"It set straight," said Rides Far. "You walked on it too soon."
"I walked on it too soon," Eli said. "So in the spring I asked her father to help me send word. He took me to the agency at Absarokee himself. I wrote you a letter in Dorran's office. Dorran's clerk, that is, Tasker. I gave it to him to post to the Tongue Fork outfit, care of Ransom Pike." He looked at Wes. "You never got it."
"No," said Wes. His throat had closed. "I never got any letter."
"I wrote three," Eli said. "That spring, and that summer, and again last fall. Every time, Tasker took them. Every time, he said they'd gone out on the mail stage." His mouth twisted. "After the third I started to watch him. That's how I got shot."
* * *
He told it in pieces, with long pauses while he caught his breath, and Rides Far filled in what he could not. Wes listened and felt the floor of the world tilt slowly under him, the way it does when a man realizes that the road he has been riding for years has been running in a direction he never meant to go.
The band of Strikes Twice drew its beef ration at the agency like every other band on the reservation. Twice a month in the warm season, once a month in the cold, the contractor drove a herd up from the south and the agent counted it into the agency corral and signed the voucher that the government would pay. The contractor this year, and last year, was Ransom Pike.
"They don't kill them all on issue day," Eli said. "They can't. Too many at once. So the extra are turned into the agency pasture to be held for the next issue. Only they're never there for the next issue. There's always a story. Wolves ran them. A storm drifted them. Some young men from another band stole them. And then the next month Pike drives a fresh herd up, and Dorran counts it, and signs for it, and the government pays again."
"Same cattle," Wes said slowly.
"Same cattle. Tasker and two of Pike's riders cut them out of the pasture at night and push them back south over the line. Then Pike sends a man up to gather the strays." Eli's eyes held his. "Who gathers the strays, Wes?"
Wes did not answer. He did not need to. He thought of the brindle steer with the crumpled left horn that he had pushed back down the Clarks Fork three times since spring. He had thought the animal was simply a wanderer, a born fence-crawler. He had joked about it with Dutch Amsel, the foreman. That old crooked-horn's got a sweetheart up on the reservation. He had been paid two dollars extra each time.