Longarm and the Shoshoni silver

Dame Flora shrugged. 'The Mormon elders we spoke with in Salt Lake City suggested much the same thing. Our point is that someone out this way answered inquiries from a good many interested and not-so-young ladies, each of whom shipped out for America with at least five hundred

Yankee dollars, never to be seen alive again by anyone we can find."

Longarm whistled thoughtfully and calculated, "Meaning at least six thousand dollars can't be accounted for. I'm sorry to say I follow your drift. But may I ask what you all might be doing up here in Idaho Territory if those missing gals and their modest fortunes were last seen headed for Salt Lake City?"

Rhinegold said, "I can answer that. Seems one of the missing Scotch gals managed to post a letter for help. Sent from Zion County, Idaho Territory, judging from the postmark. She must not have deemed it safe to put a return address on the envelope."

Dame Flora said, "It was a short, frantic note. She wrote it would be dropped in the box at the next stagecoach stop if she got the chance."

Longarm pointed at the empty tin cups and greasy plates with a meaningful glance at the young stable hand he'd just fed for free. Then he mused aloud, "Reckon a gal could scribble a note in the dark in front of other travelers, if she put her mind to it. Could have dropped it most anywhere along the Overland route, long as it had a postage stamp on it, and she wouldn't have had to come this way by stage, as soon as you study on what all of us are doing here in this stage stop this morning."

Dame Flora said she'd already figured that. When she said she and her companions had been trying to find someone up this way who recalled even one other Scotch lady, traveling in any direction way with or without a Mormon husband, Longarm said he wasn't surprised they'd had no luck. "Kidnappers don't allow their victims to jaw all that much with strangers along the trail. If any of those gals had got to jaw a lot with anyone you're likely to find, you'll likely find they ain't been kidnapped. Do you mind it I smoke. Dame Flora?"

When she nodded her permission, Longarm offered cheroots to the other two grown men, the kid having left by

then with the dirty dishes, and lit up to give himself some time to ponder before he went on. "Say a gal in trouble got a chance to drop a note in some mail slot this side of the Utah line but south of, say. Soda Springs. The Overland stage could have carried it out by way of Utah or Montana Territory, depending on which way the stage, not necessarily the gal, was going. That don't leave you many to question about strange white gals in a country where even a handsome Indian gal is worth noting in passing. What did her note say?"

Dame Flora said, "I don't have it with me. But it was simply a few scrawled lines, in broad Scots, to the effect that she'd been betrayed and warning a kinswoman who'd been planning a similar mistake to inform Her Majesty's Government instead."

Longarm admitted he didn't know just what she meant by Broad Scots. So she explained, "Think of it as a dialect neither speakers of the Queen's English nor Scots Gaelic can follow without pain. I suspect she used antiquated crofter terms in case her captors got ahold of her note before she could post it. So you'll have to take my word a 'moss trooper' is a rustic you'd never want your sister to marry, and a Sawny Bean is worse!"

She repressed a shudder and added, "I hope she only meant the band of outlaws who waylaid, robbed, and murdered travelers on a lonely road in Scotland in the sixteen hundreds. I'd hate to think any of those poor girls had actually been dismembered and eaten by a wolf pack of half-witted cannibals!"

Lx)ngarm perked up to say, "Oh, I recall reading about your Sawny Bean and his clan of cave dwellers. They remind me of the Bender family we used to have over in Kansas, albeit I doubt Kate Bender and her kin ever got around to eating any of the travelers they murdered and buried on their remote prairie homestead."

Rhinegold asked if it wasn't true some Snake Indians had been accused of eating white folks now and again.

So Longarm knew just how much Shoshoni scouting he'd likely done, despite his buckskin shirt and beat-up cavalry hat.

Longarm kept it polite, though, as he smiled thinly and told all of them, "The Indian nations come as different from one another cis our own. A Shoshoni has no more in common with, say, a Mohawk than a Swede might have with a Turk. So whilst they do say a nation called Mohawk or Man Eaters might have deserved the compliment, the Shoshoni and all their Ho-speaking kin scare their kids silly with ghost stories about Piamuhmpitz, a big black cannibal owl bird who eats wicked children."