“But you don’t take bribes, right?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never had the chance. I remember how the man I used to work under retired rich, disgraced or not. It’s been my misfortune to be posted to jobs that keep most men honest through no fault of their own.”
He led Longarm out front, sat down, and started writing on the back of an envelope as he muttered darkly about the stupidity of people who thought he was Saint Nicholas. He handed Longarm a list of eighteen names and brands and said, “Here, this should keep you busy. Every one of these idiots has offered to buy at least a section of Indian land, should it ever be auctioned off.”
Longarm scanned the list, noting that most of the names on it were those of small local cattlemen with modest but growing herds and small home spreads. When Chadwick asked how he knew so much, he explained, “I haven’t just been spitting and whittling since I came here, Chadwick. One time or the other since I got here, I’ve talked to just about everybody I’ve been able to get within a mile of.”
“Any of them cowboys interesting enough to pester again?”
“Maybe. I’ll keep this with my map and check them off as I get the time. Do you get any offers from bigger outfits, like the Double Z or maybe the Tumbling R?”
“Not that I remember. Why?” Chadwick asked.
“Takes a big outfit to afford hired guns, flying machines, and such.”
“I see your meaning. Have you thought about the army?”
“Sure I have. They’re spoiling for another go at the Blackfoot and the War Department has observation balloons, too. But some officer out to start an Indian war to advance his career wouldn’t have to use spooks. He’d just dream up some incident and start blasting away.”
“If some soldiers were trying to frighten the Blackfoot into a jump, and knew the when and where of it …” the agent suggested.
“Too damned complicated. The second lieutenant out at the fort’s ornery enough to frame up some excuse to kill Indians, but why shilly-shally about with Wendigos? If he had even one man in his command willing to murder for him, he’d just have the rascal scalp some passing white, and bye-bye, Blackfoot!”
“Yeah,” Chadwick agreed, “the War Department’s never been too subtle. How about the B.I.A., as long as you suspect your fellow federal employees all that much?”
“Hey,” Longarm said, “it was you who brought up the War Department. But I’ve considered whether the Bureau of Indian Affairs might have a reason to scare their own charges off. They haven’t got one. The minute the Blackfoot are gone, Washington cuts the funds allocated for feeding the tribe and, if there’s one thing the Indian Ring doesn’t cotton to, it’s leaving money in the Treasury.”
“Some of those funds tend to stick to fingers along the way, too,” Chadwick observed. “It wouldn’t make much sense for the B.I.A. to want to go out of business, would it?”
“Not hardly. Maybe now you see why I keep chewing the same bone over and over. It’s boring the shit out of me, too!”
“So,” the land agent said, “no matter where the trail seems to take you, it keeps leading back to a crazy man, or an Indian spook.”
“I don’t like those possibilities, much, either. I’d best be on my way and see who else I can come up with.”
Longarm left the land office and headed for where he’d tethered his chestnut in front of the saloon. He saw a townie nailing up a cardboard placard and paused to read it over the man’s shoulder. It was an election poster, advising one and all to vote for Wilbur Browning for county sheriff. Longarm frowned and opined, “Seems to me your man is getting anxious, considering. The coroner tells me you’ve never held elections hereabouts, since there ain’t enough county to mention.”
The man finished hammering the last nail and said, “I know. Damned Indian reservation takes up most of the county and there ain’t enough of us whites to matter. But that fool Paddy Murphy’s not worth the powder to blow him up with. So we’re fielding Browning against the shanty son of a bitch!”
“Browning’s a rider for the Double Z, ain’t he?” Longarm asked.
“Yeah, he shot a Texan in Dodge one time, which is more than Murphy can say. The territorial governor’s given permission for elections and we aim to vote Murphy out.”
“Reorganizing the unincorporated districts, is he? That’s right interesting. They say anything about, uh, expanding the county, over at your party headquarters?”
“Hell,” the man said, “we ain’t got a headquarters. Ain’t rightly got a party, either. But since Murphy’s a Republican, the boys over at the livery who paid for these signs must be Democrats.”
“Don’t you know for sure? Seems to me a legal election has to register voters ahead.”
“Shit, nobody in Switchback’s all that fussy. We just aim to have us a real lawman. If Murphy won’t be voted out polite, we’ll just tar and feather the son of a bitch and ride him out on a rail.”
Longarm cleared his throat and adjusted the brim of his hat. “Well, as I’m a federal man, it may not be my call to tell folks how to hold local elections. But you’ll find elections work better if they’re legal. How come folks are so anxious about politics, all of a sudden?”
“It’s the killings out on the reservation. We keep telling Murphy he ought to do something about it and he keeps saying it ain’t his jurisdiction. Wilbur Browning says he’ll jurisdict the shit out of that Wendigo son of a bitch if we give him the job.”
“The Blackfoot have their own police force out there. I suspicion they won’t want your man’s help all that much.”
“It don’t matter what they want. All these Indian rascals running about killing folks have everybody spooked. Seen some more damn Indians just this morning, coming up from the railroad station armed to the teeth.”
A troubled look darkened the tall lawman’s features. “Wait a minute,” he said. Are you saying men from other tribes are in Switchback?”
“They weren’t Blackfoot. Don’t know where they were headed. I ain’t an expert on Indians, but one of the fellows over to the railroad said they were Sioux. They were dressed like white men, save for braided hair and likely needing a bath, but Wes Collins, who used to be in the army, allowed as how the lingo they were jabbering was Dakota.”
“You couldn’t say which way they rode, huh?”
“Well, they ain’t washing dishes here in Switchback, or asking for a job as hired hands, so they likely went on out to the reservation.”
“You say this morning, eh? They’ve got four or five hours’ lead on me and I doubt they’ll be reporting in to the agent. I’ll tell the Blackfoot police about it and let them take care of it.”
“How do you know you can trust your Indian police to tell you true about other redskins?”
Longarm started to say it was a foolish question. Then he reconsidered, shrugged, and said, “I don’t.”
Chapter 12
This time Longarm rode back to the reservation along the railroad tracks instead of taking the wagon trace from town. He didn’t know what he expected to find, but he’d never ridden the entire stretch and it was possible that his survey map was missing a few details.
As he topped the rise, west of town, and started across the higher prairie rolling toward the distant foothills, a calico steer with a broken left horn stared wild-eyed at him for a moment and lit out, running. Longarm saw its badly worn hide and figured it for a queer. Sometimes something funny happened to a castrated calf and it grew up thinking it was a heifer. The range bulls thought so, too, and the poor spooked animal was all worn out from trying to get screwed. Some pissed-off bull had whupped it good for fooling him, most likely, and now it was ranging alone, too scared to let anything near it.
The range between Switchback and the reservation line was badly misused in this stretch, too. The native grasses had been overgrazed and the brush was getting out of hand along the railroad right-of-way. Prickly tumbleweed, both blowing and growing, formed dense windrows between higher clumps of sage and grease wood that had followed the tracks east out of the Great Basin beyond the mountains. Some of the brush was waist-high to a man on foot and getting too woody for even an antelope to browse. It was a hell of a way to treat a country, Longarm thought, but told himself not to worry about it. Nevertheless, he couldn’t help wondering where it would all lead to. He was all for progress; the Iron Horse had opened up a continent to Europe’s hungry hordes in his own lifetime, but couldn’t people see there was a limit to what the land could take? The high plains had been grazed for thousands of years without being damaged by its indigenous wildlife. The longhorn probably didn’t hurt the buffalo grass any more than the buffalo had, head for head. But the buffalo had kept moving, giving the grass time to grow back. The Indian had been willing to live the same way, drifting across the sea of grass from place to place. The white man’s notion of staying put with his cows and crops didn’t give the range time to recover. The ten inches of rain each season and the short green-up of the native short-grasses called for at least two years of fallow for every one grazed. At the rate they were overstocking, the cattle raisers would be raising more dust than cows in a few more years.