Longarm on the Santee Killing Grounds (35 page)

She nibbled his earlobe pensively as she pondered a mite before deciding, "But my Ina Tatowiyeh Wachipi's high and rocky claim will be worthless, worthless, once no river crossing is ever developed up her way!"

Longarm said, "Tell your aunt to sell such rights to the claim as they have for whatever they can get. Then tell them to buy stock in that feeder line the Bee Witch was surveying for."

"You said the stock was worthless, worthless!" she shouted.

Longarm hushed her with a kiss on the lips and told her, "You have to learn to pay attention if you're out to flimflam folks as slick-talking as mine. I said that railroad stock was watered pie in the sky. Stock is only worthless when nobody else wants to buy it from a poor ignorant redskin, who bought it earlier, before us wise-money boys heard about that trestle across the Minnesota, cutting hours off the regular railroading east or west."

This time she got it. She laughed incredulously and said, "Hear me, my ina and her friends have a lot of money to invest. What if we bought as much of that railroad stock as we could this month, and sold it for as much as we could get for it next month?"

He said, "Jay Gould tells me he figures to dump his own investment at the end of this month. I wouldn't hold on to any a day longer than that. For what goes up must come down, fast, when it has nothing but hot air lifting it anywheres to begin with."

She said she understood, and loved him so much for being so nice to her and her people that she wanted to give him a French lesson.

He said, "Before you find it tough to talk with your mouth full, I want you to be nice to me in another way. We both know I had to take your word about that conversation you had in Santee the other night."

She nodded and said, "I told you what those strange riders asked about you. Are you suggesting I knew them better than I told you I did, Wasichu Wastey?"

He said, "The thought had crossed my mind. A man tends to get sort of suspicious after he's been trailed by Indians for a spell, no offense. But if I take your word you weren't flim-flamming me about some pals who only wanted to know how you were doing with the sucker, let's try and slice it a couple of other ways. To begin with, that was really Santee the bunch of you were speaking, right?"

She shrugged her bare shoulders, making her tawny breasts move in an interesting manner against his bare chest as she replied, "It was a Nakota dialect at least. I'm not sure it was pure Santee. The stranger I spoke to could have been from some distant band."

"Or an Ojibwa who'd gotten fluent enough in Santee to talk to the folks he was scouting," Longarm decided. Then he asked how sure she was all four or five of them had been any sort of Indian.

She started to tell him she just knew. Then she stopped. "Hear me, it was dark, and while I thought I heard two voices, it could have been one trickster, But why do you think one Indian with Wasichu friends would want me to think them a band of Indians?"

Longarm replied, "You just suggested he was a trickster. Which means that I can account for one assimilated Ojibwa, riding with some cowhands off the same spread, better than I can account for a whole Indian band neither you nor your Santee pals would know about."

He told her as much as he knew about the late Baptiste Youngwolf or Uncle Chief as she made good on her offer to French him hard some more. She couldn't comment all that much with her mouth full, but as soon as they were going at it in a more conversational manner dog-style, Mato Takoza said, "Iyoptey wanagi! I love it this way! But hear me, I don't think you want to ride on to ask that Helga Runeberg more than you already know about her pet Ojibwa."

Longarm clasped the breed's firm tawny hips to aim it up her right as he muttered, "I know I don't want to. But I got to. She allowed she was sore as hell at me, but she never let her boys shoot it out with me over in Sleepy Eye when they had the chance."

Mato Takoza arched her spine and moaned, "Deeper! As deep as you can go! For Wakanna only knows when I'll ever find another man like you after that Wasichuweynh Witko gets another crack at you on her own land, with nobody else there to sing of the way you died!"

CHAPTER 26

Longarm had felt no call to sound foolish or show off, and he was almost certain he'd eliminated Mato Takoza and her Santee pals by the time they kissed for the last time the next morning. On the other hand, he felt no call to lay out all his future plans for her whether she was in cahoots with the ones he was really after or not.

So he was mildly chagrined when Wabasha Chambrun and a son in his teens overtook him on the road near the Bedford homestead to volunteer some backup. The burly breed reminded Longarm he'd ridden with the Ninth Cav in his day. "My wife's niece just told us about you going up alone against all them Runeberg riders. She told us how you took the time to rustle us up them swell stock market tips too. My oldest boy, Kangi Ska here, can hit a prairie dog's head at four hundred yards with that Big Fifty he begged to bring along."

Longarm sighed. "I reckon her heart was in the right place. I wasn't fixing to go up against at least seventeen guns alone, gents. I told your county sheriff and his own boys to meet up with me at Israel Bedford's this morning. Riding in on a sod-walled home spread in the dark can be injurious to one's health, and I wanted to talk to Miss Mato Takoza first, to make double sure my process of eliminating made sense. That's what you call it when you whittle away the less likely suspects, process of eliminating."

Chambrun smiled sheepishly and said, "She told us how you'd wormed so many family secrets out of her. The two of you ought to be ashamed, But how did you figure out who the real criminal mastermind was?"

As the three of them rode on, Longarm made a wry face and made sure Kangi Ska followed his drift as he told the two of them, "Criminal mastermind is a contradiction of terms. Nobody smart enough to be called a mastermind would ever become an out-and-out outlaw. You take that old Jay Gould your wife's niece may have just mentioned to you all. He spends more on fancy food, drink, and diamond shirt studs than the Reno and James-Younger gangs combined ever took from anybody at gunpoint. Old Jay don't bother with robbing trains. He helps himself to whole railroads legally by way of dirty stock-market tricks. So the murderous gang leaders we're after ain't half as slick as they think they are. They've just been confusing the shit out of me with unexpected moves."

He spotted the breakfast smoke from the Bedford place ahead and said, "I'm saddled with a halfway logical mind. So I sometimes catch myself playing chess by the rules, when the game is really checkers with ornery illogical crooks." Then he heeled his livery mount to a trot.

Sheriff Tegner had seen them coming of course. So he and his good-sized posse had mounted up in the dooryard of Israel Bedford, as had Bedford, another ex-cavalry rider himself.

Longarm and the breeds reined in close to him. The older lawman leaned closer to ask if Longarm had any objection to Neighbor Conway and his own kids tagging along.

Longarm was too thoughtful to stare at the three colored riders staring his way as they shyly sat their ponies a tad apart from the others. Longarm said, "It's your posse. It's been my experience a bigger posse packs more firepower than a smaller one."

Sheriff Tegner said, "That's the way I see it, and I already have the Swedish vote sewed up. So let's ride."

They did. Tegner was too smooth a politician to come right out and say the Conways had his kind permission to get shot by Rocking R boys of uncertain temperament. Such mutterings as Longarm picked up on during the fairly long ride across open range seemed to be directed at Chambrun and his Santee breed kid. Hardly anyone had ever lost a scalp to colored folks around New Ulm.

Longarm hoped such neighborly affairs as this one might help the reformed Indians fit in as sort of half-ass Wasichu in times to come. It would likely have reservation life beat. For those still living on the Great White Father's blanket had already started to look sort of sad to a man who remembered the way they'd been living just a short spell back. Some Indians seemed able to stay Indian as wards of the government. Someone like a Hopi could still prove his worth as a man by bringing in his swamping crop of blue corn, while a strong and smart Ojibwa could still show off with his wild rice, and even sell it. But it was tough to live the life of a buffalo-hunting professional horse thief, providing one's wives with household help captured from lesser nations, without getting one's allotment cut off by an old fuss of a B.I.A. agent. So maybe young Kangi Ska would make out better in the end as a prosperous farmer rather than a charity case, pissing and moaning about good old days he didn't really remember.

Posse riders dismounted along the way to carefully flatten and restaple such fences as they had to pass through. They saw more and more beef critters as they approached the road running north out of Sleepy Eye. But they saw none of Helga Runeberg's cowhands before they topped a rise to see her home spread waiting for them, silent as if it was late at night instead of mid-morning.

Sheriff Tegner ordered his men to spread wide, with two of his full-time deputies leading their own bunches to circle the sprawl of buildings and empty corrals as the main party closed in.

As Longarm and the local lawman in official charge rode into her barnyard, Helga Runeberg came out her back door, alone and unarmed in a more feminine outfit of polka-dotted gingham, and stated sarcastically she'd have baked a cake if she'd known so many of them would be by to court her so early in the day.

Sheriff Tegner stared soberly down at her from the saddle. "You know blamed well why we're here, Helga Runeberg. Last night we found Miss Vigdis Magnusson scattered all over creation. Dynamite wired to the other side of her back door blew off all her clothes along with her right arm, her head, and both tits when she went to let herself in after an honest day's work at her bank!"

The smaller, darker, and plainer gal didn't seem too upset as she nodded. "I know. Gus Hansson told me all about it when he got back from New Ulm late last night. Are you suggesting anyone out our way had anything to do with it?"

Longarm asked where Young Hansson might be that morning. She met his gaze boldly as she calmly said, "He and a few of the other boys are out hunting strays. I can't say exactly when they'll be back."

Sheriff Tegner snorted. "I can. Never. We saw all that new drift wire You've strung to the east, and you've had your frontage along the Sleepy Eye road fenced solid for some time. I reckon I'd better arrest you for murder before you decide to go hunt stray snipes or great horned jackrabbits your ownself, Helga Runeberg!"

She went a shade paler, but didn't look too scared. Then Longarm suggested, "Maybe we ought to go in out of this hot sun and have a more confidential conversation with the lady, Sheriff." Longarm was already swinging out of his saddle as he said this. So Sheriff Tegner dismounted as well, even though he grumbled in a lower tone, "Damn it, Longarm, it was you who pointed out this very suspect and that missing Hansson boy availed themselves of Western Union's services in New Ulm when they had a perfectly fine telegraph office way closer in Sleepy Eye."

Helga Runeberg snapped, "So this fancy federal man says. But he's right about how high that sun stands right now. So come on in if you want to make total fools of yourselves with this dumb line of questioning!"

She waited until just the three of them were alone in her kitchen before she poured herself and herself alone a cup of coffee and asked the sheriff, "Did he tell you how he followed me all the way to Sleepy Eye and threatened my poor inexperienced cowboys with a repeating rifle in front of witnesses?"

The sheriff planted his old bony butt on one corner of her kitchen table as he replied, "He did, and how he thinks you put on such a show for witnesses as well!"

Longarm remained standing by her back door as he nodded at her and explained, "Laughing Larry Lucas went through a charade to encourage the sheriff here to look somewhere else once I was dead too. You'd made too much public war talk to take back, right after I gunned your dear old Uncle Chief, and you were too sore to consider he was the only really experienced killer on your payroll. So after you wired for outside help from Saint Paul-"

"That's your word against mine!" she interrupted, eyes blazing.

Sheriff Tegner snapped, "No, it ain't. I questioned the Western Union clerk who served you, and he backs Longarm's tale of seeing you and young Hansson coming out just after. Before you even think of saying it was Gus Hansson sending that wire to that boardinghouse in Saint Paul, the clerk said it was you who wrote the telegram, no doubt in some tricky code, since we know you never had no Cousin Anna, but that don't matter. Tell her about the real deputy marshals over in Saint Paul, Deputy Long!"

Longarm smiled thinly at the defiant little thing, still trying to recall where he'd seen those eyes before, and explained, "It only took my pals in Saint Paul one visit to determine Laughing Larry had been boarding at that same address under the very name you evoked in your telegram, which would still be on file by the way."

She said, "All right, Uncle Chief gave me the name of another old army pal to call on if I needed help and he wasn't around. Uncle Chief traveled a lot. I don't know anything about any code. I was just told to wire Uncle Leroy that Cousin Anna was getting married and let his old army pals take it from there, see?"