There was a low rumble of anxious-sounding Kiowa. Then Necomi held up a hand for silence and said, "Hear me, Longarm. If you are speaking with a forked tongue, we shall be very cross with you! If somebody is raiding along the Cache Creek Trail, pretending to be members of our warrior lodge, we shall be very cross with them! The Kiowa nation is not on the warpath yet. So none of our young men have permission to ride out against your people."
The talkative elder to the north chimed in. "Young men can get a lot of their own people killed that way. Everyone knows how crazy that Cheyenne crooked lancer Woquini was to kill that rancher and his wife and daughters without telling his own people! They had no idea why the blue sleeves had come , and many stood like corn stalks until the blue sleeves cut them down at Sand Creek!"
Necomi silenced him with a stern look and told Longarm, "None of our young men could have attacked you at those sod ruins. You say you killed three of them. Where are their women, with ashes in their hair and gashes in their cheeks, if what you say is so?"
Longarm calmly replied, "My heart soars to learn nobody here as a ward of my government has women keening for him. But what if they haven't heard yet? What if a leader who got three followers killed was too ashamed to come back and tell anyone what a foolish thing he had done?"
Necomi shook all those feathers again and insisted, "That would be a very shameful way to behave. After Satanta and Quanah both had their horses shot out from under them, and many more had been killed or wounded, they agreed, like men are supposed to, they had been foolish to rely on Isatai's medicine chant. So it was time to break off the bad fight. Nobody initiated as a Kaitsenko, a fighting Kiowa, would do a thing like that!"
His old pard chimed in. "Even if he did, we would have heard about three missing members of any lodge! You say you killed not one but three, more than two days ago. Who has been sleeping with their wives all this time, the ones who led them to their deaths for no good reason?"
Longarm shrugged and said, "I keep telling folks how easy it can be to grab for easy answers. Didn't you gents just confound the sons of Cochise with a spicy French book and some other Na-dene entirely?"
That set off a real consultation. When it died down Necomi told him, "Nobody is supposed to wear black leggings and shoot at anyone unless we say he can. We have heard what you have to say. We don't see how your words could be true!"
Longarm smiled thinly and replied, "I reckon you'd have had to have been there. Ain't it possible this one chapter of the Black Leggings Lodge might lose track of no more than a dozen kids out for a lark on such a big reserve? I mean, who's to say they couldn't have been Comanche or some of them Kiowa-Apache who came along from the Texas plains with the rest of you all?"
Necomi snapped, "We are to say! We and only we who sit in council here in this Do-giagya-guat, copied to the last medicine mark from that one that was burned in the wars with you people. The Comanche fought beside us many times. The Kiowa-Apache fought as our brave younger brothers and we honor them, even though they talk funny. But hear me. We don't initiate every Kiowa warrior as a Black Legging, and it would be easier for a Kiowa girl to join than it would be for a very great man of any other nation!"
Longarm nodded and said, "I'll take your word for that. The fact remains that the bunch we tangled with were painted and dressed as a bunch of your Black Legging boys."
Necomi said, "You keep saying this. We are going to find out why. You will be taken to your women now and given something to eat. If you try to leave before we say you can, all three of you will die. I have spoken."
A couple of lesser Kiowa stood up as if to lead him somewhere. Longarm said, "Hold on. How are we supposed to find out anything if I don't have any say in it?"
One of the Indians bent to lay a firm but gentle hand on Longarm's shoulder as their chief said, "I told you I had spoken. You are very rude. Even a fool who knows nothing of our ways should see how simple it is to just count noses. Everyone who wears black leggings will be easy to account for, or at least three of them won't be. If we are missing three members we will know you could be telling the truth. If we are not, we will know you are lying, and none of us invited you to come here with a forked tongue!"
Longarm got to his feet, lest somebody haul him up by the scruff, but insisted, "Try her this way. Say somebody out to raise Ned but wanting to shift the blame, just got decked out as a Black Leggings war party."
Necomi didn't answer. But one of those herding him for the tipi's only doorway murmured in English. Longarm recognized the high-pitched voice as it insisted, "He doesn't want to talk to you anymore, Longarm. Come with us. You are only making Necomi and some of the others cross with your silly suggestions!"
As they got outside where the gloaming light was much better, Longarm could make out the middle-aged Indians better. The one who tended to speak out of turn said, "I am called Hawzitah. I can read. But I don't believe much of what you people put in your books. We are taking you to your women. You can't have your ponies or repeating rifle yet. Is that a double-action revolver?"
The other, less talkative Kiowa shooed some kids away as they came over to make faces at Longarm. He told Hawzitah he'd guessed right about the .44-40 riding on his hip, hoping they might not search him and find his double derringer. The older Indians didn't seem worried about a white man with five in the wheel well inside an Indian camp. Hawzitah pointed at a plainer fifteen-skin tipi rising pale against the purple eastern sky and said, "In there. The door is on the other side, of course. Is it true Red Cloud has allowed his young men to join the Indian Police up at his reserve?"
Longarm nodded and said, "Old Mahpiua Luta, as you say Red Cloud in his lingo, is fixing to die rich in bed, like Cochise. He made his point and got the best terms he could. Then he stayed the hell out of it when Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull demanded a rematch back in '76. So now he's got a cozy cabin instead of a drafty tipi, come the starving moons and wolf winds, and like Quanah, he's been pulling in extra money by leasing grazing rights to neighboring stock outfits."
Hawzitah muttered, "I would like to have more money to spend on good things, and when there is no need to move camp a lot, a cabin does seem a better place to spend the hungry moons. But why do Red Cloud and Quanah think they need Indian Police? What's the matter with the way we've always kept order among ourselves?"
Longarm said, "You ain't living the way you've always lived. You used to be able to keep order in camp and guard the women and ponies with a handful of men left behind while the rest of you rode off to kill buffalo, Wichita, and such. None of you had much more than that to lose as you lived the way that High Dutch writer, Karl Marx, keeps telling us all to live."
As they circled out around the tipi, he noted the pony line about a furlong out against the darkening hills, and continued. "You just said your ownself how you'd like to buy good things at the trading post. Police work gets more complicated when folks leave things worth stealing behind locked doors. Also, you all have a stake in the value of your land."
The older Indian snorted, "You call these empty plains and wooded hills without many deer land? Hear me, in Palo Duro Canyon, over by the Shining Mountains, buffalo, deer, even elk grazed among the soapberry trees while our ponies grew fat on grass that stayed green all summer!" Longarm smiled thinly and said, "You should have seen Dixie before the war, or the emerald fields of Erin before the potato blight. But if we can stick to what you have here, Quanah's getting a dollar a head off trail herds passing through and leasing grazing rights at six cents an acre a month. You're right about it being bleaker here than over in that Indian Eden. But one cow needs at least five acres to graze, so add it up."
As the Indian tried to, Longarm said, "No offense, but as both Quanah and Red Cloud must have noticed, Texas trail hands are more likely to take a man in uniform for a peace officer than a raiding hostile. After that, having regular police gets around the problem of a mixed bag of folks on a big reserve who may not know every bare-chested cuss who yells at them by name."
He lifted the entrance flap as he quietly added, "The Cherokee, Chickasa, Choctaw, and such have had Indian Police and private property for a good while now."
He didn't listen as the older man behind him muttered darkly about Cherokee not being Real People anymore. He was more interested in the two frightened faces staring at him in the dim interior of the guest, or perhaps confinement, tipi.
A smudgy little cow-chip fire was burning on the sand in the center. Old buffalo robes and some cleaner-looking blankets had been spread around the circle of twenty-two poles. There was no sign of their own bedding, saddles, or that damned old saddle gun. As he hunkered down across from the small breed and pallid schoolmarm, Matawnkiha said "We're hungry."
Longarm told her their hosts, or captors, had said something about feeding them, and added, "It seems we're stuck here for at least the night. They may have been trying to scare me into making a break for it. I told 'em I'd told the Comanche Police we were headed over this way. I don't reckon they'd want to hurt any of us close to home."
Minerva Cranston said, "I'm afraid I'm going to be sick. I don't mind the smell of tallow, and linseed oil's not so bad, but mix them together and ... Never mind. Why do you think they're behaving toward us in such a confusing way, Custis?"
Longarm sniffed uncertainly. "Got to cut down on my smoking. Now that you mention it, I do suspicion somebody wiped some of that army issue tent dubbing over these old greased hides. Reckon buffalo tallow is tougher to come by these days."
She insisted, "You haven't answered my question, Custis."
He shrugged and replied, "Don't have a good answer. I keep telling folks how dumb it can be to guess at easy answers when you just don't know. They might be behaving so confused because we've confused them. They might be trying to figure how they want to cover up something they know all about."
He asked the ladies if they cared if he smoked. When neither told him not to, and Matty said she wanted one, he handed her a cheroot, lit his own as well, and brought them up to date on his conversation with the elders of the Black Leggings Lodge.
When he'd finished, Matty said she was still hungry. Then she said something that sounded dirty in Kiowa as she stared past Longarm at the round entryway behind him.
Longarm turned to see a grinning kid of eight or nine peeking in at them. The kid said something in Kiowa that made Matty laugh in spite of herself. She explained, "I asked the fresh thing what he wanted, and he asked when are we going to take off all our duds and get dirty. He says he's never watched folks like you and Miss Minerva do it."
The schoolmarm sighed and said, "I used to admire the way Indians disciplined their children without corporal punishment. After some time among them I'm not so sure."
Matty wound up to tell the little shit what a shit she thought he was. But Longarm had a better idea. He fished out some pocket change as he told Matty what he wanted her to ask of the unsupervised brat. She did, but after he'd tossed the kid a nickel and he'd scampered off in the gathering dusk, she told him he'd just seen the last of both the kid and his money.
Then she added, "They told us before you got here that Necomi had said to feed us. It's after dark and my mother's people are used to early suppers. Do you think some big pig has helped himself to meals meant for us?"
Minerva sighed. "That tallow's kept the linseed oil dubbing from drying out all the way. I don't think you're supposed to put linseed oil on leather to begin with. I don't care if they ever feed us. Do you think someone would shoot me if I went outside to throw up?"
Longarm got out another cheroot, lit it from the tip of the one he was smoking, and when she silently refused it, threw it on the cow-chip fire between them to stink the place differently, saying, "A nose that delicate must be a heavy cross to bear, Miss Minerva. I said I could make out that army dubbing once you brought it up, and I agree it don't smell like roses, but there's worse smells than that in this imperfect world. How did you ever get by back East in a city running on horsepower and cooking with soft coal?"
She sighed and replied, "Why did you think I applied for this job out West? You're so right about it being a cross to bear. Like a lot of myopic souls, I seem to have developed my sense of smell beyond a comfortable level. How I wish things were the other way, with my eyes this keen and my nose not so delicate."
He didn't have any call to mention that eagle-eyed gal he'd met in Montana who spotted cracks in every ceiling, spots on every rug, and called a man a liar when he swore he'd shaved that same day. He asked Matty what she knew about the old rascals holding up their supper so long.
The little Kiowa breed only knew the bunch over this way by rep. She said Necomi was considered a true-heart, in a stubborn old-time way. She'd heard old Hawzitah didn't count all the coup he was said to be entitled to. She said his fellow Kiowa considered him an odd cuss in other ways. He was always asking questions, curious as a young kid about what everyone was up to, even the blue sleeves over at the fort. When the black blue sleeves had been there, he'd asked them all sorts of questions about what it felt like to live like a Saltu without being a real Saltu. Matty said she didn't see why anyone would want to ask such stupid questions, and that even the black blue sleeves had laughed and called Hawzitah the Kiowa Professor.