Longarm on the Santee Killing Grounds (13 page)
He swung the pony's head southeast, and heeled it back the way he'd just ridden, explaining, "It's neither polite nor smart to drop in uninvited when you just don't know who might be there. We can't shoot first, the way Hickok did that time he gunned his own deputy like a trigger-happy asshole. But it can take fifty years off your life to shoot last when it ain't a pal after all. So why don't we skin this cat another way entire?"
He felt no call to explain further to a pal who couldn't answer and might not care. So he just rode back to that homestead, where a worried-looking colored kid was just heading out to the road aboard a mule. When he spotted Longarm about the same time he called out, "My pap just told me to ride for town and tell the sheriff you might be dead, Cap'n! There was a bunch of hardcase white boys here just now, asking for you by name if you'd be Deputy Long!"
Longarm said, "You'd best thank your pap for me and let me deal with 'em. Did they say what they wanted of me, or where they might be headed from here?"
The kid replied, "Not in so many words, Cap'n. But they called you a mother, and Pap says he doubts they meant Mother Dear. When he allowed you'd just rode by, before they called you a mother, that is, one of 'em said they'd be able to get you as you came out of the Chambrun place if they hurried."
Longarm asked if it had sounded as if they were pals of Wabasha Chambrun, enemies of Wabasha Chambrun, or just using him and his spread as a point of reference.
When the kid said he didn't know, Longarm told him to get back to his own kith and kin and, if possible, forget this whole conversation. When the kid said he followed his drift, Longarm added, "I don't ask any man to burn himself trying to get my chestnuts out of the fire. You've done me a real service by telling me as much as you just did. If those others are smart enough to lean on any of you about the way I just backtracked, go on and tell them anything you need to tell them to keep from getting hurt, savvy?"
The kid nodded gravely, eyes wide in the moonlight, and said he surely did and assumed Longarm meant to ride in and tell the sheriff about all this himself.
Longarm didn't say yes or no. He wasn't sure as he thanked the helpful young cuss and rode on. He didn't see what the local law could do about some riders who, so far, hadn't done a thing to anybody. Meanwhile, it might be interesting to see who might know about any of this bullshit without being told.
CHAPTER 12
Night riders aiming to ambush a lawman along one stretch of the moonlit county road could be set up just as sneaky along another. So Longarm cut off across the moonlit grass as soon as he'd cleared the southeast corner of that fenced-in colored homestead. He let old Blaze have his head, since horses saw better in the dark than humans and Blaze likely knew the way to the stall he seemed so intent on reaching at an easy lope. But they were both saved by tumbleweeds, piled up in the moonlight against an otherwise invisible drift fence some son-of-a-bitching cattle outfit, most likely, had strung parallel to the road a quarter mile west, doubtless taking advantage of the wide-apart homestead fencing as well as their own. Drift fences were designed to prevent just what they were named after. A cow ranging wide from the water tanks and salt blocks of its home spread could wind up attracted by somebody else's, and road traffic tended to spook cows into drifting further.
Longarm consulted his mental map of Brown County as he dismounted to break out his small claw hammer from a saddlebag. The country hereabouts was getting crowded for free-ranging beef if they'd spent money on this much bobwire. For while the Minnesota shared Brown County with other streams such as the Sleepy Eye and Cottonwood, there had to be at least ten miles of high and dry grazing off to the west, meaning some other cattle outfit had laid claim, and likely had its own wire strung between here and the Sleepy Eye creek and wagon trace.
Tethering Blaze for the time being to a panel of four-strand he meant to leave intact, Longarm got to work with his claw hammer as he quietly explained, "It ain't neighborly to cut a man's fence if you don't have to. Since they were considerate enough to staple this murderous shit to cedar posts, we don't have to."
He used the claw of his hammer to pull staples like tin teeth, palming each one as he did so, until nothing but its own mild tension was holding the wire off the moonlit grass. Then he untethered his borrowed mount, lowered the loose wire far enough with a hand to hook the instep of a boot over it, and flattened it in the grass underfoot so he could simply lead the pony over to the far side.
Once he had, he was considerate enough to retether Blaze, get back on the eastern side, and restaple the wire back the way he'd found it with the business end of the hammer. No four strands of bob were able to stop a man afoot who knew how to duck through it, of course.
He put the claw hammer away, untethered Blaze from the fence, and swung back in the saddle to ride on, knowing he'd be skirting the back forties of the Bedford place. He knew Israel Bedford wouldn't tell him anything he could be certain of, no matter what. He'd said he'd gotten that treasury note from Wabasha Chambrun. Everyone in town seemed to feel Bedford was less likely to fib than his new breed or full-blood neighbors. On the other hand, if those colored folks had heard those other sneaks right, they didn't seem to be in cahoots with Chambrun.
"Mebbe," Longarm muttered aloud as he held Blaze to a silent walk as they moved along the far side of the fencing. A white man with a tolerable rep could alibi himself easy as pie just by claiming he'd gotten a recorded treasury note off any number of neighbors. On the other hand, a newcomer of at least mixed blood would have enough on his plate without his pals gunning a federal deputy right on his own homestead claim. So innocent or guilty, he'd want to tell the local law he'd never laid eyes on any rascals gunning folks after dark along a public right of way.
"Chambrun can't be a full-blood," Longarm muttered to his mount as he reached absently for a smoke, warned himself against a dumb move, knowing a match flare could be spotted from three miles off on open prairie, and decided, "Not a registered full-blood leastways. Abe Lincoln's Homestead Act of 1862 was designed to fill this part of the country up with white folks. The government figured there were already enough Indians out this way."
Some said, even some white folks, that the Homestead Act, passed as it was in the early half of the War Between the States, had been the spark that lit Little Crow's fuse. The Santee Sioux, as Washington called them, had already moved west to get out of the way of progress more than once. So they'd doubtless felt sort of squeezed, west of the big chalky water and with their Dakota cousins to the west, when all those Swedes, less successful Midwestern farm folks and draft dodgers crowded across the Minnesota to raise cash crops and kids where the Indians had just put down fresh roots.
There was a lot of guff, from partisans of both sides, as to the exact details leading up to what could be described as a hen-house raid or a massacre, depending. But there was no doubt old Little Crow had known what the Wasichu would do to his people once Wasichu blood had been spilled, and he'd been enough of a general to hit first, hard as hell, even though they said he'd led his young men chanting his death song, cursing the killers from the Shakopee band as he promised them they'd all have the shit kicked out of them by wintertime, and promising true.
Longarm had been busy killing other young men at the time further east, but troopers who'd been out this way said the Santee had fought like wildcats, more often on foot than their Dakota kinsmen, and more inclined to wear flowers than feathers in their hair as they came whooping and hollering, or, more often and more scary, creeping on their bellies through the bluestem like murderous animated pots of prairie posies. Likely cornflowers that time of the year. The fighting had broken out in early August. By late September a whole lot of red and white folks had died and the Santee were in one hell of a mess. It's tough to call off a war with pissed-off white men when they're winning. Most of the real fighters had lit out for Canada or the Dakotas, along with all their fighting chiefs. The seventeen hundred rounded up by Sibley and Pope, mostly women, children, and sissies, got marched to Fort Snelling, pelted along the way with stones, horse apples, and worse, to join their white admirers in watching the mass execution of the Santee. Lincoln just couldn't let off. Then they were moved to their swell new reservation at Crow Creek in the Dakota Territory. The few who'd drifted back to these parts over the years, such as old Little Crow himself, had been gunned down on sight as "wild" Indians. So that meant Wabasha Chambrun, even named as he was after a Santee who'd gone over to the whites, couldn't be a full-blood. No full-blood of any nation would have been issued a homestead claim by the Bureau of Land Management, which meant...
"Where is it engraved on stone that any cuss named Chambrun has been issued doodly-shit by anybody?" Longarm asked his mount conversationally.
When the pony failed to answer he explained. "You ain't supposed to fence in and improve no quarter section of public land without you file a homestead claim, wait for its approval, and pay the modest filing fee. But if you've never filed, who'd be likely to notice you ain't paid the fee on a claim you never really filed, right?"
The pony might have opined that sounded sort of raw, if ponies had any say in such matters. But Longarm had arrested folks for far more casual views on property rights, and folks were forever gutting a mountain, logging a forest, or raising cash crops without getting arrested, paying taxes, or even being noticed by Land Management.
A couple of dark masses off to the right jumped up to run off, cussing Longarm and his mount in cow. Longarm nodded and thought about cattle barons, filing or not bothering to file on a taxable quarter-section home spread so they could graze and often fence the surrounding range as far as they could see from high up.
He started to rein in, thought better of it, and rode on, muttering, "Let's eat this cake a bite at a time, and look at some records by the cold light of logic, before we go asking a man late at night whether he holds lawful title to his spread or not."
A man who'd lie about one thing would likely lie about others, and if the late Jacob Weber of Switzerland could claim a whole section of prime bottom land free as his private paradise, after proclaiming himself and his family The Father, The Son, and the Holy Ghost, it only stood to reason a squatter with Indian blood might say most anything.
A heap of such folks had started to. Squatter-traders such as William Bent of Bent's Fort and mountain men like Kit Carson had married up with all sorts of Indian ladies from all sorts of nations, friendly or not, to produce all sorts of kids who tended to live red, white, or however the spirit moved them. So it was tough to say what the civil rights of, say, the Bent kids ought to be, with one grown son scouting for the army, a second living purely Quill in a tipi with the Cheyenne, and the one daughter married to a French-Canadian trader living white, even though he was said to be part Creek.
Longarm decided the confusing ancestry of Quanah Parker was most relevant to whether Wabasha Chambrun might or might not hold a valid homestead claim. Old Quanah, born to a white captive woman and her Comanche husband, who'd done the right thing by the pretty little thing, had started out as a holy-terror Comanche war chief, scared the shit out of his white kin, and then, after they'd scared the shit out of him a few times, recalled he was half white after all and joined the winning side. This appeared to give old Quanah the right to a government allotment as a tame Comanche, and at the same time to wheel and deal in Texas real estate as a white or at least part-white Texican business man. Longarm figured that was as fair as the law letting the pure white Belle Shirley Starr live Cherokee at Younger's Bend in the Indian Nation, just because she screwed Indian moonshiners as well as white horse thieves.
One of those spooked cows came tearing along the fence line at him, bawling fit to bust. Longarm swung Blaze out of the way as the full-grown steer tore past, spooked by something at least as terrifying up ahead.
That was something to study on in light as tricky as this.
That ink blot a pistol shot away in the moonlight appeared to be a clump of coppice, or second-growth saplings sprouting from the stumps of more serious cottonwoods cut a few years back, for corral poles or other such use most likely. Cottonwood wasn't worth much as firewood or construction timber. Longarm swung his mount out to his right, meaning to circle wide. As he heard the brush of metal against springy twigs he rolled out of his saddle, Winchester and all, to flatten in the tall grass as Blaze loped on a ways, and then stopped as if to ask how come those reins were dragging on the grass like so.
Blaze could wait. Longarm addressed the inky shadows ahead in a firm but friendly voice, calling out, "Evening. I'd be Deputy U.S. Marshal Custis Long, out this way on government business with fifteen rounds in the tube of this saddle gun I can aim as polite or as rude as your answer might call for."
There was a long silence. Then a youthful voice with just a whiff of that Swedish singsong in it called back, "Well, I'd be Gus Hansson, riding for the Rocking R, which you've been riding across, and Miss Helga figured you might be over this way."
Longarm stayed put, keeping his guard up and his saddle gun trained as he called back, "Who might this Miss Helga be, and how come she figured anything about me, since we've never been introduced?"