Unless you had the element of surprise riding with you, it could be injurious to one's health to blindly charge a tipi ring.
For some would be empty, while others might be hornet's nests of dug-in riflemen. Horse Indians fought differently, but that wasn't to say they fought stupidly, or didn't learn new tricks along the way. Dull Knife's band had given the army a scare, despite the hopeless odds, when troopers inspecting the Cheyenne's last encampment near White River found more than one deep pit inside a tipi with its cover rolled up a few inches all around to offer a ground-level field of fire.
Dull Knife had only given in because he was low on food, blankets, and ammunition, as well as smart. Army pals had told Longarm some of the more recent hostiles had learned to reload their brass cartridges with home- brew black powder and fashion fresh slugs from hammered telegraph wire. They used mushed-up match heads for cartridge caps. The War Department had wanted to forbid the sale of kitchen matchesin trading posts, until cooler heads had pointed out how many Indians who didn't know that trick would surely get matches from the settlers all around them, even as they pondered why the army found this so important.
A brace of Kiowa kids came around the bend on foot, leading Gray Skies and the other four ponies. So Longarm yelled for the two tardy gals to get their tardy rumps out there, and once they had, he soon had the three of them riding east at an easy lope.
He reined in on a rise a quarter mile out and made sure nobody was right on their tail. Then he told his two female companions to stick tight and follow his lead.
They did as he whirled Gray Skies and plunged down the far slope, to where the pony trail crossed a barely wet and braided sandy rill along the bottom of the draw. He warned them not to cut any corners with their own hooves as he headed Gray Skies upstream in the fetlock-deep but patiently running water. Matty seemed to follow his drift, but Minerva called forward, 'Where are we going, Custis? I thought we were headed back to Quanah's agency over that way!'
Longarm called back, 'Let's hope everyone else thinks we are too. We'd never make it that far across open prairie with anyone serious on our trail. So we'd best head up into the woody Wichitas and see if we can't make Fort Sill the long way round instead.'
Matty whooped, 'I like to shop at Fort Sill. They have ribbons of different colors than our Indian trader sells, and red licorice whips and ladies' fashion magazines. Why don't they sell fashion magazines at our trading post, Custis? Don't they want us to be fashionable?'
He figured she might be on to something, but he said he just didn't know. As they rode up the streamlet, chokecherry and box elder pressed in more densely from either side. So by the time they came to where the water sprang from the sandy head of the draw, they were out of sight of the trail they'd forsaken. Longarm led the way around some bow-wood, or Osage orange, and through some cottonwoods to ride up as steep a slope as they could manage, hoping nobody would scout for any sign where nobody with a lick of sense would force his mount to go.
When they cut a more sensible deer trail cutting northeast at a gentler angle, Longarm decided to follow it. If anyone was slick enough to figure where they might be headed, they wanted their mounts in shape for a running gunfight down the slope. Longarm studied on that as he led the way single file. He had his Winchester Yellowboy again to back his six-gun and derringer. Matty had insisted on packing a nickel-plated Harrington & Richardson.32-18 in a saddlebag as if she might be fixing to start off a pony race on demand. Minerva hadn't brought any firearms at all. When asked, she'd allowed nobody had ever shown her how to fire a gun. So that was another way she'd turned out different from that newspaper gal, Godiva Weaver, cuss the two of them combined.
They had to rest and water their ponies more than once, working up through the scrubby timber or high chaparral, depending on what was rooted where on the rocky slopes. Longarm was paying attention to the sky, knowing how easy it was to get turned around in hills that hadn't read the same large-scale map. So it was little Matty, staring back the way they'd come, who called out, 'Down in those blackjack oaks, past that outcrop we passed half an hour ago!'
Longarm stared long and hard before he made out brownish movement way down yonder. He nodded but said, 'Anyone following this trail could have as innocent a reason. But why don't we give them a chance to prove they ain't dogging us in particular?'
They didn't know what he meant, so he led them a good way along the apparent natural trail along the crest of a side ridge that only groped its way to a wooded knoll that overlooked the real trail from two furlongs north and forty feet higher. As they neared the sort of island in the sky, he reined in and dismounted, telling them to do the same as he explained, 'The winds up here have tangled those blackjacks, and better yet, there's an undertangle of hellish bow-wood, if only we can get these ponies through it.'
They could, but it wasn't easy, even with little Matty helping. Being a Horse Indian raised in bow-wood country, she knew how to deal with the ornery natural bobwire.
Back East, where they called it Osage orange, bow-wood growing in a park like some floral pet could stand on one trunk about the size and shape of a crab apple, although thorny as a rosebush and bearing a sort of mock orange hard as wood. But out here where it had to fight a more ferocious climate for its life, the results were wilder. Bow-wood branches coppiced, meaning you got two or three new thorny sprouts wherever you busted off or simply peeled some bark off a wind-whipped limb. The Indians had cut stouter branches to make a heap of short tough bows of the springy wood before they'd switched to more lethal firearms. Early settlers had planted and trimmed bow-wood into buffalo-proof hedgerows before both the buffalo and slower-growing fencing had given way to bobwire. Up here on the knoll the wickedly thorned and wind-pruned greenery had taken the time to grow. So with Matty holding some branches back, and him cutting a few more, they soon had themselves and their ponies totted up inside what the surprised Minerva described as a natural bower.
That was what she said you called a shaded clearing roofed over or walled by tough sunlit branches, a bower.
Longarm tethered the ponies as deep in the little glade as he could get them, and told the otherwise less useful Minerva to pick some bow-wood leaves for them while he and Matty scouted the far sides of the knoll. No warm- blooded critter would eat oak leaves, but bow-wood grew those thorns to protect its juicy leaves.
Gingerly parting the sticker-brush to the north with Matty and her small revolver in tow, Longarm saw that approach was steeper but brushier. So he told Matty, 'If those other riders are on their own business, they'll pass on by. If they're after us, and figure out where we are, they'll circle afoot to creep up this slope through all that tanglewood.'
He cradled the Winchester Yellowboy in one arm as he drew his Colt.44-40 and handed it to her, saying, 'It's an insult to shoot a grown man with a .32-Short. But take both pistols over to the far side and keep an eye on that trail whilst I guard our back entrance. I don't want no needless gunplay. I'd rather have 'em guess where we might
