“In other words, we’re traveling a far piece on the quick glance and maybes of one old Indian who might just be wrong!”
“When you meet Real Bear, you’ll know better. He doesn’t forget much. Aren’t you going to ask about our house?”
“Your house? Is there something interesting about it, ma’am?”
“Most white people, when they hear me mention my house, seem a bit surprised. I’m supposed to wear buckskins, too.”
“Well, I ain’t most people. I’ve been on a few reservations in my time. What have you got up there, one of them government-built villages of frame lumber that could use a coat of paint and a bigger stove?”
“I see you have seen a few reservations. Ours is a shambles. The young white couple the B.I.A. sent out from the East doubtless mean well, but … you’d have to be an Indian to understand.”
Longarm fished a cheroot from his vest and when she nodded her silent permission, thumbnailed a match and lit up, pondering her words. He knew the miserable fix most tribes were in these days, caught between conflicting policies of the army, the Indian agency, and loudmouthed Washington politicos who’d never been west of the Big Muddy. He took a drag of smoke, let it trickle out through his nostrils, and asked, “What’s this other trouble you mentioned about the young men wanting another go at the Seventh Cav?”
“The boys too young to have fought in ‘76 aren’t the real problem. Left to themselves they’d just talk a lot, like white boys planning to run off and be pirates. But some of the older men are finding civilization more than they can adjust to. You know about the Ghost Dancers?”
“Heard rumors. Paiute medicine man called Wovoka has been preachin’ a new religion over on the other side of the Rockies, hasn’t he?”
“Yes. Wovoka’s notions seem crazy to our Dream Singers, but the movement’s gaining ground and even some of our people are starting to make offerings to the Wendigo. You’d have to be a Blackfoot to know how crazy that is!”
“No I wouldn’t. The Wendigo is your Dad’s folks’ name for the devil, ain’t it?”
“My, you have been on some reservations! What else do you know about our religion?”
“Not much. Never even got the Good Book that I was brought up on all that straight in my head. Blackfoot, Arapahoe, Cheyenne, and other Algonquin-speaking tribes pray to a Great Spirit called Manitou and call the devil ‘Wendigo,’ right? I remember somethin’ about owls being bad luck and turtles being good luck, but like I said, I’ve never studied all that much on anyone’s notions about the spirit world.”
“Owl is the totem of death. Turtle is the creator of new life from the Waters of Yesteryear. I suppose you regard it all as silly superstition.”
“Can’t say one way or another. I wasn’t there. It might have took seven days or Turtle might have done it. Doubtless sometime we’ll know more about it. Right now I’ve got enough on my plate just keeping track of the here-and-now of it all.”
“Does that make you an atheist or an agnostic?”
Longarm bristled slightly. The last person to call him an atheist had been a renegade Mormon night rider who had left him to die in the Great Salt Desert. He had had plenty of time to ponder on the godless behavior of those who accused others of godlessness. “Makes me a Deputy U.S. Marshal with a job to do. You were saying something about devil worship up where we’re headed, Miss Gloria.”
She shrugged and replied, “I don’t think you could put it that way. People making offerings to the Wendigo aren’t Satanists; they’re simply frightened Indians. You see, it’s all too obvious that Manitou, the Great Spirit, has turned his back on them. The Wendigo, or Evil One, seems to rule the earth these days.”
“Is he supposed to be like our devil, with horns and such, or is he a big, mean Indian cuss?”
“Like Manitou, the Wendigo’s invisible. You might say he’s a great evil force who makes bad things happen.”
“I see. And some of your folks are praying to him while others are taking up Wovoka’s notions about the ghosts of dead Indians coming back from the Happy Hunting Ground for another go-round with our side. I don’t hold much with missionaries, since those I’ve seen ain’t been all that good at it but right now it seems you could use some up on the Blackfoot reservation.”
“We have a posse of diverse missionaries on or near the reservation. My father would like to run all Dream Singers off, Indian as well as white. I hope your arrest of Johnny Hunts Alone will calm things down enough for him to cope with.”
Longarm nodded and consulted his Ingersoll pocket watch, noting that they had a long way to ride yet. The girl watched him silently for a time before she murmured, “You’re not as dumb as you pretend to be.”
Longarm smiled. “Pretending such things sometimes gives a man an advantage. Speaking of which, you’ve got a pretty good head on your own shoulders. I can see you’ve been educated.”
“I graduated from Wellesley. Does that surprise you?”
“Why should it? You had to go to school someplace to talk so uppity. I know those big Eastern colleges give scholarships to bright reservation kids. It’d surprise me more if you’d said you’d learned to read from watching smoke signals.”
“You are unusual, for a white man. By now, most of your kind I’ve met would have demanded my whole history.”
“Likely. Most folks are more curious than polite.”
“You really don’t care one way or the other, do you?”
“I likely know as much about you as I need to.”
“You don’t know anything about me! Nobody knows anything about me!”
Longarm took a drag on his cheroot and said, “Let’s see, now. You’re wearing widow’s weeds, but you’re likely not a widow. You’re wearing a wedding band, but you ain’t married. You were born in an Indian camp, but you’ve been raised white and only lately come back to your daddy’s side of the family. You’ve got a big old chip on your pretty shoulder, too, but I ain’t about to knock it off, so why don’t you quit fencing about with me?”
Gloria Two-Women stared open-mouthed at him for a time before she blurted, “Somebody gave you a full report on me and you’ve been the one doing the fencing. Who was it, that damned agent’s wife?”
“Nobody’s told me one word about you since we met, save yourself. You knew I was a lawman. Don’t you reckon folks in my line are supposed to work things out for themselves, ma’am?”
Before she could answer, the candy butcher came through with his tray of sweets, fruits, sandwiches, and bottled beer. Longarm stopped the boy and asked the girl what she’d like, adding, “We won’t stop for a proper meal this side of Cheyenne, ma’am.”
Gloria ordered a ham on rye sandwich, a beer, and an orange for later and the deputy ordered the same, except for the fruit. When the candy butcher had left them to wait on another passenger, she insisted, “All right, how did you do that?”
“Do what? Size you up? I’m paid to size folks up, Miss Gloria. You said your mama was a white lady, and since you’re about twenty-odd, I could see she must have been taken captive during that Blackfoot rising near South Pass in the ‘fifties. When the army put ‘em down that time, most white captives were released, so I figured you likely went back East with your mama when you were, oh, about seven or eight. You may talk some Blackfoot and you’ve got Indian features, but you wear that dress like a white woman. You walk white, too. Those high-buttoned shoes don’t fret your toes like they would a lad’s who grew up in moccasins. You sure weren’t riding with the Blackfoot when they came out against Terry in ‘76, so I’d say you looked your daddy up after he and the others settled down civilized on the reservation just a while back. Here, I’ll open that beer for you with my jackknife. It’s got a bottle opener and all sorts of notions.”