“Alright then, one atonement.”

The Deputy sucked his breath in through his small nostrils and squinted up at her. “Twenty’s the limit,” he said.

“I know it.”

“So how many you want?”

“One,” she said again.

He looked up at the sky and then spat into the dust before licking his pencil once again. “Four atonements,” he replied, and wrote it down in the notebook. He ripped out the paper and put it in his mouth, holding it there while his hands put away the notebook and pencil. Then he thrust the paper toward Lady Mae, who went down the last step and took it out of his hand. The wind kicked up again, and he put his arm up to his hat to keep it from blowing off.

“If I see Arbuckle again, I’ll tell him you said hello.” He had her then, and she knew it. “Court’s at eight a.m. tomorrow,” he said. “Don’t be late.”

* * *

Lady Mae was washing the floor of the depot when Arbuckle knocked hours later. She’d hoped to have the place in order, but her appointment had run long and the patient, old Herschel from the cannery whom she’d thought would be easy to subdue, had jerked and seized in the chair even though it was his sixth and final atonement. She knew him a little by now, knew his family and his children and what he had done to protect them years ago when Arbuckle’s father was still around. She might’ve done it, too, and thought about it as she sliced into his skin first with a scalpel and then again as she shimmied the bone cutter beneath his flesh. It had been difficult to get the entire hand quickly. She’d been distracted, worried that Deputy Iverson had passed Arbuckle again on the way back into town and had gotten to him. Herschel had bled significantly but not dangerously, but Lady Mae thought only of the four lines across Deputy Iverson’s face and the drip in his voice and the pail in her hand. So when Lady Mae heard Arbuckle’s knock—a knock she knew like the back of her hand—she let out the breath she’d been holding inside. He was there, and he was alive.

“I’ll be just a minute,” she called through the door. She could see his silhouette, shaded by the eaves and leaning against the frame.

“Alright,” he said. She was glad he wasn’t allowed in, that he wouldn’t see up close the stained tools or the red drops that went from the chair to the door. Herschel had refused the bandage and said he’d rather die of an infection than let her touch him again, and so she sent him off having only cauterized the severed stump with gunpowder and flame.

When she finished cleaning the floor as best she could, she threw the tools into her kit—she’d clean them up later at home—and went to the door. A hot gust of wind came, and Arbuckle reached up to keep his hat in place.