Pike laughed. It was a good laugh, rich and easy, and it carried. "Lieutenant, I'll be frank with you. If some of my steers drifted up onto the reservation and these people marked 'em, I've got no way of knowing that. I don't count every hide. My riders bring in strays, and I pay 'em for it. If there's thieving going on at this end, that's the agent's lookout, not mine." He spread his hands. "Ask any of my boys."
"I'll answer," said Wes.
He stepped forward to the fence. He could feel Rides Far's eyes on his back, and Eli's, and the eyes of every Crow on the rails, and of Pike's eight riders, and of forty troopers. His mouth was dry.
"I'm one of Pike's boys," he said. "Or I was. My name's Wesley Harlan and I rode for the Tongue Fork outfit from the winter of '80 until three weeks ago. That brindle with the crooked horn—I drove him back south off this reservation three separate times since May. I found him every time on the trail below the agency pasture, with fifty or sixty others, and every time they'd been pushed. You could see it in the tracks. Shod horses behind 'em. I told myself it was wolves. I took two dollars a head from Mister Pike every time." He swallowed. "I'll swear to that in front of any court in the Territory. I'll swear to it knowing what it makes me. But I'm not going to stand here and let him say he doesn't know."
Pike's face did not change, but something behind it did. "Wes," he said softly. "Son. Think about what you're saying."
"I've thought about it. I've had two years to think about it." Wes looked past him at the foreman. "Dutch. You sent me after them. Who told you where they'd be?"
For a long moment Dutch Amsel sat his horse and looked at nothing. Then he said, in his slow, heavy voice, "Tasker. Every time. Night before issue, Tasker'd send word by Nate which gap they'd come out of." He looked at Pike. "I'm sorry, Ransom. I got a family in Bozeman. I ain't going to Leavenworth for you."
It was then that Cobb Tasker, who had come in from the Bighorn on a borrowed mule two days before and had been standing all morning at the back of the agency porch, pulled his revolver.
He did not aim at Wes. He aimed at Eli. Afterward, Wes would understand why: Eli had written the book. Eli was the witness who had seen him at the gap in the moonlight. Eli was the dead man who would not stay dead. All Wes knew in the moment was the flash of the barrel coming up, and his own voice shouting, and the mare under his brother shying sideways—
Long Ears was faster. The police captain had been watching Tasker for an hour. He took two long strides and brought the barrel of his carbine down across the clerk's forearm with a crack that everyone on the flat heard, and the revolver went off into the snow, and Tasker went down on his knees clutching his arm and screaming, and then Plays With His Horse was sitting on him.
The flat erupted. Troopers were unslinging carbines; Pike's riders were backing their horses away from their employer as if he had come down with smallpox. Through all of it Lieutenant Severance stood quite still in the chute among the bawling cattle, and when the noise began to die, he spoke, not loudly.