by Tabor Evans
An hour later they were in a small bed in what she described as their guest room. It didn't make him feel as dirty as it might have in a bed she shared with the colonel. He didn't want to hear how many "guests" she'd been this nice to.
Her shorter, plumper body didn't seem at all like Roping Sally's as they came again in the nude on top of the bedding. But he didn't care. Old Elvira had a lot to offer, once a man persuaded himself he was sacrificing himself in the cause of investigation.
Sharing a smoke with her as they cuddled in the dark like old pals, Longarm had little trouble worming the petty details of a familiar arrangement out of the no-longer-worried colonel's lady.
She had the colonel sincerely convinced it was better for their enlisted men to let off steam in Shanty Town than, say, some Indian settlement a short ride further out, where they'd be harder to keep an eye on.
In return for this reasonable attitude, Miss Spike and the other trash whites just outside the gates gave "presents" to a lady with appetites her husband couldn't afford on his army salary. Longarm was paid by the same government. So he had to agree President Hayes seemed mighty tightfisted.
He didn't go into the mostly civilian government officials he'd had to arrest for augmenting their modest civil service salaries with the graft almost built into the system. He didn't want to remind her how Washington gave petty officials almost god-like powers over richer folks and then paid them three-or four-figure salaries to get by on. He'd often thought it was dumb to pay a bank teller barely enough to eat on and then trust him with the combination to the vault too.
Once he'd convinced her they hadn't sent him all this way to see where the troops at Fort Sill got laid, Elvira seemed more interested in the case he was really on.
He snubbed out the cheroot and got his bonier hips between her plump thighs again, to slide it back in sideways half erect, as he repeated there were only a few details to clear up and that he was leaving them to the army and the Indians.
She thrust her own hips languidly as she said, "Oh, yes, this is a nice friendly way if the man's, ah, man enough. But why were those mysterious riders act so mysterious to begin with, dear?"
He shrugged a bare shoulder, thrust a stiffer erection, and told her, "When the cat's away the mice will play, as if I had to tell you that. Somebody heard Quanah's Indian Police were resented and not too well understood by the folks around here.
Meanwhile, Quanah was away on his own mysterious business, and this gave them the chance to move in and try the Black Hand flimflam from New Orleans."
She said, "I thought you said they were Mexican, or maybe Pawnee. Could you move a little faster, honey?"
He could. He rolled atop her as he explained in the same conversational tone, "They read about war paint in books. I ain't saying the mastermind is Indian or Mex. He adds up as some sneaky white. But as soon as any of 'em are caught, they'll doubtless talk. So like I said, I can't hang around forever to pull routine police chores."
She moaned, "oh, Lord, don't you dare leave before you make me come again! I'd forgotten how grand it can feel and... Jesus, Teddy, why did you have to get yourself killed like a mere human being in that bloody mess at Lookout Mountain?"
He started to tell her a lot of Confederate widows doubtless shared her distaste for that particular battle. But he never did. He knew Elvira was thinner and younger and coming with her Teddy right now. So he just thrust it in and out of her moaning flesh until they'd both gone to Heaven again. Then all hell Seemed to be busting loose outside in the night, and he pulled out of her as she gasped, "My God! We're under attack! That was gunfire just now!"
He sat up, reaching for his duds at the foot of the bed as he said, "Two six-guns, fired fast as possible but empty by now, with nobody shooting back. Stay here and I'll find out what's going on out yonder."
She didn't argue, but groped for her own clothes as he quickly got dressed, buckled on his own six-gun, and grabbed his hat on the way out. Nobody was looking his way as they all converged on the post's guest hostel down the parade.
Longarm had time to break out his badge and pin it to the lapel of his frock coat before he got to where he'd booked a room for the night. It was just as well he had. Two military policemen were blocking the front door to the simply curious. They let Longarm through. Inside, four uniformed figures were poking about with confused expressions. One wore the arm brassard of the Officer of the Day. Another had the gilt oak leaves you'd expect on a post provost marshal. Before they could ask Longarm anything, or vice versa, another officer and two enlisted military policemen came down the stairs, confused in their own right.
The shavetail in charge said, "We found the room clerk upstairs, Major. Shot in the back in one of the rooms. There was nobody else with him. But the bed had been shot up worse! Feathers all over the place!"
Longarm asked if they were talking about the corner room numbered 206. When the shavetail allowed they surely were, Longarm said, "It was me they were after. I'd booked that room for the night and hung on to the key. The killer or killers came in down here asking for me. The clerk must have thought I was upstairs when he didn't see my key in its pigeonhole. They made him lead them upstairs and open my door with his passkey. Then they just started shooting until they emptied their wheels or noticed I wasn't there. So what are we all standing here for? Whether it was the Quirt McQueen you all know or some other son of a bitch entire, he can't have more than a few minutes lead on you, and it's open prairie all around if he's not holed up in Shanty Town!"
The provost marshal roared, "You heard the man! I want four squads assembled on the double, fully armed! I want one to sweep this post inside the perimeter, just in case. I want that squatters' settlement turned over like a wet rock, and meanwhile, I want one squad riding north and the other south!
The O.D. asked what about east and west. The major said, "We are to his west. I don't think anyone but Indians would head for that Indian agency to the east."
He shot a questioning glance at Longarm, who suggested, "If Indians passed through your gates this evening, your sentries should have seen 'em, right?"
The major smiled thinly and said, "They told us you were good. Do you think that was why someone was out to kill you just now?"
Longarm started to say Quirt McQueen hadn't struck him as that deep a thinker. Then he remembered those other more persistent attacks, and contented himself with answering, "Don't know, Major. I sent me some questions by wire earlier. Reckon I'll head over to the Signal Corps and see if anything came in. Your wire is manned round the clock, ain't it?"
The provost marshal nodded and said it had to be. Longarm elbowed his way out and started across the parade in the tricky light, his mind in a whirl. For no matter how he kept collecting facts around here, he hadn't been able to fit any together worth beans!
He knew he was overloaded with more information than he needed. It had been simple to figure the less tangled motives Of, say, Spike Wilson, the colonel's lady, and even that cheating army wife who told tales out of school. He reviewed his simple transactions with all three of them. Old Spike was just selling sin at a price enlisted men could afford. That lady in the dark who'd wound up on her way out to Fort Douglas had just been getting back at her cheating husband, and old Elvira...? She was just getting fat as she pined for the impossible, a young love now dead and buried after falling in the vicious Battle of Chickamauga in the hills of Tennessee.
Longarm took another full step before he gasped, "Jesus H. Christ! That's it!" and swerved a tad to bear down on the B.I.A. liaison office instead. There was no light inside at this hour. But Longarm knocked anyway. And it was a good thing he was standing to one side as a whole fusillade of bullets tore through frosted glass and paneling from inside!
Longarm called back, "Give it up, old son! That's another time you missed me, and I got it all figured out. After that, you're smack on an army post and they've already called out the guard on you!"
As if to prove his point, that y
oung O.D. and a quartet of his interior guard, with bayoneted rifles, were running his way until he waved his own drawn.44-40 and yelled, "Don't line up with this doorway! We got us a sore loser inside!"
As if to prove the point another shot rang out inside, and then a familiar but unexpected voice called out, "Don't shoot. I got him! What's going on around here, for Pete's sake?"
Longarm yelled, "Open up, Ryan."
So Fred Ryan did, wearing no more than his pants, a sleepy-eyed expression, and a smoking Walker Conversion as he said, "I was asleep in the back when I heard young Rogers blazing away out here. When I asked him what was going on and who he'd been shooting at, he turned on me with his two guns and I had to shoot him!"
Longarm mildly asked, "How come? I counted twelve shots just now." Ryan said as calmly, "That's doubtless why I'm still alive. He had the drop on me and I was half asleep when I fired my own gun. Come on in. You can see for yourselves how it was."
As they all filed into the smoke-filled office after him, Ryan turned up a lamp someone had trimmed to a blue flicker earlier. As it flared to display the Cherokee clerk on the floor behind the counter, facedown and bare-ass with a pistol in each dead hand, Longarm followed Ryan through the gap in the counter, observing, "You made good time to Fort Smith and back, Fred. We weren't expecting you this soon."
Ryan said, "I just got in this evening. That's why I went right to bed without making a speech about it. I never went all the way east to Fort Smith. That newspaper gal did, looking to interview Quanah Parker for her readers. I only had to pick up some mail-order stuff of a... personal nature at the freight depot in Akota."
Longarm said, "I could keep asking questions and you could keep slithering slimy as an eel all night. But it's over, Fred. I got to arrest you for all sorts of things now, starting with the murder of this Indian ward of the government on the floor."
Longarm hardly expected any sane man to throw down on the law and three armed soldiers blue. But Fred Ryan didn't look too sane as he said dreadful things about Longarm's mother and started to swing the drawn gun in his hand into position.
He never managed it, of course. Longarm sent him spinning across the office with a round of.44-40, and then as Ryan bounced off the far wall, he was hit in the face with a.45-70 rifle ball that really messed him up.
The O.D. was fussing at the trooper who'd fired without orders by the time the Indian agent stopped twitching on the blood-slicked floor. So Longarm said, "No harm done, and I'm writing you boys up for an assist in my official report. The son of a bitch we just shot used to work at the Cherokee Agency in Tahlequah, two thirds of the way to Fort Smith. He knew all about ordering police uniforms and such from Saint Lou. He'd done so earlier for the Cherokee Police, and whether he stole some or ordered more after he'd transferred out is a matter we can work out later. Them mystery riders he had pretending to be Comanche Police or Kiowa raiders were Cherokee crooks. The Five Civilized Tribes that were out here earlier have had plenty of time to pick up white habits. They never learned to set up a proper tipi ring or savvy the sign lingo and paint of Horse Indians because the Cherokee were never Horse Indians when they lived in the wooded hills of Tennessee."
The O.D. asked, "Who told you all this, Deputy Long? No offense, but you didn't seem to know that much earlier."
Longarm said, "I'd forgot some things I knew. I jumped to hasty conclusions, trying to fit Mex bandits into a pattern that wouldn't work. I didn't even get it when Agent Conway persuaded me I'd heard an Indian say someone was dead, not that he needed water. Wichita or Pawnee raiders made a tad more sense than Mexicans. But not much, and it only came to me a few minutes ago that Tennessee used to be Cherokee country and that I'd been told, marching through it, how Chickamauga, where we fought that battle, meant Dead River in Cherokee!"
He pointed his warm pistol barrel at the naked Cherokee cadaver as he said, "Cherokee is related to Iroquois and Pawnee the way Comanche is related to Shoshoni, Aztec, and such. A lawman would play hell trying to account for Shoshoni building cities down Mexico way. But at least Pawnee were possible around here."
He pointed at the dead Indian agent to add, "It worked even better as soon as I suspected we were dealing with Cherokee and a white mastermind who literally liked to screw the Cherokee."
One of the troopers said he'd heard young Rogers was like that.
Longarm said, "We might have been able to charge him with crimes against nature on federal property. I doubt he even knew Fred Ryan tried to gun me twice tonight. It looks as if Ryan killed his lover boy for the same reason he gunned that clerk across the way. To shut them both up. So's he could play innocent."
The provost marshal barged in with more troops, demanding answers. Longarm pointed to the O.D. and said, "The lieutenant knows as much as me so far. I got to get up to your Signal Corps installation and see if anyone I wired earlier can tell me anything more."
He pushed his way out as the O.D. started explaining the mess in the B.I.A. office. The provost marshal must not have been satisfied. He caught up with Longarm up the line, just as the tall deputy read the last of the few telegrams waiting there for him.
Waving a penciled transcription at the older army man, Longarm said, "It sure beats all how things fall in place once you figure the overall pattern of the puzzle. Mud Creek identifies a shotgun messenger who replaced young Quirt McQueen, for no good reason, as a Lester Tenkiller, Tenkiller being a common Cherokee name. Quirt was fired and left to fend for his fool self because Ryan didn't want a witness coming back this way to tell me, in particular, how Ryan had never gone on to Fort Smith with a lady we both knew."
Longarm picked up another message to make sure of his details as he continued. "Ryan was whipping back and forth betwixt here and the railroad stop at Atoka. That seems to have been his home plate. He met his Cherokee pals there, picked up mail-order duds for 'em, and-"
"Atoka's one hell of a ride," the provost marshal said.
Longarm nodded and said, "Handy to the railroad, though. After that, it's a fair-sized settlement where none of his recruits were apt to meet up with either Comanche Police from this reserve or the Cherokee Police from their own. I just wired the Choctaw Police to be on the lookout for the Lester Tenkiller who comes through there fairly often. I'm letting the three Indian police forces work out the probable suspects Ryan would have recruited around Tahlequah. It'll be good training for all concerned, and we've accounted for the really bad apple in the bunch. Old Ryan must have figured I'd been sent to catch him personal. He was the only one up to anything crooked, involving any Indian Police. As a liaison man he was naturally privy to all the messages sent back and forth. But he must have been afraid he'd missed something."
Longarm picked up another message and said, "It's too bad he never read this wire from Denver, ordering me home before I'd recalled the meaning of Chickamauga. That enlisted clerk and the Cherokee breed might have still been alive if old Fred had let sleeping dogs lie. I might have missed his petty extortions entirely if he hadn't scared the shit out of me with his wilder-acting Indians. Or burned my ass when he ran off with a wild newspaper gal he was only interested in getting rid of before she followed up on some gossip about his operation!"
CHAPTER 19
A few days later, along about supper-time at the Brewster Dairy outside Trinidad, the pretty young widow was crossing her barnyard toward the main house when she spied a familiar figure on a chestnut gelding.
Longarm had hired it, along with its stock saddle, at a livery near the depot. He could only hope his own saddle and original baggage was still waiting for him at the Union Depot in Denver. He was wearing his suit and tie again, seeing he was calling on a lady.
As he reined in near her front steps, Cora Brewster hurried to greet him there, saying, "I was just thinking of you, Deputy Crawford! I wired you in care of Fort Sill, and they wired back that they'd never heard of you!"
Longarm dismounted and started to tether his hired mount to her hitching rail as h
e awkwardly replied, "Good help is hard to find these days. I just got back from Fort Sill, after some tedious train transfers. But to tell the truth I spent most of my time with some Indian pals, and I reckon they lost track of me at the fort. You say you were trying to get in touch with me, Miss Cora?"
The young but fully developed brunette in blue calico that matched her eyes dimpled up at him and explained, "That horrid Longarm's back in Trinidad. They said he'd run off with Magda Homagy, the brute. But he's been sparking another Bohunk girl too young for him by half and the immigrant ladies are all atwitter!"
Longarm nodded gravely and said, "That accounts for another blond lady who talks funny up Fort Collins way. I've been in touch with my home office by wire, and they just now told me the couple in question produced papers from the Austro-Hungarian Empire when the law paid a call on their rooming house. He used to be some sort of cavalryman they call a Hula Hula Lancer, and his wife had permission to leave as well."
Cora Brewster said, "I told you Longarm deserted that other blonde somewhere. Why are you tethering your mount to that post? You surely mean to sup and visit with me a while, don't you?"
He allowed he hadn't made any better plans for that evening. So she led the way back across her barnyard, explaining along the way how she'd just given her two hired men and house-girl the payday evening off. Longarm knew enough about cows to assume her dairy stock had been led into their stalls and milked for the last time that day no later than four in the afternoon. She didn't invite him to stable a pony with her cows. The chestnut gelding wound up in the stable with its own kind to gossip with. He noted with approval she fed them all timothy hay and medium-grade oats.
On the way back to the house Cora explained she'd been planning a light, simple supper for herself alone. He said he'd been stuffing his face with peanuts and such aboard many a train for the past few days. She laughed when she thought back to those few hours they'd done the same in that D&RG club car.
