Murder at Medicine Lodge by Mardi Oakley Medawar

Author:Mardi Oakley Medawar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

TEN

The two armed guards outside the prison tent were less than delighted that Billy and I had turned up asking to visit with Little Jonas. Billy spoke to them at length. I really can’t say about anyone else, but I am very uncomfortable when people speak in a language I can’t understand. Feeling excluded, I tend to vacillate between being angry and nervous. I was both of those things, but closing in rapidly on being alarmed when the exchange became heated, Billy shouting at the top of his voice. His anger did him no good. We were being forcibly turned away when Hawwy, still wearing his finest uniform, came sloping along, black doctoring bag in hand.

He did look fine in that fancy uniform and he must have felt equally splendid, for his manner when addressing those guards was haughty. Suitably impressed, the guards stepped aside. As the three of us entered the tent, I glanced at Hawwy, realizing how very like The Cheyenne Robber he could be. That’s when I came to believe devoutly that handsome people were born with a little something extra—that something being more than just good looks. I don’t know what that something is, I only know I don’t have it. No one ever gave way to me simply because I raised my voice or looked down my nose.

Little Jonas was still in chains and he sat on a sagging cot looking forlorn and with blood weeping from a cut just above his left eye. Hawwy immediately set to work, speaking to Little Jonas in a comforting way as he carefully swabbed the cut. While Hawwy concentrated on the physical, I spoke to Little Jonas through Billy.

“Skywalker said to me that he feels you are a man with a big secret. I want you to tell me what it is.”

Little Jonas did not want to answer.

Impatiently I cried, “I am here to help but if you will not talk to me, in two days there will be nothing I can do to stop them from hanging you.”

Hesitantly Little Jonas spoke. “They’re going to hang me anyway, once you tell them what I did.”

“What? What did you do?”

Little Jonas looked thoroughly contrite. In a muttering voice he said, “Stole a mule.”

I couldn’t help it, I blurted out a laugh. This was his secret. The big, big secret that Skywalker had sensed. Watching me, Little Jonas’s mouth began to twitch, then a grudging chuckle came out of him.

“It’s not funny, Tay,” he drawled. That’s what he’d heard Billy call me—Tay (Meat). Billy liked to use only the abbreviation of my name. Little Jonas doing that reminded me again of how personal he considered his relationship with the few Kiowa he knew. I appreciated this as he continued. “A black man stealing a mule is serious. If the army found out, they’d hang me for that about as quick as they would for killing that white man.”

“Then why did you steal the mule?”

“Had to. Wanted to join up with the army and Texas was a long way to walk from Louisiana.

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