Chapter 10 - Trial by Rope and Pitchfork
He wasn't alone.
Sixteen men from Ocotillo Flats stood in a loose semicircle around the mission well. They had four farm wagons with the teams still hitched, three lanterns hanging from the wagon bows, and enough rope to hang every horse thief in Pima County.
Vogel was sitting on an upturned salt pork barrel, cleaning his fingernails with a small bone-handled knife. Beside him stood the local magistrate, old Judge Phineas Crane, his nightshirt stuffed haphazardly into his trousers, his eyes bloodshot with whisky and fear.
"I tell you, Phineas, the paperwork is legal," Vogel was saying, his voice carrying clearly over the ripple of the shallows. "The girl is an escaped ward of the Agency. The rancher, Miller, killed three of Kane’s teamsters out at the wash. We have the right to form a posse comitatus under the territorial statute of seventy-eight."
"You don't hang a white man without the circuit judge coming down from Prescott," Crane whimpered, clutching an old sheepskin ledger against his belly.
"The circuit judge won't be here till November," Vogel said without looking up. "By November, Miller’s cattle will be branded with my iron, and the Santa Rita grant will be registered in Phoenix. You sign the requisition for the hanging, or Kane might remember that little business with the payroll wagon back in seventy-four."
Ethan stepped out of the river scrub into the lantern light, the muzzle of his Winchester leveled directly at Vogel's breastbone.
"The requisition’s going to be short one signature, Luke," Ethan said.
Every man in the circle froze. Two teamsters reached for their sidearms, but the dry, unmistakable metallic clatter of Ethan cocking the lever stopped their hands cold.
"Don't do it, boys," Ethan said, his voice flat, dead, and steady as an anvil. "I’ve got ten rounds of forty-four in this tube, and Vogel gets the first three through his vest. The rest of you can fight over who gets the other seven."
Nahimana stepped out of the shadow of the cottonwood. She didn't have a gun. She carried the heavy iron assay stamp Ethan had taken from the cave, held high above her head like a priest holding a cross.
"Look at the mark!" she cried out in Spanish, then in English, her voice ringing off the mission’s plaster walls like an iron church bell. "This is Luke Vogel’s brand! Not for cattle! Not for horses! For the gold he stole from the Sonora wagons while your sons were dying in the war!"
The crowd shifted. One of the teamsters—a tall, one-eyed freighter named Jesse Cole who had hauled ore for the mines since sixty-eight—stepped forward, squinting through the glare.
May you like
"That's the Santa Rita seal," Cole said, his hand dropping away from his revolver. "The one that disappeared when Major Bell's wagon train was cut off."
"She’s an Indian liar!" Vogel barked, rising from the barrel, his face turning the color of curdled milk. "Kane! Where the hell is Kane?"
