Tatowiyeh Wachipi poured the reheated coffee as she told Longarm in a weary voice, 'There is no real mystery about where I got that money, and other money. From Wowinapa, you call him Mister Thomas Wakeman, and others of our people who now live as if they were Wasichu and, as you suggested, invest allotment funds for some of our people still drawing them from the B.I.A.'
Longarm whistled softly and asked, 'Ain't Thomas Wakeman, also known as Wowinapa, the surviving son of Little Crow?'
Dancing Antelope Gal nodded soberly and replied, 'Just as I am a niece of Wamni Tanka. You called him Big Eagle and sent him off to the state penitentiary as if he'd been a common thief instead of a great war leader!'
Longarm shrugged and said, 'He got off light. The state posted a twenty-five-dollar bounty on Santee scalps and a heap of burnt-out homesteaders got new starts by collecting quite a few. But weren't we talking about Little Crow's grown son, who lives respectable these days?'
She nodded soberly and said, 'As Thomas Wakeman, Wowinapa is now an Episcopal deacon and an official of the Y.M.C.A. Other Santee who never wanted to go to that Crow Bend Agency have done as well. Hear me. Some of them have done very well, very, off the blanket and under a Wasichu haircut.'
Her husband volunteered, 'A gent can get hurt asking a stranger drinking next to him in a saloon how he might have come by that deep tan and sort of high cheekbones.'
Longarm nodded impatiently and said, 'I drink regular with such old boys, and a fellow deputy out of the Denver office makes no bones about his Indian blood. Could we stick to that hundred-dollar treasury note?'
The lady of the house nodded and said, 'A group of Indian or former Indian businessmen have formed a syndicate with the quiet intent of getting back as much of this ancestral Santee land as possible the Wasichu way!'
Her husband chuckled fondly and said, 'We ain't had much luck in trying to hold it Indian-style. No matter how the damned treaty may read, somebody on one damned side or the other always seems to trip over some damned provision. You were the one who just said what happens when Washington gets the excuse to scrap an agreement on the grounds of breach of contract.'
Longarm laughed incredulously and said, 'Let me see if I got this straight. You treacherous Sioux, having failed to lick the U.S. Army and take this continent back by force of arms, mean to take at least some of it back by way of the Federal Homestead Act?'
Chambrun asked smugly, 'Why not? The government lets freed slaves and Swedes who speak even worse English than us file homestead claims before they've bothered applying for citizenship. Where in your Constitution or Good Book does it say a human being born on U.S. soil to families that go way back before Columbus can't call his or her ownself an American farmer, as long as he or she can abide by all your fool rules?'
'And pay all bills in legal tender?' the moon-faced wife of the otherwise normal homestead added as her breed kids snickered from the next room.
Longarm didn't want to compound the confusion by making objections or asking questions that had no direct bearing on that Fort Collins robbery. So he sipped some bitter brew to compose his own thoughts. He knew it could look either way to that kid with the cow, and it really cut no ice whether the Chambruns were using other folks' money or acting as distributors for that mysterious syndicate. So he put down his cup and got out his notebook as he quietly said, 'If I take your word how you came by that recorded hundred-dollar note, I'm still going to have to backtrack it all the way to Fort Collins, or at least to someone criminal for certain. So you'd best give me some other names I can check out. You say these sort of retired Santee have been advancing you homesteading kith and kin the money it takes to make a go of a government claim?'
Chambrun nodded, and might have said something if his moon-faced wife hadn't cut him off with a rattle of Santee Longarm couldn't keep up with.
It was tough enough to follow a Mexican conversation in rapid-fire Spanish when you knew most of the words but didn't think in Spanish. The folks you were trying to listen in on tended to run on to the next paragraph while you were still translating the first in your own head.
It was even worse when you only knew some baby-talk Indian. The Sioux-Hokan dialects weren't as confusing as some others, but that didn't mean the grammar was simple as English. The nouns and verbs changed enough, depending on who was talking about whom, while the singular and plural could stay the same. So while Longarm was still brushing up on the little he knew of their lingo, the Chambruns had come to some agreement on how they meant to talk to him in Wasichu.
It was Chambrun who spoke up, although Longarm suspected that none of these white or breed squawmen had the final say when they'd been funded by the kith and kin of their purebred wives. The burly breed said, 'We're not going to tell you, Deputy Long. Didn't they ever tell you that tale about the golden goose?'
Longarm nodded soberly and replied, 'They did, and I follow your drift. I'd be sore if I'd advanced somebody the money to start a sort of agricultural experiment and they called the law on me too. On the other hand, looking at it from my side of the checkerboard, I've been ordered to trace that treasury note all the way back to the cuss who took it from that government payroll at gunpoint, and so far the trail seems to end at your very doorstep.'
Chambrun shook his head stubbornly and said, 'No, it don't. Israel Bedford is the one who presented a thing to the bank that was listed as stolen. Banker Plover read the number of that particular piece of paper off his official list. Nobody never read shit off nothing when I paid Bedford for that riding stock.'
Longarm frowned and said, 'Hold on. Bedford says the note he took to the bank was the same one he got from you.'
Dancing Antelope Gal cut in. 'We can say we got it from Old Man Coyote as long as we didn't have to prove it. Why do you take the word of Israel Bedford over that of my husband? Because the Wasichu has blue eyes and thus his heart must be pure?'
Longarm wet a finger and drew an invisible chalk mark in the air between them as he said, 'I'll give you that point, even though they say in town that Israel Bedford has a good rep.'
Chambrun grumbled, 'What's wrong with my rep? Has anybody said I steal from my neighbors or fail to pay my bills on time? It's all the fault of that Mark Twain, making Indian Joe the halfbreed the villain. I know what they say about us two-faced snakes in the grass, but was Simon Girty who led all those raids along the old frontier part Indian? Was Benedict Arnold or Judas part Indian?'
Longarm grimaced and said, 'I just said I conceded that point. But they still expect me to make some arrests in connection with that hot paper, old son.'
