that killed the horse—and the other in the rump. “This one,” Tall Man said, pointing to the wound in the animal’s butt. He knelt, unmindful of the cold water that swirled around his knees, and began cutting into the wound channel the bullet had made in its passage.
While Tall Man was busy hunting for a speck of lead inside half a ton of cold, decaying horseflesh, Longarm wandered downstream in search of his Stetson. It must have floated far or else someone else had already found it and picked it up this morning, because there was no sign of the hat. Dammit!
By the time Longarm returned to the site of yesterday’s ambush, Tall Man and most of his men were squatting around a small fire on the creek bank roasting strips of dark red meat. And the rump of the horse had been laid open much further than seemed necessary just for the removal of a bullet.
Not that Longarm had anything against eating horse meat. Hell, the animal hadn’t been anybody’s pet, least of all his. “Did you find it?” he asked.
Tall Man grunted and stood, handing over an only slightly distorted lump of gray lead.
“Fifty-seventy,” Longarm said.
“The Piegan carry this size ball,” Tall Man offered.
“So do a helluva lot of others. Including prob’ly half your warriors.” After the Springfield Armory converted to making the much more efficient and higher-quality .45-70 models, and the army had finally stopped distributing arms and ammunition in the old .50-70 caliber, there had been, literally, tens of thousands of the obsolete models to dispose of. Virtually every state and territorial militia in the country was now armed with the old guns. Thousands more were sold to the military forces—or perhaps as often to rebel groups—in foreign nations. And more tens of thousands were distributed to almost anyone who wanted them, whether homesteaders seeking to protect their farms or Indian tribes wanting breechloaders for the pursuit of buffalo. Or nowadays, for “hunting” and slaughtering from horseback the beef rations delivered to them on the hoof.
Anyway, it was not exactly a startling discovery to learn that yesterday’s shooter had been armed with a .50- 70. Longarm would have been amazed, actually, if they’d found anything else.
But he’d wanted to know, regardless.
At some point while he’d been wandering downstream Burned Pot had brought the chestnut over from the horse herd, and someone had already saddled it with the things taken off the army horse.
Longarm shook hands with Tall Man and thanked the Crow warriors, then mounted the slow but pretty chestnut and reined it toward Camp Beloit.
Chapter 28
Longarm was downright proud of himself. He made it back to Camp Beloit without a guide, over a route he’d only traveled once before, and did it without ever getting lost. A trifle confused now and then, but never actually lost.
In fact he managed to home in on the place and make his approach a single valley away from the direct route. Which, under the circumstances, he considered to be a pretty fair performance.
The chestnut proved to be a first-class road horse, and the day was bright and warm and fair. Longarm found himself in a genuine good mood as he came down toward the ugly little army camp.
He saw a small hunting party on the ridge top to his left and waved to them, receiving a friendly wave in return. Indians, he thought, although he could not make out which tribe they belonged to. He did question their choice of a place from which to look for game. Surely they had to know how close the soldiers at Beloit were, and just as surely the presence of the soldiers would scare game away. Still, that was only an assumption. Perhaps those fellows up on the ridge knew something Longarm didn’t. Or then again, maybe it wasn’t game they were waiting for but some soldier who would sell them whiskey or other contraband. Fortunately for Longarm, it was not a problem that was his to worry about.
He rode on, and within a half hour reached Captain Wingate’s headquarters.
“Longarm. Welcome. Where is the horse … never mind, you can explain later. Get down, man. Come inside here. There is someone I want you to meet. Remember when that fellow said a civilian hired a rig for transportation out here? Do you remember that?” The officer laughed. He seemed quite excited about whatever this was. “Come inside now. Hurry.”
Longarm stepped down off the chestnut and handed his reins to Wingate’s orderly.
“Christ, I almost took you for an Indian when you were coming in,” the one-time brevet colonel said, “dressed the way you are.”
Longarm himself had as good as forgotten his rather bizarre costume, which consisted more of items borrowed from Tall Man than his own clothing, still damp from his swim the day before. And of course he had no hat. Dammit. A man accustomed to wearing a hat is unduly annoyed by sunlight in the eyes, and Longarm had been blinking and complaining to himself the whole way down from the agency.
“Here. Go ahead inside,” Wingate said, taking him by the elbow and propelling him through the tent flap into the shade and relative cool within. Longarm stopped dead in his tracks.
“Deputy Marshal Long, I would like you to meet-“
It was the randy, skinny, insatiable blonde with the hot pussy and deep mouth who’d been his traveling companion on the stagecoach north.
“-my wife Amanda,” Wingate concluded.
It was a good thing Longarm didn’t have false teeth. He would have coughed them right out of his mouth and into the dirt if he had.
As it was, he bent double in a fit of wheezing and hacking meant to cover his confusion.
Amanda Wingate, on the other hand, seemed quite thoroughly at ease with the situation of seeing her husband and a recent lover together. But hell, it likely was a situation she’d faced often enough before now, Longarm thought uncharitably.
After all, the woman was the one who’d practically raped him.
