Longarm on the Santee Killing Grounds (24 page)

She naturally wanted to know more. So Longarm explained how easy it had been for Miss Harriet Tubman, a lady of color, to pass herself as a silly old Negro mammy searching for her missing owners like the faithful darky of Dixie mythology, while acting as one of Allan Pinkerton's top Secret Service agents behind Confederate lines. He said, "The South was too proud to use colored spies. So they never looked twice at a dumb darky, when they might have asked what a white person they didn't know was doing in that particular place at that late hour. They say Harriet Tubman talked her way past a reb patrol close to Robert E. Lee's headquarters late one night by allowing she was searching for mushrooms. Every country boy in that patrol knew it was the wrong time of the year for field mushrooms, but they figured a dumb old nigger woman wouldn't know as much as them."

"I told you Mother and me played the long joke on Wasichu women to get work," the pretty breed replied. Then she asked, "What do you think Miss Jasmine was trying to hide by pretending to be witko?"

Longarm shrugged his bare shoulders and said, "Who she was working for, most likely. Nobody planning to run another rail line across the Minnesota would want it to get out ahead of time. It takes a year or more just to plan your route, grease the right political palms, and get title to the right-of-way you finally decide on. Railroads and even wagon routes have had to swing wide over greedy folks holding out for more money than a detour might be worth. Folks go witko, building tipi tankas in the sky, when they consider all that money they'll wind up with if only they can hang tougher than the rich folks trying to buy 'em out. So I doubt anyone in these parts knew, any better than you, what the so-called Bee Witch was really up to."

He took another drag on their shared cheroot, but began to brush the survey chart clean as he added, "Might as well keep her secret for her. It's easier to see now how come she took so much trouble to keep strangers well clear of this raft."

As if to prove his point they heard a cascade of tinny clankings, inspiring Longarm to say, "What the hell?"

His bed companion murmured, "That's how I knew you were moving along the bank before. Miss Jasmine showed me how. You tie one end of a dark fishing line to a sapling someone moving along the trail has to push aside. Then you run it, tautly, through a hole in the work-room wall, and hang some tomato cans up inside to-"

"Never mind the details! Let's worry about who in thunder it might be at this owlhooting hour!" Longarm trimmed the lamp to plunge the interior into darkness as he rolled off the bed to silently slip into the other bedroom for his Winchester. She followed close, whispering, "Nobody ever comes this late. Nobody!"

As if to prove her a liar for certain, somebody yelled in the near distance, and Longarm was glad they'd hauled that plank in. The male voice hailed them again in English, and when nobody answered he switched to Santee. Longarm was able to follow the coldly correct "Hokahey!" meaning something like "Get the lead out, damn it!" But then Mato Takoza went outside, and she and the strange Indian lost him as they rattled back and forth in their usual mixture of soft pleasant vowels and strangled or hissed consonants. Longarm, crouching behind her, had no way of controlling the parley, and could only hope Mato Takoza knew what she was doing as she seemed to be talking sweetly to the son of a bitch. Then, as yet another voice chimed in ashore, it seemed there were at least two sons of bitches!

Longarm followed just enough to figure she was inviting them to come aboard for coffee and cake, Indians having the same notions as other country folks when it came to offering leastways. But even as he hunkered low with his Winchester, Longarm heard one of the men on shore call the pretty little thing his Unshi, or grandmother, and respectfully decline.

As the two or more of them went crashing back along the bank through the tanglewood, Mato Takoza hugged her naked breasts to his bare back and sobbed, "They were looking for you! They said they were your friends and just wished to tell you something. But you had already told me about someone following you along the county road, and I didn't think you wanted them to know where you were!"

Longarm rose, getting a better grip on her as he shifted the cold-steel Winchester to his other side, saying, "You thought right. Did you get any line on who they might really be, and how did you manage to get rid of them like so?"

As they moved back inside, her naked hip rubbing his bare thigh, Mato Takoza said, "As I told you, they said they were friends of Wasichu Wastey, but neither offered me his name, not even a fighting name one offers a respected enemy, so I knew they did not want me to know who they were and I thought it might not be wise to press that."

She reached coyly down to grasp his flaccid manhood in the dark as she added, "I invited them to come aboard for the rest of the night. But then I had to warn them I might be tehinda, if they still followed the wakan of their elders."

Longarm started to ask, then he recalled what tehinda meant and had to laugh. He'd heard Sandwich Islanders considered a gal having her period taboo, as they put it, although few Indian nations got that excited, and were content to just stay the hell away from a gal and her quarters until the bad medicine passed on and she could make herself acceptable again with a smoke bath.

But since they both knew that in this case Mato Takoza had only been fibbing, Longarm found it surprising when she insisted in proving she wasn't anywhere close to that time of the month by shoving two pillows under her brown bottom and having him hold the lamp close as she spread her legs invitingly again. He didn't really care as he found himself rising to the occasion.

CHAPTER 19

It got tougher to ambush a rider when you didn't know when or which way he'd be coming. So Longarm left early and rode high and wide for New Ulm, working his way through more than one drift fence as he circled out across the upland prairie between the bottomlands of the Minnesota and the more modest Sleepy Eye.

There were other less famous draws and a mess of tree groves a drygulcher might have found right handy, and a thoughtful rider had to consider each as he approached, his own saddle gun across his lap. But as Longarm had surmised from the start, nobody was laying for him where he hadn't told a soul he was headed, and he met nobody out that way but cows, mostly longhorn stock with a dab of Angus or white-face to tender up their beef for the eastern market, now that the Depression of the early '70s had faded to bitter memory and housewives could act fussy about the meat they put on the table again.

The aptly named Sleepy Eye met up with the even more logically called Cottonwood around ten miles west of New Ulm. So Longarm cut east across higher rolling range and, as far as he knew, made it all the way into the bluffs just west of town without being seen by a soul.

He rode old Smokey down a deserted pathway past a brick kiln nobody seemed to be working that morning, and drifted into town at a walk, occasioning no more than casual glances from the townsfolk he found up and about. For thanks to his long detour it was well past mid-morning, and even the residential streets were fairly busy.

Gunnar Kellgren had told him he could leave old Smokey in the care of that livery near the boat landing. But the blue roan was a pretty good mount, and Longarm wanted to make sure he still had the use of old Blaze before he cut himself entirely afoot. So he rode first to see if old Ilsa Pedersson had recovered from her awkward feelings about two dead bodies in her house to explain to the neighbors.

She hadn't. Longarm found her raking under the shrubbery in her front yard when he reined in and dismounted. But as he was tethering to her hitching post the widow gal came over, rake in hand and face all flushed under her sunbonnet, as she flustered, "Good grief, Custis, what are you doing here in broad daylight?"

He frowned down at her uncertainly and replied, "I sort of thought I was staying here. Correct me if I'm wrong, honey."

She shot an uneasy glance up the maple-shaded street and murmured, "Come back after dark, on foot, no earlier than ten, and we may be able to sneak you in the back way, darling."

Longarm started to say it made little sense for a man to pussyfoot clean across town after he'd had to find another place to leave his saddle and such. But she might have thought he was acting proud, and a man just never knew before noon how he'd feel about going to bed with a particular gal after dark. So he just nodded and said he might or might not be back, depending on what they had for him over at the Western Union by the depot.

Ilsa almost put an anxious hand on his sleeve before she remembered her own rep and softly pleaded, "Promise you'll come back for at least one proper good-bye before you leave town for good."

"What about the neighbors?" he gently asked.

To which she replied with a Mona Lisa smile, "Let them get their own friends to say good-bye to. I'm not cross with you, darling. It's just that I have to live on this street and, well, it isn't every day a respectable widow has to explain three strange men shooting it out in her hitherto respectable residence!"

Longarm had to smile at the picture, but assured her he followed her drift, and would have kissed her before mounting up again if he'd thought she wanted him to. For she'd been a good old gal, and it was making him wistful already to think of her as no more than another fond memory.

But that was the way things had to be when a tumbleweed cuss wore a badge and a gun in this old uncertain world, So he rode on over to the river, where, sure enough, they knew the Kellgrens at that livery and said old Smokey would be welcome out back in their corral until such time as somebody rode in to pick him up.

Longarm asked what they charged to leave a man's saddle and possibles under lock and key instead of their more casual tack room. The elderly Swede who ran the place said it depended on whether he was a customer or not. So Longarm told him truthfully he just didn't know whether he'd need to hire another mount or not, and they settled on ten cents a day as a fair rate.

Longarm was glad. Toting his Winchester all over town could be a bother, and there were other things worth stealing in his saddlebags.

Being he had the time as well as the small room in the back to change in, Longarm left the livery in clean but faded jeans and an old darker blue army shirt he sometimes used when he wanted to look a tad different at a distance. For sometimes the fractions of shooting time it could take a shooter to make up his mind could make one hell of a difference in the outcome.

There was little a man could do about walking taller than average, and changing the Colorado crush of his sepia Stetson hardly seemed worth the bother. So he simply kept his eyes peeled as he made his way back to the Western Union afoot.

They'd been expecting him. There was no word yet on that stranger who'd gone off the railroad trestle into all that white water. But a long night letter from Billy Vail was waiting there to order him on back to Denver. According to Longarm's cagey old boss, one hell of a tracker in his own right, he'd sent his senior deputy on a wild-goose chase and he was sorry as hell.

Longarm told the telegraph clerk he wasn't ready to wire back just yet. Then he put the night letter in a hip pocket and headed up to the sheriff's office. This time that deputy was able to introduce Longarm to the sheriff in person, a potbellied but strong-looking old cuss called Verner Tegner. He said to call him Vern, and might have reminded Longarm of Billy Vail if he hadn't smiled so much.

As they lit up the cigars the sheriff handed out to guests in an election year, Longarm asked what they'd found out about those two gunslicks he'd had to lay low at the Widow Pedersson's. The local lawmen exchanged embarrassed glances, and the deputy said, "We're still working on them. Sent out an all-points by wire yesterday. Ain't had any nibbles as yet. Hired guns are most often from somewheres far and wide, you know."

Longarm took hold of the back of the bentwood chair the sheriff had pointed out for him, spun it around, and sat astride it so the two of them would consider it polite to sit. Then he sighed and told them, "There seems to be a lot of that going around. My boss back in Denver just wired he's cut the trail of that Tyger-Flanders gang way closer to the scene of their last known crime. Some of that hot paper's turned up in other parts as well. A bank in Salt Lake City stopped one, and then somebody got arrested trying to break a hundred-dollar treasury certificate in Chicago. They had to let the suspect go when he was able to prove he'd been dealing faro at the time of that Fort Collins robbery. Being a professional gambler, he naturally disremembers just who he might have won the infernal money off of."

The sheriff nodded sagely and said, "We never thought Israel Bedford was an outlaw. That Chambrun cuss likely got the hot paper as innocently. When a gang pulls a robbery, they generally have spending the money in mind. So by this time there's no saying how many innocent hands the purloined payroll has been scattered through far and wide."

Longarm took a drag on the cheap cigar, noting it burned hot in its own right the way such flashy political handouts were inclined to, as he quietly observed, "Chambrun naturally told me he'd come by the money honestly, and even suggested somebody might have switched a good note with a wicked one. Can either of you gents come up with a motive for Banker Plover wanting to get a halfbreed in trouble?"

The two lawmen looked blank. The sheriff was the one who suggested, "I don't know what sort of a name Plover might be, and he's not likely to vote for me this fall, the Republican cuss, but I fear I can't see why he'd want to frame any nester for anything. I don't think his bank could hold a mortgage on the Chambrun place, could it?"