And into that silence, from the south road, came the sound the whole summer had been promising: hooves, many of them, riding hard and in order — and Sheriff Emmett Shaw came through her gate at the head of a column, and behind him, in a line as straight as a ruled page, rode six men with federal badges catching the sun.
Chapter 24
The Law Arrives
Marshal J. C. Tolliver was a broad, slow-spoken man with a mustache like a shelf, and he dismounted in Maren's yard the way a glacier arrives in a valley — without haste, because there had never been any question of his getting there eventually. Behind him his six deputies fanned out with the unhurried professionalism of men who have arrested richer criminals than Garrett Sloan and expect to arrest richer ones yet. Emmett Shaw, riding at the head of them, sat his horse straighter than Maren had seen him sit it in three years, and she understood that whatever it had cost him to telegraph Prescott behind Judge Webb's back — for it had been Shaw, she learned later, who had sent the second wire, the one that turned Tolliver's interest into Tolliver's column — he had paid it standing up.
"Garrett Sloan," Tolliver said, almost conversationally, over the settling dust. The yard was a wreck of downed horses, dropped rifles, groaning men, and neighbors lowering their weapons by degrees, like a tide going out. Two of Sloan's riders were dead on the porch steps. Four more were wounded. The rest had their hands up or their faces down, and all of them, Maren noticed, were suddenly and individually very interested in explaining that they had been hired for cattle work, for guard duty, for anything but this. "I hold warrants—" Tolliver produced a fold of papers from his coat with the air of a man producing the only argument that has ever ended an argument "—charging conspiracy, fraud upon the United States land office, stockpiling of arms for insurrection against the territory, and the murder of Thomas Ellison, a witness under federal protection of his filings, in the year 1881. You'll come to Prescott and answer them. Bring a lawyer. Bring ten. It'll be educational for them."
"You can't—" Sloan began, from his knees, and then, because he was Garrett Sloan and money was his native language, he said the thing that convicted him in the ears of every man still standing in that yard: "Name your figure, Marshal. Every man in this territory has one. I've bought judges, banks, newspapers — name yours and stop embarrassing us both."
Tolliver looked at him for a long, almost pitying moment. "Mr. Sloan," he said, "you've spent twenty years buying this valley, and it appears you still don't know the first thing about what's for sale in it." He nodded to his deputies. "Irons."
They put the irons on him at the gate of the Rocking E, in front of the fence he had threatened, the neighbors he had discounted, and the widow he had priced at fifty thousand dollars, and the sound the irons made closing was small and final, like a book shutting. His surviving men were disarmed and herded; the two Prescott lawyers who rode out at noon with a writ from Judge Webb were received by Tolliver with great courtesy and informed that federal process outranked county paper, and that Judge Webb himself would shortly be receiving a visit about a slate of gambling debts wiped clean in 1878.
Fenn, the boy with the bandaged hand who had hidden in her rocks in June, stood among the prisoners with his face streaked, and as they were led past the porch he said to Maren — not pleading, just stating it, as if it were the first true sentence of his life: "I never shot at you, Mrs. Ellison. I want that in whatever book they're writing."
"It's in the book, Fenn," Maren said. "See that you keep the next one cleaner."
When the column rode out at last — prisoners, marshals, and a wagon for the wounded, with the dead laid decently in a second wagon under canvas — the whole valley stood in her yard and watched the dust of Garrett Sloan's going settle over the south road. Then, in the enormous quiet, Widow Brandt emerged from the house with the coffeepot she had defended all morning, surveyed the wreckage of the yard, the bullet-scarred porch, the blood on the steps, the twenty neighbors standing foolish and alive among the consequences, and announced to no one and everyone: "Well. Breakfast's ruined and the coffee's cold, and half the county's bleeding on the widow's porch. Sit down, all of you, before you fall down. Tomás — more water. We've got a well, thank God, and it isn't going anywhere."
Maren laughed then — actually laughed, with the rifle still in her hands and the tears arriving on the same breath — and sat down on her own steps among her neighbors, and let somebody take the Winchester gently out of her grip, and thought: so this is what it sounds like, when a whole valley exhales at once.