They did not have to ride far. The four men were on foot on an open bench a mile across with the sun coming up behind them, and when they saw ten cavalrymen come down the slope at a gallop, three of them threw down their rifles at the edge of the creek and put their hands up. The fourth ran. He was a lean man with a dark beard, in a buffalo coat and beaded moccasins, and he ran north along the creek bottom through the willows as though there were somewhere to run to, and he had gone perhaps two hundred yards when a rider came out of the willows ahead of him on a tall shod bay with a Miles City brand, riding bareback with a single rein, and bore down on him without slackening.
Larrabee saw it from the creek bank. He saw the bearded man stop and throw up his rifle, and he saw Stays With the Horses lean down from the bay as it went by at a full run and strike the man once across the shoulders with the flat of his quirt, hard and contemptuous and almost gentle, the way a man flicks a dog away from a supper fire. The man went sprawling on his face in the frozen gravel and the rifle spun away into the creek. The scout pulled the bay around in a short skidding circle and sat looking down at him. He did not touch his carbine. He did not need to.
When Larrabee rode up, Lucan Sorrell was on his knees in the gravel with his hands on his head, and Stays With the Horses had got down from the bay, and had untied something from behind its saddle where it had been lashed with the rifle scabbard, and was standing with it in both his hands.
It was an otter-skin quiver, the fur dark and glossy and gone a little stiff with weather, with a band of red and blue and white beadwork around the mouth and the long feathered shafts of arrows standing up out of it. He was holding it the way Larrabee had once seen a woman in Ohio hold a child's shoe that she had found in a drawer.
"This was on his horse," the scout said, not looking up. "He did not even carry it himself. He tied it on his saddle, behind, with the rope he uses for his rifle." He turned the quiver a little in his hands, gently, so that the beadwork caught the first of the sun. "My sister did this beadwork. She sat in the lodge all of one winter doing this. When he was a young man and went the first time to take horses from the Piegans."
He looked down then at Lucan Sorrell, kneeling in the gravel. Sorrell looked back at him. Whatever he saw in the scout's face, he looked away from it first.
"I have counted coup on you," Stays With the Horses said, in English, slowly and distinctly, so there could be no mistake. "I struck you, and you are alive. Among my people, that is the bravest thing a man can do to his enemy. I wanted you to know that. I do not think you will understand it." And he turned away and went to his horse, carrying the quiver in his arms.
They brought Philo Gaskell back to Fort Custer in the bed of the first wagon, on a mattress of shoddy blankets from the Crow annuities, which was the softest thing in the train. The ball had gone through his left arm and into his side under the ribs and out again, and the surgeon said that if the wound did not mortify he would live. Private Malachy Shea rode in the second wagon under a saddle blanket. He was twenty-three, and had sent four dollars a month home to his mother in Ennistymon out of his thirteen, and Donnellan wrote to her that night, and Larrabee wrote under it.