“He wore the leather shoes the B.I.A. issues us. I see your meaning. Our people are not used to the white man’s shoes, and in any case, they seldom fit right. Gray Dog may have scuffed more than a man in moccasins would have. But even so, Wendigo should have left some spoor!”
“Maybe he did. Meaning no offense, Rain Crow, a busted straw stem here and another one ten yards off ain’t hard to miss.”
“I will look some more, by moonlight. If we are lucky and there is summer frost before sunrise-Heya! Those people up ahead are gathered around the dead boy’s body.”
Longarm squinted against the sunset sky at the black knot of Indians on the horizon and made a mental note of where to mark it on his map. Then he heeled his chestnut and snapped, “Let’s go, before they trample every goddamned sign away!”
Longarm and Rain Crow loped up to the site of the latest killing and the deputy shouted, reining in, “Stand clear, damn it!” He saw Yellow Leggings in the crowd and added, “Yellow Leggings, get these folks out of here!”
The Indian policeman shouted back, “These two are the dead boy’s parents.”
“All right, they can stay. Everybody else, vamoose.”
He saw his orders were being grudgingly obeyed as he dismounted far enough away to avoid spooking his horse, dropped the reins to the grass, and walked over through the parting crowd. He looked down at the mess spread-eagled in the grass and muttered, “Jesus, I ain’t seen anyone messed up like this since the War!”
The slim, broken body was that of a boy about fourteen years old. Longarm could tell it was a boy because the body was naked except for shoes and socks. The brown flesh was crisscrossed with gaping slashes and covered by buzzing bluebottle flies as well as caked blood. The kid’s clothes hadn’t been carried off; they lay around in bloody tatters. It was likely that the shreds of plaid shirt had identified the victim to his relatives. There wasn’t any sign of his head.
Longarm saw Rain Crow was at his side, so he pointed his chin at a spatter of blood on a soapweed clump near the body and said, “You looked for blood on the stems farther off, right?”
“Of course. Anyone walking away with a cut-off head should have left a trail of blood, but we found none.”
Longarm turned slowly on one heel, scanning the horizon all around before he muttered, “Could have headed out in any direction to start with. Due south would have run him smack into the agency. There’s over thirty miles of nothing to the west before you reach some cover in the foothills over that way. A man can’t walk that far on foot in a day, packing a severed head or not. East would take him smack into Switchback, where folks would likely ask questions about blood and such. I’d say we should look north.”
He went back to his chestnut and remounted, after telling the grim-faced father standing by a kneeling, keening squaw that it was all right to move the body now. Longarm didn’t intend to take this one to the coroner. It was beginning to look like wasted effort as well as needless hardship to the victim’s kin.
Rain Crow and Yellow Leggings fell in at either side of him as he walked his chestnut slowly north, noting that the crowd had made a mess of the grass for yards in every direction. The sun was down now, but the western sky was blood-red and the big moon hung like a grinning skull to the east. They were riding over untrampled grass now, and the light was bright enough to see clearly by. Longarm spotted something shaped like a cartridge near a bird’s-nest depression in the sod and reined in, saying, “What’s that; by the rabbit’s bed?”
Rain Crow said, “I see it. Coyote turd. Coyote found the nest empty and shit because he was angry.”
Longarm allowed himself a subdued laugh. “Your eyes are better than mine, then, but I’ll take your word for it.”
“I dismounted the first time I saw it this afternoon.”
“Oh, then that pony track up ahead must be yours. I was about to say something foolish.”
“There is no sign this way. I searched for sign as far north as the railroad tracks and a mile beyond.”
“You look for railroad ballast that might have been scuffed by a horseshoe?” the lawman asked.
“I got on my hands and knees and even tasted a ballast rock I thought might have been turned over in the past few hours. I made sure it was only displaced by a passing train, long ago.”
The deputy’s eyebrows shot up. “Do tell? How’d you figure all that by taste?”
“The fresh side of the rock tasted of coal smoke. The taste settles on the roadbed when the trains run in the rain. It rained two weeks ago. That was when the rock was turned over.”
“You can tell a rock that was turned over half a month back?” Longarm asked, astonished.
“Certainly. Can’t you? The trains lay a film of soot and dust on everything they get near. Everything near the tracks smells like burnt matches or spent cartridges. That is why the buffalo herds were split up by the coming of the Iron Horse. The animals are afraid to cross the tracks. Coyote, rabbit, and antelope will, if they have to. Wolf, bear, and buffalo fear the tracks. A few years ago we had a good buffalo hunt that way. We cornered a herd in a bend of the track and ate fat cow. The old men said we should let some of the buffalo live, but the younger men killed them all, anyway. They said it was foolish to leave them for the white hide hunters. I never ate so much in my life and I got sick.” Rain Crow patted his stomach and rolled his eyes upward.
By now they were approaching the right-of-way he was talking about. The railroad followed the winding grade of an old buffalo trail, since the engineers who’d surveyed it had known that buffalo follow the lay of the land better than most surveyors could. The tracks lay mostly at grade level, with filled stretches as high as ten feet over low rolls and cuts through some rises.
Longarm rode his chestnut up a four-foot bank and reined in on the gritty ballast to stare up and down the line without dismounting. A line of telegraph poles ran along the far side, and though there was no wind near the ground, the overhead wires hummed weirdly overhead. He saw the black notch of a low railroad cut to the east, and as the two Indians joined him, he said, “Let’s see how high above the tracks that cut bank is.” As they walked their mounts along the ties he explained, “I’ve studied the timetables of the railroad. No way a man could jump even a slow freight out here from ground level. But if he climbed up on the rim of a cut, and had steel nerves …”
They reined in between the walls of earth on either side of the track and Rain Crow said, “I don’t think so. The edge up there is not as high as the tops of the freight cars and it would be a ten-or twelve-foot leap even if it was high enough. Yellow Leggings, ride up to the north side and see if there are marks of running feet. I will check the south bank.”
Longarm went with Yellow Leggings, figuring Rain Crow as the better tracker. But as he and Yellow Leggings dismounted to study the grass lip of the bank above the tracks, he saw that there was nothing to see. He called across to Rain Crow, “Any sign over there?”
“No, and the ground is barren in places from runoff. To jump off here with any chance would mean a dead run, with no hope for cautious footprints.”
LongArm shrugged and said, “This was a low cut, anyway. If we could find something in the way of a higher jump-off point, not too far to walk on foot, hell, it’s too damn dark to look for sign, serious. What say we ride back to the agency and study my map some more?”
Rain Crow called, “You go and we’ll join you later. We know this range. As the moon rises the light may shift and tell us something.”
Longarm saw no harm in letting them have their head. So he climbed back aboard the chestnut and headed for the agency.