Nathaniel's hand found the small of Eleanor's back steadying. "What are you telling us, Marshall?" Nathaniel asked. "I'm telling you that as of this morning, Charles Whitaker's been arrested." Banister said it plain.
Fraud, coercion, and in the Marsh matter, we're looking hard at whether his methods rise to something worse. The territorial courts frozen his assets pending trial. Every note he holds, every debt he's used to keep this valley scared quiet is suspended while we sort out which of them were come by honest and which weren't. He paused. Which means Mrs.
Carter that Ezra Henderson's note can't be called. Not by Whitaker. Not now. Same for the Coopers. The Vances, every family that stood up in that courtroom.
The man who held them by the throat can't hold anyone anymore. Eleanor's legs went weak, and this time she did sit down, sinking onto the arm of the settee, one hand pressed to her mouth. "He's finished," she said. It came out as barely a whisper. "He's actually finished.
He's finished." Banister nodded. "And I'll tell you the truth of it, ma'am, because I think you've earned it. We'd been getting complaints about Whitaker for years. Never enough to move on.
He was too careful and everyone he'd ruined was too scared or too scattered to testify. 40 families and not one of them would stand up because standing up meant being destroyed. He settled his hat back on his head. Then a widow nobody in Cheyenne had ever heard of got up in a country courtroom and refused to be scared. And she asked the one question that made a judge look twice.
That's what broke it open. Not our office. Not 15 years of complaints. You Eleanor stared at him. She thought of Boston of the family that had called her barren and burdensome and thrown her onto a train.
She thought of Prudence Whitaker on her porch, so certain a broken woman could be frightened off with a few cruel words. She thought of all the years she'd spent believing what everyone had told her about her own worth. And here was a marshall from Cheyenne standing in her front room telling her that her worthlessness had brought down a man 40 families couldn't touch. There's one more thing Banister said. The widow near Laram, Adelaide Marsh.