I have a witness, a guest who was here legally, recovering from a wound, who was in the loft because I'd put her there in case the men who had shot her came back with numbers. A pause. A quiet moment. "Substantially true." Bitsy said.
"It is." He took the pistol from her, checked it, wrapped it back in the leather. "When you're fit to ride, I'll go north with you. Help get the money where it needs to be." She looked at him.
"Three days for the ranch." She said. The words flat and factual, not an objection, just the arithmetic laid out. "I know." The wind came off the Davis Mountains, cold and clean, carrying pine resin from the high country.
"Tobias." She used his name with full weight and no decoration. "Why would you do that?" He thought about what Marta would have said in the same position. She would have said it plainly.
"Because it's the right thing." He had spent 3 years saying nothing when the right thing would have cost him something. He was finished with that. "Because it's the right thing." Plain as that.
Bitsy looked at him for a long moment, then she nodded once with the economy she brought to everything. He went to find the shovel. Breeze came three times in the following week. He wrote in his ledger, asked the same questions in slightly different order each time, and filed everything upward. The county seat took 2 weeks to respond.
The response effectively closed the matter. Cage had not been universally admired at the administrative level. The hired men had not come forward, and the facts of the situation were defensible under territorial law. Tobias did not read the final report, but he heard its conclusion. In the last week of March, Tobias saddled two horses, and they rode north.