There was a long silence. Away in the dark one of the mules on the picket squealed and kicked, and someone swore at it softly, and it was quiet again.
"When," Larrabee said. "And where."
"The hour before dawn. Sorrell and three men from Miles City. They were to wait in the willows in the creek bottom, where Kimbrough wanted you to camp, and come in on foot in the dark and shoot into the picket line to stampede the stock, and then Kimbrough and his two would stave in the barrels and fire the third wagon and the fourth, and in the confusion the whole train would go. Sorrell leaves the quiver, and they go back to their horses and are gone across the creek before your men have caught a mount." Gaskell lifted his head. "Only you've camped on the bench. They'll have to come up the slope to you, across open ground, and Kimbrough can't get near the barrels. You've spoiled it for them already. They may not come at all."
"They'll come," Stays With the Horses said.
Neither of them had heard him come up. He was standing at the edge of the firelight with his blanket coat open and his carbine in his hands, looking at Gaskell, and his face in the red light was as calm as Larrabee had ever seen it.
"I heard about the quiver," the scout said. "Otter skin. Long feathers. Red and blue beadwork at the mouth, with a band of white." He said it as a statement, not as a question. Gaskell stared at him, and nodded. "My cousin's name was Sings in the Timber. He died in the winter of the coughing sickness, in the Moon When the Ice Freezes, and we put him on a scaffold in the cottonwoods at the mouth of the Rotten Grass, where he liked to hunt, with his quiver and his bow and his good shirt, so that he would have them. In the spring my sister went to see him and the scaffold was pulled down, and his things were gone, and the wolves had him." He paused. "We thought it was soldiers. Soldiers take things for souvenirs. We did not say anything because there was nothing we could do. Now I know who took it."
He turned to Larrabee.
"They will come," he said, "because they do not know the wire is mended. They think they are still clever. And they will leave their horses in the willows, because they will want to walk up quiet in their moccasins, the way they think an Indian walks." He showed his teeth, briefly. "I am a Crow. Taking horses in the night is what my people have always done better than anybody in the world. When they go back to their horses, there will be no horses. Then they will be four white men on foot on a high plain in the winter, with the sun coming up, and twenty soldiers on horses. I think they will be very sensible about it."