Longarm on the Santee Killing Grounds (20 page)

Chambrun shook his head and said, "I came by it as honestly as Neighbor Bedford. I sold some stock of my own for cash to yet another farmer whose name was Tom, Dick, or mayhaps Harry."

"Might we be talking about dairy stock?" asked Longarm innocently.

Chambrun, caught off base, nodded before he decided it might be smarter to say, "We don't milk any cows on this spread. That's one of your customs none of us have ever bothered to learn, so I reckon you'd as soon have you coffee black than creamed our way, with flour?"

Longarm said he always drank his coffee straight. Then he took a breath, held it so his voice would come out dead level, and told the breed dead level, "I know at least one part-Santee family who keeps some dairy stock and milks 'em, just before supper and doubtless once before breakfast whether they're creaming their coffee or just selling the produce to Wasichu. I was never told they bought a fine Jersey purebred off you, Mister Chambrun. I was told they'd been given a helping hand from a generous... aunt?"

Chambrun sat down across from Longarm with a confused whoosh of wordless breath. Longarm leaned back and didn't press him. Sometimes the fibs you gave them time to make up could reveal as much as half truths you slapped out of a worried mouth.

But it wasn't Chambrun who broke. He seemed at a total loss for words as his wife came over, slamming two empty tin cups down on the bare wood as she snapped, in perfect English, "Your damned coffee will be ready in a minute. My Wabasha has done nothing wrong, nothing. It was I who gave him that paper money. All of it. Are you going to take me down to Mankato so they can hang me too as my children watch and weep tears of blood?"

Longarm answered quietly, "Not hardly, ma'am. Possession of stolen property ain't good for much more than a year in jail, and that's only when they can prove you knew it was stolen. So if I were you and I'd come by that recorded treasury note honestly, I'd just tell the law the truth and have done with it. The fine print on that note allows you had every right to spend it, any way you saw fit, as long as you broke no laws to come by it, see?"

She said something about that coffee, and went back to her range to consider his offer. Chambrun asked which one of those windy kids up the road had blabbed to the law about family matters.

Longarm smiled thinly and replied, "Would you want me to tell on you after I'd tricked a bitty dab of gossip out of you?"

His wife turned around to stare thoughtfully down at him, her dark eyes filled with worried wonder. She said, "You say you don't care where people might get money as long as they have broken none of the laws they pay you to enforce. But hear me, what do you have to do with the regulations of the Bureau of Indian Affairs?"

Longarm answered honestly, "Nothing. I don't ride for the B.I.A. and Brown County ain't an Indian Reserve no more. If you're hinting you might have saved up or even re-invested some B.I.A. allotments, when everyone knows you spend it all on white flour and ribbon bows before it's time for another handout, that's between you and your B.I.A. agent. If you had a B.I.A. agent. Since you seem to be living off the blanket on your Wasichu homestead claim, I fail to see what beeswax of my department it might be."

She stared long and hard. Then she nodded and said, "I think I know who you must be. They spoke of a man like you at the Crow Creek Agency out in the Dakota Territory. Our western kinsmen called you Wasichu Wastey and said you spoke as straight as you could shoot. Are you not the one Mahpiua Luta calls his Medicine Grandson?"

To which Longarm could only modestly reply, "I reckon old Red Cloud and me are on friendly enough terms considering. He's one wise old gent, and likely would have kept his own bands out of that dumb Custer fight whether I'd warned him that time or not. It hardly took as much medicine as some said I must have had to predict the way things were sure to come out in the end. Red Cloud got invited back east to Washington after he'd won his war along the Bozeman Trail with the U.S. Army back in '68. So he knew what Tatanka Yotanka, Tashunka Witko, and the others would be up against if they opposed old Terry's advance on their Paha Supa treaty lands. All I told the big chief that he hadn't heard was how certain members of the crooked Indian Ring in Washington were hoping for a nice big battle, because that would give them the excuse to just tear up the Treaty of 1868 entirely and grind the whole Lakota Confederacy up like sausage meat."

Tatowiyeh Wachipi sighed soulfully and said, "You spoke the truth. After the good fight at Greasy Grass along the Little Big Horn, they said we were savage children it was pointless to bargain with, and they took away the powers of all our chiefs and moved us off all the good lands, all of it. Do you think that was fair, after signing the Treaty of 1868 with Mahpiua Luta in ink?"

Longarm shrugged and said, "Depends on how you read a treaty, I reckon. The Five Civilized Tribes lost their rights to self-government in the Indian Nation after they chose to fight on the Confederate side in the war. There was nothing in any treaty about the government granting perpetual scalping rights to anybody."

Chambrun said, "Hold on! My own ina's folk were Osage and they fought on the Union side in the War Betwixt the States!"

Longarm nodded and said, "That's doubtless how come the Osage got their own strip in the Indian Nation, carved out of Cherokee and Creek holdings along the Arkansas. I'm glad to hear you really have Osage blood, Mister Chambrun. But how come we're jawing about such ancient history when all I ever asked was where you all got that one infernal treasury note?"

She pouted, "How can you prove the one we paid Israel Bedford for some stock was the one they say somebody stole from that payroll? A Wasichu who hates us would find it easy, very easy, to switch the paper we paid a neighbor in good faith with another he knew to be stolen. Did we think to keep a record of the serial numbers on our own money? Did Israel Bedford? Does anybody, unless they have a good or bad reason?"

Longarm started to say something that might not have been perfectly fair. Then he nodded soberly and said, "Hokahey. Let's try that on for size. Let's say Banker Plover had already short-stopped one of those red-hot treasury notes and was keeping it on ice for some devious reason. Let's say he just waited until an innocent party came in to deposit a plain old innocent hundred-dollar note. Then let's say the banker switched 'em and called the law on a customer."

Chambrun said that worked for him. His wife agreed it only confirmed what she'd always thought about Wasichu who dealt in treacherous written words and complicated numbers that always left you owing the trading post more than you'd expected.

Longarm shrugged and quietly asked, "How could Banker Plover have known where Bedford got that recorded note before he had the chance to ask him?"

The breed and his wife exchanged puzzled glances. She said something too fast for Longarm to follow in their private lingo. Then she turned away to see about that coffee.

Chambrun chuckled and said, "She says you must be Wasichu Wastey because you chew your thoughts so good before you spit them out. Now that you've put it that way, even I can see how unlikely it was that old P.S. Plover could have had it in for us in particular."

As his woman brought the coffeepot back to the table, Longarm asked either one who cared to guess, "Then what might that banker have had against Bedford? There's the old boy who'd have been in a whole lot of trouble if he hadn't been able to point to you, and you hadn't owned up to giving him that mysterious treasury note."

Tatowiyeh Wachipi poured the reheated coffee as she told Longarm in a weary voice, "There is no real mystery about where I got that money, and other money. From Wowinapa, you call him Mister Thomas Wakeman, and others of our people who now live as if they were Wasichu and, as you suggested, invest allotment funds for some of our people still drawing them from the B.I.A."

Longarm whistled softly and asked, "Ain't Thomas Wakeman, also known as Wowinapa, the surviving son of Little Crow?"

Dancing Antelope Gal nodded soberly and replied, "Just as I am a niece of Wamni Tanka. You called him Big Eagle and sent him off to the state penitentiary as if he'd been a common thief instead of a great war leader!"

Longarm shrugged and said, "He got off light. The state posted a twenty-five-dollar bounty on Santee scalps and a heap of burnt-out homesteaders got new starts by collecting quite a few. But weren't we talking about Little Crow's grown son, who lives respectable these days?"

She nodded soberly and said, "As Thomas Wakeman, Wowinapa is now an Episcopal deacon and an official of the Y.M.C.A. Other Santee who never wanted to go to that Crow Bend Agency have done as well. Hear me. Some of them have done very well, very, off the blanket and under a Wasichu haircut."

Her husband volunteered, "A gent can get hurt asking a stranger drinking next to him in a saloon how he might have come by that deep tan and sort of high cheekbones."

Longarm nodded impatiently and said, "I drink regular with such old boys, and a fellow deputy out of the Denver office makes no bones about his Indian blood. Could we stick to that hundred-dollar treasury note?"

The lady of the house nodded and said, "A group of Indian or former Indian businessmen have formed a syndicate with the quiet intent of getting back as much of this ancestral Santee land as possible the Wasichu way!"

Her husband chuckled fondly and said, "We ain't had much luck in trying to hold it Indian-style. No matter how the damned treaty may read, somebody on one damned side or the other always seems to trip over some damned provision. You were the one who just said what happens when Washington gets the excuse to scrap an agreement on the grounds of breach of contract."

Longarm laughed incredulously and said, "Let me see if I got this straight. You treacherous Sioux, having failed to lick the U.S. Army and take this continent back by force of arms, mean to take at least some of it back by way of the Federal Homestead Act?"

Chambrun asked smugly, "Why not? The government lets freed slaves and Swedes who speak even worse English than us file homestead claims before they've bothered applying for citizenship. Where in your Constitution or Good Book does it say a human being born on U.S. soil to families that go way back before Columbus can't call his or her ownself an American farmer, as long as he or she can abide by all your fool rules?"

"And pay all bills in legal tender?" the moon-faced wife of the otherwise normal homestead added as her breed kids snickered from the next room.

Longarm didn't want to compound the confusion by making objections or asking questions that had no direct bearing on that Fort Collins robbery. So he sipped some bitter brew to compose his own thoughts. He knew it could look either way to that kid with the cow, and it really cut no ice whether the Chambruns were using other folks' money or acting as distributors for that mysterious syndicate. So he put down his cup and got out his notebook as he quietly said, "If I take your word how you came by that recorded hundred-dollar note, I'm still going to have to backtrack it all the way to Fort Collins, or at least to someone criminal for certain. So you'd best give me some other names I can check out. You say these sort of retired Santee have been advancing you homesteading kith and kin the money it takes to make a go of a government claim?"

Chambrun nodded, and might have said something if his moon-faced wife hadn't cut him off with a rattle of Santee Longarm couldn't keep up with.

It was tough enough to follow a Mexican conversation in rapid-fire Spanish when you knew most of the words but didn't think in Spanish. The folks you were trying to listen in on tended to run on to the next paragraph while you were still translating the first in your own head.

It was even worse when you only knew some baby-talk Indian. The Sioux-Hokan dialects weren't as confusing as some others, but that didn't mean the grammar was simple as English. The nouns and verbs changed enough, depending on who was talking about whom, while the singular and plural could stay the same. So while Longarm was still brushing up on the little he knew of their lingo, the Chambruns had come to some agreement on how they meant to talk to him in Wasichu.

It was Chambrun who spoke up, although Longarm suspected that none of these white or breed squawmen had the final say when they'd been funded by the kith and kin of their purebred wives. The burly breed said, "We're not going to tell you, Deputy Long. Didn't they ever tell you that tale about the golden goose?"

Longarm nodded soberly and replied, "They did, and I follow your drift. I'd be sore if I'd advanced somebody the money to start a sort of agricultural experiment and they called the law on me too. On the other hand, looking at it from my side of the checkerboard, I've been ordered to trace that treasury note all the way back to the cuss who took it from that government payroll at gunpoint, and so far the trail seems to end at your very doorstep."

Chambrun shook his head stubbornly and said, "No, it don't. Israel Bedford is the one who presented a thing to the bank that was listed as stolen. Banker Plover read the number of that particular piece of paper off his official list. Nobody never read shit off nothing when I paid Bedford for that riding stock."

Longarm frowned and said, "Hold on. Bedford says the note he took to the bank was the same one he got from you."

Dancing Antelope Gal cut in. "We can say we got it from Old Man Coyote as long as we didn't have to prove it. Why do you take the word of Israel Bedford over that of my husband? Because the Wasichu has blue eyes and thus his heart must be pure?"