CHAPTER ONE The Man in Irons #4
Calder adjusted himself in the saddle, his face unreadable. A flush lay high across his cheekbones that could have come from fever, heat, pain, or something Gideon refused to name.
Gideon took the transport chain and fastened its end to a steel ring mounted beside the saddle horn. He left nearly two feet of slack, enough for Calder to balance and control the reins without pulling his wrists.
Calder looked at the connection. “There it is.”
“What?”
“The part where your kindness remembers it carries a key.”
Gideon checked the clasp. “My kindness has nothing to do with this.”
“No?”
“You are in my custody. I will deliver you safely, and I will prevent your escape. Neither requires cruelty.”
“And if one begins requiring the other?”
Gideon looked up at him. “Then I decide what kind of man wears the badge.”
Calder held his gaze for a long moment.
“Harrow will never let us reach the railroad,” he said.
The words were quiet enough that only Gideon could hear them.
“Who does he have waiting?” Gideon asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Where?”
“Somewhere the bodies won’t inconvenience him.”
“Why does he need you dead before Santa Reina?”
“Because dead men are easier to convict.”
Gideon rested one hand on the saddle horn. “What do you know?”
Calder’s cuffed hands tightened around the reins. “Enough that five innocent men are dead.”
“Your brother among them.”
Pain moved through Calder’s face so nakedly that Gideon immediately regretted the bluntness.
“My brother first,” Calder said.
He turned toward the street.
Gideon followed his gaze.
Sheriff Rusk stood in the open jail doorway. The deputy Gideon had threatened had gone to the far end of the boardwalk. He appeared to be lighting a cigarette, but when he raised the match, he held it high instead of cupping it against the sun.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
On the ridge east of town, sunlight flashed from a mirror.
Then a mounted figure turned and disappeared beyond the rise.
Gideon felt the whole landscape alter around him.
The empty windows became firing positions. The motionless street became a corridor. The southern road Rusk had recommended became a promise waiting to be fulfilled.
Gideon mounted Bishop and drew the carbine from its boot. He laid it across his saddle within easy reach.
“Change of route?” Calder asked.
“Change of pace.”
“You know another road?”
“I know several.”
“Do they all end at the courthouse?”
Gideon looked at him. “They do if I’m the man choosing.”
For the first time since Gideon had entered the cell, Calder smiled without provocation or disguise. It transformed his battered face into something younger and considerably more dangerous to look at.
Gideon turned Bishop west.
The route would add half a day and take them through Salt Knife Canyon, where the walls narrowed and the summer floods had scoured the trail nearly down to stone. It was not a route he would have chosen for a chained prisoner. It was also not the road Harrow’s rider expected.
Behind them, Rusk called, “Southern road’s the other way, Marshal.”
Gideon did not turn. “Then I’m fortunate I know my directions.”
The two horses moved down the street.
The jail receded behind them. So did the saloon, the assay office, and the few silent citizens who emerged now that it appeared no one would be shot within town limits. Dust curled around the horses’ legs and hung in the hard white light.
At the last building, Gideon glanced back.
Rusk and his deputies remained beneath the jail awning. The young deputy lowered his cigarette. Rusk said something Gideon could not hear, and one of Harrow’s branded roans was led from the rail.
They would be followed.
Calder rode beside Gideon with his bound hands low against the saddle horn. Gideon’s shirt lay against his bruised body. A thin line of chain ran from the cuffs to the saddle ring, flashing silver whenever it caught the sun.
“You should understand something,” Gideon said.
Calder turned his head.
“If you attempt to run, I’ll stop you.”
“I assumed our courtship had conditions.”
“If you reach for my weapon, I’ll break your arm.”
“There’s the poetry I was promised.”
“If you lie to me about a threat, someone could die.”
Calder’s humor faded.
“I have not lied to you,” he said.
“You haven’t told me enough to lie.”
“And yet you changed the road.”
“I saw the signal.”
“You saw what you were willing to see.”
The words followed Gideon beyond the last fence and into the open desert.
Red Mesa disappeared quickly. The land swallowed settlements without effort, reducing roofs to dark lines, then specks, then memory. Ahead, the earth rose in long red shelves toward the mountains. Heat shimmered above the trail. A hawk circled where the sky was so blue it looked merciless.
Gideon kept Bishop half a length behind the chestnut mare, close enough to seize Calder’s reins if necessary. The arrangement placed the chain between them at an angle, a bright, moving line joining prisoner to saddle, lawman to outlaw, one unknown fate to another.
Calder looked back once toward Red Mesa.
Not like a man measuring the distance of his escape.
Like a man wondering how long they had before death caught up.
Gideon touched the revolver at his thigh and watched the empty ridge.
Somewhere beyond it, a rider carried word to August Harrow that Jude Calder had left the jail alive.
And as Gideon and the man in irons rode deeper into the desert, the chain between them kept time against the saddle—soft, steady, and far too much like the ticking of a clock.