Longarm wired back that he'd possibly cut the mystery rider's trail the easy way, and agreed to do the rest of it old Billy's way. Then he leaned back, heaved a smoky sigh, and said, "That's just about all of your battery zinc I need to use up on you for now. Looks like I'll be staying here at least overnight. So I reckon I ought to start considering where."
The baby-faced breed blushed a dusky rose, but sounded downright bold as he suggested, "I could put you up, if you've no place better to bed down. Our quarters are right out back, off and since Agent Ryan won't be staying here tonight..."
"Can't use another gent's bed behind his back," said Longarm, getting to his feet with a suddenly uneasy feeling about that flat-chested but mighty girlish young jasper.
Hino-Usdi Rogers insisted, "Uncle Fred won't mind. But if you're bashful, why don't we just go back right now and have a little fun in my little bed?"
Longarm found himself backing away from the fluttery but brazen advances of the eager young squirt. He laughed awkwardly, and said, "I hate to be the one who has to tell you this, but I'm incurably queer for women, if that was the fun you had in mind."
The breed licked his pouty lips and puffed, "I can do anything for you any woman can. Better! Don't be bashful. Nobody else need ever know, and you can't tell me you've never been even a little weeny bit curious about the joys that dare not speak their names!"
Longarm laughed, too loudly for the way he felt, and confessed, "I've always wondered what the main entree at a cannibal feast might taste like too. That don't mean I'm ever fixing to eat anybody!"
The breed flicked his pink tongue like a snake's, and told him not to refuse a friend just a little taste of his own flesh raw. Longarm had to shove past to get closer to the door. So he did, saying, "I don't hold with hitting other gents just because I don't agree with their, ah, tastes. But don't start no wrestling match if you ain't ready to land flat on your ass, old son."
The breed kid wrapped both arms around Longarm and buried his head in the taller man's tweed vest, sobbing, "Don't humiliate me this way! You said you and Uncle Fred were pals. How was I to know you were one of those blue-lipped Holy Rollers who can't admit their own passions?"
Longarm gently but firmly disengaged himself from the confounded clerk as he observed, "I doubt you've been to many gatherings of the Pentecostal Movement if you don't find them capable of passion. But through no fault of anyone, everyone feels passionate in different ways. I'm sorry I ain't like you and your Uncle Fred. But that's just the way things are and... Hold on, am I to understand that Fred Ryan is a, you know...?"
"Queer is the word you were groping for," said Rogers, striking a haughty pose. "We prefer to call ourselves free to love as we please and... what's so funny, damn you?"
Longarm sheepishly confessed, "Wasn't laughing at you. Laughing at me. I thought old Fred stick-talked a gal away from me the other night. I reckon she did too. But he must have just wanted company on that long ride east, unless he was one of them free thinkers who like everybody a heap. You call gents like that bicycles, right?"
Rogers laughed despite himself and said, "The only way Uncle Fred would screw a woman would be if she was willing really to take him through her back door. Sodomy seems to make him feel romantic!"
Longarm shrugged and said, "Lucky for you. Most Indians I know are tolerant of your kind, but no more inclined than the rest of us to take you up on your kind offers."
Then he brightened and said, "That's it! I was wondering what old Fred had to offer that newspaper gal that I couldn't match. She was one of them adventurous gals who wanted to try everything. But somehow, I don't feel as jealous about the two of 'em now."
Hino-Usdi blanched and demanded, "Are you suggesting Uncle Fred is cheating on me, with a woman?"
To which Longarm could only reply gently, "Why not? You just now tried to cheat on him with a man."
Then he was out the door, smiling wearily but not sure who might be the biggest fool of them all. Life would surely be less confounding if folks got to screw like flowers, just letting the bees worry about who got to couple with whom.
By this time it was pushing noon and he hadn't had a warm meal in recent memory. So Longarm went over to that officers' mess and treated himself to eighteen cents worth of corned beef and fried spuds. He washed down his raisin pie dessert with two cups of black coffee, and then, feeling human again, he strode on up to the sutler's store to replenish his tobacco supply.
Ed Vernon seemed surprised as well as glad to see him. The sutler said, "We figured you'd ride north with Colonel Howard. Wasn't you the one sending up them smoke signals yesterday?"
Longarm nodded and said, "Told Lieutenant Standish why too. Never told him those mystery riders were headed north for certain. I reckon they were in too great a hurry to wait for me this morning. I had to carry two ladies home to Comanche Town. I could use another dozen of these same cheroots."
Vernon reached under the counter for them as he said, "Maybe just as well. Quirt McQueen just said he was riding after the column to have some words with you. I don't know if we talked him out of it or not."
As Longarm reached in his jeans to pay for the smokes he muttered, "That makes no sense, if we're talking about that silly kid who rides shotgun for the mail ambulance. There's no way in hell they could have driven all the way to Fort Smith and back by this morning."
Vernon handed over the fistful of cheroots and accepted Longarm's quarter as he casually explained, "Quirt says they fired him at the Mud Creek relay stop. Seems to think you had something to do with it. I told him if he wasn't working for the government no more I couldn't let him wait here on a military post to clean your plow. Last anyone I know seen of Quirt, he was getting liquored up over in Shanty Town, allowing he meant to kill you on sight and asking if anyone would lend him a pony."
The sutler handed Longarm his nickel in change as he added in a cheerful tone, considering, "By now someone's sure to have put him on a pony, if only to get rid of him. Quirt can be obnoxious as all get-out when he's drunk."
Longarm put his tobacco and change away as he thoughtfully said, "He ain't all that pleasant sober. But there's no way I could have wired mean things about him to Mud Creek. I didn't know he was there, and even if I had, I'd have been out on the range with more serious things on my mind at the time."
He lit one of the smokes he'd just bought as he considered all his options. Then he said, "Reckon I'll have to track the kid down, if he's still over yonder, and just ask him what this is all about."
The sutler blinked and replied in a worried tone, "You don't want to meet up with him before he's had time to cool down and sober up a mite, Longarm. Quirt is one mean drunk, and he's sworn he means to slap leather at the sight of you!"
Longarm shrugged and said, "You told me that. Now I'm going to go find the little shit and ask him what makes him so mean."
CHAPTER 18
Having just sort of growed, like Topsy, the haphazard collection of canvas and frame structures on the far side of Flipper's Impossible Ditch would have been an unsolvable maze if it had been much bigger. But Longarm asked directions, and heard the tinkling piano playing in Spike's Parisian Pavilion. Once he found it, it looked a lot more like an old threadbare army mess tent. It likely was. He shut one eyelid to let his right pupil unwind from the noonday sunlight as he strode for the opening facing the muddy lane out front. So when he stepped inside and slid sideways along a canvas wall, he only had to open his shooting eye to see well enough in the sudden shade.
A third of the big tent, toward the far end, was walled off with painted canvas. The piano stood against that, played by a skinny young squirt in his shirtsleeves and derby. A long bar had been improvised by laying planks across piled shipping crates. The floor was a squishy expanse of trampled muddy sod. Longarm wasn't sure whether the open sale of hard liquor or the painted gals in scandalous satin outfits lounging around the piano and bar would have upset Lemonade Lucy Hayes, the President's lady, the most.
A Philadelphia lawyer could likely make a case for the joint sort of squatting on an Indian or military reservation. You weren't supposed to sell hard liquor on either under current regulations out of Washington. But they were a long way from Washington, and that was between old Spike, whoever he was, and the nearest provost marshal, whatever he got to look the other way. Longarm didn't ride for the War Department, and was only on loan to the Indian Police, who had no jurisdiction over white business permits.
Longarm was far more interested in the familiar sullen figure at one end of the bar, drinking alone as he tried to attract attention to himself by sort of singing along with the piano. Saloon gals had no call to flirt with saddle tramps who drank alone, and the few male customers at this hour seemed more uneasy than amused.
Nobody seemed to feel any easier when Longarm strode to within spitting range of Quirt McQueen and announced in a tone that could be heard clean through the music, "I understand you've been looking for this child, McQueen."
The piano stopped halfway through a bar, and the professor slid off his stool to join the painted gals in a sort of crawfish stampede around the far end of that canvas partition. Those few customers who didn't simply duck outside moved back as far as they could from the bar as the gent who'd been serving drinks behind it ducked down out of sight.
Quirt McQueen looked as if he was fixing to throw up. He gulped hard and said, "Howdy, Longarm. I heard you was on your way up to Anadarko with that cavalry column!"
Longarm curtly replied, "You said you were aiming to chase after me too. But I don't see you doing it, Squirt."
The kid protested, "They call me Quirt, not Squirt, if you don't mind. Could I buy you a drink, pard?"
Longarm shook his head and snapped, "I don't drink with mean little kids, Squirt. How did you get back from Mud Creek if you don't have a pony to ride, and what's all this shit about me getting you fired?"
Quirt swallowed some more and said, "I never said it was you in the flesh. Your B.I.A. pal and that newspaper lady said something to the jehu, and he must have said something to the station manager at Mud Creek. How was I to know they were your pals? They both sort of laughed at you when we all passed by you on the prairie that time. I told them how you'd refused to fight me over to the fort and-"
"Bullshit! Fill your fist!" Longarm declared.
Then he had to smile as the kid started pissing down one leg of his pants, whimpering, "Jesus H. Christ, can't anybody take a joke out this way? You know I never meant it, pard!"
Longarm said, "I knew it. Let's talk about why your war talk got Fred Ryan and Godiva Weaver so het up. Are you saying they rode on from Mud Creek with nobody at all riding shotgun messenger?"
McQueen shook his head and said, "There was this hardcase Indian Ryan knew, working as a stable hand at Mud Creek. Ryan said he'd feel safer with a more experienced gun waddy seated up front. But I ask you, was that fair?"
Longarm nodded and said, "Sounds fair to me. Fred Ryan has his own odd notions. But he is an experienced Indian agent and, no offense, you don't make a very convincing bad man."
Longarm pointed at the doorway with his thumb as he added, "I can see why Ryan didn't want you guarding him and Miss Weaver all the way to Fort Smith with nothing but your mouth. Squirts like you make me a mite nervous too. So now I want you to go find the pony you rode back on and justride it, anywhere's you like, as long as I don't see you around me no more."
McQueen protested, "What are you talking about? You can't run me out of town! What if I just refuse to go?"
Longarm answered pleasantly enough, "That's your right, under the U.S. Constitution. I know I can't make you go. But I can surely make you sorry as hell you stayed."
He saw the kid was too drunk, or too ignorant, to grasp his full meaning. So he quietly but firmly explained, "Asshole. You've told as many witnesses as I'd ever need that you meant to gun me on sight. So here I stand in full sight, and would any court in this land expect me to hold my fire until you'd killed me?"
McQueen tried, "Aw, shit, I told you I was only joshing."
Longarm shook his head and said, "That ain't what you told Ed Vernon and some others who don't like you any better. You'd best leave now, or make good on your brag, you yellow-livered little shit, because I am fixing to take you up on it within a number of seconds I'd as soon count off silently."
Longarm wasn't really counting under his breath. He'd seen more than one man die counting aloud toward ten and getting shot around seven or eight. But the four-flushing McQueen must have thought he was counting. For he was suddenly running for the doorway as if the Hounds of Hell were in hot pursuit.
Longarm leaned over the bar and quietly said, "War's over and I'd like rye with a beer chaser, barkeep."
The ashen-faced barkeep was filling his order when one of the saloon gals came over to tell Longarm that his drink was on the house and that Spike would like a word with him in the back. So he drained the shot glass, picked up his beer schooner, and followed the drab back behind that canvas wall.