"I'll say you do! If only you could bring some up our way, I'd give seven, eight hundred for a stallion colt out of her, if the sire was anything."
The Cutters were all passionate horsemen and horse breeders; Jed would have been content to talk over Epona for longer yet, and drop some heavy hints about buying her, though there wasn't the slightest doubt he knew she was well past mark of mouth. Ingolf cleared his throat.
"Don't mean to hurry you, Rancher, but…"
Jed sighed. "Yeah, we got to get goin'. All right, you want them to strip down?" He jerked a thumb at the captives. "It's not as if they were respectable."
"I'm not buying them for their looks," Ingolf said, shrugging. "It's their work I'm interested in."
Jed slapped him on the shoulder. "You're more sensible than most men your age," he said; he was perhaps a decade older than Ingolf's twenty-eight.
Which means he was fourteen or fifteen when the Change came, Rudi thought suddenly. I wonder what sort of lad he was. And what might he have been, if the old world had not died in an instant.
"Most of my boys, they get a sniff of a woman and they can't think of anything but putting her flat on her back," he went on, with a male laugh. "Or bent over a saddle, according to taste."
Ingolf shrugged again. "Silver's harder to come by. And gold doesn't take sick and die on the road, or run off and get et by wolves or tigers, or get the galloping miseries and kill itself. Silver and gold you can trust."
"Oh, things can get confusing for a while when someone finds a big cache of bullion in one of the dead cities," Jed Smith said.
Ingolf grinned; the old time's coins were worthless, except as raw materials for arrowheads, but the new currencies hadn't settled down yet either.
"How often does that happen these days?" he said. "The ones near where people live have been picked over, and the others… friend, you do not want to go there."
"Yeah, I've heard," Jed said. "So, what do you say to forty-five dollars a head for these twenty-five? And the older children thrown in with 'em."
"I say you're kidding me and it's not funny," Ingolf replied. "I say you're a thief. I say you'd get half that much in a wet dream. I say get serious or don't waste my time."
Jed scowled at him. "They'd fetch that back to home."
"You're not home," Ingolf pointed out. "You've got over a hundred women and their kids to get back to your ranches over the mountains, all the way to the Upper Missouri. They'll have to walk, and it's getting late in the season. What happens if you run into blizzards in the high country?"
Jed reflexively cocked an eye at the heavens; they were mostly blue, with a few towering clouds like mountains of whipped cream in the sky. Anyone who made their living from the earth and feared the weather's fickleness would recognize the glance. So would a soldier.
"Should make it before the passes snow up, if we push 'em," Jed said.
He absently popped the lash of the riding quirt thonged to his wrist. Ingolf shrugged.
"That'll wear on them. And you're not planning on keeping them all yourselves, are you?"
"Oh, Black Void, no. They'd be nearly as many all up as the free women on Rippling Waters then. That'd be trouble, 'specially at first, give 'em too much chance to dream up something bad together. We'll swap at least half for livestock. Our range on Rippling Waters can carry a lot more than we've got, good grass goin' to waste."
Ingolf looked at him in surprise; a cowherd could double every three years. Jed caught the glance and explained:
"We've had a couple of bad winters, and lost some to lobo-wolves and tigers, more of the damn things every season. There've been too many prime hands away fightin' to ride guard proper or to cut enough field hay. A healthy woman who knows weaving and cheesemaking or leather work will fetch ten good breeding an' milking heifers or twenty steers, easy. That's why I let the Runamuk and Sweet Grass boys take most of the stock from here; easier to get one gal home than twenty cow-beasts."
Ingolf smiled like a wolf. "That may have been true before your war with Deseret ended, but now the prices you get for everything you took will go down, sure as sure, with so much loot chasing the livestock. And the women will eat every day, and some of them will die and leave you with nothing for your trouble. Selling some to me now means you don't have to try and move them in a glutted market… and the bullion you get you can carry on one packhorse and lend out at interest until prices for livestock drop again."
Jed grunted, pulling at his beard and looking as if he'd tasted something sour. Ingolf had explained his bargaining strategy to Rudi, and it was based on the Cutters' wants, just as a real trader's would be. In the end, cattle and sheep and horses were the only wealth that was really real to the plainsmen…
"Well, hell, Mr. Vogeler, you're makin' me feel guilty at unloading any of 'em on you," Jed said dryly. "Mebbe I should pay you to take 'em off my hands."
Ingolf shrugged. "Newcastle's a city. There are plenty of workshops there, and farms around it, and police and a town wall to keep order. We make a lot of stuff for the Sioux and for trade-they buy our buffalo-hide shields and our bows as far east as Nebraska-and we can make more if we get more hands. Hell, if you could sell us men, we could use them in the coal mines and the lamp-oil works."
"Which means you can afford to pay more than my neighbors for the gals."
"But they're not worth as much to you, which is what matters in a bargain. If I push on to Twin Falls, I'll get what I need even cheaper; I can buy from the Church's officials, or your army quartermasters. And you're not selling me the best you have here and you know it. Come on, Mr. Smith, make it worth my while to turn back now and save an extra two weeks' travel."
"You'll get a lot more than forty-five dollars each when you get home," Smith pointed out.
"On the ones who live; some won't," Ingolf said with an air of patience. "Plus there's the tax to the Oceti Sakowin, and the cost of transport, food, depreciation on working stock and those wagons I want to buy from you, and my men's wages… I'll give you fifteen each for all twenty-five and that's generous. They're none of them as good quality as the one we've already bought. And I should get a bulk purchase discount-"
Rudi had been avoiding looking at the women who waited, mostly in stolid silence beside the little bundles of food and spare clothes that would go with them, many with children clutching at their skirts. A few of the women wept, but the children were too frightened, and most of their mothers looked like they'd used up a lifetime's tears. They all glanced back at Picabo, though, as a party of young Cutters came through the gate, whooping and shoving one another in rough horseplay. Edain and Rebecca were in their midst, and they both looked as though a wagon had just run over their puppy.
No, Edain does, Rudi thought. Rebecca looks more like a queen surrounded by oafs, and walks like it. She's a fine brave girl… no, a fine woman, and no mistake… but perhaps not the best person to impersonate a slave.
Jed and Ingolf turned from their leisurely bargaining. They listened to the story-told in bits and pieces by excited youngsters-and the older Cutter's scowl would have done credit to a summertime thunderhead.
"You damned pup!" he said after a moment, and snatched his hat off. He looked as if he'd like to hit Jack with it again, too. "What're you thinking of, playing grab-ass with someone else's property? And these folks are guests in our camp, under the Prophet's protection, too! You're a disgrace to the Rippling Water brand!"