Behind them the cut wire hung in the heat, bright as a drawn knife.
Chapter 4
The Old Marshal's Warning
Stanton would not sleep in the house. He ate Maren's supper at her table like a man remembering how, declined the spare room with a courtesy that brooked no argument, and made his camp down by the corral where he could see the road and the north fence both. Tomás, who trusted strangers the way he trusted weather vanes, approved of this and said so.
The visitor came an hour after full dark, riding in slow with his hands visible and a lantern unlit on his saddle horn, and Tomás met him at the gate with a shotgun and came away satisfied. "Marshal Beckett," he announced. "Retired. He says it's not a social call."
Harlan Beckett was seventy-one years old and looked it in the way of a man who has been shot at in four decades and outlived the shooters. He had a face like a walnut and eyes that missed nothing, and he went straight past the house to the corral fence, where Stanton stood up from his fire and the two men looked at each other in the starlight like two old dogs deciding.
"Micah Stanton," Beckett said. "I heard in town a drifter shot young Fenn through the hand up at the Ellison place. Heard he shot the gun clean out of it. There aren't six men alive shoot like that, and I buried three of them."
"Harlan."
"You ride on tomorrow," Beckett said. "That's not advice. That's the last favor I've got in me to give you."
Stanton poked the fire with a stick and said nothing for a while, and Maren, standing in the shadow of the barn door where she had no business being and every right to be, held her tongue and listened the way you listen at a door when your own name is in the room.
"He's made himself a king here, Micah," Beckett said. "Bank, hotel, newspaper, the judge's second set of books. Twenty years he's been buying this valley a piece at a time, quiet as mildew. You stir him, he'll kill you — and her — and the coroner's jury will call it the tragedy of the times."
"What happened twenty years ago, Mr. Beckett?" Maren said, stepping out of the shadow, because she was done listening to her own life discussed like weather. "Somebody had better tell me the whole of it, since it appears to be sitting at my fence with a rifle."
The old man looked at her for a long moment, and something in his face relented. "Garrett Sloan wasn't always a banker, Mrs. Ellison. In sixty-four he ran a gang of road agents — robbed stages, robbed payrolls, killed a driver outside Tucson and a paymaster who begged. I was marshal then. I laid an ambush for him at Moccasin Creek, a good ambush, and it still went wrong — a horse screamed at the wrong second, and Sloan went out the far side of that creek with two men and left me two of mine dead in the water."
"And Mr. Stanton?"
"Was my youngest deputy. Twenty-four years old and the best natural shot I ever pinned a badge on." Beckett turned his walnut face back to the fire. "We hunted Sloan two more years and never got within a day's ride of him again. Then the trail died altogether, and by the time a Garrett Sloan turned up respectable in this valley — that would be seventy-four, with money to lend and a church pew with his name on it — I'd been put out to pasture and half this territory had forgot there'd ever been another one. A man can launder a name in ten years, Mrs. Ellison, if he has money enough and other people's memories are short. Mine isn't short. Neither is Micah's. That's our affliction."
"The ambush failed, Mrs. Ellison. That's the part that's wrote down. What isn't wrote down is what Sloan did after, to teach the law a lesson about reaching for him. But that's Micah's story to tell or keep, and I've rode out here at my age to tell him not to tell it — to ride on, Micah. You hear me? You've carried that man twenty years. Let the desert have him."
"I hear you," Stanton said.
Beckett studied him, and sighed, and mounted up with the care of a man whose bones keep accounts. "You always were the worst liar I ever deputized," he said, and rode out into the dark.
Maren stood with Stanton by the dying fire. "Will you ride on tomorrow?" she asked.
"No," he said. "I'll help you mend that fence first. A fence is a promise a place makes. I hate seeing one broke in the middle."