Longarm on the Santee Killing Grounds (12 page)

She didn't argue. But as she led the way around to the back she naturally wanted to know where he'd be riding, and seeing he'd be riding there on her stock, he felt obliged to tell her.

She gasped. "The Bedfords dwell a good six miles north of town, and you say these mysterious breeds are homesteading nine miles out beyond them?"

Longarm said soothingly, "We won't be jumping no fences loping either way, ma'am. I don't see how we'll get back before sundown either, but it's a county road and the moon will rise full tonight with no clouds worth mention."

So she sighed and said she'd put the ham she was baking in the warming oven up above, so it could cook much slower, but warned him his supper would be ruined if he didn't get back by seven or eight. He doubted he could, but he never said so as he followed her inside, agreed the black gelding with a white blaze she introduced him to was a handsome brute, and went along with her suggestion he use her bridle instead of his own because old Blaze was more used to the feel of the bit. He wasn't about to ride fifteen miles each way in her sidesaddle.

Seated astride an old McClellan, with his own Winchester back in its saddle boot, Longarm rode out the north side of town a little before four, and asking directions only twice along the way, rode into the Bedford dooryard around five.

The spread was a tad more imposing than he'd expected, even knowing Israel Bedford had bought a proven claim with a dozen years' worth of improvements on it before he and his younger family started work on their own. The main house and outbuildings, while sod-walled, were tin-roofed with all the wood-trim whitewashed. Handsome glass windows let in the light and kept out the winter winds. Less prosperous settlers tended to have glass bottles driven through the sod walls instead.

There were two pole corrals and a good-sized training paddock out back, with a patent sunflower windmill watering the whole shebang. It was too early in the season to say, from where he sat old Blaze, whether those acres of grain to the north of those new apple saplings were barley like some said, or the oats Longarm would have drilled in if he'd been raising that many ponies. That deputy sheriff had been right about Bedford's stock Morgan bloodlines, and it made a man feel swell just to look at those dozen or so pretty ponies staring back curiously from that one corral.

A dog was barking from inside the house. The Bedfords had doubtless called their kids inside when first they spied a stranger riding in. For Israel Bedford stepped out a side door alone, a Greener ten-gauge in hand as he smiled uncertainly and called out, "You'd be just in time for supper if you're out this way on friendly business, stranger."

Longarm flashed his badge before he dismounted in order to talk softer as he introduced himself. "I don't mean to slight that swell chicken soup I can smell from all the way out here. But I got many a mile of riding ahead of me. So I'll get right to my business with you, Captain Bedford."

The retired army man, a wirey individual in his late thirties wearing bib overalls, walked along as Longarm led his mount to the veranda steps and tethered it loosely to the cottonwood railing. Longarm broke out two cheroots and got them both lit up before he tersely brought Bedford up to date on his investigation.

Bedford had naturally figured some Of it Out already, thanks to earlier unskilled questioning by the local sheriff. He said he knew that Chambrun bunch better now than he had the day he'd sold Wabasha Chambrun a filly and a colt for that recorded treasury note. He said they'd met on the road Out front a time Or more and had some friendly talk about the weather, their crops and such. He had no idea where the breed or assimilated full-blood had come by the money because, he said, he hadn't asked.

When Longarm had asked whether an old soldier might by any chance recall his Sioux-Hokan-speaking neighbor from that big Santee uprising of '62, the retired Indian fighter shook his head as if he knew and replied, "If we ever swapped shots he'd have been just a painted kid loping past, and to be honest, most of such wild and woolly fun had ended by the time us regulars got across the Mississippi to tidy up."

He stared off across the range, now more peaceful, rolling gold and lavender in the late afternoon sunlight, as he added in a soft, bemused tone, "There wasn't much to tidy up after irregulars hit Mister Lo with everything but the kitchen sink and then shoved his head in the sink. But I have to allow Indians tend to stay down when they've been put down by others just as savage. You saw what the old Seventh Cav got for sparing so many women and children on the Washita. Old Hank Sibley and his fourteen hundred militiamen of the Sixth Minnesota didn't bother with such niceties as separating the sheep from the goats. Sibley had been an Indian trader, spoke Sioux, and just kept running down and butchering Sioux till they begged him to stop and agreed to peace on harsher terms than us regulars might have offered."

Longarm wrinkled his nose and muttered, "I'd have been scared of Long Trader Sibley if I'd been an Indian too. I understand he wound up with close to a hundred and fifty thousand in Indian funds in his own pocket before the Santee rose. But that's not what I was sent to look into. I'll take your word you didn't recall Wabasha Chambrun from your Indian-fighting days, Captain. But wasn't Wabasha the name of an important sub-chief under Little Crow?"

Bedford nodded. "I met that Wabasha. He was a rival as well as an earlier follower of Little Crow. They'd argued strategy from the beginning, and once they'd suffered some reverses Wabasha came over to our side as a sort of peacemaker."

"Or a sort of Benedict Arnold, to hear the Indians tell it," said Longarm thoughtfully.

Then he said, "I'll just ask this other Wabasha how come he took the name of a famous fork-tongue. Quill Indians are allowed to make up their own names with the aid of visions and such. But the son of a Christian, raised to wear Wasichu duds, might have been given his name without him having any say-so in the matter." He blew a thoughtful smoke ring and mused, half to himself, "Any way you slice it, though, a man named after a famous Santee chief and living on what used to be Santee hunting ground sure ain't all that convincing as a French-Canadian and Osage anything!"

CHAPTER 11

A good pony could carry a man thirty or forty miles overnight if he liked it, and over a hundred if he hated it. But old Blaze was not his to abuse, and Longarm figured spells of trotting and walking would cover the nine more miles to the Chambrun place in less than three hours.

The walking was easier on the ass of any man seated in a McClellan saddle. The old army ball-breaker had been designed with the endurance of the mount rather than the comfort of the rider in mind. But things could have felt worse. Longarm was smart enough to ride in tight pants and snug underdrawers, so his balls never got wedged in that open slit down the center of a McClellan that was designed to prevent chaffing or overheating the pony's spine no matter what new cavalry recruits wrote home about it.

The day was dying gently with a poetical sunset off to the west as the horned larks and redwings sang their harsh but not unpleasant evening serenades from either side of the dusty road. He could tell it more or less followed the trend of the river, not because he could see that much sky blue or chalky water through the denser cover to his right, but because there was so much of the cover. You never saw willows or cottonwoods that high unless they grew close to all-summer water. The scattered oak and thorn apple off to his left was reaching way deeper for groundwater on that side of the county road. But either way, the sunset made them all look as if they'd sprouted leaves made out of amber, butterscotch, and such, while sunset-gilded bees still foraged the wildflowers peeking up at him from amid the taller bluestem and needle grass. The grass didn't seem to have been grazed so much out this way, although those bees by themselves would have told an Indian, or warned him, there were white folks in these parts.

Indians admired honey as much as anybody, and so, as they had with the white man's tall-dogs, or horses, the Indians had adapted to what they called the white man's flies, or honey bees, despite the fact there'd never been any before white settlers brought them from the old country, along with other novelties, good and bad, from steel tools to smallpox.

Along about dusk, Longarm passed a homestead neither Bedford nor anyone else had mentioned to him. He wondered at first sight whether they'd gotten the distance wrong and he'd already made it to Wabasha Chambrun's. Then he saw that the folks waving at him from the front of their sod-roofed sod house seemed to be plain colored folks, not breeds or Indians. He reined in, waved back, and called out, "Ain't got time to stop and set a spell, no offense. I'd be the law and I'm looking for the Chambrun spread."

The colored homesteader rose from his barrel seat and pointed up the road as he called back, "About an hour's ride, at the rate you've been riding, Cap'n. What have them Sioux folks done?"

To which Longarm called back, "Ain't sure. Just want a few words with 'em for now. What makes you so sure they ain't French-Canadian and Osage breeds, like Chambrun says in town?"

The African-American called back, "Can't say for sure what Neighbor Chambrun might be. He never stops to talk as he rides by on his pony. But some of our kids have met up with his kids along the river friendly enough, and they say their mamma is one of them Santee Sioux you white folks had so much trouble with back when I was raising crops for somebody else, God bless Mister Lincoln and all his soldiers blue!"

Longarm didn't even want to refight the Indian Wars, so he thanked the thankful freedman and rode on through the gathering dusk.

The cloudless sky went from salmon pink and purple to star-spangled black velvet with little ceremony, as skies tended to when they had no clouds up yonder to catch any lingering rays. Longarm knew a full moon would be rising most any time now. But in the meanwhile it was a good thing horses saw better in the dark than humans. For Longarm had to take it on trust that Blaze wasn't trotting over the edge of an awesome drop as they forged on.

He told his mount, "You're doing fine. Just keep picking em up and cropping 'em down and there ought to be some sort of light in a window up ahead this early in the evening."

He failed to see any, and he'd spent enough nights with Quill Indians to know they turned in early and rose with the sun, like a lot of country folks save for Mexicans.

He had to chuckle as he recalled that pretty Comanche down on the Staked Plains who'd said if there was one thing her kind and his had ever agreed on, it had to be that Mexicans were natural night owls next to real Americans, red or white. She'd screwed agreeably, too, now that he thought back. But why in thunder was a man thinking back to Texas when he was riding towards... what, Minnesota?

As the moon rose at last, pumpkin yellow above the tree tops to the east, there was still no sign of lamplight ahead, and Longarm told his mount, "I ain't jerk-off hard. I'm piss hard. I usually get over horny dreaming as soon as I get up and piss too. So why am I just telling you all this when I got all this open country to just piss all over?"

The black pony didn't argue as Longarm reined to a halt and dismounted to suit actions to his words. But as he stood there unbuttoning with the reins in one hand, he detected distant hoofbeats and confided, "It's a good thing we stopped for a piss call, Blaze. For I doubt I'd have heard them, or vice versa, at this range with your big feet distracting my delicate ears."

He started to lead his mount off to the west through the tall grass afoot as he told the gelding, "They're doubtless on innocent business, such as making it home in time for their own suppers. But they sure are coming this way hell-for-election, and mayhaps we ought to just get out of their way and see what happens next."

He led his mount into the deeper shade of some thorn apple clustered around a blown-down or lightning-struck oak, and then took that leak, with a sigh of contentment, before he loosely tethered Blaze to an oak branch and broke out his saddle gun.

But even as he levered a round of.44-40 into the chamber of his Winchester '73 he muttered aloud, "Billy Vail would surely frown on my drygulching innocent travelers. On the other hand, it's a big boo to challenge strangers in uncertain light when they sound that excited about something!"

So he just stood there, a silent shadowy form amid bigger shadows, as the mystery riders--there were four of them--tore past at a horse-killing flat run, not pausing to tell him where they were headed or even to glance his way. But as they thundered on, Longarm told his own mount, "They want to be there sudden, but they can't be headed all that far. So the Chambrun place sounds about right."

When Blaze failed to answer, Longarm continued. "The question I'd like you to answer is whether they have such urgent business with old Wabasha Chambrun or... somebody else. So how many knew you and me were on our way to question him about that payroll robbery?"

The pony didn't answer. Longarm hadn't expected it to. Talking to yourself or other dumb brutes could organize your thoughts. But they said you were in trouble when you started to hear answers. So he undid his hasty half hitch and remounted, leaving his saddle gun thoughtfully primed and cocked across his thighs, as he walked Blaze back to the road, paused there a moment in thought, and then decided, "As old George Armstrong Custer found out in broad daylight, it ain't smart to charge into a place you don't know, where you may be way outnumbered, whilst pussyfooting can get you killed even quicker."