There is always another valley somewhere that hasn't learned to read them yet. That is not a comforting thought, partner. But, it is an honest one. Walt Pickett was removed as sheriff by the county commissioner in December following formal complaints from three valley families. The commissioner's letter of removal was notably terse.
Two sentences, no ceremony, which in a county that ran to flowery official language was its own kind of statement. Pickett spent a few months trying to find work in the area, failed to find any, and drifted south toward Albuquerque. Nobody in Redstone Crossing heard from him again, and nobody went looking. Felix Guard stayed. He had not asked for anything.
After Voss's men rode out that morning, he remained in the churchyard standing near the gate without particular purpose until Caleb walked over to him. They talked for a few minutes. Low voices, nobody close enough to hear. After that, Felix unsaddled his horse and put it in the Aldrich paddock, and by nightfall he was in the guest room of what was now the Doss ranch. And the following Monday, he was working.
He was a competent man and a steady one. And he had the particular quality of silence that belongs to people who are trying to become something, which is different from the silence of people who are hiding something. Though from the outside, they can look the same. He worked at the Doss property for 6 years. He saved what he earned.
He did not talk about his past, which suited his employers perfectly well, since they were not talking about theirs either. In 1888, he bought a small holding north of Cimarron and moved there. He ran cattle, not many, and raised a kitchen garden and paid his debts on time, and did not draw for hire. Whether he ever fully made peace with the thing he had been before is a question that belongs to him and not to this story. But he tried.
And the trying was genuine. And that is most of what the word redemption actually means. The wedding itself happened that same afternoon of October 3rd. Reverend Greist, who had spent the intervening hours in a private crisis about the person he had been that morning versus the person his sermons claimed him to be, came out of it with a kind of raw feeling that made his delivery of the ceremony considerably less polished and considerably more real than usual. Nora's cousins from Cimarron had stayed.