through it, that he wasn't half as fast with a telegraph key as the Signal Corps crew next door.
Longarm said, 'I can send and receive Morse pretty good. Used to tap into enemy wires during the war. I hope you've some connection with the Western Union grid so's we can get off wires to Denver and such?'
The Cherokee breed ran fingers through his thick black hair and looked as if he'd been caught with them in a cookie jar as he told their visitor he wasn't sure. He said his boss, Fred Ryan, usually made the long-distance connections and let him do the more routine sending and receiving.
By this time he'd shown Longarm to a table in the rear where a telegraph key and some writing material waited under a shelf of wet-cell batteries. Before he sat down, Longarm casually asked if Rogers or the army had wired those orders for police uniforms from Saint Lou.
The breed kid brightened and said, 'Oh, that was us. It was exciting to chat by wire with big-city folk. Agent Ryan patched us through to the Western Union office in Saint Louis, and then handed the task over to me. You see, he makes the important decisions while I keep the files in order, do the routine typing, and-'
'We got a young gent called Henry clerking our Denver office the same way,' Longarm said. 'You told me Ryan broke you in a spell back at the Cherokee Agency. Now I'd best contact the central Kiowa Comanche agency at Anadarko and see if they can shed any light on Colonel Howard's campaign plans.'
They couldn't. No army messages were on the line at the moment, and it only took a few minutes for someone at the B.I.A. in Anadarko to hear their own key clicking and ask who in thunder wanted what.
It seemed nobody in Anadarko knew why Colonel Howard was headed their way in battalion strength. Longarm started to send something dumb about Attila Homagy. But he never did. With any luck the fool immigrant would never think to ask questions about telegraph messages, and even if he did, it was going to take him yet another full day to get back here, giving him at least two on the trail if everyone pushed hard.
Anadarko lay a tad farther away than the thirty miles a cavalry column averaged in a day's ride. Even if Howard got there well before sundown and Homagy heard right off, there was no way he'd be able to drive a jaded team directly back alone, at night, even if the army would let him. Longarm knew they wouldn't even let a lone civilian drive by day before they had a tighter grip on this current Indian scare. Colonel Howard never would have led that big a force out chasing after a few dozen at the most if he hadn't been taking the situation seriously.
Once he'd figured how much time he had to work with, Longarm made a few penciled notes to compose the longer message he had to send his Denver office.
Before he could, Hino-Usdi Rogers shyly marveled, 'You surely send and receive good! You've a faster fist than Agent Ryan, and I can't keep up with him half the time!'
Longarm got out a brace of smokes as he explained, 'The trick is not to think in dots and dashes. It takes a spell to think and then send dit-dit-dah-dit for the letter F. If you remember it sort of sounds like 'Get a haircut!' and move the key in time with the words, you've sent your letter F already.'
The breed kid laughed, and asked if there were any other silly ways to bring Morse to mind. Longarm offered a couple that were sort of dirty, if effective. The young breed blushed like a gal, and declared he'd never forget the letter V sounded like 'Stick it in deep!'
He blushed so girlishly and refused the offered smoke so primly that Longarm shot a thoughtful look at his thin white shirtfront. But although he'd met up with gals getting by in a man's world that way in the past, Hino-Usdi had no tits worth mentioning.
Lighting his own smoke, Longarm patched himself through to the main line, and after some argument with a Western Union section manager who didn't recognize his fist and required some bragging, Longarm got through to their Denver office and had them take down a long wire at day rates, collect, to be delivered to his home office.
He brought Billy Vail up to date on his situation so far, using as few words as possible but still spending many a nickel. Then he pointed out that Quanah Parker seemed to be off the reservation on other business, and that Homagy had tracked him this far after all, and asked his boss whether he was supposed to come on home or just have it out with the fool grudge-holder.
The Cherokee breed told him, admiringly, he hadn't been able to follow a quarter of those dots and dashes, even thinking dirty.
Longarm took a thoughtful drag on his cheroot and said, 'It's sure to take them the better part of the next hour to get Marshal Vail's reply back to me. Whilst we wait, I may as well send some more, and whilst you're at it, could you dig out any files you have on those made-to-order uniforms you ordered for old Quanah?'
The kid said he could. So Longarm started sending shorter direct messages to other sub-agencies and other main agencies in the Osage, Choctaw, Creek, and Cherokee Nations.
By the time Rogers rejoined him with a file folder, Longarm was able to declare, 'Fort Smith says a newspaper-reporting gal I know seems to be on a wild-goose chase. Quanah never went there to visit Parkers he ain't related to. They couldn't tell me just where the gal and old Fred Ryan spent the last few nights.'
Rogers blushed like a gal again as he opened the file on the table by Longarm, saying all the business correspondence they'd handled for the busy Quanah Parker was somewhere among all those carbon onionskins.
Longarm was careful with his ashes as he leafed through the pile. The records showed the progressive chief had ordered, received, and paid cash for one gross of police uniforms, cut to the same pattern as those worn by the so-called Sioux Police. That jibed with what the sincerely sober Sergeant Tikano had told him.
Billy Vail had never sent him to look into the business dealings of Chief Quanah Parker himself. But seeing he had the files handy, and recalling what they said about that process of elimination, Longarm nosed around enough to see Quanah didn't have any of his uniformed police collecting fees or even recovery rewards from anyone.
Longarm made sure by asking the B.I.A. clerk what some of the obscure typing meant. Rogers said Quanah naturally reported tribal income to his own agent, Conway, who relayed it on up to Anadarko by way of the wire here in the liaison office. The breed added that the B.I.A. had felt little call to rein Quanah all that tight, seeing he had a rep among red and white folk for honest dealings and gave the B.I.A. a lot fewer problems than old sulks like Pawkigoopy or even Necomi.
Longarm saw by the wired bank statements how Quanah could afford new blue serge and brass buttons. Aside from leasing tribal grass to white neighbors, Quanah bought and sold riding stock on and off the reservation at a handsome profit. For being a product of both cultures, he knew which end of a pony the shit dropped out of. He'd already taught his Comanche wranglers to saddle-break stock to be mounted from the near side so cowhands could
