Red Fox didn’t move.
Shores threw the blanket on the claybank. He was conscious of the Indian’s eyes boring into his back as he saddled up, tied on his saddlebags, and stepped into the stirrups. “Give my regards to White Dove.” He applied his spurs, traveling west.
Presently hooves drummed, and the paint came up alongside. “Brother John go wrong way.”
Sighing, Shores reined up. “Pay attention. I’m not in the habit of repeating myself. You cannot come with me. Return to the reservation where you belong. I’ll deal with the Hoodoos in my own time and my own way.”
“Hoodoos that way.” Red Fox pointed southwest.
“And how would you know that?” Shores was trying hard not to lose his temper. He never had liked Indians all that much. Comanches had tortured and killed his grandparents when he was seven, and he would take the horrid images of their butchered bodies to his grave.
Red Fox spoke each word slowly, trying to be as precise as he could. “Gizhaa daiboo-a steal many horses from Mat-ta-vish. Take horses wooden lodge of White-Who-Likes-Lakotas. Then gizhaa daiboo-a go that way.” Again Red Fox pointed southwest.
The full import of what the old Indian was saying hit Shores with the jolt of a sledgehammer. “Wait a minute. Are you saying you can track the Hoodoos from the point where they left the ranch?”
Red Fox grunted. “Come get Brother John first. Make Great Father happy.”
Gazing heavenward, Shores silently mouthed “Thank you.” To the Shoshone he said, “I’m willing to let you join me on two conditions. One, you must do as I say at all times. Two, you will not take revenge on any of the Hoodoos without my permission. Do we have a deal?”
“Brother John not want Red Fox kill gizhaa daiboo-a?”
“Not unless I expressly say you can,” Shores stressed. “What do those Shoshone words mean? You’ve used them several times now.”
“Gizhaa daiboo-a mean not-good-white men.” Red Fox lapsed into deep thought for all of a minute. “We have deal, Brother John. But Red Fox say this. If gizhaa daiboo-a try kill us, Red Fox kill gizhaa daiboo-a.”
“Sounds fair to me,” Shores said. Especially since he would scrupulously avoid placing the old Shoshone in a life-or-death situation. “Let’s shake on it.” He thrust out his hand.
Red Fox stared at the proffered hand, then at Shores. “Brother John speak with straight tongue?”
“I am not Brother—” Shores began but stopped. What was the use? he asked himself. The old Indian would go on calling him that stupid name no matter what he said. “I always speak with a straight tongue.”
“Then no need shake.” Red Fox jabbed his heels against the pinto, and their trackdown commenced.
William Shores had never spent more than five minutes in the company of an Indian his whole life, and for a while he felt distinctly uncomfortable. It helped that the Shoshone was a tame treaty Indian, but even so, he couldn’t stop thinking about his grandparents and the legion of other incidents he had read or heard about.
The other’s silence eventually got to him. “Were you and your brother close?” Shores asked to break the monotony.
“We brothers,” Red Fox responded, his tone implying it was all the answer needed.
Shores didn’t give up. “How did Mat-ta-vish get so good with horses?” The general consensus was that Red Fox’s sibling raised some of the best horseflesh anywhere. Quarrel rated the paints so high, he had mentioned to Shores that he would gladly keep them for himself if it weren’t for his pact with the Sioux.
“Horses children,” Red Fox said.
“Sorry?”
“Mat-ta-vish raise children, raise horses, all same. Mat-ta-vish love children, Mat-ta-vish love horses. Mat-ta-vish love all but daiboo-a.”
“All but white men.” Until that moment, Shores had felt sorry for Mat-ta-vish. “And here I am, risking life and limb to bring your brother’s murderers to bay. Life is one irony after another.”
Red Fox looked at him. “Why you do this, Brother John? You not know Mat-ta-vish.”
“It’s my job. It’s what the Great Father pays me to do.” But there was a lot more to it, Shores ruefully reflected.
The Department of Justice was the newest kid on the government block. And as with most new kids, it had to prove itself before the other kids would accept it. So Attorney General Akerman had devised a strategy to prove the department was worthy of respect. His plan involved sending agents across the country to locales infested by various criminal elements. Elements, be it noted, which had garnered a lot of attention in the press. In Missouri it was a gang of bank robbers. In Georgia it was a small band of Southerners who refused to accept the South’s defeat. In New Jersey it was a corporate ring swindling millions of dollars with sham raffles. In Wyoming and adjacent territories, it was the Hoodoos.
A lot was riding on Shores’s shoulders. As the attorney general had put it at their last meeting, “I couldn’t care less about a bunch of stolen horses. But there’s more at stake here than stopping the thieves. We’re building up the department’s reputation. We’re showing we’ve got what it takes, as common parlance would have it. By the end of the year, there won’t be a person in the country who hasn’t heard of us. And when they think of us, William, I want them to think of us with pride.”
There were moments when Shores had the impression he had been set adrift in a rowboat without oars and expected to make his way upstream against the rapids. But he was nothing if not tenacious, and he wouldn’t give up until the Hoodoos were in custody or dead.
For hours Shores and his newfound ally pressed steadily on. The sun was directly overhead when Shores mentioned they should stop to rest the horses.
“Paint fine,” Red Fox said.
And it was, Shores had to admit. But the claybank was a stable rental, and he must not wear it down if he could help it. Then there was the little fact that Shores had gone without breakfast, and his stomach wouldn’t stop growling. “We’ll rest awhile anyway.” He went to draw rein.
“Not here, Brother John. There.”
Shores looked where the Shoshone pointed but saw nothing to recommend the spot. It was just another grassy tract in an unending sea of grassland. But he humored the old man and in a few moments drew rein at a buffalo wallow.
“Less chance Lakotas, Blackfeet, whites see us.” Red Fox rode into the wallow and dismounted by sliding off the right side of his paint.
Shores climbed down and walked the claybank to relieve some of the soreness in his leg muscles from all the time he had spent in the saddle recently. He frankly couldn’t wait to wrap this assignment up and return to Washington, D.C. He missed being shuttled everywhere in a carriage, missed the private club he went to each evening for a cigar and a glass or two of brandy.
Red Fox squatted. “Brother John like Red Fox?”
The query was unforeseen. To stall, Shores loosened the claybank’s cinch. As a Pinkerton, he had learned the best way to fend off unwanted questions was to answer a question with another, so he responded, “Why ask me a thing like that?”
“Many whites not like Indians. Say only good Indians, dead Indians. Brother John think same?”
“If I did, would we be having this ridiculous conversation?” Shores hedged. “My people have another saying. Judge a man by his actions, not by his words.” He moved to the rim so he could keep watch, although he didn’t really need to; the wallow was only about a foot and a half deep. But hopefully it would keep the old man from being a nuisance.