I’d shaken my head truthfully in that moment, but now a memory haunts me: Luther Rose showing me a coin that looked exactly like the one he’d pulled from my pocket that day at the Lloyds’.
“They’re twins, see,” he’d said. Like my piece, the currency marking had also been shaved off, but the eagle gleamed in the firelight. “Waylan and me grew up in an orphanage. When he ran off, he swore he’d return for me once he had the means to provide a decent life. I begged to go with him then and there, but he were eight years my senior and I’d’ve only slowed him down. He said there were nothing like these coins in the world, not with the way he’d done shaved off some of the details, and so long as I had mine and he had his, it would be like we were together.” He laid the two coins ’gainst his palm, tracing the faces with a thumb. “Waylan came back for me, like he promised, but he were different. Quieter, keener. He stood straighter and smiled more, only the smile were crooked and a little empty. When the orphanage director tried to stop him from taking me, he shot her in the chest, then emptied the donation box before we fled.”
“Why’re you telling me this?” I’d asked. It was but a few days after my attempted escape from the whorehouse. I was bruised and sore, my limbs still tight and tender.
“’Cus I want you to understand that love makes us do odd things, son. Remember that.”
He worried his palm with his thumb. The coins had disappeared into his jacket.
“Do you think he ever found it? The cache he was after in the Superstitions?”
“Gold,” Rose clarified. “It were solid gold ore—rumored to be enough for a man to become a king. Or to disappear.”
His expression were difficult to read in the firelight, but it looked almost like longing. I got the feeling it were his brother who wanted the kingdom, but that Luther wanted to disappear, to make a life for himself. Maybe even an honest one, with a family and a respectable career.
“So do you think he found the gold?” I asked.
“Yeah. I think it’s what killed him.”
Before, I thought he meant that the quest had killed his brother, that Waylan had led his men into the heartless, cursed depths of the Superstition Mountains, and though they’d found the gold, they’d been too weak to make their way out. Maybe they got lost. Maybe they starved. Maybe even it was Indians who got the best of ’em.
But as I sit before the Coltons’ fire, I fear I heard Luther Rose wrong. Or misunderstood. Perhaps he meant that his brother found the gold and then was killed for it. Kate wanted revenge, after all, and she got it. With it, she inherited an enormous fortune, one she’s kept hidden and quiet because it ties her to so much blood.
And prolly Rose suspects this.
Which means he’ll want more than vengeance. He’ll want the gunslinger who killed his brother, and then he’ll want all that gunslinger’s gold, too.
I straighten from the chair, peer out the window. The snow is undisturbed, pale and gleaming beneath the moon.
I weren’t followed. I know I weren’t. My head were heavy as Silver carried me back, but I’d managed to look over my shoulder a few times. There were nothing but snow and wind on my tail. This house is still safe, secure.
But if Jesse fails on Sunday . . . if he dies when Rose lives, I’ll be asked to show the way to this house. If I run, I’ll be followed. If anything goes wrong, this clearing will fall.
I consider telling the Coltons that Rose likely knows ’bout their gold. I consider, also, the fear it’ll evoke, the way the plan might crumble, and I can’t run no more. Neither can the Coltons. The Rose Riders won’t stop coming. They’ll track us to the gates of Hell.
So we’ll do what needs being done. We’ll board that train, shoot clean and true. And if Jesse Colton misses, I’ll finish what’s been started.
Chapter Thirty-Six
* * *
Charlotte
The snow stays on the trees through the night. There is no breeze, and so it rests there, blanketing the limbs like slender white dress gloves come morning.
It is only after I have descended the worst of the chilly mountains and am leaving the barely visible trail that signs of the storm fade. To the south, the plains are a patchwork of dusty gold-brown and muddy snow, unfolding toward Prescott.
I left at dawn, and I did not tell a soul.
Reece never came to bed, and when I crept into the kitchen after a night of fitful dreams, I found him before the fire, asleep in a chair, his head at an awkward angle. Without his hat, I could see the whole of his beaten face. He looked younger in sleep, and peaceful, too. He so often confronts the world glowering, his demons etched across his brow, a sullen expression held tight in the muscles of his tanned cheeks. Asleep, he did not look like the young man who had ordered me from the bedroom the evening prior, his eyes flashing with anger. Instead, he looked like someone I should wake to bid farewell.
But I knew better.
I’d spent the evening avoiding him. Kate must have heard the entire affair, or at least his outburst, because as I dried dishes, she said, “When folks tell us our own faults, it’s only natural to deny ’em. The things Jesse threw in my face! And the things I threw back! Sometimes we see others more clearly than we see ourselves. At least ’bout the stuff that matters most.”
I hated that she was defending him instead of nursing my hurt. Worse still, I hated that she was right. That Reece was right.
I was using their story—their life—as a step to climb. That much I can admit. But it was for reasons more complex than my own ambitions. The only way I’ve been able to keep that pool of blood beneath Parker’s head from spreading before my eyes has been to throw my efforts into comforts, into writing. I did it to cope, not realizing the damage and hurt I caused others in the process.
This whole time I have wanted nothing but to silence my uncle, and Reece is correct when he says I have put my family’s quandaries above those of the Coltons. I have been so intent on having someone else solve the problem for me, I failed to see that I had the power to solve it myself.
And so I will leave them to their story—Reece and Kate and Jesse—the tale I am not entitled to tell. I will see to mine instead.
It will not be easy, or free of risk. After all, folks entering the lions’ den rarely emerge unscathed. But I have watched Reece face his demons, and I am willing to face the devil in my own life. I carry on for Prescott.
It is a Saturday, exactly a week after the gala that welcomed the rail to the capital, and the streets are painfully quiet compared with the last time I was in town. Snow lingers in the shadowy recesses of windowsills and rooflines, hiding where the sun cannot reach it. Everything else has melted, and the sorrel’s shoes leave prints in the damp streets.