with your brag. You keep pestering me and you’ll have no gun. I’m coming to the conclusion you ain’t grown up enough to wear sidearms, the way you keep carrying on.”
Timberline holstered his gun, muttering, “One day we’ll meet where you ain’t holding all the winning cards, Longarm.”
Longarm didn’t bother to answer. He went near, but not all the way, to the fire, and took up a position where he could watch, standing back from the glow and the shifting shadows. He didn’t watch the dancers. Once you watched the first eight steps of most Indian dances you’d seen about all that was about to happen. He watched the vigilantes and the little bounty hunter, Hanks, long enough to see that they didn’t seem to be up to anything interesting, either. Foster wasn’t near the fire. Across the way, Timberline had hunkered down by some of his sidekicks, scowling fiercely.
A soft female voice at his side asked, “Has Longarm a place to sleep this night?”
Longarm turned to smile down at a pretty, moonfaced girl of perhaps eighteen summers. Like other Ho women she wore a shapeless, ankle-length Mother Hubbard of cotton, decorated with quillwork around the collar. Longarm said, “Evening, Dances-Humming. Is my brother, your husband, well?”
“This person is no longer the woman of Many Ponies.”
“Oh? Something happen to him?”
“Yes, he got older. This person is not a woman for a man who’d gotten old and fat and lazy. Many Ponies was sent home to his mother’s lodge.”
Longarm nodded soberly. He knew the marriage laws of the Ho well enough not to have to ask foolish questions. Some whites might say they were sort of casual about such things. He considered them practical.
On the other hand, while the man he knew as Many Ponies might be getting fat, he was big for a Ho and inclined to brood. The girl called Dances-Humming, while very pretty, had learned English from the last agent, the one arrested for mistreating the Indians. If there was one woman to be trusted less than a Denver’s Street play- pretty, it was a squaw who spoke perfect English.
He said, “How come you ain’t dancing with the other gals?”
“This person is tired of the old customs. They mean so little when our men grow fat and drunk on the Great White Father’s allowance.”
“Some healthy young cowboys, over by the fire?”
“This person has seen them. None of them look interesting. The last time you were here, this person was younger and you laughed at her childish ways. Since then, this person has learned how white women make love. Would you like to see how Dances-Humming can kiss?”
“Like to. Can’t. It’s against the law.”
“The Great White Father’s law, not ours. Come, we can talk about it in my lodge.”
Longarm was about to refuse, but a sudden suspicion made him reconsider. Dances-Humming giggled and took his hand, tugging him after her through the dim light. He allowed himself to be led, muttering, “Sometimes there’s nothing a gent can do but lay down and take his beating like a man.”
Dances-Humming’s lodge was not a tent. Like most of her people on the reservation, she’d been given a frame cabin neatly placed along the gravel street leading to the agency. The indians were furnished with whitewash, with the understanding that the Indians would paint their cabins. They never did so, not because they were shiftless, but because they thought it was silly to paint pine when the sun soon bleached it to a nice shade of silver-gray that never needed repainting.
Dances-Humming led him inside and lit a candle stub, bathing the interior in warm, soft light. The cabin was furnished with surplus army camp furnishings. The walls were hung with painted deerskins and flat gathering baskets woven long ago. Dances-Humming seldom worked at the old skills. Reservation LIFE was turning her and her people into something no longer Indian, but not yet white. Prostitution had been unknown when the various bands of Ho had roamed from the Rockies to the Sierras in a prouder time.
Dances-Humming sat on a bunk, atop the new-looking Hudson Bay blanket. She patted the creamy wool at her side and said, “Sit down. This person’s guest looks puzzled.”
“I reckon I am. Last time I was here you said something about a knife in my lights and liver.”
“This person was angry. You arrested a man who had been good to her and they made her marry an old man. But that was long ago, when this person was a foolish child.”
She suddenly drew her legs up under her and was kneeling in the center of the bunk. She pulled the loose Mother Hubbard off over her head and threw it aside. She laughed, stark naked, and asked, “Has not this person grown into a real woman?”
Longarm said, “That’s for damn sure!” as he stared down at her firm, brown breasts in the candlelight. Then he sniffed and said, “My medicine don’t allow me to pay a woman, Dances-Humming.”
“Did this person ask for presents? What do you take her for, a whore?”
Longarm did, but he didn’t say so. He said, “If Agent Caldwell caught us, he’d report me to the BIA.”
“No, he wouldn’t. He owes his job to you. Besides, how is he to know?”
“Well, you might just tell him.”
“Why would this person do that?”
“Maybe to get a white man who riled you in trouble. You did say you’d fix me, last time around.”
Dances-Humming cupped her breasts in her hands and thrust the nipples out at him teasingly, saying, “Is this the way you’re afraid this person will fix you?” Her voice took on a bitter shade as she added, “You are a white man with a badge. Do you think they’d take this person’s word against yours?”
He saw that there were tears in her sloe eyes and sat beside her, soothing, “Let’s not blubber about it, honey. You’re just taking me by surprise, is all. I mean, I didn’t know we were friends.”
