He said it without heat, which was what made it final. Around the yard, one by one, the federal riders were making the same discovery in their own faces β men who had ridden two hundred miles on a legend's orders, who had heard the legend narrate its crimes in a farmyard like a man reading his own memoirs, who had just watched him send a girl to burn her mother's will so he could arrange her disappearance in transport.
"You are arresting," Brandt said, with a disbelief so genuine it was almost magnificent, "me."
"I'm detaining you for the territorial court, sir, pending the district attorney's reading ofβ" the sergeant's eyes went, briefly, to the river, where the copies were still surfacing into a dozen sets of hands, "βof a considerable amount of documentation. And of the ledger, which I believe you'll find is in my saddlebag now, sir. I took the liberty while you were at the chest. A marshal's evidence should be kept safe. You taught us that."
Dane laughed then β he couldn't help it, it burst out of him like a cough, cracked and exhausted and incredulous β and the sound broke the last of the spell. Brandt's own troop closed around their marshal with the professional gentleness of men removing a dangerous animal from a road, and Brandt, to give the devil the manners he was owed, went quietly, straightening his cuffs as they took his pistol, a courthouse door closing with dignity long after the courthouse had burned.
They put him in June's corral, under guard of his own sergeant, to await transport.
It was June who carried coffee out to the guard detail an hour later β Brandt's own men, standing their strange penance in her yard β because her father had fed every prisoner the army ever left on his porch, and the habit was deeper in her than the anger. The sergeant took the cup with a hand not quite steady. "If he'd only asked for the chest quiet, we'd have ridden out at noon and I'd have died believing," he said. "It was the explaining that hanged him, ma'am. Fifteen years he ran it in silence, and the one morning he couldn't bear not to be admiredβ" He shook his head toward the corral. "Well. The court will hear it shorter." It was Dane who went to him an hour later β June watched from the porch and did not follow β and stood at the rails, and said something she could not hear; and Brandt answered, at length, in the tone of a man discussing a hand of cards already played; and Dane nodded once, and came back up the hill with the strangest expression: not triumph. Relief, worn down to the nub, like a man whose twelve-year watch had finally, finally been relieved by morning.
"Proffitt?" June asked.
"Fled in the first volley. Half of Vane's men dead or taken, the rest scattered to the border β they'll run to other masters, or to ground. It doesn't matter." He sat down on the porch step with the care of a man twice his age, and looked at the yard: the corral full of prisoners, the burned barn still smoking, her father's chair standing incongruous in the dirt where a marshal had sat in it to explain the architecture of evil. "It matters that it's finished, June. Vane dead. Brandt taken by his own. The book in honest hands β well. In hands that chose, just now, to be honest, which on this frontier is the only kind there is."
"And the valley?" she said.
"Yours," Dane said simply. "It was always yours. Now it's yours out loud."
She sat down beside him on the step. Her throat hurt; her hands, empty at last of other people's paper, shook a little in her lap, and she let them. Below, the sergeant was organizing a detail to help her neighbors haul the river-copies out to dry on the bank stones, spread like a catch of silver fish, and the priest was still reading, hoarse now, to anyone who came near β and everyone was coming near.
"You laid your rifle down," June said. "In the yard. For me."
"Yes."
"You swore to my father you'd keep your name out of this valley and watch from the ridges, and instead you rode into my yard and stacked my wood and got your name shouted across the river by armed men."
"Yes," Dane said. "I have some explaining to do, at a grave, on a knoll, when they'll let me climb it." He turned his head. His shoulder was bleeding through the shirt where nobody had yet tended it, and his face was grey with everything, and he was smiling at her in a way that made the whole ruined yard look like a beginning. "But not today, June. Today I think we are allowed to sit on this porch until the light goes, and watch other people do the work, and say nothing at all."
And so they did.
Chapter 21
The copies came down the river for two days.