She shrugged her bare shoulders, making her tawny breasts move in an interesting manner against his bare chest as she replied, "It was a Nakota dialect at least. I'm not sure it was pure Santee. The stranger I spoke to could have been from some distant band."
"Or an Ojibwa who'd gotten fluent enough in Santee to talk to the folks he was scouting," Longarm decided. Then he asked how sure she was all four or five of them had been any sort of Indian.
She started to tell him she just knew. Then she stopped. "Hear me, it was dark, and while I thought I heard two voices, it could have been one trickster, But why do you think one Indian with Wasichu friends would want me to think them a band of Indians?"
Longarm replied, "You just suggested he was a trickster. Which means that I can account for one assimilated Ojibwa, riding with some cowhands off the same spread, better than I can account for a whole Indian band neither you nor your Santee pals would know about."
He told her as much as he knew about the late Baptiste Youngwolf or Uncle Chief as she made good on her offer to French him hard some more. She couldn't comment all that much with her mouth full, but as soon as they were going at it in a more conversational manner dog-style, Mato Takoza said, "Iyoptey wanagi! I love it this way! But hear me, I don't think you want to ride on to ask that Helga Runeberg more than you already know about her pet Ojibwa."
Longarm clasped the breed's firm tawny hips to aim it up her right as he muttered, "I know I don't want to. But I got to. She allowed she was sore as hell at me, but she never let her boys shoot it out with me over in Sleepy Eye when they had the chance."
Mato Takoza arched her spine and moaned, "Deeper! As deep as you can go! For Wakanna only knows when I'll ever find another man like you after that Wasichuweynh Witko gets another crack at you on her own land, with nobody else there to sing of the way you died!"
CHAPTER 26
Longarm had felt no call to sound foolish or show off, and he was almost certain he'd eliminated Mato Takoza and her Santee pals by the time they kissed for the last time the next morning. On the other hand, he felt no call to lay out all his future plans for her whether she was in cahoots with the ones he was really after or not.
So he was mildly chagrined when Wabasha Chambrun and a son in his teens overtook him on the road near the Bedford homestead to volunteer some backup. The burly breed reminded Longarm he'd ridden with the Ninth Cav in his day. "My wife's niece just told us about you going up alone against all them Runeberg riders. She told us how you took the time to rustle us up them swell stock market tips too. My oldest boy, Kangi Ska here, can hit a prairie dog's head at four hundred yards with that Big Fifty he begged to bring along."
Longarm sighed. "I reckon her heart was in the right place. I wasn't fixing to go up against at least seventeen guns alone, gents. I told your county sheriff and his own boys to meet up with me at Israel Bedford's this morning. Riding in on a sod-walled home spread in the dark can be injurious to one's health, and I wanted to talk to Miss Mato Takoza first, to make double sure my process of eliminating made sense. That's what you call it when you whittle away the less likely suspects, process of eliminating."
Chambrun smiled sheepishly and said, "She told us how you'd wormed so many family secrets out of her. The two of you ought to be ashamed, But how did you figure out who the real criminal mastermind was?"
As the three of them rode on, Longarm made a wry face and made sure Kangi Ska followed his drift as he told the two of them, "Criminal mastermind is a contradiction of terms. Nobody smart enough to be called a mastermind would ever become an out-and-out outlaw. You take that old Jay Gould your wife's niece may have just mentioned to you all. He spends more on fancy food, drink, and diamond shirt studs than the Reno and James-Younger gangs combined ever took from anybody at gunpoint. Old Jay don't bother with robbing trains. He helps himself to whole railroads legally by way of dirty stock-market tricks. So the murderous gang leaders we're after ain't half as slick as they think they are. They've just been confusing the shit out of me with unexpected moves."
He spotted the breakfast smoke from the Bedford place ahead and said, "I'm saddled with a halfway logical mind. So I sometimes catch myself playing chess by the rules, when the game is really checkers with ornery illogical crooks." Then he heeled his livery mount to a trot.
Sheriff Tegner had seen them coming of course. So he and his good-sized posse had mounted up in the dooryard of Israel Bedford, as had Bedford, another ex-cavalry rider himself.
Longarm and the breeds reined in close to him. The older lawman leaned closer to ask if Longarm had any objection to Neighbor Conway and his own kids tagging along.
Longarm was too thoughtful to stare at the three colored riders staring his way as they shyly sat their ponies a tad apart from the others. Longarm said, "It's your posse. It's been my experience a bigger posse packs more firepower than a smaller one."
Sheriff Tegner said, "That's the way I see it, and I already have the Swedish vote sewed up. So let's ride."
They did. Tegner was too smooth a politician to come right out and say the Conways had his kind permission to get shot by Rocking R boys of uncertain temperament. Such mutterings as Longarm picked up on during the fairly long ride across open range seemed to be directed at Chambrun and his Santee breed kid. Hardly anyone had ever lost a scalp to colored folks around New Ulm.
Longarm hoped such neighborly affairs as this one might help the reformed Indians fit in as sort of half-ass Wasichu in times to come. It would likely have reservation life beat. For those still living on the Great White Father's blanket had already started to look sort of sad to a man who remembered the way they'd been living just a short spell back. Some Indians seemed able to stay Indian as wards of the government. Someone like a Hopi could still prove his worth as a man by bringing in his swamping crop of blue corn, while a strong and smart Ojibwa could still show off with his wild rice, and even sell it. But it was tough to live the life of a buffalo-hunting professional horse thief, providing one's wives with household help captured from lesser nations, without getting one's allotment cut off by an old fuss of a B.I.A. agent. So maybe young Kangi Ska would make out better in the end as a prosperous farmer rather than a charity case, pissing and moaning about good old days he didn't really remember.
Posse riders dismounted along the way to carefully flatten and restaple such fences as they had to pass through. They saw more and more beef critters as they approached the road running north out of Sleepy Eye. But they saw none of Helga Runeberg's cowhands before they topped a rise to see her home spread waiting for them, silent as if it was late at night instead of mid-morning.
Sheriff Tegner ordered his men to spread wide, with two of his full-time deputies leading their own bunches to circle the sprawl of buildings and empty corrals as the main party closed in.
As Longarm and the local lawman in official charge rode into her barnyard, Helga Runeberg came out her back door, alone and unarmed in a more feminine outfit of polka-dotted gingham, and stated sarcastically she'd have baked a cake if she'd known so many of them would be by to court her so early in the day.
Sheriff Tegner stared soberly down at her from the saddle. "You know blamed well why we're here, Helga Runeberg. Last night we found Miss Vigdis Magnusson scattered all over creation. Dynamite wired to the other side of her back door blew off all her clothes along with her right arm, her head, and both tits when she went to let herself in after an honest day's work at her bank!"
The smaller, darker, and plainer gal didn't seem too upset as she nodded. "I know. Gus Hansson told me all about it when he got back from New Ulm late last night. Are you suggesting anyone out our way had anything to do with it?"