Rafe paced back and forth across the bedroom he now shared with Jack Randall.A guard sat outside the window, and another outside the door.Dewayne had obviously meant exactly what he’d said when he’d predicted Rafe and Randall would share a cell.
This room was a damn sight more comfortable than a cell at the Ohio Penitentiary, but it was a cage nonetheless.
He wished to hell he knew what Dewayne thought, but the lawman had been uncommunicative, and his expression poker-faced.Rafe had not the slightest hint of what to expect of him, not after he refused for the second time to give Dewayne the names of the men who rode with him.
He had been given several minutes alone with Shea, just to hold her, to feel her strength and faith.He hadn’t dared kiss her, because that invariably led to something else he couldn’t afford at the moment.
She had looked at him with questions in her eyes.
“Your father did everything he said he would,” he said gently.For her own peace he wanted her to forgive her father, even if he never could.
“Why don’t they let you go, then?”
“I still robbed those stages,” he said, “and then I’m not entirely sure Dewayne believed everything … your father said.”
“What … will happen to him?”
“He’ll probably stand trial.”
She leaned against him, and he knew she was seeking his strength, when all the time she was his.He finally said the words that had been in his mind and heart.“I love you, Shea.I have no right to … tell you that now, but …”
Shea looked up at him with those damn expressive blue-gray eyes that always seemed to reach inside and see what no one else had ever seen.“You didn’t have to tell me,” she said.“You’ve told me in so many other ways.But … but I’m so glad you did.”
He gathered her closer to him, wondering how anything so … perfect could have happened to him, wondering whether it had come too late.
And then the knock on the door, and Dewayne stood there, waiting for him.…
Randall had been silent ever since he, too, had been incarcerated in this luxurious jail.He had taken a chair and placed it where he could look out toward the mountains and had directed his gaze that way.There was nothing left to be said between the two men.Their enforced proximity did nothing to alleviate the tension between them.
Rafe took the bed, pillowing his head on his hands.He was too tired to even think any longer, which was a blessing.His eyes closed and oblivion took over his thoughts.
Russ Dewayne took three days to check out the stories.He knew he couldn’t take much longer.Quarles would be hammering at the door of anyone with any influence.
He’d sent a telegram to the Army Department for details of the court-martial.He checked with the remainder of Randall’s hands to make sure Randall couldn’t have killed the miners, and he questioned Shea at length to make sure that Rafe couldn’t have committed the murders.She’d finally told him she had been with Rafe, but that he had in no way kidnapped her.
To avoid throwing blame on Ben or Clint, she said that part of her original story was true, that she had become lost and Rafe had found her.She told Dewayne about the bear and said that was why she had stayed with Rafe, to nurse him after he had rescued the cub at her request.
She also told Dewayne about finding the box with the letters and the money, and the clipping about the court-martial.
Russ finally decided that Sam McClary had been behind the killings, that he had been killed in self-defense by Rafe Tyler.The other matters were more complicated.It worried him that he had been so wrong about Jack Randall, and that he had jumped to conclusions about Tyler because of the brand.If Tyler had been lynched …
Russ spent an afternoon writing ten pages of explanation and sending them to the territorial governor.He asked for a deputy marshall, since he didn’t trust the authorities in Casey Springs.He made several recommendations.And then he sent Michael with the package to Denver.
If the Devil ever devised a torture, it couldn’t be more agonizing than the one Russ Dewayne provided.Five days with the man Rafe had hated for ten years.
Poetic justice?
Exquisite irony?
But for whom?
They were eventually forced to confront one another.Silence could last only so long.
After those five minutes alone with Shea, Rafe had been allowed no more.He had been asked additional questions.Mostly about who had ridden with him.It was a question that seemed to haunt Dewayne.
After the first day he understood that Shea had returned to the Circle R.So had Clint, he imagined, since he no longer saw his friend from the window.
He was a prisoner.No one tried to hide that fact.Both he and Randall were kept under constant guard, their meals delivered to the room by one of Russ’s sons and the slop pail emptied daily by one of the hands.
