“Sun Dance, ma’am?”
“That business of dancing around a big pole with rawhide thongs punched through living flesh. You can’t tell me that’s not a blood sacrifice!”
“Oh, bloody enough, I suppose. But we don’t let ‘em do that any more. Besides, you’re missing a point. Indians think it’s brave for a man to shed his own blood to Manitou. Other people’s blood doesn’t count as a proper gift.”
“Brrr! To think of God’s creatures living in such ignorance of the Word! Manitou is what they call their heathen god, eh?” Prudence asked.
“Well, Manitou means ‘god’, in Blackfoot, ma’am. I don’t know how heathen he might be. Seems to me the Lord would be the Lord no matter what you call Him.”
“Agent Durler tells me many of his charges speak English, so I’ll have little trouble setting them straight. You did say I could use the empty house next door as my mission, didn’t you, Mister Durler?”
Calvin shrugged and said, “If you won’t go back to town. You won’t be able to sleep there till we repaint the bedroom, though. Uh, you know what happened there, don’t you?”
“Pooh, I’m not afraid of ghosts. My Lord is with me, even into the valley of death, forever.”
Longarm wondered why she didn’t say “Amen,” but he knew better than to ask. He took out his watch and said, “Be more room here, if I took Spotted Beaver into Switchback tonight. I’ll get there before midnight if I leave soon.”
Durler asked, “Will the coroner be up at that hour?”
“Don’t know. If he ain’t, I’ll have to wake him, won’t I?”
“He isn’t going to like it much,” Durler cautioned.
“I don’t like not knowing what killed Spotted Beaver, either. The railroad station’s open all night and I’ll have a few questions for them, too. I’ll toss my saddle roll in the wagon and bed down somewhere along the way, once I’m finished in town.”
Nan Durler grimaced and said, “You don’t mean to sleep out on the open prairie, do you?”
“Why not, ma’am? It don’t look like rain.”
“It makes my flesh crawl just to think about it! It’s so creepy-crawly out there at night!”
“I spend half my nights sleeping out on the prairie,” he said. This wasn’t strictly true, but he thought it might disabuse her of any notions she might have about his carrying her off to his castle in the sky. Even if he was wrong, he did intend to spend at least one night in the open. This place was too full of women for a man to sleep peaceably in, alone.
Longarm’s luck was with him when he drove into Switchback about eleven that night. A lamp was lit over the coroner’s office and the saloons were still going full-blast.
He pounded on the coroner’s door until the older man came to cuss out at him. Then he said, “Got another one for you, Doc. You don’t get his skull, either. Somebody beat you to it.”
He carried the stiff, wrapped form of Spotted Beaver into the lab and flopped it on the table as the coroner lit an overhead lamp. The coroner said, “Good thing I’m half asleep and my supper’s about digested. What in hell tore this old boy up?”
“I was hoping you could tell me, Doc. What say you give him the once-over while I run over to the railroad station. We got some trains to ask about, too.
He left the coroner to his job and walked the three blocks to the station, where he found the stationmaster dressed but asleep in a cubbyhole office under an electric light bulb. The man awoke with a start as Longarm came in, glanced at the wall clock, and said, “Ain’t no trains due for a good six hours, mister.”
“I ain’t looking for a ticket. I’m a Deputy U.S. Marshal after some information. You have a train stopped out on the Blackfoot reservation this evening?”
“Stopped? Hell, no. There was a westbound freight around four and an eastbound crossing closer to six. No reason to stop, though, and both were on time, so they likely didn’t.”
Longarm took out a cheroot, stuck it between his front teeth, and spoke around it as he fished in his pocket for a match. “Some one killed an Indian near your tracks. I wondered if you might have some crewmen who lost kin at Little Big Horn or such.”
The stationmaster shook himself wider awake and thought for a moment. “I know the boys on both crews. I don’t think either of them would be mean enough to shoot at folks as they passed by.”
“This jasper got off to work close up with a knife. How fast do your trains run through there?”
“Hmmm, the eastbound’s coming downgrade a mite, so it’d be crossing the prairie there about forty-odd. Westbound might slow to twenty or thirty on uphill grades. I’m going by the timetables, you understand. So we’re talking about average speeds. Be a mite faster going down a rise than up, but, yeah, I’ll stick with those speeds. You want the names of the engineers?”
“Not yet. Looks like I’m sniffing up the wrong tree. While I’m here, though, do your trains run the same time every day?”
“Not hardly. Depends on what’s being freighted where. We get a wire when a train’s due in or out, but the timetable varies. Why do you ask?”
Longarm took a match from his pocket, igniting it with his thumbnail in the same motion, and touched the flame to his cheroot. “Man figuring to hop a slow freight would have to know when one was coming.”
The stationmaster looked astounded. “Hop a freight on open prairie? We don’t run freights that slow, Deputy. Be a pisser to reach for a grabiron doing more’n ten miles an hour, wouldn’t it?”
“Yeah. Like I said, I’m likely in the wrong place.”
Longarm left the man to sleep away the rest of his night in peace and went back to the coroner’s.
The coroner couldn’t tell him anything he didn’t know already. Spotted Beaver had been killed and cut up, down, and crosswise. Except for the head, nothing important was missing. The coroner found nothing to tell him what had killed the headless trunk, though he muttered laconically, “None of that knifework did him a lick of good. If he was shot or bashed, the evidence left with his head.”
“Could you say what was used to rip him up like that, Doc?”
“Something sharp. Wasn’t a butcher’s meat saw or animal teeth. but name anything else from a pen-knife to a busted bottle and I’ll swear to it.”
Longarm asked, “Can I leave him here with you for the night, Doc?”
“Sure. I’ll put him away for you on ice. I know you’re driving a long, lonesome ways, but they don’t bother me all that much.”
“I’m not worried about traveling with a dead man. Done it before in my time. Come morning, though, I aim to ship the remains to Washington for a real going-over at the federal forensic labs. I’ll come back before high noon.”
“I’ll tin his internals in formalin for you, then. What do you figure I missed?”
“Likely not a thing Doc. But it pays to double-check.”
“I don’t have the gear to look for obscure drugs or poisons, but you don’t think he was drugged, do you?”
“Don’t know what to think. Just covering every bet can come up with till I hit a winning hand.”
“Makes sense. How come you’re making such a roundabout night of it, though? You could take a room over at the Railroad Hotel and get an early start, since you’re due back anyway, before noon.”
Longarm kept his true reasons to himself as he said, “I’ve got an appointment at the agency, come sunup. They’re expecting me back tonight.”
He said good night and left, going next to the saloon he’d busted up. The night man on duty didn’t know him but a couple of the men who’d seen him come through the window wanted to buy him a drink. So Longarm let them, then stood a round in turn as he casually swept the crowd with his eyes from under the brim of his hat. Nobody seemed too interested in him. He told the two boys drinking with him part of what had been going on and repeated that he was heading back to the agency alone.