"Somebody cut a page out of the telegraph book," Larrabee said, low. "There was a message from Keogh today that nobody wants me to read."
The scout nodded as if this were the most ordinary thing in the world.
"I have something also," he said, unfolding from the ground in a single movement. "While you were gone, two of them rolled a barrel to the back of the third wagon. The barrel says pork. Pork in a barrel is heavy and quiet, packed tight in brine. This barrel was not so heavy, and it was not quiet." He made a sound in his throat, a long hollow slosh, like water going from one end of a trough to the other. "And when they set it up, I could smell it from here. It is the lamp water. The thing in the trader's store that they sell in tin cans, that burns."
"Coal oil," Larrabee said.
"Coal oil," the scout said. "In a pork barrel. In an annuity train. Going out before dark."
They did it in the deep shadow along the fence, while Kimbrough and his teamsters went up to the cookhouse for their supper, with a bull's-eye lantern Larrabee borrowed from Bewley without saying what for, and with a flour trier he also borrowed, a long hollow steel spoon with a T handle that the commissary used to sample sacks without opening them. Stays With the Horses stood at the tail of the wagon with his back to it and his blanket around him like a man waiting for a friend, and Larrabee climbed up over the tailboard of the third wagon on his knees and lay along the top of the load with the lantern shuttered to a slit.
The barrels were at the back, eight of them, standing on end in two rows and chocked with sacks. They were stenciled on the head MESS PORK, U.S.I.D., and the bungs were driven tight. He did not try to pull one. He put his nose down to the stave beside the bung and breathed in, and then he did not need to. It was in the wood. It was the smell of every barracks lamp and every trader's back room on the frontier, thin, rank, oily, a smell that got into the back of the throat and stayed there. He rapped the stave with his knuckle and it rang hollow a hand's breadth down from the top. Not full. Not pork. Not brine. Eight barrels of coal oil in one wagon, packed at the back where a man at the tailboard could reach them with a hatchet.
He went forward over the load. The flour was in the middle, hundred-pound sacks of white cotton stenciled with the miller's mark from Bismarck and the letters U.S.I.D. under it, stacked four high. The top tier was flour. He put the trier into a sack and turned it and drew it out and in the slit of light the steel was full of fine white flour that smelled of flour. He reached down between the sacks to the second tier and pushed the trier in up to the handle and drew it out and held it to the light.
There was flour at the tip. Behind it, in the hollow of the spoon, packed in like the filling of a sausage, there was a gray, gritty mixture that ran out onto his glove when he turned it, and he wet his fingertip and put it to his tongue and spat. Sand. River sand and sawdust, and a little flour on top of it for the color.