* * *
On the fourth day Eli's fever broke. On the fifth he sat up, gaunt and grinning, and demanded meat, and Good Lodge Woman fed him boiled marrow with her own spoon, scolding him fondly the whole time.
On the sixth day Rides Far took Wes out to the high ground above the camp, where the wind had swept the snow thin over the buffalo grass, and showed him the second half of her plan.
"Eli's book is good," she said. "But a book is only marks. Dorran will say Eli wrote it in his lodge, at night, to make trouble. So three weeks ago, on the last issue day, my cousins and my mother and I did something else." She crouched and, with the point of her knife, drew a mark in the snow: three short lines spread from a single point, like the track of a bird. "This is a crow's track. Our sign. We went into the agency pasture at night, after the cattle were counted in, and we cut this mark into the hair on the left hip of twenty steers. With scissors. Close to the hide, so it does not show unless you look. Hair grows slowly in winter. It will still be there in the Moon When the Water Freezes."
Wes stared at the little bird track in the snow. "If those twenty steers turn up in Pike's herd next issue day—"
"Then they are steers that were already counted, already paid for, already ours, being sold to the government a second time." She stood and dusted her knees. "But it must be seen by the right eyes. Not ours. Not Eli's. Not even yours. The eyes of someone the government believes. A soldier. An officer from Fort Custer who will stand at the corral on issue day and count with us."
"Fort Custer's better than two days' ride."
"Yes."
"And Dorran's already writing to them."
"Yes. That is why we must get there before his letter does." She looked at him sidelong. "That is why you married me."
He would have answered, but just then a horn sounded from the camp below, the long two-note call that the herd boys used when riders were coming, and they turned to see a line of horsemen coming up the creek from the south.