Chapter 15
They found Dane's saddlebag at the cellar mouth, where it had been set down โ placed, June thought with a chill, the way a man sets a thing on a table to be found.
Marshal Roland Brandt came up out of the spring cellar as the light strengthened, brushing cave dirt from a uniform coat that had no business being that clean, with a face like a courthouse door. He was sixty, white-mustached, famous from the border to the capital: the marshal who had cleaned up two counties, the incorruptible, the law's own legend. Behind him, his riders were dragging the last of Vane's men into a line in the yard, and the federal troop's officer was shouting for a surgeon, and through it all Brandt walked toward June and Dane with the ledger in his hand, and June's relief rose up in her like floodwater.
It died at his eyes. They were the eyes of a man adding a column of figures. They went over her the way Proffitt's had โ a buyer's eyes, a ledger's eyes โ and came to rest on the book in his own hand with an expression she would spend the rest of her life learning to name: satisfaction, arrived at last at its object.
It was the deference that told her, before his words could. The troop's officer โ a captain with a battlefield face, a man who had plainly never deferred to anyone under a general โ had come up out of the cellar behind Brandt and stood at his shoulder like an orderly. The riders in the yard had stopped shouting for the surgeon. Even Vane's captured men, bleeding in a row by the corral, were watching the marshal like creatures who have seen the weather change owners. June understood that the law had not arrived in her valley. The law had been waiting in it โ in her cellar, in the dark, under her house โ like something that lived there.
"Marshal," Dane said. He had gotten to his feet. His voice was strange. "Vane?"
"Dead," Brandt said, with the mild regret of a man reporting weather. "He ran. The tunnel. I regret the necessity." He turned the ledger over once, unhurried. "And this. You must be the famous Mercer. Silas Vane's runaway clerk, with Silas Vane's account book. Two hundred miles of my life, young man, tied up in this oilcloth parcel. You've saved the United States a great deal of trouble."
"Then it's yours," Dane said. "It's what it was always for. Names, routes, payments โ half the law in the territory is in that book, Marshal, bought and paid for, and I can witness toโ"
"Yes," Brandt said. "That's the difficulty, isn't it?" He smiled then โ a small, private, almost tender smile, the smile of a man who has carried a joke alone for years and has finally found someone to tell it to, and it froze the blood in June's body where she stood.
"Dane," she said.
"I know," Dane said, and though the yard was full of armed federal men, his hand found hers, and held it, and did not let go. "I see him now. God help us, June. I see him now."
Brandt let the moment ripen, enjoying it the way a craftsman enjoys a finished joint. "The names in this book," he said conversationally, "the judges, the deputies, the customs men โ did you never wonder, boy, how a smuggler kept such creatures fed and faithful for fifteen years? Vane? Vane couldn't keep a dog faithful. They aren't his plants." He tapped the ledger with one clean fingernail. "They're mine. Every rotten name in this book answers up a chain, and the chain ends at a desk in Helena with my name on the door. I have bent courts the way a smith bends iron, for years, and Silas Vane was the hammer in my hand โ a loud, vain, useful hammer, who came in time to believe he was the smith." His gaze moved to June, and the courtesy in it was worse than Vane's gentleness had been. "Your smuggler was never a king, Miss Callahan. He was a hired hand who'd been allowed to wear the crown on Sundays. And now the hand is dead, the crown is retired, and there is only one small piece of paper standing between me and a very quiet retirement."
"The will," June said. Her mouth was dry as ash. "You want the will."
"I want the registered copy's root โ the executor's original, the one your father kept. The registry in Helena can be mislaid, my dear, if the original it's copied from somehow perishes and the heirโ" his eyes flicked to her bleeding throat, "โcannot press her claim in person. Papers burn. Girls vanish on frontiers every day, tragically unrecorded." He raised his voice slightly, for the yard, for the record he was building even now. "Marshal's custody. The girl and the Mercer boy are material witnesses in a federal matter. They'll be taken in, questionedโ" To June, lower, with that same terrible courtesy: "Bring me the will from your father's chest, child. Bring it yourself, and we'll discuss how much of this valley's trouble you get to survive."