Gaskell turned and looked at him then, and his face did a thing that Larrabee would remember afterward, when he had time to remember things. It closed. It did not harden, as a man's face will when he has been contradicted and means to have his way; it closed, the way a door closes in a house where somebody is ill.
"Then the Crows will be pleased to see you," Gaskell said quietly. "And so will their agent, who has written to this post four times since September asking where his annuity goods are, and so will two thousand people on the Stillwater who are going into the winter without blankets. You know what that agency looks like in January. You've seen it." He took the message out of Larrabee's hand, folded it once, and put it in the breast of his coat. "It's an order. It's a properly transmitted, properly endorsed order from the district commander. You can sit here and argue with the man who copied it out, or you can be on the road before the light goes. I would prefer the second. So, I think, would Colonel Miles."
He did not raise his voice when he said the name, but he put it down between them on the table like a card.
Larrabee looked at him for a long moment. He liked Philo Gaskell. Most of the officers on the post liked him, and the ones who did not liked his wife, who ran the only house on the line where a second lieutenant fresh from the Point could get a hot supper and a game of whist. Gaskell had taught Larrabee how to keep a company fund, how to write an endorsement that would get a requisition through St. Paul, and what to say to a sergeant who had been drunk on guard and was a better soldier than any other man in the troop. He had a daughter, Effie, fourteen, with a cough that had not gone away since August, and on Sunday evenings the whole row could hear it through the walls.
"I'll go look at the wagons," Larrabee said.
"Look at whatever you like," Gaskell said. "On the way to your horse."
The quartermaster corral lay below the headquarters building on the slope toward the river, a big square of peeled-pole fence with the wagon sheds along the north side and the forage stacks along the west, and when Larrabee came down to it the light had gone the color of weak tea and the shadows of the fence poles lay out long and thin across the frozen mud like the bars of a gate laid flat.
The train was drawn up along the east fence in a single line, nine heavy Murphy freight wagons with high boxes and sheets of white duck stretched over the bows and lashed down, six mules to each, standing hipshot with their breath going up in small gray clouds. Three or four teamsters stood around a fire in a cut-down barrel by the gate. A big man in a buffalo coat was walking down the line checking the lead lines. His name was Jubal Kimbrough, and he was Ashdown's wagon boss, and he had brought trains up from Miles City to every post on the Yellowstone for two years without, as far as anybody knew, ever losing a wagon or a pound of freight.
"Lieutenant," Kimbrough said, coming down the line. He had a broad red face and very pale eyes and a voice that was surprisingly soft. "They tell me you're our escort. That's good. That's real good. We're ready when you are."