There were eight of them. Six were Crow, in the blue coats and black hats of the agency police. The other two were white men on good horses. One was heavy-shouldered and wore a long buffalo coat, and Wes did not know him. The second he knew at once by the way he sat his saddle, leaning back with his feet thrust forward as if he owned whatever ground was under him.
"Tasker," Wes said.
"And the agent," said Rides Far. "Dorran has come himself." Her voice was very calm. "He has never come himself before. Come. We will go down. Walk beside me, not behind. And whatever he says, Wes Harlan, do not swing first."
By the time they reached the camp, the riders had drawn up before the lodge of Strikes Twice, and the chief had come out to meet them. He stood bareheaded in the trampled snow with his blanket around his shoulders, and behind him, without anyone seeming to call them, the men of the camp had gathered in a loose half circle, forty or fifty of them, none armed, all watching. Women stood in the doorways of their lodges. Even the dogs had gone quiet.
Lucius Dorran was a man of about fifty, clean-shaven, with a broad pale face and small, very clean hands that he kept folded on his saddle horn. His voice, when he spoke, was mild and reasonable. Wes would remember that afterward: how reasonable it was.
"Strikes Twice," he said, and then, to the Crow policeman at his elbow, "Tell him I've come about the matter I wrote him of. Tell him I've been patient."
The policeman was a tall man of middle years with a heavy silver earring and a face that gave away nothing. His name, Rides Far whispered, was Long Ears, and he was captain of the agency police, and he was her father's second cousin through his mother's people. He translated Dorran's words into Crow in a flat voice. The chief replied briefly.
"He says," Long Ears reported in careful English, "that the agent is always welcome to eat at his fire."
"I didn't come to eat." Dorran's eyes moved over the gathered men and came to rest, with a faint pucker of surprise, on Wes. "I came for the white man you're hiding. A thief named Harlan. He's wanted for horse stealing in Dakota, and he shot at my clerk six nights ago in the agency pasture. Mister Tasker here can swear to it."
"I can," said Tasker. He was a lanky, sallow man with a drooping mustache and a revolver worn butt-forward on his left hip, and he had not taken his eyes off Wes since they came down the hill. "And that's another one of 'em, right there, by God. That's Pike's man. What are you doing up here, Harlan?"
Wes felt Rides Far's shoulder touch his, very lightly. He took a breath.