magic?'
Longarm nodded and said, 'Different nations call it puha, wakan, matu, and so on, but we translate it as medicine because that's about as close as we can get to a sort of mishmash of cure-all and luck on demand. Decent Indians ain't supposed to use it to hurt instead of help. But I reckon a warrior with strong medicine guiding his arrows could be said to be hexing the poor cuss he's aiming at. Comanche and other Ho speakers such as Hopi or Shoshoni hate what we'd call witchcraft and can't abide it in a medicine man. But these Kiowa have a rep for admiring a good malediction chanted in unison. So I reckon you might call a spiteful cuss like Pawkigoopy as much a sorcerer as a medicine man.'
That kid suddenly popped through the entry with the saddlebags Matty had said Longarm wanted. As Longarm handed over a couple of quarters, quantity being more impressive than face value, Matty asked him about that saddle gun. The kid said he'd only found their riding and packsaddles in a nearby tipi. He didn't know who had the Winchester Yellowboy right now. He said he hadn't tried to locate a big gray gelding because the night watch along the pony line whipped at kids and dogs with knotted thongs.
As the half-naked kid hunkered nearby to watch with interest, Longarm got out some canned provisions and began to open them with his pocket knife, explaining, 'I brought along canned beans and tomato preserves because you can eat 'em warm or cold.'
He opened an extra can of the sweetish tomato preserves so the helpful Kiowa kid could have some as well. A man just never knew when he might need a pal in such uncertain surroundings.
They consumed the beans, followed by the grease-cutting preserves, by handing the cans around and just slurping good.
Minerva said the lingering whiffs of linseed oil and stale greasy tallow didn't make her stomach churn as much now that she'd put something in it.
The Kiowa kid said his name was Pito, and asked if he could have the empty tin cans. Longarm said he could, even though Matty warned him he was being taken. Pito lit out, richer by fifty-five cents and some raw material for stamped conchos, with his already dirty face smeared with tomato preserves.
He hadn't been gone long when a couple of shy, or scared-looking, Kiowa gals came in with an iron pot and some trading post china bowls. As they dished out generous helpings of a sort of cracked corn and venison stew, Matty told Longarm and Minerva the Kiowa gals apologized for such a late supper. They said they'd had to start from scratch. Minerva murmured, 'The poor things probably didn't eat that well themselves this evening. It smells delicious. I didn't know Plains Indians cooked with garlic.'
Longarm had never heard they did. He raised the bowl he'd been served to his nose, sniffed hard, and quietly warned in English not to dig in just yet.
He waited until the two women had backed out before he grabbed the bowl from Matty's greedy young hands and snapped, 'Spit that out, in the fire, so's there won't be any on view later.'
The kid did as she was told but demanded, as her spat-out stew sizzled really strong fumes of what seemed to be garlic flavoring, what on earth was he fussing about.
The white gal across from Longarm said, 'It smells delicious.'
Longarm said, 'It's supposed to. But that ain't garlic your keen sniffer picked out of the stronger flavorings, Miss Minerva. Kiowa use garlic about as often as Eye-talians cook with buffalo berries. But they do sell flypaper at most trading posts, and the arsenic you can boil out of the stick-em does smell more like garlic than anything any honest Kiowa cook would be stirring in!' The two gals stared thunderstruck at one another. Then Minerva gasped, 'We have to make a run for it before they come back and find us alive! How long do you think we have, Custis?'
Longarm began to dig a hole in the sand with his pocket knife as he said, 'Indefinitely. I doubt the one who's out to poison us will be anywhere near come morning. He, she, or it will be down at the far end of camp, waiting to hear from the others.'
He saw they both looked scared as hell. So as he began to pour poisoned stew into the hole he soothed, 'Don't you ladies see the bright side yet? If the elders wanted us dead they'd just have us taken out a ways and shot. So I'm betting someone who failed to get his own way at that council decided to murder us on his own.'
Matty asked, 'What if you're betting wrong?'
To which he could only reply in a conversational tone, 'Oh, in that case we're as good as dead. I can't leave without the two of you, and I'll be switched with snakes if I can see a way for the three of us to slip out of camp and get far enough to matter.'
Matty said, 'Hear me, I have played nanipka with both Comanche and Kiowa and I have seldom been caught!'
Minerva murmured wistfully, 'She means hide-and-go-seek.'
Longarm said, 'I know what she means, and seldom ain't enough when you're playing with bigger boys for keeps.'
Matty insisted she could sneak really swell.
Minerva took a deep breath, sat up straighter, and told Longarm, 'The two of you could probably make it without me. There's no sense in all three of us dying and... since I'm done for anyway...'
Longarm snorted, 'Aw, stop carrying on like a gut-shot swan and pay more attention when someone's talking sense to you. When I allowed I could be wrong about that bet, I wasn't saying it wasn't worth our blowing on the dice. There's a better than fifty-fifty chance if we sit tight. We're almost certain to be tracked down and killed if we try to make Fort Sill or anywhere else on foot.'
Minerva Cranston still looked pale as a ghost as she tried to smile and managed, 'Oh, in that case maybe we'd better just sit tight.'
So that was what they tried their best to do. It wasn't easy.
CHAPTER 13
The Old Farmer's Almanac said summer nights averaged ten hours from dusk to dawn at that latitude. It only felt like a few thousand years when a body could neither sleep nor read in bed. They had no beds, and about a hundred years into the night that fire had died out and it was black as a bitch in there.
