He built a small fire and sat with his rifle and worked through the problem the way he worked through most problems, which was to set aside the pieces he couldn't control and focus on the pieces he could. He could control his own behavior. He could control whether he gave Rearen a reason to move before Vain had finished with the documents. He could not control whether Rearen decided to move anyway. Rearen decided to move anyway.
They came to the valley on a Saturday morning when the light was still flat and gray. Boon counted 11 riders from the ridge where he had positioned himself at first light, having spent the previous day watching the western approach and reading the dust on the trails that led toward the valley from Rearen's territory. 11 men, most of them carrying rifles with Rearen himself in the center on a gray horse that cost more than most of the buildings in Cutters Ford. They came down the slope toward the valley in a line that was not the line of men who have come to talk, but they stopped before they reached the camp. Not because anything blocked their path, because on the ridge on the eastern side of the valley, figures had appeared.
Then on the northern slope, then on the southern approach, emerging from the juniper and the rock in ones and twos, until there were more of them than Rearen's men, positioned across every high point in the surrounding land, with the patience and precision of people who had been thinking about this specific problem for longer than Rean had been thinking about his solution. They were not hiding. They were not threatening. They were simply present, visible, and absolutely still, the way a landscape is still when the landscape has decided something. Rearen pulled up his horse and looked around.
There was a long moment in which the only sound was the wind moving through the scrub and the small adjustments of horses that could feel their rider's uncertainty. Boon came down from his ridge and walked his horse across the valley floor toward Rearen. He stopped about 30 ft away. "Mr. Rearen," he said, "you've met with the boundary of a legal challenge filed in Prescott 3 days ago."
Anything that happens here today goes directly to the judge handling that challenge. He paused. "I'd recommend you speak with your lawyers." Rearen was a man who had gotten most of what he wanted in his life through the combination of resources and the willingness to apply them before other people had finished thinking. He looked at the ridge lines around him and looked at Boon and looked at his 11 men, and the mathematics of the situation were not complicated.