overcoat too thin for the altitude.
Lieutenant Owen Marsh was twenty-six, perhaps, with the raw, earnest face
of a man who had come west believing the Army was one thing and had not
yet finished learning it was another. He commanded the post's detachment:
infantry at half strength and a dozen troopers whose horses were always
somebody else's priority. Elias had not expected to be glad of him. He was,
immediately and against his judgment, because Marsh looked at the oilcloth
bundle under his arm the way a hungry man looks at bread.
"I was told there was a delegation expected," Marsh said. "Am I early, or—"
"You're the whole of it, Lieutenant," Whitfield said, with a thin man's thin
smile. "Sit down, Mr. Ward. Both of you. Let's hear this in order."
So Elias laid it out in order, the notebook open on Whitfield's desk with its
eleven entries in his cramped hand.
He gave them the line first: eleven steel sets counted that day, and more
uncounted beyond them — miles inside the band's country, not on its edge.
He gave them the cache: forty-odd salted hides, spare traps, chain and salt, a
going concern. He gave them the burned wickiups at the lower camp and the
fired meat caches, in arithmetic Whitfield could check against his own ration
rolls: sixty people, their winter meat gone to smoke.
Then he unwrapped the oilcloth on the desk, and set the knife in its beaded
sheath between the inkwell and the ration ledger, and gave them Kes.
75
"Kes, seventeen years old, Sekan's brother. He went under the ice on Cedar
Creek last February, near the upper end of that line. It was ruled an accident
at the time by men who didn't ride out to look." He kept his voice at the level
of the desk, a clerk's voice, because the voice was the whole of his credibility
and he would spend none of it on heat. "This was his knife. His mother made
the sheath — she's dead too, now. The knife wasn't on the body. It wasn't in
the family's keeping. It was hanging on a peg in Cyrus Vail's hide cache
yesterday morning, where I took it down myself. A man doesn't come by a
drowned boy's knife by accident, Mr. Whitfield. Not that knife. Not in that
country."
The room was quiet in the way rooms with stoves in them are quiet, the iron
ticking.
Whitfield looked at the sheath a long time. Then he did the thing Elias had
ridden in expecting him to do. He began to count the cost of believing it.
"Mr. Ward. You understand what you're asking this agency to set in motion."
He folded his hands. "If I record this, I am accusing a white citizen of theft,
arson, and by implication something considerably worse, on the word of a
single civilian witness and the contents of a cache which, by your own
account, you entered without any authority whatsoever. The Apache
corroboration will not be taken. Not in Prescott. Not in Washington. You
know this."
"I know what they'll take," Elias said. "They'll take your agent's clerk
standing in that draw with a notebook, counting the same hides I counted.
They'll take a patrol riding the line with the sets still in the ground. That's
why I've come before I took any of it up. The line's still set, Mr. Whitfield.
The cache is stocked and the wickiups are still ash. All of it is waiting for
somebody with the right kind of eyes to look at it. Mine aren't the right kind.
76
I knew it before I knocked."
"And Vail?" Whitfield's mouth worked around the name like a man testing a
sore tooth. "Vail has a contract for hides through this post's sutler, which is
entirely legal. He has friends in this territory whose letters reach Washington
faster than mine do. If I move against him and fail — and with this—" he
gestured, not at the sheath, but at the whole arrangement of facts on his desk,
"—this is what I would be moving with, Mr. Ward — then I have not merely
failed. I have started something. The East Fork band has lost meat and two
lodgings, and I will answer that hardship out of stores, gladly, today. But a
band that believes the government has called a white man a murderer on their
behalf and then let him walk away does not go back to being quiet, Mr.
Ward. That band goes to war, and I am the man who has to feed sixty people
and bury soldiers in the same week. I have buried soldiers before. I am
telling you plainly what I am afraid of, since you have been plain with me."
It was, Elias understood, a speech about fear dressed in the uniform of
procedure — and procedure was fear's best coat. Whitfield feared a frontier
war more than he loved justice. It was not villainy; Elias had met villainy at
close range and knew its smell. This was a man who had weighed a dead boy
against a possible hundred dead and found the arithmetic unbearable.
It was Marsh who broke it.
"Sir." The lieutenant had not sat down since the sheath came out of the
oilcloth. He stood by the stove with his coat still buttoned wrong from the
cold, and his voice had the bluntness of youth, which is sometimes just
courage that hasn't learned its manners yet. "If I may."
Whitfield nodded at him with the weariness of a man who knows what's