Longarm and the Shoshoni silver

McBride said Pearson had never noticed any Indian sign either on the trail from Ogden, and repeated his charges against the late Pearly and The Kid, whom he'd known by more formal names he now tended to doubt.

Longarm hauled out his notebook and stub pencil as he told the Indian agent, "There's a government telegraph up at Fort Hall. I got to wire in a progress report when we reach it any case. So I'd be obliged if you'd jot down the names and home addresses those rascals gave you when they signed on with the B.I.A."

McBride took the pencil and paper but explained, even as he was block-printing in Longarm's notebook, how Senator Rumford, not the B.I.A., had hired the two sneaks down in Ogden.

Senator Rumford told Longarm, "It was as much your fault as mine. Deputy Long. We'd been told you'd meet us there. When you didn't, and Thomas Wynn, the one called Pearly, warned us of some Indian trouble and offered to guide us through country they knew so much better . . ."

"We've established they were big fibbers," Longarm said.

Duke Pearson snorted, "Indian trouble! What Indian trouble this late in the game? I told you gents way back when that the Western Shoshoni never could hold a candle to real troublesome Indians, and that was before they were whipped, like cur dogs, by Colonel Connor from the Humboldt to the Bear way back when."

Tupombi said something that sounded mighty surly in Ho, then switched to English so that everyone there could follow her drift as she snapped, "Pat Connor was a child-molester and a disgrace to the colors of his own nation! Who did he fight at Bear River? Women and children! That's who he fought at Bear River!"

It was McBride who mildly mentioned the hundred-odd Shoshoni warriors camped near the Bear River with their dependents under Chief Sag witch when Connor's Nevada Volunteers caught up with them.

Longarm liked Tupombi too much to mention George Clayton, Hank Beam, or Henry Smith, jumped and scalped by Sagwitch for no better reason than that the Shoshoni found them way out on the range alone. Pretty white ladies back in Denver didn't like to be reminded of all those South Cheyenne jumped at Sand Creek for no particular reason either. So he hushed them both, saying, "Bear Creek was years ago and Pocatello's band managed to stay out of it."

McBride grumbled, "Until he took the shot-up Sagwitch in and hid him from the troops until he was fit to fight another day, you mean!"

Longarm shrugged. "Whatever. Pocatello ain't done nothing like that recently, and seems to want to swap more Shoshoni land for silver. So the question before the house is why a cuss called Pappy, who has to be somebody

else, seems so intent on queering your simple real estate transaction?"

Their local stockman, Lukas, suggested, "I wouldn't be so sure no Indians could be up to .. . whatever. I'll agree those jaspers Longarm had it out with were likely faking Indian trouble if you'll tell me who's been sending all them smoke signals, up the trail where neither of them dead rascals could have ever been."

Bishop Reynolds frowned thoughtfully and declared, "We don't know that. If they told the senator here they knew the country, who's to say they didn't know the country, and even some Indians, all the way up the trail?"

Longarm was about to point out how anyone with even a small band of hostiles in cahoots with them would hardly have to move in alone on a lawman alone, no matter what the lawman's reputation. But he had a better idea. So once he determined the older gents meant to rest up there until noon, and that Shoshoni Sam and the two gals meant to tag along with them, he persuaded just one of the gals to tag along with him, to his room upstairs.

Once she had, he was reminded once more of old Sandy, back at the museum in Denver, while he showed the tawny and more muscular Tupombi how some Taibo went at it dog-style, atop a feather mattress.

She found the novel position exciting. He made up for the workout she'd given him before breakfast by closing his eyes to picture a bigger redhead's paler rump as he thrust in and out a spell, then opened his eyes to stare fondly down at the renewed novelty of such a friendly Comanche ass.

So what with one position and another, the morning passed all too quickly, and then it was time to mount something less frisky, in this case his hired paint, as they all rode out to the north under a blazing noonday sun, the poor dumb sons of bitches.

Chapter 11

It could have felt worse, a lot worse, at other times or places that far west of the Big Muddy. Even those parts of Idaho Territory defined as true desert were high desert, with the thin dry air all around sucking the sweat out of you suddenly enough to give you a sort of chill whenever a cloud passed between you and the purely white afternoon sun, and that was in high summer.