"What are you looking for?" Larrabee said, the second time.
"A man who left the road." The scout swung up. "A man who cuts the wire does not want to go up a pole where somebody coming will see him. He goes where there is a coulee or some brush. The ground is frozen, but the frost is on top of the frozen ground, and a shod horse breaks the frost and it does not grow back until night. Tonight it is growing back. In a little while I will not be able to see it." He looked at the sky in the east. "When the moon comes up I will see it better."
The moon came up over the bluffs at half past eight, two days past the half and lopsided, the color of a peach, and the whole plain went from black to a dim gray-blue all at once, every sage bush with a shadow under it. A mile further on the road went down into a dry coulee with a few box elders in the bottom and a pole on either rim, and on the north rim Stays With the Horses pulled up and sat looking at the ground, and then got down and led his horse off the road a dozen yards to the foot of the pole, walking in a wide circle around something Larrabee could not see.
"Here," he said.
Larrabee dismounted and came to him. In the moonlight the frost on the ground was a faint glitter, and through it, leading in from the road and back out again, ran a line of dark marks, broken places, the round prints of a shod horse at a walk. At the foot of the pole the frost was trampled. There were the long scuffed prints of boots, and then something else: a man had stood there in moccasins. Larrabee could see the soft outline of the sole, no heel, but deep at the back.
"He took off his boots to make these," the scout said. "Then he put them back on. A Crow walks on the front of his foot, so." He showed with his hand. "This man walks on his heel, as if his feet are angry with him. He walks like a white man. He wants you to think this is an Indian. But he does not know how to be one." He looked up the pole. "And look."
Ganz had already seen it. He was standing with his head tipped back and his mouth open. The pole had frost on it like everything else, a fine fur on the north side, and running up through the frost from the height of a man's knee to the crossarm there was a double row of small black scars, a hand's width apart, one on each side, alternating, left, right, left, all the way to the top.
"Climbers," Ganz said. "Lineman's climbers. That's gaff marks, sir. Somebody's been up there in irons since the frost came on. Today." His voice went higher. "Sir, the sergeant's spare climbers have been off the hook in the store room since Tuesday. I asked him about it and he said he'd lent them to the Ellis man. There isn't any Ellis man. Not this month."