They came at midday, when the heat stood straight up from the earth and even the cottonwood's shade felt thin, and they came in a way meant to be heard before they were seen β fifteen horses at a steady trot on the Fortuna road, dust rising behind them in a long, pale banner that announced them to every living thing in the valley.
Amos was at the well, helping Kaya lift a full bucket she was too proud to ask help with, when Desba spoke a single word in Apache that needed no translation. Every woman in the yard stopped. Hands stilled on ropes, on cloth, on firewood. Nascha, who had been speaking with Haseya by the barn, turned her head toward the road and did not move again, and that stillness ran through her people like wind through grass laying flat before weather.
"Inside the barn, those who wish it," Amos said, quiet. "No one has to hide. But no one has to stand in the road either."
No one went inside.
He walked to the gate alone and stood in its center with the bar still across, his rifle left leaning against the porch post behind him where any man could see he had chosen not to carry it. The papers were in his shirt. His hands, empty, hung at his sides and did not shake, though his heart was doing hard, uneven work.
Marshal Doyle Ferris rode at the front, which was theater and Amos knew it, because Ferris was not a front-of-anything man when the thing might bite. He was fifty, soft in the middle and hard in the eyes, with a badge he kept polished to a shine that his reputation had never matched. Behind him, spread in a loose half-moon that was also theater, rode fourteen men Amos mostly recognized the way you recognize weather β company gunmen out of Fortuna and the Hollis camp, men who drew wages for their hands and kept their consciences, if any remained, in some other county. Two he knew by name and wished he didn't. One, a boy of maybe twenty with a sunburned neck, looked as if he would rather have been anywhere else on God's earth, and Amos marked him, for no reason he could name, as the most dangerous of all. Frightened boys fired first.
Ferris reined up six paces from the gate and sat enjoying the height of his horse.
"Delaney," he said.
"Marshal."
"You're harboring stolen property." Ferris said it loudly, for his audience and for the yard behind Amos, rolling the words like a man reading a bill posted on a courthouse door. "Twenty-five contract laborers belonging to the Hollis Mining and Land Company, walked off the company reserve at the wash. I'm here to return them to their lawful employment, and I'll thank you to open that gate and stand aside from company business."
Behind Amos, no one made a sound. The well rope creaked once in the heat.
"Contract laborers," Amos repeated, mild as milk.
"That's the term on the company's filing."
"Funny term for women whose houses I hear got burned."
Ferris's smile thinned. "You hear a lot for a man who's kept to himself these two years, Amos. Grief makes some men soft in the head. Makes them believe any story told in a sad voice." He leaned forward in the saddle, and the badge caught the sun and threw it. "Now. I've come with enough men to do this gentle or otherwise. Open the gate. Send them out in a line, peaceful, and there'll be no trouble on your land and no mark against your name in town. Refuse, and I'll have to consider what you're about β aiding theft, interfering with a lawful recovery. Garrett Hollis is not a patient creditor, and the company keeps long books."
One of the gunmen spat into the dust. Another eased his horse a half-step sideways, widening the half-moon, and Amos saw the choreography for what it was: a squeeze being rehearsed, pressure before permission.
Amos looked past Ferris at the ridge where watchers had sat for two days. He thought of Ruth riding that road with a folded paper and a plan, and of what Ferris was β a lawman in the company's pay, though no one said it where it counted. Until today.
"You've ridden a long way in the heat to use the word stolen about people, Doyle," Amos said at last. "People aren't cattle. They don't get rustled."
"They do when they're under contract," Ferris said, and some of the patience went out of him. "Last time I'll ask you neighborly. Open the gate."
Amos rested one hand on the bar, not lifting it.
"No," he said. "Not neighborly, and not otherwise. Not today."
The silence that followed had a weight to it, like the moment after lightning when the whole world is waiting to learn what was struck. Ferris stared at him, reassessing a widower he had filed away as harmless, and behind the marshal, fourteen men shifted in their saddles and waited for the word that would turn theater into something else.
Chapter 14
The Accusation