“Buffalo hunters?” There was still a trade in buffalo hides, which were fashioned into robes for sale in the cities.
Little Wind shook his head. “Buffalo men don’t hunt on Sioux land.”
That was true, Johnson thought. To invade the Sioux lands looking for gold was one thing, but buffalo hunters would never take the risk.
“Then who are they?”
“Same men.”
“What same men?”
“Same men at Dog Creek.”
Johnson dismounted. “The same men whose camp you found, back at Dog Creek? How do you know that?”
Little Wind pointed in the mud. “This one boot crack heel. Same heel. Same man.”
“I’ll be damned,” Johnson said. “We’re being followed.”
“Yes.”
“Well,” he said, “let’s get the water and tell Cope. Maybe he’ll want to do something.”
“No use water here.” Little Wind pointed to the horses, which were standing quietly by the spring.
“I don’t get it,” Johnson said.
“Horses no drink,” Little Wind said.
The horses always drank as soon as they reached the spring. That was the first thing they did, let the horses drink before they filled their water bags.
But Little Wind was right: today the horses were not drinking.
“I’ll be,” Johnson said.
“Water not so good,” Little Wind said. He bent close to the water and sniffed. Suddenly he plunged his arm up to his shoulder into the spring, and pulled out great clumps of a pale green grass. He reached in again, pulled out more. With each clump he removed, the spring flowed more freely.
He named the weed for Johnson, and explained that it would cause sickness if men drank it. Little Wind was speaking quickly, and Johnson did not understand it all, except that apparently it caused fevers and vomiting and men acted crazy, if they didn’t die.
“Bad thing,” he said. “Tomorrow water is good.”
He stared off across the plains.
“We go find those white men?” Johnson said.
“I go,” Little Wind said.
“Me, too,” Johnson said.
They rode at a gallop for nearly an hour in the yellowing afternoon light, and soon they were far from camp. It would be difficult, Johnson realized, to make it back by nightfall.
Periodically, Little Wind would pause, dismount, check the ground, and mount up again.
“How much farther?”
“Soon.”
They rode on.
The sun dropped behind the peaks of the Rockies, and still they rode. Johnson began to worry. He had never been out on the plains at night before, and Cope had repeatedly warned him always to return to camp before dark.
“How much farther?”
“Soon.”
They rode for perhaps fifteen minutes more and stopped again. Little Wind seemed to be stopping more often. Johnson thought it was because it was too dark to see the ground clearly.
“How much farther?”
“You want go back?”
“Me? No, I was just asking how much farther.”
Little Wind smiled. “Get dark, you afraid.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I was just asking. Is it much farther, do you think?”
“No,” Little Wind said. He pointed. “There.”
Beyond a far ridge, they saw a thin line of gray smoke climbing straight into the sky. A campfire.
“Leave horses,” Little Wind said, dismounting. He pulled up a bunch of grass, let the blades fall in the wind. They drifted south. Little Wind nodded, and explained that they must approach the camp downwind or the other men’s horses would smell them.
They crept forward, over the next ridge, lay on their stomachs, and looked down into the valley below.
In the deepening twilight, two men, a tent, a glowing fire. Six horses picketed behind the tent. One of the men was stocky, the other tall. They were cooking an antelope they had killed. Johnson could not see their faces well.
But he found the sight of this solitary camp, surrounded in all directions by miles of open plains, oddly disturbing. Why were they here?
“These men want bones,” Little Wind said, echoing his own thoughts.
And then the tall man leaned close to the fire as he adjusted the leg on the spit, and Johnson saw a face he knew. It was the tough man he had spoken to in the Omaha train station. The man Marsh had spoken to near the cornfields. Navy Joe Benedict.
And then they heard a murmuring voice. The tent flap opened, and a balding, heavyset man emerged. He was rubbing something in his hands—spectacles he was cleaning. The man spoke again, and even from a distance Johnson recognized the slight halt, the formality of the speech.
It was Marsh.
Cope clapped his hands in delight. “So! The learned professor of Copeology has followed us here! What better proof of what I have been saying? The man is not a scientist—he is a dog in the manger. He does not pursue his own discoveries—he seeks to spy on mine. I have neither time nor inclination to spy on him. But Daddy Marsh can come all the way from Yale College to the Territory of Montana just to keep track of me!” He shook his head. “The asylum will yet receive him.”
“You seem amused, Professor,” Johnson said.
“Of course I am amused! Not only is my theory of the man’s dementia amply confirmed—but so long as he is tracking me, he cannot be finding any new bones of his own!”
“I doubt that follows,” Sternberg said soberly. “Marsh has nothing if not money, and his students are not with him. He is probably paying his bone hunters to dig for him simultaneously in three or four territories, even as we speak.”
Sternberg had done some work for Marsh several years before, in Kansas. He was undoubtedly right, and Cope stopped smiling.
“Speaking of finds,” Cookie said, “how did he find us?”
“Little Wind said that these are the same men that were following us back at Dog Creek.”
Isaac leapt up. “See? I told you we were being followed!”
“Sit down, J.C.,” Cope said. He was frowning now, his good humor vanished.
“What are they doing here, anyway?” Cookie said. “They’re not on the square. They’re gonna kill us and take the bones.”
“They’re not going to kill us,” Cope said.
“Well then, take the bones, for sure.”
“They wouldn’t dare. Even Marsh wouldn’t dare.”
But in the darkness of the plains, he sounded unconvinced. There was a silence. They listened to the moan of the night wind.
“They poisoned the water,” Johnson said.
“Yes,” Cope said. “They did.”
“I wouldn’t call that neighborly,” Cookie said.
“True . . .”
“You’ve made some important discoveries, Professor. Discoveries any scientist’d give his left arm to claim as his own.”
“True.”
There was another long silence.
“We surely are a long way from home, out here,” Isaac said. “If something happened to us, who’d be the wiser? They’d just blame the Indians if we never showed back in Fort Benton.”
“They blame Indians.” Little Wind nodded.
“Quite true.”
“Better do something about them,” Isaac said.
“You’re right,” Cope said finally. He stared at the campfire. “We will do something. We will invite them to dinner tomorrow night.”
Dinner with Cope and Marsh