"No, sir. Kimbrough's men did that themselves. They had them in the shed till yesterday noon and then they drew them out and loaded from the warehouse. Ashdown's warehouse, sir, down on the flat, not ours. They're contractor's goods till they're receipted at the agency. We don't hold them."
"And the manifest says what?"
Bewley wet his lips. "I copied it into the book when it came in, sir. In October." He turned more pages and read it out in the flat, careful voice he used for property returns. "Blankets, Mackinaw, three point, one thousand two hundred. Flour, in sacks of one hundred pounds, three hundred sacks. Pork, mess, in barrels, forty barrels. Coffee, sugar, calico, kettles, knives, tobacco." He stopped. "Valued at the contract price, sir, fourteen thousand two hundred and sixty dollars, with freight."
"Who receipted for last year's?"
Bewley looked up at him, and there was something in the look that was almost like gratitude, as if he had been waiting a long time for somebody to ask, and almost like fear.
"Lieutenant Gaskell, sir," he said. "He went up with the train last November and signed for the agency at the warehouse there, on account the agent was sick. I wasn't there. I only have the copy." He paused. "There was talk, sir. In the spring. Some of the Crow headmen came down in April and talked to Captain Bayne about blankets. I don't know what was said. I wasn't there for that, either."
Larrabee was quiet a moment. Through the wall he could hear the mules in the corral stamping and the clink of a trace chain.
"Thank you, Sergeant," he said.
"Sir." Bewley closed the ledger and put both hands flat on the cover of it, as if to keep it shut. "Sir, I've been twenty years in the department. I enter what I'm told and I sign what's true. That's all I know how to do."