with repeating rifles and breech-loading field guns. There was Star Chief Miles from Fort Dodge. Three Fingers Mackenzie marched up from Fort Concho with many soldiers. Many. Yellow Leaf Chief Price came at us out of New Mexico. Eagle Chiefs Davidson and Buell marched whole regiments at us out of Fort Sill and Fort Richardson. And you ask me what happened to one man?'
He pointed at an unpainted but neatly kept cabin and said, 'That is where we are going. Hear me, those blue sleeves swarmed over us like red ants over a dead rabbit. They burned our lodges and destroyed all our winter food. They rounded up most of our ponies and then they shot them, shot them, until even the buzzards were too sick of dead meat to eat any more. Wherever we tried to make a stand they threw canister and exploding shells into us. Those of us who lived were the ones who ran away. Hear me, I admit this. We ran like rabbits run from Old Coyote, for the same reasons. It was Quanah who led us from the death trap of Palo Duro and made us feel like men again because he rode into Fort Sill ahead of us and told the blue sleeves we would right on forever if they didn't treat us right!'
That wasn't the way Longarm had heard it. But he didn't argue the point. It was just as likely the newspaper accounts of a discouraged and starving Comanche chief, pleading for his life and something to eat as they held him and his kin in the Fort Sill guardhouse for a spell, were a slight exaggeration as well. For either way, Quanah had gotten better terms for his followers, and himself, than many another hostile had managed in as tight a spot.
The harder row to hoe was going to be getting both sides to stick to them. Even the older kids had to have awful memories of blood and slaughter followed by sheer starvation on the run. Then there were all those white folks with bitter memories of Comanche war whoops and mutilated kith and kin. Sergeant Tikano broke in on his thoughts by calling out to the house as they crossed the swept dirt yard. An older gal in red Mother Hubbard, who might have been leaner and prettier sometime back, popped out the front door like a big old cuckoo-clock bird to fuss at them in their own chirpy lingo. The Indian lawman replied in English, 'I think we should all speak Saltu, Umbea Aho. This is a friend of Quanah's. We call him Saltu Ka Saltu in our own tongue and Longarm in his own. We know your man is with Quanah to help him sell grazing rights. For some reason older pure-bloods make our old enemies scowl. We've come to talk to you about your daughter, Matty. Longarm has to ask old Necomi questions, and we thought Matty could help because she speaks Kiowa as well as Saltu.'
The motherly Aho gasped, 'My Matawnkiha is only Sixteen summers grown! She has been initiated into the Real Women's Lodge, but she has never lain with a man and Necomi's summer camp is far, very far. How can you expect a mother to send her only daughter off with this big Saltu? I don't care how you or Quanah feel about him. My Matawnkiha is too young for him!' As if to prove her point, they were joined in the dirt yard by a petite belle of any harvest dance, and as soon as she giggled up at him, Longarm had to concede her mother had a point. Matawnkiha or Matty Gordon looked more like a lovely twelve-year-old than the sixteen years she doubtless bragged upon. Her mixture of races made her look a tad more Border Mexican than Quill Indian. She had her shiny black hair bound with red ribbon and flung over one bare shoulder. The rest of her petite body was covered, sort of, by thin white flour sacking, stitched together as a shin-length summer shift and cinched around her tiny waist by a beadwork belt. Longarm knew that the beadwork was Kiowa because it tried for a floral design on that dark background. Comanche beadwork was almost always angular and abstract, to a stranger's eyes, against a white background.
But the kid's moccasins were traditional Comanche, too big for her tiny feet, with a bundle of buckskin thongs sprouting from the heels where a white rider might wear spurs.
Longarm knew she wasn't a Comanche raider out to blur his own trail by dragging thongs across his footprints. So it was safe to assume the little gal had her daddy's old slippers on.
Matawnkiha had obviously heard part of the conversation before coming out to join it. You could hear the pleading tone in her voice as she spoke to her mother in what had to be Kiowa. Longarm could pick up on a few words of the far-flung Uto-Aztec dialects such as Comanche, Shoshoni, or Ute. But it was small wonder the Kiowa had invented the sign lingo of the plains nations. Some said it was related to one of the several Pueblo dialects. But otherwise Kiowa seemed to be orphans.
Whether to be polite or just avoid cussing in Kiowa, the outraged Aho Gordon wailed in English, 'Hear me! I never raised you to be just another play for the Taibo! Is that what you want? Is that why your father and I ate lean cow meat so you could go to that school and learn to read and write?'
Longarm started to assure the lady he wasn't a damned cradle-snatcher. But little Matawnkiha showed she'd been paying attention in class by bursting out in Kiowa some more, in a way that made her worried mother's jaw drop, even as you cou d see some of her resolve fading. Longarm quietly asked Sergeant Tikano what was going on. The Indian muttered, 'How should I know? I told you why you'd need someone like her to get through to old Necomi. Why do you Saltu think all of us speak one tongue grunting like pigs?'
The younger Indian girl kicked off her dad's floppy moccasins and scampered off across the yard barefooted as her mother turned to them and said, 'She has gone to see if the agency school teacher, Minerva Cranston, wants to ride with YOU.'
Longarm frowned uncertainly and asked, 'You have an agency schoolmarm who speaks Kiowa, ma'am?'
The erstwhile Kiowa woman snorted, 'Of course not. She is Saltu. But my daughter and the other young people say she is very strict when school is open during the cooler moons. She will not allow the young men to pinch the girls or pull their hair, even when they laugh about it. So I don't think Minerva Cranston would let you screw Matawnkiha when the three of you made camp so far from me. I think we should go inside and have some coffee and fresh pastry now. My husband's father was a Saltu trader, and I only feel cross with Saltu who want to screw my daughter. Now that I don't think you can, I don't want to stab either one of you anymore.'
She proved her good intent by taking them inside, seating them both at a table near her kitchen range, and serving huge mugs of coffee and big servings of what seemed to be pies stuffed with blackberries imbedded in beef hash. Sergeant Tikano was watching to see what Longarm would do about that. But Longarm had been invited inside by Horse Indians before, and decided their home cooking was best described as unusual instead of downright awful.
Her coffee was good. Longarm liked his coffee black. So that got around the common Indian notion that white flour was better than cream and sugar in their coffee. For that was really an acquired taste.
By the time they'd polished off the greasy pie and second cups of coffee the daughter of the house was back with a taller, far thinner, and far more severe-looking white gal. She didn't seem to find Longarm all that delightful either.
Minerva Cranston wore her mouse-colored hair in a bun. Her pale face was not really ugly but sort of plain. The wire-rimmed specs she had on sort of hid her best feature, a pair of intelligent-looking gray eyes. Longarm figured she'd been fixing to go riding. She'd put on a practical split skirt of suede leather and a hickory work shirt a size too big to tell a man what sort of tits she might have.
Her Spanish hat hung down her back on a braided thong around her slender throat. Her Justin boots were cut sort of Border Mexican as well. That didn't mean she couldn't be fresh from the East. Thanks to Ned Buntline's dime novels, everybody knew, or thought they knew, the way folks were supposed to dress out this way.
