For the next four days, the many daughters of Swift Fox cared for the hanged man. They wrapped him in buffalo blankets and fed him a hot broth of deer blood. While they did this, the old man kept watch and smoked his pipe. On the morning of the fifth day, the hanged man regained full consciousness.
He looked at the old man's daughters and then at the old man himself. Then he asked for water in a dry, dead voice. The old man sent his daughters away and let the hanged man drink all he desired from a jug fashioned from the bladder of a buffalo.
"My throat burns," he finally said, his eyes blue and icy.
"It is not broken, " Swift Fox said. "By the grace of the fathers, you lived."
"You speak good English."
The old man took this as a fact, not a compliment. "I was a cavalry scout."
"Did you bring me here?"
"Yes."
The man nodded painfully. He looked around. "Flathead?" he asked.
"Yes. I am called Swift Fox."
"Joseph Smith Longtree," the man said. "Where am I exactly?"
"You are in a camp on the north fork of the Shoshone River. Less than a mile from where I found you, Marshal."
Longtree coughed dryly, nodding. "How far are we from Bad River?"
"Two miles," the old man told him. "No more, no less."
Longtree sat up and his head spun. "Damn," he said. "I have to get down to Bad River. The men I'm hunting…they might still be there."
"Who are these men?"
Longtree told him.
There were three men, he said. Charles Brickley, Carl Weiss, and Budd Hannion. They ambushed an army wagon in Nebraska that was en route to Fort Kearny, killing all six troopers on board. The wagon had carried army carbines which, it was learned, were sold to Bannock war parties. That was a matter now for the army itself and the Indian Bureau. But the killing of soldiers was a federal offense which made it the business of the U. S. Marshals Office. Longtree had trailed the killers from Dakota Territory to Bad River. And in the foothills of the Absarokas, they had ambushed him. They jumped him, beat him senseless, strung him up.
"But you did not die," Swift Fox reminded him.
"Thanks to you." Longtree was able to sit up now without dizziness.
Swift Fox was studying him. His hair was long and dark, carrying a blueblack sheen foreign to whites. "You are a breed?" he asked.
Longtree smiled thinly. "My mother was a Crow, my father a beaver trapper."
Swift Fox only nodded. "When do you plan on hunting these men?"
Longtree rubbed his neck. "Tomorrow," he said, then laid back down, shutting his eyes.