Kempton began pacing back and forth, chewing his lip—a man trying to find something to say while he was trying not to say what wanted to come out. “If you just hand the job to me, I guess I'll take it. I don't want to take it from you, but you're acting like you don't want to be sheriff anymore. It's all about how people see you. That's what it is, right there. How people see you.”

“I prefer how the Heavenly Father sees me.”

“Of course. That's the only way. But those Power boys are disrupting the natural order of things. And to attack the order of things is to attack the Heavenly Father who created it. And I, for one, don't want to let that go on.”

“Did you just come up with that argument, or have you been working on it? It would make a fine campaign speech.”

“It's the truth, the way I see it. And here's more. I'm not running for sheriff.”

Martin did want to be sheriff. That was as clear as a June morning. And Haynes was even more self-serving than Martin, and his service took less honorable avenues. Martin was right that the people would want the Power boys brought in—at least, the good people would. They would want them brought in and thrown in jail or worse.

And the “worse” bothered him. Without the death penalty, which the state had forgone in order to get into the Union, a lot of people would find the process too slow, too weak for their liking. People didn't like deliberation. They liked action. And they might well come for the boys or even the Old Man, and they would come with ropes and an earnest desire to show that they would not be trifled with. There was, certainly, the possibility of a riot or a lynching at the end of this business. McBride couldn't shake the feeling that all this was because Tom Power had somehow bested Haynes and Kane Wootan in some illegal whiskey business. McBride wished, vaguely, that he had chosen to remain a carpenter.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

1918

It was no more than a walk through Bonita Canyon, through the scrub oak and mesquite, a steady uphill pull they were able to do standing up, not crouched, not looking back over their shoulders. Poke had given them a good lead on their pursuers. Ahead of them lay more than twenty miles of mountain to climb and scramble through, but Poke was right. A few miles in, and they would be mostly free from pursuit. The mountain would turn the others back, except for Wootan, of course, and whatever lackeys and crazies he would talk into climbing into the mountains with him. Tom couldn't even think how many times in his life, when things seemed to be going his way, a damned Wootan showed up.