Riders were coming out of the heat shimmer in good order: twelve, fourteen, with a guidon snapping at their head that bore no company brand but the seal of the Territory. Marshal Gideon Park rode at their front on a tall roan, a man of sixty with a back like a fence post and a face that weather and duty had planed down to essentials. He had ridden two days on the strength of a packet of copied pages, and he had not wasted the ride. The copies had reached him at Prescott with Willa's own covering letter, and he had read them twice through in one night, the way a man reads weather.
He halted his party between the lines, in the same open ground where Willa had stood unveiled, and he looked a long time at Harrow's lowered crescent, at the revolver still lying in the dust, at the ledger in Willa's hands. Then he took off his hat, as a man does before speaking of serious things.
"Ezekiel Harrow," he said, "I hold a warrant for your arrest, issued at Cinnabar, on charges of forgery, fraud, conspiracy, and complicity in murder. You'll dismount, sir. Slowly, if you please. My deputies are young and the morning has excited them."
It was done without drama, which is how law prefers its work. Two deputies took Harrow's horse. A third brought out the irons β real irons, forge-welded, meant for the long ride to Cinnabar β and the click of them closing around the baron's wrists was a small sound that carried the length of the canyon. Nobody in the canyon cheered. It did not need cheering. Harrow bore it with his chin high, studying Marshal Park as if memorizing him for some future ledger of his own. His remaining hard-faced riders looked at their lowered weapons and at the marshal's seal and made the last arithmetic of hired men, and stood aside.
The rest of the afternoon went to statements, sworn and written. Renner came down from the rocks, pale, his arm rebandaged by Grandmother Saba, and gave his account to a deputy's pencil without ornament. Tomaso gave his, asking no promises. Willa, unveiled still, gave hers standing, and when it was finished the marshal himself walked her horse back to her, a courtesy from another century of manners, and said, "Your mother would have done the same, ma'am, and been proud to watch it."
It was near evening, when the prisoners were being mounted for the first stage of the ride, that the moment came β and it came, as such moments do, dressed as nothing at all.
Jonas had been detailed to walk Harrow from the shade of the wall to his horse. The deputies were busy with the pack animals. For perhaps ten seconds the two men were alone in a fold of the canyon where the stone cut off every view, and Harrow's irons were chained short, and Jonas's revolver hung at his hip loaded, and the roar of the morning's rifles was still ringing somewhere behind his eyes. A stumble. A grabbed arm. A prisoner shot attempting escape, in a canyon, at dusk, with no witness β the report would write itself, and Marshal Park, who understood such things, might not even ask the questions. It was offered to Jonas as cleanly as a coin laid on a table: his father cheated of his land, his brother dead in an arroyo, his wife's face scarred, all of it answered in one unwitnessed second.
Jonas looked at the man. Harrow, who read faces the way other men read print, saw the whole of it pass, and something in his own face β contempt, perhaps, or the expectation of it β began to form.
"Walk," Jonas said, and took him by the elbow, not roughly, and walked him out into the open light where everyone could see them both. "You will answer in a courtroom, Zeke, with clerks writing it down. That's slower. It's meant to be."
On the walk back, the silver locket knocked once against his chest, light as a knuckle on a door. He thought of Amos, who had kept that locket through drought and debt and had never once, so far as his son knew, settled an account in a fold of rock where no one could see.
Marshal Park watched them come into the open, and his eyes went from Jonas's face to Jonas's holstered gun and back, and he nodded once β a small, private acknowledgment, lawman to lawman though only one of them wore the star.
By dark the column was gone from the valley mouth, and the irons could be heard, faintly, long after the riders passed from sight.
Chapter 25
: The Trial at Cinnabar
They tried Ezekiel Harrow in Cinnabar in the second week of October, in the new brick courthouse whose roof still smelled of fresh tar, and the town filled for it the way it filled for a hanging. Ranchers rode in from three counties. Miners from Harrow's own pits stood along the back wall, come to see whether the mountain they had worked under was a man after all. Willa sat in the front row beside her father, unveiled, and the crowd's long staring did her no visible injury at all.