Longarm on the Santee Killing Grounds (22 page)

This one waved her wings, or sticks threaded through shaggy black tatters, anyway, and desperately moaned, "Go away! I have spoken!"

That wasn't exactly the way an old colored lady, sane or insane, might have put it. So Longarm nodded and said, "Evening, Miss Matilda. You say the Bee Witch is feeling poorly tonight?"

The dark figure out on the raft let her fake wings drop and stood frozen in confusion, or perhaps fear, without answering. Longarm let it ride until he saw it would be up to him and gently said, "I ain't using wakan sapa, Miss Matilda. They told me your old boss lady had a younger orphan gal out this way helping out, and no offense, you talk more like an Indian lady than a colored lady, even trying to talk spooky. Would you like to talk more sensible now?"

She didn't answer, but it sounded as if she might be crying out there under that raggedy witch outfit. But Longarm insisted, "I told you I was federal law, and you seem to be afloat on a federal waterway instead of private property. So I could likely make it stick if I was to board you without a fussy search warrant."

He let that sink in before he added, "On the other hand, I told you true this pony and me are cold and wet. So would you like to talk a mite more sensible about that and give me less cause for suspecting you of Lord knows what?"

The small spooky figure sobbed, "I have done nothing wrong, nothing! If I show you where to shelter your horse and give you both food and water, will you keep my secret?"

Longarm almost asked what her secret was. Then he decided he'd cross that bridge after he made sure old Smokey wouldn't cool lame on him and the Kellgrens. So he said he didn't ride for the B.I.A. or anyone all that interested in bee culture, and that brought her ashore, showing more of her head in the moonlight as she murmured, "We can't keep our pony cart and burro aboard the raft. I'll show you where I pitched the tent this time."

Longarm followed her along the bank a ways to where, sure enough, an old army perimeter tent stood back in the sticker bush screened over with cut branches. The small gal had explained along the way how much safer she felt out on that raft after dark with all sorts of Wasichu moving up and down the river or that county road to the west.

It was far warmer inside the thick beeswax-dubbed canvas because a small burro had been in there, giving off dry heat through all that summer rain. It got easier to see in there after Longarm struck a match and lit an oil lantern hanging handy on the center pole. The two-wheeled cart she'd mentioned took up close to a third of the remaining space. But he saw the blue roan would have enough room if he tethered it next to the burro. Both brutes being geldings, they just nickered at one another while Longarm exchanged the bit and bridle for a more comfortable rope halter and peeled off the wet saddle and sopping blanket.

The gal said he could drape both over the side rails of that pony cart. So he did as he saw she was pouring cracked Corn in the elm-bark trough the two brutes were close enough to share. In the soft lantern light the head sticking out of the raggedy black costume she had on wasn't spooky at all. The fine bone structure under her tawny complexion and raven's-wing hair said she was at least part Wasichu. She hadn't painted the part in her braided hair Santee-style either. Dressed up more sensibly, with her hair pinned up more fashionably, she might have passed in town for a high-born Mexican gal had she wanted to. He was still working on why she wanted to be taken for a crazy old colored lady.

He never said so. He said he'd sure like to wipe old Smokey down with some dry sacking if they had any.

She nodded, and worked her way around the far side of the pony cart to fumble out some feed sacks and, better yet, a tattered but clean and dry horse blanket. Longarm wiped the blue roan as dry as he could manage while he told her she was an angel of mercy and asked if she'd like to tell him some more about the Bee Witch now.

She started to cry. He went on wiping until he saw no improvement for the effort, and then he fastened the horse blanket over the corn-munching critter and quietly suggested, "I met up with another beekeeper down to the Indian Territory a spell back, preserved in wax like a bug in amber. Of course, the slow learner he had working for him when he died naturally wasn't bright enough to just bury the poor old gent, or did you sink her in the river?"

The young breed gal wailed, "I did nothing at all to Sapaweyah Witko! Come with me and I will show you she is not aboard her house raft dead or alive. I don't know where she is. I have not seen her since the moon when the wolves run together."

Longarm frowned thoughtfully down at her and demanded, "Are you saying she's been missing since the other side of our New Year's Eve, Miss Matilda?"

The girl nodded. "She said she was going into New Ulm to tell her own people something on the talking wire. If you wish to call me by name, I am called Mato Takoza."

Longarm nodded soberly. "I stand corrected and I sure am wet. You wouldn't have a stove, or at least a peg to hang some of these wet duds on, aboard that house raft, would you, ma'am?"

She said she had both, and asked him to douse that lantern before he followed her outside. So he did. Neither his mount nor her burro seemed to care. As he followed her back along the same path Mato Takoza explained, or bragged, how her grandfather had been a war chief almost as important as Little Crow himself, before the blue sleeves had killed him in the fight at Birch Coulee. Longarm had already figured her name meant something like Grandchild of the Bear. It might not have been polite to point out none of the ranking chiefs the milita or regulars bragged on had been called Mato. It was possible he'd been a Big Bear, a Medicine Bear, or some other sort of Bear. It was even more likely he'd been an enlisted Santee remembered as more important by his kith and kin. Longarm had yet to meet anyone whose daddy had been killed as a Confederate private, the C.S.A. records being sort of scattered since the war, and Indian war records had been hampered by neither modesty nor words on paper.

He followed the proud Santee beauty across that springy plank and into the lopsided shingled structure that took up most of the raft.

She'd left a candle lit inside. So he could see the front room was a work shed, smelling strongly of honey and devoted to the extraction gear and mason jars of her trade. Most of the jars seemed to be filled. When he commented, she said she'd been saving all the money she got in town from the Bee Witch's regular customers. She said she hadn't tried to drum up extra business on her own.

When Longarm said he hadn't noticed all that many beehives in the woods, she explained she'd set out two score that spring, along the edge of the trees to the west, shaded by the trees from the hot noonday sun but offering her bees plenty of flowery foraging on the far side of that county road. Longarm was country enough to know she was talking straight when she said more kinds of flowers grew, in greater numbers, where Wasichu had messed with the original lay of the land. Her kind had set grass fires late in the season to keep their hunting grounds open and lush for the critters they ate. But even had they wanted more posies they'd have had to wait till white settlers brought a whole Noah's Ark of extra old country greenery such as alfalfa, chickory, clover, dandelions, and even that Kentucky bluegrass everybody thought as American as apple pie, which was Pennsylvania Dutch in the first place.

The center of the surprisingly roomy shanty was taken up by a main room where, bless her heart, the pretty little thing had lit a combined cooking and heating stove against the damp chill. She seemed as anxious to show him the whole layout as he was to inspect it. He had to allow the two bedchambers opening into the far end of the main central room smelled too clean for her to be hiding a corpse on board.

Mato Takoza sat Longarm at a plank table and rustled up a length of cotton line and a cheesebox of clothes pegs. She strung the line catty-corner across the top of the hot stove, from hooks screwed into the two-by-four framing just right, and told him to shuck his wet duds so she could dry them for him as she whipped up some fresh coffee and scrambled eggs.

He was willing enough, till he got down to just his dank pants, soggy undershirt, and gunbelt. By this time she'd shed her raggedy black spook dress, and it was surprising how womanly a gal with such a young face could look in a thin cotton shift. She didn't have to hang her black rags to dry. As she pegged his to the clothesline she asked how come he was ashamed to take off his gun and pants. She said, "Hear me, you are much bigger than me and you can see I am wearing no gun under this flour sacking. Hang that gunbelt over the Winchester in the corner behind you, and we can have a lot of fun watching one another for false moves!"

He chuckled and replied, "You might suspect me of plotting other sorts of moves if I was to sit here in my birthday suit so close to anybody pretty as you, no offense."

She was too dusky for a blush to show in such dim light, but she fluttered her lashes and sounded a tad flustered as she stammered something about being just a halfbreed, sakes alive. Then she fetched him a blanket from another room, saying, "Wrap this around you if you're afraid I'll peek. But get out of those wet clothes if you don't want to catch a summer cough. It will get colder before it gets warmer here on the water."

He knew that was true. So he ducked into one of the bedrooms to strip down to his bare feet and come back out, wrapped in the dark blue blanket with his free hand holding his gun rig and boots as well as soggy duds. She took everything but his six-gun, saying his boots would dry safer if she stuffed them with newspaper and didn't stand them too close to her stove. He went and hung his gun rig on a nail above the Winchester he'd stood in the angle of some framing. He'd found it could be as educational to pretend you were completely disarmed as it could to pretend you didn't know a word of Spanish or Indian dialects. So the less said about the derringer under the blanket the better.

By this time she had everything hung and she'd rustled up the makings of that light supper she'd offered. As she put the pot on to boil, under his dangling duds, and greased a cast-iron spider for the eggs, Mato Takoza told Longarm more about herself.

She said she'd been a girl-child during the big Santee Scare of '62 and the long forced march to Crow Creek that had followed inevitably after that much bad blood between her two races.

Both her ma and pa had been breeds, raised Indian by pure-blood gals who'd been married up with Wasichu trappers while they'd been out this way. Mato Takoza's momma's clan had fought more and hence lost more under Little Crow. But later. out at the Crow Creek Agency, the young gal's daddy had taken to strong drink and wife-beatings in spite of, or maybe because of, never counting coup in the short but savage uprising. Mato Takoza was too smart to call it "The First Sioux War" the way some old soldiers and even civilian volunteers put it when they got to bragging.

She busted half a dozen eggs into her greased spider and got to scrambling them, along with some chopped-up wild onion grass, as she told him how her homesick momma had brought her back to the old Santee Agency at Redwood Falls, only to find Wasichu, many Wasichu, living there now. She sounded mighty steamed as she complained, "Hear me, my mother's people were not woodland creatures. We had learned long ago to build cabins and plant fruit orchards by watching you Wasichu. Out at Crow Creek they expected us to winter in tipis where the wolf wind howls across open prairie from the Moon of Many Colored Leaves to the Geese Nesting Moon. We had built nicer houses here than a lot of Wasichu, and now Wasichu had moved into them. All of them."

Longarm shrugged his bare shoulders under the blanket and resisted the obvious observation about the spoils of war. He knew they'd never admitted starting a war, and he didn't want her to lose the thread of her own story.

She didn't. She dished out the eggs on tin plates as she told him how she and her late momma had gotten by as hired help to homesteader housewives, since both had looked half-white and it had been easy enough to say they were friendlier "Chippewa" when no real Ojibwa were about to call them fibbers. After Mato Takoza's ma had died of the consumption or some other lung rot, she'd heard tell of the Bee Witch, a crazy old colored lady who lived free and easy up and down the river, and so, being less afraid of the white man's flies than some purebreds might have been, she'd tracked the Bee Witch down to ask her for a job.

It hadn't been easy. Mato Takoza had learned that spooky crow-flapping act from the old colored lady, who was more worried about being robbed or pestered than really witko. The Bee Witch had tried to scare the Santee breed off, and when that hadn't worked they'd got to talking enough so they could finally cut a deal.

Mato Takoza said the Bee Witch had been an easygoing boss, once she'd taught her young apprentice how to herd bees without getting stung too often. Mato Takoza said the older gal had been way more educated than she'd let on to strangers. As she motioned him to dig in and moved back to her stove to check the coffeepot, she told him how the old colored lady had read herself to sleep with big old books, and how she'd liked to sketch with pencil and ink on a drawing pad as she let her younger helper do most of the simple chores that went with a mighty carefree life.

Longarm said the old gal sounded as if she might have been a house slave in her younger days, explaining, "Most slave states had laws against teaching bond-servants to read or write, since they thought a little knowledge could be a dangerous thing after a slave called Nat Turner read a copy of the Declaration of Independence and thought he was included in that part about all men being created equal. But lots of easygoing slave-holders didn't mind, and even taught some of their people, as they called 'em, to read. For one thing, it made a house slave more valuable if he or she could read written instructions."