"They'll listen to the agent."
"Perhaps. Perhaps not." She tilted her head. "Eli told me something about you. He said that when you were boys, a man in your town sold your mother a mule that he said was six years old, and you looked in its mouth and said it was fourteen, in front of the whole town, and the man had to give back the money."
Wes felt his face heat in the dark. "I was eleven. I got a whipping for sassing my elders."
"But you were right."
"I was right."
"Then tomorrow," said Rides Far, "look in the mouth of the mule."
* * *
It was Rides Far who saw the magpies.
They were coming down off a ridge toward a long brushy draw that ran east to the river, and she pulled the roan up so sharply that the mare sat back on her hocks. A dozen magpies had risen out of the chokecherry thickets at the bottom of the draw, black and white, and were circling and scolding a quarter mile ahead, refusing to settle.
"Something is in there," she said. "Something they do not like."
Plays With His Horse rode up beside her and looked, and said something in Crow, and she nodded.