Vail growled, "Because you're going to Fort Sill instead. If I thought sweet reason would work on Attila Homagy, he'd be sitting here having apple pie with us right now whilst the three of us tried to figure out what really happened last May. I told you I told him I had you right down the hall on court duty at the very time he has you wrecking his happy home nearly two hundred miles away. He wouldn't have it. He's quit his job to track down the man who hung all them magnificent horns on him, and if you ain't the one, who in blue blazes is he supposed to shoot?"
Billy's wife refilled their cups with a weary smiles as she said, "Men! I swear you all just get more mule-headed as you get older! I don't see how that crazy coal miner is supposed to support his young wife without a job, no matter how they work out their difficulties."
Vail said, "I don't either. I figure that whether they bust up or stick together, he's still going to need another job soon as he's run his fool self broke tearing all over like this. Trinidad says he cleaned out his modest bank account the day he quit at the mine. Since we ain't talking four figures to begin with, he can't keep at it more than a month at the rate he's been steaming. Worrying about where on earth your next meal or another job might be coming from has a grand way of concentrating a man's mind. So the timing of your trip over to Fort Sill and back works out about right."
Longarm washed down the last bite of pie and leaned back in his bentwood chair to ask how come they wanted him to run over to Fort Sill in the Indian Nation.
Billy Vail leaned back in his own chair and got out one of his more expensive but far smellier smokes as he pontificated, "Indian Territory since the war. If you want self-rule, like the Civilized Tribes were granted back in Jackson's day, don't ever side with the Confederacy and then brag on not surrendering for six months after Lee!"
Vail struck a match and lit his pungent cigar, ignoring the sad sigh of his wife as he continued. "Fort Reno and Fort Sill went up west of the original Indian Nation grants in any case. Indians had no self-rule in those parts to begin with. Those western outposts were built to police far wilder nations such as Comanche, Kiowa, and Kiowa-Apache."
Longarm had known all that. It was more important he catch the eye of the lady of the house, lest he find himself with no defense against Bill Vail's cigar. Once he did so, patting the cheroots in a breast pocket, she nodded, but headed for another part of the house with a remark about opening more windows.
Vail gazed fondly after her and remarked, "She knew I smoked this brand the day we married up. Women and children are a lot like the Indians when it comes to counting on dreams of the future. But that gets us back to your mission to Fort Sill. The recently shot-up and calmed-down Comanche and their Kiowa allies have been moved off their old reservation in the Texas Panhandle and resettled around Fort Sill."
"On what?" Longarm dryly asked as he got out a cheaper but much less vile smoke. "I know Fort Reno, to the north, better. But I've passed through Fort Sill often enough to opine such timber and game as there might have once been has been cut down and shot off a heap."
Vail let fly a thunderhead of swirling blue smoke and replied in a philosophical tone, "Don't never ask the Bureau of Indian Affairs for nicer hunting grounds if you mean to lift white hair and then brag about it. The trouble only got serious after that Kiowa chief came in for a government handout and gloated to Agent Tatum that he'd wiped out a wagon train."
Longarm hung some of his own tobacco smoke between them as he thought back, nodded, and said, "I never figured out why poor old Satanta did that. Indians I know tell me that raid was led by his rival, Mamanti."
Vail shrugged and declared, "Don't matter. The war that resulted was the end of both of them, and we ain't got time for ancient history. Now that everyone's agreed on Quanah Parker as the heap big chief of the Comanche and spokesman for his orphaned Kiowa children, things have commenced to get more progressive. The Comanche have actually taken to drilling in corn crops and raising pony herds instead of raiding for 'em. The Kiowa and that half-ass bunch of stray Apache they've adopted are still trying to live their old free ways. That's what you call it when you sponge off employed neighbors and the self-supporting taxpayer, the old free ways."
Longarm asked dubiously if any of the new developments around Fort Sill had anything to do with him and his trouble with Attila Homagy.
Vail said, "It wouldn't have, if that fool Bohunk had kept a tighter rein on his wayward bride. But a few days back I got me this request from the B.I.A. Seems Chief Quanah Parker asked for you by name and-"
"Hold on!" Longarm cut in. "I barely know Quanah Parker to howdy, and I've never messed with even one of his eight wives!"
Vail got to his feet with a weary smile. "You got it ass backwards. Right now you're likely safer surrounded by Quill Indian husbands than the other kind. They asked to borrow you for a spell to help 'em smooth the rough spots of their new Indian Police out of Fort Sill. The army ain't so interested in training Indians for anything but scouting since Indian Affairs got transferred from the War to Interior Department. I was about to write back that our Justice Department has enough on its plate when that Attila jasper showed up with the avowed intent of blowing your balls off."
Vail picked up a bulky manila envelope from the sideboard and turned back to Longarm. "You'll find more about it in here, along with your travel orders and such. I had Henry type up copies of the shit from Fort Sill. Meanwhile, I sent Smiley and Dutch over to your hired quarters on the far side of the creek to fetch your Winchester, McClellan, and saddlebags packed for the field--if you know what's good for you. You'll find your stuff in the baggage room at Union Depot. Your claim check and train tickets are in this envelope."
As he handed it to Longarm he continued. "I've already told you I'm sending someone else to scout the cheating wives of Trinidad. I want you totally out of our hair at Fort Sill whilst we find out just what happened and do something about it. So what are you waiting for, a kiss good-bye?"
Longarm muttered he wasn't that sort of cuss, and so they settled for shaking hands and parting more or less friendly. Longarm was still a mite riled as he ambled back to Colfax to catch a horse-drawn streetcar. The notion of running off to join the Comanche Nation to avoid a fight with a mighty silly pest just didn't sit right, even though his common sense told him nobody important to him was fixing to call him a coward or even laugh at him. The pure fact that Attila Homagy was probably green as hell with a gun and surely misinformed about his wife's love life made him impossible to reason with and stupid for any real gunfighter to tangle with.
The streetcar carried him the mile and a quarter to Union Depot a tad sooner and not as sweaty as if he'd legged it all the way at that pace. As he entered the cavernous depths of the sooty red brick edifice, it took a short spell for his eyes to adjust from the bright sunlight out front. So he froze in mid stride and came close to going for his gun when an all-too-familiar voice near the tobacco stand let fly with, "You didn't think I'd be slick enough to head anyone off here, did you, Deputy Smiley?"
Those last two words saved Attila Homagy from a pistol-whipping at the very least as Longarm stared thoughtfully down at the older man and paused to hear him out.
Homagy nodded at the envelope in Longarm's left hand. "Some last-minute instructions from Marshal Vail, eh? I guess all of you had me down as just another dumb greenhorn. But I'll have everyone know that whether I was born in the Carpathians or not, I graduated from the eighth grade in Penn State!"