the hill road, and Ambrose Hale was on his veranda with a glass of wine in
his hand, watching them come. His smile had not yet gone. It was the smile
of a man who had bought this county piece by piece and could not imagine it
refusing him now β the easy, practiced curve he had worn for bankers, for
judges, for the territorial governor's men when they came through on the
stage. He lifted the glass slightly, as if in greeting, as if these riders were
guests arriving for supper.
Marshal Ada Quinn rode at the head of them, her gray braid over one
shoulder, the star on her coat catching the last of the light. Behind her came
six deputies, and with them Silas Wren on the dun gelding Slate, and Dokan
walking his pony at the rear, because Dokan had refused to be left out of this
and Quinn had learned, in the two weeks since the copies of the red notebook
reached her desk, that there were some allies you did not argue with.
Hale set his wine down on the veranda rail. "Marshal," he called, warm as
lamplight. "To what do I owe this honor? You should have sent word β I'd
have had the cook put on coffee."
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Quinn dismounted. She did not smile. "Ambrose Hale," she said, and her
voice carried across the yard the way a rifle shot would, "I have warrants for
your arrest. Conspiracy. Kidnapping. Fraud. And murder, in the matter of the
Halloran family."
The smile stayed on Hale's face for one more second, held there by habit, and
then it went β not all at once, but the way a lamp gutters before it dies.
"That's absurd," he said. "Do you know who I am in this county, Marshal? I
employ forty men. I hold notes on half the ranches between here and the
territorial line. You come onto my property with β with this β on the word
of a crippled surveyor and a drifter?"
"I know what you are," Quinn said. "That's sufficient."
Hale's gaze slid past her to Silas. "Wren," he said, and there was something
almost pitying in it. "You. I remember you. You used to haul my freight. A
broken-down teamster with a dead wife, and now you ride up my hill with
the law." He spread his hands. "What did they promise you?"
Silas looked at him for a long moment. Slate shifted under him, the leather
creaking. "Nobody promised me anything," Silas said. "That's the difference
between us."
Quinn nodded to her deputies. "Search the house. Every room. Every drawer.
Bring me paper β ledgers, letters, anything with writing on it."
"You can't β" Hale started, and then the deputies were moving past him up
the veranda steps, and he turned to follow, blustering, threatening lawsuits,
naming attorneys in Santa Fe, and Quinn put one hand on his shoulder β not
rough, just immovable β and said, "Stay where I can see you, Mr. Hale."
They found the ledgers first, in the study, in a cabinet whose lock gave way
to a deputy's pry bar in under a minute. Then the correspondence β letters to
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the surveyor's office, drafts of filings, a packet of bank drafts made out to
men whose names matched the payment entries in Pell's notebook, each
initialed in the same cramped hand: A.H. And then, in the desk itself, the
deputy running his fingers along the underside of the center drawer found the
catch, and the false bottom sprang up, and there it lay: the red notebook. The
original. Pell's neat columns of claim maps and dates and names, the ink
barely faded, the pages Silas had copied by charcoal light in a line shack with
his hands shaking β only this one was real, and it had been sitting in
Ambrose Hale's desk while men vanished off the Cobre County roads.
Quinn held it up so Hale could see it. "Yours?" she asked.
Hale said nothing. The color had gone out of his face like water out of a
cracked jug.
They put the irons on him there on his own veranda, in front of his own
house, while his cook watched from the kitchen doorway with her apron
twisted in her hands. He tried charm once more as they walked him down the
hill road β "Marshal, be reasonable, whatever Pell told you, the man drinks"
β and then, when the first townspeople appeared at the edges of Juniper
Flats, drawn by the sight of the posse, his voice changed. "This is an
outrage," he shouted, for the benefit of the gathering crowd. "I am the largest
taxpayer in this county!"
Quill the clerk stood in front of his office with his spectacles in his hand, and
said nothing at all, which in Quill was the loudest thing anyone had ever
heard him say. Felipe the blacksmith came out of the forge with his hammer
still in his fist, and when he saw Hale in irons between two deputies, he set
the hammer down very carefully on the anvil, as if he did not trust himself to
keep holding it.
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In the jail, Foreman Aikens was already talking. He had been talking for
three days, ever since Quinn's deputies took him at the home ranch without a
shot fired. He talked the way a dam talks when the first crack runs through it
β all at once, and then everything. The line camp. The men. The payments.
The Hallorans. Quinn wrote it down, and had him sign it, and locked the
paper in her safe next to the red notebook.
That night Silas sat on the jailhouse porch with Quinn, sharing a pot of
coffee that tasted like it had been made during the previous administration,
and she told him what Aikens had said about the camp in the high country β
a box canyon past the second spring, where the taken men were kept