Four anxious souls were gathered around Booth Corbin, watching every bill he peeled off the packs of cash, as he counted the Quaker treasure that had been meant to build a new Friends community near Helena. He had managed to delay the official split of the money for several days in an effort to keep them from storming into Choteau to flash it around. The only reason he had been successful in holding them back was the fact that there wasn’t much in Choteau to spend it on. Finally, however, it had gotten to the point where they threatened to take it away from him and he wasn’t sure if they were serious or not. So, he decided he might as well deal the fortune out.

He had told them that the total was estimated to be around thirty thousand dollars and it represented the sales of six separate farms, plus the savings of all the members of the church. For most of the five bandits, it was difficult to imagine such a large payday, and they were eager to see exactly how much it was for each of them. Booth had started to simply deal the money in five separate piles, but his partners wanted him to count out the whole treasure in one pile first, so they could gloat over the score they had pulled off. With his brother, Jesse, helping him count, Booth laid the last bill down for a total of $30,800. None of the five had been schooled in arithmetic, but all knew they got six thousand each. Then Jesse called on his basic knowledge of long division and figured out that each man’s share of the extra eight hundred was $160. With the one hundred dollars Booth gave everyone the first night after the massacre, each man’s payday amounted to a total of $6,260. The whooping and hollering that followed his summation might have been heard by Hawk, had he been within a mile of the log cabin perched at the top of a ravine. At this particular time, he was closer to three miles from the ravine.

Tater Thompson’s first response, as everyone expected, was that he was going to ride down to Choteau and buy all the whiskey the fellow in the tent-saloon had. He had already drunk up almost all the whiskey he had taken from Grover Dean’s store. “That’s just what we need, you damned old fool,” Blue Davis scolded. “Let everybody in that little town know we’re all suddenly rich. That would really give ’em somethin’ to talk about in that dried-up little town.”

“Blue’s right,” Booth said. “This ain’t the time to show off your money. Before you know it, there’d be a bunch of soldiers or a posse of lawmen up here, combin’ these hills.”

“That woman down at the store thinks we’re prospectors,” Tater replied. “Maybe they’d just think we struck it rich.”