"Sergeant Kehoe. Put Mister Tasker in irons for attempted murder. Mister Pike, your herd is impounded by the United States Army pending inquiry, and so are your vouchers. Mister Dorran." He turned. "I can't arrest an agent of the Interior Department. But I'll be writing to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs tonight, and to the department commander, and I'll be enclosing a ledger, and seventeen hides, and the sworn statements of three white men, and"—he glanced at Long Ears—"the captain of your own police. I expect an inspector will want to talk to you. I'd stay close to home."
* * *
The inspector came in January, a dour, bearded man from Washington named Pardee who spent eleven days at Absarokee going through Dorran's books with a pencil and a magnifying glass, and who left without saying good-bye to anyone. Dorran left a week after him, on the stage for Bozeman, with his trunks and his small clean hands, and he did not come back. Word went round in the spring that the agency was to be moved east to the Little Bighorn, and that the new agent was an old Army quartermaster who was said to count cattle twice before he signed for them once. Ransom Pike's beef contract was cancelled. Cobb Tasker sat in the jail at Miles City waiting for the district court, and nobody on the Clarks Fork seemed in any hurry to post his bond.
None of it happened quickly or cleanly. But the winter ration that came up from the south in December was a full ration, of fat steers, and every one of them was killed and eaten, and the lodges of Strikes Twice's band were warm.
Eli healed. By midwinter he could draw a bow again, and by the time the chinook winds came over the Beartooths in March and turned the snow to slush in a single afternoon, he was racing Plays With His Horse across the creek flats on a paint colt and losing loudly. He wrote to their mother. So did Wes. They wrote the letters together, at the fire in Rides Far's lodge, passing the pencil back and forth, and Rides Far carried them to the agency herself and stood by while the new clerk put them in the mail sack.
The answer came in April. It was longer than one line. Wes read it three times, and then folded it and put it in his shirt pocket, and took out the old one that had been there for nearly three years, and fed it to the fire, and watched it go.
* * *
On a morning in early May, when the cottonwoods along Pryor Creek had leafed out in that first green so pale it is almost gold, and the mares were dropping their foals in the brush corrals, Wes came back from the horse herd at sunup and found his saddle sitting outside the door of the lodge.
It sat squarely on the new grass, with his bridle hung over the horn and his bedroll tied behind the cantle and his spare shirt folded on top. Beside it, in a neat row, lay the moccasins Good Lodge Woman had made him, and the elk-horn knife that Plays With His Horse had given him at midwinter, and a small painted parfleche he had never seen before.
He stood and looked at it for a long time.
He had known it would come. She had told him so on the first night, plainly, as she told him everything. When Eli is safe and the agent is answered. Eli was safe. The agent was answered. She had kept her word to the letter, and there was nothing in it to complain of, and he found that he had to put one hand against a lodge pole because his knees were not entirely to be trusted.