Longarm on the Santee Killing Grounds (10 page)

Longarm got to his feet, holding the Winchester muzzle down in his free hand as he got out his billfold and flipped it open with a practiced motion to display his federal badge and personal identification. He gallantly suggested, "Nobody would ever buy a lady as young as yourself for the Widow of Windsor, ma'am."

He hadn't lied. He doubted she could be past fifty, and he could see she'd been a real beauty in her day. She still had most of her teeth, and if the hair peeking out from under that sun-bonnet was a mite streaked with gray, it was still thick and healthy-looking. Gals who shaded their features with sun-bonnets didn't prune up as fast in prairie country. So she looked downright comely when she smiled across the fence at him and said, "Well, I never. You come around to the front and let me coffee and cake you whilst you tell me all about it! Were you chasing somebody when I saw you leap from that speeding train, Custis? I didn't see anyone but you bearing down on me at breakneck speed, but then, I was cultivating my cabbages with this high fence between US."

"I wasn't chasing nobody, ma'am," he said, only hesitating a moment before he added, "I'll surely take you up on your kind offer. For anybody out to chase me round the depot figures to get discouraged when I don't get off that train and they don't see me anywhere downtown for a spell."

That would have roused most anyone's curiosity, and it turned out she was a woman who'd had few men to talk to since she'd wound up a widow three summers back. So he told her more or less why he was on the outskirts of her town, leaving out a few details. It was best to leave a certain amount of guilty knowledge to guilty folk, and far as Longarm knew, nobody in New Ulm was supposed to know about serial numbers one could backtrack to a payroll robbery but the bankers and the local lawmen who'd contacted Billy Vail about that treasury note. With any luck, the crooks who'd run off with them still didn't know the dead paymaster had listed the numbers on those larger notes. For nobody but a total asshole, or an innocent man, would try to spend any paper as hot as that.

His widowed hostess had shucked her sun-bonnet in the shade of her kitchen as she'd sat Longarm at a pine table and rustled some coffee and cake for the both of them. Her comfortably lived-in face looked softer once out of the harsher sunlight, and light brown hair streaked with gray looked sort of nice pinned up atop her fine-boned skull that way. She said the raisin cake she'd baked herself was an old Swedish recipe, and he wasn't surprised, since her name was Ilsa Pedersson nee Syse. She and her late husband had come to America from the Norwegian province of Sweden as kids, before Lincoln's Homestead Act cluttered up these parts with land-hungry Scandinavian folk. So that likely accounted for her natural English, although she confessed she could still talk her own sort of Swedish if push came to shove. She said most of the new American landowners were proud to be American now, and only talked their native languages during old-country festivals and such. She seemed surprised he already knew about Swedish children expecting a lady in a long white nightgown, with candles lit atop her head at Christmas instead of Santa Claus. Ilsa said it had to be fascinating to ride all over the country, meeting all sorts of folks and being allowed to question them without being called a nosy snoop.

He chuckled down at his coffee mug and confided, "I do get to ask about most anything I find interesting, Miss Ilsa. But seeing you know more folks around here than me, and couldn't be expected in advance to lie to the law, I've good reasons for asking if you've ever heard anything about a local homesteader called Israel Bedford."

The friendly old Swedish lady nodded, smiling. "Of course I recall Captain Bedford from that dreadful Sioux uprising during the war! You may have seen that famous photograph they took of all us women and children huddled together on a prairie rise, with the army guarding us, after Little Crow burned most of New Ulm and killed so many!"

Longarm nodded. "I've seen it. Some of you ladies looked sort of pretty despite your windblown and dusty appearances. But you all look sort of worried as well, and there's one pretty gal near the front, staring into the camera in sheer terror, as if it was a ghost."

The graying brown-haired woman across the table nodded gravely and said, "She might have been seeing ghosts. I know the face in the photograph you mean, albeit I've forgotten her name and exactly who in her family they killed. I was more fortunate. My man was riding with Sibley's Volunteers and we had no children. But the Sioux did some dreadful things to the young boy we had working in our dry-goods store at the time. They say they shoved wads of straw down the throat of one trading-post employee to swell his stomach like a balloon until it burst!"

Longarm nodded gravely and explained, "Trader named Andrew Myrick, in charge of the trading post at Redwood. It was Indians as told me about it. Seems that during a hungry stretch before the fighting got started, some starving Santee begged Myrick for food and he suggested they eat all the grass they liked."

He finished his coffee and dryly added, "Indians are inclined to possess sardonic notions of humor, as well as long memories."

She refilled his mug from her pot. "Pooh, neither me nor mine around New Ulm ever did anything to harm those Sioux. So why did they ride right through town, howling like wolves as they murdered, burned, and looted!"

Longarm suggested, "They were vexed with the Wasichu, ma'am. That's what they call us white folk, Wasichu. The Third Colorado figured a Cheyenne was a Cheyenne too, when they rode through that Indian camp along Sand Creek, howling like wolves as they murdered, looted, and burned. It's a mistake to consider such clashes to be melodrama, ma'am. Our relations with Mister Lo, The Poor Indian, make more sense as tragedy, with neither side all right or wrong, and we were talking about Israel Bedford, right?"

She shrugged her shoulders, perking up the small firm breasts he could just make out under her pleated calico in a surprising girlish way, as she told him flatly, "Captain Bedford was a kindly as well as gallant officer during the war. There was more to assisting hungry and homeless survivors than just chasing Indians away. I think he was in charge of the spare horses. I know he was in a position to issue supplies without the usual fuss and feathers others put us through."

She served him another slice of cake, unasked, as she went on to say, "My late husband and I were at the dance they staged to welcome the captain and his bride when they came back to Brown County about eight or ten years after the war. Life in the peacetime army hadn't agreed with an ambitious man and a farm-bred wife. So nobody was surprised when they bought the Bergen homestead and commenced to raise barley, ponies, and kids. Two girls and a boy, the last I heard, with another one on the way."

"Back up a ways and let's go over them buying a homestead claim, ma'am?"

She shrugged again, just as perky, and explained. "With money he'd saved up as a soldier, I suppose, Old Lars Bergen had proven his original claim and so the land was his to farm, let, or sell. They say the old man lost interest in his quarter section after losing one son in the war, another to prairie lightning, and then his wife coming down with the cholera and dying on him so nasty."

She grimaced, made a brushing motion, and continued in a brighter tone. "Suffice it to say the old Bergen place is a lot more cheerful these days. The Bedfords are good neighbors, even if they didn't come from the same old country. I still do business in town, so I can tell you their credit is good. Captain Bedford pays all his bills when due."

"That's what I heard," said Longarm thoughtfully. He had no call to tell her what he meant to ask at the bank. But she'd said at the start he looked sort of travel-stained, and he'd scare most bankers by striding in with a Winchester as well as a strange face. So he told her, "I sure could use some place to store my saddle gun for a spell, and you say you still have that dry-goods store in town, ma'am?"

She shook her head. "You can leave that rifle here with me if you like. We never rebuilt the place the Indians burned out. Since the railroad crossed the river I've done better taking orders for barbed wire, patent windmills, and such from this very house."

He allowed in that case he'd be proud to bring her anything she might need from town when he came back for his Winchester. When she asked when that might be he told her truthfully, "Can't say yet. I got some wires to send, some other errands to tend, and some calls to make around Courthouse Square. Then I got to find me a place to stay, hire me a pony to ride, and-"

"I've more than one spare room and two horses out back," she told him. "One of them draws my sulky, and I ride the other when I have to make time cross-country. So I can tell you it's a pretty good jumper, with my weight at least."

Longarm started to protest, he didn't want to put her to that much trouble. Then he considered how tough it might be for a hired gun to find out which hotel a stranger in town had registered at if he was holed up in a private home a good quarter mile away instead. So he nodded soberly and said, "I can easily get away with putting down a dollar a day for room and board, and most liveries hire mounts at two bits a day plus deposit, ma'am."

She said she dealt in hardware, not room and board, and suggested they argue about it after he came home for supper. So, the day not getting any younger as they sat there staring thoughtfully at each other, he allowed that sounded fair, and they shook on it before he headed on into town on foot.

It only took Longarm a few minutes to cover the five or six city blocks to the area around the depot he was more familiar with. That Western Union was still where it had been the time he'd stopped here in New Ulm on his way to Northfield, where the James and Younger gang had robbed that bank. When he strode in and identified himself to the older gent behind the counter, he was told they'd been expecting him because more than one wire had been sent to him in care of the New Ulm Western Union.

One was from Billy Vail, informing him that yet another of those hundred-dollar treasury notes had turned up at a Cheyenne bank, but that he was to go on with his investigation at New Ulm in any case, that you didn't investigate by running in circles, and that nobody in Cheyenne could say who'd broken that big bill in a local saloon on a Saturday night to begin with.

Another wire was from Pagosa Junction in the South Ute reserve, in answer to the earlier wire he'd sent them while changing trains at K.C. The Indian Police said they'd dragged a few likely stretches of the San Juan in vain and relayed his request to the Navajo Agency downstream. So he knew he didn't have to wire the Navajo Police after all. They'd find the body of that murdering young jasper for him or they wouldn't, and in either case it wasn't too likely anyone out to assassinate federal lawmen would be packing identification papers made out to his true name. But aliases turned up on the yellow sheets as well, if an owlhoot rider kept flashing the library card, voter's registration, or whatever he'd stuffed in his wallet.

Longarm hummed a few bars of "Farther Along" as he tore open the last wire from an old pal in Denver who screwed like a mink and rode herd over a library of war records, including Confederate, collected by a rich eccentric who, having avoided service in either army, seemed to have enjoyed the hell out of the war on paper.

The good old gal he'd wired for more details about Tyger, Flanders, and others who deserted about that same time, such as that scout he only had down as "Chief," had wired back she needed more time. For most of the Confederate records in that private library in Denver dealt with western rebs, such as Hood's Texas Brigade. But she said she'd keep digging and that she was looking forward to a personal visit as soon as he got back to Denver. Longarm grinned as he put all the telegrams away, for after all those pure hours aboard those trains, even the memory of a sort of homely old gal could make a man feel sort of horny. He remembered how hard she tried to please with a rollicking rump despite her plain appearance.

Recalling what Ilsa Pedersson had just said about him looking like a hobo, Longarm scouted up a barbershop that served hot baths in the back as well. He borrowed a whisk broom and did what he could about the fly ash and dust on his duds as the tub slowly filled with only slightly rusty water. He had a fresh shirt and a change of underwear in his saddlebags, of course, but he didn't want to traipse all over New Ulm to get them. The dirt on his light blue work shirt wasn't all that awful anyway, once he'd washed his hide good with naptha soap and had the barber sprinkle him with plenty of bay rum after his shave out front.

The barber's business had been slow that afternoon, but a lawman who knew the ropes of a small town didn't press his luck by bringing up the subject of Israel Bedford. Old Ilsa had already told him the suspect enjoyed a good local rep, and there was no way in hell to ask about folks in a town this size without someone being sure to let them know there was a stranger in town asking about them.

There were only so many hours in a day to work with, but a strange lawman who didn't let the local lawmen know who he was ahead of time could sure have silly conversations about the six-gun someone had just noticed he was packing with no other visible means of support.

Billy Vail's opposite number in these parts worked out of the bigger twin cities further east, where the Minnesota joined the Mississippi. So the ranking law in New Ulm was the county sheriff, and fortunately the sheriff himself was out raising campaign funds for the coming fall elections. So Longarm only had to tell a senior deputy what he was doing in Brown County in a dirty shirt and with a.44-40.