I crouched in front of him, reached into his coat. He didn't try to stop me. In the inside pocket, right where he tucked it on the hill at the mission was the old envelope, water stained, my name on the front and a careful hand that couldn't spell it. I didn't open it. I didn't need to.
I put it inside my shirt, flat against my chest. Amos Puit, you're under arrest. Conspiracy to murder. The deaths of 37 people of this territory. The murders of Nathan and Samuel Pickering and Hap Merryweather.
Tampering with the federal mails. corruption of your office. You'll never make it stick, son. You know who I know. I know exactly who you know. I've also got Ror's ledger, your own hand on a letter to Dupre.
Lon spivy over there in my cuffs with a rifle bruise on his face from the rim above DRI's camp. The chief's letter opened by you and a white witness sworn and willing who heard Dupre name you before your rifleman shut him up. Wesley stood, walked over, looked down at Puit a long, long while. My brothers were good men. Nathan sang bass in church.
Samuel was going to be married come fall. You never even knew their names, did you? Puit's mouth stayed shut. That's all right. The judge will say them for you.
Then Wesley turned and did a thing I didn't expect. He walked over to Kane, to Yon, to Isha, to Dashka, still dripping, and last to Tavana. and he took off his hat and held it against his chest. I pointed a rifle at you. I'd have pulled the trigger. I called you things I won't ever say again.
I was wrong about every bit of it. His voice cracked down the middle. I'm sorry. I don't expect that's worth much. Tavana looked at him a moment.
Then she laid one hand on his bad shoulder. Lightly. It means you listened. That is worth more than most men give. They held the hearing in Tucson in the third week of August.
A federal courtroom with whitewashed walls and tall windows that wouldn't open. In front of a judge named Horus Witcom, sent down special from Prescott, a man with a reputation for being nobody's friend. Ror's ledger was read into the record. Every line of it AP 2000 Dupre 500 Pickering Matter. 12 sections of land along a railroad that didn't exist yet. Every last one of them sitting over water.
Lon Spivby testified in irons, sweating through his shirt about the rifle on the rim. Wesley Pickering testified most of an afternoon. When he got to the laugh on the road, three men in the gallery stood up and walked out. Then I read the chief's letter aloud. Every misspelled word.
Slowly. I made myself go slowly. Amos Puit was bound over for trial on every count. The warrant against five Apache women for the Pickering murders was withdrawn by order of the court, and the judge had it entered into the record that it had been a fraud from its first day. My own warrant he tore in half right there on the bench and handed me the pieces.
Keep those, Marshal. Frame them. Men, forget I kept them. He swore me back in that same afternoon and had his clerk put a new federal badge in my hand. The sisters weren't in the courtroom to see it.
They'd been offered seats and declined. Isha explained it to me afterward. We have sat in enough rooms where people stared. That night on the boardwalk outside the hotel, Tavana pressed something into my palm without a word and closed my fingers over it. Tin, five points, one bent.
We moved our dead at the end of that month. Our dead. That's how I'd come to think of them. We opened the graves the sisters had dug with their own hands back in June, and lifted them out one by one, wrapped them in new hides, and carried them up into the old passage under the mountain to the niches where their grandfathers waited. Tavana spoke to each one.
So did her sisters. I took off my hat in that passage for the second time in my life, and I left it off all day. At the last niche, Tavana turned to me with a candle in her hand, her face very calm. It is done. The promise I made over their graves.
Not the way I made it. Better. She looked into the niche. My father would say the scales are balanced. Are they?
No, they will never balance. But they are still. That is enough. We came up out of the chimney into the mission ruins at sunset. The sky to the west going golden red.
The cracked bell tower black against it. I'd been carrying two things in my coat pocket since the hearing. I took them both out now. The new badge, federal, bright as a dime. And beside it, I pinned the other one.
Tin deputy mesquite flat. Two stars. One I'd been handed. One I'd given away and gotten back. Tavana saw them side by side on my coat.
Something moved across her face. You wear both. One's what I swore. The others what I meant. Then I took her hands.
Both of them. In front of her sisters who were pretending very badly not to watch. Tavana, I don't own a ranch. I haven't got much money. I've got a borrowed horse and a badge that nearly got me hanged.
But I'd like to spend whatever years I have left proving I'm worth the trust your father put in a fooled deputy with an empty shotgun. If you'll have me and if your sisters will have me for a brother silence. Even the wind held its breath. That was a very long speech, Marshal. I practiced it.
It shows. But she was smiling all the way for the first time since the tree. The whole smile. Nothing held back. Yes, Boon Halleran.
Yes, the kiss tasted like dust and rain and something just beginning. When we finally came apart, Isha was grinning like a barn cat in a creamery. Well, that is one way to keep the map in the family. Tavana laughed. Then she reached up and tapped one finger lightly against her own forehead, right between her eyes.
It never left.