"He's alive," said Iona. "You kept him alive."
Holloway shut his eyes. A breath went out of him that was not a dying breath; it was something else, a long letting-go. When he opened them again they were wet.
"I owed Saybrook eleven hundred dollars," he said. "Sutler's credit, and my sister's passage from Cork, and drink. More drink than the rest. He said I'd only have to keep the scouts busy and bring the escort into the canyon late. He said nobody would be hurt but stock. I knew he was lying. I made myself not know." His hand moved in the sand toward the pistol at his own hip. Asa, who had come down behind them, stepped forward, and Holloway shook his head weakly and drew the revolver out by two fingers and turned it butt-first. He did not hold it out to Asa. He held it out to Iona.
"Not to the army," he said. "The army'll court-martial me and shoot me and bury it. I want it said in a courtroom. Saybrook. The ledger in the near wagon. Tull. Me. All of it."
Iona took the revolver. It was heavier than she expected. She did not know what to do with it, so she held it the way she had once held a dead bird a child had brought her, carefully, away from her body. In her other hand the star caught the sun.
She did not know the words. She found she did not need them to be the right ones.
"Sergeant Dacey Holloway," she said, and her voice shook only a little. "On behalf of Deputy Marshal Callum MacRae, and by his summons, I'm placing you under arrest in the name of the United States. You'll be carried to Tucson and tried there, in a courtroom, with all of it said aloud." She turned. "And that man too. Mr. Tull."
From where he lay bound in the sand, Tull laughed at her. "A schoolmarm," he said, "with a tin star."
"Brass," said Iona. "And it isn't mine. That's why it works."
VIII.
They came back into Ojo Prieto at the same hour Nalté had come in the evening before, with the light pouring gold down the valley and the adobe walls glowing. They came slowly. Callum rode on a travois behind the gray mare, cursing every stone. Holloway lay in the bed of Saybrook's freight wagon on a pile of blankets with lint from Iona's saddlebag packed into his chest and Private Varga sitting beside him, holding the water. Tull sat in the back of the second wagon with his wrists bound, and no one had washed his face.
The wagon company came out through the gate to meet them, the men first and then the women with children on their hips, and they stopped when they saw him. They stood and looked at the red stripes on his cheeks and the lampblack band across his eyes and the horsehair braids hanging from the hat somebody had thrown in the wagon bed beside him. Nobody said anything for a long time. Tobias Stroud, standing by his father, reached up and took his father's hand, which he had not done since he was six.
Ephraim Stroud walked to where Nalté sat his horse. He took off his hat.