The little cavalcade
struck a swinging trot as it cleared the barracks, swung down into the
bed of Battle Creek, up the farther bank, and away to the west. And a
little later we, too, left the post, following in the dusty wake of the
paymaster's wagon and its mounted escort.
For ten or twelve miles we kept to the MacLeod trail at an easy pace,
never more than a mile behind the "transient treasury," as Goodell
facetiously termed it. He was a pretty bright sort, that same Goodell,
quick-witted, nimble of tongue above the average Englishman. I don't
know that he was English; for that matter, none of the three carried the
stamp of his nationality on his face or in his speech. They were men of
white blood, but they might have been English, Irish, Scotch or Dutch
for all I could tell to the contrary. But each of them was broke to the
frontier; that showed in the way they sat their horses, the way they
bore themselves toward one another when clear of the post and its
atmosphere of rigidly enforced discipline. The breed I didn't take much
notice of at the time, except that when he spoke, which was seldom, he
was given to using better language than lots of white men I have known.
At a point where the trail seemed to bear north a few degrees, Goodell
angled away from the beaten track and headed straight across country for
Pend d' Oreille.
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