robbing folks and wasn't there something about an Indian riding with that gang when they shot up that government office at Fort Collins?'
Longarm shrugged. 'We can't ever get everyone to agree on how many there were in the gang. One witness figures five all told. Another counted six or eight as he bled on the floor. He may have just been excited. Nobody on the streets of Fort Collins seems to have counted shit as the gang left cool as cucumbers and slow as innocent churchgoers. But Tyger and Flanders did have at least one associate called Chief. I'm still working on his full name. The army sure kept casual records as they were chasing Little Crow with such informally recruited columns.'
The somewhat older Minnesota man nodded. 'Don't I know it. I rode with Sibley's Volunteers, and we had to laugh at those ragtag Galvanized Yankees when they rode tear-ass all over after Sioux we'd already shot the liver and lights out of.'
He got up to stride over to a file cabinet as he continued. 'We thought some of the regulars were all right, though. Captain Bedford was in charge of his column's remount and quartermaster detail. Not as picky as some West Pointers when it came to sharing supplies in the field with comrades in arms. Made hisself a heap of friends out this way.'
Longarm nodded and said he'd heard as much. Then, since the son of a bitch was helping himself to a swig from that jug without offering to share, Longarm allowed he had other fish to fry, and got back out to the square before he found himself saying something unprofessional. It wasn't easy, knowing half-ass federal men and selfish county men who openly favored his prime suspect had totally fucked up his original plan of action.
CHAPTER 9
The Granger's Savings & Loans was just off the square, and a handsome young gal peering out through the bars of the teller's cage didn't look scared of strangers as Longarm came in just as they were fixing to shut down for the afternoon. When he flashed his badge and told her what he'd come for, she vanished for a moment, and then unbolted an oaken door from the inside to run him back to the branch manager's private office.
The bank was run by a P.S. Plover, a portly white-haired cuss who rose behind his acre or so of desk in a neighborly way to wave Longarm to another padded chair and offer a cigar from his big brass humidor. 'That was quick,' he said. 'I just posted my letter yesterday and I didn't expect Saint Paul to send anyone this side of Monday.'
Longarm accepted the Havana claro with a nod of thanks, and took his seat before he replied. 'I ain't from the marshal in Saint Paul, Mister Plover. I ride for Marshal Vail out of Denver, and I'm here in response to that purloined treasury note you all detected. You say you've written more since?'
As he lit his fancy smoke the banker explained. 'I'm pretty sure I can name that breed who bought stock off Israel Bedford with one of those hot treasury notes, Marshal Long.'
Longarm modestly replied, 'I'm just a deputy marshal, but lots of folk make that same mistake. Just let me get out my notebook before you name the mysterious Indian for us, hear?'
As Longarm gripped the cigar with his teeth to break out his notebook and a pencil stub, the banker said, 'He's not pure Sioux. Looks like a full-blood, if you ask me, but he claims to be white on his daddy's side and hence eligible to own land, sign contracts without a white sponsor, and in sum, make a perfect pest of himself with his full-blood squaw and platoon of trashy breed brats.'
Longarm poised his pencil and cocked a quizzical brow, so the banker said, 'His name's Chambrun, Wabasha Chambrun, for God's sake. Claims to be the spawn of a French-Canadian mountain man and a squaw of the Osage persuasion.'
Longarm wrote down the name, mildly observing, 'Squaw means woman in most Algonquin dialects. Osage, Santee, and other such Sioux-Hokan speakers say something like Wee-yah for women in general. Meanwhile, whilst they talk much the same lingo, real Osage range farther south than you'd have expected your average Canadian trapper to range in the Shining Times.'
The banker shrugged. 'I have them down as Santee Sioux too. But try to prove it, and even if you could at this late date, who but the Land Office has any say in the matter of their homestead claim?'
He took a drag on his own cigar before adding, 'In any case, the rascal who stuck Israel Bedford with that hot treasury note came in here bold as brass just yesterday to open a savings and checking account with us.'
Longarm grinned wolfishly with the cigar at a jaunty angle and asked, 'With yet more of those treasury notes from the Fort Collins robbery?'
The older man splashed cold water on that. 'Well, not in so many words. He presented four hundred and thirty-seven dollars to Magnusson out front, in bills of smaller denomination, but I had told all my tellers to watch out for prosperous Indians, and so they naturally asked him, in a cool and casual way, if he was by any chance the same Mister Chambrun who'd bought that nice riding stock off Israel Bedford. So guess what he admitted bold as brass!'
Longarm whistled thoughtfully. 'Stupid as hell too, if he knew where that bigger bill came from. Could we have your smart Dealer join in with the rest of this conversation, lest we drop even one detail in the cracks?'
The banker nodded and banged a desk chime near the humidor as he agreed, 'Good thinking. I should have asked her to stay to begin with. She was the one who brought that hundred-dollar treasury note to MY attention when a shopkeeper got it off another depositor last week.'
The willowy-hipped but top-heavy blonde came in to join them with a puzzled smile. Her boss waved her to another seat and explained, 'I want you to tell Deputy Long just what you know about both the Bedford and Chambrun accounts, Vigdis.'
Longarm jotted down 'Vigdis Magnusson,' figuring that might not get you teased as much by the other kids in your school if they'd been stuck with Swedish names as well.
The beautiful blonde explained in her educated but lilting English how they'd already known about the respectable Captain Bedford paying for seed and supplies with that paper a dark sinister stranger had stuck him with. She said she couldn't rightly say why a Polite breed or assimilate had struck her as sinister when he'd come dressed white and with a batch Of innocent paper and Specie.
She said the sinister stranger had given his name as one Wabasha Chambrun, had allowed he and his family were settled in and trying to Prove their own homestead claim up the river a ways, and had said that he'd heard it was safer to keep his money in a bank and pay his bigger bills by check.
The big blonde sounded a mite puzzled as she confided to Longarm, 'I'm not sure why such a simple story from such a Polite homesteader simply asking to open an account with us made me feel all tingly and sneaky. But it did,
