As he ducked inside he asked if either gal had tasted anything but their own supplies. Matty said a Kiowa gal had offered them some coffee, but they'd poured it on the cold ashes when nobody had been looking.
Longarm said, "Good thinking. We're fixing to ride out any minute, so let's pull ourselves together in here."
Minerva Cranston commenced to pin her hair back atop her skull as she murmured, not meeting Longarm's eye, "I suppose I owe you an explanation for the way I carried on last night."
He shook his head and said, "Save it for the next sewing bee. Right now the inner thoughts of a teasing schoolmarm are the least of my worries." He scooped up his saddlebags and told them to join him outside as pronto as possible. Then he ducked out of the tipi to see that things had simmered down a bit, with most everybody and his or her belongings forted up inside the circle of thin-skinned but mysterious hide shelters.
Unless you had the element of surprise riding with you, it could be injurious to one's health to blindly charge a tipi ring.
For some would be empty, while others might be hornet's nests of dug-in riflemen. Horse Indians fought differently, but that wasn't to say they fought stupidly, or didn't learn new tricks along the way. Dull Knife's band had given the army a scare, despite the hopeless odds, when troopers inspecting the Cheyenne's last encampment near White River found more than one deep pit inside a tipi with its cover rolled up a few inches all around to offer a ground-level field of fire.
Dull Knife had only given in because he was low on food, blankets, and ammunition, as well as smart. Army pals had told Longarm some of the more recent hostiles had learned to reload their brass cartridges with home-brew black powder and fashion fresh slugs from hammered telegraph wire. They used mushed-up match heads for cartridge caps. The War Department had wanted to forbid the sale of kitchen matchesin trading posts, until cooler heads had pointed out how many Indians who didn't know that trick would surely get matches from the settlers all around them, even as they pondered why the army found this so important.
A brace of Kiowa kids came around the bend on foot, leading Gray Skies and the other four ponies. So Longarm yelled for the two tardy gals to get their tardy rumps out there, and once they had, he soon had the three of them riding east at an easy lope.
He reined in on a rise a quarter mile out and made sure nobody was right on their tail. Then he told his two female companions to stick tight and follow his lead.
They did as he whirled Gray Skies and plunged down the far slope, to where the pony trail crossed a barely wet and braided sandy rill along the bottom of the draw. He warned them not to cut any corners with their own hooves as he headed Gray Skies upstream in the fetlock-deep but patiently running water. Matty seemed to follow his drift, but Minerva called forward, "Where are we going, Custis? I thought we were headed back to Quanah's agency over that way!"
Longarm called back, "Let's hope everyone else thinks we are too. We'd never make it that far across open prairie with anyone serious on our trail. So we'd best head up into the woody Wichitas and see if we can't make Fort Sill the long way round instead."
Matty whooped, "I like to shop at Fort Sill. They have ribbons of different colors than our Indian trader sells, and red licorice whips and ladies' fashion magazines. Why don't they sell fashion magazines at our trading post, Custis? Don't they want us to be fashionable?"
He figured she might be on to something, but he said he just didn't know. As they rode up the streamlet, chokecherry and box elder pressed in more densely from either side. So by the time they came to where the water sprang from the sandy head of the draw, they were out of sight of the trail they'd forsaken. Longarm led the way around some bow-wood, or Osage orange, and through some cottonwoods to ride up as steep a slope as they could manage, hoping nobody would scout for any sign where nobody with a lick of sense would force his mount to go.
When they cut a more sensible deer trail cutting northeast at a gentler angle, Longarm decided to follow it. If anyone was slick enough to figure where they might be headed, they wanted their mounts in shape for a running gunfight down the slope. Longarm studied on that as he led the way single file. He had his Winchester Yellowboy again to back his six-gun and derringer. Matty had insisted on packing a nickel-plated Harrington & Richardson.32-18 in a saddlebag as if she might be fixing to start off a pony race on demand. Minerva hadn't brought any firearms at all. When asked, she'd allowed nobody had ever shown her how to fire a gun. So that was another way she'd turned out different from that newspaper gal, Godiva Weaver, cuss the two of them combined.
They had to rest and water their ponies more than once, working up through the scrubby timber or high chaparral, depending on what was rooted where on the rocky slopes. Longarm was paying attention to the sky, knowing how easy it was to get turned around in hills that hadn't read the same large-scale map. So it was little Matty, staring back the way they'd come, who called out, "Down in those blackjack oaks, past that outcrop we passed half an hour ago!"
Longarm stared long and hard before he made out brownish movement way down yonder. He nodded but said, "Anyone following this trail could have as innocent a reason. But why don't we give them a chance to prove they ain't dogging us in particular?"
They didn't know what he meant, so he led them a good way along the apparent natural trail along the crest of a side ridge that only groped its way to a wooded knoll that overlooked the real trail from two furlongs north and forty feet higher. As they neared the sort of island in the sky, he reined in and dismounted, telling them to do the same as he explained, "The winds up here have tangled those blackjacks, and better yet, there's an undertangle of hellish bow-wood, if only we can get these ponies through it."
They could, but it wasn't easy, even with little Matty helping. Being a Horse Indian raised in bow-wood country, she knew how to deal with the ornery natural bobwire.
Back East, where they called it Osage orange, bow-wood growing in a park like some floral pet could stand on one trunk about the size and shape of a crab apple, although thorny as a rosebush and bearing a sort of mock orange hard as wood. But out here where it had to fight a more ferocious climate for its life, the results were wilder. Bow-wood branches coppiced, meaning you got two or three new thorny sprouts wherever you busted off or simply peeled some bark off a wind-whipped limb. The Indians had cut stouter branches to make a heap of short tough bows of the springy wood before they'd switched to more lethal firearms. Early settlers had planted and trimmed bow-wood into buffalo-proof hedgerows before both the buffalo and slower-growing fencing had given way to bobwire. Up here on the knoll the wickedly thorned and wind-pruned greenery had taken the time to grow. So with Matty holding some branches back, and him cutting a few more, they soon had themselves and their ponies totted up inside what the surprised Minerva described as a natural bower.
That was what she said you called a shaded clearing roofed over or walled by tough sunlit branches, a bower.
Longarm tethered the ponies as deep in the little glade as he could get them, and told the otherwise less useful Minerva to pick some bow-wood leaves for them while he and Matty scouted the far sides of the knoll. No warm-blooded critter would eat oak leaves, but bow-wood grew those thorns to protect its juicy leaves.
Gingerly parting the sticker-brush to the north with Matty and her small revolver in tow, Longarm saw that approach was steeper but brushier. So he told Matty, "If those other riders are on their own business, they'll pass on by. If they're after us, and figure out where we are, they'll circle afoot to creep up this slope through all that tanglewood."
He cradled the Winchester Yellowboy in one arm as he drew his Colt.44-40 and handed it to her, saying, "It's an insult to shoot a grown man with a .32-Short. But take both pistols over to the far side and keep an eye on that trail whilst I guard our back entrance. I don't want no needless gunplay. I'd rather have 'em guess where we might be. Do you know how to twitter like a horned lark?"
The breed kid proved she could by doing so. But then she told him she didn't think any horned larks would be this far off their usual prairie range.
Longarm nodded and said, "That's why I chose such a signal. It's possible to hear grassland birds up here amid all this tanglewood, but unlikely enough to make for a handy code whistle. Horn-lark me once if you see those other riders doing anything. Whistle twice if they seem to be searching for us. Three whistles will mean they're getting warm. Now git! I don't know how much time we have to get set for whatever."
Matty nodded and scampered off through the dappled shade, a gun in each hand. Longarm took off his jacket and hung it on a thorny bow-wood branch, along with his hat. Then he got down on his belly to lizard through the sticker-brush with the Yellowboy cradled in his elbows until he had a clear field of fire down the far-from-clear northern slopes.
Putting himself in the boots or moccasins of someone trying to work his way up through all that tanglewood, he decided on the three best ways to creep. That wasn't saying some son of a bitch with a different view of this knoll couldn't plan an entirely different approach. But a man with fifteen rounds in an antiquated repeater had to start with some damned plan.
He levered a round into the hitherto empty chamber, and slid another round into the magazine, making that sixteen rounds to work with. He could only hope that would be enough.
He'd just told himself not to be such an old fuss when Minerva Cranston spotted his boot heels sticking out the other side of his thorny green tunnel and gasped, "Oh, there you are. Custis, I feel so helpless and I'm so scared! What's going on out there?"
He could only reply, "Nothing. As the morning warms up you don't hear half as much skittering. There's a red-tail circling off to the northeast above another wooded rise. That's about the size of it. Not even an interesting cloud to ponder, as far as the eye can see."
She got down on her hands and knees to crawl forward through the brush, catching her thinly clad rump in a thorn and bitching about it.
Longarm laughed, not unkindly, and observed, "That was the first thing they warned us about when I was a young and foolish recruit. Green troops always seem to know enough to keep their heads down. So a soldier's first wound, if it ain't fatal, is likely to be undignified. Lay flat in the dirt and sort of slither your hips as you walk on your elbows. Why do you want to move this deep in the brush to begin with?"
She worked her way up his left flank as she panted, "I told you. I'm scared skinny and you have that gun. And, as I tried to tell you earlier, there's a reason, if not an excuse, for the silly way I tend to behave when I'm upset. Don't you want to know why I was so... forward last night in that tipi?"
He didn't, but as he'd learned aboard many a stagecoach or steamboat, there was no stopping a woman once she'd decided to tell you the story of her life, and what the hell, that fool hawk wasn't up yonder to admire now.
Minerva said she'd been about Matty's age, feeling just as put upon, when she'd run off from her strict upbringing with a handsome drifter called Ace. She said she hadn't known he was a gambling man with a drinking problem until they wound up stranded in a fleabag hotel over in Dodge.
Reflecting that the childish Matty might be dumb enough to fall for a saddle tramp called Ace, Longarm gently asked how come he'd gotten the impression she'd first come west as an employee of the B.I.A.
Minerva answered simply, "I left a few things off my civil service application. How does a spinster qualify herself as a schoolteacher by declaring she finally left a depraved brute after he'd offered a night in bed with her as table stakes in Laredo?"
Longarm calmly asked who'd won.
She laughed bitterly and said, "I didn't wait to find out. The older and probably wiser gambler Ace propositioned wanted to hear I approved of the wager, as he put it, before he bet hard cash."
Her voice dropped almost to a whisper as she continued, half to herself. "They called him Baltimore, and I guess I never got to thank him properly. After I got hysterical, and they'd carried Ace across the street to the infirmary, Baltimore led me firmly but gently to the boat landing and put me on a riverboat bound for Brownsville. He gave me some money and told me he'd take care of everything there in Laredo. I guess he did. I never tried to find out. I knew Ace had only been pistol-whipped, and I was afraid that if he ever got me back in his power there might not be a Baltimore the next time."
Longarm nodded soberly and said, "I've heard similar tales from parlor-house gals who weren't so lucky. If I live to be a hundred I will never understand how nice gals from gentle homes manage to pass up all the nice young neighborhood gents in favor of some weak-chinned self-styled roughneck calling himself Ace, Duke, or Frenchy. I reckon a total stranger who needs a bath is more exciting than the boy next door, eh?"
Minerva sighed and said, "Ace smelled of larkspur lotion and put on a fresh shirt every day when we were in the money. There were times we were too broke for that. The gambling life means steak with champagne some nights, with beer and beans more often."
"Sounds mighty glamorous," Longarm muttered dryly.
Minerva said, "I liked it best when we were broke. That was when Ace seemed to pay the most attention to me. When we were in the money he stayed up half the night and came to bed too tired to... you know."