“So you don’t care that the Hoodoos go around stealing and killing as they see fit?” Shores couldn’t hide his resentment.
“Not when they’re stealin’ from and killin’ Injuns, no.” Quarrel set his pipe down. “Brock Alvord is nobody’s fool. He’s been rustlin’ for years and never been caught because he steals from the red man and sells to the white. He knows that if he stole stock from me or any other rancher, we’d hunt him to the ends of the earth and treat him to a hemp social. But no one out here gives a damn what he does to redskins.”
“Indians should have the same rights whites do,” Shores declared.
The room rocked with hoots and jeers. “Pilgrim, you’re tryin’ to sell your tonic to the wrong crowd!” a cowboy hollered. “We’d all as soon every last Injun was pushin’ up tumbleweeds as breathin’.” He glanced at his employer. “Except the Sioux, of course.”
Folding the paper, Shores shoved it into his pocket. “I can see I won’t get anywhere by appealing to your sense of civic duty.”
“Our what?” The toothless puncher pulled his shirt out from his chest and peered down under it. “I’m not sure I have one of those.”
Laughter shook the rafters.
William Shores faced O. T. Quarrel. “Very well. Let’s get to it. In Cheyenne I ran into a cowhand who told me an interesting story. He claimed the Hoodoos paid you a visit a while back and sold you a fine herd of pintos for your remuda. Fifteen in all, rustled from Mat-ta-vish after they murdered him.” Shores nodded at a window. “The same fifteen pintos right out there in your corral.”
“That’s not true,” Quarrel said.
“You’re a liar.”
Chairs went flying as seven or eight cowhands leaped to their feet. But the cowboys froze when the federal agent’s Smith & Wesson blossomed in his hand, trained on the man they rode for.
Quarrel, as calm as could be, motioned at his would-be defenders. “Simmer down, boys. This gent doesn’t have enough sense to bell a cat, but he’s my guest, and we’ll treat him accordingly.” He smiled at Shores. “Put your nickel-plated hardware away, mister. All I’d have to do is snap my fingers, and you’d be perforated with more holes than a sieve.”
It was no idle threat. Shores replaced the Smith & Wesson but kept his hand inches from it on the table. “How can you sit there and tell me you didn’t accept stolen stock when I saw the pintos on my way in?”
“All I meant was that I didn’t buy them for my remuda. I bought them for the Sioux.”
Shores remembered the sign and the comments by Quarrel and the puncher. “You’ve lost me.”
Quarrel picked up his corncob pipe and puffed a few times. “I was one of the first, Mr. Shores. There was nothin’ here before me except prairie dogs. And the Oglala Sioux. This was their territory, and they drove off every white who tried to plant roots. But I wanted this land, wanted it from the moment I set eyes on it. So I hired an army scout to arrange a parley with the Oglala.”
“That took nerve,” Shores had to admit.
“When a man wants somethin’ bad enough, he’ll do anything to get it. I offered the Sioux their weight in trade blankets and trinkets. I offered them knives, rifles, ammunition. I offered all the money I had and more each year for the rest of my life. But they weren’t interested. All they wanted were horses.”
“Pintos?” Shores deduced.
“Injuns are mighty fond of bright colors. They love blue beads and red blankets and paint horses. So they agreed to let me stay for fifteen paint horses.” Quarrel chuckled at the recollection. “I don’t mind admittin’ I about pulled out my hair findin’ that many. I sent riders as far south as Texas, as far north as Canada. But I found the fifteen.”
“That was decades ago.”
The rancher nodded. “Fifteen paints that first year and fifteen more every five winters for as long as I live on their land. In another month, or moon as the Sioux call them, another fifteen are due.”
Shores digested this. “But you don’t need to give them the horses. The Oglalas drifted north years ago. They’re up on the reservation in the Black Hills. As far as the United States government is concerned, this land is yours, free and clear.”
“I gave my word, Mr. Shores. It doesn’t matter where the Oglalas are. I’m still here. I’m obligated to live up to my promise.”
Shores glanced out the window and did not say anything else for a while. “Why hire the Hoodoos? Why not send punchers out to find the paints you needed?”
The lines in Quarrel’s face deepened. “I never hired Alvord’s bunch. He’s been around awhile, Burt has. He knows how I got my start. He heard I’d need more paints soon. So he took it on himself to rustle some and showed up here to offer them to me for top dollar.”
“You knew they were stolen, yet you bought them anyway? By rights I could arrest you as an accessory.”
“You could try,” a puncher declared.
Shores ignored him. “All I’m interested in are the Hoodoos. Tell me where to find them, and I’ll forget the rest.”
Quarrel’s pipe was going out, and he tapped it a few times. “You give me too much credit, government man. I’ve known Brock since the early days, true, but we’ve never been friendly. He’s always been a hellion. Me, I like the straight and narrow. He’s not about to confide his secrets.”
“You can’t tell me where the Hoodoos lie low? Or whether any of them have a wife or a family stashed away somewhere?
“Sorry.”
Shores reached into his slicker and produced a different sheet of paper. “Do me a favor. Mat-ta-vish drew these in the dirt right before he died. His daughter thought they might be important, so she copied the drawings onto the back of an old buffalo hide.” He slid the paper across. “I sketched them as best I could.”
O. T. Quarrel gave them due consideration. “I’m not much on Injun symbols. If the Shoshones don’t know what they mean, it’s a cinch I wouldn’t.”
“Damn.” William Shores sat back, defeated. “I came all this way for nothing.”
Colorado-Nebraska border
Eli’s was part tavern, part general store, and all sod from roof to floor. The proprietor, Eli Brandenberg, had been on his way to the Rocky Mountains to prospect for gold when one of his mules came up lame. Insult was added to misfortune when the wagon train he was with had decided to go on without him. The wagon master had found tracks of unshod ponies and concluded a hostile war party was in the area. The rest of the emigrants took a vote and decided they were unwilling to slow their pace to a crawl and heighten the risk of losing their scalps for Eli’s sake.
After four days of being on his own, after being drenched by the most violent thunderstorm Eli had ever experienced and losing the canvas on his Conestoga to hail the size of walnuts, after running into a friendly band of Pawnees who offered to trade half an antelope for half a bottle of whiskey, and after a second mule broke a leg in a prairie dog hole, Eli decided enough was enough. He built his soddy, piled his belongings inside, and hung a sign over the door.
That had been a decade ago.
Eli prospered. He made annual treks to Denver for supplies, then charged five times what he paid when he resold the items to frontiersmen and Indians. He charged emigrants ten times as much.
Most days Eli had to himself. His old coon dog would doze by the counter while Eli indulged in his favorite hobby: picking lice off himself and crushing them between his fingertips. He loved how they squished.