“Get your hands behind you,” Gaines ordered. Pritchard had no choice but to comply. The gangly deputy put a pistol barrel against his belly as the other two deputies shackled his hands behind his back.

“You didn’t really think Burnell Shipley was going to spend the rest of his life lookin’ over his shoulder, did you?” Gaines said in his high-pitched voice.

“I reckon not,” Pritchard answered.

“Even if Burnell didn’t want you dead,” Gaines said, “I damn sure wasn’t going to let you go off and join the Union army. My older brother, Reuben, is off fightin’ for the South.”

Pritchard vaguely remembered Deputy Gaines had an older brother who was just as gangly, ugly, and mean as Eli. Everyone thought he’d grown up and moved on, but no one could have guessed a Gaines boy would join up to fight for the Confederacy.

“Does Burnell know you’ve got a brother fighting for the South? Seems to me, as the head Union man in this county, he might take offense.”

“Pa sure took offense,” Gaines said, “before he died. Having his oldest son run off to fight for the South is likely what killed him.”

“Maybe Burnell will feel the same way?”

“What he don’t know,” Gaines said, “won’t hurt him. Me, either.”

Gaines and the county deputies had obviously been lying in wait to waylay Pritchard on Shipley’s orders. He realized, with bitterness, that his mother would never know his fate. She would honor the pact she’d made to preserve his life, never learning that Shipley had crawfished on his end of the deal. Dovie Pritchard would marry the repugnant mayor, taking comfort in the false knowledge her sacrifice had been her son’s salvation. His insides roiled.

“Let’s get moving,” Gaines ordered. The two deputies brought out three horses, which had been tied out of sight in the woods. One of the them took the reins of Pritchard’s horse as the three lawmen mounted up.

“Where’re we going?” Pritchard asked.

“Down to the river,” Gaines said.

“The river Jordan,” one of the other deputies said with a smirk.

The quartet rode for another mile before Gaines led them off the road into the heavy woods. The Missouri River was only a hundred yards away.

When they reached the riverbank, Gaines stopped. He dismounted and signaled for the deputies to follow suit.

“Get him off his horse,” Gaines said. One of the deputies, Boudroy, a heavyset man in his thirties with a full beard, shoved Pritchard from the saddle. He fell, with his hands bound behind him, heavily to the soft earth.

Gaines produced a short shovel from his saddle and tossed it to the other deputy, a thin, dirty-looking, man named Merle Crittenden. “Start digging.”

“Why don’t we have him do it?” Crittenden complained, pointing the shovel at Pritchard. “He looks stout enough to dig a forty-foot well in a single afternoon.”