Longarm on the Santee Killing Grounds (26 page)

It worked even better when, just around the corner, Longarm spied a service entrance in the brick wall of the corner store and crawfished into it, casually drawing his.44-40 but holding it down at his side politely. The man on his tail with that scattergun swung the corner wider, as a trained gunfighter was supposed to. As he spotted Longarm and broke stride, Longarm called out an easygoing howdy, and never raised his own gun muzzle until he saw he had to.

They fired as one, the dark stranger's twelve-gauge blowing a big dusty crater in the cinder paving between them as Longarm's round of.44-40 punched him in the gut to jackknife him out from under his large hat and lay him low.

Longarm managed just in time not to squeeze off the extra round or so that seemed safest on such occasions. He covered his downed foe thoughtfully instead as he strode over to smile down, saying, "I was admiring that fowling piece you just dropped, pard. English made over to London Town, right?"

He could see now the man he'd gunned seemed almost pure Indian despite his duds and short haircut. Longarm hunkered down, six-gun in hand but held politely, to quietly ask, "Where are you hit and, just in case, who would you like us to get in touch with for you?"

The dying man just glared spitefully as his lips moved silently in what could have been a curse, a prayer, or a death song. By the time Longarm had pinned on his federal badge and Sheriff Tegner had joined the gathering crowd, the black-clad stranger's jet black eyes had commenced to film over and he wasn't moving his lips or breathing.

As Tegner hunkered beside him, Longarm quietly said, "I ain't sure what just happened. He was tailing me from your office to here. But he had the drop on me earlier, and never got really hostile until I challenged him."

The sheriff said, "Remind me never to challenge you, Longarm. I think I know this old boy. He looks a mite older now, but don't we all, and he reminds me of a scout we had with the old Sixth Volunteers. If it's the same cuss, his name was Baptiste Youngwolf. Last I'd heard, he'd run off to his reservation. Lots of 'em were like that when it came to taking orders, you know."

Longarm softly said, "I've ridden some with full-blood scouts. If this was one who rode with you, Vern, might he by any chance have been Santee?"

The sheriff shook his head and replied, "Hell, no, Chippewa. Even if you could get yourself a Sioux to scout Sioux for you, you'd not be sure you could trust such a two-faced cuss yourself. Him being Sioux could complicate hell out of things!"

Longarm grumbled, "Not hardly. This would all make more sense if I could be more certain this was a Santee-speaker I may have overheard just last night."

"He was Chippewa," another old-timer in the crowd decided. "I recall that same hatchet face and the cavalry crease of his big black hat from earlier days as well. I never rode with the Volunteers, but I used to drink with some. This old boy was one of their scouts like the sheriff here says. The soldiers called him Chief, as I now recall, and now that I think back, they did say old Chief deserted with some white boys and never hung about to draw his last pay."

Longarm got wearily back to his feet, muttering, "A lot old Billy Vail really knows! I got to go send him a wire, Vern, if that's all the same with you."

The sheriff got to his own feet, saying, "As long as you wasn't planning on leaving Brown County before we can tidy this up with the coroner's office. I doubt there will be any fuss, you being a lawman and him coming after you with that scattergun and all. But they are likely to want some more details for the death certificate and bill of mortality book. You reckon he was really that cuss called Chief who ran off with them Galvanized Yankee deserters that time?"

To which Longarm could only reply, "That works better than any Objibwa working in cahoots on something else with folks he'd have been raised to call Nadowessioux and hate like sulfur and molasses!"

Then he added, reloading his six-gun, "After that, like your county coroner, I sure would like to have some-damned-body fill in some of the damned details! For I'll be switched with snakes if I can make one lick of sense out of all this bullshit!"

But before he could elbow away through the gathering crowd, one of the newcomers loudly demanded, "Jesus H. Christ, who tangled with the Chief and what's the Chief doing there on the ground?"

It was Gus Hansson, that young cowhand Longarm had met the other night on the open range west of the county road. Longarm turned to the surprised-looking kid to declare, "He's dead because he tangled with me. It was his own notion. I'm still working on how come. You say you knew him more recent than these older gents, Gus?"

Hansson nodded, but stared at Longarm as if he'd just been caught jerking off in church as he replied, "Well, sure I knew him. We was riding for the same outfit. Miss Helga Runeberg hired him as a top hand not two weeks ago, and she ain't going to like this at all!"

An older local in the crowd proclaimed with a more noticeable Swedish accent, "Yumpin' Yesus! Helga Runeberg has always been as mean as she was pretty and she has more than a dozen riders! If I wass you I'd get out of town before she finds out, no matter who I wass or why I yust shot one of her boys!"

Longarm smiled thinly and announced for all who had any interest in the matter, "I did what I had to and I'll leave these parts when I've finished what I came to do. If anyone wants to build what just happened here into a blood feud, be advised I can get just as mean as pretty too!"

CHAPTER 20

Longarm spent more time than he felt he had to spare at the Western Union office near the depot. First the fuss in charge had to argue with him about rates, seeing he wanted to send more than three full pages of close-set block lettering to his home office at day rates collect.

The clerk pointed out they charged way less than a nickel a word after midnight, when the moonlit wires might otherwise hum idle in the wind. But Longarm said he'd have told them to send it as a night letter if he hadn't wanted his boss to get the damned report directly.

They didn't argue, since he paid up front for the shorter wires he sent to the Indian agents at Crow Creek and Leech Lake, hoping to get a better line on that dead Indian, whether Ojibwa or Santee. Then he had a longer argument over their prior telegraph traffic, with the old fuss in charge insisting Mister Ezra Cornell would rise from his grave to haunt them if they betrayed their sacred trust to all their customers.

Ezra Cornell had been the rich old bird who'd gotten richer than old Sam Morse on the telegraph by founding and stringing the Western Union Telegraph Company just in time for the Civil War. He'd made so much money he'd had enough left over to build a university and get his son elected governor of New York, after Ezra had died, by setting down some company rules in stone. One that had given Longarm a pain in the past was that nobody who didn't work for the company was ever to read a private message sent by a paying customer.

Longarm explained, "I've had this argument with you boys before and, so far, I've usually won. Old Ezra never intended his employees to obstruct justice. He just didn't want small-town gossip emanating from his scattered offices."

He let that sink in and added, "I ain't interested in whether an elderly colored lady who might have called herself Smith was sending or receiving dirty messages. I only need to know if anyone like that availed herself of your services at all, damn it!"

The clerk sniffed and grudgingly allowed, "We have very few darkies in New Ulm to begin with. I suppose it's safe to tell you no elderly colored women by any name have availed themselves of our services in recent memory."

Longarm nodded. "Now we're getting somewheres. As you'll see whilst you're sending that tedious report to my boss, Marshal Vail, I just had to shoot me an Indian they called Chief Youngwolf. Santee, or what you'd call Chippewa. I described him in more detail in them wires I just asked you to send to the Sioux and Chippewa B.I.A. agents. You'd know if a pure-blood wearing a black Stetson Buckeye had been in and out of here all that much by any name, right?"

The Western Union man declared that as a matter of fact they had fewer Indians sending or receiving telegrams than colored folks, the Great Sioux Rising of '62 having left Indians unpopular as hell in this particular corner of Minnesota.

Longarm started to ask a dumb question about breeds. He decided an Indian gunslick laying low in a county so crowded with blue-eyed blond Scandinavians would as likely recruit a pure white to front for him if he was shy about dealing with Western Union in person.

Longarm confided to the clerk, as much to diagram it in his own puzzled mind, "Somebody communicating by wire with Colorado pals on a fairly regular basis would doubtless be using some slick code if he was too slick to just wire back and forth naturally."

The Western Union clerk asked how Longarm knew his mysterious red outlaw had been trying to communicate with anyone by wire to begin with.

Longarm said, "That's easy. I never put an ad in your local paper to announce my arrival. Youngwolf has been laying low on a cattle spread closer to Sleepy Eye than here to begin with. I'd have never thought to look for him there if he hadn't come looking for me with a twelve-gauge just now, if that was his true intent. I'd sure like to ask the white pal he must have had fronting for him just what in blue blazes this is all about. For up until a few minutes ago I was inclined to agree with my boss that there wasn't all that much going on here in New Ulm!"

The somewhat mollified telegraph clerk agreed it seemed a real poser. Longarm didn't want to get him het up again by asking to go over all the wires they'd sent or received for, say, the past seventy-two hours. He knew that even if he won the fight, he'd have a hell of a chore just reading that many messages without a clue as to which ones might be in code.

Folks who hadn't had to try decoding tended to mix codes up with ciphers. A cipher was kid stuff next to a code. The cipher everyone since the ancient Greeks tried first involved simply switching the letters of the alphabet around, so an X might stand for an A or a Z for an E and so forth. But any signal corpsman worth his salt would know right off that a message reading something like "UIF RVJDL CSPXO GPA KVNQFE PWFS UIF MBAZ EPH" had to be cipher, and once you knew that, it wasn't too tough to figure the letter used most likely stood for an E, the next most an A, and so on till you got a few words to make sense and could fill in the rest.

But a simple pre-arranged code could be almost impossible to break because it worked the way kith and kin might talk when they didn't want the kids to know just what they were saying. It was just as easy and less shocking, for instance, for the lady of the house to suggest they put the kiddies to bed and go for a stroll in the moonlight than it was to say, "Let's lock the kids up and screw," although her man had as good a notion of what she really had in mind. Crooks tended to use messages such as, "Aunt Edna sends her regards," when they wanted to say a robbery was off, still being planned, or all set to pull off. There was simply no saying how a gang leader back in Denver or Durango could have wired the Chief he was coming this way, or what to do about it once he arrived. He mulled the recent events in his own mind as he legged it over to the post office. The Indian they called the Chief had surely been following him, to whatever purpose, when he'd forced the issue. Those other Indians who'd mentioned him by name, in Santee, might or might not have been working with an outlaw everyone had down as a blood enemy. Crooks had no shame. Or what if those Santee trying to get a foot back in the doorway of their old hunting grounds were not in cahoots with the Indian he'd just shot it out with, but worried about something else he might uncover on them? The wheels were still spinning within wheels inside his head when he hit pay dirt, sort of, at the post office. A mousy but not too bad-looking mail sorter recalled a nicely dressed colored lady who'd picked up more than one bulky letter from Chicago, she thought, addressed to one Judith Jones in care of General Delivery, New Ulm. Longarm said that sounded close enough to Jasmine Smith. Longarm had no call to pursue how such a lady might send mail to Chicago, since there were public mail drops all over. It added up to the sneaky so-called Bee Witch sending her tracing-silk drawings by mail and getting paid for them the same way. Whether she'd sent all they'd wanted and she'd just left for other parts, or whether someone else had committed foul play to keep her from finishing, was still up in the air. He'd told pretty little Mato Takoza that, either way, he saw no reason why she shouldn't just go on herding bees out yonder for fun and profit until further notice. He had to go next to the county courthouse, where, just as Sheriff Tegner had said, they were holding a meeting in the cellar to see how they wanted to record that dead Indian. As the older lawman introduced Longarm to their coroner and his pals, Longarm learned they'd already determined the cause of death had been internal bleeding, occasioned by a.44-40 round busting the old boy's aorta all to hell inside him. Longarm said he'd aimed low in the fond hope of getting more out of the son of a bitch than he had. Nobody there disputed the right of a lawman, or any white man, to fire on an infernal Indian pointing a twelve-gauge anywhere near him.

The coroner said he'd already sent a rider out to talk to the dead man's female boss, in hopes Miss Runeberg could shed some light on what one of her riders had been doing in town with that Cleveland to begin with.

Once that meeting was adjourned pro tem, Longarm walked Sheriff Tegner and his deputies back to their nearby office, and borrowed a desk to write up as detailed a report for Brown County as they had any right to expect. He suggested Tegner keep a friendly eye on the breed gal running that honey and wax operation in the absence of the missing Bee Witch. Since everyone else was acting so sneaky about a possible bridge site up the river, Longarm put things plain enough for a cuss as friendly as old Tegner to make some profitable real-estate deals if he felt like it. Old George Washington had been decent enough in his day, and nobody had begrudged him a little land speculation near the end of the Revolution. Doing well for oneself while doing good for others was a grand old American custom. Longarm didn't care what others did as long as they didn't break federal statutes on purpose or hurt a soul he had any use for.