Folded it twice with the particular care of a woman folding a deed. Placed it inside her dress. Looked at Voss. She said without heat, without theater, "Thank you." Voss held her gaze for a moment. Then he turned his horse.
His men fell in behind him. Pickett, after a pause that communicated his exact understanding of how his situation had changed, turned and followed. Felix Guard remained standing in the yard. The crowd stayed where it was for a moment. The way crowds do after something they were expecting to be dramatic resolved itself quietly, trying to determine whether it was over or whether there was more.
Then Hector Beaumont from the mercantile walked forward into the yard and he put his hand briefly on Nora's shoulder without saying anything. And that small action broke the freeze. Other people began to move. Someone near the Chapel door started talking. The two ranch hands who had stood by and done nothing were now several paces apart trying to look like they had been doing something useful the whole time.
Reverend Bryce stepped down from the Chapel threshold and stood in the yard with an expression of a man who has a great deal to think about in his next sermon. The morning moved forward into the particular territory that comes after a crisis, when the crisis did not become what it threatened to be. Now, for what happened next in the days and weeks following that October morning, Edson Crew was arrested 11 days later when the circuit judge arrived in Santa Rosa for the fall session. Nora had filed a formal complaint with the county commissioner's office the following week, presenting the operating ledger and the county filing stamp, and a sworn statement from Reverend Grice about the date of Silas Aldridge's death. Crew, faced with the specific and demonstrable mechanics of his own forgery, cooperated with the court in the direct and comprehensive way that men in his position generally cooperate when the alternative is a federal penitentiary.
He confirmed that Voss had instructed him to find a way to acquire the water rights claim by available means, and that he had extended that instruction beyond what had been authorized. The line between Crew's individual criminality and Voss's culpability was narrow enough that Voss's lawyer could argue it, and did, successfully. Voss was not charged. He did not need to be. The public record of the lien withdrawal was already filed.
The water rights claim was confirmed in the Aldridge estate without encumbrance. Voss's practical position in the valley had changed in the hardest possible way, publicly, before witnesses, in a county where word travels in the way word always travels in small places, which is to say everywhere by nightfall. He left Red Stone Crossing by the end of 1884. He sold the Crescent V to a consortium from Denver at something below what he had paid to build it, which was the cost of the public record he had left behind him. His kind always moves on eventually when a territory stops being easy and starts being the kind of place with people who read filing dates.