He figured she was close to his own age, and he knew he'd been all over. So instead of asking her where she came from as they shook hands, he asked how come she wanted to go visit those Quill Kiowa. He felt he had to warn both ladies of the possible danger, pointing out he was only out to question the Kiowa about hostile Kiowa because he'd run into some.
He felt no call to mention other ladies once he'd told them more than one Black Legging had gone down.
Little Matawnkiha was already behind a curtain, changing into her own riding duds, as Minerva Cranston went into a dry dissertation on the book she was writing about Indians.
Longarm didn't care. He didn't cotton to the notion of riding into a possibly hostile camp with one female to worry about, let alone two! But since it seemed the only way he might get a thing out of the leader of the Black Leggings Lodge, all he could do was ask Sergeant Tikano about the internal riding stock this loco expedition was going to require.
CHAPTER 12
Ouachita, Washita, and Wichita were just different spellings for a nation that wasn't there anymore. Early white travelers had met up with them as tattood hoe farmers growing corn, beans, squash, and such on prairie bottomlands from the Arkansas River to the Red. Then less-settled wanderers had learned to chase buffalo, and everybody else, on horseback. So the surviving Wichita had run off to join their much more warlike Pawnee cousins up Nebraska way, where they'd become the Pawnee Picts, leaving a heap of handy place names for rivers, towns, and such where they'd lived much earlier.
The Wichita Mountains northwest of Fort Sill would have only been hardwood-timbered rises if they hadn't been surrounded by so much flatter prairie. But they offered summer shade and winter windbreaks at a fair distance from the well-meaning Kiowa agents up around Akota, and so Longarm wasn't surprised to see tipi smoke rising against the golden western sky as he, the two gals, and five ponies topped another grassy rise after one tedious afternoon in the saddle.
Little Matty, as both whites had taken to calling her, had turned out more childlike and bossy than expected. Minerva Cranston spoke no Kiowa, nor more than a few basic words of Comanche-Ho. So Longarm was able to follow the nasty comments and snide suggestions Matty was offering as the two of them rode a few lengths behind him. He could tell the prim-faced schoolmarm didn't want to be teased like that. So he refrained from telling either just how safe they were from a full-grown man, for Pete's sake.
As they got within a tough rifle shot of the ring of tipis on a rise, an old maniac in a crow feather cloak with his face painted red and black came tearing toward them on foot, followed by a mess of kids and dogs, to shake a turtle-shell rattle at them and sound off like a jackrabbit caught in a bobwire fence.
Matty heeled her pony up beside Longarm's army gray and calmly told him, 'That's Pawkigoopy. He's telling us we'll all be struck down by his medicine and eaten by owls if we don't turn back.'
She shouted at the crazy old coot in Kiowa, and as if some puppet master had quit jerking his strings, Pawkigoopy stopped shaking his rattle at them and asked in a conversational tone what his daughter wanted and why she was riding with enemies.
It took Matty a few minutes to explain all that to Longarm and Minerva Cranston, of course. First she told the medicine man what all of them were doing there, and then she told her white companions what he'd said after he'd said to follow him on in.
They did. The dogs snarled mean as hell and the kids said mean things as they approached the tipi ring, but nobody shot or threw a thing at them. That was how sore this particular band seemed to be.
Artists who sketched Indian villages for Currier & Ives or Street & Smith tended to picture them the way white folks might have pitched a circle of tents, with all the entryways facing inward around that big central bonfire. But that wasn't the way most Indians set things up when it was up to them.
To begin with, unless they were holding a ceremony or torturing captives, they had no call to put all that fuel and effort into any central fire at all. You wanted a thrifty fire of your own inside your tipi when it was cold, or just outside it when you were cooking a meal in warm weather.
Then you wanted your entryway facing east to catch the dawn sunlight and screen the interior from the hot afternoon sun, no matter where you'd pitched your tipi poles in the defensive circle. As they rode in he saw some of the Kiowa had lifted the south-facing rims of their tipi covers clear of the grass to suck in air at ground level and exhaust heat out the top, between the smoke.
There were eighteen such lodges in the ring, with the one at the twelve o'clock position to the north a tad bigger and painted in black and yellow tiger stripes on its southern half. As the medicine man told them to rein in, Longarm saw that the northern half of the big tipi was covered with coup signs, or what might have passed for that Egyptian picture writing. He'd already known from those horizontal stripes that something or somebody with a heap of medicine would be waiting for them inside.
They dismounted. Some kids in their teens came over to take charge of all five ponies, saddle or pack. Then an imposing figure in a full war bonnet and Hudson Bay blanket came out of the tiger-striped tipi to stare at them as if he was rehearsing for a career in front of cigar stores. It wasn't true that only blue eyes could stare cold as ice. The small sloe eyes staring out of that dried-apple face at Longarm looked as friendly as a hangman fixing to pull the lever.
Matty said that was Necomi, and started to introduce them to one another in Kiowa. But then the old chief snorted in disgust, and his English was just fine when he said, 'Hear me, I am Necomi. I count coup for every eagle feather in this bonnet, and I will not have my words spoken to any damn enemy by any woman! Not even an old one like this other I find too skinny to screw!'
Longarm said, 'Watch your mouth, Chief. These ladies are with me and mayhaps I count some coup as well.'
Necomi stared long and hard before he said, 'I know who you are. They told us you were coming, Longarm. Are you threatening me here in my own camp?'
Longarm calmly replied, 'Ain't sure. Are you threatening me?'
The old Kiowa almost smiled. He managed not to, and said, 'They told me you were crazy. Come inside while I decide whether I want to smoke with you or let the army and our agents wonder forever what could have happened to the three of YOU.' He ducked inside. Longarm shrugged and started to follow the hospitable son of a bitch as, behind him, he heard Matty warn the schoolmarm, 'No! That is a warrior society lodge and we are women!'
As the Kiowa kid had sounded mighty demanding, Longarm decided the two gals would be all right for
