Chapter 18 — The Snow Coming
The cold came down in earnest in the night, the way a door shuts.
Erik took the middle watch and sat with his back to a cottonwood and his rifle across his knees, listening to the wind comb the dry grass and to the coulee breathing below him in the dark — a hundred small sounds of horses shifting, stamping, blowing, that came up out of the earth like a single slow animal turning in its sleep. The first stars had gone behind a high gray lid of cloud before midnight. By his watch's end there was no star anywhere, and the air had that flat, waiting stillness that on the northern plains means only one thing.
He woke Mato for the last watch an hour before any light, and found the Lakota already awake, sitting wrapped in his blanket, facing north.
"Your snow is coming fast," Mato said.
"It is not my snow."
"It will fall on your farm." Mato's mouth moved in what might, in daylight, have been a smile. "And on my father's camp, and on Flint's stakes in the bottom. Snow is the one thing in this country that does not ask a man's nation." He said it plainly, the way a man repeats something older than himself, and Erik understood that he was hearing the chief's words carried in the son's mouth. "If it comes today, the tracks of everything will be written down for anyone to read. Your Flint does not want this done in snow, Erik Halvorsen. We must do it at first light, and let the snow write it."
The others were waking. The Swede came out of his blankets stamping and blowing on his hands. Nils stood looking west, where the militia would be coming up in the dark if the boy had ridden true — a whole company of farmers with rifles, making for the west mouth of the coulee with orders to be loud.
The plan was simple, and Erik went over it once more in a low voice, because simple plans are the only ones that survive a dawn.
At first light, Alcott's company would show itself at the west mouth — not charging, not firing on any man, but present in force and loud as a threshing crew: horns, hallooing, a wagon rattling down the track, shots fired into the air if need be to keep every rustler's eye nailed to the west. The guard camp faced that way. The camp's whole fear faced that way.
And at the same light, from the east: Erik and Mato and Gray Elk's riders — who were even now, if the council had kept faith, coming up the creek bottom in the dark to the cottonwood grove — would drop the pole gate the rustlers had laid across the east mouth, go in quiet among the herd's edge, and start the whole mass moving east, slow at first, horse following horse the way water finds a crack, and then faster, out onto the open plain and away south toward the creek and home.
Nils and the Swede would go in on foot at the herd's south edge to keep the leaders turning east and not west into the noise. Mato's riders would take the north side and the drag. Erik would ride the point with two of Gray Elk's men, because Erik knew the ground between the coulee and the creek in the dark and in the snow both.
Before they settled to wait, Erik and Mato went down together through the brush to look at the east mouth in the dark. The rustlers had laid a gate of cottonwood poles across the narrows, lashed with rawhide — and two of Gray Elk's men were already there ahead of them, lying in the brush like stones, their knives out and the lashings cut half through: cut just enough that the poles would fall at a pull, and no sooner. Mato touched one lashing with a fingertip and nodded in the dark.
"When the noise begins in the west," he said, "this gate is already open. It only does not know it yet."
"And if a guard rides this way before the light?"
"Then he finds a gate." Mato's teeth showed briefly. "And two men who are not there."
"The foreman," Erik said. "Kramer. If he can be taken, he is to be taken alive. He's worth more talking than any ten of the others are worth running. But no man is to throw his life away for him. Is that understood?" He said it looking at Mato, because they both knew whose sister had a grazed arm and a three days' thirst to lay at that man's door.
Mato was quiet a moment. "My sister said: the horses, not the men." His hand rested on his rifle and then, deliberately, moved away from it. "If he runs, we take his horse from under him and we take him out of the dirt. He will talk to your captain with his mouth, Erik Halvorsen. That is a better use of him than the other."
"Then it's settled," Nils said, and his voice shook only a little, with cold or with the rest of it nobody asked him.
Far off to the west, faint and then gone, came a sound that might have been a wagon on a frozen track.
They went down to the east mouth in the dark to wait for the light, and the first fine grains of snow began to sift through the cottonwoods, so light at first that a man could not say if they were snow or only the cold made visible — and Erik found himself thinking of the mare in the draw, the windbreak of brush, the pile of oats within reach of her nose, and he hoped she was still there, and still stubborn, because the day was going to need every witness it could get.