"This one has been in his harness since the sun was here," the scout said, and turned his hand and pointed with the edge of it to a place in the southern sky well above where the sun now hung. "Before the middle of the day. The collar has opened him. See, there. And there." He moved the collar a finger's breadth and Larrabee saw the raw place on the point of the shoulder, wet and new. "All of them. I have walked down both sides. Every mule on the wheel has the same."
"Kimbrough says they've been ready since Tuesday."
"They have been ready since before Tuesday." Stays With the Horses wiped his fingers on the mule's mane, carefully, and turned and looked at Larrabee for the first time, and his face was perfectly calm. "Those wagons were packed before the order arrived," he said. "Some time before. Come. I will show you."
He did not go toward Kimbrough. He went the other way, around the tail of the last wagon and along its far side, between the wagon and the fence, where the teamsters at the fire could not see them without coming to look, and Larrabee followed him.
"First," Stays With the Horses said, and put his hand flat on the duck sheet of the wagon at the height of his shoulder.
It was white with frost. Not the heavy rime of a hard night, but a fine, dry, sugary fur of it that had grown on the canvas in the dark and had not yet been burned off, because this side of the wagon faced north and the sun had not reached it all day. Larrabee touched it and it came away on his glove.
"Last night was a frost," the scout said. "A clear night, no wind after the moon set. The frost came down on everything. On the canvas. On the ground." He crouched and put his hand under the wagon bed and laid it flat on the earth there, and then took it away and laid it flat on the earth a foot outside the line of the wheels, and looked up. "Put your hand."
Larrabee crouched beside him and did it. Outside the wheels the mud of the corral was frozen into ridges, and over the ridges there was the same white fur, unmelted in the shadow of the fence. Under the wagon bed it was bare. Dark, frozen, but bare. There was a clean oblong of ground beneath the wagon, the exact size of the box, on which no frost had fallen at all.
"The wagon was here before the frost," Larrabee said slowly. "It's been standing on this spot since yesterday. Since before dark yesterday."