'Making her own maps?' the breed gal suggested innocently.
Longarm hugged her closer and said, 'Bless you, my child, and as soon as I can get it up again I aim to kiss you. But let me have my arm back right now. I need both hands to investigate this further.'
She sat up long enough for him to haul that arm out from behind her bare shoulders, but as she grasped what he was doing she protested, 'Don't get that paper all dirty! Miss Jasmine will be angry, angry!'
Longarm went right on rubbing tobacco ash all over the survey map with gentle fingertips as he said soothingly, 'It'll all brush away in the end. In the meantime this is an old trick we use when we find paper somebody's written or traced something else on top of.'
As the pretty breed watched in wonder, the tobacco ash, blacker where it stuck in the grooves left in the thick paper by a heavier hand wielding something sharp, proceeded to draw lines across parts of Brown County where no government surveyor ever had. Indians made pretty fair maps on their own. So even though she didn't know how to read or write, Mato Takoza was able to follow the drift of the missing Bee Witch when the hitherto invisible line reached the Minnesota the two of them had just been swimming in.
'That line crosses the river just above the driftwood jam this raft is moored below!' she decided.
Longarm soberly replied, 'I noticed. Whether your Bee Witch had another wagon trace or a railroad in mind, she figured it ought to cross the river up by the Chambrun place.'
He took a drag on the cheroot to produce more ash before he went on. 'I'd have to agree with her if somebody asked me to survey yet another trestle site. These contour lines show higher ground to either side of the river, meaning a mid-stream span high enough for the bitty steamboats up this way to sneak their stacks under.'
He rubbed in more ash as he mused, 'Any engineer worth his salt could figure that much out in bed with his true love and this public knowledge. Did your Miss Jasmine ever drill holes in the ground as she barged her beehives up and down the banks?'
Mota Takoza started to say no. Then she thought and decided, 'Hear me, it would be rude to follow anyone into the trees when they took along a shovel and a mail-order catalogue. Everyone digs at least a little hole to squat over if they intend to camp more than a night in the same spot.'
'Unless they crap in a handy river,' Longarm objected. He didn't ask how often she'd done that. Her sudden silence spoke louder than words. He just said, 'Either way, you wouldn't have to dig far to be sure there's as much granite under the Chambrun claim as more local folks keep saying. When you plant foundations for a trestle you want to make sure they don't shift. Foundations planted in granite bedrock ain't about to shift, even on the flood plain of a somewhat whimsical river, so, yep, Chambrun knew what he was about when he up and claimed that high, dry quarter section. Or should I say his Santee wife and her secret pals picked it for him? Did your Miss Jasmine ever go over to borrow a cup of sugar or mayhaps sell a jar of honey at the Chambrun place, kitten?'
Mato Takoza thought before she said, 'Not while I was with her. I told you I don't know that Tatowiyeh Wachipi who thinks she's such an important person. What are you afraid the Chambruns might have done to Miss Jasmine?'
Longarm frowned thoughtfully and replied, 'Don't know and, damn it, I wish there wasn't so much stray sign across the trail Billy Vail sent me over this way to follow. But if what I'm commencing to suspect about a harmless colored crazy lady pans out, the Chambruns would be the last ones along this river to want her harmed or hampered in any way.'
She naturally wanted to know more. So Longarm explained how easy it had been for Miss Harriet Tubman, a lady of color, to pass herself as a silly old Negro mammy searching for her missing owners like the faithful darky of Dixie mythology, while acting as one of Allan Pinkerton's top Secret Service agents behind Confederate lines. He said, 'The South was too proud to use colored spies. So they never looked twice at a dumb darky, when they might have asked what a white person they didn't know was doing in that particular place at that late hour. They say Harriet Tubman talked her way past a reb patrol close to Robert E. Lee's headquarters late one night by allowing she was searching for mushrooms. Every country boy in that patrol knew it was the wrong time of the year for field mushrooms, but they figured a dumb old nigger woman wouldn't know as much as them.'
'I told you Mother and me played the long joke on Wasichu women to get work,' the pretty breed replied. Then she asked, 'What do you think Miss Jasmine was trying to hide by pretending to be witko?'
Longarm shrugged his bare shoulders and said, 'Who she was working for, most likely. Nobody planning to run another rail line across the Minnesota would want it to get out ahead of time. It takes a year or more just to plan your route, grease the right political palms, and get title to the right-of-way you finally decide on. Railroads and even wagon routes have had to swing wide over greedy folks holding out for more money than a detour might be worth. Folks go witko, building tipi tankas in the sky, when they consider all that money they'll wind up with if only they can hang tougher than the rich folks trying to buy 'em out. So I doubt anyone in these parts knew, any better than you, what the so-called Bee Witch was really up to.'
He took another drag on their shared cheroot, but began to brush the survey chart clean as he added, 'Might as well keep her secret for her. It's easier to see now how come she took so much trouble to keep strangers well clear of this raft.'
As if to prove his point they heard a cascade of tinny clankings, inspiring Longarm to say, 'What the hell?'
His bed companion murmured, 'That's how I knew you were moving along the bank before. Miss Jasmine showed me how. You tie one end of a dark fishing line to a sapling someone moving along the trail has to push aside. Then you run it, tautly, through a hole in the work-room wall, and hang some tomato cans up inside to-'
'Never mind the details! Let's worry about who in thunder it might be at this owlhooting hour!' Longarm trimmed the lamp to plunge the interior into darkness as he rolled off the bed to silently slip into the other bedroom for his Winchester. She followed close, whispering, 'Nobody ever comes this late. Nobody!'
As if to prove her a liar for certain, somebody yelled in the near distance, and Longarm was glad they'd hauled that plank in. The male voice hailed them again in English, and when nobody answered he switched to Santee. Longarm was able to follow the coldly correct 'Hokahey!' meaning something like 'Get the lead out, damn it!' But then Mato Takoza went outside, and she and the strange Indian lost him as they rattled back and forth in their usual mixture of soft pleasant vowels and strangled or hissed consonants. Longarm, crouching behind her, had no way of controlling the parley, and could only hope Mato Takoza knew what she was doing as she seemed to be talking sweetly to the son of a bitch. Then, as yet another voice chimed in ashore, it seemed there were at least two sons of bitches!
Longarm followed just enough to figure she was inviting them to come aboard for coffee and cake, Indians having the same notions as other country folks when it came to offering leastways. But even as he hunkered low with his Winchester, Longarm heard one of the men on shore call the pretty little thing his Unshi, or grandmother,
