* * *
Fort Custer stood on a high bench above the meeting of the Bighorn and the Little Bighorn, plank barracks and log stables laid square around a parade ground. They rode in at dusk on blown horses, Wes and Rides Far and Plays With His Horse—the two cousins had stayed behind with Tasker's mounts—and the sentry at the gate looked at the three of them, and at the two Crow riders in particular, and sent at a run for the officer of the day.
The officer of the day was a first lieutenant of the Second Cavalry named Daniel Severance. He was perhaps thirty-five, lean and tired-looking, with a sun-cracked face and the gray beginning in his mustache, and he came out of the guardhouse buttoning his greatcoat and stopped dead at the sight of Plays With His Horse.
"Well, I'll be damned," he said. "You were with Gibbon. On the Yellowstone, in '76. You rode scout with Mitch Bouyer's bunch."
Plays With His Horse grinned and said, in his forty words of English, "Long time. You very skinny then. Now still skinny."
Severance laughed, a short startled bark, and some of the tiredness went out of his face. Then he looked at Wes, and at Rides Far, and it came back.
"I suppose you'll be the people Agent Dorran's letter is about," he said. "It came in about two hours ago. The colonel's down at Fort Keogh until Monday, and I'm the senior officer present, God help me, so I've read it twice." He took a folded paper from his coat. "Renegade white men, threatening language, a band growing insolent and refusing to surrender a fugitive. He requests a company of cavalry be present on issue day to—how does he put it—overawe the disaffected element." He folded it again. "Which one of you is the disaffected element?"
"All of us, I expect," said Wes. "Lieutenant, my name's Wesley Harlan. I'd like ten minutes of your time, and a lamp, and somewhere to sit my wife down out of the wind."
They sat in the adjutant's office by a sheet-iron stove, and Wes told it. All of it, from the Yellowstone to the chokecherry draw. He did not dress it up. He told the lieutenant about the crooked-horn brindle and the two dollars a head for strays, and he said plainly that he had driven those steers back south himself, more than once, and taken Pike's money for it, and had not had the sense to ask why. When he had finished, Rides Far untied the painted parfleche and laid Eli's ledger on the desk.
Severance read it by lamplight for a quarter of an hour without speaking.
"Your brother keeps a good book," he said at last.