Esteban β April. Halloran β woman, two children β May. Cobb, peddler
β February β she set the pages down very carefully, as if they might
detonate.
"Esteban was Felipe's brother," she said quietly. "The Hallorans were on my
list for four months. I wrote to their people in Missouri myself." She looked
up. "This is enough for warrants. For Pell, for Aikens, and β" she tapped the
initials A.H. with one blunt finger, "β for Hale, once Pell talks. And Pell
will talk. Men who keep books like this always talk, because they kept the
book to protect themselves from the man who paid them."
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Quinn leaned back, and for a moment the marshal's mask slipped and Silas
saw the person underneath β tired, and angry in a way that had nothing to
do with politics and everything to do with arithmetic. "I carried dispatches
for the Army when I was nineteen," she said. "Wore a deputy's star in three
counties since. The Hallorans β" her voice roughened, "β I wrote to their
people in Missouri myself. Four months of nothing to tell them. You brought
me something to tell them."
Her plan was simple and fast, the way Silas imagined Army plans were: ride
at first light, take Pell at his camp before anyone in town could warn him,
then ride back with warrants for Hale before the money could buy its way out
of the county.
"We move tomorrow," she said. "Tonight you three sleep in my cells β the
clean ones, don't look at me like that β because Hale's men will be watching
the hotel and the livery, and I'd rather they wonder where you went."
It was a good plan. It lasted until sunup.
What broke the plan was Felipe.
He came to the marshal's office at sunup with his apron still on and soot on
his forearms, and he didn't knock. "Aikens rode out twenty minutes ago," he
said, breathing hard. "Six men with him, rifles, heading for the canyon trail.
Somebody in this town talks to Hale's house, Marshal, and it wasn't me."
Quinn was on her feet before he'd finished, already reaching for her hat. "The
canyon trail narrows through the red rocks two miles out," she said to Silas.
"If they're going to stop you from reaching my office with those pages, that's
where they'll do it."
"We're already here," Silas said. "The pages are already here."
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"The pages are here," Quinn agreed grimly. "But you aren't supposed to be.
And Hale doesn't know that." She was buckling her gun belt as she spoke.
"Aikens will be waiting on that trail for three riders who aren't coming. I
want him to keep waiting β right up until my deputies are behind him."
The plan re-formed in minutes, the way good plans do when the people
making them have stopped being surprised by the territory. Quinn's deputies
β Rook, a long young man with a longer rifle, and a broad woman named
Okafor who looked like she could arrest a mountain β would ride the long
way around through the arroyo and come up behind the rocks. Silas, Dokan,
and Saya would ride the canyon trail as bait, exactly as Aikens expected,
with strict orders not to start anything.
"I don't take orders well," Silas said.
"Take these," Quinn said, and handed him a deputy's star. She gave one to
Dokan too, who turned it over in his fingers with an expression Silas couldn't
read. "That makes you the law until sundown. Try to act like it."
Saya got no star β "You're a witness, and I need you alive more than I need
you armed," Quinn told her, not unkindly β but nobody suggested she stay
behind, and nobody would have survived suggesting it.
Saya looked at the two tin stars and then at Quinn, and said, very dryly, "I
will try to be ornamental."
Quinn's mouth twitched. "You be whatever you need to be."
They rode out with the morning sun at their backs, and Silas felt the copied
pages in his shirt like a second heartbeat. Dokan rode point, reading the trail
the way other men read newspapers, and twice he signed them to a halt while
he studied something in the dust β and twice he nodded and they went on.
The third time he stopped, he didn't nod. He just looked at Silas, and then up
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at the red rock walls closing in on either side of the trail.
"They are here," he said quietly.
The trail narrowed through the rocks exactly as Quinn had said β a defile no
wider than a wagon, walls rising twenty feet on either side, the morning
shadows still pooled in its throat. And across it, sitting their horses in a line
like a fence, were seven men.
Aikens sat in the middle, his scarred knuckle white where he gripped his
rifle. He smiled when he saw them, the easy smile of a man holding all the
cards.
"Morning," he called. "Hale sends his regards, Wren. And he'd like his book
back."
"There is no book," Silas said.
"Then we'll take the copies." Aikens's smile didn't move. "Hand them over,
and you three can ride on into town and forget any of this happened. That's
the offer. It's the only one."
Aikens shifted his attention to Dokan. "This isn't your fight, hunter. Ride on."
Dokan didn't move. Didn't blink.
"Girl," Aikens said to Saya, "you don't want to be here when this goes
wrong."
"She is exactly where she wants to be," Silas said. "And her name is Saya.
You'll use it if you speak to her again."
One of Aikens's men β young, his rifle held like it might bite him β
glanced from his foreman to the empty rims of the defile and back again, and
Silas saw the exact moment the boy started doing his own arithmetic.
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Silas felt Saya go very still beside him. He thought about the barn's black ribs