He hadn’t asked. So he wondered why she’d felt the call to tell a male supper guest.
He didn’t ask how come she’d cooked enough for two as she dished out generous helpings. She wasn’t chubby by white standards. She was downright skinny by those of her own nation. Like most Horse Indians, Osage men prided themselves on providing all the solid grub a wife or more could possibly eat. So a weya over twenty-five or so was often a well-fed butterball.
It would have been rude to ask the lady how old she was, or what she did to stay in such fine shape. So he never did. But as they ate and jawed across the table from one another, he found himself learning a tad more about Olive Red-Dog.
She said she’d taken her Indian name back after some Wasichu kin of a late husband had laughed at the notion of any Widow Swenson being so brunette. The Red-Dog family of the Osage Nation were as respected across the Kansas prairie as any tow-headed immigrants, as she put it.
When Longarm soberly assured her he’d heard tell of the good fights the Osage had fought for the Union against Confederates, Wasichu or Cherokee, she seemed less defensive, and allowed her poor Gonar had been good to her and taught her a lot before he’d come down with a winter ague and died on her a good two years back. She said he’d had the idea to open a livery along the trail between McCook and Dodge. She said she’d been the one the township council approached to add on a municipal corral as well. They gave her a property tax break in return for her boarding stock that belonged to the town law, the aldermen, and all.
He didn’t care. As he let her pour him a second cup of coffee, made Wasichu style instead of with white flour added, he tried to switch the conversation to what Dad Jergens had said about trouble in nearby parts.
Olive didn’t know anything about Horst Heger or, naturally, Wolf Ritter. But she could have written a textbook on northwest Kansas. To begin with she’d been born on this same rolling prairie, though a good three hundred miles to the southeast, before the town of Coffeyville had been there and when the buffalo still roamed. So despite being on the softer side of forty, the good old gal had watched Kansas turn white, through good times and bad. She’d been a toddler barely old enough to understand what her elders were talking about when old John Brown had massacred those slaveocrats on the banks of the Pottawatamie. Her nation hadn’t thought much of the “Peculiar Institution” either.
White folks moving west had met with the friendly buffalo-hunting, tipi-dwelling Osage. So they’d never gotten as famous as their Sioux-Hokan-speaking Lakota or Santee cousins.
Like the Absaroka, Caddo, Ojibway-Crow, Pawnee, and such, the Osage had been sensible enough to change with the times and avoid such destructive habits as shooting up the Seventh Cav, though they’d shown themselves to be ferocious enough against Confederate or Cherokee columns during the war. So Olive, as she had been baptized as a Christian Osage maiden, had married up with the late Gonar Swenson and moved out this way with him while it was still pure cattle country, to watch it fill out a mite as homesteaders of various persuasions edged ever further into dried short-grass prairie.
She told Longarm a bit more about that argument about the weather old Dad Jergens was worried about. She thought it was dumb. Everyone knew it took six medicine men around one big drum, beating it as they chanted in unison, to make it rain.
Like most Horse Indians, as well as the stock raisers who still grazed the higher and drier country all around, Olive was content to let it rain or shine within reason. A rainy day could be a bother. On the other hand, it freshened the short grass and left prairie pools for the stock, saving them longer walks to their regular watering places. You got fatter meat off buffalo, or cows, who hadn’t worked too hard at growing up.
Longarm already knew why nesters who plowed and planted late in an uncertain greenup wanted more summer rain than you usually got out in short-grass country. He suspected it made more sense to drill in some of that winter wheat in autumn and roll with the punches. But nobody had asked him for agricultural advice, and Dad Jergens had started to tell him about bank robberies and kidnappings before he’d gotten so distracted.
Olive said Dad did that a lot, and added, “They didn’t exactly rob the Granger’s Trust over in the county seat. They crept in after-hours to crack the safe. The sheriff told the newspaper reporters the crooks had likely been professionals, who’d used nitrate fertilizer.”
Longarm gently murmured, “I think you mean nitroglycerine. It’s a lot like lamp oil, only it blows up like dynamite cause dynamite is only a mixture of nitroglycerine and clay. Safecrackers pour the sort of dangerous juice along the door cracks of a safe, take a deep breath, and smack the whole shebang with a sledgehammer.”
The Osage gal poured more coffee for them both as she said, “I see why they call it cracking a safe. How come anyone would want to mix such dangerous juice with clay, Custis?”
Longarm explained, “To make it less dangerous. Liquid nitro can go off in your hands if you stare at it too hard. So nobody had near as much use for it before that Swedish chemist, Nobel, got to fooling with it. He tried mixing it with gunpowder and came close to killing his fool self.”
Longarm sipped some of her strong black coffee as he considered a probably dumb notion, dropped it, and continued. “He finally settled on clay, wood flour, or whatever to make paper-wrapped sticks of diluted nitroglycerine that wouldn’t swish and blow up when you handled ‘em. By the way, what old country did you say your late husband hailed from?”
Olive stared back at him in confusion as she thought then told him, “Gonar was born in a place called Iceland before his elders brought him to York State as a baby. What’s that have to do with high explosives?”
Longarm said, “Probably nothing. What might Dad Jergens have meant when he mentioned kidnappings?”
Olive frowned thoughtfully—Longarm found thoughtful gals sort of pretty—and told him, “We don’t talk as much to those Mennonite nesters a fair ride to the south. But I have heard gossip about a wife either running off on her husband or worse. They seemed to be getting along and nobody had noticed her flirting with another man.”
He didn’t press the Cedar Bend gal for details most anyone in Sappa Crossing would know better. He put down his empty cup and said, “You sure brew fine coffee, Miss Olive. But now we’d best settle on what I owe you so’s I can be on my way. For it’s dark out now, and I still don’t know where I mean to spend the night my ownself.”
She glanced over at the one oil lamp in the kitchen, as if deciding whether to turn the wick brighter or dimmer, as she quietly asked him, “Why don’t you stay here? Are you too proud, Wasichu Wastey?”
He blinked in surprise and replied, “Your folks never hung such a friendly name on me for acting snooty. I reckon it would make sense for me to unroll my bedding up in your hayloft and get an early start in the morning, if that’s what you had in mind, ma’am.”
Olive Red-Dog stared pointedly at the curtained doorway leading to her sleeping quarters as she quietly said that hadn’t been exactly what she’d had in mind.
So Longarm got to his feet and as the far smaller Indian gal rose expectantly, he just swept her off her moccasined feet and headed out of the kitchen with her as she clung to him and murmured what sounded like “Oh hinh, iyopte!” which might have meant she was anxious to get going. He’d been wanting to since he’d first seen her ankles in the doorway a hundred hard-up years ago.
But even as he groped their way to her iron bedstead in the dim light of her small clean-smelling sleeping quarters, Longarm felt he owed it to the gal to say, “You do understand I’ll be moving on at sunrise, don’t you, pretty lady?”
She replied softly, “I’d never have invited you in here for the night if I thought you might be here long enough to need a haircut. I hate the way you men brag in barbershops, as if you had anything to say about this sort of thing!”