flipped it open with a practiced motion to display his federal badge and personal identification. He gallantly suggested, 'Nobody would ever buy a lady as young as yourself for the Widow of Windsor, ma'am.'
He hadn't lied. He doubted she could be past fifty, and he could see she'd been a real beauty in her day. She still had most of her teeth, and if the hair peeking out from under that sun-bonnet was a mite streaked with gray, it was still thick and healthy-looking. Gals who shaded their features with sun-bonnets didn't prune up as fast in prairie country. So she looked downright comely when she smiled across the fence at him and said, 'Well, I never. You come around to the front and let me coffee and cake you whilst you tell me all about it! Were you chasing somebody when I saw you leap from that speeding train, Custis? I didn't see anyone but you bearing down on me at breakneck speed, but then, I was cultivating my cabbages with this high fence between US.'
'I wasn't chasing nobody, ma'am,' he said, only hesitating a moment before he added, 'I'll surely take you up on your kind offer. For anybody out to chase me round the depot figures to get discouraged when I don't get off that train and they don't see me anywhere downtown for a spell.'
That would have roused most anyone's curiosity, and it turned out she was a woman who'd had few men to talk to since she'd wound up a widow three summers back. So he told her more or less why he was on the outskirts of her town, leaving out a few details. It was best to leave a certain amount of guilty knowledge to guilty folk, and far as Longarm knew, nobody in New Ulm was supposed to know about serial numbers one could backtrack to a payroll robbery but the bankers and the local lawmen who'd contacted Billy Vail about that treasury note. With any luck, the crooks who'd run off with them still didn't know the dead paymaster had listed the numbers on those larger notes. For nobody but a total asshole, or an innocent man, would try to spend any paper as hot as that.
His widowed hostess had shucked her sun-bonnet in the shade of her kitchen as she'd sat Longarm at a pine table and rustled some coffee and cake for the both of them. Her comfortably lived-in face looked softer once out of the harsher sunlight, and light brown hair streaked with gray looked sort of nice pinned up atop her fine-boned skull that way. She said the raisin cake she'd baked herself was an old Swedish recipe, and he wasn't surprised, since her name was Ilsa Pedersson nee Syse. She and her late husband had come to America from the Norwegian province of Sweden as kids, before Lincoln's Homestead Act cluttered up these parts with land-hungry Scandinavian folk. So that likely accounted for her natural English, although she confessed she could still talk her own sort of Swedish if push came to shove. She said most of the new American landowners were proud to be American now, and only talked their native languages during old-country festivals and such. She seemed surprised he already knew about Swedish children expecting a lady in a long white nightgown, with candles lit atop her head at Christmas instead of Santa Claus. Ilsa said it had to be fascinating to ride all over the country, meeting all sorts of folks and being allowed to question them without being called a nosy snoop.
He chuckled down at his coffee mug and confided, 'I do get to ask about most anything I find interesting, Miss Ilsa. But seeing you know more folks around here than me, and couldn't be expected in advance to lie to the law, I've good reasons for asking if you've ever heard anything about a local homesteader called Israel Bedford.'
The friendly old Swedish lady nodded, smiling. 'Of course I recall Captain Bedford from that dreadful Sioux uprising during the war! You may have seen that famous photograph they took of all us women and children huddled together on a prairie rise, with the army guarding us, after Little Crow burned most of New Ulm and killed so many!'
Longarm nodded. 'I've seen it. Some of you ladies looked sort of pretty despite your windblown and dusty appearances. But you all look sort of worried as well, and there's one pretty gal near the front, staring into the camera in sheer terror, as if it was a ghost.'
The graying brown-haired woman across the table nodded gravely and said, 'She might have been seeing ghosts. I know the face in the photograph you mean, albeit I've forgotten her name and exactly who in her family they killed. I was more fortunate. My man was riding with Sibley's Volunteers and we had no children. But the Sioux did some dreadful things to the young boy we had working in our dry-goods store at the time. They say they shoved wads of straw down the throat of one trading-post employee to swell his stomach like a balloon until it burst!'
Longarm nodded gravely and explained, 'Trader named Andrew Myrick, in charge of the trading post at Redwood. It was Indians as told me about it. Seems that during a hungry stretch before the fighting got started, some starving Santee begged Myrick for food and he suggested they eat all the grass they liked.'
He finished his coffee and dryly added, 'Indians are inclined to possess sardonic notions of humor, as well as long memories.'
She refilled his mug from her pot. 'Pooh, neither me nor mine around New Ulm ever did anything to harm those Sioux. So why did they ride right through town, howling like wolves as they murdered, burned, and looted!'
Longarm suggested, 'They were vexed with the Wasichu, ma'am. That's what they call us white folk, Wasichu. The Third Colorado figured a Cheyenne was a Cheyenne too, when they rode through that Indian camp along Sand Creek, howling like wolves as they murdered, looted, and burned. It's a mistake to consider such clashes to be melodrama, ma'am. Our relations with Mister Lo, The Poor Indian, make more sense as tragedy, with neither side all right or wrong, and we were talking about Israel Bedford, right?'
She shrugged her shoulders, perking up the small firm breasts he could just make out under her pleated calico in a surprising girlish way, as she told him flatly, 'Captain Bedford was a kindly as well as gallant officer during the war. There was more to assisting hungry and homeless survivors than just chasing Indians away. I think he was in charge of the spare horses. I know he was in a position to issue supplies without the usual fuss and feathers others put us through.'
She served him another slice of cake, unasked, as she went on to say, 'My late husband and I were at the dance they staged to welcome the captain and his bride when they came back to Brown County about eight or ten years after the war. Life in the peacetime army hadn't agreed with an ambitious man and a farm-bred wife. So nobody was surprised when they bought the Bergen homestead and commenced to raise barley, ponies, and kids. Two girls and a boy, the last I heard, with another one on the way.'
'Back up a ways and let's go over them buying a homestead claim, ma'am?'
She shrugged again, just as perky, and explained. 'With money he'd saved up as a soldier, I suppose, Old Lars Bergen had proven his original claim and so the land was his to farm, let, or sell. They say the old man lost interest in his quarter section after losing one son in the war, another to prairie lightning, and then his wife coming down with the cholera and dying on him so nasty.'
She grimaced, made a brushing motion, and continued in a brighter tone. 'Suffice it to say the old Bergen place is a lot more cheerful these days. The Bedfords are good neighbors, even if they didn't come from the same old country. I still do business in town, so I can tell you their credit is good. Captain Bedford pays all his bills when due.'
'That's what I heard,' said Longarm thoughtfully. He had no call to tell her what he meant to ask at the bank. But she'd said at the start he looked sort of travel-stained, and he'd scare most bankers by striding in with a Winchester as well as a strange face. So he told her, 'I sure could use some place to store my saddle gun for a spell, and you say you still have that dry-goods store in town, ma'am?'
