She didn't argue. But as she led the way around to the back she naturally wanted to know where he'd be riding, and seeing he'd be riding there on her stock, he felt obliged to tell her.
She gasped. "The Bedfords dwell a good six miles north of town, and you say these mysterious breeds are homesteading nine miles out beyond them?"
Longarm said soothingly, "We won't be jumping no fences loping either way, ma'am. I don't see how we'll get back before sundown either, but it's a county road and the moon will rise full tonight with no clouds worth mention."
So she sighed and said she'd put the ham she was baking in the warming oven up above, so it could cook much slower, but warned him his supper would be ruined if he didn't get back by seven or eight. He doubted he could, but he never said so as he followed her inside, agreed the black gelding with a white blaze she introduced him to was a handsome brute, and went along with her suggestion he use her bridle instead of his own because old Blaze was more used to the feel of the bit. He wasn't about to ride fifteen miles each way in her sidesaddle.
Seated astride an old McClellan, with his own Winchester back in its saddle boot, Longarm rode out the north side of town a little before four, and asking directions only twice along the way, rode into the Bedford dooryard around five.
The spread was a tad more imposing than he'd expected, even knowing Israel Bedford had bought a proven claim with a dozen years' worth of improvements on it before he and his younger family started work on their own. The main house and outbuildings, while sod-walled, were tin-roofed with all the wood-trim whitewashed. Handsome glass windows let in the light and kept out the winter winds. Less prosperous settlers tended to have glass bottles driven through the sod walls instead.
There were two pole corrals and a good-sized training paddock out back, with a patent sunflower windmill watering the whole shebang. It was too early in the season to say, from where he sat old Blaze, whether those acres of grain to the north of those new apple saplings were barley like some said, or the oats Longarm would have drilled in if he'd been raising that many ponies. That deputy sheriff had been right about Bedford's stock Morgan bloodlines, and it made a man feel swell just to look at those dozen or so pretty ponies staring back curiously from that one corral.
A dog was barking from inside the house. The Bedfords had doubtless called their kids inside when first they spied a stranger riding in. For Israel Bedford stepped out a side door alone, a Greener ten-gauge in hand as he smiled uncertainly and called out, "You'd be just in time for supper if you're out this way on friendly business, stranger."
Longarm flashed his badge before he dismounted in order to talk softer as he introduced himself. "I don't mean to slight that swell chicken soup I can smell from all the way out here. But I got many a mile of riding ahead of me. So I'll get right to my business with you, Captain Bedford."
The retired army man, a wirey individual in his late thirties wearing bib overalls, walked along as Longarm led his mount to the veranda steps and tethered it loosely to the cottonwood railing. Longarm broke out two cheroots and got them both lit up before he tersely brought Bedford up to date on his investigation.
Bedford had naturally figured some Of it Out already, thanks to earlier unskilled questioning by the local sheriff. He said he knew that Chambrun bunch better now than he had the day he'd sold Wabasha Chambrun a filly and a colt for that recorded treasury note. He said they'd met on the road Out front a time Or more and had some friendly talk about the weather, their crops and such. He had no idea where the breed or assimilated full-blood had come by the money because, he said, he hadn't asked.
When Longarm had asked whether an old soldier might by any chance recall his Sioux-Hokan-speaking neighbor from that big Santee uprising of '62, the retired Indian fighter shook his head as if he knew and replied, "If we ever swapped shots he'd have been just a painted kid loping past, and to be honest, most of such wild and woolly fun had ended by the time us regulars got across the Mississippi to tidy up."
He stared off across the range, now more peaceful, rolling gold and lavender in the late afternoon sunlight, as he added in a soft, bemused tone, "There wasn't much to tidy up after irregulars hit Mister Lo with everything but the kitchen sink and then shoved his head in the sink. But I have to allow Indians tend to stay down when they've been put down by others just as savage. You saw what the old Seventh Cav got for sparing so many women and children on the Washita. Old Hank Sibley and his fourteen hundred militiamen of the Sixth Minnesota didn't bother with such niceties as separating the sheep from the goats. Sibley had been an Indian trader, spoke Sioux, and just kept running down and butchering Sioux till they begged him to stop and agreed to peace on harsher terms than us regulars might have offered."
Longarm wrinkled his nose and muttered, "I'd have been scared of Long Trader Sibley if I'd been an Indian too. I understand he wound up with close to a hundred and fifty thousand in Indian funds in his own pocket before the Santee rose. But that's not what I was sent to look into. I'll take your word you didn't recall Wabasha Chambrun from your Indian-fighting days, Captain. But wasn't Wabasha the name of an important sub-chief under Little Crow?"
Bedford nodded. "I met that Wabasha. He was a rival as well as an earlier follower of Little Crow. They'd argued strategy from the beginning, and once they'd suffered some reverses Wabasha came over to our side as a sort of peacemaker."
"Or a sort of Benedict Arnold, to hear the Indians tell it," said Longarm thoughtfully.
Then he said, "I'll just ask this other Wabasha how come he took the name of a famous fork-tongue. Quill Indians are allowed to make up their own names with the aid of visions and such. But the son of a Christian, raised to wear Wasichu duds, might have been given his name without him having any say-so in the matter." He blew a thoughtful smoke ring and mused, half to himself, "Any way you slice it, though, a man named after a famous Santee chief and living on what used to be Santee hunting ground sure ain't all that convincing as a French-Canadian and Osage anything!"
CHAPTER 11
A good pony could carry a man thirty or forty miles overnight if he liked it, and over a hundred if he hated it. But old Blaze was not his to abuse, and Longarm figured spells of trotting and walking would cover the nine more miles to the Chambrun place in less than three hours.
The walking was easier on the ass of any man seated in a McClellan saddle. The old army ball-breaker had been designed with the endurance of the mount rather than the comfort of the rider in mind. But things could have felt worse. Longarm was smart enough to ride in tight pants and snug underdrawers, so his balls never got wedged in that open slit down the center of a McClellan that was designed to prevent chaffing or overheating the pony's spine no matter what new cavalry recruits wrote home about it.
The day was dying gently with a poetical sunset off to the west as the horned larks and redwings sang their harsh but not unpleasant evening serenades from either side of the dusty road. He could tell it more or less followed the trend of the river, not because he could see that much sky blue or chalky water through the denser cover to his right, but because there was so much of the cover. You never saw willows or cottonwoods that high unless they grew close to all-summer water. The scattered oak and thorn apple off to his left was reaching way deeper for groundwater on that side of the county road. But either way, the sunset made them all look as if they'd sprouted leaves made out of amber, butterscotch, and such, while sunset-gilded bees still foraged the wildflowers peeking up at him from amid the taller bluestem and needle grass. The grass didn't seem to have been grazed so much out this way, although those bees by themselves would have told an Indian, or warned him, there were white folks in these parts.