female Miss Spike in mind when he turned in alone at the hostel that night. A man would feel silly as hell having wet dreams about Cherokee breeds who only thought they were gals.
Crossing the parade, he noticed the mud was sun-baking back to 'dobe again. 'Dobe was what you called clay soil with lots of lime in it out here whether anyone molded it into bricks or not. Kids in Denver molded it into bitty balls to have 'dobe fights after it set solid as plaster. Those mystery riders wouldn't be leaving hoofprints much longer as they rode across thick sod rooted in drying 'dobe.
Colonel Howard and his column were headed the wrong direction in any case. If the gang was smart enough to split up and drift into the rail stop at Atoka in scattered twos and threes, they might even get by the Choctaw Police, dad blast their sneaky ways!
Longarm went back to the stable to get his saddlebags and Yellowboy from the army tack room. Then he toted them to that hostel to ask for the same room if they had it.
They did. So he put his personal baggage away after shaving and such down the hall, and this time he wedged a match stem under the bottom hinge as he shut and locked his hired door. He was just about sure he'd seen the last of Quirt McQueen, but it could pay to take the routine precautions.
He was standing on the veranda, lighting another smoke while he pondered whether he had enough questions left to pester the signal corps, when a familiar figure on a paint pony reined in a few yards away to hail him.
It was Sergeant Tikano of the Indian Police. The moonfaced Comanche said, 'They told me you might be here. Quanah just rode in. He was bringing another beef herd up from Texas when he heard about all the trouble you've been having and rode on ahead. Do you want me to bring him here or will you ride with me?'
Longarm said he was in a hurry to compare notes too. So as the Indian trotted his mount beside the walk, Longarm hurried back to the stable and saddled the bay he'd hired in Spanish Flats, and they loped out together for that Comanche sub-agency just over the horizon.
Along the way, Longarm brought the Indian police sergeant up to date on his early chores with a telegraph key. Tikano agreed the rail stop at Atoka, on the Choctaw reserve, made heaps of sense for the mystery riders, if they were really running for it. He said they'd have ridden smack into Quanah and two dozen real Indians if they'd taken the Cache Creek Trail for the depot at Spanish Flats. Longarm asked how Quanah had found out enough to worry him at all, and Tikano explained, 'He's been buying more beef down in Texas all this time. He likes to act more like his Saltu relations when dealing with the Saltu. That is why nobody else knew where he was all this time. He met your friends from the Running X as they were riding home to Texas. The trail boss called Carver told him about those police who were not police and others who might or might not have been Black Leggings. So now Quanah and Agent Conway are drinking much black coffee, trying to figure out what to say when they ask Agent Ryan's clerk to wire the main agency at Anadarko.'
Longarm allowed he had to study on that too. As they topped a rise and saw that church steeple ahead, Longarm casually asked the Comanche if he'd ever heard any gossip about young Hino-Usdi.
Tikano replied simply, 'We call him Ta Soon Da Hipey. Every now and then a boy is born who grows up that way. It is wrong to use such a young man as a woman. But it is wrong to hurt him or even mock him as one might mock a real man who missed a shot or fell off his pony. Nobody asks for such boys to happen. Eyototo, the chief of the spirits, must have some reasons for making some people awkward, crippled, crazy, or just different. They are the ones to be pitied. Sometimes, if you give the pitied ones a chance, they turn out all right. One of the greatest war chiefs of the Arapaho did everything with his left hand. But the blue sleeves couldn't kill him at Sand Creek, even though they hit him with many bullets, many. The Cheyenne had a chief called Left Hand too.'
Longarm said, 'I noticed that the time Dull Knife lit out from Fort Reno just north of here. My point about that Cherokee kid, and the agent he works for, was that few if any Indians would think to blackmail such gents, whilst Spanish-speaking Christians might.'
Tikano asked what Mexican outlaws might blackmail Fred Ryan or his clerk into doing for them.
Longarm answered, 'Don't know. Maybe nothing. Maybe heaps. I'd best compare notes with Quanah before I send any more wires.'
So he did. When they rode in they found Agent Conway and the taller Quanah Parker, dressed like a Texas trail herder with long braids, out on the front porch as if they'd been watching from a window.
Once Longarm had dismounted and shook hands all around, already knowing the stern-faced but agreeable chief to talk to, Longarm wasted no time in bringing everyone up to date, including the little he'd just found out by wire.
Quanah nodded soberly and said, 'Our friend Harry Carver told me much of what you just said. When my young men and I got to where you Saltu met those police who were not police, we found nobody there to demand money from me in my name. But we scouted for sign and found where they had planted tipi poles crazy. Some with four main poles, as our women plant, but others based on a three-pole tripod, the way Arapaho put up a lodge. They had no idea at all how a tipi should be facing.'
Longarm nodded and replied, 'I just said I thought they might be Mex bandits with a mighty unusual approach.'
Quanah said, 'I had not finished. When we came to where Harry said you and that girl shot it out with Black Leggings, we scouted around those sod walls carefully. The rain that had just fallen gave away a lot of sign they may have thought they'd covered. The reason you and those cowboys never found those dead Indians is that they were buried in a draw a good ride to the west. We might not have found this out if the rainwater hadn't found the softer earth under the replaced sod easier to wash down the draw.'
Longarm resisted the impulse to declare he'd never thought those rascals had been treated to any Horse Indian sky burial. It was tough to remember that despite a lot of white manners, Quanah Parker still followed Indian manners when it came to conversation. Indians broke in while others were speaking about as often as white folks belched or farted at such times.
Quanah said, 'People do not rot as fast buried in 'dobe. So we knew they were not anyone we knew. They were wearing black leggings, but their war paint was silly. We who paint ourselves don't just daub it on like Saltu children going to a Halloween party. Paint is worn for puha, or to warn your enemies what kind of a fighter they face.'
The erstwhile war leader wiped two fingers down a hollow bronzed cheek and sneered, 'One had yellow lightning bolts running down green cheeks like tears. That is the paint of a great warrior lodge, but neither Kiowa nor Comanche. Only the Arapaho Black Hearts, not Kiowa Black Leggings, paint their faces that way.'
The experienced war paint enthusiast put his fingers to his hairline as he grinned in a surprisingly boyish manner and said, 'Another had a red half-moon down his forehead from his hair, with both cheeks solid red. That looked Kiowa. A Kiowa woman paints her face that way when her man rides off to war and she wants him to come
