Do you reckon your kinswoman's Mexican husband would take you in for a few days if we asked politely?"

The Na-dene gal looked sincerely puzzled. "What would he have to say about it? A man can ask his asdza to offer food and shelter to his own friends. But everyone knows she has the final say."

Then she scowled and demanded, "Why do you want to leave me alone among Nakaih strangers? I knew you were tired of me after all the nice things you said about my body! You men are all alike. You go through life like that wicked Holy One, Begochidi! You grab us poor trusting things by our privates when we least expect it, then you run away crying, 'Bego! Bego!' as if you had done something brave!"

He handed her the cheroot. "Folks who say your kind and mine have nothing in common have surely never played slap-and-tickle with a lady of either persuasion. I ain't tired of s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g you, honey lamb. I just don't want to have to worry about another backside they might shoot at as I poke about those canyons on the far side of the Chama Valley. I told you why I'd been sent down this way to scout them, remember?"

The tawny little gal began to unb.u.t.ton the front of his borrowed blue shirt as she lay back on the summer-cured gra.s.s between those rocks, replying mockingly, "I thought it was just to see me. Do you like what you see, Belagana Hastin?"

Most men would have, as she spread her chunky thighs wide in the dappled morning sunlight. For while all such sights were inspiring, some were prettier than others. She said she admired his dong too, when he dropped his jeans to show it was already hard.

So the day would have pa.s.sed quite enjoyably, had they had just a tad more to eat as they screwed, smoked, and lazed the sunlit hours away.

Then it was dark enough to move on, so they did, both ponies a bit balky now, and their own rumps feeling less rested than usual.

It was still fairly early after moonrise. So the other riders they heard first could have been on less pressing business than witch-hunting. But as the riders were moving past the cottonwood grove Longarm and the girl were hiding in, that blamed police buckskin neighed, inspiring the Indians in the middle distance to rein in and discuss the situation.

Longarm could only c.o.c.k his Winchester and hope for the best for now.

But Kinipai naturally understood what those old boys were saying about odd noises in the dark. So she suddenly let loose with what Longarm considered a rusty imitation of a great horned owl.

He said so with a chuckle as the Indians lit out at full gallop. When he told her she'd have never fooled any West-by-G.o.d-Virginia ridge-runners with such odd hootings, she demurely explained that she hadn't been trying to imitate any old owl. She said she'd heard one of them call another by name. So she'd wondered what they might do if Owl called out that name.

He laughed harder and said he'd always thought she was smart as a b.u.t.ton. She sighed and said, "I've picked up some terrible habits since I met you. Pretending to be a Holy One is as bad as burning pollen. Our Pueblo enemies hold dance ways where masked elders act out the parts of their spirits. But I was taught by my uncle how disrespectful that would be to our own Holy Ones. I don't know how I shall ever be pure enough to conduct any blessing ways now!"

He said, "I don't see how, either. No offense, but ain't you in the position of one of those Salem witch women, if she'd got away and run off to live with the Mohegans or Pequoit?"

She didn't know what he was talking about. That didn't surprise him.

He said, "I mean that, seeing you've been drummed out of your old chanters' guild as a tried and convicted witch, your best bet now would be a total change of position."

She said she liked some of the positions he'd taught her.

He laughed and said, "For Pete's sake, we're both dressed and on horseback. So pay attention. I've had this same conversation with a heap of disgruntled folks of various nations. I'm sorry as h.e.l.l about that wrong turn Columbus took on his way to India, but he took it, and you folks wound up Indians, whether you wanted to be or not, at least as long as you kept on behaving like Indians."

She pouted. "Hear me, what is wrong with the way my N'de people behave?

We have always been this way, ever since Spider Woman showed us the way to these sunny lands from the dark caves we used to live in."

He said, "That ain't true. Your own Changing Woman tells you that nothing stays the same, without changing, unless it's dead, and even the dead keep changing, sort of disgustingly, until nothing's left."

She said she wouldn't know about that, having been taught from her girlhood to avoid the dead and to speak about them as seldom as possible.

He shrugged and said, "I got to see more of dead boys in blue and gray at more than one battleground back East. So I see why a Jicarilla who didn't have to watch 'em bloat up and turn all sorts of ugly colors might not want to. My point was that living folks can cling to their old ways after their old ways don't work no more, or they can follow Changing Woman's advice and take up ways that do work. That kinswoman living Mexican on that ranch we're looking for ain't being asked to move clean down to the Tularosa Agency against her will. She's likely eating, drinking, sleeping, and so on as good or better than she ever did. And meanwhile, there's no BIA agent telling her to line up and sound off her allotment number."

Kinipai protested, "Hear me, she's no longer N'de since she wed that stranger and accepted the strange ways of his cruel Holy Ones, the Mary Mother, who was not able to save her only son as Changing Woman saved the Hero Twins, and the Jesus Chindi, whose medicine failed to protect him from his enemies and whom even his followers call a dead man's chindi!"

Longarm dryly observed, "'Holy Ghost' don't sound as spooky. I ain't out to convert an Apache witch to the Santa Fe, as the Mexican call their Holy Faith. I know this fullblood Arapaho family running a tolerable cattle spread up near Pikes Peak. Lord only knows who or what they pray to after dark. But in daylight they're taken for regular cattle folk with some Indian blood. Meanwhile n.o.body makes 'em fill out forms or sends the cavalry after them every time they order a beer after a hard day in the saddle."

She said, "I could never live like a pindah lickoyee! Could you learn to live like a N'de if things were different and we were the ones who had won?"

Longarm shrugged. "I'd have to, wouldn't I? Given the choice of living as a grown man with longer hair and a different supper menu, or being kept as a sort of combination charity ward and museum exhibit, unless I aimed to run off and get shot up by the Fourth Na-dene Cav, I reckon I'd as soon adjust enough to get by."

Then he said, "It's up to you. I picked my race with more care before I let myself be born. Meanwhile we'd best get off the range of your superior kith and kin before they kill us both in some fine old traditional way you'd never want them to forsake."

She protested she didn't approve of all the customs of her own kind.

Just the nicer beliefs, like Changing Woman, White-Sh.e.l.l Woman, or Rainbow Boy. She said she'd never be able to give up all her N'de ways.

Longarm said, "Let's ride. I'll teach you another way my own kind follow behind Queen Victoria's back. I reckon we could call it the Hypocrisy Way. Mighty strong medicine a heap of our own gals find mighty useful. I'm sure a paid-up witch could learn it in no time."

Chapter 6.

Folks who didn't know many Mexicans with steady jobs tended to feel they were lazy because they took that long siesta in the heat of a sunny afternoon. Longarm knew they made up for La Siesta with a shorter spell of sleep at night. So he wasn't surprised when they rode down on a Mexican quartet stringing bobwire by the dawn's most early light. Their English-speaking boss didn't seem too delighted by the sight of an armed Anglo and obvious Apache coming at him off the Jicarilla reserve. But he'd been raised by a mama of quality. So he said, "Buendias. We are not stringing this drift wire too close to the reservation line, one hopes?"

Longarm agreed they were at least a couple of furlongs east of the line, and explained they were looking for a spread that branded with either an inverted sombero or a cabeza de vaca chongo.

The boss looked relieved, and said they'd guessed right with the cow-skull brand. He said they were looking for the Alvera spread, and gave them simple directions that made Longarm cuss under his breath.

For while only a total s.h.i.t would abandon such a sweet pal on foot with so far to walk, getting Kinipai to her literally distant kin was going to cost him almost a full day out of his way.

But p.i.s.sing and moaning about that wasn't going to get them there any quicker, so he thanked the fence crew and rode on. Longarm had no call to ask them why they were stringing wire on public land. It would have only been rude to talk about reasons why no vaquero wanted to hunt for stray Mexican stock on Apache range with talk of an Apache uprising in the air.

Knowing the going would be easier up the east bank of the river because there'd be fewer side branches, they worked their way down to the fairly broad but mighty shallow Rio Chama to ford it.

Chama meant something like "brushwood" in Spanish, and Anglo settlers who liked to sound smart were quick to a.s.sume El Rio Chama had gotten such a name for the cottonwood, willow, and such along its floodplain.

But in point of fact an ancient Spanish explorer named Francisco Chamuscado could have just as easily had that side branch of El Rio Grande named after his fool self. Greenhorns were always leaping to hasty conclusions about the West. That was why they were called greenhorns. After a dozen or more years out this way Longarm wasn't so certain he knew everything.

Once on the coach road up the far side, they had to ride the way they'd just come, inside the reservation line. Kinipai said she was sorry she hadn't known her kinswoman had settled that far north. He let her make it up to him during a trail break, off the trail in some tall rabbitbrush.

You saw far more rabbitbrush and wild mustard than bunchgra.s.s and sage when riding up a valley grazed by beef stock instead of the deer the Jicarilla preferred to eat. As the alien but lush golden mustard gave way to more greasewood and tumbleweed, Longarm knew they were within easy goatherding of some settlement. The Indian gal thought it was mighty spooky to see that much bare dust at that time of year.

They found the small but thriving trail town of Vado Seguro to be a cattle ford and market town used by both Anglo and Mexican settlers off the surrounding spreads. There were parts of Texas where you might see one breed refusing to drink with the other. But Anglos and Mexicans got along better in New Mexico Territory, having far more in common with each other than with the considerable Indian population, which ranged from hostile through barely civil, with none of them anxious to dance with your gal or vice versa.

Longarm didn't need the odd looks Kinipai was attracting as they rode in to inspire him to rein in near the market and buy her a frilly cotton blouse, a wraparound skirt of floral-print calico, and a pair of woven-leather zapatas to replace the moccasin boots she'd been stripped of. Her tough brown feet had about recovered from those ant bites by this time, and she seemed delighted as the elderly Mexican gal they'd bought them from showed her how to lace the zapatas to her trim ankles.

Longarm also bought her a small gilt cross on a fake golden chain. He wasn't just being a sport. Lots of folks, Anglo or Mexican, thought you could tell a Mex senorita of Indian blood from a plain old Indian by such tokens of La Santa Fe. Few of them knew how many Indians used the same cross as a medicine symbol, usually representing a star or the four mystical directions.

Kinipai had learned enough about outsider ways while learning English at a mission school she'd never wanted to go to, to grasp the symbolism of a cross with one leg a tad longer. She fussed at him while they were enjoying a warm sit-down meal of chili con carne and tamales near the livery, where he'd paid some kids to curry and water their ponies while they cooled off and ate some genuine oats as reward for a job half-done.

Seated at the blue-painted table under an awning, Kinipai said she could see their colored waiter took her for a fairly prosperous Mexican gal with new shoes. But she said it made her feel funny, as if she was telling her own kind they weren't good enough to hang about with anymore.

He washed down some lava-stuffed tamale with strong black coffee and quietly observed, "It was them who decided you weren't the kind of gal they wanted blessing them the old-timey way, Kinipai. We live in changing times, as Miss Changing Woman warned you long ago. You can't go back to the Dulce Agency. They drummed you out of your old regiment under a sentence of death. It's as simple as that."

She protested, "This food tastes funny. These fine clothes you just bought me are pretty, pretty, but they are not the sort of clothes I am used to wearing, and I feel as if I am wearing my way-chanting mask, even though my face is naked, naked!"

Longarm smiled fondly and said, "Hold that thought until I can hire us a room here in town for La Siesta. I like you naked all over, and there's no sense pushing on through the heat of the day just to find everyone in bed when we get there."

She fluttered her lashes and said, "I like to get naked with you, even though you are not a real person. Do you think real people at some other agency would take me in if I went there instead of that rancho my cousin lives on?"

Longarm shrugged and said, "The Mescalero are fixing to get marched over to the Arizona Desert. The Chiricahua are as likely as your own Jicarilla to jump their reserve and give the army an excuse to scratch 'em off the government dole. I've spent enough time with your Navaho cousins to tell you they're as enthusiastic about hunting witches as the Jicarilla witch-hunters we just saved you from. So I'd say you had the choice betwixt conforming like a new recruit to the mighty strict traditions of strange Na-dene, or to the less strict Mexican ways. I understand from Papist pals that you can get along with a heap of fun as long as you don't rob the poor box or insult a priest to his face."

She had to smile at that picture, but insisted, "Hear me, I could never forsake Changing Woman, Rainbow Boy, or Child of the Waters for strange Holy Ones. Why do you white eyes make it so hard for us to go on living the way we were meant to live?"