Lauters had gone for his gun, but the men were already on him. They knocked him senseless with the butts of their rifles and tied him to his chair. When he came to later, it was all done with. His deputy-Alden Bowes-had returned from delivering a prisoner to Virginia City and untied him.

Red Elk was hanged from an oak in the square across the street.

There were a few questions after that, but none Lauters couldn't answer. The men had worn masks, he couldn't identify them. They had overpowered him and he had the bruises to show for it. And why had he sent his deputy away to deliver a prisoner to Virginia City with a volatile situation brewing and anti-Indian sentiment running high? He'd thought no one would try such a thing.

The questions were answered to everyone's satisfaction.

Besides, the man they'd strung up was just an Indian, a Blackfoot. And he'd killed a white. Case closed. The only ones really concerned were the Blackfeet people and they didn't count.

Everyone else believed Lauters.

They never guessed he was lying about it all.

Knowing this, Lauters drank more. It was a year ago this week that the injun had been lynched and duly swung. In his mind, he could hear the creaking of that limb the noose was strung over.

It made him shiver.

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The blizzard had been threatening for several days. On around midnight of the day Nate Segaris' body was discovered and carted away in Wynona Spence's funeral wagon to be plucked and polished in secret, it hit. It came down out of the Tobacco Root Mountains, urged forward by shrill, squealing winds that forced the mercury well below freezing. Several feet of heavy, blowing snow were dumped over Wolf Creek, the wind sculpting it into four and five foot drifts that looked like frozen waves crashing ashore on some alien beach.

Around four, the storm passed.

The world was white. Drifting, swirling, frozen. In the foothills of the mountains, Curly Del Vecchio waited in an old abandoned mine shaft wondering when death would come. His horse threw him the night before, a short distance away, breaking his leg in the process.

Now it was night again.

He was alone.

Thankful only that he found the old shaft. Thankful there was a firepot in it and a heap of kindling left behind when the miners sought greener pastures. Enough wood to burn for three, maybe four days. Maybe by then, he hoped, someone would find him.

Maybe not.

Curly fed the fire only when he had to. This way the blaze would last for days, he figured. The only other thing he did was look at his leg and the bloody knob of bone that had burst through the skin. If he moved too much, the pain was so intense he lost consciousness.

So he sat and fed the fire.

The rest of the time was spent in a feverish half-sleep in which shadows mulled around him. Shadows with claws and teeth that reached out for him as the moon brooded above, a yellow, dead winking eye.

Curly didn't even move to relieve himself. He pissed his pants and his crotch steamed with spreading warmth. If he moved his head just a few inches, he could see the mouth of the shaft and the world beyond. A huge drift had insinuated itself there now and he could see only a few feet of the world. He saw parting, rolling clouds and cold stars. And a sliver of moon growing fat by the day like a spider gorging on flies.

Long before dawn, a savage, primal baying rode the screaming winds. Curly wondered again when death would come.

Then, before sunup, with the decayed stink of an old slaughterhouse, it did.

19

It was two days later when Joseph Longtree approached Wolf Creek.

He came from the southeast, across the Madison River on a night of blowing snow and subzero winds. He paused astride his black on a ridge outside town, looking down at the sprawl of houses, buildings, and farms below him. Wolf Creek was a mining town, he knew, its blood running rich from transfusions pumped in from ore veins. There were miners here and ranchers. That and a lot of hatred between the whites and local Blackfeet tribe. Tom Rivers had told him this much.

Not that he needed to be told.

Whites hated most Indians as a rule.

And the Blackfeet, he knew, were a hostile bunch. They'd fought whites and, before them, other Indians. And with a vengeance next to which even the Dakotas often paled. But Longtree knew the Blackfeet weren't a bad lot. Not really. Just fiercely territorial and unrelentingly proud.

Longtree held no prejudices against them.

In his line of work, he couldn't afford to. Such things blinded a man's judgment. And the last thing he ever wanted was to arrest a man and see him brought to trial (and possibly the gallows) simply because of his skin color.

Longtree accepted long ago, that although he might've been a lot of things, no one would ever accuse him of not being fair or honest.

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