"None of that's got anything to do with some fire eight years back in another territory," Cassidy said. But there was no real fight left in his voice anymore—just the thin, last argument of a man who could feel the whole room deciding something without waiting on his permission to do it.
"Don't need it to," Boone said. "Antelope Creek's the reason this whole room's still standing here listening to you instead of going back to their cards. What you did to Sawyer and half this camp since spring is the reason you're not walking back out that door tonight with your guns loaded."
Cassidy looked toward the old man, some last flicker of hope crossing his face that the stranger who just spared his life might also speak up for him now, and found nothing there but the same steady, unreadable patience that had unsettled him from the very first minute he'd noticed it sitting quietly in that corner.
"I'm not deciding anything for this town," the old man said. "Never came here to. What happens to him past tonight is yours to settle, same as it would have been before I ever rode in and sat down for a cup of coffee."
Boone looked around the room at Sawyer, at the dealer, at a dozen other men who'd spent months quietly paying Cassidy's tax on fear without ever once naming it out loud in front of witnesses, and found, without much further discussion needed, the kind of quiet consensus a camp without formal law relied on to keep itself from tearing apart entirely.
Cassidy would be walked to the edge of Deadwood by sundown, his guns emptied first, his reputation already dying faster than any horse could carry him away from it.
Four men from the crowd walked Cassidy out as the light went long and gold across Main Street, his horse saddled by somebody else's hands, his revolvers returned only after being emptied—a warning riding out with him that Deadwood's particular version of frontier justice rarely offered second chances to men who'd already spent one lifetime running from a first crime.
The old man stayed only long enough to finish coffee that had gone fully cold an hour earlier, ignoring the small crowd hovering near his table, hoping for more of a story than he clearly had any intention of telling twice in one afternoon.