"Sergeant Kessel said I wasn't to touch the line, sir," he said now, riding a little behind. He had a strong German accent that came and went when he was frightened. "He said it was the Keogh end and they'd send their own man from the Yellowstone."
"Did he say that before or after it went down?"
Ganz was quiet a moment. "Before, sir," he said. "At dinner. He said if the line goes down this afternoon, Leo, you stay in bed, it's Keogh's lookout." He swallowed. "I thought it was a joke, sir. I didn't think of it again till you came."
"Can you find a break in the dark?"
"Yes, sir. If I can get on the wire. I've got a pocket relay and a key and a little battery. I hook on and I call Custer, and if Custer answers I know the wire's good behind me, and I call Keogh, and if Keogh doesn't answer it's broke in front. Then I go on and hook on again. It goes quicker than you'd think." He hesitated. "Sir, the trouble is the climbing. Every time I hook on I have to go up a pole."
"Not every pole," Stays With the Horses said from the dark ahead of them. "I think you only have to go up one."
The telegraph line ran north from the post along the old road down the Bighorn to the Yellowstone, one galvanized iron wire on cottonwood poles a hundred and fifty feet apart. In the dark the poles came up out of the plain one after another, thin and black, each with its little white knob of porcelain at the top like a bird asleep, and the wire swung between them in long low curves against the stars. When the wind touched it, it hummed.
They rode at a trot where the road was good and at a walk where it was not. The cold deepened, the dry hard cold of the high plains that came up out of the ground through the horse into the legs. The scout rode a little to the side of the road, leaning out from his saddle to look at the ground on the side nearest the poles, and twice he got down and walked a little way with his face almost to the earth, and then got back up without saying anything.