by Tabor Evans
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 pictur
e 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.