Vance’s florid face drained of color, turning the sickly gray of curdled milk. His fingers twitched toward the pocket of his brocade vest, but before his hand could clear his lapel, the cold steel muzzle of Ethan Walker’s Colt was pressed firmly beneath the syndicate boss's chin.
"Don't do it, Vance," Ethan whispered, his thumb slowly drawing the hammer back to full cock. "You move a finger, and you won't live to see the judge hang you."
The cold steel muzzle of Ethan Walker’s Colt .45 dug deep into the soft, fleshy hollow beneath Jason Vance’s chin, forcing the syndicate boss’s head backward until the diamond stickpin in his cravat caught the harsh desert sun angling through the office window.
The click of the single-action hammer reaching full cock had resonated like a miniature whip-crack inside the whitewashed adobe room.
Outside on the veranda, the armed guard of four cavalrymen stiffened, their boots scraping hard against the red flagstones as their Springfield trapdoors swung toward the open doorway. "Captain Baylor, sir?!" Corporal Miller shouted, his voice tight with emergency discipline. "You need us inside?!"
"Hold your posts!" Captain Baylor commanded without raising his eyes from the open ledger. His voice was neither panicked nor hurried; it had the dry, clipped authority of a veteran who had listened to Confederate artillery barrages at Malvern Hill without flinching. "No man enters or leaves this office until I give the order. Corporal, post two men at the rear windows and keep the veranda clear of all enlisted personnel."
"Sir, yes sir!"
Inside, the silence settled again, thick, suffocating, and reeking of danger.
Vance stood rigid, his florid face beaded with oily sweat that trickled through his graying sideburns and soaked the stiff linen of his collar. His hands hovered at shoulder level, trembling with a volatile mixture of fear and outraged entitlement. For five years across the Arizona Territory, Jason Vance had bought governors with telegrams, bribed marshals with mining certificates, and driven rival ranchers off their water rights with three-line legal injunctions. He had never stared into the dead center of a rifled barrel held by a man who had nothing left to lose.
"You're a dead man, Walker," Vance hissed through clenched teeth, his breath hot and sour with expensive Kentucky rye. "You think you can brandish an iron in a federal garrison and walk out alive? Baylor, shoot this miserable vagrant! He’s an outlaw! He’s trespassing on military grounds!"
Captain Baylor did not reach for his sidearm. Slowly, deliberately, the cavalry captain took a polished bone paper knife from his desk tray and slipped it between the pages of the syndicate’s private ledger, marking page forty-two. Then he closed the heavy volume, folded his hands atop the leather cover, and fixed his slate-gray eyes directly on Vance.
"Mr. Vance," Baylor said in a tone that could have chipped granite, "you will lower your hands and place them flat upon my desk. If you make a sudden motion toward your coat pocket, I will instruct Mr. Walker to blow the back of your skull through that wall, and I will write it up in my post log as the lawful termination of a treasonous saboteur resisting arrest."
Vance’s small eyes widened in genuine panic. Slowly, leaning forward under the unrelenting pressure of Ethan's gun muzzle, he laid his trembling, ring-adorned hands flat onto the polished mahogany desk.
"Ethan," Baylor said, his eyes shifting to the cowboy for the first time. "Ease that hammer down. In this room, my word is the only law that draws breath."
Ethan kept his gaze locked on Vance’s jugular for two long seconds. Then, using his thumb to control the Colt’s hammer, he smoothly dropped the mechanism to half-cock, stepped back two paces, and lowered the weapon to his hip, though his fingers never left the walnut grip.
"Captain," Ethan said, his voice flat and hoarse from the long night ride over the Tortolitas. "You march eighty troopers of the Fifth into that canyon tomorrow, and you're doing Vance’s private murder for him. The Apache in the red rocks haven't broken a treaty since sixty-eight. They're sitting on ancestral ground that ain't never been surveyed under the public land laws. This eviction writ is paper treason."
Baylor opened the second document—the official military requisition order bearing the blue seal of the Department of War. He ran his forefinger over the embossed signature at the bottom: A. P. K. Safford, Territorial Governor of Arizona.
"The Territorial Governor has the statutory authority to request federal troops to quell armed civil unrest and protect territorial surveyors," Baylor observed, his tone analytical, almost detached. "The War Department delegates frontier commanders to assist civil authority in maintaining order along transit corridors."