Chapter 27 — Taken at the Railhead
The wire came at noon: Stanton had bought a ticket east under his wife's maiden name, through to the capital with a connection beyond, and meant to leave on the evening train with the serene confidence of a man who believed lawyers were a kind of weather he could purchase. Marshal Ford read the telegram twice in the depot office, folded it into his coat, and came out onto the platform where Dan Whitaker was waiting with two saddled horses Ford had not asked for.
"You read my mind, segundo," Ford said.
"I read the timetable," Dan said. "He'll come an hour early. Men like him always come an hour early, to be seen not hurrying."
They did not make a spectacle of it, which was Ford's way and, Dan had come to understand, the entire point. No posse at the depot doors. No rifles on the roof. Ford sat on a baggage truck with a newspaper he was not reading, and Dan stood at the far end of the platform with his hat in his hands and his back to the track, one more man waiting on a train, and the valley — which had known since breakfast, the way valleys know things — found reasons to be at the railhead that evening that had nothing to do with Stanton and everything to do with him. The Herreras had a crate of apples to ship that could have gone any day that week. Old Man Teague had business with the station agent about nothing anyone could name. Half the Lazy J crew was suddenly concerned with the price of freight to Billings.
Stanton came down the platform at five with a porter at his elbow and the valise in his own hand, because there were things Avery Stanton did not entrust to porters. It was a good valise, bull-hide and brass, and it swung heavy — heavy the way money is heavy when a man has converted a valley into it. He wore his traveling suit and his dignity like two coats, and he nodded to Teague as he passed, out of eight years of habit, and Teague looked at him the way you look at weather going somewhere else, and nodded neither back nor away.
"Colonel Stanton." Ford had risen from the baggage truck without any haste at all. "I have a warrant here with your name spelled the way you spell it. Territorial court. Arson and rustling, and the grand jury's compliments."
Stanton looked at the paper, and Dan watched a man of fifty-some years run through his whole armory in the space of a breath — outrage, amusement, command, contempt — and find every door in it locked. "This is a misunderstanding that will embarrass you, Marshal."
"It may," Ford said agreeably. "It'll still ride the train with us. Set the valise down, please."
He set it down. He did not run, and Dan was glad of it for reasons he would not have examined too closely — the man had burned a family out of its home and stolen eight years of a woman's life, and still there was something in Dan that did not want to watch him scramble. The irons made their small sound. Ford buckled Stanton's own valise into the baggage master's custody with a receipt, proper as church, the money traveling as evidence now instead of escape, and walked him down the platform to the second car with one hand resting, almost courteously, at his elbow.
That was when the silence came down, and Dan would remember it longer than anything else about the man. A depot crowd makes a noise the way a flock does, constant and mindless — and it stopped. Forty people of Cedar Valley stood on their own platform in the evening light and watched Avery Stanton climb into a railway car in irons, and not one of them said one word. Not Teague, who had known him forty years. Not the Lazy J boys. Not Jasper, who had been driven down in the buggy against his doctor's orders and sat wrapped in a lap robe with his hat off — Dan never learned whether that was respect or its opposite, and decided it was neither: it was a man declining, at last, to look away. Stanton paused in the car door and searched the platform for one friendly face, the way a drowning man searches water for a plank, and found the whole valley looking back at him with the flat, finished calm of people who had already buried him in their minds and were only waiting for the train to agree.
The whistle took the moment and ended it. The train pulled out with its ordinary racket, taking the Colonel Avery Stanton era east in a cloud of cinders, and the platform let out its breath all at once and became a depot again. Ford rode in the car with his prisoner. He tipped two fingers to Dan from the window as it passed, already reading his newspaper for real this time.
Dan rode home the long way in the dusk, past the burned homestead ground, and slowed where the lane topped the rise. Down in the hollow a small fire burned in a ruined hearth, and a red roan mare stood hip-shot in the last light, grazing another woman's ancestral grass like she'd never been away. He did not ride down. Some claims a man witnesses from the fence line. He turned for the Lazy J with the queer, light feeling that the valley itself was riding easier in its traces — as if a stone had been lifted out of a shoe it had worn for eight years.