Legend With a Six-gun (9781101601839), page 3
“Of course,” Bitter Water replied with assurance. “No white man can track me in my native hills. But you did not run away. You stayed to help me. This is a new thing I must consider.”
Longarm shrugged and said, “You light out on your own if you’ve a mind to. I’ve got to see if I can find my gun and badge.”
But as he went out front to rummage through the constable’s desk, the Indian, now dressed, took his arm and said, “Come, Saltu brother. The siesta will be ending and we must have at least an hour’s start on them through the trees.”
Longarm looked at Bitter Water with some surprise. “I thought you aimed to make it on your own, Bitter Water. Just let me find my stuff, and—”
“You are a good person, but a fool. You had your badge and they arrested you! When they find their friend unconscious, the whole town will be after us!”
“Us? All for one and one for all?”
The Miwok nodded. “You have me in your debt. Come with me and no Saltu will ever cut your trail.”
“Well, maybe if I can get a few miles off and study my next move a spell . . .” Longarm speculated.
“Come. I will show you things no Saltu knows about these hills. Later, you can go back to Wa Sentan. Agreed?”
Longarm nodded, but then he said, “Not hardly. This case is just getting interesting.”
“You mean to come back to this place? Without your badge? Without your gun? Without a friend in the county?”
“Hell, old son, I’ve got a gun. The other odds just promise to make the game a mite more interesting.”
* * *
In a white man’s town, wearing a white man’s cast-off rags, Bitter Water had seemed a rather shabby specimen. But crouched on a granite outcropping beside the lawman, the Miwok was a wild creature in its own element. The Mother Lode country lay in the oak-covered foothills of the Sierras, rather than in the evergreen slopes he’d half expected, so they were no higher than the Colorado prairie he was used to, yet Longarm was out of breath. His Indian companion had set a killing pace since they’d skulked out of Manzanita. Bitter Water had led them downslope for a time, which made sense, since anyone trying to cut their trail would figure they’d made a beeline for the high country. But then he’d led them in a series of hairpin turns through canyons thick with undergrowth and over hogback ridges too steep for a billy goat to consider, and, except for knowing that they were somewhere to the south of, and slightly higher than Manzanita, Longarm was completely lost.
He could only hope that anyone following them was as bushed and mixed-up as he was. As he rested his cramped calves by sprawling on the granite on one elbow, Longarm began to recover his bearings as well as his breath. The lookout Bitter Water had selected was a cunning choice. Longarm knew most men moved to the highest ground they could find when they wanted to see out across the world. The Miwok had led them to one of many boulders running in a horizontal band two-thirds of the way up this particular ridge. Anyone sweeping the high country with field glasses from the valley below would have no particular reason to study the rocks they were on, and their outlines were well below the skyline.
At the same time, they had a spectacular view to the west, north, and south. The sun was low and blazing red as it headed for China. The tawny, rolling foothills lay below them like some huge, wrinkled carpet, stitched together by the Great Spirit from odds and ends of animal skins—mostly cougar. The ridges ran north and south, under a cover of cheat grass and wild mustard, in rounded muscular curves that reminded one of the feminine strength of a great cat. It was easy to see, from up here, why California was earthquake country. The lower slopes of the Sierra looked as if they were about to spring at the North Pole. The folds between the smooth rolls of the slopes were dark with canyon oak and manzanita. To his left and right, the land grew rougher as the slopes became steeper, with a darker pelt of ponderosa pines and other evergreens disputing the claim of the lowland vegetation. He couldn’t see the snow-covered crests of the High Sierra behind them, for the range climbed to the timberline in graduated waves, steeper toward the east and gentler toward the sunset. The western slope of the Sierra would hardly have been noticeable, in fact, had not time and the patient running waters of a million brooks carved the main slopes into thousands of smaller ridges and canyons.
Bitter Water was watching one of the brush-choked canyons. They had come through it on the way here, and he was worried about his attempts to hide their sign. He’d called the place Spider Valley, Longarm remembered it as a winding stretch of dusty hell where he’d crawled on his hands and knees under waist-high twisted branches that smelled like medicine. He didn’t remember seeing any spiders in Spider Valley, but the place had been crawling with sassy little lizards who stuck their tongues out before they darted away along the branches.
He couldn’t locate it now. Spider Valley could have been any of those wrinkles down there, sinking into twilight well ahead of the still brightly illuminated ridges. He squinted his eyes against the red sun and managed to make out the distant flatness of the Great Valley between where they stood and the lower coastal ranges. The lowlands shimmered under a flat haze of dull orange and woodsmoke gray as the late afternoon breeze moved in from the invisible Pacific, beyond the horizon. He knew Sacramento was down there, somewhere. That son-of-a-bitch federal judge who’d disputed his jurisdiction was probably watching a nice sunset and planning a night on the town. In a state notorious for political corruption, Justice Stephen Field had gained a reputation for innovative crookedness.
The trouble with federal judges, Longarm mused, was that they were appointed for life and were often given the job as a reward for getting out the vote instead of for juridical literacy. Justice Field was one of those old-timers who’d come West to do good, and he had done a lot of it—for himself. They said he’d killed a few men in his day, and he was widely known for his draconian views on the rights of Greasers, Chinks, Niggers, or Injuns, as he called them. He was reputed to be thick with the railroad barons and bankers. He’d elevated the art of land-grabbing and claim-jumping to a fine science. This very year, at a place called Mussel Slough, U.S. marshals from the judge’s district had done battle with a group of small ranchers and farmers who had failed to see the justice in their homesteads being seized by Justice Field for his richer cronies. Longarm was glad he hadn’t been assigned to that case. The Battle of Mussel Slough had been a bloodbath California was going to remember. Five settlers had been gunned down by federal deputies, but they had taken two members of the attacking forces with them before losing their lands. It was easy to see why someone in Washington had asked for a deputy from another district. The California marshals had said they had no idea who had been stealing that gold bound for the San Francisco Mint. Longarm wondered if they were all in on it, or if he only had a few key men in high places to worry about. He felt a certain sense of loyalty to his fellow deputies, but in truth, he knew his own good reputation was mostly the result of his having a certain amount of common sense in an outfit tending to hire cheap help. He knew a lot of federal deputies who didn’t have sense enough to pour piss out of their boots. They’d go where they were told and see what they were told to see. The cover-up that Washington suspected was pretty obvious. Yet, wasn’t it a mite too obvious?
Longarm chewed thoughtfully on the edge of his full, dark brown mustache. Aloud, he muttered, “I don’t understand it. We just ain’t talking about all that much money!”
Beside him, Bitter Water asked, “What money are you talking about?”
Longarm said, “I’ve been thinking about those gold shipments. A federal judge is expensive and I’ve been adding it up. Those high-graders haven’t been running off with gold bullion; they’ve been stealing whole trainloads of ore. You know what ore is, don’t you?” Bitter Water looked at Longarm a bit reproachfully.
“Of course. My people roamed the Mother Lode before the Saltu found out there was gold in that band of yellow-brown quartz that runs north and south through these hills.” He chuckled softly and added, “We used to make arrowheads out of it. If the Saltu were less unfriendly, we could show them places where the flecks of gold in the rock are visible to the naked eye. We never had any use for it. Gold is softer than lead; it makes very poor tools. In the old days our children used to find the beads of gold washed out of the rocks by running water and, being children, they’d bring them to their mothers. Once, when I was a boy, I found a nugget as big as my thumb. My mother said not to be foolish. It was the time of the year to be gathering acorns.”
Longarm nodded and said, “I sometimes wonder myself why so many men have gone crazy over the stuff. Though I don’t hold with eating acorns. Pinyon nuts ain’t bad, but acorns are bitter as hell.”
The Miwok laughed and pointed a finger at Longarm. “You are a Saltu. You don’t know how to wash the bitterness from our food. Your people have no patience; you only eat what’s easy. Over to our west, there is a valley where a whole party of your people starved to death many years ago. They were very crazy. They starved surrounded by food, had they but seen fit to gather it. Yet they cried like women and started to eat one another. My people have often joked about those crazy Saltu.”
Longarm frowned and asked, “Are you talking about the Donner party, back in the gold rush?”
“I think that was what they were called. They got lost in the High Sierra and were snowed in for the winter. There were roots and nuts all around them, but they ate each other. The ways of your people are very strange.”
Longarm had had this same conversation with other Indians, so he didn’t want to get into it. Unlike some whites he knew, Longarm liked most Indians. But he didn’t buy the “noble savage” myth. As a man who’d lived with, slept with, and fought with Indians, he knew them better than either the bigots who hated them or the poetic writers who, never having swapped shots with Apache, tended to picture them as misunderstood supermen. The tragedy of the American Indian was simply that, save for a few tribes he could think of, they saw the world they shared with the white man as something different—something no white man could fully understand. Bitter Water seemed neighborly enough, and they were in this mess together. But Longarm knew that, no matter how it all turned out, they’d never really understand each other, so he didn’t waste time trying.
He said, “The sun’s going down. You aim to spend the night up here on this rock like some big-assed bird?”
The Miwok shrugged and said, “One part of this country is as good as any other. I don’t see dust against the sunset. If they are trailing us, they are on foot.”
Longarm stood up, shook the kinks out of his leg muscles, and stretched in the red glow of the setting sun.
“I could have told you that. We went through places no pony could have gone. Come to think of it, I wouldn’t have laid odds on a mountain goat.”
“If I had run off alone,” Bitter Water continued, “I would not think anyone was taking the trouble to search for me. They consider us pests rather than game worthy of a great hunt. But you seemed important to them. From what you have told me this day, important people want you out of the way. There may be a reward offered for your capture. Saltu will do anything for money.”
The tall deputy nodded grimly. “That’s for damned sure. But you purely puzzle me, Bitter Water. You know what money is.”
“Of course. Did you think I was a stupid person? You know I speak your tongue. ‘Fuck’ and ‘money’ are the first words anyone learns around you people.”
Longarm chuckled. “Well, maybe ‘son of a bitch’ comes almost as early. Where’d you pick up English, at some mission school?”
“No, my band avoided the padres when Mexico owned California. They were nearly as cruel as your people. When I was young, I was captured by some gold miners. They made me work for them one summer. Your tongue is less complicated than my own. You Saltu speak a sort of baby talk with very few words. It was easy to learn your speech, although your ways will always be a mystery to me.”
“White folks keep surprising me a mite, too,” Longarm admitted. “But what do you mean about us talking like babies? I know your old ones like to make long speeches. Most Indians I’ve met could talk the horns off a billy goat. But where’d you get such a big vocabulary with no books or telegraph lines?”
The Miwok shrugged and said, “We talk about things your people do not seem to find important. When Saltu speak, they only skim the surface. For instance, you only have one word for a horse.”
“Wait a minute. We have lots of words for the critters. We call them horses, ponies, studs, mares, pintos, roans, all sorts of things.”
Bitter Water waved this away with an imperious gesture. “Bah. Those words only deal with the surface. You say the same word for the poor animal no matter what it’s doing!”
The lawman looked puzzled. “I don’t follow you.”
“Of course you don’t. Suppose I said I saw a horse. What would this mean to you?”
Longarm stared down into the low country and asked, “Do you see a horse down there?”
“No. I am hoping that when it gets dark, anyone following us may build a fire and give his position away. To a Miwok, the word ‘horse’ would have little meaning. He would want to know how old the horse was and which way it was going. He would want to know if the horse had a rider. He would want to know if it was running, walking, or standing still. He would have no word that simply meant ‘horse.’”
“You mean in your lingo you use a different word for a horse running and a horse standing?”
Bitter Water nodded. “Also for every other thing a horse can do. We have no word that means ‘woman.’ To a Miwok, it is important whether a woman is young or old, ugly or pretty, awake or asleep, and so forth. No Miwok would ever ever say he had a woman. He would say he had a pretty woman who’d had children and made good acorn mush, or—”
Comprehension flickered in Longarm’s steely dark eyes. “I’m getting your drift. That’s why when I ask what you folks call a man, I get all sorts of answers, right? I mean, as far as I can grasp your lingo, a ‘ho,’ a ‘wa,’ a ‘pai,’ or a ‘ute’ are the same critter!”
“They are all men, doing different things,” Bitter Water concurred. “Your wise men are very funny. They keep writing down names of things they call tribes. They don’t understand that when they asked the so-called Paiute, Ute, Hopi, and so forth what they were, they were given the same answer. We all call ourselves ‘people.’ What the wise men wrote down was simply what the people they met were doing, or felt like, that day.”
“Well, I thank you for the language lesson, but I never came out here to study Indians. I’m looking for some jaspers given to stealing federal gold. For some reason, you have as much trouble grasping the idea of money as I do understanding Miwok.”
“I understand money. I just see no use for it,” the Indian said.
“That’s what I mean. Hell, can’t you see that a couple of dollars would buy you a decent set of jeans instead of those rags you’re wearing?”
Bitter Water shrugged and said, “I wear cotton this time of the year because it is cool on the skin in the heat. Later, when it’s cold, I will wear skins. In the green of spring I will go naked. It seems very sensible to me.”
“Sure,” Longarm persisted, “but if you had money you could buy all sorts of outfits and have them ready as the seasons changed.”
“You speak foolishly. Why should any man carry everything he might need for all the months he can’t possibly need them?”
Longarm started to argue. Then he reconsidered and nodded. Since the Diggers wandered constantly, following the game and harvests of wild vegetables, it did make sense to travel light. But he saw a hole in that argument and, even though he knew better, he asked, “Haven’t you folks ever considered sort of staying put? I mean, you ain’t dumb and you must see the advantages of a permanent home, with maybe a garden and some livestock. Farm folks don’t have to wander all over creation just to rustle up a meal.”
The Miwok grimaced and asked, “Would you have us live like some sort of Mexicans? Even if we were content to spend all our days looking at the same hills and trees, drinking water that always tasted the same, smelling flowers that always smelled the same, eating food that always tasted the same, would we be left to enjoy our new bland lives?”
“Well, the Indian agency would protect you, on a proper reservation.”
Anger darkened the Indian’s features. “As a caged bear is protected by its keepers? No, thank you. There were villages of my people in the Great Valley when the gold seekers came. They had learned farming from the Mexicans. They ate well, as you say. Then a general called Fremont came over the Sierra to fight the Mexicans. The Mexicans had guns and knew how to fight back. So your Fremont had his war with the mission Indians. He killed many. Today their farms are owned by Saltu. They boast that they won their homesteads from wild Indians.”
Longarm said, “You win. It’s nigh dark enough for anyone on our trail to be thinking of setting up camp for the night. You think we can find your village in the dark?”
“My people have no villages. They wander. They sleep wherever they are when it’s time to sleep.”
“Then how do you expect to find your band?” Longarm asked.
Bitter Water shrugged and said, “We shall meet when we meet. There are only so many valleys where a person can find food. At this time of the year my people will be gathering manzanita. I know where it grows thickly. If I don’t find them in the manzanita groves, they will be harvesting acorns soon.”
Longarm started to say he’d tasted one of the little crabapple things off a manzanita bush once, and never intended to try again. Instead, he pointed with his chin and said, “Smoke. Over there to our right, behind that saddleback ridge.” The distant plume of smoke was tinted violet by the setting sun.
