He tried four more sacks. Two were flour. Two were sand. At the front of the wagon were the bales of blankets, wrapped in burlap and bound with hoop iron, and he opened the corner of one with his knife and drew out a fold and held the lantern to it. It was gray and thin as a pocket handkerchief, and when he rubbed it between his fingers it pilled and broke. Shoddy. Rags carded and pressed together with a little new wool and some glue. The whole bale would go to pieces in a month of January.
He put everything back as he had found it. He tucked the blanket back into the bale and pressed the burlap shut over it, and turned the sacks so the trier holes were underneath, and backed out over the tailboard and let himself down to the ground. Stays With the Horses did not turn around.
"Sand," Larrabee said quietly. "Half the flour. The blankets are shoddy. There's coal oil enough in the back of that wagon to burn the whole train if you broke the barrels over the load and dropped a match."
"Yes," the scout said.
"They're not taking these to the agency."
"No." The scout was looking out across the dark corral toward the barrel fire, where Kimbrough had come back and was standing with his coat open and his hands on his hips, laughing at something one of the teamsters said. "I think they are taking them out into the dark, where somebody will come in the night and burn them. And in the morning there will be ashes and dead mules and nothing to count. And then nobody will ever know what was in them." He was quiet a moment. "And they will say who burned them."
Larrabee looked at him.
"In the old Intercourse Act," he said slowly, working it out as he spoke, "a man who loses property to Indians in Indian country can put in a claim. A depredation claim. The Indian Office pays it." He felt something cold go down him that had nothing to do with the wind. "And it pays it out of the annuities of the tribe that did it. If Crows burn a contractor's train, the contractor gets fourteen thousand dollars, and it comes out of the Crow annuities. Out of next year's blankets."
Stays With the Horses said nothing for a while.