She asked, "Then what are those wigwams doing down that way?"
Longarm reined and stood up to stare soberly eastward along the riverside tree line. He could see all those cows still milling amid billows of trail dust, and atop a slight rise beyond the trail, there was surely a ring of the conical tents the Eastern gal had just misnamed.
He said, "That's a tipi ring, Miss Weaver. A wigwam is the same thing made out of bark and mentioned by someone speaking Algonquin. Tipi seems to be a Sioux-Hokan word for lodge or dwelling, but all the plains nations who live in 'em seem to use tipi or something close. The question before the house ain't what they are but what they might be doing yonder. You just heard me say why I'd hardly expect a Kiowa or Comanche camp this far south."
He unfastened his recently purchased and fully loaded Yellowboy and heeled his mount into a thoughtful walk as he mused aloud, "The trail hands in charge of that herd seem perplexed too, seeing they don't seem able to move their cows past them Indians."
As she gingerly followed, Godiva hauled her own saddle gun up to brace it across her upraised right thigh as she asked if this was really any of their business.
Longarm soberly replied, "Ain't none of your beeswax, ma'am. I'm paid to be sort of nosey. So why don't you rein in here and leave it all to me?"
She said she was paid to be nosey too. But at least she hung back a couple of lengths as Longarm handed her the lead line of the pack pony and forged ahead.
He hadn't forged far when he made out about twenty riders, nine in literally half-ass blue uniforms with their bare tawny legs exposed, and eleven white men dressed more cow-camp. The bunch of them seemed to be arguing about something between a drawn-up chuck wagon and the tipi ring dominating the trail ahead from its rise. Far less formally dressed Indians were watching from up yonder. As Longarm rode in, he got out his badge and pinned it to the front of his vest.
As he'd hoped, that seemed to keep either side from shooting at him. As he got within easy shouting range, the gray-bearded trail boss seated on a buckskin pointed at a sort of haughty Indian Police rider and wailed, "Praise the Lord the B.I.A. sent you to talk sense to these savages, Marshal! This fool Comanche thinks we have to pay him a dollar-a-head trail toll, and I got better than nine hundred head here!"
As Longarm joined them, the sergeant in charge of the longhaired but cav-hatted Indians looked downright surly until Longarm said, "Quanah Parker and the combined tribal councils have set the price at a dollar for passage with grazing, and two bits an acre a season for just grazing. Lots of big cattle spreads charge more, and they have full permission from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. So I'm sorry as hell, but that's just the way it seems to be."
The Indian sergeant beamed and said, "I know who you are. We were told you were coming to talk to us about our blue shirts. I am Tuka Wa Pombi. I did not see why we needed a Taibo to tell us anything. But my heart soars to see they have not sent us a fool."
The grizzled trail boss protested, "The two of you are surely talking foolish about this herd me and the boys are supposed to deliver up to Fort Sill! I ain't packing anything like nine hundred dollars, and even if I was I wouldn't owe it to no blamed Comanche! The Comanche or at least their blamed agency already owns all these cows! They've been bought and paid for off our Running X spread in Baylor County, for purely Indian consumption, and whoever heard of the jasper delivering the goods having to pay a blamed delivery fee?"
By this time Godiva Weaver had reined in just a few paces away, looking as if she expected to be introduced to everybody. Longarm could only hope she'd understand his apparent rudeness. The trail boss nodded and ticked his hat brim to the lady. None of the Indians seemed to see anyone there. He knew they weren't trying to be hard-ass. Like most warrior breeds, Comanche weren't supposed to start up with a stranger's woman unless they were fixing to offer plenty of ponies, a good fight, or both for her. Allowing you'd noticed a woman but didn't mean to bid on her was an easy way to get into a fight whether her man had wanted to trade her or not. The notion a stranger would sit still for another man just sort of looking was a deadly insult to all concerned.
Longarm turned to Tuka Wa Pombi and asked if he knew what an I.O.U. was. The Indian said he did but made Longarm explain it twice lest he miss any of the details. Once he'd grasped that the Taibos were ready to part with some of their paper medicine that could somehow be turned into solid silver, he agreed an I.O.U. was better than an all day standoff.
The Running X trail boss insisted, "I ain't good for any nine hundred dollars worth of credit! I don't make that much in a year, and if I did I wouldn't be able to save it all, the way prices has riz since the war."
Longarm said, "Make it out in the name of the original owner of this beef and oblige him to settle up with the new owner, Chief Quanah Parker of the Comanche Nation. Then let the two of them work it out." The trail boss started to object, blinked, went poker-faced, and then got out a tally pad and a pencil stub as he said, "I follow your drift."
So a few minutes later the chuck wagon crew was leading out to the north, followed by the wranglers herding the remuda of spare ponies. Then, a ways back, came the madrina or judas cow, trained to lead the way and naturally followed by the herd, six or eight critters abreast, with the flank and drag riders yipping softly but constantly to keep them moving.
Longarm and the newspaper gal watched a spell, and then Longarm suggested they circle wide and head on up the trail ahead and alone. Godiva had no call to argue. She'd already heard cows moved between eight to sixteen miles a day, and she knew she could get further than twenty miles a day on foot in dry weather and good shoes.
Longarm set a somewhat faster pace, trotting their ponies a few furlongs, walking them about a mile, and letting them water, graze, and rest a good twenty minutes every time the trail crossed a wet draw. There were more of those than usual this far east. Despite all the belly-aching on the part of Mister Lo and the opposition newspapers, the rolling grasslands and timbered watercourses the government had reserved for this patchwork quilt of Indian nations was far from the sterile desert some held it to be. When Godiva commented on some late-blooming wildflowers along the trail, Longarm said, "The grass grows taller and thicker than out where the buffalo roam much more numerously even in these trying times. After all that blood and war paint wasted a few summers back to save the south herd, and despite all the Kiowa or Comanche dreams of a last big reservation jump, there ain't enough buffalo left to support that many Indians."
He stared off to the east across the miles of open range as he added, almost to himself, "Funny how fast the buffalo thinned out. Back home in West-by-God-Virginia the elders told tales of buffalo running wild through the woods and even smashing down log cabins on occasion. The Eastern herds were gone well before my time, of course. But you could still hunt buffalo along the banks of the Mississippi just after the war."
She laughed in a superior way and declared, "There's no mystery as to who's hunted the buffalo almost to extinction in the few years since the invention of the repeating rifle! The supply of buffalo robes and bone meal might have lasted indefinitely if white men hadn't been so selfish! Why didn't they just buy them from Indians?"
Longarm got out a fresh cheroot and, seeing she didn't smoke, lit up before he muttered, "I used to see things that clear and simple. Poets reporting Indians never killed more buffalo than they needed never hunted buffalo with Indians. A pack of contesting riders running a buffalo herd downed every buffalo they could and, wherever possible, ran the whole herd off a cliff. Then they held one swamping supper and stuffed themselves with grease running down their chins till they all got sick. But more than half the meat still spoiled, even after the dogs had eaten a heap. I've heard all those sad stories of white hide skinners leaving buffalo carcasses scattered across the prairies to rot. They're true. A man making as much off one buffalo hide as them cowhands back yonder make after two days in the saddle ain't inclined to conserve wild game."
He blew smoke out his nostrils and continued. "Professional hide hunters seldom used repeating rifles, by the way. The tools of their trade were the single-shot Big Fifty with a telescope sight."
The Eastern girl grimaced and said, "I stand corrected. The game hogs shot off all those buffalo one at a time. What about the rights of the Indians to their traditional game?"
Longarm shrugged and said, "Nobody back East had any use for a buffalo hide skinned the traditional Horse Indian way. They sat the dead critter up on its belly, like a big old hound by the fire, and skinned it by cutting along the backbone. They either didn't know how or didn't want to preserve the fur for a lap robe. They held that a rawhide skin, preserved their greasier way with brains and tallow, should have the softer belly skin in the center. For all I know they were right. But no white folks back East would pay any three dollars and fifty cents for such a hide. They wanted 'em dried flat, untreated, with the thickest back fur down the middle. After that, it depends on who you ask about the Horse Indian's traditions."
He reined in and stood in the stirrups to stare back the way they'd just come as he continued. "What the Indians call their Shining Times was one of those golden boom times, like the beaver trade or the New England whaling industry before Drake's oil wells back in Penn State. Mister Lo got the horse and fanned out across these plains as a wondrous new species after the white man and the horse got to these shores and multiplied some. They figure 1700 as the earliest date you'd have noticed any substantial numbers of Indians on horseback, and the buffalo were already in trouble. They were butchering 'em fast as they knew how before they had the horse, let alone the guns they admire just as much as we do."
She insisted, "There are still far more white men and they have killed far more buffalo."
He nodded soberly and said, "That's the way things work. If it was the other way, or if just Mister Lo and his horse and gun had been left to shoot the buffalo off, he'd have managed. Or it would have looked as if he'd managed. A spell back I was riding herd on these ancient bone professors up around the headwaters of the Green River. They told me these swamping giant lizards called dinosaurs had roamed out this way long before either us or any buffalo. And yet there they all lay, dead for a coon's age. So what do you reckon wiped them out?"
Godiva laughed incredulously and demanded, "How should I know? Some ancient species of animals have simply gone extinct. Everybody knows that."
Longarm settled back in his saddle as he replied, "I know mankind has been trying to wipe out the coyote, the rat, and even the bitty housefly for as long as anyone remembers. So there must be more to this extinguishing business than meets the eye. The coyote and more'n one breed of deer have been holding up swell under the same hunting pressure. So it might be something else we've been doing. Both red and white old-timers have told me the buffalo used to migrate like geese, north or south from the Canadian Peace River to the Rio Grande, as the grazing got better or worse. But now there's a north herd and a south herd, both dwindling, staying north or south of the Union Pacific's main line east and west. Must make it tough for a buffalo momma to raise her calf when it gets too cold, or too dry, on what still looks like a sea of grass to us."
Then he casually handed her the pack pony's lead and told her, "I'd like you to ride ahead for a spell. The trail ahead is plain as day. So you can't lead us too far astray."
She took the lead from him, but naturally asked how come. He told her, "May not be nothing, but I'd best bring up the rear with this old Yellowboy for now. Can't tell whether it's a kid from that tipi ring, an innocent traveler on the same trail, or something worse. But he, she, or it is raising just enough dust to make out from here, and every time we change pace, that dust does the same."
Godiva gasped, "Good Lord, you think we're being followed?"
To which Longarm could only reply, "That's about the size of it."
CHAPTER 7
The old sod house seemed to be melting like chocolate under the afternoon sun as it stood knee-deep in tawny grass atop a rise to the west of the trail. Before Godiva could ask, Longarm swung the bay he was now riding around her and softly called out, "Stay here whilst I scout it. If I'm riding into anything, drop that lead andride back to those Texas trail herders fast."
Then he moved on up the grassy slope to within easy pistol range of the apparently deserted soddy, covering its gaping doorway and unglazed window spaces with his Yellowboy. He reined in and dismounted near a rusted-out but handy seed-spreader moldering in the weeds and grass of many a summer. He tethered the bay mare to the rusty draw-bar and moved in zigzag on foot to dive through a window space instead of the doorway, roll upright on the grass growing in the roofless interior, and allow at a glance he had the one-room ten-by-twenty-foot interior to himself.
He went back outside the easier way and waved Godiva and the other two ponies in as he strode down to retrieve that bay. By the time he had, the newspaper gal had joined him. So he said, "There's nobody here but us chickens yet. We'd better hole up inside them bullet-proof walls until we see just who might be following us."
That made sense to her. As they got all three ponies inside the hollow shell, Godiva asked if he had any idea what it was doing there.