“Nothing’s changed, and that’s the problem. I’m still the same waste of skin I was before. I just don’t know how to deal with this situation. When we were about to be lynched, I was so scared I passed out. Then, when you attacked Knox, I tried to take on Gillespie, but he bettered me with just one punch.”

  Dalton shrugged. “On the other hand, you are improving. This time you needed to be hit before you collapsed. Maybe next time you might stay on your feet for long enough to actually throw a punch.”

  Wenlock looked doubtful, but when Dalton laughed, he mustered a wry chuckle and pointed at their horses.

  “I have nothing to gain by moving on and I have nothing to gain by staying here, so I might as well accept my fate and follow this through to the inevitable end.”

  With that gloomy assessment of his situation, he joined Dalton in setting off after their horses. As it turned out, it took them around thirty minutes to catch up with and round up their skittish mounts, by which time Wenlock had regained his former level spirits.

  They decided not to seek Jarren’s help as Mayor Quantrill had now met him and he had probably told them about their role in recent events. When they’d mounted up, they rode upriver. They maintained a steady pace, not expecting that they would catch up with their quarries for a while, but after they had covered around five miles, Dalton raised a hand.

  “Slow down,” he called. “There’s movement ahead.”

  The two men drew back on the reins. It soon became clear that the movement came from two horses bustling around behind a tree at the water’s edge. They carried on cautiously until they were able to confirm that the horses were Gillespie’s and Knox’s mounts.

  “I can’t see anyone else around,” Wenlock said.

  Dalton was about to agree, but something moved behind the tree, and this time the movement was several yards off the ground.

  “Sadly, I can.”

  Dalton bade Wenlock to stop and a few moments later the movement came again, the sight making Wenlock groan. Gillespie and Knox had been strung up from the tree. Dalton and Wenlock both lowered their heads. Then they moved on.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “I can’t say that they didn’t deserve this fate,” Wenlock said as he stood before the dangling bodies. “But it’s still not right.”

  Gillespie was swinging in the breeze, his face contorted and suffused. Knox’s face didn’t look much different than before, but that was only because he had been shot several times, suggesting he’d put up a more determined defense and he’d been strung up after he’d died.

  “It’s not right,” Dalton said. “Knox needed to be tried in a court for what he did, and Gillespie needed to face the right charges for his crimes.”

  “With Quantrill still determined to deliver summary justice to everyone who crossed him, what are our chances of getting proper justice?”

  “We’ll worry about that after we’ve cut these men down.”

  With that, Dalton moved closer to the tree and began untying the rope holding up Gillespie’s body. Wenlock stayed back while regarding the bodies with distaste, but then, with a sigh, he moved in to deal with Knox.

  When they’d lowered the bodies to the ground, they set them down beside each other. Then Dalton searched through their pockets. He didn’t hold out much hope that one of the bodies would have the missing page on them, as when he and Wenlock had nearly been lynched, Quantrill had searched them and disposed of anything he found. Sure enough, their pockets were empty and their horses had none of their possessions on them.

  “We’ve given them some dignity, but we can’t risk taking the time to bury their bodies,” Wenlock said when Dalton had finished searching. “The mayor might return or someone else might find us.”

  “I agree, but it doesn’t feel right leaving them here,” Dalton said. “Perhaps we should risk visiting Jarren again. I doubt the news will concern him, but I’m sure he’ll be prepared to deal with their bodies.”

  Wenlock nodded. “And it’ll give us a chance to find out if he told Mayor Quantrill about us.”

  Dalton nodded, but then he bowed his head in disappointment, feeling reluctant to leave the scene despite the need to move on. Wenlock edged from foot to foot as he showed his eagerness to leave, but Dalton paced around the tree and then farther afield while examining the ground.

  He hoped that Quantrill might have only ripped up any documents he’d taken from the dead men and scattered them, but when he found nothing, he returned to the bodies while sighing.

  “My last chance to find out what happened to my sister has gone,” he said.

  “There’s still a small hope that the mayor has that page.”

  Wenlock frowned, showing he thought this was unlikely. Dalton shook his head.

  “I’m obliged for your attempt to keep my spirits up, but he had no reason to take it. I have to accept the truth that. . . .”

  Dalton trailed off and leaned forward to examine Knox’s body more closely. He hadn’t been mistaken. Knox’s jaw had dropped down displaying a scrunched up ball of paper in his mouth.

  Dalton went to his knees and dragged the paper out before prizing the body’s mouth fully open to check there was nothing else inside. Then he checked on Gillespie’s mouth and there, lodged in his throat, was the top of another wad of paper.

  Dalton thrust his fingers into the body’s mouth, but he couldn’t grip the paper and he had to use a twig to drag it out. He placed the two balled up sheets on the ground and gently teased one of them open. It was still damp, so he worked carefully.

  “He made Gillespie choke on that sheet of paper while he was being hanged,” Wenlock said as Dalton worked. “I guess he wanted him to suffer for stealing it from him.”

  Dalton stopped opening up the sheet as he registered what Wenlock was assuming. With a groan, he accepted he was probably right. The two sheets were the ones these men had taken from the office and not the page from the ledger that had been torn in half.

  Working less carefully, he flattened out the paper and confirmed that it didn’t list the names of children. Then again, it didn’t look like a legal document either as it had various items listed alongside their values, although a lot of the detail had been lost.

  He worked on the other sheet. When he’d opened it up, he passed both sheets to Wenlock, who scanned them before shrugging and passing them back to Dalton.

  “So you have no idea what it is?” Dalton asked.

  “It appears to be nothing more than a receipt for. . . .” Wenlock trailed off and took the sheets back from Dalton.

  He read the few legible words and then walked a few paces away with a hand pressed to his brow. Then he turned back to Dalton.

  “What have you just figured out?”

  “I can’t be sure, but I reckon I know what these papers show.” Wenlock waved both pages at Dalton. “Mayor Quantrill bought a load of items from Sidney Cushing, the man who came into town on the day we broke into the mayor’s office.”

  “So the man who’s helping Quantrill raise money to rebuild his office also sold him things.” Dalton shrugged. “That doesn’t sound sinister.”

  “It doesn’t unless you consider why Gillespie and Knox stole this document and why Quantrill thrust it down their throats. The reason has to be that the mayor wasn’t so much buying these items as converting a lot of cash he didn’t want anyone to know he had into goods.”

  Wenlock smiled, as if Dalton ought to understand his line of thinking. Dalton shrugged and was about to ask him to explain, but then he recalled what Jarren had told them. He smiled and slapped his forehead with a show of his surprise.

  “The Rafferty brothers didn’t want to find the money that Ollie Yarborough buried on their land because they’d worked out that Mayor Quantrill had already gotten to it. Then the mayor used that money to convert the orphanage into his office.”

  Wenlock nodded. “Quantrill keeps immaculate records, but it’d be foolish to keep something that’d incriminate him. He must have kept that document so he could use it against Sidney if he ever needed his help again.”

  “Clearly he did.”

  “The brothers knew that so their plan all along was to get hold of the evidence of what he did with the money and bribe him for a cut.”

  Dalton frowned. “Their plan could have worked, but Quantrill was even more ruthless than they expected.”

  “And in a way that gives us some hope. If we can get this evidence to the marshal, it’ll confirm his suspicions about the mayor’s behavior and help to prove that our involvement in the break-in was minor.”

  “I like that idea. We only have to avoid Quantrill on the way there and if the marshal is in town, our problems could be over.”

  With that plan in hand, Dalton hoped he might still find the missing page lying close by. Then, with a firm swing of the head, he forced himself to accept it wasn’t there and headed to his horse.

  When they’d mounted up, they agreed that as Quantrill and his gunmen might still be nearby, they should do what they’d originally intended and tell Jarren what had happened before they headed to town. They rode downriver and when they approached the house Jarren and Kathleen were sitting on a bench at the corner of the building.

  As they had feared, Jarren jumped to his feet and headed into his house. He came out clutching a rifle, but they still rode on and drew up twenty yards away from him.

  “We’re not here to waste any more of your time,” Wenlock called. “We need to tell you something.”

  “Do it,” Jarren said. He raised his rifle to shoulder height and aimed it at them. “Then leave.”

  Despite the rifle, with the somber nature of their news, Wenlock dismounted and walked on to stand in front of him.

  “I’m sorry to tell you this, but we came across two bodies a few miles upriver.”

  Jarren firmed his jaw, looking as if this news wasn’t enough to make him treat them differently. Then he flinched as he appeared to work out the likely identities of the dead men. He lowered the rifle and beckoned for them to come to the bench. Kathleen frowned and when he joined her, he placed a hand on her shoulder.

  “We thought we saw Gillespie and Knox riding by earlier,” she said. “Is it them?”

  “It is,” Wenlock said.

  “Then that’s the end of it.” Kathleen sighed. “How did they die?”

  “Mayor Quantrill and his hired guns got to them. It seems that Gillespie and Knox had been watching your house in the hope that the mayor would come here to look for them, but their ambush must have gone awry.” Wenlock lowered his voice. “He strung them up.”

  Jarren and Kathleen exchanged concerned looks that showed that despite everything this news had still shocked them.

  “Then you two will need to move quickly,” Jarren said.

  Wenlock sighed. “Does that mean Quantrill told you about us?”

  “He did, and no matter what the rights and wrongs of what you did in his office, it’s not got nothing to do with us.”

  “We understand. If we can leave you to deal with the bodies, we’ll head to town now.”

  Jarren tipped back his hat in surprise. “I’m prepared to do as you asked, but going to town could be dangerous for you. The men who strung them up can’t be far away.”

  “We know that, but we hope we can avoid them.” Wenlock gestured at Dalton. “We’ve decided to hand ourselves in and tell the law the truth about what happened.”

  Jarren gave a slow nod and Kathleen also nodded, suggesting they’d just made a decision despite not uttering a word.

  “You two will stay here where it’ll be safer, while we take the bodies to town and tell Marshal Latimer what you told us. I’m sure he’ll then come out here and talk to you.”

  “That’s mighty generous of you,” Wenlock said while Dalton offered the same sentiment.

  While Jarren and Kathleen got ready to leave, they sat on the bench as this provided them with a good vantage point to look out for anyone approaching the house. The couple said nothing more to them and when they had ridden away on a buggy, Dalton and Wenlock sat quietly for an hour.

  With it looking as if their problem with Mayor Quantrill might soon be resolved, Dalton turned his thoughts to his other problem, which he now doubted would ever have an acceptable answer.

  “What could have happened to that missing page?” he asked after a while.

  “I don’t know,” Wenlock said levelly. “You need to stop worrying about it and concentrate on getting our story straight for Marshal Latimer.”

  “I reckon we’ve already done that so I’m going back to my main problem, and no matter how I look at it, it doesn’t make no sense.” He counted off his points on his fingers. “The page was near to where Melville Ashdown’s name was listed. He was at the orphanage at the same time as I was. So it’s likely my name was on that page and it’s unlikely it was torn out accidentally before I stole the ledger. So someone did it deliberately afterward.”

  “I agree that’s the most likely possibility, but the answer died when Gillespie and Knox started swinging from that tree.”

  “I’m sure you’re right. Few people have had access to the ledger. As it wasn’t me or you, it had to be them. On the other hand, when we went off to find wood for the fire that night, we weren’t gone for that long. So they did well to find the right page so quickly.”

  Wenlock shrugged. “A man could drive himself loco trying to find an answer to problems like that.”

  “He could, but it’s the only dangling thread I can pick at if I’m to find an answer, and the more I think about it the stranger it feels that they found the right page in a ledger that it took you, a man with experience of reading such documents, well over an hour to read. . . .”

  Dalton trailed off as a worrying thought hit him. He tried to shake it away, but now that he’d considered it the solution felt as if it was the most likely one. He turned to Wenlock, and Wenlock reacted in the worst possible way by turning away from him, suggesting he’d picked up on his line of thought.

  “Maybe if we think this through we can find an answer,” he said with a gruff voice.

  “We don’t need to,” Dalton said, his voice rising with concern. “I’ve already done it. It was you. You tore out that page!”

  Chapter Fourteen

  For long moments Dalton waited, defying Wenlock to disagree with him, but Wenlock kept his back to him.

  “What I did isn’t as bad as it sounds,” he said.

  “So you did do it,” Dalton said. Then, with his anger growing, he leaped at Wenlock.

  He slammed into Wenlock’s back making him go sprawling over the bench. Then both men tipped off the bench and went tumbling to the ground. With Wenlock offering no resistance, they came to rest with Wenlock lying on his back and Dalton kneeling on top of him and his hands gripping his collar. He bunched his hands so the collar squeezed Wenlock’s neck and then raised himself to loom up over him.

  “I’m sorry,” Wenlock said, his voice strained from his constricted throat.

  “Where is it?”

  Wenlock struggled, but he failed to dislodge Dalton.

  “It’s gone.” Wenlock coughed painfully, but Dalton didn’t relax his hold. “Quantrill threw it in the river after Proctor had searched us and our belongings, but I—”

  Dalton roared with anger and rose up while dragging Wenlock to his feet. Wenlock didn’t try to defend himself, but that didn’t stop Dalton from drawing back his fist and then crunching it into Wenlock’s cheek.

  The blow made him go spinning away and slam into the wall between the door and the bench. Wenlock shook himself and turned around only to find that Dalton had advanced on him with both fists raised.

  “That was just a light tap,” he said. “Now you’re about to get pounded into the ground.”

  Dalton hammered a short-armed punch into Wenlock’s stomach making him gasp in pain and lower his head followed by a fierce uppercut to the chin that raised him back up again. Wenlock stumbled backward into the wall where he stood with his eyes rolling and his legs shaking.

  “Stop!” he cried with a hand raised. When Dalton only thrust back his fist, he fingered his cheek and straightened up. “You don’t need to see the page. I remembered the details that were written down.”

  “And?”

  “There wasn’t much and you have to believe me about that. Your sister was the name listed below yours and she was one of the children who were taken by someone who didn’t provide a destination or a signature.” Wenlock spread his hands, imploring Dalton to believe him. “Her name was Amanda.”

  “Amanda, my sister’s name is Amanda,” Dalton said, already feeling some of his anger seep away.

  “It’s not much, but it’s something.”

  “I guess it is.” Dalton lowered his fist. He walked away for a few paces as he tried to calm down and then returned. “Why did you do it?”

  “I wish I hadn’t, but I was scared,” Wenlock said, speaking so quickly his words ran into each other. “I’m not cut out to be a fugitive from justice and I didn’t know how I could get out of the mess I was in. So I sneaked back to the campsite and found the page with your name on it. I figured that if I had something you wanted you’d be forced to help me.”

  “I’d have done that anyhow.”

  “I’ve known that for a while, but I didn’t know it back then.” Wenlock lowered his head and rubbed the back of neck before facing Dalton. “I had intended to claim I’d found the page and blame Knox, but Quantrill destroyed it when he nearly lynched us. After that, I couldn’t find a way to tell you the details without admitting what I’d done, so I kept lying in the hope I’d find a way out, except I never did.”

  “That ought to show you that you need to stop lying. You’re not very good at it.”

  Wenlock nodded. With Dalton making no move to attack him again, he moved over to the bench. He flopped down on to it and fingered the spots where Dalton had hit him while wincing.

  “I’m not, so while I’m busy confessing there’s one other thing I ought to tell you. I set fire to the mayor’s office, both times.”

 

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