“I am Colonel Evaris. And I am the man who will make sure Teonna Rainwater never sees the sun rise again. Now. The message.”
Evaris stopped polishing. “Who?”
A disgraced Montana telegraph operator, armed with a fractured prototype of a "threesixtyp" cipher machine, must decode a cryptic message from Teonna Rainwater before a brutal Indian Agent and a ruthless rival rancher can bury the truth—and the Yellowstone—forever. Prologue: The Unspoken Signal 1923 Season 1 - Threesixtyp
Artie had built the decoder—a clumsy, brass-and-copper contraption he called the "Threesixtyp" because its three rotating discs mapped letters in 360-degree permutations. He’d dreamed of selling it to the Army, but after a court-martial for insubordination (punching a colonel who’d ordered a cavalry charge into a peaceful Crow camp), he was lucky to be tapping wires in a frontier town.
Artie Pendergast, bleeding from a split lip, was tied to a chair in the back of Banner Creighton’s wagon. Evaris sat across from him, calmly polishing his monocle. “I am Colonel Evaris
Post-credits scene: A telegram prints in a dark room in Washington, D.C. A hand reaches for it. The hand wears a gold ring with a crest—a lion and a stag. The ring of the Spencer family. The man reading the message is not American. He is British. And he is very, very old.
“Mr. Pendergast,” the uniformed man said, stepping over the broken door. “You have something of mine. A cipher machine. And a message.” The message
The man smiled. It was the worst thing Artie had ever seen.