"So I see."
"Been ready since Tuesday, tell the truth. We've been setting here waiting on the paper. You know how it is with the government." He smiled. "Hurry up and wait, and then hurry."
"Where's Mr. Ashdown?"
"Went down to Miles City on the noon stage. Business. He leaves the road to me." The pale eyes rested on Larrabee pleasantly. "We can roll the minute your boys are mounted."
Larrabee nodded and walked on past him down the line of wagons, not looking at anything in particular. He did not know yet what he was looking for. He had the order in his head and Gaskell's face in his head and a feeling in his stomach like the feeling of a horse under him that has seen something in the grass he has not, and he walked the way he would have walked through the troop's stables on a Sunday morning, slow, with his hands behind his back.
At the end of the line, beside the last wagon, a man was standing at the head of the off-wheel mule with his hand flat on the animal's shoulder under the collar.
He was a Crow, of perhaps fifty years, wide through the chest, wearing a blue army blanket coat over a buckskin shirt, and moccasins beaded in the old Crow colors, light blue and pink and white in long straight bands. His hair was worn in the Crow way, the front brushed up stiff and high over the forehead and the rest falling down his back in wrapped braids. He was of the Whistling Water clan, and there was a brass medal on a thong around his neck that had come to him from his father, who had been at the treaty council at Fort Laramie in 1851. His name, in his own language, meant something like He Keeps Close to the Horses; on the post's rolls of enlisted Indian scouts he was entered as Stays With the Horses, and in the troop he was called Horses, which he seemed to find funny.
He had been with General Gibbon's column in 'seventy-six, when Larrabee had been a second lieutenant with the Second Cavalry battalion in that column, and they had come up the Little Bighorn together on the morning of the twenty-seventh of June and seen what was on the hill. Neither of them had ever spoken of that morning to the other. There were not very many things that Larrabee would have said he was sure of in the world, but one of them was that this man saw more in a quarter-mile of ground than he himself would see in a day.
Stays With the Horses did not look up. He was still feeling under the collar of the mule. After a moment he took his hand away and held it out flat, palm up, so that Larrabee could see it. There was a smear of something on the fingers, thin and pink, with a little hair in it.