Strange use of Quapaw article/aux.

[R. Rankin]

I was just looking at the ways Quapaw handles temporal relationships
(since it lacks morphological tense) and ran across this sentence in a
Dorsey text c. 1890.  The baffling thing about the sentence is that
/-khe/ ‘LYING.CONTINUATIVE AUXILIARY’ should agree with the subject,
‘they’ (the people bringing the step father home), not the step father,
who is the grammatical object here, and who is presumably the one lying
down.

di-átte-z^íka íyowí-ttaN akdániN kdí
your-father-little V1-wound-?-as V1-SUUS-bring VERT-come
your stepfather   as X shot him, (they) are taking him back to his own
home
Since your stepfather has been shot, (they) are taking him home

-khe, ppákkaNkka tta-thaN.
LYING.CONTIN.AUX, nose-crooked LOC-from
nose-crooked                        from
from Crooked-Nose’s (a trading post).

At the April meeting we had discussed the possible use of the article
-khe 'lying' in a few contexts where it seemed actually to carry a
'past' connotation (or denotation?).  Someone suggested that this might
be because a person referred to in the past might be considered 'dead'
and therefore horizontal.  If the above sentence is not just speaker
error, then it may be that -khe has been extended analogically from
deceased animates to past events generally.  I mentioned in April that I
had a few instances of that in Kansa but that I thought then that they
represented "speaker error".  Now I'm not as sure.  Comments welcome.

Bob