Longarm and the Shoshoni silver

This late in the year old Tanapah couldn't really get his back into his shining, even on the dusty Snake River Plains out ahead. So things just felt shirtsleevey as they followed the trail over rolling, partly timbered, but mostly grassy range, as long they kept moving and let their duds flap some. A lot of the grass was cheat closer to town, where the range had been overgrazed by old Lukas and other gentile stockmen who raised scrubbier beef more casually than your average Saint. The few cows they encountered naturally scattered at the sight of that many riders headed their way. Longarm doubted cows really knew what happened to them after they'd been cut from the herd to be cut up into handier portions. But it hardly mattered to any critter with Hispano-Moorish ancestry. For the Mexican-Texican longhom had been bred to stay alive until its owner was damn well ready to slaughter it and running like hell from anything it didn't aim to eat or fuck was a good way for a cow to stay alive on open range.

After no more than three or four trail breaks they saw fewer cows and far more real grass, mostly buffalo, bunch, and grama, sun-dried to rib-sticking straw for grazing critters. Longarm had been told some buffalo had roamed this side of the Continental Divide in the Shining Times. There were old Indian tales of longhom buffalo, bigger, meaner, and dumber than the regular kind. Longarm hadn't seen any this far west since he'd first come West just after the war. For some reason the pronghoms the more western tribes liked to hunt instead seemed to prefer the sagebrush country ahead, on somewhat lower and flatter ground. He figured he'd know better which kind of hunting ground old Pocatello had for sale when he saw some of it. The best land for farming wasn't always the best kind for hunting, and vice versa. But it figured to be piss-poor land for anything if the Indians were willing to let it go so cheap. Pocatello wasn't exactly a poor dumb Arawak, watching Columbus wade ashore. So it might be interesting to know whether the Shoshoni thought they or Uncle Sam was taking it up the ass.

It happened both ways. The old boys who'd sold Manhattan Island for twenty-odd dollars' worth of perfectly good trade goods hadn't been the only Indians who'd sold land they didn't happen to own to the paleface and nobody would have ever invented the term "Indian giver" if at least some Indians hadn't wanted their swaps back after they'd used up the salt or drank all the liquor in the jug. Pocatello was supposed to know how to read his own copy of the Book of Mormon, and he'd been smart enough to demand solid silver. So what was really going on, and why was that smoke rising over to his left? Those cowhands had said they'd spotted smoke talk above the far higher ground to his right.

Longarm had been riding point with Tim McBride, a quarter mile out ahead of the others. When McBride saw the same smoke and commenced to rein in Longarm muttered, "I see it. Don't let on you do just yet."

McBride kept pace with Lx)ngarm and his hired mount— since the last watering it had been the roan—and said, "I don't savvy that smoke talk at all."

Longarm said, "Neither do I. We're not supposed to. It ain't a regular code, like Morse. Different series of puffs mean whatever the puffer and puffee agreed on earlier. But for openers I'd say someone over to our west is telling someone else to our east about where we are, how many we are, mayhaps even who we are."

The Indian agent snorted and said, "That part ain't what I don't savvy. What I don't savvy is why they seem to be scouting us from low ground and signaling our whereabouts to somebody else on high ground!"

Longarm nodded. "I follow your drift, and for once the B.I.A. seems to have hired a white man with brains, no offense. I doubt they could be signaling anyone who already has a better view of us from those hills to our east. How do you cotton to the notion of them signaling ahead, say to someone just as low-down, over the horizon to our north?"

McBride agreed that made more sense, and asked what they ought to do next. So Lx)ngarm suggested, "What if you was to just keep following this same beaten path, at the same pace, with no shift in the dust column keeping pace behind us, whilst I sort of eased my way out around that smoke talk to jump 'em from behind and have a little talk with 'em?"

McBride demanded, "How? I'm pretty sure they must be on that one lone swell rising a few dozen feet above the others all about."

When Lx)ngarm agreed he had the same location in mind McBride pointed out, 'They'll surely see you peeling away from the party and be long gone before you can get within miles of'em!"

Longarm said, "We're edready within miles of 'em. I make it no more than two miles out, unless they're on another swell entirely, in which case they can't see us at all, so what are we arguing about?"