CHAPTER THIRTEEN Chained at Sundown
By noon, August Harrow had turned the death of Jude Calder into a county fair.
Wagons stood axle to axle along the streets leading into courthouse square.
Ranch families had come from as far away as San Rosario, some because Harrow had ordered his foremen to bring them and others because fear possessed its own gravity.
Men from small holdings stood beneath the awnings with their hats held low, avoiding the eyes of Harrow’s riders.
Women kept children close despite the vendors selling watered beer and paper cones of roasted corn.
A photographer had erected his black camera beneath a canvas hood opposite the gallows so Harrow could preserve the moment in silver.
The scaffold dominated the center of the square.
It had been built higher than necessary.
Fresh pine glared pale beneath the sun, and thirteen steps climbed to a platform large enough to display three condemned people if Harrow ever required them.
Two ropes hung from the crossbeam. One ended in a noose.
The other remained loose, waiting to become one.
A black banner had been stretched across the front railing.
JUSTICE AT SUNDOWN, it proclaimed in white paint.
Jude read the words while walking at Gideon’s horse.
The cuffs were warm now. The sun had heated the steel, but the leather guards Gideon had fitted beneath them kept the metal from burning his skin. The ankle chain dragged through the dust with every shortened step, announcing him before the crowd turned to look.
Voices died as they entered the square.
Gideon felt hundreds of eyes settle upon them.
He kept his face hard and his shoulders square despite the ledger bound against his wounded ribs.
Sweat had begun to gather beneath the bandage, loosening the linen and stinging the reopened cut.
Every hoofbeat drove the book’s leather corner deeper into his side.
He did not look down at Jude.
He could not trust himself to do it.
Marshal Amos Cutter waited on the courthouse steps with four deputies arranged behind him.
He wore his long black coat despite the heat and had polished his badge until it shone like a weapon.
August Harrow stood one step above him in a cream-colored suit, silver hair uncovered beneath the sun.
Brill, the foreman Jude had left unconscious inside the horse barn, stood at Harrow’s shoulder with a strip of cloth tied around his swollen head.
The sight of Gideon produced no surprise in Cutter’s face.
Only calculation.
Harrow smiled.
“Well,” he called across the square. “The prodigal lawman remembers his way home.”
Gideon stopped the gelding at the foot of the courthouse steps.
Jude stopped beside him.
Gideon dismounted carefully, concealing the weakness in his left leg by keeping one hand on the saddle horn. When both boots were on the ground, he unwound the lead chain from the horn and closed his fist around it.
He gave Jude no more than a foot of slack.
Jude’s shoulders tightened.
It was acting. Gideon knew it was acting. They had agreed to every inch of it inside the mission, but the sight of the chain pulled short between them still made his stomach turn.
Cutter descended two steps.
“You look poorly, Shaw.”
“I have been shot, buried, beaten, and hunted under a warrant bearing your name.”
Cutter’s eyes sharpened. “Yet here you are.”
“Here I am.”
“With the prisoner.”
Gideon pulled the chain once.
The movement was slight. Jude stepped forward immediately, making it appear harsher than it was. A murmur moved through the crowd.
Gideon did not let his hand tremble.
“I found him at the San Diablo mine,” he said. “Harrow’s men separated us before I could bring him in. He escaped through a ventilation shaft. I tracked him to the old mission this morning.”
Brill spat into the dust. “He came through that shaft carrying something.”
“A leather strongbox,” Cutter said.
“The box was empty when I found it.”
Harrow’s smile thinned. “And the documents?”
Gideon turned toward Jude for the first time.
Jude looked back at him with a hatred convincing enough to wound.
“He says he buried them,” Gideon answered.
“Where?”
“He has not told me.”
Harrow descended the steps until he stood directly before Jude.
Jude’s cuffed hands hung in front of him. The key remained concealed beneath the linen wrapped against his right palm. His breathing was steady, but Gideon saw the pulse working in his throat.
Harrow lifted Jude’s chin with the silver head of his walking stick.
Jude endured the touch without looking away.
“Your brother was similarly stubborn,” Harrow said. “For a while.”
Gideon’s grip tightened around the chain.
Jude glanced at him.
Not a signal.
Only a warning.
Harrow dragged the walking stick down Jude’s throat and hooked its silver head beneath the collar of his shirt.
“You returned for him,” Harrow said to Gideon.
“I returned for the prisoner named in my warrant.”
“You remained beside him long after the warrant ceased to matter.”
“I made an error.”
Jude’s eyes did not change, but Gideon felt the lie strike him.
Harrow watched them both. “And what corrected this error?”
Gideon met his gaze.
“Pain.”
Cutter smiled then.
It was a small, satisfied movement. Gideon had chosen the one answer both men trusted.
Harrow believed pain revealed weakness. Cutter believed it revealed price.
Neither understood that Gideon had already been given the worst pain he could imagine and discovered something on the other side of it that they could not purchase.
Cutter held out his hand for the chain.
Gideon did not surrender it.
“I deliver him into the courthouse,” he said.
“You are under arrest.”
“You ordered my murder.”
“Allegedly.”
“I know the cipher on the kill order.”
Cutter’s smile disappeared.
Gideon stepped closer. “If you want to hang Calder before sunset, you accept the version of this story I have brought you. I saw through his lies. I completed my assignment. I returned him alive.”
“And your price?”
“My badge. The warrants withdrawn. My record restored.”
Harrow laughed softly. “There he is.”
Jude lowered his eyes.
The performance was perfect. Too perfect. Gideon wanted to touch him, to place one hand against the back of his neck and remind him that none of those words belonged to the man speaking them.
Instead, he jerked the chain.
“Move.”
Jude climbed the courthouse steps.
Cutter stepped aside. “Search them both.”
Two deputies took Jude.
Gideon forced himself to release the chain.
One deputy seized Jude’s shoulder and turned him toward the wall.
The other began at his collar, moving down his back, waist, and legs with quick, impersonal hands.
Gideon watched every touch. Jude’s jaw tightened when the deputy struck a bruise beneath his ribs.
When the search reached his wrists, the man tested both cuffs and tugged the linen padding.
“This necessary?” the deputy asked.
“He slipped a tighter pair at the mine,” Gideon said. “The leather keeps him from using blood as grease.”
The explanation was ugly enough to be believed.
The deputy released the padding without discovering the key.
He removed Jude’s knife, two folded documents from beneath his boot insole, and the brass button Jude had kept from Noah’s coat since Dry Mercy. The button rolled across the courthouse floor.
Jude moved instinctively.
A rifle stock struck him between the shoulders.
He dropped to one knee.
Gideon’s hand reached his revolver before he could stop it.
Every deputy in the hall shifted.
Cutter looked at Gideon’s hand.
Jude remained on one knee, head lowered. His cuffed fingers closed around the button before anyone could kick it away.
Gideon released the revolver.
“Do not damage him before the hanging,” he said coldly. “The crowd paid to recognize his face.”
Jude looked up.
For one suspended breath their eyes met.
I am here, Gideon tried to say.
Jude rose without assistance.
The deputies searched Gideon next. They took his revolver and knife, found the decoy key in his vest, and pressed hard enough along his wounded side to draw fresh blood through his shirt.
Gideon let his knees buckle slightly.
The searching deputy recoiled from the stain.
“Mine collapse,” Gideon said through his teeth. “Unless you intend to stitch me, leave the bandage.”
Cutter regarded the blood, then nodded.
The ledger remained against Gideon’s ribs.
Cutter took the decoy key and slid it into his pocket.
“You will be watched,” he told Gideon.
“I expected no less.”
“And if this performance proves false—”
“You will kill me. Your imagination has never been your finest quality.”
Cutter’s eyes became flat.
Harrow’s laugh followed Gideon and Jude into the courthouse.
The cells occupied a corridor behind the records office. Their iron doors faced one another across a passage too narrow for two men to walk abreast. Marisol stood when Jude appeared.
Her dark hair had come loose from its pins. A bruise colored one side of her face, and dried blood marked the sleeve of her dress. One wrist was bound to the cell bars with rope.
She looked first at Jude’s chains, then at Gideon’s badge.
For half a second, fury transformed her.
Then Jude said, “He found me.”
Something in his voice made her understand.
Marisol’s attention shifted to Gideon’s bloodstained shirt.
“Marshal,” she said.
“Mrs. Vega.”
Cutter’s deputies opened the opposite cell and pushed Jude inside. He turned before they closed the door.
The chain connecting his wrists passed near Gideon’s hand.
Jude extended two fingers.
One light touch crossed the inside of Gideon’s wrist.
Not twice.
Not stop.
Still here.
Gideon did not react.
The cell door slammed between them.
Cutter ordered two deputies to remain in the corridor and took Gideon upstairs. Harrow followed, his walking stick striking each step like a judge’s hammer.