Still, whether he deserved the break or not, he’d gotten away with his stupidity and no real harm had been done. Maybe it would even prove to be helpful if it taught him a lesson. To slow down and pay attention to the business at hand. Don’t demand instant justice, but let it come in its own time. And then savor it like the smoke from a particularly fine cigar.
Longarm reined his rented horse south away from Colorado City, down along the base of the Front Range foothills, the stoutly made packhorse trailing amiably along at the end of its lead rope. He was a good three or four miles south of town by the time he remembered that in his annoyance with himself he’d clean forgotten to go to the bank to get some more cash. Still, there were other banks in other towns. And he wouldn’t likely need any cash money again until he got to another town. It wasn’t worth turning back for.
He found the trail he wanted easily enough. He’d been there before a couple times in the past. He turned west then, the trail commencing to climb in a zigzag route of switchbacks and rises, toward the heavy, looming shoulder of the mountain they called Cheyenne. Although why it was named for the Cheyenne tribe when it was the Utes who came there to summer on its flanks each year, he had never quite understood.
Further to the west and a bit north by now, he knew, there was the much more impressive presence of Pikes Peak, but from this close to the mountains Longarm could no longer see the mantle of deep snow that capped this highest and most magnificent peak in the range that started on the grassy plains and leaped with spectacular suddenness toward the clouds.
From where Longarm now rode it was Cheyenne Mountain that filled the horizon and warned travelers away with its size and the steepness of its slopes. Anyone who did not know the mountain would look at it from afar and quickly conclude that the mountain was unscalable, or that at best it would take a man with ropes and special climbing skills to reach its summit. The truth, though, for those who knew the mountain’s secrets, was that this— and nearly the whole of the range for scores of miles in either direction—was cross-hatched with narrow, often precipitous trails that the Ute tribes had followed for … who knows how long? Perhaps hundreds upon hundreds of years in their annual migrations between the mountains and the plains.
The eastern-dwelling bands of Utes eschewed the white man’s practice of summering high and wintering in lowlands. Instead the Indians had long ago learned to descend to the grasslands in summer in order to find the great herds of buffalo that were the mainstay of their culture, then in winter retreat into the mountains, where they would remain safe from any approach by enemy raiders, locked snug and comfortable behind snow-clogged passes while their many enemies were left far behind and below on the warmer plains.
Longarm had been privileged to travel in the company of the Utes on several occasions in the past, and while he could not claim to truly know the trails, he at least was aware of them, and he figured he could puzzle out a way that would bring him soon to wherever the tribe was now. For if they were not yet camped on the lower flanks of Cheyenne Mountain, they were sure to be on their way there. Longarm figured to intercept them. And to talk to them.
If they or any other band of Utes was involved in the assassination plot against the commissioner, a plot that had killed more than merely the Washington City politician and his lady, Longarm believed he would surely get a whiff of it from old friends in the tribe.
And once he had the scent, he would not let it be. Longarm swore that silently to himself. And to the memory of Billy Vail.
Chapter 11
He spent the night high on the slopes of Cheyenne Mountain, the lights of the plains towns clearly visible below him in the thin, clean air. There was Colorado City to the north, and Colorado Springs east of it, Fountain straight east from where Longarm was, and far to the south, a faint glimmer that probably was distant Pueblo. From this elevation Longarm figured he could see a hundred miles out across the grass, maybe further. Manitou would be there somewhere too, to the north of him, but from the location he’d picked for a campsite it was not visible.
Something else not visible, and something he’d hoped to see, was the rising plumes of smoke that would have marked the Ute encampment.
The Indians just hadn’t gotten this far yet, dammit, although he was pretty sure they normally should have been on Cheyenne or somewhere close to it by this time of year. He couldn’t help but wonder if there had been something that had distracted them from their ordinary pursuits this year. Something like planning the assassination of the special commissioner who was capable of taking away from them the grazing rights on their own land.
For that was certainly the appearance of things. After all, Longarm had with his own eyes seen the cape- shrouded back of the assassin’s head. And the hair he’d seen, long and black and ropy with grease, for damn sure wasn’t any white man’s hair.
He had to admit the possibility that some of the hotter-tempered young warriors among the Utes might have planned it.
They would have known about the commissioner’s arrival. It hadn’t been any secret. The Indian agent would have told them all about it. Would have warned them of the dangers if the commissioner chose to rule against them when he reported back to Congress and the president.
And in truth there wasn’t much reason why the Utes, or for that matter any of the wild tribes, should place unbounded trust in the politicians from back in Washington. The government’s past record wasn’t exactly worth much in the way of bragging rights when it came to upholding land agreements, even those guaranteed by solemn treaty. When there was a hunger for land on the part of citizens—voting citizens—then it was the Indian who generally had to accept the inevitable and settle for less than he’d thought he was getting the first time the cards were dealt. Or the second.
That wasn’t a pleasant thing to contemplate. But it was true. Longarm couldn’t deny it. And the Utes would certainly recognize it as well as anybody. They were not, after all, a stupid people, nor at this point even an uneducated one. Enough of their young men had been sent east to the school at Carlisle, or south to Santa Fe, to study and learn and report back about all the things they’d seen and read. Enough, for that matter, had studied white ways and white books and white politics in their own agency schools so that few of them could nowadays be considered untutored savages. The young in particular were aware of and informed about the world around them, and they would understand the realities of what they faced now that the white livestock growers, cattlemen and sheep men alike, coveted the Ute grazing lands.
Was that enough to cause an explosion of emotions strong enough to carry Billy away?
That was one of the things Longarm had to determine.
That was why he was there now instead of being over in Utah where he’d been assigned.
Longarm pondered and fretted far into the night before he finally closed his eyes and managed some
