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he comes in peace a man’s welcome at Foot o’ the Mountains. That’s what I call my place here.” The old man noted the Indian’s newly healed left hand where Panther Burn had cauterized the stump of his severed finger and covered it with a healing poultice of elk mint, whiteweed, and tallow, wrapping it in buckskin until the wound had ceased draining. The old man knew the purpose of such a self-mutilation but did not inquire. He ended his speech and turned his back on the brave and started down the straw-littered aisle that separated the two rows of stalls.
    â€œThere’s coffee and hot grub at the house,” Wister muttered as he neared the rear of the barn. He doubled over, and lifted a trapdoor. “Got me a tunnel here so we don’t even need to get wet. Dug it myself, which is why I don’t walk so straight-up, erect-like no more.” His pocked features managed a grin, and frankness, too, that Panther Burn found to be an unusual quality in a ve-ho-e , a white man. “Bed here or follow me to the house, whatever you’ve a mind to.” Wister took a lamp from a nearby timber support, knocking a bridle to the floor in the process. He muttered something about useless old-timers, and returning the gear, struck a match on his belt buckle and lit a little coal-oil lantern. The glare colored the homely set of his wrinkled face a sickly yellow. He started down.
    â€œWister,” the Cheyenne said, stomach betraying him with an audible growl, “I will camp at your fire. I am called Panther Burn.”
    The old man chuckled and waved him over. “You speak pretty good English. Understand it good, too?”
    â€œWhite missionaries, traders, soldiers at Fort Bozeman, I learned from all,” Panther Burn flatly explained.
    Wister nodded. “You’ll do, lad. Find a stall for your horse and come on.”
    Foot o’ the Mountains was a long, low-ceilinged house lost in the shadowy base of a massive chunk of granite that rose out of the valley floor. Climbing out of the tunnel that connected the main house to the barn, Panther Burn entered the cluttered main room where Jed Wister served up his grub and tended to the thirsty requests of his customers behind a bar built of sturdy timbers with the bark still on, rough-hewn like the men who visited Foot o’ the Mountains. Oil lamps dangled from the ceiling on short stubby chains. Barrels of flour, grain, dried apples, and salt pork were stacked along the far wall. Tables and ladder-back chairs built by the same hand that had felled wood to build the house were set about the room with little regard to pattern. Pipe and cigar smoke coiled and swirled like serpent-wraiths about the foot-thick beams overhead. The room smelled of beans and bacon, of wet clothes and rye whiskey, of tobacco and sweat; it smelled of burning pine timbers and worn leather, of fur pelts, gunpowder, coal oil, and coffee. Three men clustered around one table closest to the fireplace. In the darkest corner of the room, barely discernible in the glow of his pipe, another figure sat with his back to the supply barrels. Panther Burn could not tell much about the man in shadow but the other three were dressed in uniforms like those he had seen worn by the cavalry troopers at Fort Buchanan in the Dakotas; short-waisted blue coats trimmed with brass buttons, brass buckles on black belts, breeches dyed a lighter shade of blue than the coats and tucked into calf-high black boots patched with dried mud. One of the men wore a campaign hat with one side of the brim pinned up to hold a scarlet plume that jutted back at a rakish angle.
    His two companions sported short-brimmed caps and red bandannas around their throats. The uniforms had been stripped of any identifying insignia.
    â€œHelp yourself to grub. It’s hanging over the fire,” Wister said, rummaging behind the bar and placing a tin cup of strong black coffee on the countertop alongside