"You'll have it."
"I've asked Kessel. I'm asking you." He held the older man's eyes. "And I'd like to know, before I go, if there's anything else I ought to know about this train. Anything at all. I'd take it kindly."
There was a pause. Sallie Gaskell's hand on her husband's sleeve had tightened; Larrabee could see the knuckles. Out on the road below the post, Kimbrough's voice rose up, soft and carrying, calling the teams to stretch out, and the first wagon groaned and began to roll, and the second, and the iron tires cracked on the frozen ruts like pistol shots.
"No," Philo Gaskell said. "There's nothing. Take care of yourself on the river. The ice is bad at the ford."
"I will." Larrabee touched his hat to Sallie Gaskell again. Then, because he could not help it, he said, "You taught me to keep a property return, Philo. I've always been grateful. Every nail. Every blanket. You said a man who'd sign for something he hadn't counted would sign for anything."
He did not wait for an answer. He rode back to the head of the troop and lifted his hand, and the bugler blew forward, and they went down off the bench behind the train with the stars coming out over the Bighorn Mountains one at a time, and he did not look back at the porch, though he knew without looking that Gaskell was still on it.
The ford of the Bighorn below the post was a long gravel bar with the river going over it in two black channels edged with shelf ice, rotten underneath. The wagons crossed slow, one at a time, the teamsters walking at the leaders' heads in water to their knees and swearing steadily. On the far side the road climbed out onto the great dark sweep of the bench land to the west, and here, while the last wagons were still in the river and Kimbrough was riding back to shout at them, Larrabee pulled out of the column with Stays With the Horses and a short, thick young man on a gray horse with a canvas bag across his back, and rode north along the edge of the bluff without a word to anyone.
The young man was Private Leopold Ganz of the Signal Corps, Kessel's assistant, who had been until 1877 an apprentice lineman for the Western Union in Milwaukee. He was nineteen. He had been asleep in the back room behind the telegraph office, because Kessel had given him the night off, which Kessel had never done before.