Larrabee looked at it. Then he turned back a page to the day before. Eleven messages from Keogh, numbered one through eleven. Each office numbered its messages to each other office in order from midnight, so that a gap would show. He turned forward again. One, two, three, four. No gap.
But there was a thin dark line close in against the binding, between the page that ended with No. 3 and the page that began with No. 4, and when he put his thumbnail into the gutter of the book and pressed it open he could see that it was the stub of a leaf. Somebody had cut a page out of the received book with a razor, very close and very neatly, so close that it could not be seen unless the book was pressed flat.
He did not look up. He let the book close of its own weight and slid it back across the table.
"Thank you, Sergeant," he said. "When the line comes back up, I'd like you to send to Keogh for me. Acknowledge the order and ask them to repeat it."
"Yes, sir. Of course, sir. As soon as she's up."
"I'll want a copy of the repeat. Have it sent after me if I'm gone."
"Yes, sir."
Larrabee went out. The cold hit him in the face like a hand. The sun was on the rim of the bluffs west of the river, a flattened red coin with the cottonwoods drawn across it in black, and the parade had gone the color of a bruise, with the barracks windows coming alight one by one. His troop was forming on the line in front of the stables, twenty-one men and horses and two pack mules, the steam going up off the horses in a single low cloud. At the far end of the line, on the porch of the adjutant's office, Philo Gaskell stood with his weight on his good leg and his hand on the rail, watching.
Larrabee did not go to his horse. He went back down the hill to the corral, walking fast now, and found Stays With the Horses where he had left him, sitting on his heels in the dark against the fence at the tail of the last wagon with his blanket coat pulled up around his ears, and so still that Larrabee nearly walked into him.