"You did," Larrabee said. "On the bench."
On the twenty-third, with a letter from Thacker in his saddlebag, Larrabee rode west with Stays With the Horses and four men to Bull Weasel's camp on Pryor Creek, to tell the headmen what had been meant for them before they heard it from somebody else. It was a gray day with snow in the air. The real annuity goods were still in a warehouse in Bismarck, or in somebody's ledger, or nowhere at all; Thacker had wired St. Paul for an emergency purchase and had no answer yet, and the post commissary had sent what flour it could spare, which was not much. Larrabee did not know what he would say about that. He thought he would tell the truth, and see what that was worth.
They stopped at noon by the mouth of the Rotten Grass, in the cottonwoods, where there were the broken poles of an old scaffold half buried in the drifted leaves. Stays With the Horses got down and stood among them for a long time with the otter-skin quiver in his hands, and then he went and cut four new poles from the young cottonwoods along the creek, and Larrabee got down and helped him without being asked, and the four troopers held the horses and watched and said nothing at all.
When it was done, and they were mounted again, riding west along the creek with the telegraph wire going away from them over the hills to the north toward Fort Ellis, thin and black against the snow clouds, Larrabee found that he wanted to ask a question he had not asked in two years.
"What do your people call that?" he said, and pointed with his chin at the wire, the way the scout did.
Stays With the Horses looked at it for a while.
"Some say the iron that talks," he said. "The old people. My sister's boy calls it the white man's gossip." He rode on a little. "I call it the thing that tells the truth when somebody makes it, and lies when somebody makes it. Like a man. Like paper." He glanced at Larrabee sideways. "It is not the wire you have to watch, Lieutenant. It is the wagons. The wagons always know first."
The snow began a little after that, small and dry, and they rode on into it toward the camp on the Pryor, where the smoke of forty lodges was going up straight into the gray, and where, Larrabee knew, someone had already seen them coming a long way off.