by Tabor Evans
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 gr
ay 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 kee
p 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."