On the far side it smelled even mustier, and he saw they'd divided that part of the big tent into a maze of tiny partitions. He had a fair grasp on what went on in some of them. The drab led him into a sort of canvas-walled office, where an older but prettier gal with funeral-black hair was seated behind a couple of planks laid across two flour barrels. She declared her friends called her Spike, Then she waved him to a stool on his side of the improvised desk. The younger gal with far more face paint ducked out without being ordered to leave. Longarm sipped some beer and waited for the lady to have the first say.
Spike said, "You had us worried. Quirt McQueen had a rep until a minute ago. He was a pest and bad for business as well. So to whom might we owe the honor?"
Longarm introduced himself. She didn't ask to see his badge. She laughed and said, "I'd have left town too. My help told me the kid was talking big about a lawman with a rep. I frankly never expected anyone famous as you to show up!"
Longarm modestly replied, "I doubt Quirt McQueen was either. I come across punks like him all the time. It's safer to threaten grown lawmen than some total stranger with a less certain reaction to your brag."
The lady known as Spike chuckled and recalled, "I saw the amusing outcome of such an encounter in Coffeyville, just before they cleaned it up and ran me out. There was this quiet little gent drinking alone at the bar. Looked like a windmill salesman, had anybody paid enough attention to speculate."
She reached in a box in front of her and took out two Havana Claros as she continued. "Anyhow, this big rough mule skinner packing a.45 on one hip comes through the door, already in his cups and doubtless feeling even bigger, to declare it's a Saturday night, that his Indian blood is up, and that he can lick any son of a bitch on the premises."
She handed Longarm one of the cigars and added, "Naturally the little lone drinker just drew and drilled him directly through the heart without a word. He declared as he was leaving that he had never let anyone talk about his dear momma like that."
Longarm broke out some matches to light them both up as he said, "The mule skinner would have been safer daring the town law to fight him. I'm surprised he didn't. Most mean drunks learn how much safer that is by the time they've been beaten up a few times. I've had some professional boxers tell me they have the same trouble. It's a lot safer to challenge someone like John L. Sullivan to a bare-knuckles brawl than some blacksmith or even a bootblack who'd be more likely to take you up on it."
She placed cool manicured fingers against his hand to steady it as he lit her cigar. He wondered whether they were flirting or not. She hadn't said what she really wanted of him yet.
He said, "There's no mystery about Quirt McQueen. He Somehow got the notion he could bluff me beyond reason. But now he knows better."
She leaned back, blew a sort of octopus cloud of blue smoke at him, and quietly asked, "Why did they send such a famous lawman here to the Indian Territory, Custis?"
So now he knew what was worrying her. He smiled through the smoke at her and said, "Nobody in Denver or Washington, most likely, has ever heard of Spike's Parisian Pavilion. I'd be lying if I said the War or Interior Departments approved of your doubtless well-meant services to lonely troops a long ways from home. On the other hand, a heap of old army men and even Indian agents are more worldly than Queen Victoria or Lemonade Lucy Hayes. They know, or say they know, a soldier blue with some place to let off steam close to his post is less likely to go over the hill or, worse yet, molest some handier Indian gal. I had to chase a cuss clean to Mexico after he'd been charged with the murderous mistreatment of an Indian laundress one time."
Spike blew more smoke at him and quietly asked, "Then why did they send you?"
He finished the last of his beer, rested one elbow on her desk as he leaned closer, and just told her.
It naturally took a spell, even when he left out the dirty parts. So Spike rang a bell on her desk when he was halfway back from that Kiowa camp, and another drab came in with a pitcher of beer and two tumblers on a tray.
She set it on the desk and backed out. As Spike poured she said some troopers had told her why they had to ride up to Anadarko. She said it was going to be lousy for business. But she was glad nobody had double-crossed her.
Longarm waved his cigar warningly and said, "Stop right there, ma'am. Any deals you've made with white folks are betwixt you and white folks. Like I told you, I was sent here to give Chief Quanah a hand with his new Indian Police and as things turned out, Quanah ain't here. My orders are to give him another twenty-four hours to get back and explain his fool self. Unless he has something to say that ain't on record, I'm as good as gone. From all the files I've had a look at and all the folks I've questioned, there's nothing all that wrong with the way the Indian Police have been set up in these parts."
She asked, "What about those fake Indian Police, working with a band of fake wild Indians?"
He shrugged and said, "Quanah set up his own police force to deal with such crooks on his own reserve. Him and the B.I.A. have the army to back their play. They don't need one more white lawman all that much, and like I told you, I suspect I've somehow managed to scare the gang back to wherever they came from. I sure wish I knew how."
Spike laughed and said, "That's no mystery. I was watching through the canvas when the piano professor told me Quirt McQueen had met up with that jasper he was fixing to fight. You're scary when you're on the prod, Custis. I could see by your gun-muzzle eyes, clear across the saloon, it was time for that boy to slap leather or start running!"
Longarm shrugged modestly and said, "I don't usually start out as annoyed. I never locked eyeballs with that Sergeant Black Sheep. He just took it upon himself to go to war with me. If I knew what the fuss was about I might know how I won!"
She agreed it was a puzzle, and then, since they'd finished the two drinks she'd poured and she wasn't pouring more, Longarm said he had to figure out where he was going to spend the coming night.
He could see why they called her Spike. She had no suggestions to offer. She didn't even walk him out front when he rose to leave. He wondered who she was paying off at the nearby fort, with what. But it wasn't any of his beeswax. An army provost marshal seldom heeded and never appreciated helpful hints from the Justice Department.
As he ambled back to the fort afoot, he laughed at himself for concerning himself with the business dealings and dubious charms of a gal too old for him. He decided it was likely because a nice-looking gal of any age was such an improvement on the offer that Hino-Usdi Rogers had made him. He decided to keep the hard-eyed but decidedly female Miss Spike in mind when he turned in alone at the hostel that night. A man would feel silly as hell having wet dreams about Cherokee breeds who only thought they were gals.
Crossing the parade, he noticed the mud was sun-baking back to 'dobe again. 'Dobe was what you called clay soil with lots of lime in it out here whether anyone molded it into bricks or not. Kids in Denver molded it into bitty balls to have 'dobe fights after it set solid as plaster. Those mystery riders wouldn't be leaving hoofprints much longer as they rode across thick sod rooted in drying 'dobe.
Colonel Howard and his column were headed the wrong direction in any case. If the gang was smart enough to split up and drift into the rail stop at Atoka in scattered twos and threes, they might even get by the Choctaw Police, dad blast their sneaky ways!
Longarm went back to the stable to get his saddlebags and Yellowboy from the army tack room. Then he toted them to that hostel to ask for the same room if they had it.
They did. So he put his personal baggage away after shaving and such down the hall, and this time he wedged a match stem under the bottom hinge as he shut and locked his hired door. He was just about sure he'd seen the last of Quirt McQueen, but it could pay to take the routine precautions.
He was standing on the veranda, lighting another smoke while he pondered whether he had enough questions left to pester the signal corps, when a familiar figure on a paint pony reined in a few yards away to hail him.
It was Sergeant Tikano of the Indian Police. The moonfaced Comanche said, "They told me you might be here. Quanah just rode in. He was bringing another beef herd up from Texas when he heard about all the trouble you've been having and rode on ahead. Do you want me to bring him here or will you ride with me?"
Longarm said he was in a hurry to compare notes too. So as the Indian trotted his mount beside the walk, Longarm hurried back to the stable and saddled the bay he'd hired in Spanish Flats, and they loped out together for that Comanche sub-agency just over the horizon.
Along the way, Longarm brought the Indian police sergeant up to date on his early chores with a telegraph key. Tikano agreed the rail stop at Atoka, on the Choctaw reserve, made heaps of sense for the mystery riders, if they were really running for it. He said they'd have ridden smack into Quanah and two dozen real Indians if they'd taken the Cache Creek Trail for the depot at Spanish Flats. Longarm asked how Quanah had found out enough to worry him at all, and Tikano explained, "He's been buying more beef down in Texas all this time. He likes to act more like his Saltu relations when dealing with the Saltu. That is why nobody else knew where he was all this time. He met your friends from the Running X as they were riding home to Texas. The trail boss called Carver told him about those police who were not police and others who might or might not have been Black Leggings. So now Quanah and Agent Conway are drinking much black coffee, trying to figure out what to say when they ask Agent Ryan's clerk to wire the main agency at Anadarko."
Longarm allowed he had to study on that too. As they topped a rise and saw that church steeple ahead, Longarm casually asked the Comanche if he'd ever heard any gossip about young Hino-Usdi.
Tikano replied simply, "We call him Ta Soon Da Hipey. Every now and then a boy is born who grows up that way. It is wrong to use such a young man as a woman. But it is wrong to hurt him or even mock him as one might mock a real man who missed a shot or fell off his pony. Nobody asks for such boys to happen. Eyototo, the chief of the spirits, must have some reasons for making some people awkward, crippled, crazy, or just different. They are the ones to be pitied. Sometimes, if you give the pitied ones a chance, they turn out all right. One of the greatest war chiefs of the Arapaho did everything with his left hand. But the blue sleeves couldn't kill him at Sand Creek, even though they hit him with many bullets, many. The Cheyenne had a chief called Left Hand too."
Longarm said, "I noticed that the time Dull Knife lit out from Fort Reno just north of here. My point about that Cherokee kid, and the agent he works for, was that few if any Indians would think to blackmail such gents, whilst Spanish-speaking Christians might."
Tikano asked what Mexican outlaws might blackmail Fred Ryan or his clerk into doing for them.
Longarm answered, "Don't know. Maybe nothing. Maybe heaps. I'd best compare notes with Quanah before I send any more wires."
So he did. When they rode in they found Agent Conway and the taller Quanah Parker, dressed like a Texas trail herder with long braids, out on the front porch as if they'd been watching from a window.
Once Longarm had dismounted and shook hands all around, already knowing the stern-faced but agreeable chief to talk to, Longarm wasted no time in bringing everyone up to date, including the little he'd just found out by wire.
Quanah nodded soberly and said, "Our friend Harry Carver told me much of what you just said. When my young men and I got to where you Saltu met those police who were not police, we found nobody there to demand money from me in my name. But we scouted for sign and found where they had planted tipi poles crazy. Some with four main poles, as our women plant, but others based on a three-pole tripod, the way Arapaho put up a lodge. They had no idea at all how a tipi should be facing."
Longarm nodded and replied, "I just said I thought they might be Mex bandits with a mighty unusual approach."
Quanah said, "I had not finished. When we came to where Harry said you and that girl shot it out with Black Leggings, we scouted around those sod walls carefully. The rain that had just fallen gave away a lot of sign they may have thought they'd covered. The reason you and those cowboys never found those dead Indians is that they were buried in a draw a good ride to the west. We might not have found this out if the rainwater hadn't found the softer earth under the replaced sod easier to wash down the draw."
Longarm resisted the impulse to declare he'd never thought those rascals had been treated to any Horse Indian sky burial. It was tough to remember that despite a lot of white manners, Quanah Parker still followed Indian manners when it came to conversation. Indians broke in while others were speaking about as often as white folks belched or farted at such times.
Quanah said, "People do not rot as fast buried in 'dobe. So we knew they were not anyone we knew. They were wearing black leggings, but their war paint was silly. We who paint ourselves don't just daub it on like Saltu children going to a Halloween party. Paint is worn for puha, or to warn your enemies what kind of a fighter they face."
The erstwhile war leader wiped two fingers down a hollow bronzed cheek and sneered, "One had yellow lightning bolts running down green cheeks like tears. That is the paint of a great warrior lodge, but neither Kiowa nor Comanche. Only the Arapaho Black Hearts, not Kiowa Black Leggings, paint their faces that way."