When he got his hired stock saddle from the tack room and cinched it up, he could see the critter stood close to sixteen hands high and had the barrel chest of a serious traveler. They told him the brute was called Gray Skies. Longarm didn't know why until he'd mounted up, fortunately inside the paddock, and suddenly found out what all those soldiers blue had been grinning about.
But he stayed on, cheating some by hanging on to the horn and locking his denim-clad calves against the gelding's big shoulders in a way few could have managed in cavalry stirrups with more natural legs. So after he'd settled down to sullen crow-hops, Longarm tore off his Stetson to whip Gray Skies across the eyes with it, yelling, "Powder River and let her buck! You call this big fat puppy dog a horse?"
So, seeing the joke was on him, Gray Skies decided to be a sport about it, and they rode off across Flipper's Ditch as pals, or at a more sedate trot leastways.
They'd told him the Indian village he was looking for was better than a half hour ride. So he didn't slow down to take in the shantytown between. There seemed to be fewer Indians and more colored folks than you usually saw around Western military posts. The Tenth Cavalry was likely expected back once the current Apache scare wound down. It was none of his beeswax how any army men spent their free time. It hadn't even been his own notion to help that army wife enjoy herself the night before, blast her devious ways and wasn't it a shame they'd had to quit so early.
He hadn't ridden far across the prairie out the far side of the ragged-ass settlement before he heard a whip crack behind him and turned in the saddle to spy that B.I.A. ambulance, or light-sprung cross between a surrey and a covered wagon, following him down the ruts at a good clip.
Not wanting to be taken as a kid who raced with wagons, Longarm reined off the trail and sat his big gray on a slight rise to watch them tear on for Fort Smith. As they got closer he saw they had the canvas cover rolled halfway up on its hoops to let him see the passengers seated between the load in back and the jehu and shotgun messenger up front. They were going like hell and bouncing pretty good behind the full six-mule team. Neither Godiva Weaver nor the pouty kid up front with that Greener Ten-Gauge seemed to notice him as they passed. But the buckskin-clad Fred Ryan waved. So Longarm waved back.
He rode on through the settling dust of their passage, trying to compare the gyrating pussies of two different gals in his mind, even as he wondered why that seemed so tough. He'd long since noticed how easy it was to recall the ones who'd got away, or the very few who'd been really bad in bed. But it seemed to be the great lays a man got mixed up in his fool head. Sometimes he wondered if that might not be the reason some few gals just lay there like a side of beef. They just wanted to be remembered.
The grass all around had grown higher than one saw around Denver by the time it dried out and went dormant but still nourishing in the midsummer sun. For they were just east of the old Chisholm Trail and hence on what the grass professors called the mid-grass prairies. They meant the almost-perfect zone for growing winter wheat or beef, with neither too little nor too much rain. He could only imagine how the buffalo might have roamed before they'd been shot off this far east. He could see how the Indians had felt when they'd all wound up on the shorter grass of the Texas Panhandle and the hide shooters had still kept at it.
The Indians suspected, and Longarm knew, some of what passed for a heap of yahoo butchery had been deliberate government policy. Or at least the policy of General Phil Sheridan's pals in Congress. The old war hero and Indian fighter had only been half joshing when he'd told Congress they ought to issue a medal showing a buffalo hunter on one side and a surrendering Indian on the other.
Longarm couldn't help feeling sorry for both the buffalo and the Indians. But having done his share of scouting, he had to admit life on the High Plains could be more healthy when you didn't see as many of either coming over the skyline at you.
He topped a gentle rise to spy a dozen head of those longhorns he'd accompanied north from the Red River. A couple of Indian kids dressed like feathery cowhands were drifting them down the grassy draw as if to move them further from the traveled trace and yet another sudden surprise. Cows on unfamiliar range could spook and go tearing off a day's ride when somebody snapped his fingers at them the wrong way.
Longarm waved casually to the distant Comanche, and they waved back in as relaxed a manner. But it was too early to tell whether the B.I.A. and Quanah Parker were going to turn the most dangerous horsemen on the High Plains into peaceable stockmen or farmers.
In the meantime, the way they'd been acting seemed a welcome change from the way Comanche could act if they put their minds to it. They said that in his wilder days Quanah had adopted a colored deserter, a bugler from the Tenth Cav, who'd taught the Comanche Warrior Lodge what all the bugle calls meant the soldiers were fixing to do next. On occasion the runaway bugle boy had confounded the hell out of army columns by tooting contrary orders at them.
Longarm spied a white church steeple ahead. He let Gray Skies trot faster, assuming the big gray had been out this way before and knew there was shade and water in the offing. Horses were neither smarter nor dumber than cows. They saw their world different. The way Comanche, or at least Quanah Parker, seemed to grasp the good and bad points of the Saltu path.
As he rode on toward the cluster of frame structures, whitewashed in the middle but with unpainted siding further out, Longarm reflected on other nations who spoke related dialects and tended to think of themselves as simply Ho, or Real People. As he did so he decided Quanah deserved some credit for speeding things along, but there was something about the bandy-legged and big-headed breed that made them quicker to catch on to new inventions than some others, red or white.
Those professors who studied ancient Indians all agreed the Uto-Aztec-speaking variety had originated as ragged-ass digger tribes in the Great Basin between the Rockies and the High Sierras. A mess of Desert Paiute still lived that way, if one wanted to call a steady diet of pine nuts and jackrabbit living.
Yet close kinsmen wandering south into the Pueblo country had seen the advantages of apartment houses and farming at a glance, and turned themselves overnight into Pueblos just as advanced as, say, the Zuni or Tanoan. They called themselves Hopi, and were easy to get along with as long as you didn't start anything.
Other poor raggedy bastards speaking the same lingo had gone on down to Mexico to turn into the highly civilized but mighty cruel Aztec as soon as they'd gotten the Toltec to show them how you really built a pueblo.
Some held there was a mean streak in all the related Ho nations. But Longarm wasn't so sure. He'd found Hopi decent enough and Papago downright gentle, for folks who'd licked the Chificahua more than once. So it was up for grabs whether the recent terrors of the Texas plains were going to take one fork in the trail or another.
It was those morose Kiowa he was most concerned about at the moment. So he heeled Gray Skies into a lope and tore into the Comanche agency to the delight of a heap of kids and dogs. The shaggy yellow dogs had long since learned not to actually bite as they snarled and snapped around a big gray's hooves. Gray Skies knew they were only funning as well. Longarm had never decided whether Indian kids missed by accident or on purpose as they tried to assassinate a visiting white man with bird arrows and horse apples. But he knew they seldom hit you. So he just kept riding for the flagpole in the center of things, and sure enough, a sign informed him the two-story frame house across from the church and school house was where he wanted to get started.