He followed the proud Santee beauty across that springy plank and into the lopsided shingled structure that took up most of the raft.
She'd left a candle lit inside. So he could see the front room was a work shed, smelling strongly of honey and devoted to the extraction gear and mason jars of her trade. Most of the jars seemed to be filled. When he commented, she said she'd been saving all the money she got in town from the Bee Witch's regular customers. She said she hadn't tried to drum up extra business on her own.
When Longarm said he hadn't noticed all that many beehives in the woods, she explained she'd set out two score that spring, along the edge of the trees to the west, shaded by the trees from the hot noonday sun but offering her bees plenty of flowery foraging on the far side of that county road. Longarm was country enough to know she was talking straight when she said more kinds of flowers grew, in greater numbers, where Wasichu had messed with the original lay of the land. Her kind had set grass fires late in the season to keep their hunting grounds open and lush for the critters they ate. But even had they wanted more posies they'd have had to wait till white settlers brought a whole Noah's Ark of extra old country greenery such as alfalfa, chickory, clover, dandelions, and even that Kentucky bluegrass everybody thought as American as apple pie, which was Pennsylvania Dutch in the first place.
The center of the surprisingly roomy shanty was taken up by a main room where, bless her heart, the pretty little thing had lit a combined cooking and heating stove against the damp chill. She seemed as anxious to show him the whole layout as he was to inspect it. He had to allow the two bedchambers opening into the far end of the main central room smelled too clean for her to be hiding a corpse on board.
Mato Takoza sat Longarm at a plank table and rustled up a length of cotton line and a cheesebox of clothes pegs. She strung the line catty-corner across the top of the hot stove, from hooks screwed into the two-by-four framing just right, and told him to shuck his wet duds so she could dry them for him as she whipped up some fresh coffee and scrambled eggs.
He was willing enough, till he got down to just his dank pants, soggy undershirt, and gunbelt. By this time she'd shed her raggedy black spook dress, and it was surprising how womanly a gal with such a young face could look in a thin cotton shift. She didn't have to hang her black rags to dry. As she pegged his to the clothesline she asked how come he was ashamed to take off his gun and pants. She said, "Hear me, you are much bigger than me and you can see I am wearing no gun under this flour sacking. Hang that gunbelt over the Winchester in the corner behind you, and we can have a lot of fun watching one another for false moves!"
He chuckled and replied, "You might suspect me of plotting other sorts of moves if I was to sit here in my birthday suit so close to anybody pretty as you, no offense."
She was too dusky for a blush to show in such dim light, but she fluttered her lashes and sounded a tad flustered as she stammered something about being just a halfbreed, sakes alive. Then she fetched him a blanket from another room, saying, "Wrap this around you if you're afraid I'll peek. But get out of those wet clothes if you don't want to catch a summer cough. It will get colder before it gets warmer here on the water."
He knew that was true. So he ducked into one of the bedrooms to strip down to his bare feet and come back out, wrapped in the dark blue blanket with his free hand holding his gun rig and boots as well as soggy duds. She took everything but his six-gun, saying his boots would dry safer if she stuffed them with newspaper and didn't stand them too close to her stove. He went and hung his gun rig on a nail above the Winchester he'd stood in the angle of some framing. He'd found it could be as educational to pretend you were completely disarmed as it could to pretend you didn't know a word of Spanish or Indian dialects. So the less said about the derringer under the blanket the better.
By this time she had everything hung and she'd rustled up the makings of that light supper she'd offered. As she put the pot on to boil, under his dangling duds, and greased a cast-iron spider for the eggs, Mato Takoza told Longarm more about herself.
She said she'd been a girl-child during the big Santee Scare of '62 and the long forced march to Crow Creek that had followed inevitably after that much bad blood between her two races.
Both her ma and pa had been breeds, raised Indian by pure-blood gals who'd been married up with Wasichu trappers while they'd been out this way. Mato Takoza's momma's clan had fought more and hence lost more under Little Crow. But later. out at the Crow Creek Agency, the young gal's daddy had taken to strong drink and wife-beatings in spite of, or maybe because of, never counting coup in the short but savage uprising. Mato Takoza was too smart to call it "The First Sioux War" the way some old soldiers and even civilian volunteers put it when they got to bragging.
She busted half a dozen eggs into her greased spider and got to scrambling them, along with some chopped-up wild onion grass, as she told him how her homesick momma had brought her back to the old Santee Agency at Redwood Falls, only to find Wasichu, many Wasichu, living there now. She sounded mighty steamed as she complained, "Hear me, my mother's people were not woodland creatures. We had learned long ago to build cabins and plant fruit orchards by watching you Wasichu. Out at Crow Creek they expected us to winter in tipis where the wolf wind howls across open prairie from the Moon of Many Colored Leaves to the Geese Nesting Moon. We had built nicer houses here than a lot of Wasichu, and now Wasichu had moved into them. All of them."
Longarm shrugged his bare shoulders under the blanket and resisted the obvious observation about the spoils of war. He knew they'd never admitted starting a war, and he didn't want her to lose the thread of her own story.
She didn't. She dished out the eggs on tin plates as she told him how she and her late momma had gotten by as hired help to homesteader housewives, since both had looked half-white and it had been easy enough to say they were friendlier "Chippewa" when no real Ojibwa were about to call them fibbers. After Mato Takoza's ma had died of the consumption or some other lung rot, she'd heard tell of the Bee Witch, a crazy old colored lady who lived free and easy up and down the river, and so, being less afraid of the white man's flies than some purebreds might have been, she'd tracked the Bee Witch down to ask her for a job.
It hadn't been easy. Mato Takoza had learned that spooky crow-flapping act from the old colored lady, who was more worried about being robbed or pestered than really witko. The Bee Witch had tried to scare the Santee breed off, and when that hadn't worked they'd got to talking enough so they could finally cut a deal.
Mato Takoza said the Bee Witch had been an easygoing boss, once she'd taught her young apprentice how to herd bees without getting stung too often. Mato Takoza said the older gal had been way more educated than she'd let on to strangers. As she motioned him to dig in and moved back to her stove to check the coffeepot, she told him how the old colored lady had read herself to sleep with big old books, and how she'd liked to sketch with pencil and ink on a drawing pad as she let her younger helper do most of the simple chores that went with a mighty carefree life.
Longarm said the old gal sounded as if she might have been a house slave in her younger days, explaining, "Most slave states had laws against teaching bond-servants to read or write, since they thought a little knowledge could be a dangerous thing after a slave called Nat Turner read a copy of the Declaration of Independence and thought he was included in that part about all men being created equal. But lots of easygoing slave-holders didn't mind, and even taught some of their people, as they called 'em, to read. For one thing, it made a house slave more valuable if he or she could read written instructions."