Chapter 24
Jem lay on his back and stared at the stars.
Josiah.
He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. It didn't mean anything. Tolliver was a liar and a thief, and whatever he'd said in that wagon was meant to destabilize him, to get inside his head and leave something behind that would fester. That was all it was.
But the name kept coming back.
Josiah.
And the harder he tried to push it away, the more something in the dark behind his eyes began to shift and take shape, pulling him back toward something he couldn't quite see and couldn't quite stop himself from looking for.
He stopped fighting it.
And the present dissolved.
“I'm done,” Josiah said. “After this winter, I'm out.” Ransom didn't look up from the pistol. He turned it over and over in his hands, focusing on the way it glinted in the firelight.
“Done,” Ransom repeated the word as if it were foreign.
“I mean it this time,” Josiah pressed.
Ransom turned the barrel of his own pistol over in his hands, inspecting it in the firelight. For a long moment he didn't speak. Josiah had learned over the years that Ransom's silences weren’t good.
“All right,” Ransom said finally.
Josiah looked at him. “All right?”
“You want out, you're out.” Ransom set the pistol on his knee and looked up. His eyes were dark and calm, the way they always were. “I'm not going to hold you here, brother. You know that.”
Josiah let out a slow breath.
“There's just one thing.” Ransom reached for his coffee cup. “I've got a job coming up. Small bank, small town, easy work. I need a lookout on the street, nothing more.” He took a drink. “Do that for me, and we're square. You walk away clean.”
Josiah stared into the fire.
He knew better. He had always known better when it came to Ransom's one last things. But the alternative was walking away with whatever consequences his brother decided to hand out.
“Just a lookout,” he said.
“That's all.” Ransom smiled. “You won't even need to go inside.”
“You’ve got a deal.” Josiah ignored the turning of his stomach. His brother’s jobs were rarely “innocent.”
A few days later, the time for the job came.
Josiah was quiet the whole ride into town.
“Just the two of us,” Josiah said finally. He was excited to be so close to having the dreaded job behind them, but something seemed odd about him and his brother doing a job alone, leaving the other men back at camp.
“That's right, though Tolliver will meet us there.”
“You said it was a simple job, but just the two of us? That seems a bit dangerous. Even for you.” Josiah frowned.
Ransom glanced over at him. “Simple jobs don't need six men. They need three. Two inside, one out. It’s a small town, and they’ve just opened a bank. We’re in Wyoming territory; sheriffs here hardly know what’s going on.”
Josiah looked at the town coming up ahead. It was small.
“New bank means new safe, new staff, nobody who's been doing it long enough to be a hero about it.” Ransom smiled. “That's a good thing, brother, not a bad one.”
“You're sure about this?” Josiah glanced at his brother. He wished Ransom would forget all of his ceremony, and just let him leave, but that wasn't like his brother.
Ransom reached over and clapped him once on the shoulder.
“I'm always sure,” he said. “That's why you trust me.”
Josiah said nothing to that. He trusted his brother because he had to. They rode on into town.
It was small enough that the main street was visible from one end to the other. Ransom pulled around the corner of the bank, then rode another few minutes, before stopping the wagon, and hopping down along Josiah.
“You stay here. You see anyone heading to the bank that looks like the law, and you shoot two bullets into the sky. All right? I’ll hear it and we’ll know we’ve been made and get out before we have a problem.
Josiah gritted his teeth and nodded.
Ransom grinned.
“Not sure why you want to leave, little brother, when you’ve always been such a good lookout.”
Josiah didn’t reply. The way that Ransom said lookout was no compliment. It was one of the only jobs he’d do in the gang without protest, the one job he wasn't directly hurting anyone.
Ransom left before he could say anything else.
Josiah stood outside the bank with his hat pulled low and stuffed his hands in his coat pockets, watching the road the way Ransom had told him to.
It was a Tuesday morning. The street was quiet. A woman crossed with a basket over her arm. Two men talked outside the feed store. A dog lay in the shade beside the barber's steps and didn't move.
Josiah tried to ignore the feeling in his stomach.
Three minutes passed. Then five.
He was watching a wagon turn at the far end of the street when he caught movement at the opposite end. Two riders, coming in at a neck breaking pace, straight down the center of the road.
His hand moved toward the pistol at his hip.
He’d barely closed his fingers around the grip when something shifted in his peripheral vision. To his left. Then his right.
He turned his head.
Deputies. Three of them, stepping out from the gap between the buildings across the street, weapons already drawn and leveled. On the other side, two more emerged from the alley beside the bank, moving to cut off the door.
The two riders had stopped in the middle of the road and were watching him with their hands on their rifles.
Then the click of a hammer behind his left ear.
“Don't move,” a gruff voice said. “Hands where I can see them,” the man came into view. A tall man, with a scowling face, broad shoulders, and a star on his belt.
Josiah raised his hands slowly. When he turned his head, there were four of them. The sheriff and three deputies spread out in a loose arc, all with weapons drawn.
They'd been waiting for him, or they’d been way more organized than they’d planed for.
“You think just because we are a small town we don’t know how to protect what’s ours?” The sheriff shook his head. “You picked the wrong place to rob. The three of you, you’ll learn your lesson when we’re done with you.”
Josiah gritted his teeth.
They put him in irons on the main street while the woman with the basket stopped to watch.
Josiah scanned the area for Ransom and Tolliver. Had they already been arrested? Had they made it out?
How had the sheriff found out so quickly what was going on?
Josiah tried to calm his beating heart as he was dragged down the street toward the sheriff’s office, and the cell that awaited him.
Jem's eyes opened.
The stars were still there, motionless above him. He had a brother.
The thought landed with a weight that made his chest feel strange. Not the fragmented, half-formed impressions he'd been chasing for months.
Ransom.
He got to his feet. His ribs protested and he pressed a hand against them briefly. He started to pace, a short back and forth in the dark beside his bedroll
Ransom was his brother. Tolliver worked for Ransom. And at some point, Josiah had helped him, or tried to help him rob a bank.
He stopped pacing.
There was more. He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes and stood very still.
It was coming back.
All of it.
The cell was small and the cot was hard and Josiah had been sitting on it for three hours when he heard the lock. He tensed.
Ransom and Tolliver hadn’t been in the sheriff’s office, and they certainly hadn’t made an appearance since he’d been arrested.
Something worked from the other side with a particular patience.
Josiah stood up, squinting his eyes, trying to see.
The door swung open.
Tolliver stood in the frame with a strip of metal in his hand and an expression of mild amusement on his face. Behind him, the corridor was dark. The deputy who had been sitting at the end of it was gone.
Ransom stepped in past Tolliver.
He looked at Josiah for a moment, then looked around the cell.
“Small,” he said.
“Ransom.” Josiah's voice came out low and tight. “What did you do?” It was no coincidence things had gone so smoothly for his brother, despite the fact they were supposed to have gone very wrong, considering he’d ended up in jail.
“I got you out.” Ransom gestured toward the open door. “Come on. We don't have long.”
“That's not what I'm asking; what happened to you and Tolliver earlier?”
Ransom looked at him. The glint in his eyes gave him away.
Ransom shrugged. “We'll talk outside.”
They slipped out the back of the sheriff's office through a door that had been left unlatched, crossed two alleys, and came out on the far edge of town where the horses were waiting in a dry creek bed out of sightline from the road. Tolliver moved ahead, giving them space.
Josiah wanted to scream at his brother, demanding all the answers, but held himself back as he turned toward Ransom.
Ransom put his back against a cottonwood and crossed his arms.
“Did you…set me up?” He remembered the deputies. So convenient. They must have known he was there.
“I did.” Ransom’s words stabbed like a knife through the chest.
“You sent me to that street knowing they'd be waiting.” Josiah narrowed his eyes.
“I did,” Ransom said again, in the same tone. “And now there’ll be a wanted poster with your name on it being printed before sundown today. Maybe two counties by the end of the week.” He tilted his head slightly. “You understand what that means.”
Josiah stared at him.
“It means you can't walk away,” Ransom said.
“Not to a normal life. Not to whatever it was you were imagining for yourself out there.” He unfolded his arms and pushed off the tree.
“You want to leave the gang; you leave as a wanted man.
Every town you ride into, every sheriff's office with a board on the wall, every lawman you pass on the road.” He shrugged.
“You'd never stop looking over your shoulder.”
“You're my brother,” Josiah drew in a breath. Why had he thought that would make a difference?
“I am,” Ransom said. “And I need you with me. I tried asking. You said no.” Something shifted briefly in his expression, too fast to read. “Family wasn't enough to keep you. So now you've got another reason to stay.”
“Think of what Ma would have thought of this. She wanted us to be church going folks.”
His brother scoffed.
“Church going? That never got her anything, did it? She’s not here, Josiah. I know what’s best for us, I always have, ever since I started taking care of you. I suggest you start listening, or I’ll have to find more creative ways to keep you in line.” Ransom turned away from him.
“You were never in any danger,” Ransom said in a softer tone, “you'd still be in that cell, but I came for you, same as I always have. That doesn't change.” He held Josiah's gaze. “Nothing changes. We ride out, we go back to work, and we don't talk about leaving again.”
He walked past Josiah toward the horses.
Josiah stood in the dry creek bed and the betrayal settled through him. He hadn’t realized what Ransom was capable of.
Josiah lifted his chin. He had no choice but to stay. He couldn’t live in a cell for something he hadn’t done.
He turned and followed his brother toward the horses. Maybe he could do more good by staying close to his brother and lessening those who got hurt, instead of running a way.
Jem stopped pacing.
His stomach had turned. He pressed a hand against his mouth and stood very still in the dark, breathing carefully, waiting for the nausea to pass.
A wanted man. A gang. A brother who had put him in a cell to keep him from leaving a miserable life he considered wrong.
He thought of Tolliver crouched over the Crenshaw trunk with both hands inside it and felt sick all over again. He thought of all those evenings watching the camp, counting wagons, asking questions about their background and route. All of it feeding back to Ransom.
And then he thought of Theda.
Her trusting green eyes. The way she'd looked at him across the fire, worried, completely certain that he was worth caring for.
He closed his eyes.
She would never want a man like him. He knew that without having to think very hard about it.
A woman like Theda, who had built her whole life around caring for people, who got up every morning and did good without being asked, she would look at what he'd just remembered, and she would see a coward.
He thought about her hand against his cheek. You're a good man. Said with such certainty.
He thought about Phineas shaking his hand and offering him a place all the way to Oregon. About Nora's small fingers wrapped around his while Theda stitched her arm. About every person on this wagon train who had looked at a man with no name and no past and decided to trust him anyway.
He had never been strong enough to stand up to Ransom.
Not once, in all the years it mattered. Not really.
He had gone along and looked away and told himself that being a lookout wasn't the same as being a criminal, and he had known even then that it was a lie he was telling because it was easier than the truth.
He couldn't do that anymore.
The wagon train people had believed in him when they had no reason to. The least he could do was tell them the truth before Ransom's men came for the diamonds and brought everything down on top of them.
Even if it cost him everything. Even if it cost him her.
He picked up his hat from the ground beside his bedroll and started walking. Jem was twenty feet from Theda and Phineas' wagon when a figure stepped out from between two wagons directly in front of him.
He stopped short.
Leland held up a lantern. The light caught his face, then Jem's.
“What are you doing up?” Leland's voice was low.
Jem's eyes moved briefly to the dark shape of Theda's wagon. The lantern inside was out. She was asleep.
“Couldn't rest,” he mumbled. “Thought I'd help with the watch rotation.” If he told Leland where he was going, Leland would suspect something was wrong. Jem wanted the chance to tell Theda his truth himself. He didn't want her to hear it from anyone else.
Leland studied him for a moment, then he jerked his head toward the far end of the wagon line.
“Henderson's rotation ends in an hour. Come on then.”
Jem glanced once more at Theda's wagon.
In the morning. He'd tell her in the morning, before the train moved out. He'd find her at first light and he'd tell her everything, and whatever came after that he would face straight on.
He pulled his hat down and fell into step beside Leland.