Chapter 20
Chambers was fast for a heavy man. Fourteen years of dread put speed in his hand, and the gun came clearly in a blur of gold chain and lamplight.
But Nate had been watching that vest since the man stood smiling in his yard, and his own gun was back up before the derringer cleared leather. He didn’t aim to wound. A man with a gun out gets shot center. Josh had taught him, every time, no flourishes.
The Winchester slammed against his shoulder, and the report filled the little room like a thunderclap, and the derringer went off into the floorboards as the slug took Chambers high in the chest and flung him backward over his own desk in a crash of whiskey glass and scattered papers.
He was dead before he slid off the far edge of it and folded onto the rug. The murderer of Eldon and Vallie Ralston lay still in the lamplight with his fine coat thrown open and his gold chain pooled on the boards. It was over, fourteen years of it, in the time it took a clock to tick.
Nate stood in the powder smoke and felt no triumph at all.
He’d thought he would. He’d thought there would be some great loosening in him, the wound finally healed.
There was only a man dead on the floor who’d needed to be, and a promise kept by the thinnest margin God allowed because Chambers had chosen the gun and not the rope and made the ending himself.
Nate had given him the option of the law. The man had reached for the derringer instead. Whatever this was, it wasn’t murder, and it wasn’t revenge. It was the last thing a cornered killer left a person no choice but to do.
“You made me,” he said quietly to the dead man.
“Right to the end, you made the choice for both of us.” He stood there with the gun in his hand and his ears still ringing, and then his legs went heavy all at once.
He sat down on the edge of the overturned desk and let the Winchester rest across his knees.
His hands weren’t shaking, but they wanted to. The room smelled of burned powder and spilled whiskey and old wood, and fourteen years had sat in his chest, carried so long he’d forgotten the weight. Now the weight was just gone, and he hadn’t caught up to that yet.
He breathed in. He breathed out.
Boots pounded in the hall.
The door burst open, and Cooley filled it, one arm bound tightly to his side and a pistol held awkwardly in his offhand, Hart crowding behind him with his small eyes wild.
They took in the room in one glance—the smoke, the overturned desk, the dead king on the floor—and their guns came up.
They stopped short, the bore of Nate’s Winchester leveled steadily on the two of them.
“He drew on me,” Nate said. “I gave him the law, and he drew a hidden gun. You both heard the shot. You can join him on that floor, or you can set those pistols down and live to tell a federal marshal exactly what happened in this house tonight. You’ve got till I run out of patience, and I’m about out. ”
Hart dropped his pistol as if it had gone hot. “Down,” he said hoarsely to Cooley. “Cisco’s dead, you fool, there’s no wage in dying for a dead man. Put it down.”
And Cooley, who had only ever fought for the wage, looked at his paymaster cooling on the rug and let his pistol fall from his hand, the sneer gone slack at last on the pitted face, a hired gun with no one left to hire him.
Outside in the dark before dawn, a new sound rose over the yard. Hoofbeats, many of them, and shouts, and Nate heard old Halloran’s voice bellowing for the Chambers men to throw down, throw down, the law was coming, and the war was over.
The neighbors had come through the night as Lucy promised they would, a dozen honest guns ringing the yard.
With Chambers dead and no paymaster to fund the fight, there was nothing left to hold the line for.
The thing came apart in an hour, not with a battle but with hard cases going still in the dark, hands raising, the violence draining out of them.
By the time the sun came up gray over the Chambers ranch, Nate stood in the yard with the Winchester loose in his hand and watched the neighbors disarm the last of the men, and there was no more shooting to be done.
* * *
The federal marshal rode in from Colorado Springs two days later.
His name was Gideon Pike, a spare gray man with a worn star and eyes that took Chambers’s empire apart and saw to the bottom of it in an afternoon.
Lucy’s wire had found him quickly. He came with four deputies and a wagon and a writ, and he listened to all of it.
What he heard wasn’t one frightened person’s word but a rope of evidence too thick for any crooked county court to cut.
He heard Lucy swear to the confession she’d overheard from the hayloft: the gold claim, the killing, the boast. He weighed the gold sample in his hand and unrolled her sketch of the cave and set a deputy to ride out and confirm the vein was real, which it was.
He read the thin closed file with Trisler’s name at the bottom and set it beside the Circle C brand on the horse the ambushers had left, the branded bandana off the man who’d set fire to the barn, the burned barn itself, the powder-scarred cave, and the dead men in the canyon.
He took down the accounts of a dozen neighbors who, with the fear gone out of the county, found their tongues.
By the end, Pike had a case that would stand in any honest court in the territory, and he said so plainly, and the saying of it was the first time in fourteen years the truth of the Ralston murders had been spoken by a man with the power to act on it.
Sheriff Trisler tried to run. He saw which way the wind had turned and went for his horse behind the jail in the gray morning, his badge left on the desk, a carpetbag of Chambers’s bribe money already tied to his saddle.
He’d spent fourteen years keeping one hand clean for the law and one hand in Chambers’s pocket, and now the pocket was a grave, and a federal writ was two days out. He didn’t wait for either to reach him.
He never made the road. A stocky old rider came around the corner of the livery on a bay horse and put himself squarely in the sheriff’s path, pale yet from his wound and sitting on the saddle by sheer stubbornness, his long Sharps rifle once again laid across the bow.
Trisler pulled up short. “Bodine. Get out of my way.”
“Goin’ somewhere, Budd?” Josh asked. His voice was flat, and it had been flat since before dawn, since he’d pulled himself onto a horse he shouldn’t have been on yet, because there was one thing left, he’d told himself he would do before he let the arm finish healing.
“You closed a file on two friends of mine fourteen years back. Eight days of nothing, and not one honest question in it.” He thumbed the hammer back. The click of it carried in the still morning air. “I’ve waited a long while to see you answer for that. Get down off that horse.”
Trisler’s hand drifted toward his hip and then stopped because the bore of the Sharps was squarely on him, and Josh’s eyes weren’t watching the hand at all.
He got down. The fight had never been in him without numbers at his back, and his numbers were dead or in irons.
The old man on the bay horse didn’t look like a man who would miss or forgive.
Josh marched him through the street at the point of the buffalo gun, past the neighbors standing in the early light, past the ring of deputies, and brought him to Pike at the front of the jail like a debt finally settled.
Pike clapped the irons on Trisler personally, and Trisler looked at the ground and didn’t look at Josh, who stood there and watched until the cell door swung shut and the lock turned. Then he let out a long breath and walked back to where he’d hitched the bay.
Cooley and Hart and the surviving hands were charged with conspiracy, arson, and attempted murder, and the cave was sealed and posted under federal guard as evidence and as the proven motive that hanged the whole black business on the dead man who’d started it.
It was, Pike said, the cleanest case of its kind he’d carried in twenty years on the trail, and he’d have not had it without the girl, the old man, and the young man who’d kept his head and brought him the law instead of just a pile of bodies.
* * *
It was weeks before the county settled, and weeks more before Nate did.
They rebuilt the barn first, a raising that brought out every family for twenty miles because a county coming out from under a long fear wants to build a thing together with its own hands.
Then they mended the house, the corral, and last of all the porch, where the old bloodstain had darkened the boards by the door for fourteen years.
Nate removed those boards himself to lay fresh ones and didn’t speak while he did it.
Lucy worked beside him and knew enough not to fill the quiet.
On a morning at the very end of summer, he stood on that new porch at sunrise with a cup of coffee going cold in his hand and watched the light come up over the Rockies, the same mountains that had swallowed his father’s secret and very nearly his own life.
Josh was mending tack in the new barn, mostly healed, slower than he’d been but not by much, and singing some tuneless old thing under his breath.
The ranch breathed around them, alive again.
Nate took his grandfather’s map out of his coat. The soft old sheet, the broken red wax, his father’s pencil lines that had led him three thousand miles and into the dark of a mountain and out the other side a different man. He’d carried it next to his heart since Boston. He didn’t need it anymore.
He went inside to where the family Bible sat on the mantel, his mother’s Bible, with the births and the deaths in it in his grandmother’s hand, and he opened it, laid the folded map inside between the testaments, and closed it gently.
Its purpose was done. The thing his father drew in fear had brought the killer to justice and the family home to a living son.
That was payment enough. Let it rest in the good book and trouble no one ever again.
Lucy was on the porch when he came back out, leaning on the new rail with her hat off and her auburn hair loose in the morning light, looking east at the climbing sun.
She’d taken to coming over most mornings, and neither of them made much fuss about why, so Celia had stopped asking when supper might run two ways permanently.
“So,” Lucy said, not turning, a dry, teasing thread in her voice. “Nathaniel Ralston. You’re a man with a cave full of gold and the law’s own blessing to dig it. Richest fool in the county, by rights.” She slid him a sideways look. “Whatever in the world do you mean to do with it?”
Nate stood beside her at the rail, his shoulder near to hers, the ranch his father built looking green and whole in the new light, and the woman who’d refused to let him face any of it alone close enough to touch.
He found, to his own surprise, that the hard line his mouth had held since the night he was seven years old finally let go.
He smiled. “Buy some cattle,” he said. “Fix that south fence. Maybe build a bigger house, in time, if a certain woman thought she could stand the company.” He looked at her, and the smile stayed, easy and real and fourteen years overdue.
“The gold can wait in the rock a while longer. I’ve already found the thing out here worth keeping. ”
Lucy’s chin came up, and her own slow smile broke to meet his, there and staying this time, and the sun cleared the mountains and laid its gold across them both, and across the porch, and across the long, good county a man had finally come home to.
The End