"Can you stay with these wagons," he said, "while I go up the hill? Don't let anyone see you're watching them."
The scout looked at him with something that might have been amusement.
"Nobody ever sees an Indian watching anything," he said. "It is the one thing white men are sure of."
The quartermaster's office was in the end of the storehouse nearest the corral, a long low building of logs chinked with river mud, and inside it smelled of tallow and new leather and the sweetish, dusty smell of oats. A lamp was already lit on the counter. Quartermaster Sergeant Amariah Bewley was behind the counter with his spectacles on the end of his nose and his ledger open in front of him, entering something with a steel pen, and when Larrabee came in he looked up and then, quickly, down again.
Bewley was a small, round-shouldered, scrupulous man of about fifty who had come into the army as a teamster in 1861 and never left it, and who knew to the last horseshoe nail what was in every building on the post and who had signed for it.
"Sergeant," Larrabee said. "I'm taking Ashdown's train out tonight. I want to see the forage issue for it. And the manifest."
"Yes, sir." Bewley did not move. "The lieutenant has the manifest, sir. Lieutenant Gaskell. He took it up to the office."
"The forage issue, then."
There was the smallest hesitation. Then Bewley turned the ledger around on the counter and turned the pages back, two, three, with a licked finger, and laid his hand flat beside an entry and took the hand away.