back alive.'
After they'd all chuckled at the picture, Longarm said, 'They must have copied designs from some picture book. We've about agreed no Horse Indian ever called water agua.'
Agent Conway cocked a brow and asked, 'You sure you don't mean mauga, pard?'
Longarm thought back before he decided, 'Might have been mauga as easily as agua. Why do you ask?'
Conway sounded sure as he replied, 'Mauga means dead in Pawnee. I rode with Pawnee Bill and his Pawnee Scouts one summer, during the Sioux wars. Every time they nailed a Sioux, or vice versa, them Pawnee said the one on the ground was mauga.'
Longarm and the two Comanche speakers exchanged glances. Quanah suggested, 'They say the Wichita and Caddo are related to Pawnee, but would even a Caddo be dumb enough to paint himself like a Kiowa girl?'
Longarm smiled thinly and said, 'I know a Cherokee who might. Were any of them mysterious cadavers tattood Wichita-style, Chief?'
Quanah Parker said, 'I don't think so. You have to understand the bodies were muddy and starting to turn funny colors under all the mud and war paint. I don't think the younger Wichita have tattood their bodies as much since they rode northeast to join the Pawnee. People laugh at you when you act different on purpose.'
Agent Conway suggested they all go inside and have a sit-down over coffee and cake. But Quanah said he had to get back to those cows his boys were herding up the Cache Creek Trail.
Longarm said, 'Hold on, Chief. I got places to go as well. So why don't you tell me why you sent for me by name in the first place?'
Quanah grinned like a mean little kid and said, 'I think you have already done what I was going to ask you how to do. We were having the same trouble as they've had up around Fort Reno, with some few Arapaho willing to be Indian Police while the Cheyenne call them woman-hearts or worse. I haven't been asking my father's people to put up with this civilization shit because I've forgotten the old ways. They have to learn new ways because the old ways keep getting them killed. I tell them they can all be blown away by field artillery, live as animals in a zoo while they tell themselves they are still proud warriors, or learn how it is that even your twelve-year-old boys can leave home and support themselves with no B.I.A. to feed and clothe them.'
Longarm nodded soberly and said, 'I expect gents like you to get the vote before most white women or colored men. But I know what you mean about some unreconstructed Hors Indians holding out. I talked to your Kiowa pals about acting more progressive. I doubt I made any impression, though.'
Quanah Parker said, 'You're wrong. Some of Hawzitah's young men have said they would like to hear more about becoming Indian Police. If we get any Kiowa into those neat blue uniforms, with extra money to spend at the trading posts...'
'I get the picture,' Longarm said. 'If that's all you wanted from me, like I said, I got my own row to hoe. Got to get my ass somewhere's else before that column comes back from Anadarko. You gents know as much as me about those mystery riders, who could be long gone for all I know. So let me ride back to the fort for my saddlebags, and I'll ride down the Cache Creek Trail with you, Chief.'
But Quanah said, 'If I wait that long there won't be much riding for me. By now that herd should be just over the horizon to the south. I want to rejoin my drovers and make sure they have the beef bedded down well east of here before sundown. It makes a mess when I try to distribute beef too close to this settlement. Some people would rather just shoot a cow and cut it up on the spot than drive it home.'
Longarm allowed he'd been there when B.I.A. beef on the hoof had been divided up. He squinted up at the sun and added, 'No sense in me sleeping along the trail when I don't have to. I've hired a bed under a roof at the fort. Riding alone from an early start I could likely make it to another before nightfall by loping some. Got me a mess of wires back and forth to consider in any case.'
So they all shook on it, and Longarm said he'd let them know if he got any helpful answers to some of the questions he'd sent earlier about those mysterious riders.
He loped back to Fort Sill, considered reining in out front of the B.I.A. liaison office, and had a better idea. He dismounted in front of the army Signal Corps installation, went inside, and asked for the gent in charge.
When the skinny gray sergeant in the front office said that was him, Longarm introduced himself and explained his problem.
The army man chuckled, said he'd heard that Cherokee clerk just down the walk was a sissy, and agreed to contact anyone Longarm was waiting to hear from, provided he'd write it all down.
Longarm accepted the yellow writing tablet and block-printed each address and query on a separate sheet. He lettered a longer progress report for Billy Vail, but didn't say when he'd be leaving. Vail would know his own travel instructions and nobody else needed to. Asking a total stranger not to show these sheets of foolscap to a Homagy who might offer money to see them would be stretching one's luck.
He offered to send the considerable dots and dashes himself. But the sergeant said his own telegraphers could use the practice. So Longarm blocked out a few more queries as long as he was at it, and said he'd be back after supper-time to pick up any replies.
He led the spent pony on a shortcut to the stable across the now dry and solid parade. A stable hand who met him just outside to take the reins handed him a small white envelope, saying, 'Compliments of the colonel's lady. They told her at the hostel you'd ridden off post, sir.'
Longarm took the envelope with a nod of thanks and said, I ain't no damn officer you have to salute and sir, pard.'
He tore open the envelope to discover he'd been invited to supper on officers' row. So, checking the sun against his pocket watch, he saw he just had time to make himself more presentable.
He took a bath at the hostel while he was at it, and showed UP at the Howard house before sundown, as he'd been invited, with a clean shirt and shoestring tie, his rumpled tobacco brown tweed suit, and a good splashing of bay rum. He'd picked the prairie primroses out back of the stable. Fortunately, the kind with white blossoms grew later in the summer than the pink evening primrose.
The plump Elvira Howard opened the door to him herself, wearing a paisley print dress a size too skinny for her, along with a heap of jasmine scent and, he suspected, a fresh henna rinse.
