Lots of Indians seemed anxious to join the Indian Police. Almost all their nations had traditional notions of warriors appointed to keep their own versions of law and order. And a chance to wear a quasi-military uniform and pack a gun had the more usual occupations, such as beating on drums and lining up for government handouts, beat by a country mile. So Longarm was surprised when the Jicarilla police sergeant strode over to stick out his hand like a white man expecting to shake like an equal, announcing in fair English, “I am Joseph Doli. I am a Christian. I am Nada of Those Who Make Everyone Behave at this agency. I welcome you if you come here in peace. If you are running away from your own kind, I think it would be better for us all if you got back on that train before it leaves.”
Longarm said, “I ain’t running away from anybody. But I ain’t sure I want somebody to know I’m coming. Before we get into who I am and where I’m headed, might you know a hatali of your own kind known as Cho’chibas?”
The Indian nodded soberly and said, “Everyone has heard of that powerful medicine man, as you people say, hatali. What is Cho’chibas to you, White Eyes?”
Longarm modestly replied, “He calls me his Tsoi Belagana.”
The somewhat older Indian blinked and let fly a whole string of rapid-fire Na-dene. So Longarm waved him down with his free hand and sheepishly admitted, “I don’t speak your tongue and only savvy a few words at baby-talk speed. Cho’chibas told me Tsoi Belagana meant something like ‘American Grandchild,’ right?”
Doli nodded. “Belagana is the more polite term we use for you people. It comes from the sound of American, not the funny eyes so many of you seem to have. What did you do to make a real person like Cho’chibas call you his grandchild?”
Longarm shrugged. “It wasn’t all that much. I just ran off some other white eyes who were searching for yellow iron in one of your holy places. They had no right to be there. They were trespassing on reservation land your folks and mine had agreed on. So it only took a little pistol-whipping and-“
“You are the one called Betagana Hastin!” the Jicarilla said without hesitation. “The Nakaih call you Brazo Largo. Your own people call you Longarm. Have you come to do something about the trouble we are having here this summer? Our white-eyed agent is getting ready to have supper with some others sent all the way from Washington, if you want to scold them for us.”
Longarm shook his head morosely and replied, “I’d like to. But I don’t have that much medicine and if the truth be known, I’d as soon not have too many others, your kind or mine, knowing more than they need to about my passing this way.”
The Indian said, “I understand. I am a lawman too. I think you should come home with me for supper and we can talk about it where others need not worry about what we are saying.”
Longarm said that sounded like a swell notion, and let the Indian steer him around the back of their guardhouse to what looked like a regulation BIA frame cabin, even though Sergeant Doli called it his hogan. The more famous Navaho hogan was a kind of home, which was what the word meant in Na-dene. Along the way, Doli told Longarm, not unkindly, that Jicarilla pronounced Na-dene somewhat closer to N’de. Only sometimes they said Tinneh, because nobody ever said their lingo was simple.
All the Indians Longarm had ever had supper with seemed to admire a haze of smoke instead of flies around them as they ate. Doli’s moon-faced asdza—you never called her breed a squaw—had been expecting her shasti home for supper and whipped up a heap of alta nabi, the Jicarilla version of Irish stew, with blue corn substituting for the spuds, and juniper ashes instead of salt.
If they had any kids, she’d sent them out back so the two grown men could eat in peace. She served them generous bowls of her stew, and shyly asked Longarm if he wanted honey in his own coffee, but didn’t sit down to table with them as her man waited for Longarm to dig in. So he did, and he was glad he’d been polite and accepted the strong but overly sweet coffee when he decided her juniper ash seasoning had to be an acquired taste.
Doli must have been more used to it, because he washed some down with his own ash-flavored coffee and asked Longarm if juniper grew along the rimrocks of that Tularosa Canyon to the south.
Longarm said truthfully he doubted there could be as much of anything green around Tularosa, but quickly added, “They do say the reserve at San Carlos is hotter and drier by far. It was moving old Victorio over to San Carlos that seems to have inspired his latest reservation jump. He kept bellyaching that he wanted to go back to the Tularosa Agency before he just went wild some more. So Tularosa has to be nicer than San Carlos, right?”
The Indian chewed sullenly, swallowed, and said, “An ant pile on a salt flat, covered with ashes, would be nicer than San Carlos! People who have run away from San Carlos have told us about the fine place our BIA chose for our Chiricahua cousins near Fort Apache. The land is too barren for the black goats of the Nakaih to graze. In the dry moons there is barely water to drink and the children must go to bed with dust in their hair. The agent there told the people to plant crops, like Pueblo. But only greasewood and cactus grows well where it rains so seldom, and the hunting around San Carlos is poor, very poor. The people were asked to just bake there, under a crueler sun than they had known before, with nothing to do but get drunk and hit one another while they waited for another allotment. Can you blame a real man like the hacki you call Victorio for running away?”
Longarm didn’t want to get into the distinctions between leaving a place you might not cotton to and raiding total strangers who’d had no idea you were coming. He said, “Be that as it may, nobody here at the Dulce Agency has been asked to go to San Carlos, and even if they had, I don’t have any more say in the matter than you all. Counting on a fellow federal lawman’s discretion, Sergeant, I’ve got orders to investigate other matters over by La Mesa de los Viejos on the far side of the Divide. Can you lend me some riding stock and have you or your local folks heard anything about what’s been going on over on the far side of the mountains?”
The Indian said, “Choose any ponies in our police corral and they are your own from this day forward. I have heard nothing, nothing, about trouble around that distant mesa. It used to lie on Jicarilla range, or on range we disputed with others, at any rate. But now we hold nothing, nothing-much farther east than Stinking Lake. Once the medicine waters of the lake drain eastward toward the Rio Chama they are lost to us forever. Do you think it is right for Nakaih farmers to grow all that corn and squash with water they get from us without paying for it? Hear me, those Nakaih are not real farmers like the Zuni we used to have so much fun with. Like your own kind, the Nakaih came in from far away with their guns and iron tools to claim the best places for themselves. Why don’t you white eyes make them go back to Mexico, where they belong? Didn’t you have a good fight with them, and didn’t you win?”
Longarm smiled wearily and replied, “You’d be surprised how many white eyes might agree with you. But the peace treaty we signed at the end of the Mexican War gave Mexicans already settled in country taken from Mexico the right to hang on to their property and just go on acting natural, whether some of their new Anglo neighbors liked it or not.”
The Indian scowled. “I have been told this before. But I still don’t understand why Washington keeps that one old treaty with the Nakaih when it has broken so many, many with my kind!”
Longarm was far more interested in that riding stock. But supper was still being served, in the form of a sweeter corn mush the lady of the house called ta’nil’kan, so he sighed and said, “Mexico, for all her faults, ain’t never gone back on that treaty of ‘48. If she was to, say, grab Texas back or send her marines to raid the California gold fields, all bets would be off and we’d feel free to be mean as hell to the Mexicans or, as you call them, Nakaih.”