The lady of the house nodded and said, "A group of Indian or former Indian businessmen have formed a syndicate with the quiet intent of getting back as much of this ancestral Santee land as possible the Wasichu way!"
Her husband chuckled fondly and said, "We ain't had much luck in trying to hold it Indian-style. No matter how the damned treaty may read, somebody on one damned side or the other always seems to trip over some damned provision. You were the one who just said what happens when Washington gets the excuse to scrap an agreement on the grounds of breach of contract."
Longarm laughed incredulously and said, "Let me see if I got this straight. You treacherous Sioux, having failed to lick the U.S. Army and take this continent back by force of arms, mean to take at least some of it back by way of the Federal Homestead Act?"
Chambrun asked smugly, "Why not? The government lets freed slaves and Swedes who speak even worse English than us file homestead claims before they've bothered applying for citizenship. Where in your Constitution or Good Book does it say a human being born on U.S. soil to families that go way back before Columbus can't call his or her ownself an American farmer, as long as he or she can abide by all your fool rules?"
"And pay all bills in legal tender?" the moon-faced wife of the otherwise normal homestead added as her breed kids snickered from the next room.
Longarm didn't want to compound the confusion by making objections or asking questions that had no direct bearing on that Fort Collins robbery. So he sipped some bitter brew to compose his own thoughts. He knew it could look either way to that kid with the cow, and it really cut no ice whether the Chambruns were using other folks' money or acting as distributors for that mysterious syndicate. So he put down his cup and got out his notebook as he quietly said, "If I take your word how you came by that recorded hundred-dollar note, I'm still going to have to backtrack it all the way to Fort Collins, or at least to someone criminal for certain. So you'd best give me some other names I can check out. You say these sort of retired Santee have been advancing you homesteading kith and kin the money it takes to make a go of a government claim?"
Chambrun nodded, and might have said something if his moon-faced wife hadn't cut him off with a rattle of Santee Longarm couldn't keep up with.
It was tough enough to follow a Mexican conversation in rapid-fire Spanish when you knew most of the words but didn't think in Spanish. The folks you were trying to listen in on tended to run on to the next paragraph while you were still translating the first in your own head.
It was even worse when you only knew some baby-talk Indian. The Sioux-Hokan dialects weren't as confusing as some others, but that didn't mean the grammar was simple as English. The nouns and verbs changed enough, depending on who was talking about whom, while the singular and plural could stay the same. So while Longarm was still brushing up on the little he knew of their lingo, the Chambruns had come to some agreement on how they meant to talk to him in Wasichu.
It was Chambrun who spoke up, although Longarm suspected that none of these white or breed squawmen had the final say when they'd been funded by the kith and kin of their purebred wives. The burly breed said, "We're not going to tell you, Deputy Long. Didn't they ever tell you that tale about the golden goose?"
Longarm nodded soberly and replied, "They did, and I follow your drift. I'd be sore if I'd advanced somebody the money to start a sort of agricultural experiment and they called the law on me too. On the other hand, looking at it from my side of the checkerboard, I've been ordered to trace that treasury note all the way back to the cuss who took it from that government payroll at gunpoint, and so far the trail seems to end at your very doorstep."
Chambrun shook his head stubbornly and said, "No, it don't. Israel Bedford is the one who presented a thing to the bank that was listed as stolen. Banker Plover read the number of that particular piece of paper off his official list. Nobody never read shit off nothing when I paid Bedford for that riding stock."
Longarm frowned and said, "Hold on. Bedford says the note he took to the bank was the same one he got from you."
Dancing Antelope Gal cut in. "We can say we got it from Old Man Coyote as long as we didn't have to prove it. Why do you take the word of Israel Bedford over that of my husband? Because the Wasichu has blue eyes and thus his heart must be pure?"
Longarm wet a finger and drew an invisible chalk mark in the air between them as he said, "I'll give you that point, even though they say in town that Israel Bedford has a good rep."
Chambrun grumbled, "What's wrong with my rep? Has anybody said I steal from my neighbors or fail to pay my bills on time? It's all the fault of that Mark Twain, making Indian Joe the halfbreed the villain. I know what they say about us two-faced snakes in the grass, but was Simon Girty who led all those raids along the old frontier part Indian? Was Benedict Arnold or Judas part Indian?"
Longarm grimaced and said, "I just said I conceded that point. But they still expect me to make some arrests in connection with that hot paper, old son."
Chambrun shrugged and said, "Arrest Bedford then. He's the one who spent that treasury note in town for certain. It's my word against his that I handed him that particular treasury note and no other. But if you want to arrest me, on no more than a white man's sacred word, I reckon I'll just have to take my chances with the grand jury if it goes that far."
His wife said, in a less teasing tone, "We know none of the people we are ... fronting for would hold anybody up. It would only upset them, very much, if we told you who they were and let you bother them. If they knew anything, anything about stolen money, they would never pass it on to people of their own nation."
Then she crossed her arms and quietly added, "So hear me. I have spoken."
Longarm finished all but the dregs in his tin cup as he composed his words carefully. "I know nobody would knowingly pass on a recorded hundred-dollar treasury note if they knew about those lists of serial numbers, ma'am. But you've just now convinced me an innocent person could accept and pass one on in ignorant good faith. So can't you see how some perfectly respectable businessman of the Santee or part-Santee persuasion could have accepted some of that hot paper in trade, and might be able to tell me just who in thunder stuck him with it?"
The Indian woman didn't answer. Her husband rose from the table to say, "I reckon I have spoken too."
So Longarm shrugged, got to his own feet, and put his hat back on as he replied, "In that case there's nothing left for me to say but pilamiyeh, or is that pinamiyeh in Santee, and in either case I'll be back if your story don't hold water, hear?"
CHAPTER 17
The darkness had finished falling by the time Longarm mounted up to ride on, the bitter taste in his mouth only partly inspired by that dreadful coffee back yonder. The moon was up and out to shine bright, but a herd of big black clouds were stampeding across the sky from the southwest to make the night air taste like electric tingles felt and make the moonlight mighty tricky. But as he rode old Smokey downstream, Longarm could tell the road under them lay at a nine- or ten-degree grade, and they'd told him aboard that old steamboat how Chambrun had claimed high rocky ground instead of richer bottomlands up and down the river for the taking. For folks trying to live off the blanket like white settlers, they sure had some mighty odd ways, maybe left over from the vision-seeking notions of less advanced times. Indians were always camping way up in the middle of the air, and starving themselves on top of rock outcroppings, until a friendly wanigi took pity on them and sent a vision from the spirit world. Longarm had never heard of anyone having a vision in the warm comfort of a really swell campsite.