In his mind, he counted off the men he would have to contend with. Hugh MacRae was the most formidable, but, for the time being, their interests coincided. And Hugh’s brother Donald did as Hugh told him.

Next in order of prominence came the Taylor brothers.

Colonel Walker Taylor, officially in charge of the State Guard, could be a problem. He seemed to want to run things. But he favored posture—intimidation and threat—over outright violence: stand up straight, shoulder to shoulder, and you won’t have to fire a shot. That was good. Walker Taylor had high-minded ideas about duty and honor. He would act with restraint. Still, if things got out of control, he was a brave man who would give orders to shoot to kill. Waddell must be careful when and how to use him.

J. Allan Taylor, who held no official claim to anything, was the brother to watch. He had close ties to Hugh MacRae and lacked Walker’s patience and restraint. He would charge in and do the job, quick and dirty and mean. He wanted results. He didn’t much care about the legal niceties—he was used to fixing them up later. He was still bitter about how much his father had lost in the War, and he aimed to get it back any way he could. If you crossed him, he was the kind of man who would pull a pistol and shoot you between the eyes in front of a hundred witnesses, then go take his supper.

George Rountree was the smartest of the bunch. Waddell liked him the least. In some ways, they thought alike—Rountree was always scouting out the board three moves ahead of everybody else. And they both served the law. But Rountree was a fanatic on the subject—he wouldn’t cross the street without the proper paperwork. He knew precedents and counter-precedents, ordinances and codes, right down to their subsections and footnotes.

For Waddell, the law was a drama, the courtroom a theater—exactly like the courthouse meeting. The broad sweep of justice ranged from tragedy to farce. Each trial had its own set of players, protagonist and antagonist, and a rising curve of suspense as they struggled toward the climax—that moment of decision after which nothing would ever be the same.

At the center of each trial was the nut: one actor wanted something, and the other would stop at nothing to keep him from having it. A stage-managed combat by proxy. The consequences might be staggering—fines, hard labor, life imprisonment, even death.