When the horses were rested, the fires were put out, and the troopers were ordered to mount up. Hawk stood upstream and watched them move out as they crossed the creek and started toward the Crazy Mountains. He hoped that Ben would point out to the stubborn lieutenant that there were no tracks to support the rancher’s claims that the Indians were driving a sizable portion of his herd away. He gave a little whistle, and the buckskin came up from the edge of the creek at once. Hawk climbed on board, already thinking about some things he hadn’t gotten around to doing back at his cabin on the Boulder River. He would have time to replace some of the mud chinking on his stone chimney now that he was a free man. And he would need to do some hunting to make sure he had enough meat smoke-cured. First, however, he would have to return to Fort Ellis to get his packhorse and pick up the possibles he kept in one of the stables there. It was a day and a halfback to Fort Ellis. Rascal could make it in a day if he had to, but now, with all the time in the world at Hawk’s disposal, there was no need to push the buckskin.

As he rode, moving comfortably with Rascal’s easy rhythm, he thought about the patrol he had just left, and it occurred to him that he was relieved to have been fired. Old Walking Owl and his people had long been friends of his, and he wasn’t really comfortable leading a patrol to capture him. In fact, he sincerely hoped the old chief successfully escaped into the mountains. Ben Mullins was a good scout, but Walking Owl was a pretty shrewd old bird, and he had been avoiding army patrols for quite some time. Hawk was glad to be relieved of the task of finding the small village of Blackfeet, because he was confident that he could have tracked them down. Unlike Ben, he had lived with the Crow and the Blackfeet. He knew how they thought. He also suspected he knew Lieutenant Meade’s lack of determination. And if Walking Owl could manage to stay ahead of the cavalry patrol, he thought there was a good chance Meade would call it quits. It had been Hawk’s experience that Meade wasn’t comfortable when he reached the exhaustion of the rations drawn for an estimated number of days and would recall the patrol. So, with the chance of that possibility in mind, Hawk headed southwest, intending to strike the Yellowstone west of Big Timber and follow it in to Fort Ellis.

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