“Retribution, I think you might say,” Longarm told him. “An’ justice.” He glanced toward the west. Damned if the girl hadn’t been right after all. The sun was just now approaching the horizon. “Your police have what you might call exceeded their authority lately. Like committing murder.”
“Why would they do that?”
“I ain’t entirely for sure, Reverend,” Longarm admitted. “I was hoping you could tell me that. I-“
A pale and deadly ghost-shape dashed in front of Longarm, moving so quickly it seemed a blur.
A flash of white. A menacing growl. A leap high into the air.
Reverend MacNall threw a hand up in a vain attempt to block the fangs from his face.
The white dog—Angelica’s so-called spirit wolf—hit the agent full in the chest and sent him crashing backward, onto the floor and hard against the wall.
MacNall screamed as the dog bit and tore at his flesh.
Longarm could have shot the animal. Probably should have shot it. His .44 was already in his hand and the dog was less than a dozen paces distant, its back to him and all its attention concentrated on savaging the Indian agent.
Longarm could have shot it. Except his hand remained motionless even while he gave thought to the need to defend MacNall.
He stood there and watched as the dog slashed and snarled.
He continued to stand there, rooted and immobile, as the dog ripped Ames MacNall’s throat out and shook the dying man like a terrier shakes a rat.
And he continued to stand in awe as the dog backed away from the body of its victim, shook itself once, and then calmly trotted off the porch and out of sight around the back of the building.
“The sun is now touching the far hills, Longarm,” Cloud Talker said softly.
Longarm shook himself and looked around. Angelica was gone. So was the dog. The spirit wolf. Longarm felt a chill dance up his spine.
Over on the porch Charles Prandel stood trembling with fear, his forehead beaded with cold sweat.
“I think,” Longarm said, “we got to ask you some questions, Prandel. I think …”
“Longarm.”
“Yes, Tall Man?”
Tall Man and one of his warriors were standing in the entrance to the headquarters. Longarm hadn’t so much as noticed them go inside, but probably they had gone looking to see if there were any more Piegan police who needed killing. A chore which none of the Crow seemed to find all that distasteful, actually.
“The captain, Wingate, Longarm.”
“Yes?”
“He is in here. He has been bound with handcuffs and gagged, Longarm. You should come, I think.”
“Yeah, I reckon I should at that. Cloud Talker, you watch Prandel there. Don’t let him go anyplace, hear?”
Longarm holstered his Colt and stepped wide around the gore that marked the Reverend MacNall’s death.
Chapter 37
“Greed,” Wingate said. The officer was seated behind Ames MacNall’s desk, the Indian agent’s records spread out before him. The documents might as well have been written in Piegan for all Longarm understood them, but to Wingate they were clear as Austrian crystal. “MacNall and his friend Prandel there have been making a fortune off their assignment at this agency.” Wingate rubbed his wrists where the steel of the manacles had chafed and gouged him.
“You say you already suspected it?” Longarm asked.
The officer nodded. “That’s what brought me here this afternoon. I wanted to call MacNall to account for his excesses. Do you remember that I had a load of goods delivered to Camp Beloit recently?”
“Sure. You said you had to check it all in, I believe. What’d they do, short the amounts on you an’ hold stuff back for themselves to sell on the side?”
“Oh, much more lucrative than anything that simple. And in fact, the amounts delivered were exactly as invoiced.” Wingate gave Prandel a tight smile that held no mirth whatsoever. Prandel was seated nearby, wearing the handcuffs recently removed from Wingate’s wrists.
“I imagine they expected me to verify the amounts of goods, as of course I did. But what they did not anticipate was that I would also know what they paid for each of those items.
“Longarm, for the past eight years I have sat behind a desk supervising the granting of contracts for procurement and haulage at frontier posts from the north of Dakota Territory to the southern tip of Arizona Territory. I know the contract rates. 1 know what each hundredweight of flour costs, every bottle of vinegar or slab of bacon. I can tell you off the top of my head the freight charges of the twenty leading transportation contractors west of the Mississippi River. And I could see at a glance the profits MacNall and this man were raking in by falsely reporting their costs and pocketing the difference.
“I haven’t confirmed all of it in these books. Yet. But I can tell you that they have been stealing from the government at a rate that I expect will total in the tens of thousands each year.”
“Just that easy?” Longarm asked.
“Just that easy,” Wingate said. “It is quite simple, of course. They bought bacon, for instance, at three cents per pound, but charged against the agency accounts at the rate of five cents.”
“Fine, but two lousy cents-“
“Adds up to a great deal of money when you are thinking in terms of tons upon tons of supplies of various sorts. Beef, flour, blankets—why, they even drew funds at the rate of three quarters of a cent per cartridge for ammunition for all those rifles they said they bought at two dollars and a half apiece. And the quartermaster to my certain knowledge delivered the rifles and the ammunition without charge other than the transportation.”
“They figured to get rich,” Longarm said.
“Figured, hell, Longarm, they were getting rich.”
“Which explains why they grabbed you and were fixing to kill you this afternoon. But why John Jumps-the-Creek? I mean, the old boy was a friend of mine. He was a great shaman and a leader of his people. But he didn’t know or care a damn thing about logistics or the cost of things.”
“I think he did care about the welfare of his people, though,” Wingate said.
“That he did, I guarantee it. He was a genuinely good man, and would never have let anything bad happen to the Piegan nation. Not if he had any say in the matter.”
“Could he have kept the Piegan from going to war with the Crow?”
“Yes, I think John Jumps-the-Creek was strong enough to do that,” Longarm answered.
“You should probably ask your friend there”—Wingate pointed toward Charles Prandel—“but I think I know what MacNall had in mind. The same reason why he had his political cronies back in Washington have an ineffective field officer assigned to command Camp Beloit, actually.”
“I don’t understand,” Longarm admitted.
“MacNall and Prandel, along with whoever else they were paying off in this deal, wanted to reduce the population of the agency. They wanted me here because they were sure a desk officer like me would not be able to stop the hostilities MacNall himself intended to generate.”
“But …”
“It makes sense, Longarm, when you look at the cold figures on paper. It costs roughly seven dollars … six dollars and fifty-four cents if you want to draw a fine line … to feed and clothe one agency Indian, Crow or Piegan, for one month. MacNall, was drawing funds at the rate of approximately twelve dollars per Indian per month.”
“Giving him one helluva nice profit,” Longarm said.
“But not enough to satisfy his dark soul, I think. By killing off, say, two hundred people … and then not reporting those losses to the Department of the Interior … he could reap the full twelve dollars per head instead of a meager five, as he was already doing.”
“Jesus,” Longarm blurted out.
“I somehow doubt the reverend took Jesus into account when he was making his plans,” Wingate said dryly.
“Do you have enough evidence that we can convict Prandel of all this?”