The count began. It was done the way it was always done: the steers were pushed down a long chute and through a narrow gate in the corral fence, one at a time, and Dorran stood at the gate with his tally book and a clerk beside him, calling the numbers aloud. Only this time Lieutenant Severance stood on the other side of the gate, and beside him stood Long Ears in his blue police coat, and beside Long Ears stood Good Lodge Woman with her blanket over her head, so that she should not by accident have to look upon her son-in-law, who stood three yards behind her.
The first steer went through. The second. The twentieth. Severance watched each one, leaning a little forward. On the forty-first, he raised his hand.
"Hold that one."
Dorran looked up from his book. "Lieutenant?"
"Hold it, please." Severance swung over the fence and dropped into the chute, and a trooper caught the steer by the horns. It was a brindle, rangy and long-legged, with its left horn crumpled down against its skull like a crushed hat. The lieutenant bent and looked at its left hip. Then he took off his glove and laid his bare hand flat against the hair there, and smoothed it, and stepped back so that the men on the fence could see.
Clipped close into the brindle hair, sharp and unmistakable, was the track of a bird.
Good Lodge Woman, from under her blanket, said one word in Crow. It went down the line of old men on the corral rails like fire down a fuse.
"Mister Dorran," said Severance, quite mildly, "I'm told this animal was counted into your agency pasture on the eighteenth of October. I'm told it's been counted into it on four occasions before that, and I have a ledger that says so. Would you care to tell me how it comes to be arriving with Mister Pike's herd this morning, to be bought again?"
Dorran's face had gone the color of tallow. "That's—Lieutenant, that's absurd. Any fool could cut a mark in a cow's hide. These people did it themselves, last night, to discredit me—"
"Last night this herd was bedded down on Pike's side of the line, with eight riders on it," said Severance. "And that hair has grown out a good quarter inch. It was cut weeks ago." He nodded to the trooper. "Let it go. Keep counting. I'd like to see the rest."
They counted the rest. The lieutenant held up his hand sixteen more times. When the last steer had gone through, seventeen animals stood bunched in a side pen with the crow's track on their hips, and the whole flat had gone silent except for the bawling of the cattle and the wind.