CHAPTER TWELVE Wear the Chains #5
The ankle irons waited beside the bedroll.
“They are not necessary,” Gideon said.
“They will make the capture more convincing.”
“They will shorten your stride.”
“Only until I take them off.”
“I dislike them.”
“I had gathered.”
Jude sat on the edge of the cracked altar step and extended one boot.
Gideon knelt again.
He wrapped leather around Jude’s right ankle above the boot, his fingers passing slowly around the hard line of bone. Jude’s trouser leg had ridden up. Gideon could feel the warmth of his skin where the leather ended.
“Any tenderness?” he asked.
“Not there.”
Gideon pressed along the ankle, watching Jude’s face for pain.
“May I fasten the iron?”
“Yes.”
The cuff closed around the leather.
Gideon fitted the second in the same manner. The connecting chain was long enough for Jude to walk normally if he shortened his stride by only an inch. It would clatter convincingly against the ground without cutting him.
When Gideon finished, he remained kneeling between Jude’s boots.
Jude’s cuffed hands settled on his shoulders.
Gideon looked up.
The image struck them both: the marshal on his knees, the prisoner touching him with tenderness, every visible symbol of power contradicted by the truth of who had chosen what.
“You can still say no,” Gideon said.
“I know.”
“I will remove every piece of iron.”
“I know.”
“We can find another way.”
“Can we?”
Gideon did not lie. “No.”
“Then this is the way we chose.”
Jude bent and kissed him.
The chain between his wrists brushed Gideon’s cheek. Gideon held Jude’s waist, fingers tightening in the fabric of his shirt as their mouths met for what might be the last time without witnesses.
When Jude drew back, he rested his forehead against Gideon’s.
“Bring me home,” he whispered.
Gideon stood.
“Together,” he answered.
They led the gelding from the ruined stable as the sun cleared the eastern ridge.
At first they rode double, Jude in front and Gideon behind him, Gideon’s arm surrounding Jude’s waist exactly as it had after Salt Knife Canyon.
The irons rested in Jude’s lap. The key remained concealed against his palm.
Every movement of the horse pressed their bodies together, but neither spoke of their first ride or of the chain that had connected them then.
Two miles outside Santa Reina, they stopped among a stand of mesquite.
Gideon dismounted first.
He helped Jude down, his hands closing around Jude’s waist. For a moment he did not release him.
Beyond the trees, Santa Reina shimmered in the rising heat. The courthouse cupola stood above the roofs. A black gallows had been raised in the square beside it.
Even at this distance they could see the rope.
Jude turned in Gideon’s arms.
“When they can see us,” he said, “you have to make it look true.”
“I know.”
“You cannot touch me as though you are afraid I might break.”
“I am not afraid you will break.”
“As though you love me, then.”
Gideon’s hands tightened once at Jude’s waist. “That may be more difficult to conceal.”
“Look angry.”
“That will not require acting.”
Jude smiled faintly. “There is my marshal.”
Gideon mounted. He looped the long lead chain from Jude’s cuffs around the saddle horn but did not knot it. One pull from Jude would free it. Gideon kept enough slack that the horse could not drag him.
Jude stepped onto the road.
Gideon looked down at him. “Your wrists?”
“Comfortable.”
“Ankles?”
“Loose.”
“The key?”
Jude turned one hand enough for Gideon to glimpse the edge of linen wrapped across his palm.
“Still mine.”
“And the signal?”
Jude reached up. His two fingers found the inside of Gideon’s wrist and pressed once, not twice.
A reminder.
Not yet.
Gideon closed his hand around Jude’s for one final second.
Then he released him.
They rode into Santa Reina beneath a sun that bleached every shadow from the road.
People saw them before they reached the first buildings. A woman carrying laundry stopped beside a fence. Two ranch hands emerged from a feed store. A boy ran ahead toward the courthouse, shouting that Marshal Shaw had returned.
Wanted posters bearing both their faces covered the telegraph office wall.
Gideon did not look at them.
He sat straight in the saddle with his badge visible and his revolver at his hip. Jude walked beside the horse, dust whitening his boots, his stride shortened by the ankle chain. The irons at his wrists flashed whenever the morning light struck them.
No one watching could see the leather beneath the steel.
No one could see the key against Jude’s palm.
No one could see Noah’s ledger bound over Gideon’s ribs or know that every step carried the truth closer to the gallows.
The courthouse square opened before them.
A crowd had already begun to gather beneath the scaffold. Harrow’s riders guarded every corner. Federal deputies stood on the courthouse steps with rifles across their chests.
At the top of those steps, Marshal Amos Cutter waited.
Gideon closed his hand around the chain.
Jude kept walking by choice.
And beneath the white blaze of the Santa Reina morning, the chain stretched between them.