The agency at Absarokee was a straggle of log buildings along the river, and beyond them the long pole corrals where the beef was received and issued. By midmorning the flats around the corrals were crowded. Every band that drew its ration at the agency had come in, hundreds of people, and through the middle of them, in a column of twos, rode forty troopers of the Second Cavalry with Lieutenant Severance at their head.
Dorran came out on his porch to receive them. He was smiling. He shook the lieutenant's hand at length and pointed out the camp of Strikes Twice.
"He thinks the soldiers are his," Rides Far said, at Wes's side. "Look at his face. He thinks he has already won."
"Let him think it a while longer."
Eli was with them. He had refused to stay behind. He sat a quiet old mare with a buffalo robe around his shoulders and his left arm strapped against his chest, so gaunt and pale that people stared, and when Wes had argued, three days before, he had only said, "I've been dead two years, Wes. I want to see this," and Strikes Twice had said something in Crow that ended the matter.
Pike's herd came in from the south a little before noon, four hundred head strung out along the river trail with eight riders working them, and the dust of their coming hung gold in the cold air. Ransom Pike rode in front. He was a big, handsome, open-faced man of fifty with a white Stetson and a laugh you could hear across a section of land, and he swung down at the corral gate and pumped Dorran's hand and then the lieutenant's, and then he saw Wes, and for one instant the laugh went out of him like water out of a cracked bucket.
It came back almost at once. "Harlan!" he boomed. "There you are! Thought you'd froze in that blow. Dutch, look who it is."
The foreman, Dutch Amsel, a square, quiet man with a frost-burned face, looked at Wes from the back of his horse and said nothing at all.
"I didn't freeze," Wes said.
"Well, I'm glad of it. Truly." Pike's eyes went to Rides Far, and to Eli, and back. "I hear you've gone native on me."
"I've gone married," said Wes. "It's a different thing."