"Before dark."
"It's half past three now."
"I can count the hours, thank you." Gaskell came around the table, limping, and stood next to him at the window, looking out at the parade. His breath smelled of coffee and of the cloves he chewed for a bad tooth. "I've already sent to your first sergeant. Donnellan's turning out twenty men. Rations for ten days are being drawn. The forage is on the wagons. All you have to do is put your boots in the stirrups."
There was something in the voice that Larrabee did not have a name for yet. It was not quite urgency and it was not quite fear. It was the voice of a man reciting a lesson he had learned the night before, getting the words right, getting them in the right order, in a hurry to get to the end of it before anybody asked a question.
"A Sioux war party," Larrabee said. "In November."
"That's what it says."
"Below the Pillar. Moving southwest. That puts them on the Crow side of the river, in Crow country, with snow on the ground and the buffalo scattered. Coming to do what?"
"Jonas, I don't write the intelligence. I file it."
"There's no Sioux war party below the Pillar," Larrabee said. "Sitting Bull's people are north of the Line eating their horses. The ones who came in are at the agencies. If there were a war party anywhere near the Yellowstone, the Crows would have known it three days ago and told us two days ago, and every scout on this post would be painted and sitting on the bluff."