Longarm on the Santee Killing Grounds (29 page)

The clerk agreed it hardly seemed worth going to Sleepy Eye at all if a man didn't have several hours to visit there.

Longarm didn't know how long he might want to stay in that smaller railroad stop. He felt better about his means of transportation when, just as he was untethering his livery mount out front, the sun broke through and he declared, "I'll be damned if I don't believe it could be fixing to clear up."

Both his jeans and his saddle were still sopping wet, of course, and neither would dry as fast in contact as they might if he let the sun and wind get at them. So instead of mounting up as he'd meant to, he told the mare, "There's a chance we got some answers to wires we sent earlier from here in New Ulm. So why don't we mosey on over afoot and sun-bake that saddle some?"

The buckskin didn't seem to care. Others stared at them from all sides as Longarm led his mount deliberately down the sunny side of the muddy street, although he was sure the more experienced riders they passed knew what he was doing.

A quartet of riders coming the other way deliberately crossed over as if to give him more room than he really needed. Longarm kept the brim of his Stetson low as he kept a wary eye on them from its shade. All four of them were cowhands at first glance, but Indians as soon as one looked closer. Full-bloods. One of them still wore his hair in braids, although none seemed to feel the need for feathers, beads, or other fringes you saw on some old boys living off the blanket. So it was safe to assume they weren't out to advertise their ancestry in a county where many a Wasichu family was still mourning kith or kin who'd gone under in the Great Sioux Scare.

The four full-bloods, who could have been Ojibwa as soon as one studied on it, passed on uneventfully, leaving Longarm to wonder if they could have been the Santee who'd been asking about him personally out at that raft the other night.

Longarm was as puzzled by them asking Mato Takoza in Santee. For the late Baptiste Youngwolf, or Uncle Chief, had either been Ojibwa or one hell of an actor in a part of the country where most everyone knew the enemy nations apart. You didn't have to be fluent in either lingo to tell "Sioux" and "Chippewa" apart. They were as unrelated as, say, Spanish and English, and sounded like they were, whether one could follow the drift or not.

Neither pretty little Mato Takoza nor her mysterious night lit callers had been speaking the Algonquin dialect a "Chippewa scout" known to one and all as Baptiste Youngwolf would have spoken when talking to other...

"Hold on!" Longarm told the buckskin. "An Ojibwa paid to scout the Santee for the army might have learned at least as much Sioux-Hokan as the rest of us, and a man who'd desert any outfit in time of war, in the company of white outlaws, might not take his membership in the nation of his birth too seriously!"

The mare didn't answer, so Longarm explained, "A renegade scout of any nation could be riding with Santee who don't want to be Indians anymore. But damn it, that answer raises more questions than I can hear it answering!"

They trudged on, Longarm's wet duds starting to feel stickier as the sun warmed that rain to the temperature of sweat. He started to feel for a smoke, but decided to wait till his cheroots dried out all the way as well. They were almost to the Western Union near the depot by then, and who might that male and female be, coming out of the telegraph office and pretending so hard not to notice a tall man afoot with a buckskin mare at easy pistol range?

Longarm knew right off the young cuss he'd met the other night, out on the open range, had to be Gus Hansson, who'd bragged he rode for Miss Helga Runeberg. So the slightly older and far meaner-looking gal had to be the same Helga Runeberg who'd told everyone how sore she was at him for gunning her dear old Uncle Chief.

Longarm never broke stride as he just kept going the way he'd been going. So the two of them had to scurry some to mount the two cow ponies they'd tethered out front, still pretending not to notice him as he led the mare catty-corner across the muddy street.

Gus Hansson was blushing like a schoolmarm who'd been invited to elope with a whisky drummer. So Longarm assumed it was the gal who'd given the order to ignore a lawman she detested. Longarm was able to look her over all he liked as she pretended not to notice.

She was dressed for her business, which was raising stock, in an expensively tailored but practical outfit. The split skirts that let her ride astride were the only distinctly female notions to her dark gray outfit. Her dark hair matched her black pony.

Longarm had been expecting lighter features to go with her Swedish name. She wasn't as tall as either Swedish gal he'd met on friendlier terms in New Ulm. But Longarm knew some Swedes were naturally short and dark, just as some Spanish folks were tall and blond. The local folks who knew her better would have said so if she'd been a breed. Her profile was turned to him as they rode past him at a trot, her with her nose in the air, so he decided she just missed being pretty, although her whipcord-skirted rump, as he turned to boldly watch the two of them ride off, bounced shapely enough in her double-rigged roping saddle.

He chuckled, tethered the buckskin to the hitch rail they'd just been using, and moseyed on inside to see if anyone had sent any wires meant for him.

They had. Old Billy Vail had wired from Denver that yet another of those recorded treasury notes had surfaced at a bank back East in Boston, for Pete's sake, and hence old Billy wanted Longarm to come on home. He'd considered Longarm's reports about the member of the gang he'd apparently caught up with, or vice versa. But he still thought Longarm could be chasing his own tail.

For as the older lawman tersely pointed out, it stood to reason a member of the gang with local connections might have headed for New Ulm after they'd divided the proceeds of that payroll robbery before they'd split up in every known direction. Some of the hot paper had shown up around the renegade scout's old stamping grounds for the same reasons he had. But as far as anyone knew, none of those Galvanized Yankees who'd led a young Chippewa astray had been Minnesota boys, and other treasury notes from the same robbery kept turning up all over creation. So what was a senior deputy doing where he'd already run one of the rascals to the grave?

Everything his boss had wired made sense. But so did another wire from the Navajo Agency at Shiprock. The Indian Police had finally spotted the bloated body of that cuss Longarm had sent flying into the San Juan from a couple of railroad transfer points back.

Better yet, they'd matched some scars and a silly tattoo with a couple of wanted posters, state and federal. So the young cuss who'd lost that fight with Longarm as they'd been crossing the white water of the San Juan had been a known road agent called Mermaid Morrison. Or else there'd been two pallid youths with the same bullet scars and a mermaid tattoo who might have felt they had just cause to tangle with a paid-up lawman aboard moving trains.

Longarm got out his notebook to make certain. Then he tore off a telegram blank to wire Vail he might not be finished in New Ulm yet. For another suspect they had down as a possible member of the Tyger gang had sure been anxious to prevent him from ever reaching New Ulm, and come to study on it, why had Youngwolf been trailing him with a shotgun like so if he'd been the only member of the gang for miles?

Longarm wired he'd have never spotted the gang member he'd nailed if the fool Indian hadn't broken such fine cover, as if to prevent him from spotting something else. Then he allowed he'd head home after he'd found out what they both seemed to be missing so far.

CHAPTER 22

Longarm's crotch still sat sticky in the saddle, but the rest of him was dry enough, by the time he'd topped the clay bluffs west of New Ulm to follow the rail line's service road with the morning sun at his back.

The same sun was only commencing to dry the rain-smoothed mud of the service road. So it seemed easy at first to read the sign of the one two-spanned carriage or wagon, most likely, preceding him towards Sleepy Eye after that short but serious shower.

Then he spotted a hoofprint overlapping a wheel rut to the right of the center strip of grass, and knew two horses had been pulling the wheeled vehicle while the other two, although moving stirrup to stirrup as if a team, had been packing two riders. There'd have been better than one set of wheel ruts if he'd been reading two buckboards, and a lone rider leading a pack brute would have left most of the hoofprints of both critters along one or the other dirt-strip.

By this time Longarm's tobacco was dry enough to smoke. So he lit up without reining in as he idly wondered why he gave a hoot about morning traffic along a public right-of-way. A one-span carriage or buckboard had left New Ulm first, followed within a few minutes or a whole heap of minutes by a couple of riders, with all concerned no doubt headed for Sleepy Eye, where the rail line crossed another northwest-to-southeast county road, meant to serve the folks along that side of the higher ground between the Minnesota and Sleepy Eye.

The horse apples he spied on the road ahead from time to time were of more import to the bluebottles and buffalo gnats buzzing over them as he passed. He'd gotten back to pondering more serious puzzles. So he'd almost put the ordinary signs of ordinary travelers out of his mind, but not all the way out of his mind, when he spotted sign that wasn't there.

A less experienced tracker, or even an Indian who didn't give a hang, might not have noticed something that wasn't there. But just the same, before there'd been four steel-rimmed wheels and four sets of steel-shod hooves heading down that same road. Now he only read the sign of four wheels and three critters.

Longarm casually drew his Winchester from its saddle boot as he rode on, sweeping the range ahead with his thoughtful gun-muzzle-gray eyes as he tried to come up with innocent reasons for that one rider to hive off across the gently rolling and grove-speckled prairie all about. The most logical reason involved a shortcut for a nearby homestead after keeping company with that other rider a ways.

Had they in fact been riding side by side to begin with? Wasn't it possible that one-span vehicle had left first, followed by a lone rider headed for Sleepy Eye, followed by yet another who'd cut across yonder grass at an angle after...

"Anything's possible," Longarm said aloud to his own mount. Then he asked the buckskin, "Would you walk more than half-ways to Sleepy Eye along this muddy wagon trace if you were really headed for another place from the beginning?"

When the buckskin failed to answer, Longarm reined her to his left, towards the railroad tracks, as he observed, "I've seldom seen you critters match your strides so tight unless the pal you were striding with was right close. But why are we arguing, when it's so easy for us to just swing clear of any sneaky bullshit?"

The buckskin balked a bit at crossing the loose railroad ballast and snaky steel rails. But Longarm rode with his knees tight and a firm as well as gentle hand on the reins. So they got across with no more than a little crow-hopping, and she settled down as soon as they were on soft ground again and he'd whacked her a couple of times with the barrel of his Winchester.

He rode due south, away from the rails at an angle, till they were better than an easy rifle shot from the tracks. Then he reined to his right some more, explaining, "It's better to be safe than sorry. That mysterious rider who dropped out of our parade couldn't have expected us to do what we just done. So even if he's hunkered off the road up ahead behind some sticker brush, he's going to have a long wait before he bushwhacks this child!"

Thanks to the clearly visible telegraph poles along the railroad right-of-way, it was just as easy to find the railroad flag stop ahead while riding most of the way across wet bluestem and more kinds of wildflowers than you saw on the higher and drier plains further west. When he saw a church steeple and grain elevator out ahead, Longarm had no call to cross the tracks a second time. He just kept riding until, sure enough, he came to that country road serving folks to the south as well as the north of the flag stop.

Sleepy Eye was called a flag stop because cross-country trains only stopped there if someone on board wanted off or the station master at Sleepy Eye flagged down the train because somebody wanted on. Freight and livestock were usually taken aboard on a more formal schedule, maybe once or twice a week.

To someone riding in from any direction, the overall impression of Sleepy Eye was that its name sure fit it, even though it must have been named for the watercourse way off to the southwest on its own tanglewood flood plain. The just as aptly named town was mostly sun-silvered frame, dozing like a big dried-out buffalo chip in the late morning sun as Longarm rode in.

That clerk back in New Ulm had been on the money about the tedious ride, and jam on toast would only carry a man so far. So first things coming first, Longarm asked directions from a couple of kids shooting marbles in a dooryard, and dismounted out front of the only livery in town.

An old geezer wearing overalls and a Swedish accent came out to see if Longarm really wanted anything. Longarm told the hostler he didn't know how long he'd be in town, but that his buckskin pal could doubtless do with a rubdown and some fodder and water while she waited for him to finish his business in town. The old Swede said nobody had ever stolen anything from their tack room. But Longarm held on to his Winchester just the same.

So he was carrying it, muzzle aimed down as peaceably as he knew how, when he strode into the restaurant the old-timer at the livery had recommended. It stood handy to the Western Union and across from the open platform and stock loading ramps of the railroad. Longarm figured he'd fill up on stronger coffee and more solid grub than he'd managed for breakfast.