A Grieving Widow Turned Sheriff—But Her First Target Shocked the Entire Town
Part 2
They found the gang’s trail nine days later, cut cold through a burned-out relay station near the Washita crossing. Deputy Rafael Ortiz — a wiry ex-outlaw turned lawman who trusted his gut over his eyes — crouched over the ash and grunted.
“Eight riders, maybe ten. Split here. Half went toward Anadarko, half toward the border.” He looked up at Hendricks. “Your call, Marshal.”
“Border,” Hendricks said. “Cross is too smart to ride through Texas with his face known in every saloon between here and Waco. If he’s aiming for Mexico, Arizona’s his door.”
They rode with young Sam Whitfield trailing the posse, a boy of sixteen who’d begged his way onto the trail promising to cook and, when that failed to impress anyone, promising to learn to read sign the way Joss did. “Whitfield,” he corrected Ortiz for the third time over breakfast. “Just one t. Folks always put in two.” Joss had let him practice on her own boot prints in the ash by the fire that morning, and he’d gotten it right twice out of three tries, which for a boy his age was nothing to scoff at.
On the third evening, an ambush meant for the whole posse closed instead around only the two of them, cut off from the others after two of Cross’s riders had deliberately laid a false trail through the rocks. Silas Crane took them both. Only Joss survived what came after, dragged half a day’s ride from where Sam’s body was later found.
It was Crane who made the mistake that broke the case wide open. Sitting across the campfire that night, needling her about her dead husband, he pulled from his vest a small gold watch — dented, its chime flattened on one note — and wound it, letting the broken melody spill out into the dark like a confession he didn’t know he was making.
“Recognize this tune?” he grinned. “Took it off a fella on the Amarillo road, must be near a year back now. Him and an old man both. Screamed something awful, both of ’em, before they quit.”
Joss did not move. Did not breathe wrong. She only watched the firelight catch on metal that had once sat in her husband’s coat pocket every single night of their marriage, and understood, with a clarity that felt almost peaceful, exactly what she was going to do the moment her hands were free.
