Larrabee sat down on his heels across the fire. Donnellan stood a little way off with his back to them.
"Tell me," Larrabee said.
Gaskell told him, plainly and quickly and without looking up, the way a man reads a casualty list. Last November, at the agency on the Stillwater, with the agent down with a fever and the train come in late in a snowstorm, Ashdown had stood at his elbow in the warehouse door saying, it's all there, Lieutenant, the Indians are waiting, sign and let's get these people their blankets; and he had signed for twelve hundred blankets without counting them, and for three hundred sacks of flour without opening one. There had been perhaps seven hundred blankets, and half the flour was what Larrabee had found tonight. His name was on the receipts in Washington, swearing to a delivery that had never been made.
"And Ashdown came to me in April," Gaskell said, "after the headmen had been in to see Bayne, and he put the copies of those receipts on my table, and he said, Lieutenant, you and I are in the same boat. If anyone looks at this, I lose a contract, and you lose your commission. A first lieutenant of forty-three with no money and a sick child, cashiered for fraud on the Indian Office. Think about it, he said. And then he lent me four hundred dollars, because Effie had been sent down to the doctors in St. Paul last winter and the bills had followed her home, and I did not have four hundred dollars, and he did." He laughed, a short, terrible sound. "That's all. That's the whole of it. That's how they do it. They don't buy you. They just wait for you to fall down, and then they offer you a hand up."
"And this train."
"This train was going to be the end of it. The inspector was coming; Ashdown had a friend in the district office who wrote him so. If the inspector found this year's goods he'd look at last year's, and we were both done. So the goods would go out early and be lost on the road. A stampede in the night. A wagon fire. Nobody hurt. Nothing left to count. And Ashdown would burn my receipts in front of me. He promised me that." He looked up at Larrabee for the first time. "It needed a report from an officer whose word was good. Mine was no use; I was the quartermaster. It needed you. I told Kessel to write you in by name. I chose you because you were honest."
Larrabee said nothing. The fire ticked.
"I want you to know I didn't know about the Crows," Gaskell said, very low. "God help me, I didn't let myself know. I told myself the report would say raiders, unknown. Then on Wednesday night I went down to Ashdown's warehouse to sign the bill of lading, and Kimbrough was there with a man called Sorrell who works for Ashdown at Miles City, and they had a bundle on the table, laughing at it. An Indian quiver, otter skin, with beadwork and the old kind of arrows with the long feathers. Sorrell was to leave it in the ashes of the third wagon, partly burnt, so there'd be no question what tribe it was. And Kimbrough said there was a Crow camp on Pryor Creek, Bull Weasel's people, forty lodges hunting buffalo, and that's where the trail would go, and the army could take it from there. Let the Crows pay for it twice, he said. He said it three or four times." Gaskell stopped. "And I went home, and sat and listened to Effie cough. And today Kessel brought me the message he'd written, and I read it to Bayne with my thumb over the number, and he signed it." He put his face in his hands. "And then you stood under my porch and told me what I'd said about signing for things I hadn't counted. And Sallie looked at me. And I couldn't stay in the house."