supposed to deliver up to Fort Sill! I ain't packing anything like nine hundred dollars, and even if I was I wouldn't owe it to no blamed Comanche! The Comanche or at least their blamed agency already owns all these cows! They've been bought and paid for off our Running X spread in Baylor County, for purely Indian consumption, and whoever heard of the jasper delivering the goods having to pay a blamed delivery fee?'
By this time Godiva Weaver had reined in just a few paces away, looking as if she expected to be introduced to everybody. Longarm could only hope she'd understand his apparent rudeness. The trail boss nodded and ticked his hat brim to the lady. None of the Indians seemed to see anyone there. He knew they weren't trying to be hard-ass. Like most warrior breeds, Comanche weren't supposed to start up with a stranger's woman unless they were fixing to offer plenty of ponies, a good fight, or both for her. Allowing you'd noticed a woman but didn't mean to bid on her was an easy way to get into a fight whether her man had wanted to trade her or not. The notion a stranger would sit still for another man just sort of looking was a deadly insult to all concerned.
Longarm turned to Tuka Wa Pombi and asked if he knew what an I.O.U. was. The Indian said he did but made Longarm explain it twice lest he miss any of the details. Once he'd grasped that the Taibos were ready to part with some of their paper medicine that could somehow be turned into solid silver, he agreed an I.O.U. was better than an all day standoff.
The Running X trail boss insisted, 'I ain't good for any nine hundred dollars worth of credit! I don't make that much in a year, and if I did I wouldn't be able to save it all, the way prices has riz since the war.'
Longarm said, 'Make it out in the name of the original owner of this beef and oblige him to settle up with the new owner, Chief Quanah Parker of the Comanche Nation. Then let the two of them work it out.' The trail boss started to object, blinked, went poker-faced, and then got out a tally pad and a pencil stub as he said, 'I follow your drift.'
So a few minutes later the chuck wagon crew was leading out to the north, followed by the wranglers herding the remuda of spare ponies. Then, a ways back, came the madrina or judas cow, trained to lead the way and naturally followed by the herd, six or eight critters abreast, with the flank and drag riders yipping softly but constantly to keep them moving.
Longarm and the newspaper gal watched a spell, and then Longarm suggested they circle wide and head on up the trail ahead and alone. Godiva had no call to argue. She'd already heard cows moved between eight to sixteen miles a day, and she knew she could get further than twenty miles a day on foot in dry weather and good shoes.
Longarm set a somewhat faster pace, trotting their ponies a few furlongs, walking them about a mile, and letting them water, graze, and rest a good twenty minutes every time the trail crossed a wet draw. There were more of those than usual this far east. Despite all the belly-aching on the part of Mister Lo and the opposition newspapers, the rolling grasslands and timbered watercourses the government had reserved for this patchwork quilt of Indian nations was far from the sterile desert some held it to be. When Godiva commented on some late- blooming wildflowers along the trail, Longarm said, 'The grass grows taller and thicker than out where the buffalo roam much more numerously even in these trying times. After all that blood and war paint wasted a few summers back to save the south herd, and despite all the Kiowa or Comanche dreams of a last big reservation jump, there ain't enough buffalo left to support that many Indians.'
He stared off to the east across the miles of open range as he added, almost to himself, 'Funny how fast the buffalo thinned out. Back home in West-by-God-Virginia the elders told tales of buffalo running wild through the woods and even smashing down log cabins on occasion. The Eastern herds were gone well before my time, of course. But you could still hunt buffalo along the banks of the Mississippi just after the war.'
She laughed in a superior way and declared, 'There's no mystery as to who's hunted the buffalo almost to extinction in the few years since the invention of the repeating rifle! The supply of buffalo robes and bone meal might have lasted indefinitely if white men hadn't been so selfish! Why didn't they just buy them from Indians?'
Longarm got out a fresh cheroot and, seeing she didn't smoke, lit up before he muttered, 'I used to see things that clear and simple. Poets reporting Indians never killed more buffalo than they needed never hunted buffalo with Indians. A pack of contesting riders running a buffalo herd downed every buffalo they could and, wherever possible, ran the whole herd off a cliff. Then they held one swamping supper and stuffed themselves with grease running down their chins till they all got sick. But more than half the meat still spoiled, even after the dogs had eaten a heap. I've heard all those sad stories of white hide skinners leaving buffalo carcasses scattered across the prairies to rot. They're true. A man making as much off one buffalo hide as them cowhands back yonder make after two days in the saddle ain't inclined to conserve wild game.'
He blew smoke out his nostrils and continued. 'Professional hide hunters seldom used repeating rifles, by the way. The tools of their trade were the single-shot Big Fifty with a telescope sight.'
The Eastern girl grimaced and said, 'I stand corrected. The game hogs shot off all those buffalo one at a time. What about the rights of the Indians to their traditional game?'
Longarm shrugged and said, 'Nobody back East had any use for a buffalo hide skinned the traditional Horse Indian way. They sat the dead critter up on its belly, like a big old hound by the fire, and skinned it by cutting along the backbone. They either didn't know how or didn't want to preserve the fur for a lap robe. They held that a rawhide skin, preserved their greasier way with brains and tallow, should have the softer belly skin in the center. For all I know they were right. But no white folks back East would pay any three dollars and fifty cents for such a hide. They wanted 'em dried flat, untreated, with the thickest back fur down the middle. After that, it depends on who you ask about the Horse Indian's traditions.'
He reined in and stood in the stirrups to stare back the way they'd just come as he continued. 'What the Indians call their Shining Times was one of those golden boom times, like the beaver trade or the New England whaling industry before Drake's oil wells back in Penn State. Mister Lo got the horse and fanned out across these plains as a wondrous new species after the white man and the horse got to these shores and multiplied some. They figure 1700 as the earliest date you'd have noticed any substantial numbers of Indians on horseback, and the buffalo were already in trouble. They were butchering 'em fast as they knew how before they had the horse, let alone the guns they admire just as much as we do.'
She insisted, 'There are still far more white men and they have killed far more buffalo.'
He nodded soberly and said, 'That's the way things work. If it was the other way, or if just Mister Lo and his horse and gun had been left to shoot the buffalo off, he'd have managed. Or it would have looked as if he'd managed. A spell back I was riding herd on these ancient bone professors up around the headwaters of the Green River. They told me these swamping giant lizards called dinosaurs had roamed out this way long before either us or any buffalo. And yet there they all lay, dead for a coon's age. So what do you reckon wiped them out?'
Godiva laughed incredulously and demanded, 'How should I know? Some ancient species of animals have simply gone extinct. Everybody knows that.'
Longarm settled back in his saddle as he replied, 'I know mankind has been trying to wipe out the coyote, the
