The D&RG Western locomotives stopped to fill up with boiler water at the Dulce Indian Agency because, as the Spanish name for the place would indicate, the springwater there ran sweeter there than anywhere else for miles around. But Longarm didn’t care. As the train he’d gotten down from filled up on sweet water, he was already legging himself and his borrowed roper and saddlebags to the whitewashed agency complex, nestled between the broad, flat railroad right-of-way and the eroded cliffs of striped sedimentary rocks to the south. The higher peaks of the Continental Divide rose hazily to the east. Dulce already lay way above sea level, and while the Divide rose even higher, the mountains down this way, while still considered a stretch of the Rockies, didn’t stick up quite as high as, say, the Front range west of Denver.
A brown-faced gent in a dark blue uniform came out of the Indian Police guardhouse as if to see what the tall, strange pindah lickoyee, or “white eyes,” wanted. Sentimental reporters who paid a bit too much attention to that schoolmarm who claimed to have lived with the Lakota long enough to translate their bellyaching, wrote a heap of bull about the Indian Police being made up of trash whites instead of real Indians. Longarm knew the Indian Police were run by white men, just as the rest of the country was. But it would have been impractical as all get-out to have any police force staffed by underpaid white boys who didn’t savvy the lingo of the folks they’d been armed and equipped to ride herd on.
Lots of Indians seemed anxious to join the Indian Police. Almost all their nations had traditional notions of warriors appointed to keep their own versions of law and order. And a chance to wear a quasi-military uniform and pack a gun had the more usual occupations, such as beating on drums and lining up for government handouts, beat by a country mile. So Longarm was surprised when the Jicarilla police sergeant strode over to stick out his hand like a white man expecting to shake like an equal, announcing in fair English, “I am Joseph Doli. I am a Christian. I am Nada of Those Who Make Everyone Behave at this agency. I welcome you if you come here in peace. If you are running away from your own kind, I think it would be better for us all if you got back on that train before it leaves.”
Longarm said, “I ain’t running away from anybody. But I ain’t sure I want somebody to know I’m coming. Before we get into who I am and where I’m headed, might you know a hatali of your own kind known as Cho’chibas?”
The Indian nodded soberly and said, “Everyone has heard of that powerful medicine man, as you people say, hatali. What is Cho’chibas to you, White Eyes?”
Longarm modestly replied, “He calls me his Tsoi Belagana.”
The somewhat older Indian blinked and let fly a whole string of rapid-fire Na-dene. So Longarm waved him down with his free hand and sheepishly admitted, “I don’t speak your tongue and only savvy a few words at baby- talk speed. Cho’chibas told me Tsoi Belagana meant something like ‘American Grandchild,’ right?”
Doli nodded. “Belagana is the more polite term we use for you people. It comes from the sound of American, not the funny eyes so many of you seem to have. What did you do to make a real person like Cho’chibas call you his grandchild?”
Longarm shrugged. “It wasn’t all that much. I just ran off some other white eyes who were searching for yellow iron in one of your holy places. They had no right to be there. They were trespassing on reservation land your folks and mine had agreed on. So it only took a little pistol-whipping and-“
“You are the one called Betagana Hastin!” the Jicarilla said without hesitation. “The Nakaih call you Brazo Largo. Your own people call you Longarm. Have you come to do something about the trouble we are having here this summer? Our white-eyed agent is getting ready to have supper with some others sent all the way from Washington, if you want to scold them for us.”
Longarm shook his head morosely and replied, “I’d like to. But I don’t have that much medicine and if the truth be known, I’d as soon not have too many others, your kind or mine, knowing more than they need to about my passing this way.”
The Indian said, “I understand. I am a lawman too. I think you should come home with me for supper and we can talk about it where others need not worry about what we are saying.”
Longarm said that sounded like a swell notion, and let the Indian steer him around the back of their guardhouse to what looked like a regulation BIA frame cabin, even though Sergeant Doli called it his hogan. The more famous Navaho hogan was a kind of home, which was what the word meant in Na-dene. Along the way, Doli told Longarm, not unkindly, that Jicarilla pronounced Na-dene somewhat closer to N’de. Only sometimes they said Tinneh, because nobody ever said their lingo was simple.
All the Indians Longarm had ever had supper with seemed to admire a haze of smoke instead of flies around them as they ate. Doli’s moon-faced asdza—you never called her breed a squaw—had been expecting her shasti home for supper and whipped up a heap of alta nabi, the Jicarilla version of Irish stew, with blue corn substituting for the spuds, and juniper ashes instead of salt.
If they had any kids, she’d sent them out back so the two grown men could eat in peace. She served them generous bowls of her stew, and shyly asked Longarm if he wanted honey in his own coffee, but didn’t sit down to table with them as her man waited for Longarm to dig in. So he did, and he was glad he’d been polite and accepted the strong but overly sweet coffee when he decided her juniper ash seasoning had to be an acquired taste.
Doli must have been more used to it, because he washed some down with his own ash-flavored coffee and asked Longarm if juniper grew along the rimrocks of that Tularosa Canyon to the south.
Longarm said truthfully he doubted there could be as much of anything green around Tularosa, but quickly added, “They do say the reserve at San Carlos is hotter and drier by far. It was moving old Victorio over to San Carlos that seems to have inspired his latest reservation jump. He kept bellyaching that he wanted to go back to the Tularosa Agency before he just went wild some more. So Tularosa has to be nicer than San Carlos, right?”
The Indian chewed sullenly, swallowed, and said, “An ant pile on a salt flat, covered with ashes, would be nicer than San Carlos! People who have run away from San Carlos have told us about the fine place our BIA chose for our Chiricahua cousins near Fort Apache. The land is too barren for the black goats of the Nakaih to graze. In the dry moons there is barely water to drink and the children must go to bed with dust in their hair. The agent there told the people to plant crops, like Pueblo. But only greasewood and cactus grows well where it rains so seldom, and the hunting around San Carlos is poor, very poor. The people were asked to just bake there, under a crueler sun than they had known before, with nothing to do but get drunk and hit one another while they waited for another allotment. Can you blame a real man like the hacki you call Victorio for running away?”
Longarm didn’t want to get into the distinctions between leaving a place you might not cotton to and raiding total strangers who’d had no idea you were coming. He said, “Be that as it may, nobody here at the Dulce Agency has been asked to go to San Carlos, and even if they had, I don’t have any more say in the matter than you all. Counting on a fellow federal lawman’s discretion, Sergeant, I’ve got orders to investigate other matters over by La Mesa de los Viejos on the far side of the Divide. Can you lend me some riding stock and have you or your local folks heard anything about what’s been going on over on the far side of the mountains?”
