against the sky. He thought about Esteban's name in Pell's hurried ink, and
the Halloran children, and the dates beside each one like stones on a grave.
"No," he said.
Aikens's smile finally moved β downward. "Then I guess β"
He never finished the sentence, because at that moment a pebble came
clicking down the rock wall to his left, and then another to his right, and
Aikens looked up β they all looked up β and saw them.
Dokan's hunters lined both rims of the defile, motionless as the rock itself,
rifles held low but unmistakably present. Silas counted eight, maybe nine.
They hadn't been there a moment ago. That was the thing about Dokan's
people: they were never anywhere until they decided to be everywhere.
Aikens did the arithmetic. Silas watched him do it β seven men in the open
against nine rifles on the high ground, with no cover and no way out except
forward or back. The scarred knuckle went whiter.
"That's β" Aikens started.
And then came the hoofbeats from behind them, fast and many, and Marshal
Ada Quinn rode into the defile at the head of her deputies with Felipe right
behind her, and the morning suddenly had more law in it than Aikens had
ever seen in one place.
"Ambrose Hale's foreman," Quinn said pleasantly, dismounting with her rifle
held easy across her arm. "Aikens, isn't it? I've got a warrant with your name
on it. Arson, attempted murder, conspiracy β we're still deciding on the
order." She drew a folded paper from her coat and read aloud, her voice
carrying the length of the defile: "For Aikens, foreman to Ambrose Hale, and
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Pell, surveyor β conspiracy, fraud, arson, and the murders of Esteban, of the
Halloran family, of Cobb the peddler, and of persons unknown." She folded
it again. "Disarm them."
It went quietly, as these things go when the arithmetic is that clear. The rifles
were collected. The irons went on Aikens's wrists β Silas watched the
scarred knuckle go white one last time around the metal, and felt nothing at
all like satisfaction, and everything like relief.
"You'll never hold him," Aikens said to Quinn as they led him past. "You
know that. Men like Hale don't get held."
"We'll see," Quinn said. "Men like you said the same thing about the James
gang, and they're fertilizer now."
The young rider β the boy whose rifle had shaken β surrendered his
weapon to Rook with visible relief and asked, in a small voice, whether he
could write to his mother. Quinn told him he could write to his mother, his
lawyer, and his maker, in that order.
They rode into Juniper Flats at dusk with Aikens in irons between the
deputies and the copied pages safe in Quinn's saddlebag, and the town turned
out to watch the way towns do β doorways filling, conversations stopping
mid-word, children being pulled back from the street by their mothers. Silas
saw Quill the clerk standing white-faced in the land office doorway. He saw
Felipe's wife with her hand over her mouth. He saw, on porches and in
windows, the faces of people who had lost brothers and neighbors and had
never known where to put the grief.
A woman Silas didn't know stepped off the boardwalk as they passed and
pressed a small cloth bundle into Saya's hands β dried apples, by the smell
of it. "For the healer," she whispered, and was gone before Saya could
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answer. An old man took off his hat and held it over his heart until they'd
passed. Felipe's wife stood in the smithy doorway with both hands over her
mouth, and when Saya met her eyes she nodded once β the smallest,
heaviest nod Silas had ever seen. Nobody cheered. It wasn't that kind of
town, or that kind of evening. But the doorways stayed full, and the watching
felt β for the first time since Silas had ridden into Juniper Flats with a dead
barn behind him β like something closer to hope than to fear.
Quinn didn't stop at her office. She kept riding, straight through town and up
the hill road, with Rook and Okafor and her warrants and the last red light of
the day at her back.
Hale's house glowed on the hilltop, every lamp lit, the veranda wide and
white in the dusk. And there on the veranda, as the posse's horses crunched
up the gravel drive, stood Ambrose Hale himself β tall, silver-haired, a glass
of wine in his hand, watching them come with the mild interest of a man
observing weather in another county.
He didn't run. Men like Hale never ran; running was an admission, and
admission was the one thing money couldn't buy back.
The deputies fanned out without being told, Rook taking the east side of the
veranda, Okafor the west, the way Quinn must have drilled them. Gravel
crunched under the horses' hooves, loud in the stillness. Somewhere inside
the house a clock chimed the hour, delicate and absurd.
Hale turned the wine glass slowly in his fingers, as if the evening were a
negotiation and the glass a term he was still considering. "Marshal," he said,
pleasantly. "To what do I owe the pleasure?"
Quinn dismounted at the foot of the veranda steps. The warrants were in her
hand. "Ambrose Hale," she said, "you're under arrest for conspiracy, fraud,
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arson, and murder." Her voice didn't rise. It didn't need to. Behind her, Silas
sat his horse with the day's dust in his throat and Saya beside him and Dokan
behind them both, and watched the richest man in Cobre County look down
at the law coming up his driveway.
Hale lifted his wine glass slightly, in something that was almost a salute and
almost a dismissal.
His smile was not yet gone.
The sun was going down behind the western ridge when the posse rode up