"He always did have a fair hand."
"It's a good book," the lieutenant repeated, "and it's worth precisely nothing, and you know that, don't you? Dorran will say it's fabricated. Pike will say it's fabricated. And Washington will believe the man with the commission over a cowhand and a—" He stopped, glanced at Rides Far, and chose his next word with care. "Over a cowhand and his wife's family."
"Yes," said Wes. "I know. That's why we didn't come to give you a book." He leaned forward. "Dorran wants soldiers at the agency on the fifteenth. Fine. Give him what he asked for. Come yourself. Bring your company. Stand at the corral when Pike's herd comes in and Dorran counts it. And when they're counted, before anybody signs anything, look at the left hip of every steer that comes through that gate."
"Look for what?"
Rides Far reached across the desk, took the lieutenant's pen without asking, dipped it, and drew on the blotter three short lines spreading from a point.
"This," she said. "Clipped into the hair, close to the hide. Twenty steers. My mother and I cut them ourselves, in the agency pasture, on the night after the last issue, after Dorran had counted them in and signed the paper that said they were ours." She set the pen down. "If any of them comes through that gate on the fifteenth with Pike's herd, then the government has bought it twice. And you will have seen it with your own eyes. Not ours. Yours."
Severance looked at the bird track on the blotter for a long time. Then he looked up at her, and Wes saw in his face the thing he had seen in Dorran's face back at the camp: the sudden attention of a man who has found a card he did not expect. Only in Severance it did not look like fear. It looked like respect.
"Ma'am," the lieutenant said, "where in God's name did you learn to think like that?"
"From horse traders," said Rides Far. "White ones. They are very instructive."
* * *
The fifteenth of November came in clear and bitter, with the sun standing low over the Beartooth peaks and the snow on the Stillwater flats crusted so hard that it rang under the horses' hooves.