Ganz sent it. Then he said, in a small voice, without looking down, "Sir. Sir, it goes through Custer. Everything does. The sergeant's sounder's on the line. If he's at his table, he's heard every word of it."
"I know," Larrabee said. "Come down."
They rode southwest, cross-country, by the moon, with the scout leading. They crossed the Bighorn at a riffle where the water was too fast to have shelved over, and the horses came out with their legs sheathed in ice that cracked and fell away as they climbed, and then they were up on the great bare tableland to the west, where the wind was rising again from the northwest with the turn of the night and moving through the grass with a sound like breathing.
An hour after midnight, crossing a little frozen creek in a fold of the land, Stays With the Horses stopped once more and got down and studied the ice at the edge where the horses had broken it.
"Four horses," he said, when he was back in the saddle. "Shod. They crossed here maybe two hours ago, going that way." He pointed southwest, the way they were going. "They stopped to water. One got down and broke the ice for them with his heel. The same man who walks on his heels." He was silent a moment. "They are going to the same place we are."
They rode faster after that.
The camp was on the bench above Sage Hen Creek where Larrabee had told Donnellan to make it, and they saw it from two miles off because there was no light in it at all: a low dark ring on the pale moonlit swell of the bench, the wagons drawn in a circle with the tongues run inside. A sentry challenged them from flat on his belly in the sage, and Larrabee gave the countersign. Inside the ring the horses and mules stood together on the double picket, steaming, a great dark mass of animal heat he could feel on his face, and the men lay rolled in their blankets in the lee of the wheels with their carbines under the blankets with them.
Donnellan met him at the gap between the first wagon and the last. He saluted and took Larrabee's bridle and said, in a voice pitched for the two of them, "All quiet, sir. Kimbrough wanted the bottom. He was very hot about it. Said the willows would break the wind and there was water, and the men would freeze on the bench. I said the lieutenant's orders. He said the lieutenant's a damned fool. I said that's as may be." He paused. "And sir, Lieutenant Gaskell's here."