Larrabee looked at him a long moment.
"Take who you need," he said.
"I need nobody," the scout said. "Nobody would be better." And he was gone.
They took Kimbrough first, at half past four, in black dark. Donnellan and Lusby and two troopers went in under the fifth wagon with a lantern unshuttered in his face, and Kimbrough came up out of his blankets with a hatchet in his hand, and Donnellan hit him across the wrist with a carbine barrel, and in thirty seconds they had him and his two teamsters face down in the frozen grass with their hands tied. In Kimbrough's coat they found lucifer matches and a revolver. He said nothing. He lay with his cheek on the ground and his pale eyes open and looked at the wheel of the wagon.
Then they waited.
Larrabee put the men out along the north rim of the bench, flat in the sage at ten-yard intervals, and told them no man was to fire until he had called a challenge and been fired upon. The sky in the east went from black to slate. The wind died. Larrabee lay on his belly beside Donnellan with the frozen ground under his chest like a sheet of iron, and listened, and heard nothing for a long time, and then heard, from down the slope, the small dry crack of a frozen sage stem breaking under a foot.
Four shapes came up out of the dark of the creek bottom in a loose line, bent over, moving slowly up the long pale slope toward the dark ring of the wagons. They were sixty yards off. Fifty. In the slate light Larrabee could see that they had rifles, and that one of them carried something long and pale across his back that was not a rifle. He drew breath to call out.
Philo Gaskell stood up.