"So the Apsáalooke pay for the bad flour," he said at last. "And then we pay again, for the burning. And we do not even get the bad flour." He made a short sound that was not a laugh. "That is very clever. Whoever thought of that is a clever man." Then: "And they need a soldier to say it was us. A good soldier. A soldier whose word is good in the white man's papers."
"Lieutenant Larrabee preferred," Larrabee said.
The scout looked at him, and then away.
"Will you go?" he said.
It was the question. Larrabee stood in the dark by the fence and turned it over. He could go up the hill now and lay it all on the table in front of Philo Gaskell, the frost, the ropes, the ledger, the cut page, the sand, the coal oil, and refuse the order. And none of it would hang a dog. The frost proved that some wagons had been loaded on Thursday. The ledger proved that a quartermaster had anticipated an order. Sand in a contractor's flour was a matter for the Indian Office. Coal oil was not a crime. The order was properly numbered and endorsed by the commanding officer of the post, and an officer who refused it on the strength of a bare patch of ground under a wagon would be under arrest in his quarters by retreat, and the train would roll out anyway, tonight or tomorrow, under the only other officer of the Second on the post who was not on sick report, Second Lieutenant Haverly, who was twenty-two years old and four months out of West Point and would sign anything Philo Gaskell put in front of him and believe every word of it.
"I'll go," Larrabee said.
The scout nodded, as though he had known.
"Then I will come," he said. "But I do not want to ride with the wagons. I want to ride on the lightning road."
Larrabee had been thinking the same thing, and had not yet said it to himself.