Granger volunteered, "At least four hundred thousand acres the Shoshoni-Bannock bands don't really need, this side of the Snake River."
Senator Rumford confirmed both Washington and Salt Lake felt the land in question would be much improved by white settlers because the otherwise-fertile soil needed irrigation works to bring it up to its full potential.
When Granger added something about Indians not understanding a thing about agriculture, Longarm managed not to mention those vast irrigation projects Indians had come up with down to the southwest before Columbus had been a gleam in his daddy's eye. He said instead, "That many acres of pure-ass desert would be a bargain at double your offer, no offense. So them Shoshoni must want that silver awesomely bad!"
He reached for one of his own smokes in self-defense, muttering half to himself, "So how come the Shoshoni have been acting so spooky of late?"
When Granger suggested their treacherous scouts, for whatever reason, could have been just making up some Indian trouble, it was Bishop Reynolds's turn to declare, "Some Indians have been sending up smoke signals to the north, and Shoshoni are about all the Indians we get in these parts."
Lukas nodded and said, "Banncx:k seldom ride this far south since Buffalo Horn got his fool self shot acting sassy that time. Some of my riders have reported smoke talk over to the foothills too. That's how come I been out rounding up my herd the last few days."
Longarm asked the stockman how many head he might be missing. The Easterners couldn't see why until Lukas allowed he didn't seem to be missing enough to matter, adding, *They can't be raiding us for livestock, after all. Lord only knows what they're really talking over with all that infernal smoke!"
Longarm frowned uncertainly and ventured, "It could be no more than us. Whether we were coming or not, I mean. If old Pocatello demanded two tons of silver for anything, he surely expects to see it before the first real snowfall."
Granger said with a pout that neither he nor the stock would be ready to push on for at least a spell. Then two more men from their outfit came in, followed by Shoshoni Sam, Madame Marvella, and a mighty innocent-looking Tupombi. So seeing he was going to have to start all over again, Longarm suggested they haul over an extra table and more chairs. Bishop Reynolds got out of helping by heading out to the kitchen to demand some danmed service.
The two new government men were an Indian agent and a head mule teamster with at least one Indian grandparent, both loaned by the B.I.A. Tim McBride, the whiter of the two, allowed he'd been deputy agent at the White River Agency in Colorado before the Utes there had been pushed across the Green River into less civilized range. Duke Pearson, the breed, said he'd been allowed to go on driving mules trains most anywhere because his grandmother's Ute band had been smart enough to steer clear of the Meeker Massacre and such. Neither B.I.A. man had any fringes or beadwork on or about their persons. They were both dressed for comfort on the trail in sort of uncertain autumn weather. Either one of them could have passed for a hand employed by Lukas digging graves or punching cows.
By the time they had all of that straightened out they'd all found seats at the two shoved-together tables. By the time a weary Longarm had repeated a tale he was commencing to find tedious, the Mormon kids from the kitchen had everyone there but the bishop sipping coffee and nibbling marble cake. Bishop Reynolds had his cake with buttermilk.
After confirming suspicions he'd already had about those two so-called scouts, Tim McBride opined, 'They were slowing us down deliberate, more than they really needed to if all they had in mind was dry-gulching Deputy Long here."
Before anyone could answer, McBride brightened and asked, "Say, might you be the Deputy Long called Longarm, the one the Utes call Saltu Ka Saltu?"
Longarm nodded modestly. Duke Pearson grinned too and said, "Well, I swan, and wait till I tell the folk back home I met up with the gent who arrested that son-of-a-bitching agent who was robbing 'em blind that time."
Then he remembered there were women present, stammered as much at Madame Marvella, and apparently apologized more handsomely to Tupombi in Ho. She tried not to let her suffering show as she coped with his Ute accent, and demurely replied in her more trilly Shoshoni-Comanche version of the same basic lingo.
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.