The arrest did not happen the way Rosalind had imagined arrests happening, in all the years she had run Bar Seven and settled disputes with a look and a ledger. There was no gunfire, and no chase, and no dramatic flight across the valley, because Duncan Pryce was a man who understood, better than most, when a road had run out. Inspector Lind had finished reading the registration, and the railroad lawyer had folded his papers with the careful, quiet hands of a man who did not wish to be remembered as a party to a fraud, and the surveyor had loaded his stakes back into the wagon without being told, and Duncan had stood at the fence for a long time looking at the waterhole, at the herd, at the fence his own hands had once helped to tear down in another life, and he had said nothing at all.
It was Sam Kearney who walked to him first, and Sam did not touch him, and did not raise his voice. "Duncan," he said, "the sheriff is coming from Juniper Creek. You can ride in with us, or you can be fetched. It is your choice, and it is the last easy one you will get today."
Duncan looked at Sam, and for a moment Rosalind saw something cross his face that she had never seen there before — not anger, and not fear, but a kind of terrible tiredness, as if a man had been carrying a weight for eighteen years and had only just realized how heavy it was. He nodded, once, and he walked to his horse, and he mounted, and he rode with them back toward Juniper Creek, with Sam on one side and one of the railroad men — who had suddenly become very eager to be helpful to the law — on the other, and Rosalind rode behind with Ana and Miren, and the whole camp, it seemed, fell in behind them, because no one wanted to be told about this later. Everyone wanted to have been there.
Juniper Creek by midday was already full. Word travels in a valley the way smoke travels, fast and in every direction at once, and by the time the column came down the main street, the boardwalk was lined with people: shopkeepers with their aprons still on, ranch wives with children at their skirts, shepherds who had come down from the high pasture, miners from the far end of the valley who had heard there was to be a reckoning and had come to see what kind. Edith Marlow stood on the steps of the depot, her ledger clutched to her chest, and when she saw Rosalind she gave a small, fierce nod, as if to say: I kept the trunk, and I kept the copies, and I kept my word. Dr. Tomas Herrera was there too, standing a little apart from the crowd, his hands in his pockets, his eyes on Rosalind, and the look he gave her was not the look of a man watching a spectacle. It was the look of a man watching a woman he loved walk through the hardest hour of her life, and willing her, silently, to keep walking.
The sheriff, a broad, patient man named Cole who had held the office for twelve years and had never once had to arrest a ranch manager, met them in front of the jailhouse, and he read the charges in a voice that was made for reading charges: cattle theft, established by three years of tally books; attempted sale of land to which the seller held no title; and forgery of a signature, Rosalind Carmichael's, on railroad papers. Duncan listened with his head bowed, and his hands, when the sheriff took them, were steady, which surprised Rosalind more than anything else that day. She had expected shaking. She had expected rage. What she saw was a man who had finally stopped pretending, and the stillness of him was more frightening than any outburst would have been.
They were leading him up the steps when he stopped.
It was not a struggle. He did not pull away, and he did not run. He simply stopped, halfway up, and turned, and looked out over the crowd, and over the street, and over the valley beyond it, and he said, in a voice that was not loud but that every person in Juniper Creek seemed to hear, "Wait. If I am to be taken for this, then I will be taken for all of it."