“You know, I’d forgotten all about that?”
“Denver didn’t forget. The warrant I pack on Hunts Alone was the only reason I came up here in the first damn place. You might say this crap about the Wendigo, Mendez, or whomsoever was a side issue.”
Chadwick laughed and said, “Some side issue! You scattered the poor bastard from hell to breakfast!”
Longarm smiled. “Well, he wasn’t too tidy while he was alive. I’m sorry I shot him, though. He died too sudden, and before he could tell me some things I wished to know.”
“You still think he had a motive, then? I mean, a sensible motive a sane person might understand?”
“There’s no big mystery to that part of it. Mendez was a killer by nature and a bully by profession. He was playing Wendigo to run the Blackfoot off their land.”
“Damn it, Longarm, we’ve been over that till I’m blue in the face from explaining. There’s no way anyone can claim that Indian land. I not only looked it up in the regulations, I wired Washington to see if there’d been any new rulings on the subject.”
“Do tell?” Longarm raised an eyebrow. “What did Washington say?”
“The same thing I’ve been telling you. Even if this particular reservation was completely abandoned for a full seven years, the land’s been set aside in trust for the Blackfoot Nation.”
“In other words, as long as one Blackfoot’s still living anywhere in the country, no white man can claim an acre of that range?”
Chadwick rolled his eyes heavenward and said, “Not even if the Blackfoot ran up to Canada and took an oath to Queen Victoria. I checked that out with headquarters while I was at it. As wards of the state the Indians are not allowed to sell, give, or even throw away a square foot of their land, once it’s been allotted to them.”
Longarm asked, “What about some other tribe being given an abandoned reservation?”
Chadwick looked blank. Then he went to the bookshelf and started rummaging through a buckram-bound book of regulations, muttering, “I can see it, in time. But that couldn’t be what the Wendigo, or Mendez, had in mind.”
“Why not?”
“Hell,” Chadwick said disgustedly, “you know how slowly the government works. And even if the B.I.A. did assign some other tribe the lands, what good would it do any white man?”
He opened the book to the regulation he’d been looking for and nodded, saying, “Seven years with no other claims, as I thought. Besides, even if another bunch of Indians were brought in, what would it mean to a white cattleman? I agree, all that ungrazed range might tempt almost anyone who might have hired Mendez, but as 1 keep trying to tell you, there’s no way on earth they can get it!”
As he put the book back, Longarm asked, “Let’s try it another way. What if someone were to just hire the range? Doesn’t the government charge a modest fee per head for running cattle on public lands?”
“Certainly. Collecting range fees is part of my job.”
“All right. What would it cost me, per head and season, if I came to you for a grazing permit on those reservation lands?”
Chadwick reached for his bookshelf, hesitated as if lost, and turned to say, “I don’t know. You’d have to ask Durler, the Indian agent.”
“I have. He doesn’t know how to rope a cow, either. I thought the Land Agency had the final say on all government lands not being used for anything else.”
“We do and we don’t. You know about interservice rivalry, Longarm. The B.I.A. would never release grazing rights to us.”
“Doesn’t your office hire out land in the Indian Nation, down Oklahoma way?”
Chadwick frowned and said, “I’ll have to ask about that. It’s my understanding the Indian Nation’s a special case. As you can see, I don’t have any B.I.A. regulations here. Doesn’t Durler have a library of his own out at the reservation?”
Longarm sighed, “Yeah. I’ve been looking through those fool books, too. I never was good at Latin and they seem to have been written by some old boys who never learned enough English to matter. Durler says he doesn’t know what the Wendigo wanted, either. Do you think he’s telling me the truth?”
Chadwick blinked in surprise before he asked, “Jesus, do you think the Indian agent himself might have been behind the killings?”
“Somebody was. I’ve been going with the notion that Durler doesn’t know too much about stealing money from the government, yet.”
Chadwick laughed and said, “It takes a while. I’m still working on my education. By the way, how long have you been in the service, Longarm?”
Longarm chewed his unlit cheroot and answered soberly, “Seven or eight years. They haven’t caught me stealing from them yet.”
“That makes two of us. Us little fellows never get to put our hands in the cookie jar, do we? You have to know those thieves in Washington pretty well before they let you at the pork barrel.”
Longarm didn’t answer, so Chadwick continued, “I don’t know Durler all that well, but I’ll stick my neck out and say he’s probably as honest as most of us field men. If he was thinking of pocketing bribes for granting range fees to any local cattleman, he’d be foolish to run his own Blackfoot off.”
Longarm frowned and said, “Keep talking. How would a crooked Indian agent go about getting rich at his job?”
Chadwick hesitated. Then he shrugged and said expansively, “Hell, we all know how the Indian Ring worked it under Grant. They didn’t chase Indians off reservations. They crowded ‘em in like sardines. If Durler was a crook, he’d want all the Indians out there he could get!”
“How do you figure that, Chadwick?”
“Jesus, I thought you said you’d been reading the B.I.A. regulations!” Chadwick said impatiently. “The B.I.A. gets money from Congress to take care of them. The money in mistreating Indians is in skimming off part of the government allotments for food, clothing, medical supplies, and so forth.”
“Then the more Indians an agent has to work with, the more loose change there is to sort of lose in the cracks?”
Chadwick laughed a bit enviously, as he nodded and said, “There you have it. If I was a crooked Indian agent I’d have ten times as many Indians out on that reservation. Then I’d divert about ten cents on the dollar and retire rich!”
Longarm nodded as if in sudden enlightenment and agreed, “You’d make more that way than selling range permits for a side bet under the table, huh?”
Chadwick sighed in open envy this time as he said, “Oh, God, yes. Cows only eat grass. There’s no way to fiddle with the price of beans and white bread, feeding cows. They don’t wear shoes or sleep under blankets, either. I’ll bet that agent Cal Durler replaced is living in a big New York brownstone, now.”
Longarm frowned and said, “Back up. Are you saying the agent young Cal replaced might have been a crook?”
Chadwick grew suddenly cautious as he answered slyly, “I don’t want you to quote me about a fellow federal man, but it’s common knowledge he was a Grant appointee. His name was McBride and the new reform administration threw him out on his ass as soon as they went over his books.”
Longarm ripped a piece of yellow paper from a pad on Chadwick’s desk and wrote the name down before he asked, “Was this McBride ever charged with anything, or are we only funning?”
Chadwick said, “I told you I have no real evidence. No, they did not put him in jail. The way I heard it, they let him resign peaceably, after he had some trouble explaining why he was collecting rations for three times as many Indians as there were in all Montana Territory.”
“They get a federal indictment on this McBride jasper, or is all this just suspicions?” Longarm asked, folding the piece of paper and putting it in his pocket.