They buried Shea on Sunday in the post cemetery on the bluff, with the troop at present arms and the band playing and three volleys over the grave, and the wind blowing from the northwest.
Inspector Alpheus Thacker of the Indian Office arrived on the seventeenth, a thin, sour, elderly man from Vermont with a flour trier of his own in a leather case, and spent two days in the quartermaster corral with Bewley at his elbow and a clerk writing down every sack. When he was done he sat in the adjutant's office with his hat on and said that in thirty-one years he had seen a great deal of bad flour, but that this was the first time anyone had tried to make the Indians pay to have it burned. He did not say it as though he thought it was funny.
Ashdown was taken off the stage at Miles City by a provost guard from Keogh on the fifteenth, and was in the guardhouse there six days, and then a lawyer came from Helena, and a telegram from a senator, and he was let out on bond. Kessel was not found. A Crow hunting party saw a white man on a trader's horse crossing the Yellowstone on the ice on the sixteenth, going north, and did not stop him, because nobody had told them to. Kimbrough and Sorrell and the others went down the river to Keogh in irons to wait for the federal court, and whether a jury of the Territory of Montana would convict seven white men for burning, or failing to burn, a train of goods meant for Indians, nobody on the post was willing to say.
Larrabee wrote his report at the long table in the adjutant's office, and it took him most of a night. He put in the frost and the ropes and the harness galls, the ledger dated the thirteenth, the stub of the page in the received book, the rawhide in the wire and the scars of the climbers on the pole. He put in what Lieutenant Gaskell had told him by the fire, and that Lieutenant Gaskell had stood up unarmed on the rim of the bench and called on the men to surrender, and been shot for it. And at the end, on a line by itself, so that no clerk in St. Paul or Washington could misread it, he wrote: No Indians of any tribe were engaged in this affair, except the enlisted scout Stays With the Horses, Crow, who recovered the stolen property of his own family, took the attackers' horses without injury to any man, and is entitled to the thanks of the service.
He took the report up to Gaskell in the hospital before he sent it. Gaskell was propped up on two pillows with his arm bound to his chest and Sallie in a chair beside the bed, and he read the whole of it slowly while she watched his face, and when he was done he gave it back.
"It's all true," he said. "Send it."
"They'll court-martial you, Philo."
"I know it." He looked at the window. "Thacker's taken a statement from me already. I gave him everything. The receipts, the loan, all of it. Ashdown's lawyer will say I'm a cashiered thief lying to save my neck, and maybe the court will believe him." He was quiet a moment. "Sallie's taking Effie to Colorado Springs on the next boat down the river in the spring, whatever happens. Thacker says the Indian Office will put the four hundred dollars in evidence. He says it was the only honest money in the whole business, because at least Effie got the good of it." He nearly smiled. "I'd like to have signed my name once more to something I'd counted, Jonas. That's all."