“Well, drat it all, did you see them, man? What’s the—” And still the sergeant seemed wholly disconcerted, although at last he nodded. “I saw them. Yessir. Right clear in fact. But—”

“And? So? Can we take them? Can we get—”

“We could take them easy. Yessir. But the thing is, we can’t. I mean we can’t fight. Because—”

“Can’t fight? Says what? There aren’t that many of them, are there? And if there’s a good tactical approach from—”

“It ain’t that,” the sergeant said, although still he seemed incapable of coping with whatever it might be instead. “I mean we don’t even need tactics. But that’s the whole point.

I mean, it’d be almost too easy, because it ain’t Injuns. I mean, I reckon they’re Injuns all right, but—”

“Listen now, listen!” Captain Fiedler struggled to check his anger. “Sergeant, are you sick? Will you for heaven’s sake tell me what’s—”

“It’s squaws.”

“It’s — what?”

“Squaws. Ain’t one single buck warrior down there; not a one. You kin hang me for a chicken-stealer if’n every single Winchester ain’t being shot by a female. And—”

“But — but — ambushing a patrol of United States Cavalry? Squaws?”

The sergeant shrugged. “Well, it don’t sound no more loco than it looked, I reckon. But it’s even more loco’n that. Because there’s some men down there too, all right, maybe ten or a dozen of’em, but they ain’t fighters — jest the old limp-dicked kind you see on reservations, maybe. And there’s a decent-size remuda likewise, like the whole outfit’s migrating somewheres, or was, until say no more’n ten or fifteen minutes ago. But now there’s this one tepee sort of half throwed up against a couple of trees — more like a improvised lean-to is what you’d call it — and there’s this buck-board setting near it. With that there wardrobe trunk still on it, yes’m. But what I mean, all the old men are doing, they’re loafing around like somebody told ‘em they had to wait on something for a spell, while over by the lean-to — well, there was this one squaw, real purty young wench too, jest getting herself all stripped down bare-titted and crawling inside. So it’s only the other sixteen who’s deployed out behind them boulders keeping a bead on us, and—”

“It’s only—” Hoke cut the man off without intending to, the exclamation voicing itself. And then he was almost afraid to pursue it. “Sixteen?” he asked hesitantly. “You mean counting the one in the lean-to, nacherly. You don’t mean the sum total of them squaws is—”

“Jest what I said. Sixteen and one, which if’n you know how to add better’n you know how to git dressed, comes out to—”

But Hoke had already stopped listening. He had closed his eyes also. “Seventeen?” he moaned. “Seventeen?” Finally he faced it again, not able not to. “But jest tell me slow,” he said. “Down amongst the old men, you dint maybe notice one of them chewing on a nice appetizing boiled wood rat, sort offer nourishment betwixt meals? Or if’n he ain’t hungry at the moment, then doubtless he’s still wearing a expensive derby hat anyways, and—”

“Well, yair, come to think on it I did see one with a derby, but what is—”

“Nothing,” Hoke said. “Nothing at all.” His eyes were shut again, and his head was lowered. “Excepting it’ll be at least twenty hours now, or anyways that’s what it took him the last time when they was camped up to Fronteras, and I don’t reckon there’s gonter be none of them let us cut it no shorter neither, not until they all durned sure git their belly-buttons squished out, so—”

But he was not being understood, evidently. Or perhaps he had mumbled even more than he realized, slumped against a rock and not even caring, not for the moment. “Dean Goose?” he heard Belle shouting at him. And then she was shaking him once more too. “Because he’s the greatest what? Who? Now what the blazes kind of word is—”

But this time he didn’t answer at all, already banging his head against the boulder behind him where he sat, quite hard, although quite deliberately also, in that profoundly impotent, ponderous rhythm of absolute and unmitigable frustration, of futility beyond hope. They had to restrain him physically.

And he was right, because it was to be the twenty hours indeed, give or take an apparent meal or two, and by then Captain Fiedler and his troopers would be long departed for Yerkey’s Hole. But there would be another problem then too. Because it had been approximately six o’clock in the morning when it commenced, and at dusk, at twilight, it was only the twelfth squaw who was emerging from the tepee, the thirteenth who was entering. So they knew it would be under cover of darkness that it would cease. “Or when the damned thing just falls off him altogether,” Belle said.

So when (he next morning came and the Indians were furtively gone at that, and the buckboard at the same time, without there having been a single sound for Belle or Hoke to hear, without a trace now either, there was only one boon, one saving grace. There still remained only the one direction for him to have taken with his burden. At the crack of dawn, and with the further benison of well-rested horses, they were storming after him again.

“And I’m even almost glad,” Belle said. “I almost am. Because this time I’m gonter have less mercy than a aggravated rattlesnake. I ain’t even gonter kill him now, not right off. I’m jest gonter bury the little pee-drinker up to his neck Apache-style and prop his mouth open with a stick and let the ants do it. As a matter of fact I’ll sell tickets.”

Hoke said nothing. He hadn’t for most of the day and night of the waiting. Now he simply rocked in place, not even jouncing with the sway of the surrey either, but almost as if in some esoteric, mystical periodicity of his own, like a creature irretrievably lost to meditation. He still wore the dress, the bonnet, but he had stopped thinking about both. He clutched his Smith and Wesson in his right hand, its hammer uncocked but with his finger welded against the trigger for so long that he had lost all feeling there without knowing it.

They were perhaps four hours into daylight when they met the wagon, a dilapidated old Conestoga, creaking in desultory indolence toward them behind equally aged, imperturbable mules. There were two women aboard, neither of them young but not old either, wholly anonymous, undifferentiated in their drabness as well. Hoke did not even avert his face now, did not hide his mustache as Belle questioned them. “Why, yes,” one of them acknowledged, “no more than an hour ago. Indeed, a lovely girl. We chatted briefly. Her husband recently passed away, and she’s returning home to Wounded Knee.”

Then Hoke awoke to something after all, remembered it, dissuading Belle with a gesture even as she was about to urge

the horses onward again. “Yair,” he said. “Because it’s a day and a half already, and I’m about to start on the harness.” He restrained the two drab women in the covered wagon. “I ain’t particular,” he said. “Hardtack or jerky or—”

They gave him biscuits and cheese, willingly enough, if still dubious about his costume. And then Hoke refused to eat while riding too. “Because it ain’t good fer what ails me,” he said, “not after what he done put my intestines through already. But anyways, time don’t matter no more. Sooner or later, that’s all that matters. Today or next week or someyear when Mister Chester Arthur ain’t even President no longer. Because I got a whole lifetime I’m gonter be contented to devote to it now.”

So he was standing at the side of the Cones toga, dipping water from a lashed-down canister, when he overheard the conversation. The women had paused to rest now themselves, although their dialogue meant nothing to him:

“Oh, dear, sometimes I’m afraid we just won’t find him after all—”

“And it’s our own fault too, for waiting so long to look Six wasted years, when we should never have let him leave to begin with. Never—”