The room held that silence for a long moment after the old man laid the empty revolver down atop the row of bullets, nobody quite sure yet whether they'd just watched a reckoning or a confession.
And it was Elias Boone who finally spoke into it.
"A man saying what he just said in front of a room full of strangers with a loaded gun already in his hand... that ain't the kind of thing a killer usually bothers doing," Boone said. "Killers usually just kill and ride on. He had every reason to, sitting right there in front of all of us, and he chose different."
"That's not the man this room needs to worry about," said a thin, hollow-eyed miner near the door, a man named Curly Sawyer, who hadn't spoken a word since the whiskey first hit the old man's hat. "It's him."
He nodded toward Cassidy, his voice gaining steadiness with every word. "Took near half my claim last spring. Told me the paperwork read different than what I'd filed with my own hand. And there wasn't a court in this whole camp fit to argue it with him."
Another voice picked it up before Sawyer had even finished: a faro dealer describing money Cassidy had skimmed off the top of every big pot at his table for three months running under a threat nobody had dared refuse out loud.
Then a third, quieter voice describing a gambler beaten half-senseless in the alley behind the Bella Union back in July for the crime of winning too consistently at Cassidy's own table.
Cassidy sat frozen through all of it, watching four months of carefully cultivated fear collapse, testimony by testimony, into something closer to an honest accounting.