Longarm said he was in a hurry to compare notes too. So as the Indian trotted his mount beside the walk, Longarm hurried back to the stable and saddled the bay he'd hired in Spanish Flats, and they loped out together for that Comanche sub-agency just over the horizon.
Along the way, Longarm brought the Indian police sergeant up to date on his early chores with a telegraph key. Tikano agreed the rail stop at Atoka, on the Choctaw reserve, made heaps of sense for the mystery riders, if they were really running for it. He said they'd have ridden smack into Quanah and two dozen real Indians if they'd taken the Cache Creek Trail for the depot at Spanish Flats. Longarm asked how Quanah had found out enough to worry him at all, and Tikano explained, "He's been buying more beef down in Texas all this time. He likes to act more like his Saltu relations when dealing with the Saltu. That is why nobody else knew where he was all this time. He met your friends from the Running X as they were riding home to Texas. The trail boss called Carver told him about those police who were not police and others who might or might not have been Black Leggings. So now Quanah and Agent Conway are drinking much black coffee, trying to figure out what to say when they ask Agent Ryan's clerk to wire the main agency at Anadarko."
Longarm allowed he had to study on that too. As they topped a rise and saw that church steeple ahead, Longarm casually asked the Comanche if he'd ever heard any gossip about young Hino-Usdi.
Tikano replied simply, "We call him Ta Soon Da Hipey. Every now and then a boy is born who grows up that way. It is wrong to use such a young man as a woman. But it is wrong to hurt him or even mock him as one might mock a real man who missed a shot or fell off his pony. Nobody asks for such boys to happen. Eyototo, the chief of the spirits, must have some reasons for making some people awkward, crippled, crazy, or just different. They are the ones to be pitied. Sometimes, if you give the pitied ones a chance, they turn out all right. One of the greatest war chiefs of the Arapaho did everything with his left hand. But the blue sleeves couldn't kill him at Sand Creek, even though they hit him with many bullets, many. The Cheyenne had a chief called Left Hand too."
Longarm said, "I noticed that the time Dull Knife lit out from Fort Reno just north of here. My point about that Cherokee kid, and the agent he works for, was that few if any Indians would think to blackmail such gents, whilst Spanish-speaking Christians might."
Tikano asked what Mexican outlaws might blackmail Fred Ryan or his clerk into doing for them.
Longarm answered, "Don't know. Maybe nothing. Maybe heaps. I'd best compare notes with Quanah before I send any more wires."
So he did. When they rode in they found Agent Conway and the taller Quanah Parker, dressed like a Texas trail herder with long braids, out on the front porch as if they'd been watching from a window.
Once Longarm had dismounted and shook hands all around, already knowing the stern-faced but agreeable chief to talk to, Longarm wasted no time in bringing everyone up to date, including the little he'd just found out by wire.
Quanah nodded soberly and said, "Our friend Harry Carver told me much of what you just said. When my young men and I got to where you Saltu met those police who were not police, we found nobody there to demand money from me in my name. But we scouted for sign and found where they had planted tipi poles crazy. Some with four main poles, as our women plant, but others based on a three-pole tripod, the way Arapaho put up a lodge. They had no idea at all how a tipi should be facing."
Longarm nodded and replied, "I just said I thought they might be Mex bandits with a mighty unusual approach."
Quanah said, "I had not finished. When we came to where Harry said you and that girl shot it out with Black Leggings, we scouted around those sod walls carefully. The rain that had just fallen gave away a lot of sign they may have thought they'd covered. The reason you and those cowboys never found those dead Indians is that they were buried in a draw a good ride to the west. We might not have found this out if the rainwater hadn't found the softer earth under the replaced sod easier to wash down the draw."
Longarm resisted the impulse to declare he'd never thought those rascals had been treated to any Horse Indian sky burial. It was tough to remember that despite a lot of white manners, Quanah Parker still followed Indian manners when it came to conversation. Indians broke in while others were speaking about as often as white folks belched or farted at such times.
Quanah said, "People do not rot as fast buried in 'dobe. So we knew they were not anyone we knew. They were wearing black leggings, but their war paint was silly. We who paint ourselves don't just daub it on like Saltu children going to a Halloween party. Paint is worn for puha, or to warn your enemies what kind of a fighter they face."
The erstwhile war leader wiped two fingers down a hollow bronzed cheek and sneered, "One had yellow lightning bolts running down green cheeks like tears. That is the paint of a great warrior lodge, but neither Kiowa nor Comanche. Only the Arapaho Black Hearts, not Kiowa Black Leggings, paint their faces that way."
The experienced war paint enthusiast put his fingers to his hairline as he grinned in a surprisingly boyish manner and said, "Another had a red half-moon down his forehead from his hair, with both cheeks solid red. That looked Kiowa. A Kiowa woman paints her face that way when her man rides off to war and she wants him to come back alive."
After they'd all chuckled at the picture, Longarm said, "They must have copied designs from some picture book. We've about agreed no Horse Indian ever called water agua."
Agent Conway cocked a brow and asked, "You sure you don't mean mauga, pard?"
Longarm thought back before he decided, "Might have been mauga as easily as agua. Why do you ask?"
Conway sounded sure as he replied, "Mauga means dead in Pawnee. I rode with Pawnee Bill and his Pawnee Scouts one summer, during the Sioux wars. Every time they nailed a Sioux, or vice versa, them Pawnee said the one on the ground was mauga."
Longarm and the two Comanche speakers exchanged glances. Quanah suggested, "They say the Wichita and Caddo are related to Pawnee, but would even a Caddo be dumb enough to paint himself like a Kiowa girl?"
Longarm smiled thinly and said, "I know a Cherokee who might. Were any of them mysterious cadavers tattood Wichita-style, Chief?"
Quanah Parker said, "I don't think so. You have to understand the bodies were muddy and starting to turn funny colors under all the mud and war paint. I don't think the younger Wichita have tattood their bodies as much since they rode northeast to join the Pawnee. People laugh at you when you act different on purpose."
Agent Conway suggested they all go inside and have a sit-down over coffee and cake. But Quanah said he had to get back to those cows his boys were herding up the Cache Creek Trail.
Longarm said, "Hold on, Chief. I got places to go as well. So why don't you tell me why you sent for me by name in the first place?"
Quanah grinned like a mean little kid and said, "I think you have already done what I was going to ask you how to do. We were having the same trouble as they've had up around Fort Reno, with some few Arapaho willing to be Indian Police while the Cheyenne call them woman-hearts or worse. I haven't been asking my father's people to put up with this civilization shit because I've forgotten the old ways. They have to learn new ways because the old ways keep getting them killed. I tell them they can all be blown away by field artillery, live as animals in a zoo while they tell themselves they are still proud warriors, or learn how it is that even your twelve-year-old boys can leave home and support themselves with no B.I.A. to feed and clothe them."