She asked what made him so certain they'd been Shoshoni. The fat old gal was coming their way with a mug of coffee and a plate piled high with com piki and salmon sandwiches. So Longarm told the Scotch gal, "Because Bannock don't ride that far south and Paiute are afraid to come that far north. Now hush and let me talk to this Shoshoni lady."
They both seemed mildly surprised when Longarm thanked the fat gal by extending both hands, palms down, and sweeping them low like some fool pagan praying to some idol. Then he set the mug and sandwiches aside on a comer of her cast-iron range, to leave both hands free as he tried to ask directions to the lodge of her Chief Pocatello. It wasn't easy, and he had a time following her directions once she seemed to follow his drift.
It helped him as well as Dame Flora if he repeated the meanings of each sign in English. So when the fat gal raised her pudgy hand, fingers spread, and pivoted it on her wrist he muttered, "Wants to ask a question." He told her to go ahead and ask, with his own fist near his mouth, fingers opening and closing.
She pointed at him, drew her palm across her own brow, made it snake-slither, then put her fist to her heart before she put the back of it to her lips with the index finger pointed at him. So he said, "I think she's asking if I might be the white man they call the one with a Shoshoni heart."
Then he modestly said, "Ayee," knowing that meant yes in Ho, and so she grabbed him in a happy bear hug and began to yell fit to bust until a Shoshoni boy came in from out back with a broom and a puzzled expression. He spoke English. So it was easier for him to say, "Aunt Tahcutiney wants me to lead you over to our big chief's cabin, Taibo with Our Kind of Heart."
Longarm said that sounded swell, gulped some coffee, and
grabbed the sandwich off the plate to eat on the fly as he followed the boy out the back door with Dame Hora still following him. It was dark as an overcast night figured to get outside by this time. When he asked the Shoshoni boy whether they'd be walking or riding, the boy said he was walking and that it wasn't too far for a real man. So Longarm said to just lead on, but warned the Scotch gal in high-buttons she'd likely be more comfortable just waiting inside till he returned.
She said she wasn't about to sit and fidget now that they were so close, at last, to some answers about those missing spinsters.
He told her, "Ain't sure how close we might be to anything right now. Not even where we might be heading. So don't say I never warned you and don't expect us to carry you if you can't keep up."
She said she wouldn't. As they crunched along over uncertain footing after the barely visible outline of the young Shoshoni, she asked him why he didn't like her.
When he said he liked her as much as anyone else he knew around Fort Hall, she said she wasn't used to being spoken to so curtly by her social inferiors.
To which he could only reply with a wry chuckle, "I'd already got that feeling about you, ma'am. May-haps that's what inspired me to keep things plain and simple. If it's any comfort to you, I ain't your social inferior. I'm a bom and bred American from West-by-God-Virginia, and my ancestors whupped your ancestors twice."
She hissed like a stomped sidewinder, muttered something awfiil in Gaelic, then laughed despite herself and said, "I'll have you know it was the Sasunnach, I mean the English, you colonists had so much fun with. But your point's well taken, so lead on. Mo MacNial na Barra."
Lx)ngarm answered, simply, "Can't. If this kid ain't leading us the right way we're lost, and who's that other cuss you seem to have me mixed up with, ma'am?"
She laughed again and said, "Mixed up indeed. The
MacNial, the high chief of a small but proud island clan, was invited to court by one of our German Georges, but since he'd arrived in the rain with his tartan plaid wrapped around him and the eagle feathers drooping on his wet blue bonnet, he was lucky to get any place at the king's table at all. You know, of course, that guests are seated beginning at the head of the table in order of rank?"
He said he'd heard as much, complicated as it sounded. So she explained, "The MacNial was seated below the salt, or near the unfashionable end of the table, among mere Sirs and even Right Honorables. Being a true Highland gentleman he said nothing but simply started eating, with his hat still on, in the Highland fashion."
Longarm said, "Hebrews and cowhands too. Saves having to fuss with your fool hat before or after. Is that why I remind you of this cuss, because I've been chawing on this sandwich with my hat on all this time?"
She said, "No. You see, after a time the king, at the head of his table, noticed the chief's four feathers, sensed they might mean something, and had one of his servants make some discreet inquires. One can imagine His Majesty's chagrin when it developed they'd seated a ruler in his own right below the salt. At any rate an equerry in a white wig was sent down to The MacNial to offer a full apology and move such a distinguished guest up by the head of the table. But by then the chief had started eating and so all he did was glance up to shout, the length of the table, 'Och, dinna' frush yersel', Gordie. Wherever The MacNial may be seated already is the head of the table!' "
Longarm didn't laugh. He swallowed the last of his slim supper and said, "Makes sense to me. I don't see what all the frush was about neither."
She replied, in a softer tone, "That's what I meant. I think I see why the Indians call you a white man with an Indian heart. They seem to see things less, well, frushy than the rest of us."
He sighed and said, "Don't bank on that, ma'am. They mean I try to understand them, not that they can't act just as complicated, as you'll see once we meet up with some of 'em, if ever we meet up with any of 'em."
He managed not to pester their silent and almost invisible Indian guide until, somewhere in the night, they heard someone singing in a high-pitched but sleepy-sounding way. Then they saw faint lights ahead and their young guide called out. The singing stopped. Then a male voice called back in Ho, and the kid told Longarm and Dame Flora, "Pocatello makes you welcome if you come with good hearts and don't want to sell him anything."
Longarm said that sounded fair. So the kid yelled some more and then they headed on in. When she saw about a dozen blanket-wrapped forms seated cross-legged on the front porch of a log cabin, back-lit by an oil lamp on one windowsill. Dame Flora marveled, "Why, they seem to living in a real house, as if they were white people."
He said, "Yes, ma'am. It gets cold as a banker's heart up this way come January, so would you squat in a tipi you had to put up yourself when the government was willing to build you a fine cabin?"
She dimpled and said she understood. He told her to keep future comments to herself, lest folks feel she felt too good for them. He was pleased when she said she'd let him do all the talking.
But now they were close enough for the Indians on the porch to make them out as well. A bearlike figure wrapped in a cream and black-striped Hudson Bay blanket rose to a tad above average for a Ho, all Ho being shorter than your average lanky Lakota, and began a speech in a curious mishmash of English, Chinook, and Ho. Lx)ngarm gravely replied he'd been on fair terms with the late "Big Um" too, hoping they were talking about Brigham Young. Trying to introduce Dame Flora, even with sign thrown in, was a real bitch. Then a sort of sweet old female voice cut in to hush the chief and offer
to translate, in better English than Longarm was used to speaking.
Moving in closer, they saw she seemed to be someone's mummy, the Egyptian kind, wrapped in a real old-timey blanket made by wrapping thin strips of rabbit fur 2U'ound weepah cords and weaving them into a sort of thick fuzzy burlap. The old woman's long hair was whiter than Pocatello's blanket. She said she was called Wadzewipa, and when the young boy from the agency said she was a porivo, the old gal sighed and said, "I am no such thing. I am only a guest who came over the mountains from Fort Washakie to speak for my young nephew, Pocatello, and make sure the Taibo didn't cheat him."