed legs and softly told him she wasn't certain what she meant either. Then, before he could ask or she could explain further, some other gal was screaming fit to bust and all hell seemed to be busting loose out in the hall!

Longarm rolled from between her bare legs to land on his bare feet between the bedstead and one window. As he peered out into a mess of swirling gloom his mysterious visitor hissed, "Come back here and don't get into it! It sounds as if they're fighting over some other army wife, and it's not as if anyone will be looking for this one, darling!"

But Longarm was already hauling on his pants as he told her, "I wouldn't bet any eating money on that. I'm a peace officer, and at least a dozen others are disturbing the peace considerably right outside that hardwood door!"

As if to prove his point, something at least as large and solid as a human head thunked against the far side of the door, followed by an anguished moan of, "Take it easy, for Gawd's sake! You know I can't hit back, you crazy old goat! And I haven't done a thing a lot of your other junior officers haven't done, damn it!"

Then the brawl rolled down the hall in a series of loud thuds as Longarm shucked into his shirt, pinned his badge to the front of it, and strapped on his six-gun, muttering, "Bolt the door after me and don't open up to another soul, hear?"

She started to protest as, somewhere in the night, a voice rang out, "Corporal of the Guard! Post Number Nine and all is not well by a long shot!"

Knowing the military police were surely on the way, the half-dressed federal deputy stepped out in the hall to spy other guests gaping at nothing much. The action had apparently spilled down the stairs while he was getting up.

He moved down the stairs in his bare feet, his.44-40 undrawn on his left hip as he eased in on all those loud voices ahead. A voice of authority had just assured one and all that it was in full charge. But a sardonic Irish brogue replied, "Faith, and begging the major's pardon, me darling, general orders say that after Guard Mount and until I've been relieved as Corporal of the Guard, I'm to be after taking orders from the Sergeant of the Guard, the Officer of the Day, and nobody else, with the possible exception of the Regimental C.O. I forgot to ask about that. But sure and since you can't be any of the officers just described, I'll be placing you under arrest, sir. By this time Longarm had moved down far enough to take in the sad scene. A muscular stark-naked man reclined on his rump in a far corner, covered with bruises and bleeding from the nose and mouth as a half-dressed fellow officer tried to help him with a damp kerchief. The obvious Corporal of the Guard and two other enlisted members of his interior guard had a little old gray-haired and fully dressed major against the lobby desk. He seemed twice as mad and three times as confused as a gamecock caught by one leg in a rat trap. When the Irish noncom spotted Longarm and his badge, he nodded and told him, "The O.D. told us you'd checked in here and ordered us to keep an eye on you. So who might you have slept with after that dance, and what's the story about you and that darling Quirt McQueen?"

Longarm laughed lightly and replied, "I can promise you that shotgun messenger never walked this child home from any dance. I take it these other gentlemen were fighting over somebody else just now?"

The corporal shrugged and said, "I ordered one of me boyos to sneak her out the back and escort her home for now. It will be up to the colonel to decide whether she and the major here still have a home on this post."

The elderly field-grade officer protested, "See here! I was the one who was wronged by that smooth-talking Casanova I had every right to shoot down like a dog!" Whirling on the younger man still bleeding in the corner, the outraged major half sobbed, "You know you deserve to die, don't you, Chalmers! My Meg and me had been married for nearly fifteen years, and you spoiled it all for a few moments of lust, you two-faced hound!" The battered lover looked up and snorted impatiently, "Aw, shove a sock in it, you old fool! Your precious Meg has been giving it away since the two of you hit this post, if not before, and I only did my duty by taking pity on an aging beauty who was begging for some!"

The poor old major tried to go for his jeering junior officer. But the others stopped him and Longarm, seeing his own services weren't needed, eased back up the stairs, muttering to himself about beauties of any age who got poor weak-willed men in trouble. Then he felt a whole lot worse about them as he saw that room clerk and a couple of the interior guardsmen had lit up the hall to fling open each and every damned door along the damned hall!

Pasting a self-assured smile across his own face, Longarm strode to join them, trying in vain to come up with a damned good story in a damned short time as, sure enough, the fool clerk was opening the door he'd told that fairy godmother to bolt on the inside!

But as he joined them, the clerk just nodded at him and explained, "The Corporal of the Guard said to check every room, Deputy Long."

Longarm gravely allowed that he understood. His fairy godmother, like all the others, had obviously slipped into her duds and down the back way with a skill born of some practice.

As he bade the enlisted men good night and shut the door after them, he couldn't help feeling a mite tense about his fairy godmother's married name.

For that damned unwritten law could be a bitch when a man knew who might be gunning for him. He was going to feel dumb as hell if he'd come all this way to avoid one jealous husband, only to be totally surprised by some outraged total stranger!

CHAPTER 11

After a breakfast of bacon and flapjacks with butter and sorghum molasses, Longarm went across to the stables to see about getting to that Comanche Agency. The livery ponies he'd hired in Spanish Flats had been ridden some since then. So he asked the remount sergeant to lend him a cavalry mount that could use the exercise. The sergeant showed him a big gray gelding they kept as a spare for their mounted band. Cavalry bandsmen always rode grays, and doubled in battle as litter bearers. Nobody had ever explained the part about gray mounts to Longarm's satisfaction.

When he got his hired stock saddle from the tack room and cinched it up, he could see the critter stood close to sixteen hands high and had the barrel chest of a serious traveler. They told him the brute was called Gray Skies. Longarm didn't know why until he'd mounted up, fortunately inside the paddock, and suddenly found out what all those soldiers blue had been grinning about.

But he stayed on, cheating some by hanging on to the horn and locking his denim-clad calves against the gelding's big shoulders in a way few could have managed in cavalry stirrups with more natural legs. So after he'd settled down to sullen crow-hops, Longarm tore off his Stetson to whip Gray Skies across the eyes with it, yelling, "Powder River and let her buck! You call this big fat puppy dog a horse?"

So, seeing the joke was on him, Gray Skies decided to be a sport about it, and they rode off across Flipper's Ditch as pals, or at a more sedate trot leastways.

They'd told him the Indian village he was looking for was better than a half hour ride. So he didn't slow down to take in the shantytown between. There seemed to be fewer Indians and more colored folks than you usually saw around Western military posts. The Tenth Cavalry was likely expected back once the current Apache scare wound down. It was none of his beeswax how any army men spent their free time. It hadn't even been his own notion to help that army wife enjoy herself the night before, blast her devious ways and wasn't it a shame they'd had to quit so early.

He hadn't ridden far across the prairie out the far side of the ragged-ass settlement before he heard a whip crack behind him and turned in the saddle to spy that B.I.A. ambulance, or light-sprung cross between a surrey and a covered wagon, following him down the ruts at a good clip.

Not wanting to be taken as a kid who raced with wagons, Longarm reined off the trail and sat his big gray on a slight rise to watch them tear on for Fort Smith. As they got closer he saw they had the canvas cover rolled halfway up on its hoops to let him see the passengers seated between the load in back and the jehu and shotgun messenger up front. They were going like hell and bouncing pretty good behind the full six-mule team. Neither Godiva Weaver nor the pouty kid up front with that Greener Ten-Gauge seemed to notice him as they passed. But the buckskin-clad Fred Ryan waved. So Longarm waved back.

He rode on through the settling dust of their passage, trying to compare the gyrating pussies of two different gals in his mind, even as he wondered why that seemed so tough. He'd long since noticed how easy it was to recall the ones who'd got away, or the very few who'd been really bad in bed. But it seemed to be the great lays a man got mixed up in his fool head. Sometimes he wondered if that might not be the reason some few gals just lay there like a side of beef. They just wanted to be remembered.

The grass all around had grown higher than one saw around Denver by the time it dried out and went dormant but still nourishing in the midsummer sun. For they were just east of the old Chisholm Trail and hence on what the grass professors called the mid-grass prairies. They meant the almost-perfect zone for growing winter wheat or beef, with neither too little nor too much rain. He could only imagine how the buffalo might have roamed before they'd been shot off this far east. He could see how the Indians had felt when they'd all wound up on the shorter grass of the Texas Panhandle and the hide shooters had still kept at it.

The Indians suspected, and Longarm knew, some of what passed for a heap of yahoo butchery had been deliberate government policy. Or at least the policy of General Phil Sheridan's pals in Congress. The old war hero and Indian fighter had only been half joshing when he'd told Congress they ought to issue a medal showing a buffalo hunter on one side and a surrendering Indian on the other.

Longarm couldn't help feeling sorry for both the buffalo and the Indians. But having done his share of scouting, he had to admit life on the High Plains could be more healthy when you didn't see as many of either coming over the skyline at you.

He topped a gentle rise to spy a dozen head of those longhorns he'd accompanied north from the Red River. A couple of Indian kids dressed like feathery cowhands were drifting them down the grassy draw as if to move them further from the traveled trace and yet another sudden surprise. Cows on unfamiliar range could spook and go tearing off a day's ride when somebody snapped his fingers at them the wrong way.

Longarm waved casually to the distant Comanche, and they waved back in as relaxed a manner. But it was too early to tell whether the B.I.A. and Quanah Parker were going to turn the most dangerous horsemen on the High Plains into peaceable stockmen or farmers.

In the meantime, the way they'd been acting seemed a welcome change from the way Comanche could act if they put their minds to it. They said that in his wilder days Quanah had adopted a colored deserter, a bugler from the Tenth Cav, who'd taught the Comanche Warrior Lodge what all the bugle calls meant the soldiers were fixing to do next. On occasion the runaway bugle boy had confounded the hell out of army columns by tooting contrary orders at them.

Longarm spied a white church steeple ahead. He let Gray Skies trot faster, assuming the big gray had been out this way before and knew there was shade and water in the offing. Horses were neither smarter nor dumber than cows. They saw their world different. The way Comanche, or at least Quanah Parker, seemed to grasp the good and bad points of the Saltu path.

As he rode on toward the cluster of frame structures, whitewashed in the middle but with unpainted siding further out, Longarm reflected on other nations who spoke related dialects and tended to think of themselves as simply Ho, or Real People. As he did so he decided Quanah deserved some credit for speeding things along, but there was something about the bandy-legged and big-headed breed that made them quicker to catch on to new inventions than some others, red or white.

Those professors who studied ancient Indians all agreed the Uto-Aztec-speaking variety had originated as ragged-ass digger tribes in the Great Basin between the Rockies and the High Sierras. A mess of Desert Paiute still lived that way, if one wanted to call a steady diet of pine nuts and jackrabbit living.

Yet close kinsmen wandering south into the Pueblo country had seen the advantages of apartment houses and farming at a glance, and turned themselves overnight into Pueblos just as advanced as, say, the Zuni or Tanoan. They called themselves Hopi, and were easy to get along with as long as you didn't start anything.

Other poor raggedy bastards speaking the same lingo had gone on down to Mexico to turn into the highly civilized but mighty cruel Aztec as soon as they'd gotten the Toltec to show them how you really built a pueblo.

Some held there was a mean streak in all the related Ho nations. But Longarm wasn't so sure. He'd found Hopi decent enough and Papago downright gentle, for folks who'd licked the Chificahua more than once. So it was up for grabs whether the recent terrors of the Texas plains were going to take one fork in the trail or another.

It was those morose Kiowa he was most concerned about at the moment. So he heeled Gray Skies into a lope and tore into the Comanche agency to the delight of a heap of kids and dogs. The shaggy yellow dogs had long since learned not to actually bite as they snarled and snapped around a big gray's hooves. Gray Skies knew they were only funning as well. Longarm had never decided whether Indian kids missed by accident or on purpose as they tried to assassinate a visiting white man with bird arrows and horse apples. But he knew they seldom hit you. So he just kept riding for the flagpole in the center of things, and sure enough, a sign informed him the two-story frame house across from the church and school house was where he wanted to get started.

As he reined in, an older and skinnier white man came out on the porch while a middle-aged Indian lady in a print house dress shyly watched from the doorway.

As Longarm dismounted, the Indian agent barked something in the Comanche dialect and a kid who'd been winding up to throw a horse apple ran over, grinning, to take charge of Gray Skies for their distinguished guest. Longarm hung on to the Yellowboy saddle gun, having been a kid once himself.

As he joined the older couple on the porch, the agent said to call him Conway. He explained he already knew who Longarm was because the mail ambulance had just passed through and Fred Ryan had told them to expect him. He added, Fred said you and a newspaper lady with him had brushed with Black Legging Kiowa. Makes no sense, but come on in and we'll talk about it."

He hadn't introduced the Indian woman. As they entered the combined front parlor and reception room, she seemed to be tearing out the back door, as if she was shy as hell or going somewhere else.

Longarm didn't comment. He knew some called gents like Conway "squaw men," while others considered them only practical. He'd just come from a government installation where white men stuck way out in Indian country were trying to get white women to go along with the unusual conditions.

Conway waved him to a seat on a hardwood bench designed not to stain too easily, and got a bottle from a filing cabinet as Longarm brought him up to date as tersely as he knew how. Conway poured two tumblers of clear corn liquor, and handed one to Longarm as he perched his own lean rump on a three-legged stool, saying, "I just sent for Sergeant Tikano. He'd know better than me about them reservation police. Quanah left his own boys in command whilst he's gone."

Longarm sipped gingerly at the moonshine, and asked the agent just where the chief might be, doing what.

Conway shrugged and replied, "Try getting a straight answer out of a poker-faced breed who braids his hair and figures long division in his head. He said he was going across the headwaters of Wildhorse Creek to see about leasing some grazing rights to some kissing cousins on his mamma's side. I don't recall him ever telling his half-assed police to collect any passage or grazing fees for him."

This turned out to be the simple truth when they were joined a few minutes later by a blue-uniformed Indian who'd have been a giant, if his arms and legs had been proportioned like those of a white man. A lot of Comanche seemed to be built that way. But Sergeant Tikano overdid it a mite with his barrel chest and big moon face.

Conway didn't pour the Indian a drink. Tikano simply went over to that filing cabinet and helped himself. Federal regulations forbade a white man to serve hard liquor to a ward of the government. But no lawman, red or white, was supposed to take a glass out of an Indian's fool hand.

Conway repeated what Longarm had said, in a rapid-fire mixture of English and Comanche, as the big Indian sat down on the bench next to their visitor. The sergeant took a solid swig, grimaced, and declared in no uncertain terms, "No Kwahadi Comanche would call himself a sheep of any color. I think he was trying to have fun with you. A Kwahadi who spoke your Saltu tongue that well would have heard what your people mean by a black sheep."

Longarm nodded and said, "Makes sense. Might one of your police officers by any name be authorized to collect tribal fees for the rest of you?"

The Indian flatly answered, "Chief Quanah takes the money from Saltu he does business with and puts it in a Texas bank to have litters. I don't know how this puha is sung, but it works well and Quanah buys good things with some of the money while the rest keeps breeding for us in that big iron box!"

Conway cut in. "We've looked into Quanah's business dealings, and it sure beats all how sharp as well as honest that wily breed has got since last he lifted hair! He sort of plays both ends against the middle, now that he's been accepted by quality folk of both his momma and pappa's complexions."

Longarm didn't want to get into how some Hopi had taken to oil lamps and buckboards without giving up their blue corn or Katchina religious notions. So he said, "Be that as it may, I can see why your chief sent for me if nobody can say where a particular police patrol is supposed to be, or who'd be leading it! You got a whole heap of range to police, Sergeant Tikano. Don't you have, say, a wall chart divided into numbered beats for your boys to ride?"

The Indian and his agent exchanged puzzled looks. Longarm nodded and said, "I'm commencing to see what I'm doing here. Might you at least have a table of organization?"

When that didn't work he tried, "A list of riders signed up to draw government wages as nominal peace officers?"

It was the agent who brightened and said, "Oh, sure, I'm the one who pays them extra on allotment day. We have us a force of about two dozen so far."

Longarm frowned and observed, "That's hardly enough to patrol a reserve bigger than some eastern states!"

Tikano shrugged in resignation and explained, "We haven't been able to get many to join. The others laugh and refuse to obey when they see a Real Person dressed as a Saitu. Quanah says we are not to beat anyone just for laughing at us. We can only use force if we see them doing a really bad thing, but of course, nobody does anything bad when one of us is around."

He sipped more corn and continued. "In our Shining Times our old ones made laws. But they were not the laws the Great Father expects us to follow today. When young men were appointed to make everyone obey the rules that had to be obeyed, they were not the same lawmen every day. One group would be appointed to keep order during the hunts for Kutsu, I mean the Buffalo, while others would keep order in camp during the New Women dances. Nobody made others behave long enough to make a lot of people cross with him, and as I said, our old laws were not the new laws. In our Shining Times it was very important that a hunter who had hunted well would share his meat with others. Whether he slept with one woman, two women, or another man was between him and Taiowa, the one you Saitu call Holy Ghost. Our new police force would have more respect if we were allowed to take away the ponies of a man who refused to help a neighbor, instead of locking up the neighbor when he helped himself!"

Longarm finished his drink, silently declined another, and got out three smokes as he quietly said, "Nobody's asked me to write a Comanche civil or criminal code, praise the Lord. I'd best wait until Quanah returns before I set out to overhaul your whole setup. What can you tell me about them Black Leggings Kiowa, and how do you cotton to the notion of them working in cahoots with at least one dishonest Comanche patrol leader? That mysterious bunch wearing paint only hit us after I'd identified myself to old Tuka Wa Pombi and told him I'd soon be having this very conversation with you gents."

Sergeant Tikano didn't like it at all. He said, "There are other Kiowa closer, but the elder who keeps the puha bundles of their Black Leggings would be old Necomi, camped this time of the year a half day's ride to the northwest in the Wichita Hills. I'll send a rider over to see what he has to say for himself. But I don't think he will want to tell us much, whether he knows anything or not."

But Longarm said, "I'd as soon ride over for a word with him my ownself, seeing the Kiowa seem to resent you and your own riders and, no offense, I've been questioning witnesses longer."

The white agent protested, "Necomi won't tell you shit! He hates us white folks to a man, and lies to other Indians when the truth is in his favor!"

Longarm smiled thinly and replied, "That's what I meant about my being more experienced. Most of the suspects I question hate my guts and lie like rugs. But when you know how to deal the right questions to a poker-faced liar, it's surprising what you can get him to tell you."

Sergeant Tikano snorted impatiently. "The two of you are buzzing in my ear like flies above a pile of shit. Necomi doesn't speak a word of Saltu. Do you speak Kiowa, Great Saltu Lawman?"

Longarm grinned sheepishly and replied, "I talk sign well enough to get by."

The Indian said, "Hear me, if you ride alone into Necomi's tipi ring you will want to keep both hands free to slap leather at all times. Agent Jed speaks straight about Necomi. He looks down upon anyone who is not a Black Legging Warrior and saves up his hate, as the red ant saves up grasshopper legs, for you people! I don't think you want to ride over there right after putting three Black Leggings on the ground!"

Longarm got to his feet with a grimace to hand out the cheroots as he explained, "If I only had to do what I wanted to do, I'd be overpaid for pursuing wine, women, and song.

In the meanwhile I see no way to ask Quanah Parker what he wants me to do with his police force until he gets back, and by that time, I ought to be able to make it to the Wichita Hills and back, so..."

"If you ride in alone they will kill you and say you were never there," Sergeant Tikano told him with a scowl. Then he brightened and decided, "I don't think even Necomi would kill a woman of Quanah's own band, and you will need someone with you who can speak for you in Kiowa!"

Longarm struck a match to light up the three of them before it went out--that was considered good luck in cow camps--and asked, "A Kiowa lady belonging to your Comanche band?"

The Indian nodded and offered to explain along the way. Jed Conway blinked and demanded, "Hold on. You don't mean little Matty Gordon, do you?"

The Indian just shrugged, asked who else they had to trans late for Longarm, and led the tall deputy outside, pointing past the church and schoolhouse while explaining, "Yaduka Gordon is a halfbreed like our Quanah. He married a Kiowa woman called Aho when we used to feast with them after the fall hunts. They have a daughter he calls Matty because he speaks no Kiowa. Her Kiowa mother named her something as tongue-twisting as Matawnkiha because Kiowa talk funny. I think it means something like Growing Daughter in her mother's tongue. But it means nothing in our own."

They started walking as the Indian went on. "Growing up among Ho, the girl naturally speaks both her father and mother's tongues, along with your own. Quanah has made all our children go to the B.I.A. school so that none of you Saltu will be able to laugh at them or take any advantage of them in times to come."

Longarm nodded soberly and said, "Jeb Conway just allowed your chief was smart. Whatever happened to that colored army deserter he had blowing bugle calls for you all over by the Palo Duro that time?"

The erstwhile hostile shrugged and said, "I never saw him after the blue sleeves found our last good hideout. No Saltu were supposed to know about that secret canyon in the Texas Panhandle. Our Tonkawa enemies told your Star Chief Sherman where we hid among the berry trees in the depths of that big well-watered canyon."

Longarm was almost sorry he'd asked as the Indian went on. "They marched against us from every direction, with repeating rifles and breech-loading field guns. There was Star Chief Miles from Fort Dodge. Three Fingers Mackenzie marched up from Fort Concho with many soldiers. Many. Yellow Leaf Chief Price came at us out of New Mexico. Eagle Chiefs Davidson and Buell marched whole regiments at us out of Fort Sill and Fort Richardson. And you ask me what happened to one man?"

He pointed at an unpainted but neatly kept cabin and said, "That is where we are going. Hear me, those blue sleeves swarmed over us like red ants over a dead rabbit. They burned our lodges and destroyed all our winter food. They rounded up most of our ponies and then they shot them, shot them, until even the buzzards were too sick of dead meat to eat any more. Wherever we tried to make a stand they threw canister and exploding shells into us. Those of us who lived were the ones who ran away. Hear me, I admit this. We ran like rabbits run from Old Coyote, for the same reasons. It was Quanah who led us from the death trap of Palo Duro and made us feel like men again because he rode into Fort Sill ahead of us and told the blue sleeves we would right on forever if they didn't treat us right!"

That wasn't the way Longarm had heard it. But he didn't argue the point. It was just as likely the newspaper accounts of a discouraged and starving Comanche chief, pleading for his life and something to eat as they held him and his kin in the Fort Sill guardhouse for a spell, were a slight exaggeration as well. For either way, Quanah had gotten better terms for his followers, and himself, than many another hostile had managed in as tight a spot.

The harder row to hoe was going to be getting both sides to stick to them. Even the older kids had to have awful memories of blood and slaughter followed by sheer starvation on the run. Then there were all those white folks with bitter memories of Comanche war whoops and mutilated kith and kin. Sergeant Tikano broke in on his thoughts by calling out to the house as they crossed the swept dirt yard. An older gal in red Mother Hubbard, who might have been leaner and prettier sometime back, popped out the front door like a big old cuckoo-clock bird to fuss at them in their own chirpy lingo. The Indian lawman replied in English, "I think we should all speak Saltu, Umbea Aho. This is a friend of Quanah's. We call him Saltu Ka Saltu in our own tongue and Longarm in his own. We know your man is with Quanah to help him sell grazing rights. For some reason older pure-bloods make our old enemies scowl. We've come to talk to you about your daughter, Matty. Longarm has to ask old Necomi questions, and we thought Matty could help because she speaks Kiowa as well as Saltu."

The motherly Aho gasped, "My Matawnkiha is only Sixteen summers grown! She has been initiated into the Real Women's Lodge, but she has never lain with a man and Necomi's summer camp is far, very far. How can you expect a mother to send her only daughter off with this big Saltu? I don't care how you or Quanah feel about him. My Matawnkiha is too young for him!" As if to prove her point, they were joined in the dirt yard by a petite belle of any harvest dance, and as soon as she giggled up at him, Longarm had to concede her mother had a point. Matawnkiha or Matty Gordon looked more like a lovely twelve-year-old than the sixteen years she doubtless bragged upon. Her mixture of races made her look a tad more Border Mexican than Quill Indian. She had her shiny black hair bound with red ribbon and flung over one bare shoulder. The rest of her petite body was covered, sort of, by thin white flour sacking, stitched together as a shin-length summer shift and cinched around her tiny waist by a beadwork belt. Longarm knew that the beadwork was Kiowa because it tried for a floral design on that dark background. Comanche beadwork was almost always angular and abstract, to a stranger's eyes, against a white background.

But the kid's moccasins were traditional Comanche, too big for her tiny feet, with a bundle of buckskin thongs sprouting from the heels where a white rider might wear spurs.

Longarm knew she wasn't a Comanche raider out to blur his own trail by dragging thongs across his footprints. So it was safe to assume the little gal had her daddy's old slippers on.

Matawnkiha had obviously heard part of the conversation before coming out to join it. You could hear the pleading tone in her voice as she spoke to her mother in what had to be Kiowa. Longarm could pick up on a few words of the far-flung Uto-Aztec dialects such as Comanche, Shoshoni, or Ute. But it was small wonder the Kiowa had invented the sign lingo of the plains nations. Some said it was related to one of the several Pueblo dialects. But otherwise Kiowa seemed to be orphans.

Whether to be polite or just avoid cussing in Kiowa, the outraged Aho Gordon wailed in English, "Hear me! I never raised you to be just another play for the Taibo! Is that what you want? Is that why your father and I ate lean cow meat so you could go to that school and learn to read and write?"

Longarm started to assure the lady he wasn't a damned cradle-snatcher. But little Matawnkiha showed she'd been paying attention in class by bursting out in Kiowa some more, in a way that made her worried mother's jaw drop, even as you cou d see some of her resolve fading. Longarm quietly asked Sergeant Tikano what was going on. The Indian muttered, "How should I know? I told you why you'd need someone like her to get through to old Necomi. Why do you Saltu think all of us speak one tongue grunting like pigs?"

The younger Indian girl kicked off her dad's floppy moccasins and scampered off across the yard barefooted as her mother turned to them and said, "She has gone to see if the agency school teacher, Minerva Cranston, wants to ride with YOU."

Longarm frowned uncertainly and asked, "You have an agency schoolmarm who speaks Kiowa, ma'am?"

The erstwhile Kiowa woman snorted, "Of course not. She is Saltu. But my daughter and the other young people say she is very strict when school is open during the cooler moons. She will not allow the young men to pinch the girls or pull their hair, even when they laugh about it. So I don't think Minerva Cranston would let you screw Matawnkiha when the three of you made camp so far from me. I think we should go inside and have some coffee and fresh pastry now. My husband's father was a Saltu trader, and I only feel cross with Saltu who want to screw my daughter. Now that I don't think you can, I don't want to stab either one of you anymore."

She proved her good intent by taking them inside, seating them both at a table near her kitchen range, and serving huge mugs of coffee and big servings of what seemed to be pies stuffed with blackberries imbedded in beef hash. Sergeant Tikano was watching to see what Longarm would do about that. But Longarm had been invited inside by Horse Indians before, and decided their home cooking was best described as unusual instead of downright awful.

Her coffee was good. Longarm liked his coffee black. So that got around the common Indian notion that white flour was better than cream and sugar in their coffee. For that was really an acquired taste.

By the time they'd polished off the greasy pie and second cups of coffee the daughter of the house was back with a taller, far thinner, and far more severe-looking white gal. She didn't seem to find Longarm all that delightful either.

Minerva Cranston wore her mouse-colored hair in a bun. Her pale face was not really ugly but sort of plain. The wire-rimmed specs she had on sort of hid her best feature, a pair of intelligent-looking gray eyes. Longarm figured she'd been fixing to go riding. She'd put on a practical split skirt of suede leather and a hickory work shirt a size too big to tell a man what sort of tits she might have.

Her Spanish hat hung down her back on a braided thong around her slender throat. Her Justin boots were cut sort of Border Mexican as well. That didn't mean she couldn't be fresh from the East. Thanks to Ned Buntline's dime novels, everybody knew, or thought they knew, the way folks were supposed to dress out this way.

He figured she was close to his own age, and he knew he'd been all over. So instead of asking her where she came from as they shook hands, he asked how come she wanted to go visit those Quill Kiowa. He felt he had to warn both ladies of the possible danger, pointing out he was only out to question the Kiowa about hostile Kiowa because he'd run into some.

He felt no call to mention other ladies once he'd told them more than one Black Legging had gone down.

Little Matawnkiha was already behind a curtain, changing into her own riding duds, as Minerva Cranston went into a dry dissertation on the book she was writing about Indians.

Longarm didn't care. He didn't cotton to the notion of riding into a possibly hostile camp with one female to worry about, let alone two! But since it seemed the only way he might get a thing out of the leader of the Black Leggings Lodge, all he could do was ask Sergeant Tikano about the internal riding stock this loco expedition was going to require.

CHAPTER 12

Ouachita, Washita, and Wichita were just different spellings for a nation that wasn't there anymore. Early white travelers had met up with them as tattood hoe farmers growing corn, beans, squash, and such on prairie bottomlands from the Arkansas River to the Red. Then less-settled wanderers had learned to chase buffalo, and everybody else, on horseback. So the surviving Wichita had run off to join their much more warlike Pawnee cousins up Nebraska way, where they'd become the Pawnee Picts, leaving a heap of handy place names for rivers, towns, and such where they'd lived much earlier.

The Wichita Mountains northwest of Fort Sill would have only been hardwood-timbered rises if they hadn't been surrounded by so much flatter prairie. But they offered summer shade and winter windbreaks at a fair distance from the well-meaning Kiowa agents up around Akota, and so Longarm wasn't surprised to see tipi smoke rising against the golden western sky as he, the two gals, and five ponies topped another grassy rise after one tedious afternoon in the saddle.

Little Matty, as both whites had taken to calling her, had turned out more childlike and bossy than expected. Minerva Cranston spoke no Kiowa, nor more than a few basic words of Comanche-Ho. So Longarm was able to follow the nasty comments and snide suggestions Matty was offering as the two of them rode a few lengths behind him. He could tell the prim-faced schoolmarm didn't want to be teased like that. So he refrained from telling either just how safe they were from a full-grown man, for Pete's sake.

As they got within a tough rifle shot of the ring of tipis on a rise, an old maniac in a crow feather cloak with his face painted red and black came tearing toward them on foot, followed by a mess of kids and dogs, to shake a turtle-shell rattle at them and sound off like a jackrabbit caught in a bobwire fence.

Matty heeled her pony up beside Longarm's army gray and calmly told him, "That's Pawkigoopy. He's telling us we'll all be struck down by his medicine and eaten by owls if we don't turn back."

She shouted at the crazy old coot in Kiowa, and as if some puppet master had quit jerking his strings, Pawkigoopy stopped shaking his rattle at them and asked in a conversational tone what his daughter wanted and why she was riding with enemies.

It took Matty a few minutes to explain all that to Longarm and Minerva Cranston, of course. First she told the medicine man what all of them were doing there, and then she told her white companions what he'd said after he'd said to follow him on in.

They did. The dogs snarled mean as hell and the kids said mean things as they approached the tipi ring, but nobody shot or threw a thing at them. That was how sore this particular band seemed to be.

Artists who sketched Indian villages for Currier & Ives or Street & Smith tended to picture them the way white folks might have pitched a circle of tents, with all the entryways facing inward around that big central bonfire. But that wasn't the way most Indians set things up when it was up to them.

To begin with, unless they were holding a ceremony or torturing captives, they had no call to put all that fuel and effort into any central fire at all. You wanted a thrifty fire of your own inside your tipi when it was cold, or just outside it when you were cooking a meal in warm weather.

Then you wanted your entryway facing east to catch the dawn sunlight and screen the interior from the hot afternoon sun, no matter where you'd pitched your tipi poles in the defensive circle. As they rode in he saw some of the Kiowa had lifted the south-facing rims of their tipi covers clear of the grass to suck in air at ground level and exhaust heat out the top, between the smoke.

There were eighteen such lodges in the ring, with the one at the twelve o'clock position to the north a tad bigger and painted in black and yellow tiger stripes on its southern half. As the medicine man told them to rein in, Longarm saw that the northern half of the big tipi was covered with coup signs, or what might have passed for that Egyptian picture writing. He'd already known from those horizontal stripes that something or somebody with a heap of medicine would be waiting for them inside.

They dismounted. Some kids in their teens came over to take charge of all five ponies, saddle or pack. Then an imposing figure in a full war bonnet and Hudson Bay blanket came out of the tiger-striped tipi to stare at them as if he was rehearsing for a career in front of cigar stores. It wasn't true that only blue eyes could stare cold as ice. The small sloe eyes staring out of that dried-apple face at Longarm looked as friendly as a hangman fixing to pull the lever.

Matty said that was Necomi, and started to introduce them to one another in Kiowa. But then the old chief snorted in disgust, and his English was just fine when he said, "Hear me, I am Necomi. I count coup for every eagle feather in this bonnet, and I will not have my words spoken to any damn enemy by any woman! Not even an old one like this other I find too skinny to screw!"

Longarm said, "Watch your mouth, Chief. These ladies are with me and mayhaps I count some coup as well."

Necomi stared long and hard before he said, "I know who you are. They told us you were coming, Longarm. Are you threatening me here in my own camp?"

Longarm calmly replied, "Ain't sure. Are you threatening me?"

The old Kiowa almost smiled. He managed not to, and said, "They told me you were crazy. Come inside while I decide whether I want to smoke with you or let the army and our agents wonder forever what could have happened to the three of YOU." He ducked inside. Longarm shrugged and started to follow the hospitable son of a bitch as, behind him, he heard Matty warn the schoolmarm, "No! That is a warrior society lodge and we are women!"

As the Kiowa kid had sounded mighty demanding, Longarm decided the two gals would be all right for now.

Inside, the air was murky with tobacco smoke, and while some of the last rays of sunset were shining through the rain-resistant, oil-soaked, and painted hides all around, it took him a few moments to make out the other old gents seated solemnly around the inward-slanting walls of their fair-sized meeting hall. Since it was high summer, they hadn't hung the usual hide curtain that made for a more vertical backdrop while it kept the drafts at bay. Thanks to all the smoke, they could use even more drafts about now.

Necomi indicated a seat for their guest on one corner of a big red blanket. As he took his own seat across from Longarm and out a piece from the others in the council circle, Necomi said, "If you have come to hear what is wrong with this agency, you have come to the right place. We are so angry we are weeping tears of blood, and if they don't start treating us better they will feel their own blood running down the sides of their heads! Hear me, I am Necomi. Two times I fought your people at Adobe Walls. Both times under our own great war chief, Satanta. Hear me, Quanah Parker was only a child when we fought Eagle Chief Carson and his big brass guns at Adobe Walls. If we let Quanah lead the second time, against those buffalo thieves, it was only because he brought the most warriors and that crazy medicine man who said nobody could hit us on open prairie with those telescope sights!"

Longarm was aware some of the others were whispering translations as he dryly observed, "They've brought out longer-ranging express rifles since. I ain't here to hear sad tales about lost battles. The defeated vets of the Army of Virginia will be proud to tell you how close they came to winning in many a trail-town saloon. But meanwhile, some more ambitious gents who once fought in butternut gray have gone on to become cattle barons, mining magnates, railroad builders, and such. When a man's licked fair and square, he can get back on his two feet and go on, or he can lay there whimpering for as long as he cares to, and nobody else will give a damn."

Necomi shook his head, an alarming sight with all those feathers aflutter, and protested, "We know about the war between the blue and gray sleeves. We thought it would be a good time to take to the warpath. We did not know Eagle Chief Carson would have Ute scouts and those big brass guns. We were not able to make peace the way the gray sleeves did when they could fight no more. They had been beaten by their own kind of people. All they had to do was stop fighting and go on living the same way they had always lived."

Longarm chuckled softly and warned, "Don't ever say that in Old Dixie. Nobody ever gets to go on living the way they always lived. The world keeps changing and, like that Na-dene spirit Changing Woman warns us all, the only folks that never have to change at all are the dead. Kit Carson used his field artillery on the Na-dene we call Navajo too. They never got the honorable terms Quanah Parker got for his allies. They were marched to Fort Sumner and taught to plant peach trees. Some of them learned to read and write whilst they were at it. After a few years and a lot of letters, the Eagle Chief Sherman and the Great Father in Washington allowed them to have their old hunting grounds back as their reserve, provided they gave up some of their old ways, such as raiding the Pueblo or Mexicans when they were low on supplies."

By now the sunset outside was shining through the greased hides as red as fresh blood. The Indians all around looked sort of spooky as Necomi protested, "Hear me! We agreed not to raid anybody after the B.I.A. said they would give us plenty of supplies to make up for the poor hunting on this reservation. But they never give us all that we need. Never! When our women have served up all they issued us and we ask for more, they say there is no more and we should not eat all they give us so soon!"

Longarm nodded soberly and said, "I've had that same argument when I came back for seconds with an empty mess kit. Gents who dole out government grub are like that, even when they ain't stealing any. I was trying to get to the point about the Navajo. Thanks to having all that time on their hands, the men have learned to hammer silver coins into conchos, rings, and such that sell for as much as those nice saddle blankets their womenfolk weave. They sell such goods for more money or swap 'em at their trading posts for nicer rations and play-pretties than the tax-collecting government is ever going to give any former friend or foe."

He let that sink in before he added, "Cochise led even wilder Na-dene in his day, and yet he died prosperous in bed, after he settled for terms he could live with and then sold firewood by the wagon load to the white-eyed settlers and silver miners in those parts."

"Cochise is dead. His son, Nana, rides with Victorio along the warrior's path tonight!" snapped the unrepentant Kiowa leader.

Longarm muttered, "Bullshit. There've been two Bronco Apache by the name of Nana so far. Neither one could claim Cochise as his sire. The elder son and heir of Cochise was named Taza. He was just as smart and tried to carry on the same way until he died of pneumonia on a visit to Washington. He was buried with full honors in the Congressional Cemetery. You and those lazy newspaper reporters who grab easy answers out of thin air must have found Nana easier to recall than Taza, being there's a sassy French novel called Nana on the stands right now. Cochise did have a younger boy called Naiche, but not Nana, and it's true he seems more sullen. If he's riding with Victorio tonight, he'll doubtless wind up dead as well. Did you gents know Quanah Parker just bought a whole herd of beef, without having to beg an extra dime off the B.I.A.?"

He let that sink in before he added in a desperately casual tone, "I reckon he means to share some of it with his Kiowa brothers, seeing he's such a big sissy. I'll tell him you all could use some extra grub over this way, once them two gals and I get back over yonder."

He couldn't tell whether it had worked or not. In the ruby red gloom the old chief grumbled, "You did not come all this way to tell us we should be good children of the Great Father. We knew about that herd Quanah said he would send for. Of course he intends to share with us. I only said he was not as important as you and your people seem to think he is. I never said he was not a Real Person!"

Another old Kiowa, almost invisible against the dark north wall of the big tipi, forgot his manners as he impatiently snapped in fair English, "Tell us why you came here, Longarm. Tell us what you want from us."

Longarm nodded soberly and told them. They listened mutely, and he couldn't read any expressions on their shadowy faces as he brought them all up to date on that brush with those other Kiowa. Once he had, he added, "I didn't count coup on the three we put on the ground. But I got a good look at them before their friends carried their bodies away. Their faces were painted half red, their beadwork was red or green with lighter flower designs. Their chests were bare, streaked with red, and their leggings were black leggings."

There was a low rumble of anxious-sounding Kiowa. Then Necomi held up a hand for silence and said, "Hear me, Longarm. If you are speaking with a forked tongue, we shall be very cross with you! If somebody is raiding along the Cache Creek Trail, pretending to be members of our warrior lodge, we shall be very cross with them! The Kiowa nation is not on the warpath yet. So none of our young men have permission to ride out against your people."

The talkative elder to the north chimed in. "Young men can get a lot of their own people killed that way. Everyone knows how crazy that Cheyenne crooked lancer Woquini was to kill that rancher and his wife and daughters without telling his own people! They had no idea why the blue sleeves had come , and many stood like corn stalks until the blue sleeves cut them down at Sand Creek!"

Necomi silenced him with a stern look and told Longarm, "None of our young men could have attacked you at those sod ruins. You say you killed three of them. Where are their women, with ashes in their hair and gashes in their cheeks, if what you say is so?"

Longarm calmly replied, "My heart soars to learn nobody here as a ward of my government has women keening for him. But what if they haven't heard yet? What if a leader who got three followers killed was too ashamed to come back and tell anyone what a foolish thing he had done?"

Necomi shook all those feathers again and insisted, "That would be a very shameful way to behave. After Satanta and Quanah both had their horses shot out from under them, and many more had been killed or wounded, they agreed, like men are supposed to, they had been foolish to rely on Isatai's medicine chant. So it was time to break off the bad fight. Nobody initiated as a Kaitsenko, a fighting Kiowa, would do a thing like that!"

His old pard chimed in. "Even if he did, we would have heard about three missing members of any lodge! You say you killed not one but three, more than two days ago. Who has been sleeping with their wives all this time, the ones who led them to their deaths for no good reason?"

Longarm shrugged and said, "I keep telling folks how easy it can be to grab for easy answers. Didn't you gents just confound the sons of Cochise with a spicy French book and some other Na-dene entirely?"

That set off a real consultation. When it died down Necomi told him, "Nobody is supposed to wear black leggings and shoot at anyone unless we say he can. We have heard what you have to say. We don't see how your words could be true!"

Longarm smiled thinly and replied, "I reckon you'd have had to have been there. Ain't it possible this one chapter of the Black Leggings Lodge might lose track of no more than a dozen kids out for a lark on such a big reserve? I mean, who's to say they couldn't have been Comanche or some of them Kiowa-Apache who came along from the Texas plains with the rest of you all?"

Necomi snapped, "We are to say! We and only we who sit in council here in this Do-giagya-guat, copied to the last medicine mark from that one that was burned in the wars with you people. The Comanche fought beside us many times. The Kiowa-Apache fought as our brave younger brothers and we honor them, even though they talk funny. But hear me. We don't initiate every Kiowa warrior as a Black Legging, and it would be easier for a Kiowa girl to join than it would be for a very great man of any other nation!"

Longarm nodded and said, "I'll take your word for that. The fact remains that the bunch we tangled with were painted and dressed as a bunch of your Black Legging boys."

Necomi said, "You keep saying this. We are going to find out why. You will be taken to your women now and given something to eat. If you try to leave before we say you can, all three of you will die. I have spoken."

A couple of lesser Kiowa stood up as if to lead him somewhere. Longarm said, "Hold on. How are we supposed to find out anything if I don't have any say in it?"

One of the Indians bent to lay a firm but gentle hand on Longarm's shoulder as their chief said, "I told you I had spoken. You are very rude. Even a fool who knows nothing of our ways should see how simple it is to just count noses. Everyone who wears black leggings will be easy to account for, or at least three of them won't be. If we are missing three members we will know you could be telling the truth. If we are not, we will know you are lying, and none of us invited you to come here with a forked tongue!"

Longarm got to his feet, lest somebody haul him up by the scruff, but insisted, "Try her this way. Say somebody out to raise Ned but wanting to shift the blame, just got decked out as a Black Leggings war party."

Necomi didn't answer. But one of those herding him for the tipi's only doorway murmured in English. Longarm recognized the high-pitched voice as it insisted, "He doesn't want to talk to you anymore, Longarm. Come with us. You are only making Necomi and some of the others cross with your silly suggestions!"

As they got outside where the gloaming light was much better, Longarm could make out the middle-aged Indians better. The one who tended to speak out of turn said, "I am called Hawzitah. I can read. But I don't believe much of what you people put in your books. We are taking you to your women. You can't have your ponies or repeating rifle yet. Is that a double-action revolver?"

The other, less talkative Kiowa shooed some kids away as they came over to make faces at Longarm. He told Hawzitah he'd guessed right about the .44-40 riding on his hip, hoping they might not search him and find his double derringer. The older Indians didn't seem worried about a white man with five in the wheel well inside an Indian camp. Hawzitah pointed at a plainer fifteen-skin tipi rising pale against the purple eastern sky and said, "In there. The door is on the other side, of course. Is it true Red Cloud has allowed his young men to join the Indian Police up at his reserve?"

Longarm nodded and said, "Old Mahpiua Luta, as you say Red Cloud in his lingo, is fixing to die rich in bed, like Cochise. He made his point and got the best terms he could. Then he stayed the hell out of it when Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull demanded a rematch back in '76. So now he's got a cozy cabin instead of a drafty tipi, come the starving moons and wolf winds, and like Quanah, he's been pulling in extra money by leasing grazing rights to neighboring stock outfits."

Hawzitah muttered, "I would like to have more money to spend on good things, and when there is no need to move camp a lot, a cabin does seem a better place to spend the hungry moons. But why do Red Cloud and Quanah think they need Indian Police? What's the matter with the way we've always kept order among ourselves?"

Longarm said, "You ain't living the way you've always lived. You used to be able to keep order in camp and guard the women and ponies with a handful of men left behind while the rest of you rode off to kill buffalo, Wichita, and such. None of you had much more than that to lose as you lived the way that High Dutch writer, Karl Marx, keeps telling us all to live."

As they circled out around the tipi, he noted the pony line about a furlong out against the darkening hills, and continued. "You just said your ownself how you'd like to buy good things at the trading post. Police work gets more complicated when folks leave things worth stealing behind locked doors. Also, you all have a stake in the value of your land."

The older Indian snorted, "You call these empty plains and wooded hills without many deer land? Hear me, in Palo Duro Canyon, over by the Shining Mountains, buffalo, deer, even elk grazed among the soapberry trees while our ponies grew fat on grass that stayed green all summer!" Longarm smiled thinly and said, "You should have seen Dixie before the war, or the emerald fields of Erin before the potato blight. But if we can stick to what you have here, Quanah's getting a dollar a head off trail herds passing through and leasing grazing rights at six cents an acre a month. You're right about it being bleaker here than over in that Indian Eden. But one cow needs at least five acres to graze, so add it up."

As the Indian tried to, Longarm said, "No offense, but as both Quanah and Red Cloud must have noticed, Texas trail hands are more likely to take a man in uniform for a peace officer than a raiding hostile. After that, having regular police gets around the problem of a mixed bag of folks on a big reserve who may not know every bare-chested cuss who yells at them by name."

He lifted the entrance flap as he quietly added, "The Cherokee, Chickasa, Choctaw, and such have had Indian Police and private property for a good while now."

He didn't listen as the older man behind him muttered darkly about Cherokee not being Real People anymore. He was more interested in the two frightened faces staring at him in the dim interior of the guest, or perhaps confinement, tipi.

A smudgy little cow-chip fire was burning on the sand in the center. Old buffalo robes and some cleaner-looking blankets had been spread around the circle of twenty-two poles. There was no sign of their own bedding, saddles, or that damned old saddle gun. As he hunkered down across from the small breed and pallid schoolmarm, Matawnkiha said "We're hungry."

Longarm told her their hosts, or captors, had said something about feeding them, and added, "It seems we're stuck here for at least the night. They may have been trying to scare me into making a break for it. I told 'em I'd told the Comanche Police we were headed over this way. I don't reckon they'd want to hurt any of us close to home."

Minerva Cranston said, "I'm afraid I'm going to be sick. I don't mind the smell of tallow, and linseed oil's not so bad, but mix them together and ... Never mind. Why do you think they're behaving toward us in such a confusing way, Custis?"

Longarm sniffed uncertainly. "Got to cut down on my smoking. Now that you mention it, I do suspicion somebody wiped some of that army issue tent dubbing over these old greased hides. Reckon buffalo tallow is tougher to come by these days."

She insisted, "You haven't answered my question, Custis."

He shrugged and replied, "Don't have a good answer. I keep telling folks how dumb it can be to guess at easy answers when you just don't know. They might be behaving so confused because we've confused them. They might be trying to figure how they want to cover up something they know all about."

He asked the ladies if they cared if he smoked. When neither told him not to, and Matty said she wanted one, he handed her a cheroot, lit his own as well, and brought them up to date on his conversation with the elders of the Black Leggings Lodge.

When he'd finished, Matty said she was still hungry. Then she said something that sounded dirty in Kiowa as she stared past Longarm at the round entryway behind him.

Longarm turned to see a grinning kid of eight or nine peeking in at them. The kid said something in Kiowa that made Matty laugh in spite of herself. She explained, "I asked the fresh thing what he wanted, and he asked when are we going to take off all our duds and get dirty. He says he's never watched folks like you and Miss Minerva do it."

The schoolmarm sighed and said, "I used to admire the way Indians disciplined their children without corporal punishment. After some time among them I'm not so sure."

Matty wound up to tell the little shit what a shit she thought he was. But Longarm had a better idea. He fished out some pocket change as he told Matty what he wanted her to ask of the unsupervised brat. She did, but after he'd tossed the kid a nickel and he'd scampered off in the gathering dusk, she told him he'd just seen the last of both the kid and his money.

Then she added, "They told us before you got here that Necomi had said to feed us. It's after dark and my mother's people are used to early suppers. Do you think some big pig has helped himself to meals meant for us?"

Minerva sighed. "That tallow's kept the linseed oil dubbing from drying out all the way. I don't think you're supposed to put linseed oil on leather to begin with. I don't care if they ever feed us. Do you think someone would shoot me if I went outside to throw up?"

Longarm got out another cheroot, lit it from the tip of the one he was smoking, and when she silently refused it, threw it on the cow-chip fire between them to stink the place differently, saying, "A nose that delicate must be a heavy cross to bear, Miss Minerva. I said I could make out that army dubbing once you brought it up, and I agree it don't smell like roses, but there's worse smells than that in this imperfect world. How did you ever get by back East in a city running on horsepower and cooking with soft coal?"

She sighed and replied, "Why did you think I applied for this job out West? You're so right about it being a cross to bear. Like a lot of myopic souls, I seem to have developed my sense of smell beyond a comfortable level. How I wish things were the other way, with my eyes this keen and my nose not so delicate."

He didn't have any call to mention that eagle-eyed gal he'd met in Montana who spotted cracks in every ceiling, spots on every rug, and called a man a liar when he swore he'd shaved that same day. He asked Matty what she knew about the old rascals holding up their supper so long.

The little Kiowa breed only knew the bunch over this way by rep. She said Necomi was considered a true-heart, in a stubborn old-time way. She'd heard old Hawzitah didn't count all the coup he was said to be entitled to. She said his fellow Kiowa considered him an odd cuss in other ways. He was always asking questions, curious as a young kid about what everyone was up to, even the blue sleeves over at the fort. When the black blue sleeves had been there, he'd asked them all sorts of questions about what it felt like to live like a Saltu without being a real Saltu. Matty said she didn't see why anyone would want to ask such stupid questions, and that even the black blue sleeves had laughed and called Hawzitah the Kiowa Professor.

She said the medicine man, Pawkigoopy, acted crazy and had some of her elders scared of him. She couldn't say why. Nodding at her white teacher across from Longarm, she said, "I don't think I would like to be saved and dunked in water. But Umbea Mary seems to be a friendlier spirit than Piamumpitz, who eats little children when they play outside at night!"

Longarm said he didn't think it was too late for that kid to be out fooling around, and asked her to tell them more about the spooky medicine man.

She said, "I don't live over this way. All I know is what I hear when some of her old friends come to visit my Kiowa mamma. I've heard them say it's not a good idea to ask Fawkigoopy to chant over you or your children when bad spirits get into them. They say he asks for presents afterwards, or for the younger mothers of sick babies to sleep with him. They say the men would beat him for behaving that way if they were not so afraid of his tu-puha."

Minerva had been trying to learn the Comanche dialect since she'd been teaching their kids, and so she moved her lips in thoughtful silence and then murmured aloud, "Black medicine? Would that be anything like black magic?"

Longarm nodded and said, "Different nations call it puha, wakan, matu, and so on, but we translate it as medicine because that's about as close as we can get to a sort of mishmash of cure-all and luck on demand. Decent Indians ain't supposed to use it to hurt instead of help. But I reckon a warrior with strong medicine guiding his arrows could be said to be hexing the poor cuss he's aiming at. Comanche and other Ho speakers such as Hopi or Shoshoni hate what we'd call witchcraft and can't abide it in a medicine man. But these Kiowa have a rep for admiring a good malediction chanted in unison. So I reckon you might call a spiteful cuss like Pawkigoopy as much a sorcerer as a medicine man."

That kid suddenly popped through the entry with the saddlebags Matty had said Longarm wanted. As Longarm handed over a couple of quarters, quantity being more impressive than face value, Matty asked him about that saddle gun. The kid said he'd only found their riding and packsaddles in a nearby tipi. He didn't know who had the Winchester Yellowboy right now. He said he hadn't tried to locate a big gray gelding because the night watch along the pony line whipped at kids and dogs with knotted thongs.

As the half-naked kid hunkered nearby to watch with interest, Longarm got out some canned provisions and began to open them with his pocket knife, explaining, "I brought along canned beans and tomato preserves because you can eat 'em warm or cold."

He opened an extra can of the sweetish tomato preserves so the helpful Kiowa kid could have some as well. A man just never knew when he might need a pal in such uncertain surroundings.

They consumed the beans, followed by the grease-cutting preserves, by handing the cans around and just slurping good.

Minerva said the lingering whiffs of linseed oil and stale greasy tallow didn't make her stomach churn as much now that she'd put something in it.

The Kiowa kid said his name was Pito, and asked if he could have the empty tin cans. Longarm said he could, even though Matty warned him he was being taken. Pito lit out, richer by fifty-five cents and some raw material for stamped conchos, with his already dirty face smeared with tomato preserves.

He hadn't been gone long when a couple of shy, or scared-looking, Kiowa gals came in with an iron pot and some trading post china bowls. As they dished out generous helpings of a sort of cracked corn and venison stew, Matty told Longarm and Minerva the Kiowa gals apologized for such a late supper. They said they'd had to start from scratch. Minerva murmured, "The poor things probably didn't eat that well themselves this evening. It smells delicious. I didn't know Plains Indians cooked with garlic."

Longarm had never heard they did. He raised the bowl he'd been served to his nose, sniffed hard, and quietly warned in English not to dig in just yet.

He waited until the two women had backed out before he grabbed the bowl from Matty's greedy young hands and snapped, "Spit that out, in the fire, so's there won't be any on view later."

The kid did as she was told but demanded, as her spat-out stew sizzled really strong fumes of what seemed to be garlic flavoring, what on earth was he fussing about.

The white gal across from Longarm said, "It smells delicious."

Longarm said, "It's supposed to. But that ain't garlic your keen sniffer picked out of the stronger flavorings, Miss Minerva. Kiowa use garlic about as often as Eye-talians cook with buffalo berries. But they do sell flypaper at most trading posts, and the arsenic you can boil out of the stick-em does smell more like garlic than anything any honest Kiowa cook would be stirring in!" The two gals stared thunderstruck at one another. Then Minerva gasped, "We have to make a run for it before they come back and find us alive! How long do you think we have, Custis?"

Longarm began to dig a hole in the sand with his pocket knife as he said, "Indefinitely. I doubt the one who's out to poison us will be anywhere near come morning. He, she, or it will be down at the far end of camp, waiting to hear from the others."

He saw they both looked scared as hell. So as he began to pour poisoned stew into the hole he soothed, "Don't you ladies see the bright side yet? If the elders wanted us dead they'd just have us taken out a ways and shot. So I'm betting someone who failed to get his own way at that council decided to murder us on his own."

Matty asked, "What if you're betting wrong?"

To which he could only reply in a conversational tone, "Oh, in that case we're as good as dead. I can't leave without the two of you, and I'll be switched with snakes if I can see a way for the three of us to slip out of camp and get far enough to matter."

Matty said, "Hear me, I have played nanipka with both Comanche and Kiowa and I have seldom been caught!"

Minerva murmured wistfully, "She means hide-and-go-seek."

Longarm said, "I know what she means, and seldom ain't enough when you're playing with bigger boys for keeps."

Matty insisted she could sneak really swell.

Minerva took a deep breath, sat up straighter, and told Longarm, "The two of you could probably make it without me. There's no sense in all three of us dying and... since I'm done for anyway..."

Longarm snorted, "Aw, stop carrying on like a gut-shot swan and pay more attention when someone's talking sense to you. When I allowed I could be wrong about that bet, I wasn't saying it wasn't worth our blowing on the dice. There's a better than fifty-fifty chance if we sit tight. We're almost certain to be tracked down and killed if we try to make Fort Sill or anywhere else on foot."

Minerva Cranston still looked pale as a ghost as she tried to smile and managed, "Oh, in that case maybe we'd better just sit tight."

So that was what they tried their best to do. It wasn't easy.

CHAPTER 13

The Old Farmer's Almanac said summer nights averaged ten hours from dusk to dawn at that latitude. It only felt like a few thousand years when a body could neither sleep nor read in bed. They had no beds, and about a hundred years into the night that fire had died out and it was black as a bitch in there.

Both gals had somehow wound up snuggled against Longarm on either side as he reclined with his back propped high enough on his piled-up baggage for him to face the fainter black oval of the one entrance, gun in hand as he rested his weary wrist in his own crotch. On his right little Matty was softly blowing bubbles as she somehow managed to doze on and off. Minerva's straw-blond head rested lighter against his left shoulder until her occasional stifled sobs inspired him to wrap a soothing left arm around her trembling torso and point out that the longer the night dragged on the better their chances got. He said, "If the majority was in favor of killing us, they'd have made a play for it by now."

Her teeth chattered on her when she first tried to answer. Then she got them under control again and murmured, "I'm not this terrified of the Indians who don't want to kill us. I can't help thinking how easy it would be for the ones who spiked our supper with arsenic! Do you think they think we're alive or dead in here by now?"

To which he could only reply, "Don't know. So I can't say. We get a lot of crooks who can't resist coming back for a peek at the scene of their crime. But the smarter ones know better. I'm betting on old Pawkigoopy as the author of our woes. Kiowa medicine men are said to use more scientific curses than your average rattle-shaker. If it's him, he's likely been at such sneaky stuff long enough to stay clear and sit tight till somebody else finds his professed enemies laid out stiff by his visions. It's all right for a medicine man to have grim visions. Sitting Bull told everyone he'd had a vision of soldiers all covered with blood. But he never said he'd used poison or even chants on Custer and the Seventh Cav. They admire a prophet, but wizards make 'em proddy."

She didn't answer for a moment. She was probably considering what he'd just said, a rare trait in even a halfways pretty young gal. He knew he'd judged her right when she said, "It would be even more foolish for our secret enemy to fire bullets through these thin hide walls, wouldn't it?"

He patted her far shoulder and said, "Mighty foolish. He'd have no way to aim at anyone in particular, whilst for all he knew, he'd be giving his fool self away by attacking folks he'd already killed."

She asked, "Then why do you have that six-shooter in your lap?"

He chuckled and replied, "Ain't in my lap. Got the muzzle resting on the blanket under me. I meant what I said just now about nobody with a lick of sense creeping in on us tonight. I got my gun out for two simple reasons. I have the gun to work with, and this cruel world is afflicted with murderous fools."

She timidly asked how often he ran into them. He told her they were reasonably rare, but that his job required him to brush with more than his share. When she asked him to elaborate, he didn't want to brag on some of his wilder cases, but settled for explaining how he'd wound up over this way to begin with.

She sounded dubious as she asked him if he was sure he'd never even met that wayward wife of Attila Homagy.

He sighed and said, "That's what makes my situation so awkward. Nine out of ten folks, just hearing his wild accusations, tend to wonder if there ain't at least a spark to go with all that smoke. I can say I've never laid eyes on Magda Homagy until I'm blue in the face and no judge or jury will ever find that jealous maniac guilty if ever he manages to get the drop on me."

Minerva proved she was smart enough to teach school by whistling silently and saying, "But if you killed him, even if he drew first, everyone would say you were a home-wrecking killer!"

Longarm sighed and said, "My boss wants me to lie low over here in the Indian Territory whilst he tries to find out who Homagy can really thank for his lack of domestic bliss."

They both laughed as the same thought hit them at the same time. Matty stirred in her sleep and asked what was so funny. Longarm told her softly to go back to sleep as Minerva murmured, "This sure seems a fine way to lie low. How on earth does that child manage to sleep so soundly at a time like this?"

Longarm said, "She's likely tired. Her mother said she was sort of young and carefree. That's how we got you into this, I regret to say. As things turned out, I could have got in this much trouble with no help from either of you ladies."

Minerva sighed in weary agreement and murmured, "It sounded like such a lark when they asked me to chaperone the two of you, as if any of us are ever going to get the chance to be naughty again!"

He started to point out there'd be plenty of time to act as naughty as she cared to in times to come. Then he couldn't help wondering if she was trying to come. It would have been rude to ask a lady why she was moving and rustling like that in the dark. She must have been able to tell from his awkward silence what he suspected she was up to. For she suddenly stopped, sighed, and murmured, "I must be going crazy. My Aunt Ida said the little girl across the way went crazy because she couldn't leave herself alone until the right man came along."

Longarm thought it might sound cruel to agree with a lady who was already confounded enough. He quietly said, "There seems to be something about feeling hurt or scared that makes folks sort of, well... fidgety. Wounded soldiers are always proposing to their nurses, and there's some argument as to whether hanged men stiffen up so silly before or after they hit the end of the rope."

She softly asked, "Are you saying all this has made you feel more amorous than usual, Custis?"

He chuckled and said, "I always feel more amorous than usual. But I got to cover that doorway, no offense."

She stiffened and demanded, "Did you think for one moment I was suggesting anything improper, good sir? I was only asking a question, not extending an invitation!"

He tried to say he hadn't meant to sound dirty. But she'd already rolled away in the darkness to flop down on some piled buffalo robes, and after a suspenseful silence he could hear her breathing harder in time with the softer sounds of what seemed like a frisky puppy thumping its tail by the back door to be let out.

He was mighty tempted to just roll over and help her scratch what ailed her, but he didn't see how he could let little Matty's head fall that far without waking her.

That conjured up a really silly scene in Longarm's head. But he managed not to laugh out loud as he considered how the sassy little gal Minerva had come along to chaperone was really chaperoning her elders without half trying, or really knowing what was going on.

As he heard Minerva moaning in the darkness, "Custis, please!" he softly murmured, "You'll be sorry you ever said that once we get out of this fix alive. But no offense, this is about the last time or place I'd ever risk getting caught with my pants down!"

CHAPTER 14

Longarm hadn't been trying to doze off, but he saw he must have when he awoke with a start to see daylight in the entryway across from them and heard all sorts of commotion outside.

He eased Matty's drowsy head from his lap, and rolled over to holster his gun and stab the tipi cover with his knife. When he put an eye to the puncture he saw ponies swirling in a haze of dust in the center of the tipi ring. Minerva sat up on her pile of buffalo robes to ask what all the fuss was about.

Longarm replied, "Ain't certain. They've run all their riding stock inside the ring for safekeeping and never mind the mess. Some kids from another band might be out to have some fun. On the other hand they might really be worried about something."

A figure appeared in the entryway to call out in bad English that the man, not the women, was wanted at the Do-giagyaguat. So Longarm tossed the pocket knife near her, saying, "Open some more cans and don't eat or drink anything else before I get back, hear?"

Matty sat up, rubbing her eyes, to ask what they were supposed to do if he never came back. Longarm didn't offer any suggestions as he rolled to his feet and ducked outside. It would have sounded hard to point out it wouldn't really be his problem.

He followed his Kiowa guide through the swirling confusion, noting he didn't seem to be under guard as the Indians worked to get set for something ominous.

He found old Necomi and the other Kiowa elders out front of that bi painted tipi, along with five younger Indians dressed much the same with different beadwork. When he heard everybody talking in English he caught on. The visitors had to be Kiowa-Apache, allied or adopted and hence half-ass Kiowa who spoke another lingo entirely. He knew Na-dene, spoken by the so-called Apache, Navajo, and such, was as tough for either a white man or Indian as Arabic or Turkish might be for your average cowhand. You could ask a Comanche or a Lakota what a buffalo was, and while one would say tatanka and the other called it kutsu, they agreed to call the critter something. But Na-dene speakers would ask you whether you meant a buffalo off a ways or in plain sight, grazing, running, or hell, shitting.

Kiowa could only powwow with their little brothers in English or Sign, and Sign being slower, the meeting that morning was being conducted in the hated tongue of the blue sleeves.

Necomi told the head Kiowa-Apache, a scar-faced runt called Eskiminzin, to tell the damned government rider his sad story. So the runty Kiowa-Apache did. He said his own band ranged west of the Wichitas, as close to the reservation line as they could manage without making the Great Father angry. He said they'd been raided more than once by riders who'd sure as hell looked like Kiowa Black Leggings.

Necomi sighed and told Longarm, "Maybe you did not lie about the riders you fought with over by Cache Creek. But somebody is lying about being members of our lodge and we are very cross, very!"

Eskiminzin said, "My Kiowa uncle is not as cross as the women we left back along Elk Creek, throwing dust in the air and calling us cowards because we let the Comanche Police bring our ponies back for us without killing any two-hearted Kiowa raiders! Listen to me, all of you, there must be blood for blood, and one of our pony guards was stabbed in the back by those Black Leggings!"

The outraged Necomi roared, "No Black Legging rider owes any blood to anybody! We just told this other twittering magpie from the Great Father that our lodge has done nothing, nothing, to be blamed for all these silly fights! Hear me, when and if we do put on our paint and follow the warpath again, we will not be stopped by a few shots or less than a thousand enemies!"

Longarm didn't wait for the runty Eskiminzin to tell the older man he was full of shit. In a more soothing tone he asked about those Comanche Police. He pointed out, "Elk Creek ain't all that close to the Comanche range southeast of Fort Sill, is it?"

The Kiowa-Apache grumbled, "We never invited Quanah's white-eyed Comanche in blue sleeves to patrol along Elk Creek. They told us they had to patrol all the reservation lines because nobody else was willing to join them. Maybe we were not so cross the second time they rode by, right after those Black Leggings killed that boy and drove off two hundred of our best ponies!"

Longarm nodded soberly and said, "Chores such as that were what Quanah and the B.I.A. had in mind when they commenced to organize such forces for this big reserve. I don't think any of your Kiowa brothers from the real Black Legings Lodge ran that stock off on you. I think Necomi here was right about some big fibbers pretending to be a bunch more feared and respected than your average band of horse thieves."

Necomi gasped, "Riders who were never initiated into our lodge in the leggings and paint of members? Who would do such a terrible thing? Who would dare? Tanapah, the great bright eye in the sky, would tell all the other spirits, and then where would they be? Everyone knows it is wrong to use another person's puha, or even to paint one's pony in the same way, without offering him a present and getting his permission!"

Eskiminzin nodded gravely and volunteered, "This is true among my people too. I paid the first very rich Aravaipa ranchero for the use of this prosperous and powerful name. It would have been bad medicine if I had just stolen the name like a chicken!"

Longarm nodded and said, "I understand about your old ways. Sort of. Maybe these raiders pretending to be honorable Kiowa have forgotten the old ways. Tell me about those Comanche Police recovering your run-off stock without having to gun any of the rascals."

The Kiowa-Apache shrugged and said, "None of us were there. The blue sleeves said that they only had to track the stolen ponies a day and a night. They said they found them in a draw at dawn. The men who'd run them off were not there. So the Comanche only had to round them up and herd them back to us. Their sergeant said he did not think the stinking Kiowa wanted to fight Comanche. So they ran away in the dark."

Necomi gasped, "That was a bad thing to say! Hear me! Any rabbit-killing Comanche who thinks even a Kiowa girlchild is afraid of him had better stop dreaming and wake up!"

Longarm shook his head and said, "Don't get your bowels in such an uproar, Chief. There used to be some troublemakers called Romans on the far side of the Great Bitter Water. They liked to get the rest of us white folks to fighting amongst ourselves by spreading just such an easy mess of fibs. Then they'd move in and stick us with spears. They called their game divide and conquer."

Eskiminzin asked innocently, "You mean the way your Eagle Chief Carson got the Utes to fight our western cousins for him over in the Canyon de Chelly?"

Longarm laughed sheepishly and said, "It worked, didn't it? What I'm saying about these mysterious raiders is that anyone can slip on a pair of black leggings. And they've been acting more like plain and simple outlaws than any warrior society I know of. I got a good look at three of them, dead, over by Cache Creek. So I'd be mighty surprised to discover they were a gang of Minnesota Swedes. But how do you boys feel about them being Mexican bandits, dressed up in Kiowa duds to confound the law, both red and white?"

Eskiminzin shook his head and said, "They were heard shouting back and forth. Nobody could tell what they were saying, but it did not sound at all like Spanish. Many of our people speak enough Spanish to deal with Mexican ... ah, horse traders."

Longarm dryly observed, "That likely accounts for all this sudden interest in horseflesh and the reservation borders. I'll ask directly, with a better chance of getting a straight answer, when I catch up with those Comanche Police. Did they say which post they were working out of, Eskiminzin?"

The runty Kiowa-Apache looked blank. Longarm nodded and muttered, "Never mind. Some damned body is supposed to keep files on everything, and recovering two hundred head of goats would rate a commendation. I don't suppose you could give me that patrol leader's name?"

Eskiminzin soberly replied, "I could not even give you my name, if you mean my real name, given to me in a vision by White Painted Woman. But the Comanche who brought back our ponies said we could call him Black Sheep, in your tongue, after we told him his Comanche words meant nothing, nothing to a real person."

Longarm cocked a brow and marveled, "That Tuka Wa Pombi sure gets around! A few days ago he was trying to collect passage fees off a Texican trail boss, and when I asked about that at their nearest field headquarters, none of the Comanche Police I spoke to had ever heard of a comrade by such a name."

Eskiminzin shrugged and said, "There are many reasons, many, for a man to give different names at different times. He may be trying to avoid an evil chindi, or the husband of some wicked woman he met when he was full of tiswin and forgot you are not supposed to do that with another man's woman."

Longarm smiled thinly and declared, "That last notion sounds way more reasonable than ducking evil spirits. There can't be all that big a police force. So sooner or later we're bound to meet up and I can just ask him. Did they say where they were headed next?"

The Kiowa-Apache nodded gravely and replied, "They said they had to take the money to Chief Quanah."

Longarm frowned thoughtfully and asked what money they might be talking about.

The runty Kiowa-Apache explained, "The money they need to buy more blue sleeves and guns. They said if our young men would not join the Indian Police, then the least we could do would be to pay our fair share. Meeting in council, our elders agreed. They had brought back our ponies. They had done a good job of tracking after our own young men had lost the trail where slickrock runs down into Elk Creek. We were surprised that Comanche could do this."

Necomi scowled and said, "So am 1. Our little Kiowa-Apache brothers range closer than the rest of us to their old hunting grounds between these hills and the Washita bottomlands. Would you say I was crazy if I wondered about liars dressing up as both Black Leggings and Indian Police?"

Longarm shook his head and replied, "I would say great minds are inclined to run in the same channels. No Indian Police led by anyone by any name are authorized to collect money in the name of Quanah Parker. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, run with government money by Little Big Eyes or Interior Secretary Schurz, pays and equips all the Indian Police on all the reserves. Chief Quanah's business dealings are matters of civil law, backed up as such by federal or local courts, depending on what the problem might be."

Necomi was first to get the picture. He said, "This Black I Sheep was not supposed to ask those drivers for money. He was not supposed to ask our little Kiowa-Apache brothers for money. He is... what?"

"A crook," said Longarm flatly. "There's this more pallid outfit over near New Orleans called the Black Hand instead of Sheep. There's no natural law saying an Indian with a droll sense of humor and an eye for easy money couldn't read the Police Gazette and see how the Black Hand flimflams other folks less inclined than average to send for the regular law." He saw none of the Indians gaping at him knew what he was talking about, even if they spoke English. So he simplified the protection swindle of the notorious Black Hand, and even a Horse Indian could see how once a bunch of friendly-acting toughs could pretend to protect a neighborhood from meaner-acting members of the same gang.

Eskiminzin gasped, "It would be easy, easy to track stolen ponies over slickrock and through running water if you knew just where some secret friends had left them for you!"

Necomi said, "That is why there was no fight. Those riders acting as if they were Kiowa Black Leggings never really wanted all those ponies! Where could they have sold them on this crowded reserve? I think it was all a trick to make you pay good money for your own ponies!"

Longarm nodded. But before he could answer, Necomi cut in. "Then what are these forked tongues when they are not pretending to be other people? Are they wicked Kiowa or evil Comanche?"

It was a good question. Longarm said it was too early to say, and asked if he and the ladies were free to go ask. Necomi said they had never been prisoners and that he'd have his young men cut out and saddle their ponies for them. They'd Just agreed a cuss with a forked tongue was no good. So Longarm turned and strode through sunlit dust and dark Kiowa curses to rejoin the two gals. Along the way he met up with old Pawkigoopy, shaking his rattle and chanting while the others did all the work to secure their camp. When the medicine man saw Longarm bearing down on him alive and well, he looked as if he'd been fed something awful himself. Longarm just grinned wolfishly and hauled out a couple of cheroots, asking the goggle-eyed Indian if he'd like a heap strong smoke.

Pawkigoopy ran away, calling on his spirit pals for help against what had to be Longarm's heap stronger medicine.

Longarm lit one cheroot and put the other away as he circled out of the tipi ring to rejoin the gals from the east. He was glad their particular tipi faced away from the swirling confusion inside the tipi ring. Since every tipi faced the same way, the folks on the other side of the circle were stuck with the settling dust and fly-blown horseshit whether they were under attack or not.

As he ducked inside he asked if either gal had tasted anything but their own supplies. Matty said a Kiowa gal had offered them some coffee, but they'd poured it on the cold ashes when nobody had been looking.

Longarm said, "Good thinking. We're fixing to ride out any minute, so let's pull ourselves together in here."

Minerva Cranston commenced to pin her hair back atop her skull as she murmured, not meeting Longarm's eye, "I suppose I owe you an explanation for the way I carried on last night."

He shook his head and said, "Save it for the next sewing bee. Right now the inner thoughts of a teasing schoolmarm are the least of my worries." He scooped up his saddlebags and told them to join him outside as pronto as possible. Then he ducked out of the tipi to see that things had simmered down a bit, with most everybody and his or her belongings forted up inside the circle of thin-skinned but mysterious hide shelters.

Unless you had the element of surprise riding with you, it could be injurious to one's health to blindly charge a tipi ring.

For some would be empty, while others might be hornet's nests of dug-in riflemen. Horse Indians fought differently, but that wasn't to say they fought stupidly, or didn't learn new tricks along the way. Dull Knife's band had given the army a scare, despite the hopeless odds, when troopers inspecting the Cheyenne's last encampment near White River found more than one deep pit inside a tipi with its cover rolled up a few inches all around to offer a ground-level field of fire.

Dull Knife had only given in because he was low on food, blankets, and ammunition, as well as smart. Army pals had told Longarm some of the more recent hostiles had learned to reload their brass cartridges with home-brew black powder and fashion fresh slugs from hammered telegraph wire. They used mushed-up match heads for cartridge caps. The War Department had wanted to forbid the sale of kitchen matchesin trading posts, until cooler heads had pointed out how many Indians who didn't know that trick would surely get matches from the settlers all around them, even as they pondered why the army found this so important.

A brace of Kiowa kids came around the bend on foot, leading Gray Skies and the other four ponies. So Longarm yelled for the two tardy gals to get their tardy rumps out there, and once they had, he soon had the three of them riding east at an easy lope.

He reined in on a rise a quarter mile out and made sure nobody was right on their tail. Then he told his two female companions to stick tight and follow his lead.

They did as he whirled Gray Skies and plunged down the far slope, to where the pony trail crossed a barely wet and braided sandy rill along the bottom of the draw. He warned them not to cut any corners with their own hooves as he headed Gray Skies upstream in the fetlock-deep but patiently running water. Matty seemed to follow his drift, but Minerva called forward, "Where are we going, Custis? I thought we were headed back to Quanah's agency over that way!"

Longarm called back, "Let's hope everyone else thinks we are too. We'd never make it that far across open prairie with anyone serious on our trail. So we'd best head up into the woody Wichitas and see if we can't make Fort Sill the long way round instead."

Matty whooped, "I like to shop at Fort Sill. They have ribbons of different colors than our Indian trader sells, and red licorice whips and ladies' fashion magazines. Why don't they sell fashion magazines at our trading post, Custis? Don't they want us to be fashionable?"

He figured she might be on to something, but he said he just didn't know. As they rode up the streamlet, chokecherry and box elder pressed in more densely from either side. So by the time they came to where the water sprang from the sandy head of the draw, they were out of sight of the trail they'd forsaken. Longarm led the way around some bow-wood, or Osage orange, and through some cottonwoods to ride up as steep a slope as they could manage, hoping nobody would scout for any sign where nobody with a lick of sense would force his mount to go.

When they cut a more sensible deer trail cutting northeast at a gentler angle, Longarm decided to follow it. If anyone was slick enough to figure where they might be headed, they wanted their mounts in shape for a running gunfight down the slope. Longarm studied on that as he led the way single file. He had his Winchester Yellowboy again to back his six-gun and derringer. Matty had insisted on packing a nickel-plated Harrington & Richardson.32-18 in a saddlebag as if she might be fixing to start off a pony race on demand. Minerva hadn't brought any firearms at all. When asked, she'd allowed nobody had ever shown her how to fire a gun. So that was another way she'd turned out different from that newspaper gal, Godiva Weaver, cuss the two of them combined.

They had to rest and water their ponies more than once, working up through the scrubby timber or high chaparral, depending on what was rooted where on the rocky slopes. Longarm was paying attention to the sky, knowing how easy it was to get turned around in hills that hadn't read the same large-scale map. So it was little Matty, staring back the way they'd come, who called out, "Down in those blackjack oaks, past that outcrop we passed half an hour ago!"

Longarm stared long and hard before he made out brownish movement way down yonder. He nodded but said, "Anyone following this trail could have as innocent a reason. But why don't we give them a chance to prove they ain't dogging us in particular?"

They didn't know what he meant, so he led them a good way along the apparent natural trail along the crest of a side ridge that only groped its way to a wooded knoll that overlooked the real trail from two furlongs north and forty feet higher. As they neared the sort of island in the sky, he reined in and dismounted, telling them to do the same as he explained, "The winds up here have tangled those blackjacks, and better yet, there's an undertangle of hellish bow-wood, if only we can get these ponies through it."

They could, but it wasn't easy, even with little Matty helping. Being a Horse Indian raised in bow-wood country, she knew how to deal with the ornery natural bobwire.

Back East, where they called it Osage orange, bow-wood growing in a park like some floral pet could stand on one trunk about the size and shape of a crab apple, although thorny as a rosebush and bearing a sort of mock orange hard as wood. But out here where it had to fight a more ferocious climate for its life, the results were wilder. Bow-wood branches coppiced, meaning you got two or three new thorny sprouts wherever you busted off or simply peeled some bark off a wind-whipped limb. The Indians had cut stouter branches to make a heap of short tough bows of the springy wood before they'd switched to more lethal firearms. Early settlers had planted and trimmed bow-wood into buffalo-proof hedgerows before both the buffalo and slower-growing fencing had given way to bobwire. Up here on the knoll the wickedly thorned and wind-pruned greenery had taken the time to grow. So with Matty holding some branches back, and him cutting a few more, they soon had themselves and their ponies totted up inside what the surprised Minerva described as a natural bower.

That was what she said you called a shaded clearing roofed over or walled by tough sunlit branches, a bower.

Longarm tethered the ponies as deep in the little glade as he could get them, and told the otherwise less useful Minerva to pick some bow-wood leaves for them while he and Matty scouted the far sides of the knoll. No warm-blooded critter would eat oak leaves, but bow-wood grew those thorns to protect its juicy leaves.

Gingerly parting the sticker-brush to the north with Matty and her small revolver in tow, Longarm saw that approach was steeper but brushier. So he told Matty, "If those other riders are on their own business, they'll pass on by. If they're after us, and figure out where we are, they'll circle afoot to creep up this slope through all that tanglewood."

He cradled the Winchester Yellowboy in one arm as he drew his Colt.44-40 and handed it to her, saying, "It's an insult to shoot a grown man with a .32-Short. But take both pistols over to the far side and keep an eye on that trail whilst I guard our back entrance. I don't want no needless gunplay. I'd rather have 'em guess where we might be. Do you know how to twitter like a horned lark?"

The breed kid proved she could by doing so. But then she told him she didn't think any horned larks would be this far off their usual prairie range.

Longarm nodded and said, "That's why I chose such a signal. It's possible to hear grassland birds up here amid all this tanglewood, but unlikely enough to make for a handy code whistle. Horn-lark me once if you see those other riders doing anything. Whistle twice if they seem to be searching for us. Three whistles will mean they're getting warm. Now git! I don't know how much time we have to get set for whatever."

Matty nodded and scampered off through the dappled shade, a gun in each hand. Longarm took off his jacket and hung it on a thorny bow-wood branch, along with his hat. Then he got down on his belly to lizard through the sticker-brush with the Yellowboy cradled in his elbows until he had a clear field of fire down the far-from-clear northern slopes.

Putting himself in the boots or moccasins of someone trying to work his way up through all that tanglewood, he decided on the three best ways to creep. That wasn't saying some son of a bitch with a different view of this knoll couldn't plan an entirely different approach. But a man with fifteen rounds in an antiquated repeater had to start with some damned plan.

He levered a round into the hitherto empty chamber, and slid another round into the magazine, making that sixteen rounds to work with. He could only hope that would be enough.

He'd just told himself not to be such an old fuss when Minerva Cranston spotted his boot heels sticking out the other side of his thorny green tunnel and gasped, "Oh, there you are. Custis, I feel so helpless and I'm so scared! What's going on out there?"

He could only reply, "Nothing. As the morning warms up you don't hear half as much skittering. There's a red-tail circling off to the northeast above another wooded rise. That's about the size of it. Not even an interesting cloud to ponder, as far as the eye can see."

She got down on her hands and knees to crawl forward through the brush, catching her thinly clad rump in a thorn and bitching about it.

Longarm laughed, not unkindly, and observed, "That was the first thing they warned us about when I was a young and foolish recruit. Green troops always seem to know enough to keep their heads down. So a soldier's first wound, if it ain't fatal, is likely to be undignified. Lay flat in the dirt and sort of slither your hips as you walk on your elbows. Why do you want to move this deep in the brush to begin with?"

She worked her way up his left flank as she panted, "I told you. I'm scared skinny and you have that gun. And, as I tried to tell you earlier, there's a reason, if not an excuse, for the silly way I tend to behave when I'm upset. Don't you want to know why I was so... forward last night in that tipi?"

He didn't, but as he'd learned aboard many a stagecoach or steamboat, there was no stopping a woman once she'd decided to tell you the story of her life, and what the hell, that fool hawk wasn't up yonder to admire now.

Minerva said she'd been about Matty's age, feeling just as put upon, when she'd run off from her strict upbringing with a handsome drifter called Ace. She said she hadn't known he was a gambling man with a drinking problem until they wound up stranded in a fleabag hotel over in Dodge.

Reflecting that the childish Matty might be dumb enough to fall for a saddle tramp called Ace, Longarm gently asked how come he'd gotten the impression she'd first come west as an employee of the B.I.A.

Minerva answered simply, "I left a few things off my civil service application. How does a spinster qualify herself as a schoolteacher by declaring she finally left a depraved brute after he'd offered a night in bed with her as table stakes in Laredo?"

Longarm calmly asked who'd won.

She laughed bitterly and said, "I didn't wait to find out. The older and probably wiser gambler Ace propositioned wanted to hear I approved of the wager, as he put it, before he bet hard cash."

Her voice dropped almost to a whisper as she continued, half to herself. "They called him Baltimore, and I guess I never got to thank him properly. After I got hysterical, and they'd carried Ace across the street to the infirmary, Baltimore led me firmly but gently to the boat landing and put me on a riverboat bound for Brownsville. He gave me some money and told me he'd take care of everything there in Laredo. I guess he did. I never tried to find out. I knew Ace had only been pistol-whipped, and I was afraid that if he ever got me back in his power there might not be a Baltimore the next time."

Longarm nodded soberly and said, "I've heard similar tales from parlor-house gals who weren't so lucky. If I live to be a hundred I will never understand how nice gals from gentle homes manage to pass up all the nice young neighborhood gents in favor of some weak-chinned self-styled roughneck calling himself Ace, Duke, or Frenchy. I reckon a total stranger who needs a bath is more exciting than the boy next door, eh?"

Minerva sighed and said, "Ace smelled of larkspur lotion and put on a fresh shirt every day when we were in the money. There were times we were too broke for that. The gambling life means steak with champagne some nights, with beer and beans more often."

"Sounds mighty glamorous," Longarm muttered dryly.

Minerva said, "I liked it best when we were broke. That was when Ace seemed to pay the most attention to me. When we were in the money he stayed up half the night and came to bed too tired to... you know."

Longarm muttered, "I told you I'd heard the same story many, many times. A bum with nothing better to do is naturally going to spend way more time playing slap and tickle with his gal than a gent with a job to go to. Why are you telling me all this, Miss Minerva? You got away from the useless rascal just in time, didn't you?"

She answered simply, "No. Not all the way. There have naturally been other men since. Some of them fine men. What you'd describe as the boy next door. I haven't been able to feel anything for any of them. I think it's because I feel so... safe with them. I know you don't have any idea of what I'm talking about, but..."

"Aw, I ain't that ignorant," Longarm told her. "I check out books from the Denver Public Library when I'm low on pocket change near payday. I've read about them Vienna alienist doctors who worry about what folks are really thinking when they talk sort of loco en la cabeza. You're confounded about feeling hot around menfolk because a poor excuse for a man broke you in bass-akwards!"

She protested, "Custis, Ace and I never went in for anything all that perverse. We just made sweet love a lot when things seemed to be going bad for us. I remember this time in Cheyenne when Ace and I were waiting for a wired money order and couldn't show ourselves outside our hotel room for three whole days and nights."

"I said I followed your drift," Longarm told her, trying to ignore the way his privates had started to throb against the soil under him.

She said, "You're so understanding. I felt so silly this morning. But last night, alone in the dark with no other man to turn to as those memories of other tense nights came back unbidden."

Longarm grimaced and groaned, "I know you're feeling tense again. So am I. But it ain't the same. Your Ace might have been enough of a baby to grope for a nipple when he should have been working on a way out of a tight spot. But we ain't holed up in some rooming house to avoid our creditors, Miss Minerva."

She gasped, "What a horrid way to talk to a lady!"

So he said, "Act like a lady, or at least a grown woman, and I'll be proud to kiss your hand, or any other part of you, once we make it to Fort Sill alive."

He couldn't resist adding, "Fortunately, they have locks on the bedroom doors at the army guest hostel. So I won't be able to get at you once you're feeling less inspired."

She told him he was a brute. He said, "Never mind what I am and go see why Matty's tweeting like a horned lark getting eaten alive by red ants!"

Minerva gasped, "Dear Lord! Is that who all that chirping over to the east is coming from?"

Longarm said, "Never mind. I see them now. Just like I thought they might, they've circled through the brush below. Matty never fooled 'em with her lark whistles. We'll soon see whether they expected me to be covering this side with a Winchester!

CHAPTER 15

A long time crept by and the sun just kept rising in a sultry blue sky. Nothing else seemed to be happening. From time to time some shrubbery down the slope would sway as if a ripple of breeze was moving in the still summer air. Longarm was almost certain the rascals who'd surrounded them just out of rifle range were flashing rare glimpses of brown skin instead of blue shirt as they moved from one patch of deeper cover to another.

Longarm and Matty had the nervous Minerva dashing back and forth with messages from time to time. Although neither had all that much to report. Matty's story was that she'd barely spotted a distant party of what looked to be Kiowa, riding single-file, when they'd all reined in to dismount, lead their ponies off the trail, and commence to sneak all about.

When Longarm sent a message asking Matty which side they'd dismounted from, she didn't remember. Minerva asked what difference it made, and Longarm could only say, "None most likely. Even Indian Police would be inclined to mount or dismount Horse Indian style, from the off side."

"Off side?" asked the mighty green schoolmarm.

Longarm said, "That's the right-hand side of a pony. You mount it from the near or left side if you're a white rider. Being contrary or mayhaps self-taught, most Horse Nations get on and off the opposite way. It don't matter all that much. I'm fixing to be surprised as all get-out if these fake Black Legging Kiowa turn out to be Irishmen."

Prone beside him under the bow-wood, Minerva asked how he knew they were fake, adding that she couldn't see anybody down yonder.

Longarm replied, "That's about all I'm halfway sure about. Chief Necomi, Hawzitah, and those other elders run the real Black Leggings Lodge. Had they wanted any of us hurt by their outfit, they had us in their power last night. So why would the leaders of the real warrior lodge turn us loose with arms and trail supplies this morning if they meant us any harm?"

She pointed out, "Somebody in that band tried to poison us last night, didn't they?"

He nodded, but said, "That makes the Kiowa leaders look even more innocent. Like I said, they had us had they meant to really make us vanish from this earth, as Necomi suggested they might. He was only trying to scare the truth out of me about that earlier brush with those mystery riders. When the Kiowa-Apache backed my story we got to be pals again. I suspect that medicine man, Pawkigoopy, might have at least a part in all this confusion. On the other hand, he could just be a mean old Kiowa medicine man. None of them could have been all that happy about our whipping them and turning a once-proud nation into wards of the government. So it's possible Pawkigoopy or some other malcontent was just trying to murder us on his or her own!"

Minerva said he'd never know how cheerful that notion made her.

She asked how else those Indians down the slope could have known which way they'd gone unless someone in Necomi's band had told them.

Longarm said, "They tracked us. They tracked us good. Nobody could have told them we'd be cutting this way through these hills because I never told nobody."

He stared down through the shimmering silence thoughtfully as he added, "They must really want us bad. I sure wish I knew why."

Minerva stared pensively down at the dusty green tanglewood and wondered aloud whether anyone was still there.

Longarm flatly stated, "They're there. Like us, they're trying to decide their next move. Playing chess for keeps is tough enough when you've some notion what the other player might be thinking."

Minerva asked Longarm if he had any moves in mind.

Longarm glanced up at the cobalt-blue sky before he replied, "I ain't so sure about the only one I've come up with. If we yell for help it's likely to inspire an all-out attack before help could get here. I figure, just as they must figure, a daylight charge up steep slopes could cost 'em. Henceways, if we just sit tight up here, they ain't as likely to move in before sundown."

Minerva gulped but said, "I read somewhere that Indians seldom attack after dark."

Longarm grimaced and asked, "How often do you want 'em to? Captain Walker of the Texas Rangers recorded one time that Comanche hate to charge on horseback in total darkness, for reasons anyone ought to be able to see. Then some Eastern writer turned sensible cavalry tactics into Heap Big Medicine. Likely the same authority on Indians as the one who decided they prayed to a Great Spirit who presided over a half-baked Christian heaven called the Happy Hunting Ground."

The schoolmarm, who prided herself on her own study of Indian lore, demanded, "Well, don't they?"

Longarm said, "Sure they do, if they're Christian converts. A heap of 'em are, more than once, with Anglo-Protestant missionaries holding the mistaken notion they've saved the souls of pagans already taught a heap of tales from the Good Book by earlier Spanish or French church workers."

A blackjack oak trembled as if caressed by a mountain breeze. So Longarm muttered, "They're tethering their own ponies as if they mean to stay a spell. I wish I could at least guess their nation. Different Indians do use somewhat different tactics and-"

"Over there! By those big yellow flowers!" gasped Minerva, even as Longarm fired into the clump of sunflowers.

They heard somebody yip like a kicked pup. Then Longarm had pushed the schoolmarm one way and rolled the other as a fusillade of rifle balls shredded leaves where they'd just been.

Longarm fired thrice at the dirty cotton bolls of gunsmoke giving away positions down the slope, rolling over once each time he gave them some to shoot at. Then, figuring any marksman worth his salt had to guess he'd keep rolling the same way, he rolled back through his own shot-up positions, watching in vain for another target of opportunity until he found himself back in conversational range with the bewildered schoolmarm. He smiled reassuringly at her and told her to go tell Matty what had happened, see what Matty had to say, and get back to him.

She moaned, "Oh, Custis, I'm so scared, and so excited between my thighs that I fear I'm about to climax!"

He said, "It'll feel just as good on the run. Get moving! This is a goddamn gunfight, not a time to start screwing, girl!"

She blushed beet red and jumped up to run off through the dappled shade as, down near those sunflowers, he heard someone shouting something. It could have been "agua," which was Mexican for water. A cuss stretched out on a dusty slope with two hundred grains of.44-40 lead in him would doubtless want some. But an Indian asking another Indian for a drink of water in Spanish? Longarm was backing out of the natural bow-wood hedge row as Minerva rejoined him, flopping to her knees in the dust beside him with her straw-colored hair half undone. She gasped, "Matty said nobody seemed to be moving in from her side! Oh, Custis, I'm so hot!"

He had to laugh, although not unkindly, as he handed her his pocket derringer and placed her awkward thumb on the break lever, pressing it as they broke open the simple mechanism together. She protested she didn't know anything about guns. He just extracted the two live rounds, thumbed them back in place, and twisted the tiny brass weapon in shape to fire both as he dug out some spare rounds for her.

He said, "They don't know how much you might or might not know about guns. They won't know what you're firing, at whom, if you just blaze away and roll somewhere else every time you spot any motion."

She sobbed, "You're crazy. I couldn't hit the side of a barn if I was standing inside it! You can't run off and leave me to defend this side!"

He said, "I ain't going far, and I'll be back like a shot as soon as I hear you fire one round. I just heard one of 'em call for water in Spanish. Lord only knows what Mex outlaws could be up to this far north. But they might not know any more than you about Kiowa, Comanche, and such, no offense.

He saw she was just kneeling there. So he set his Winchester to one side and placed a gentle hand on each of her trembling shoulders with the intent of steering her back through that bow-wood screen.

She seemed to misread his intent. It sure felt silly to wrestle with a kissy schoolmarm as she tried to haul him down atop her with a derringer in one hand and fistful of ammunition in the other. But he was bigger and stronger, as well as more worried about their lives beyond the next five minutes. So he finally had her posted belly-down and aimed the right way.

This left him free to scoop up his Yellowboy and move over to the grounded saddles near their tethered mounts in the deeper shade.

Opening a packsaddle, Longarm broke out a kindling hatchet and a ground tarp before he got to work on some lower oak branches. He found some dry duff sprinkled with acorns, and even a few dry twigs. But he broke open a couple of.44-40 rounds to sprinkle eighty grains of gunpowder on his tinder before he piled the green lengths of oak wood atop it. He thumbed a match head aflame to light his small pile of piss-poor firewood. Then he ran over to where Matawnkiha Gordon was holding the fort with a pistol in each small tawny fist. When he asked Matty how she was doing, the Kiowa, Comanche, and Scotch-Irish gal said things had been quiet as a graveyard on her side, and asked him what all that shooting had been about on his side.

He brought her up to date in a few terse phrases, and asked, "Seeing you speak both Kiowa and Comanche, no offense, do you recall any word in either lingo that sounds like agua, the Spanish for water?"

Matty thought, then shook her head and said, "Uka means to eat in what you people call Comanche."

Longarm shook his head and said, "My ears ain't that far off, and even if they were, a man lying wounded on a dusty slope would surely want some water to drink before he demanded a ham sandwich."

Matty said she didn't see why Mexicans would want to dress up like Kiowa Black Leggings and carry on so oddly. Longarm told her he was still working on it, and ran back to see how his smudgy fire was doing.

It was smoldering a lot, with much more dense gray smoke than visible flames. He nodded in satisfaction, set the Winchester aside again, and used the ground tarp to send up a series of smoky dots and dashes. Then he scooped up his saddle gun and rejoined Minerva, just in time.

Those two shots he'd heard on his way to her side had been fired blind, with the beginner's luck and natural aim of a gal shooting at a frightening target with both eyes shut.

She'd hit the half-naked cuss in the thigh, and he was still crawling back down an open stretch when Longarm called out, Como no, cabron! Alte o te voy a mandur pal carajo!"

The swarthy bare-chested cuss in black leggings kept going, so Longarm shot him in the ass and he didn't move in any direction once he'd finished flopping down the slope a good ways.

Longarm got himself and Minerva well clear of his own gunsmoke as he muttered, "I told him I'd send him on to Hell if he didn't stay put. Matty agrees with me that one of them was calling for water in Spanish before. So that fool we both shot should have known what I was saying."

Minerva moaned, "I'm about to come! Won't you even stick a finger in there for me, Custis?"

To which he could only reply, "Not just now. The next few minutes should tell the tale. I just sent up a pillar of smoke they ought to be able to see from Fort Sill. So those sneaks just down the way must have a much better view of it. Indian or Mex, they ought to be able to figure out why. So now they're making up their minds whether they want to charge like Pickett or ride for their lives. They know they don't have until nightfall now. I figure it won't take a full hour for my old pal, Colonel Howard, to order out a patrol once somebody points out our mysterious smoke signals. It might move him faster if you'd like to toss on more leaves and flip-flop that tarp from time to time."

Minerva grimaced and declared, "I've been taking notes on Indian customs. But I don't even know Morse code, Custis."

Longarm said, "Just try for any old dots and dashes. The cavalry are more likely to ride over and see who's sending lem up than they are to worry about decoding it!"

She didn't seem to be moving. He insisted, "Give it a try. A patrol from Fort Sill would be hard pressed to make it here in less than four hours if we got 'em started right now!"

She moaned that wouldn't be soon enough, and started to back out of the sticker-brush. He told her to hang on to that derringer and just let fly a blind shot from time to time in the two directions neither he nor Matty could cover. She got to her feet, bawling like a baby but heading for that smudge fire. So Longarm concentrated on the slope he hoped they'd choose to charge.

If the cavalry came at all, they'd be moving in from the southeast not much later than noon. He knew that down below they knew they had to shit or get off the pot a lot sooner. You didn't want a cavalry column less than two hours behind you as you lit out, even when you'd won. Admirers of either cowboys or Indians might not know it, but the well-shod and oat-fed cavalry stock selected by the Army Remount Service tended to outlast and overtake more casually cared-for ponies.

Staring down through the shimmering sunlight, Longarm tried to put himself in the other side's fix. it might have been easier if he'd had a better line on who in the hell they might be.

He composed some nasty Mexican insults with care, knowing how tough it was to cuss in Mexican. English enjoyed the luxury of words that were dirty all by themselves. You had to be more poetic in Spanish. Son of a bitch lost its sting translated into "hijo de perra," because you had to settle for a plain old female hound. "Cabron," meaning goat, was a meaner thing to call a Mexican because a goat, like a betrayed husband, wore big but nearly harmless horns.

Recalling what some border raiders had once tried on him and a mess of Ranger pals, Longarm cupped a palm over his mouth to blur just where he might be calling from as he bawled, "Ay, que mariposas, es probable que son sesenta y nueve!"

Somebody pegged a shot where they thought he might be. He couldn't say whether the one behind that outcrop was annoyed at the suggestion he was a butterfly sucking off a pal, or whether he'd just sounded off longer than he should have.

He yelled, "Tu madre!" which was usually good for a flying bottle in any well-run cantina, and sure enough, that same hothead behind that same outcrop let fly another round.

Longarm didn't return the fire. His hidden target was over four hundred yards out. He was hoping they could see how easy it would be for him to nail anyone at fifty as they struggled up the last barren yards of that steep dusty slope.

So what was holding them from just riding on? If they knew who was up here, they knew one man and two gals weren't packing a treasure worth dying for.

Longarm grumbled, "You sneaky sons of bitches think we know something about you that we don't. But what could that be? You know that by now I've reported my suspicions about fake Black Leggings to real Black Leggings. I've asked everyone who'll listen about Indian Police acting suspicious as hell. So what's left? What could I be missing?"

He spotted movement nobody but an experienced deer hunter on the prod might have spotted. Somebody was sidewinding through some knee-high mountain campion. Longarm considered what that gal had said about the quality of mercy in that play about Venice. On the other hand, Miss Portia had never had to stop so many bastards with one old saddle gun. So he fired, and damned if the jasper rolling down the slope from that clump of brush wasn't clad in dusty blue from head to toe. Longarm chortled, "Hot damn if I ain't smart! It's just like I was only suggesting, back in that Kiowa camp! Those fake Indian Police are in cahoots with fake Indians!" He yelled, "Bolla de idiotas! No me jodas!"

So then it got very noisy, with shot-up twigs and chewed-up oak leaves raining down on him as he grinned down at the billowing gun-smoke and muttered, "I asked you not to screw i with me, you idiots!" Then the guns fell silent, and a long time crept by as the sun rose ever higher and he tried to determine whether they were moving in or moving out. Minerva rejoined him on her hands and knees to gasp, "Matty sent me. She says a lot of riders are moving along the slopes from the southwest. She says she can tell they're busting through the chaparral on horseback because of all the dust. Those cavalry troops from Fort Sill haven't had time to get here yet, have they?"

To which he could only reply grim-lipped, "Not hardly. Stay here with that derringer. Fire it a heap if anyone shows his fool face to the north. I doubt anyone will. But you never know for certain."

As he crawfished back under the blackjacks, Minerva protested, "I couldn't repel a charge with this toy if I knew how to use it! Where do you think you're going, Custis?"

He grunted, "Where I expect more action, of course." Then he got to his feet, Yellowboy at port, and added, "They knew right off it was a lot steeper on this side. By now they must have noticed how we've been covering it." He moved off through the trees as he grumbled, "you bet they'll try the gentler slope from the trail, if and when they go for broke!" He kicked more greenery on the smudge fire in passing, and then he was kneeling by Matawnkiha Gordon to say, "We're swapping places. Go cover the tougher-looking backyard whilst I watch this front way in with a tougher gun." Unlike her white teacher, little Matty had been raised on tales of blood and slaughter. So she merely said, "I think they're bunching on this side too. There's no dust downslope now. But I keep spotting moving branches, and there's no wind at all right now!" Then she was fading back through the dappled shade, and Longarm had slid into her place behind a fallen log. She'd chosen a swell position. She'd gone a night and then some without a bath as well. But the female odor lingering in the crushed grass didn't disgust a man worth mention. The kid's Kiowa mamma had known what she'd been about when she'd insisted on a chaperone.

He had to laugh. He knew Matty's momma would laugh too if she ever found out who'd been chaperoning whom on this expedition.

His new position offered a whole new set of tactical considerations. There wasn't much cover between this wooded knoll and the trail about a furlong south, with fair cover growing right up to the far side and the open slope they'd have to cross no steeper than that streetcar line up Denver's Capitol Hill. He figured he could drop eight or ten if they rushed him in a bunch. He didn't know what he'd do if they charged across the trail spread out in greater numbers.

He glanced up at the sky. He didn't need to dig out his watch to see no cavalry patrol could have made it far enough to matter as yet.

Longarm asked a carpenter ant crawling along the log, "Do you reckon we're just spooking ourselves? Those fakes have to know they ain't got all day to hit and run. So what if they've just run?"

He figured Comanche would have charged by this time. In their day they'd been admired for fighting just as bravely, or dumbly, as Texas Rangers. Most other Indians considered a fallen hero a dead fool. There was no shame in calling off a "bad fight" because the idea was to make the enemy die bravely, not to get your fool self killed.

Counting those others Godiva Weaver had nailed the other day, the gang had taken mighty heavy losses for the nervous moments they'd been able to manage for him so far. He asked that ant how come the rascals had kept coming back for more. The ant didn't seem to know. Longarm insisted, "it has to be a better reason than my guns and boots. Some leader with a personal hard-on has to be ordering them to lift my hair in particular!"

He warned himself he was thinking in circles. Not wanting to give away his position with tobacco smoke, he plucked a stem of grass to chew as he softly sang:

Farther along, we'll know more about it. Farther along, we'll understand why. Cheer up, my brother, walk in the sunshine. We'll understand this, all by and by.

Then he spotted riders coming along that trail from the southwest. There sure were a heap of them. All wearing feathers, paint, and those black buckskin leggings as they sat their ponies tall, as if they didn't have a worry in this world.

Longarm wasn't sure they did. He had sixteen rounds in his saddle gun, the gals had his other guns, and there had to be at least fifty of the befeathered riders headed his way!

Then he recognized a familiar war bonnet. It was the only thing about old Necomi that hadn't been daubed with red, black, and yellow paint. And that had to be good old Hawzitah riding beside the chief, in spite of the way he'd whitewashed his head and shoulders. So Longarm half rose to shout, "Look out, Necomi! We're surrounded up this way and you boys are riding into an ambush!"

That inspired a Kiowa reply that sounded like puppy dogs getting their tails docked in a meat grinder. As half his followers dropped off the trail to beat through the brush and cuss it just awful, the more dignified Necomi rode closer to shout, "Which side was sending up those smoke signals? We could not read them. But when we see smoke above our own hills we wish to know why!"

Longarm called back that he'd been trying to signal Fort Sill. The older Kiowa shouted, "We can talk about it later. My scouts say some of those fork-tongues wearing black leggings just rode off to the northeast, and I wish to talk to them before they die!"

Longarm broked cover to signal danger with his free hand as he cautioned, "Call your young men back! I just told you I sent for the U.S. Cav! What would you do if you were a green trooper and you saw Kiowa in feathers and paint coming your way at full gallop?"

Necomi was smart enough to picture that. He swore mightily and rode closer, protesting, "This is not sensible! We could catch them if we really tried. But they will be far, very far, by the time the blue sleeves get here!"

As they closed to within conversational distance, Longarm nodded and said, "I know. If your young men were dressed as Indian Police, those mysterious rascals would never get away. But they're not. So now all we can do is wait here and explain all this confusion to the infernal army!"

CHAPTER 16

The morose Necomi didn't wait an hour for the hated cavalry. He headed for home with most of his followers. But the more progressive or more curious Hawzitah thought his two dozen painted warriors ought to practice their scouting. So they did. Longarm had to take their word when they reported no bodies after a thorough search out at least a mile in all directions. The knoll he'd chosen for a stand was surrounded by tanglewood-choked draws, timbered north slopes, and high chaparral most everywhere else. But once real Kiowa came back with signs as small as torn-off feathers, blood-spattered grass stems, and one brass uniform button, Longarm had to concede they'd have hardly overlooked a full-grown corpse out yonder.

He was stoking the smudge fire atop the knoll with fresh green branches, with the two gals hunkered nearby, when old Hawzitah came through the blackjacks again to report, "They were riding shod ponies. Many shod ponies that dropped blue sleeve sign. Those who paint themselves do not feed their ponies oat seeds for the birds to peck at. I think all of them, whether in blue sleeves or paint, were riding police ponies. By the time those other blue sleeves get here they will have made it east to the post road to Anadarko. Nobody will be able to pick out their sign from the other hoofprints on such a well-traveled trail, even if they forget to change their clothes!"

Longarm grimaced, stared thoughtfully down at the brass button in his left hand, and said, "I'm afraid you're right. This button tells me the ones in uniform may not be wearing government issue. The B.I.A. salvages cast-off army blue for the Indian Police. But some dress more spiffy. Agent Clum, over to the San Carlos Reserve, managed to get local settlers to outfit his Apache Police in spanking new blue tunics with their own pewter badges a spell back. I'll ask the Comanche Police sergeant I know whether this button looks like one he'd want his own boys to polish."

Minerva Cranston had been listening with interest. So she chimed in. "What good would that do you either way, Custis? We've all agreed those mysterious uniformed riders don't seem to be Comanche. There are no other Indian Police on this particular reserve. So it's obvious they begged, borrowed, or stole those uniforms somewhere else!"

Longarm shook his head and said, "They might have bought 'em. You can buy such livery, from a maid's uniform to an officer's full kit, in any fair-sized city, east or west. Indians acting on their own would be more likely to just steal new duds, no offense, Hawzitah."

The old whitewashed Kiowa smiled and replied, "A fighting man takes what a fighting man needs. I count coup on all the good things I have stolen from your kind. But I think I see what you mean. Those forked tongues have cheated many people of much money. They may not have the courage to just kill Indian Police and strip them. They may just buy those blue uniforms and black Spanish hats they were wearing when our younger brothers bought their own ponies back from them."

Longarm suggested, "Their leader might not have cottoned to all that much attention from the real Indian Police. As it's commencing to shape up, the gang's been taking advantage of how thin everyone's spread out, with less than five thousand folks, red and white, hither and yon across an area the size of, say, Connecticut."

Hawzitah asked what a Connecticut was, adding that it sounded like a Cheyenne word.

Longarm said, "I think it means something like a long river in the Algonquin lingo, which your Cheyenne pals speak. All it means to us is the name of a state back East about the size of this reserve. As long as we're discussing such matters, are you certain you've never heard anyone who paints himself call anything an agua? I took it for a wounded Mex requesting some water. But you're the expert on local vocabularies, Chief."

Hawzitah shook his whitewashed head and said, "Not Kiowa, Comanche, or Kiowa-Apache. Not Arapaho. Not Cheyenne. I can't speak of Wichita. We killed all the Wichita that didn't run away. We never had many powwows with the tattood root grubbers!"

Longarm thought about this. It made no sense to go about it in such a sneaky way if you were a left-over Wichita trying to reclaim the old homestead. But the mysterious riders hadn't made a whole lot of sense no matter what they thought they were up to, and the younger so-called Pawnee Picts had stopped tattooing themselves of late. He'd hold the thought until he had the chance to ask some Caddo speaker whether they had an Indian word that sounded like the Spanish word for water.

He told Hawzitah, "I got a reason for asking a religious question. Might you know any Horse Nation that buries its dead in the ground instead of leaving them up in the sky?"

The traditional Kiowa made a wry face and said, "The agents tell us we should bury our dead, as if they were food scraps we wanted the worms instead of the winds to dispose of. Some of our people who died in the guardhouse at Fort Sill or the B.I.A. hospital in Anadarko have been buried your disgusting way. I have told my sons that should ever you people treat me that way, they must dig me up in the dark of the moon and leave me high on a windy rise, up in the sky, to let clean winds blow me away."

The old Kiowa made a wry face and asked, "Why are we talking about my sky burial? When a man has seen more than sixty summers he is not greatly cheered by such talk!"

Longarm said, "Wasn't talking about your healthy body, pard. Talking about at least a half-dozen dead strangers nobody's seen hide nor hair of since. Don't it seem to you a body buried in an unmarked grave under thick sod would attract less notice than a traditional cuss spread out on a fourposter eight or ten feet off the ground?"

Hawzitah shrugged and said he couldn't answer for crazy two-hearts.

A younger Kiowa with his face painted solid yellow and the rest of him covered with red polka dots came through the trees to shout something at old Hawzitah.

The whitewashed leader told Longarm, "My young men had spotted dust, a lot of dust, on the prairie flats to the southeast. It is coming this way, lined up with this smoke you keep playing with. I think it must be that column from Fort Sill. Don't you?"

Longarm nodded and said, "Them other riders must be long gone with no intention of investigating this smoke. They knew what I was up to before you boys run them off."

He glanced down at the two gals and added, "We could save us all a heap of wasted time if we saddled up and rode on down to meet 'em."

Minerva protested, "What if those fake Indian Police are hiding in the bushes between us?"

Longarm started to dismiss this as a stupid question. Then he muttered, "Out of the mouthes of babes, when you're dealing with the great unknown. Could you and your young men escort us down off these timbered slopes, Chief?"

Hawzitah thought, nodded, and said, "It would be grand if we met those forked-tongued Wichita or Mexicans in our own hills! But your words about blue sleeves and war paint sounded wise. I think we will just ride with you as far as the open prairie between here and all those blue sleeves!"

So that was how they worked it. Longarm piled a last armful of green oak branches on his smoky fire before he helped the two gals get the four ponies ready to go. No Horse Indian was about to help anyone else with his or her own ponies. Then, mounted on Gray Skies, Longarm led the way directly on down through the high chaparral of the sun-baked southern slopes toward what surely seemed the rising dust of a fair-sized cavalry column.

Along the way, he got in a few more words for the real Indian Police, explaining once more to Hawzitah how his own young men could track down and count coup on sneaks such as the ones they'd just brushed with. He told the older man how those Apache Police had won medals, big shiny ones, for saving the life of their agent, John Clum, in a fight with renegades. He told the Kiowa leader how the great Lakota war chief, Red Cloud, had encouraged young men to join the so-called Sioux Tribal Police. He said, "Cochise met us halfway and died prosperous in bed. Red Cloud and Quanah Parker have both been making honest money on the side, without cutting their hair or joining the Women's Christian Temperence Movement."

Hawzitah answered dubiously, "I have heard all this. Maybe it is true. I will think about it."

Then he said, "Today I am painted for fighting in the old way. So I think this is about as far as my young men and I should ride with you!"

Longarm felt no call to argue against common sense. So they split up amid some cottonwoods where a draw fanned out across the rolling prairie, and Longarm led just the two gals toward that mustard haze of trail dust betwixt them and Fort Sill.

They saved the platoon led by a callow second john at least an hour and change by meeting them miles short of the hills. The patrol leader answered to Second Lieutenant Standish, and he naturally wanted to ride on and see if they could cut the trail of those fake Indian Police. He allowed the army had been getting reports about the rascals from all over. It usually took folks a day or so to figure out they'd been taken, after they'd paid off peace officers who were said to be paid by the B.I.A.

Longarm shook his head and pointed out, "Kiowa who know this range better, no offense, assure me the rascals have made it over to the post road by now. They could just as easily be headed for Fort Sill as Anadarko by now. So why don't we all just see if we can make the fort by supper-time? I promised to bring these ladies back, and by now the little one's momma ought to be having a fit!"

Standish, to his credit, thought before he asked, "Wouldn't it be awfully stupid to ride into an army post in fake uniforms after a firefight with a federal lawman?"

Longarm nodded but said, "Be even dumber to ride that way to the B.I.A.'s main agency at Anadarko. A white soldier might be slower to spy a fake resident of this reserve than a rider for the real Indian Police."

Standish nodded grudgingly, but said, "If I was one of those crooks I think I'd put on my cowboy outfit!"

Longarm smiled thinly and said, "I suspicion they dress more like Indians just traipsing about. Down where Cache Creek runs into the Red River they seem to have had some of the outfit in uniform, with at least a dozen more pretendin' to be quill dependents in a nearby tipi ring. Thinking back, with my eyes half-shut as I try to picture that setup, I ain't dead certain that what I took for women and kids had to really be women and kids. What do you call them Lakota boys who dress up and even walk like weyas? That's what Lakota call their women, by the way. Don't never call a Lakota weya a squaw."

Standish promised he wouldn't and said, "I've heard of those Sioux fairies. I find Indians sort of confusing. You think that could be what we're up against down this way?"

Longarm chuckled dryly and said, "My point is that it's easy for anyone to look like anything at a distance. It wasn't long after I talked sense to what I took for Indian Police that what I took for Kiowa in feathers and paint tried to keep me and a newspaper gal from going on to ask possibly embarrassing questions."

He rode on a bit further with his eyes shut all the way. Then he opened them with a nod and said, "That tipi circle down by the Red River wasn't set up traditionally. It was set up the way you or me might set up a tipi ring, with all the doorways facing one another as if they were seated around a table."

Standish squinted into the distance as if he too was picturing an imaginary Indian camp. "Looked about right to me," he decided.

Longarm said, "Me too, just passing by. Both of us are white men, not Horse Indians housewives. I'm commencing to doubt the bunch I met to the south were real Horse Indians. Such riders, even if they left their womenfolk behind, would be inclined to pitch a traditional camp, with every tipi open to the sunrise, not some Cuffier and Ives notion of an Indian village green!"

As they rode on the young officer, new to both the army and the West, but not to pictures of Indian camps, observed, "We have more than a few tents pitched downright sloppy along Flipper's Ditch around the fort, Deputy Long. Now that you've brought it up, I can't recall just which way any doorway might be pointed."

Longarm made a wry face and said, "I was talking about traditional Indians. Dispirited drunks and broken old men pimping for their wives and daughters might pitch a tipi upside down for all it matters."

Standish nodded, then asked, "Who's to say that's not the sort of reservation trash you've run up against then?"

Longarm said, "Me. They've come after me in particular more than once. They've come at me too brave, or desperate to be beggars or even pimps. After that, we know they swindled some Kiowa pretty slick, and tried to slicker that Running X outfit out of serious money. That sass who calls himself Black Sheep had me half convinced he was a real lawman, and you may have noticed the real badge I showed you back there where we first met."

Standish shot a thoughtful glance at the late afternoon sky. "In sum we have a band of clever desperados out here somewhere," he said. "I sure hope we can make Fort Sill before that storm blows in from the south!"

Longarm stared up at the darkening sky until he spotted silently flickering lightning deep in the badly bruised clouds. "We're a good three hours from the fort and less than an hour from that gullywasher headed our way," he said, "I know I ain't in command of this column. But if I was I'd circle the ponies and pitch me some of those swell army pup tents you all ought to be packing!"

Standish said, "Don't be ridiculous! We're only six or eight miles from the fort. We could make it in less than an hour and a half if we loped our mounts a good part of the time!"

"Through a gullywasher?" Longarm marveled. "They give no prizes for killing your ponies and catching pneumonia out our way. If I was in command I'd camp on high ground and let the gathering storm blow over before I rode on."

Standish let a little steel creep into his voice as he quietly replied, "You're not in command, Deputy Long. My orders from Colonel Howard were to investigate those distant smoke signals and report back to him as soon as I knew what they might mean. You've been kind enough to save us part of the trip. But meanwhile my commanding officer is waiting, probably with everyone on the post braced for an Indian raid. So I'll not waste a whole night out here in the dark just to keep from getting wet!"

He must have meant it. He raised his free arm and waved his men foreward, calling out, "In column of twos, slow gallop, ho!"

Longarm sidestepped Gray Skies, and waved down Minerva and the young breed gal leading the pack brute as the soldiers blue lit out at a lope as if anxious to meet up with that storm from the south.

Matawnkiha Gordon said, "I know. It's going to be raining fire and salt by the time we can hope to make camp!"

But the kid was good and so, with Longarm's experienced help, they had a canvas half-shelter facing a good fire with its back to the rain as the afternoon sky turned twilight dark and proceeded to sweep the rolling short grass all around with silvery sheets of summer rain.

They'd tethered the four ponies to some rabbit brush on the downwind side of their rise. They'd piled their saddles at either end of their flapping lean-to. That kept some of the swirling wet drafts at bay. They'd spread their bedding on the grass before it had managed to get wet. So they enjoyed a cold but reasonably dry supper as they huddled side by side in the gathering dusk with the storm showing no signs of letting up.

Minerva asked if they thought those soldiers had made it to the fort by this time. Longarm said he doubted it, and Matty said it would serve them right if they all drowned. Eating pork and beans from a can, she declared, "You Saltu are always in such a hurry to go nowhere. The three of us are as warm and dry as anyone can hope to be when Waigon spreads his wings. That gold bar chief was stupid. Stupid!"

As Longarm chuckled in agreement Minerva whispered, "Waigon?"

He said, "Thunderbird. I thought you were taking down a heap of Comanche, Miss Minerva."

She sighed and said, "I keep hearing new words. Didn't you say you were a Christian, Matty?"

The little breed shrugged and said, "When they are giving presents at the agency Sunday school I am. At times like these, when I have to look out for myself, I remember your Jesus Ghost didn't know how to fight when they came to kill him. He let himself be killed without a struggle, as if he was not a man of puha! When I asked the missionary about this, he said I was too savage to understand what the Jesus Ghost was doing for me. Maybe he is right. Nothing the Jesus Ghost ever did for me would keep me dry and feed me fine beans if I was out here on my hands and knees, praying like a Saltu girl !"

Longarm put a warning hand on Minerva's knee to keep the white gal from arguing religion with a pagan breed in the middle of such a storm.

The rain seemed to be easing off as the wind, if anything, blew harder. It got dark as hell, save for the ruby glow of their wind-fanned night fire. When Minerva suggested they build the fire back up, Longarm sadly asked, "With what? Those sage brush roots and cow chips we started with were dry when I first put a match to 'em. As of right now there's nothing flammable for miles that ain't wet as a mad hen."

He patted her knee in the dark again. "We'll be warm enough under our bedding, and it ain't as if we ain't had a long hard day. So what say we all turn in with the extra tarp over us?"

Minerva took his wrist in both hands to move his hand down the inside of her thigh, under her damp summer dress, as she allowed his words made a lot of sense.

He started to ask her what in thunder she thought she was doing. But he knew little Matty could hear every word, and it was all too clear what she was doing once he discovered, with the back of his hand, she was wearing no underdrawers between those smooth and almost clammy bare thighs.

He murmured, "I didn't know you were feeling scared again, Miss Minerva. I'd be lying if I denied you're making me feel... just about as nervous. But can't it wait until all three of us make it on to Fort Sill and that swell hostel I told you about?"

She began to rub his bare knuckles along the warm crease in her fuzzy lap as she half murmured, half moaned, "I thought we were all bedding down for the night out here, Custis."

On the other side of him, Matty yawned and declared, "You two do as you like. I'm tired. I've eaten. I want to go to sleep now. I have spoken!"

Suiting actions to her words, the little breed raised her end of the casually spread bedding and proceeded to get under some of it. Longarm didn't ask how much of her own duds she was shucking as she tossed at least some yards of damp cotton atop the tarp beside him.

He just got to his hands and knees so Minerva could get under at her end. Then he wriggled in between the two of them, having removed no more than his hat, boots, and gun rig. As he snuggled down he felt Matty's bare back with one hand, and didn't explore further down her arched spine. To the other side of him, Minerva lay naked as a jay, facing him, and he didn't have to depend on accidental brushes with either hand. Minerva had his right hand gripped in both hers as she hauled it back down to her fuzzy moist groin and whispered, "As I was saying before you interrupted me, you shy boy..."

"Minerva, for Pete's sake!" he protested, not wanting to say anything less delicate.

The passionate schoolmarm seemed to follow his drift. For she was casual and innocent as she quietly asked, "Are you still awake, Matty?"

The young girl muttered, "Go away. I was plucking sweet grass to weave a yattah for my umbea, and you brought me back from the dream country. Talk to Custis if you can't sleep."

Minerva did. She whispered, "She's too sleepy to pay attention, even if the wind wasn't flapping that canvas over us. Won't you even finger me, for land's sake?"

It seemed the best way to quiet her down. But even as he started to strum her old banjo with lust-slicked fingers, he murmured, "It can't be later than six or eight. So it ain't as if this was all that desperate a situation, ma'am."

She began to move her compact hips as if she was being laid as she moaned, "Speak for yourself. This is all so deliciously sordid, and for all we know, those Indians could be creeping up on us this very minute! I want to come again before I die, and doesn't this remind you of that night we did it in that Pullman berth with those Hard-Shell Baptists sleeping just across the aisle from us, Ace?"

Longarm had a better notion what was eating her now. He'd met other gals who seemed to get a dirty thrill out of taking chances at being caught in the act. There'd been that older gal back home in West-by-God-Virginia who'd never let him have any in her hayloft unless her sister was milking the cow down below.

The sister had been more sensible about doing it out in the woods a mile from their dear old dad and his Greener Ten-Gauge. But then there'd been that French gal touring with Miss Sarah Bernhardt who'd confided she just loved to suck dick in a theatre box, with the show going on and the orchestra droning passionate sounds.

He knew he ought to be ashamed of his fool self as she proceeded to unbutton his fly while she snuggled her naked body closer. But of course he never was. Her naked body felt more tempting in the dark than it looked inside a summer-weight outfit in sunlight. So he kissed her back when she pressed her parted lips to his and hauled out his rock-hard organ-grinder. For he was made of mortal clay and when you got down to brass tacks, what in thunder was a sixteen-year-old kid going to do to them if she figured out what they were doing to each other?

As if she'd read his mind, without taking her lips from his, or missing a stroke as she pulled his pecker, Minerva begged him to put it in her, adding, "It feels so romantic out here on the wet windswept prairie with the children fast asleep!"

He fingered her faster to encourage what she was doing to him, but he still felt awkward about the other gal under the covers with them, and so he whispered, "Wait till we get to that hostel at Fort Sill and I'll romance the hell out of you across a brass bedstead with the lamp lit and the mirror tilted our way!"

To which she demurely replied, "What kind of a girl do you take me for? I could never go up to a man's rented room like some woman of the town!"

He said, "I figured we'd hire separate rooms and act sort of sly, seeing you find that exciting. But how about your own place or, hell, your schoolhouse back at your agency? That sounds sort of risky to my way of thinking."

She sniffed and stopped stroking, just hanging on, as she told him, "It would only be distasteful. The door bolts on the inside and none of my Indian pupils would dare attempt to break in. And there's no soft place to lie down, and the whole place smells of chalk dust and unwashed children and their greasy lunch bags."

He sure wanted her to move that soft hand on his hard shaft some more. He tried slowing down with his own fingers. She called him a meany and began to stroke him some more even as she pleaded, "Can't we finish right, darling?"

When he didn't answer, she murmured louder, "Matty? How are you coming with that basket for your momma?"

When there was no answer, Longarm reflected that the wind-flapped canvas and moaning prairie all around was making at least as much noise as discreet screwing. So he moaned himself and rolled atop her with his duds on, at first.

Then his naked shaft was in her to the hilt, and she was peeling his duds off for him with her hands as she moved those school marmish hips in a way that might have made her a rich woman in Leadville or Virginia City. The best part was that they didn't bounce the solid prairie under little Matty the way they'd have surely bounced any bedsprings they were sharing with her. Longarm didn't ask why Minerva tossed the top tarp aside as she wrapped her slender but surprisingly strong legs around his waist and softly begged him to thrust harder and faster. He knew full well how his bare ass would have whipped the covers back and forth across that sleeping kid's skinny naked hips. And thinking about the dark tawny Matty's younger and likely even tighter little twat, just inches away from the one he was in, inspired him to start hitting bottom with every stroke as Minerva gasped, "My Lord, you're not at all like Ace after all, and to tell the truth you may be curing my warped hankerings for that tinhorn brute!"

Longarm allowed he was about cured of some heartless gals who'd used and abused him more recently. Then they came hard, and she agreed a shared cheroot might save both their lives.

It was tricky to light up, even with a wax Mexican match. For the wind eddied in under their flapping canvas shelter. But the match cast enough light to tell Longarm he'd been right about that other gal's skinny bare ass.

As if she sensed the light, or perhaps because of the chill in the air, Matty covered her bare butt with her blanket as she muttered some sleepy Kiowa curse words without turning over to face them.

Longarm hastily shook the match out, aware of how much of them the kid would have seen as he lit that cheroot. Then he and Minerva were snuggled under the tarp, naked limbs entwined, as they shared the one smoke. He wondered what other unmaidenly vices she indulged in, but he never asked. Billy Vail hadn't sent him all this way to investigate an almost pretty schoolmarm's morals.

But being a woman, Minerva naturally wanted to hear more about those other gals who'd been this mean to him. He figured that went with Professor Darwin's notions. He'd read how Mormons, Turks, and other such harem keepers were only carrying on traditions far older than, say, Queen Victoria. Menfolk, like apefolk, wolves, elk, and such, were inclined to hog all the females they could, fighting off any other males that might come courting.

But womenfolk, descended from many a great-granny who'd been part of some caveman's herd, were more inclined to size up the competition with a view to out-screwing them. So Longarm knew the horny schoolmarm wouldn't get sore if he told her the truth about that fickle newspaper gal or the mysterious stranger who'd taken cruel advantage of his weak nature the other night at Fort Sill.

Minerva laughed sort of dirty, and said she'd wondered why he'd seemed so anxious to lure her to that army hostel. She agreed it had doubtless been some army wife with a hankering for novelty. When he said he was worried about her damned army husband finding out, Minerva said she doubted many wives were in the habit of confessing such side trips to their menfolk.

He had to tell her the whole dumb tale of Attila the Hungarian and the confession of his Magda before he could ask her opinion, as a woman, on that mess.

Minerva agreed it made little sense from a male or female position. After a thoughtful drag on their shared cheroot she said, "The only thing I can think of is that she was trying to protect her real lover. Didn't you say he'd been heard to speak Hungarian to her?"

Longarm replied, "I never said it. Neighbor gals who know way more about the lingo say this rascal claiming to be me was some sort of greenhorn from their old country."

Minerva passed the smoke back to him as she pointed out, "He might not have told anyone he was anybody. When her husband heard she'd been billing and cooing with a tall dark stranger, it was Magda herself, a greenhorn bride who barely speaks English, who told her man an American lawman had done them both dirty, remember?"

Longarm did. He said, "It's already been suggested there was this article about me in the papers about the time old Magda would have had to come up with some answers in a hurry. I'm glad you think that was what she might have been doing too. My boss has other deputies looking into it, and since all roads seem to lead to the same reasons, that's likely where they'll wind up. They'll get the real story out of the lying sass, and I'll be able to turn this other stuff over to the army and real Indian Police. Lord knows they ought to be just as good as tracking flimflam artists across their own range."

She took the cheroot from his lips and flicked it far out into the windy darkness as she cooed, "You don't have to leave just now, do you?"

So a grand time was had by all, or at least two out of three of them, and they even got some sleep, once the storm had blown itself over and it got too quiet to get dirty under the covers with little Matty snoring away.

They got up, ate a cold breakfast, and were on their way again as the sun rose off to the east in a cloudless windswept sky.

That shavetail's complaint that they'd been almost there when the storm hit had been well taken. They'd ridden less than an hour when they topped a rise to make out the fluttering flag and higher rooftops of Fort Sill to the south.

Seeing the Comanche sub-agency lay east-northeast of the actual fort, although within the sprawling limits of the military reservation, Longarm led the gals that way until they spotted the steeple of that church Quanah Parker and his band attended when they weren't beating drums for other puha. Somebody must have spotted them riding in, for old Aho Gordon came tearing out on foot to meet them, wailing at her daughter in Kiowa and saying awful things about Longarm in English until Matty calmed her down in their own lingo.

The dumpy Indian gal stopped cussing Longarm, and switched to cussing those lying two-hearts who'd endangered her only child and cost her two sleepless nights. She told Longarm she was sorry she'd called him a baby-raper, now that she'd been told he'd behaved so properly to both of his companions, and added she'd heard rumors of riders dressed as Kiowa who failed to respond to the hand signals all Horse Indians were familiar with.

As Matty helped her mother aboard her own pony to ride into the agency with them, Longarm said, half to himself, "Paid-up Scotch-Irish outlaws have been known to gussy up like Indians, and a breed or Mex would look even more convincing to anyone but a real Quill Indian. We've established no Black Leggings Kiowa are wearing paint with permission of their lodge leaders. I'm pretty sure those tipis I took for Comanche down by the Red River were circled wrong for traditional Horse Indians. I know one I winged was calling out in Spanish, unless it was one of his pals calling for him. In either case, no Indian on this reserve would have reason to call for water in Spanish, whilst few Mexicans would be likely to be fluent in the sign lingo of these plains."

Minerva said, "Didn't you tell me that when you and that other girl tried to signal peaceful intent from that sod house they pegged a shot at you, Custis?"

He smiled thinly and replied, "Didn't know you were really that interested. But the more I study on it, the more it looks as if those fake Black Leggings ain't real residents of this here reserve!"

They rode on into the settlement, to be greeted by yapping dogs, laughing kids, and Police Sergeant Tikano, who said he'd already heard some of it from a rider from Fort Sill.

The three ladies seemed headed for the Gordon cabin to sip tea or something. Longarm and his two ponies wound up out front of the police station, a frame structure cut to the same pattern as a B.I.A. schoolhouse. As Tikano was ordering one of his uniformed policemen to take the ponies around back and tend to them, the older white agent, Conway, came over from his larger house to join them. Longarm waited until they were inside, where the moon-faced Comanche sergeant seemed to keep his own moonshine on file, before he got out the brass button his Kiowa pals had found on the mountain for him.

Tikano handed him a tumbler of moonshine as he took the button in his other hand, held it up to the light, and decided, "Ahee, it looks like it came from one of our uniforms. When we started to organize, the army gave us ragged old tunics and the B.I.A. gave us straw hats. The kind Saltu farmers wear. Quanah said we looked like scarecrows. He sent away to Saint Louis for real uniforms and felt hats like the soldiers wear. That is why this button has crossed poggamoggons instead of U.S. on it."

Longarm took a polite sip of firewater and said, "I thought they were supposed to be war clubs. So what we're talking about would be fake Indian Police in real uniforms that were lost, Strayed, or stolen?"

Conway allowed that made sense to him too. But the Indian scowled and declared, "We are missing no uniforms. None. We have less than a hundred Indian Police, counting the noncommissioned officers. All of them are Comanche, so far. All of them are known to me as Hou-Huam with true hearts. Hear me, each man has been issued one uniform. One. None of them are missing. None of them have reported the loss of the fine uniforms Quanah bought them. Even if one, or even two of our men got drunk and were ashamed to report such stupidity, didn't you say there were many of these forked-tongued koshares wearing big blue falsehoods?"

Longarm nodded thoughtfully and said, "That's about the size of it. But a tailor who'd sell uniforms to Quanah would sell the same sort of uniforms to most anyone else. You wouldn't know the name of that outfit in Saint Lou, would you?"

The Indian and his agent exchanged glances. Conway shook his head and said, "Quanah never asked my permission. I had nothing to do with the whole shebang. As I understand it, Quanah got permission to start his own police from the main office, up at Anadarko. They have a telegraph line to the outside world at Anadarko. We don't. Have to depend on the army line out of Fort Sill in a real emergency. Fortunately we don't have many, betwixt the cavalry and Quanah's new police force looking out for us."

Longarm nodded absently, and turned back to Sergeant Tikano to ask, "Did you say no Comanche held higher rank than noncom? Who does that leave as the commissioned officers in your outfit?"

The Indian looked sincerely puzzled as he polished off the last of his own drink and said, "Nobody. I mean, there's no Saltu dressed up as an Indian Police Officer. We take our orders from Quanah. Maybe he takes orders from army officers, or our boss agent up at Anadarko."

Longarm cocked a brow at Conway, who said, "Makes sense to me. I know I don't order even Sergeant Tikano here direct. Whenever we have trouble here, Tikano and his boys seem able to get on top of it without my help. I have asked them to arrest troublemakers who sass me on allotment day. But I reckon you'd have to ask at Anadarko if anyone other than Quanah rides herd."

Longarm insisted, "Some B.I.A. official has to approve their payroll. Quanah can't be hiring and firing out of his own pocket, can he?"

Conway shook his head and replied, "I just now said somebody up to Anadarko has to have the final say. You might ask Fred Ryan, if he's made it back to Fort Sill yet. Fred's in closer contact with headquarters thanks to that army telegraph line. That's how come Fred's our liaison man at Sill. He gets to relay heaps of messages back and forth. He'd likely know the address of that tailor in Saint Lou. For I doubt Quanah would have ridden all the way up to Anadarko to wire out for uniforms when he could have done so from Fred Ryan's office.

Longarm figured Fred Ryan was likely still in Fort Smith that morning, but said he knew how to use a telegraph key, if push came to shove and the Signal Corps would patch him through to a line off the reservation. So seeing nobody at the sub-agency could shed more light on the subject, he said he had to get on over to the army post.

He tried calling on Minerva to say his proper good-byes. But she seemed too busy over by the school to chat with him. So he just rode on out with a clear conscience, seeing he didn't seem able to terrify her by the safe sane light of a sunny morning.

CHAPTER 17

Longarm walked his tired ponies most of the modest way over to Fort Sill. He'd ridden them harder earlier, and it was that awkward time of the morning when folks were either too busy or too sleep-gurrimed to chew the fat with you. That summer gullywasher would have wiped away any sign that even greenhorns might have left, and the one man who might be about to clear away a heap of cobwebs, Quanah Parker, was nowhere to be found just yet.

Crossing the post road, Longarm read by the rain-paved mud how a whole mess of riders and at least six wheeled vehicles had just that morning headed north. Any signs young Standish and his patrol had left riding in through that slurry were naturally long gone. Longarm decided it stood to reason that Colonel Howard had sent out other patrols in more strength, once Standish had reported in. But unless they'd been wired further news about those fake riders, it seemed to Longarm the wrong way to go about it. The so-called Indian Wars had always been a tad distinguished for useless wear and tear on the U.S. Army. A heap of Mister Lo's diabolical cunning was nothing more than the facts of life on the High Plains. There were a lot of directions to ride on a sea of grass twice the size of the Baltic. Columns crossing it in the open, bold as big-ass birds, were invisible below the horizon to a scout on horseback less than ten miles away.

Longarm rode through the seemingly deserted shantytown outside the east gate of the cavalry post. He knew the whores, pimps, and gamblers were there. Night owls with no profit to be made this side of the army flag coming down again had no call to be out on their muddy streets at this hour. He passed a seemingly random grove of canvas tipis. He smiled to himself as he noted that despite the casual way they'd been put up by the side of the wagon trace, all four covered entrances faced due east.

Mexicans playing Kiowa wouldn't have been brought up in any sort of Indian shelter facing any direction. Longarm knew that despite the obvious Indian ancestry of many a Mexican, Spanish notions of orderly living had produced a sort of Papist Pueblo culture, with the faith and superstitions of the Spanish peasant plastered over the tortillas and red peppers contributed by Aztec, Chihuahua, and such. Mestizo or even pure Indio Mexicans started out with the same 'dobe bricks as, say, a Zuni from New Mexico, but after that they had all their front doors facing the street, no matter where the sun might rise in the morning.

He nodded at the sentry lounging by the gate and rode on through, muttering, "Nobody in that gang ever pitched a tipi around real Horse Indians. They'd have only had to do it once before the kids laughed at them and called them total assholes. If I knew better, from just my own friendly visits, it's a safe bet those rascals learned about the Indian Police and Black Leggings Lodge from Ned Buntline's Buffalo Bill Magazine!"

As he crossed the churned-up muddy parade Longarm warned himself not to chase moonbeams further than they might be shining. That one slicker calling his fool self Sergeant Black Sheep hadn't had a Mexican accent and he'd seemed at ease with police routine, whether he'd ever been sworn in as a lawman or not.

Longarm asked Gray Skies, "How do you feel about an American crook of Mex descent who spent some time on a small-town force or, hell, did some time in jail!"

When his mount failed to answer, Longarm insisted, "Anyone serving more than thirty days on a vagrancy conviction would pick up the way real copper badges walk and talk. That one could even be a breed. Only the one who called for water in Spanish has to have been a Mex for certain."

By this time they'd made it to the stables, where a remount noncom he'd talked to earlier was coming out the open end to greet them. The soldier's Class B uniform for the day showed he only supervised the mucking out of the stalls inside. So Longarm didn't offer him any reins as he dismounted, saying, "Good ponies you boys loaned me. I noticed a whole shit-house of riders just left from here a short while ago."

The two-striper nodded and replied, "You noticed right, and the old man was sort of pissed that you hadn't made it back yet. Him and the First Battalion just rode out to track down them painted Kiowa."

Longarm sighed and said, "Aw, shit, I'd best switch this saddle and bridle to that bay I rode in on and see if I can catch up with Colonel Howard before he hurts somebody, or vice versa! They took the post road north, right?"

The man they'd left behind nodded and said, "Headed up Anadarko way. Somebody said something about them wild Indians crossing the post road or following it one way or the other. They never came this way. The agency guns around Anadarko are forted up and ready for the red rascals, of course. The army and the B.I.A. have been burning up the wires, trying to figure which way the rascals went."

Longarm started to lead the two jaded ponies inside as the remount man tagged along, volunteering, "That Colorado pal of yours is with the column driving a buckboard."

Longarm handed the reins to another remount man dressed in faded blue fatigues as he asked with a puzzled frown, "Pal of mine, you say?"

The noncom said, "A Mr. Homy-something. Said he'd driven all the way up from Spanish Flats looking for you."

Longarm knew it was useless to hope. But he still made sure they were talking about Attila Homagy, from Trinidad, Colorado, before he decided, "I might not ride after that column just yet. Got to send me some telegrams first. Where might I find your signal officer at this hour pard?"

The army regular looked awkward and suggested, "You might find the liaison office less busy, Deputy Long. They got their own telegraph setup, and with Agent Ryan over by Fort Smith, his breed clerk can't have all that much to do.

Longarm didn't ask whose wife the signal officer might be with as so much of the outfit rode off to glory. But that reminded him of the other night and so, seeing the enlisted men always knew, he asked what the colonel had decided about those two officers who'd been fighting in the hall at the hostel.

The remount man grinned lewdly and said, "Long gone. Colonel Howard rides with fairly easygoing reins, but he won't put up with downright stupid. Both officers were transferred out the next morning, one to Fort Douglas in Mormon Country and the other down to Fort Apache. We all felt the sassy wife on her way to Fort Apache got off lucky, once she'd been caught with the regimental Romeo."

Longarm nodded and agreed it seemed rough on the innocent wife of that Romeo.

The remount man nodded, but said, "That's how come he was only sent to Fort Douglas, despite his wayward dong. The colonel's lady, Miss Elvira, said they had to consider the innocent victim of the untidy triangle. Fort Douglas ain't much worse than here for the wives, and her horny husband deserves the slow rate of promotion over yonder in the Great Basin."

Longarm didn't ask how they'd learned this much tending to the regimental riding stock. He knew senior-grade officers rated lots of household help, and he hadn't even had to serve breakfast to the older couple himself to learn old Elvira tended to call the shots about social matters on or about this post.

He agreed she seemed an understanding old gal, and left the two army ponies in the care of the army as he ducked out and circled the parade the less muddy way until he came to Fred Ryan's liaison office near the Headquarters and Headquarters building. He'd never figured out why the army felt you ought to say "Headquarters" twice. But he didn't really care.

Finding the door of the B.I.A.'s more modest doghouse unlocked, he went inside, where a baby-faced breed wearing a white shirt and shoestring tie looked up from a desk behind the counter and primly told him the boss wouldn't be back until later in the week, if then.

Longarm nodded and said, "I know Fred Ryan rode the mail ambulance east. We waved to one another in passing. I'd be Deputy U.S. Marshal Custis Long, and I'm sure old Fred would be proud to let me use your telegraph key, seeing the army signal officer seems away on serious business as well."

The young breed rose warily to come over by the counter as he confessed to being Hino-Usdi Rogers of the Cherokee persuasion. When Longarm bluntly asked him what a Cherokee might be doing here in Kiowa-Comanche country, Rogers looked embarrassed and explained how Ryan had brought him along to a newer post after hiring him and training him at the Tahlequah Agency in the Cherokee Nation. Longarm didn't care. Ryan had obviously been with the B.I.A. longer than the Kiowa or Comanche had been with this agency.

Rogers opened a flap at one end of the counter, but warned Longarm, even as the far taller deputy stepped through it, that he wasn't half as fast with a telegraph key as the Signal Corps crew next door.

Longarm said, "I can send and receive Morse pretty good. Used to tap into enemy wires during the war. I hope you've some connection with the Western Union grid so's we can get off wires to Denver and such?"

The Cherokee breed ran fingers through his thick black hair and looked as if he'd been caught with them in a cookie jar as he told their visitor he wasn't sure. He said his boss, Fred Ryan, usually made the long-distance connections and let him do the more routine sending and receiving.

By this time he'd shown Longarm to a table in the rear where a telegraph key and some writing material waited under a shelf of wet-cell batteries. Before he sat down, Longarm casually asked if Rogers or the army had wired those orders for police uniforms from Saint Lou.

The breed kid brightened and said, "Oh, that was us. It was exciting to chat by wire with big-city folk. Agent Ryan patched us through to the Western Union office in Saint Louis, and then handed the task over to me. You see, he makes the important decisions while I keep the files in order, do the routine typing, and-"

"We got a young gent called Henry clerking our Denver office the same way," Longarm said. "You told me Ryan broke you in a spell back at the Cherokee Agency. Now I'd best contact the central Kiowa Comanche agency at Anadarko and see if they can shed any light on Colonel Howard's campaign plans."

They couldn't. No army messages were on the line at the moment, and it only took a few minutes for someone at the B.I.A. in Anadarko to hear their own key clicking and ask who in thunder wanted what.

It seemed nobody in Anadarko knew why Colonel Howard was headed their way in battalion strength. Longarm started to send something dumb about Attila Homagy. But he never did. With any luck the fool immigrant would never think to ask questions about telegraph messages, and even if he did, it was going to take him yet another full day to get back here, giving him at least two on the trail if everyone pushed hard.

Anadarko lay a tad farther away than the thirty miles a cavalry column averaged in a day's ride. Even if Howard got there well before sundown and Homagy heard right off, there was no way he'd be able to drive a jaded team directly back alone, at night, even if the army would let him. Longarm knew they wouldn't even let a lone civilian drive by day before they had a tighter grip on this current Indian scare. Colonel Howard never would have led that big a force out chasing after a few dozen at the most if he hadn't been taking the situation seriously.

Once he'd figured how much time he had to work with, Longarm made a few penciled notes to compose the longer message he had to send his Denver office.

Before he could, Hino-Usdi Rogers shyly marveled, "You surely send and receive good! You've a faster fist than Agent Ryan, and I can't keep up with him half the time!"

Longarm got out a brace of smokes as he explained, "The trick is not to think in dots and dashes. It takes a spell to think and then send dit-dit-dah-dit for the letter F. If you remember it sort of sounds like 'Get a haircut!' and move the key in time with the words, you've sent your letter F already."

The breed kid laughed, and asked if there were any other silly ways to bring Morse to mind. Longarm offered a couple that were sort of dirty, if effective. The young breed blushed like a gal, and declared he'd never forget the letter V sounded like "Stick it in deep!"

He blushed so girlishly and refused the offered smoke so primly that Longarm shot a thoughtful look at his thin white shirtfront. But although he'd met up with gals getting by in a man's world that way in the past, Hino-Usdi had no tits worth mentioning.

Lighting his own smoke, Longarm patched himself through to the main line, and after some argument with a Western Union section manager who didn't recognize his fist and required some bragging, Longarm got through to their Denver office and had them take down a long wire at day rates, collect, to be delivered to his home office.

He brought Billy Vail up to date on his situation so far, using as few words as possible but still spending many a nickel. Then he pointed out that Quanah Parker seemed to be off the reservation on other business, and that Homagy had tracked him this far after all, and asked his boss whether he was supposed to come on home or just have it out with the fool grudge-holder.

The Cherokee breed told him, admiringly, he hadn't been able to follow a quarter of those dots and dashes, even thinking dirty.

Longarm took a thoughtful drag on his cheroot and said, "It's sure to take them the better part of the next hour to get Marshal Vail's reply back to me. Whilst we wait, I may as well send some more, and whilst you're at it, could you dig out any files you have on those made-to-order uniforms you ordered for old Quanah?"

The kid said he could. So Longarm started sending shorter direct messages to other sub-agencies and other main agencies in the Osage, Choctaw, Creek, and Cherokee Nations.

By the time Rogers rejoined him with a file folder, Longarm was able to declare, "Fort Smith says a newspaper-reporting gal I know seems to be on a wild-goose chase. Quanah never went there to visit Parkers he ain't related to. They couldn't tell me just where the gal and old Fred Ryan spent the last few nights."

Rogers blushed like a gal again as he opened the file on the table by Longarm, saying all the business correspondence they'd handled for the busy Quanah Parker was somewhere among all those carbon onionskins.

Longarm was careful with his ashes as he leafed through the pile. The records showed the progressive chief had ordered, received, and paid cash for one gross of police uniforms, cut to the same pattern as those worn by the so-called Sioux Police. That jibed with what the sincerely sober Sergeant Tikano had told him.

Billy Vail had never sent him to look into the business dealings of Chief Quanah Parker himself. But seeing he had the files handy, and recalling what they said about that process of elimination, Longarm nosed around enough to see Quanah didn't have any of his uniformed police collecting fees or even recovery rewards from anyone.

Longarm made sure by asking the B.I.A. clerk what some of the obscure typing meant. Rogers said Quanah naturally reported tribal income to his own agent, Conway, who relayed it on up to Anadarko by way of the wire here in the liaison office. The breed added that the B.I.A. had felt little call to rein Quanah all that tight, seeing he had a rep among red and white folk for honest dealings and gave the B.I.A. a lot fewer problems than old sulks like Pawkigoopy or even Necomi.

Longarm saw by the wired bank statements how Quanah could afford new blue serge and brass buttons. Aside from leasing tribal grass to white neighbors, Quanah bought and sold riding stock on and off the reservation at a handsome profit. For being a product of both cultures, he knew which end of a pony the shit dropped out of. He'd already taught his Comanche wranglers to saddle-break stock to be mounted from the near side so cowhands could get more use out of them.

It got downright spooky when you got to the real-estate deals a man who could pass for Comanche or Texas Parker was capable of pulling off. For thanks to having been accepted by his late mother's kin all over North Texas, he was in a position to put on some pants and make a profit from any proven homestead he could get off some greenhorn cheap.

A mean thought crossed Longarm's mind when he came to that. But he'd have heard about any recent Comanche scares down the other side of the Red River. Meanwhile, two out of three homesteaders went bust with no help from anyone but the grasshoppers and fickle climate out this way. He noticed most of the part-time Indian's cropland deals had been just east of Longitude 100', where dry farming or dairy herds had more of a chance. He wondered who in thunder had ever taught a Comanche war chief you needed just over ten inches of rain before you dared to bust your sod. Poor Cynthia Ann Parker had only been nine when she'd had to learn more about weaving baskets and tanning hides than agriculture. One suspected that in spite of his long braids, old Quanah had to be another sneak who reads books when his pals weren't watching.

The papers he was reading inspired Longarm to send other questions to the outside world. When he contacted Anadarko again to see if they had anything on Colonel Howard's column yet, they wired back that the cav had stopped for a trail break at the dinky sub-agency at Elgin, meaning Howard was really taking his own good time and that he'd be lucky to make it up to Anadarko by sundown.