Nate, hearing the account second hand, felt the particular guilt of a decision made a year and a half earlier reaching forward to nearly cost people considerably more than he'd ever intended. When he'd simply fired a dishonest hand rather than pressed formal charges against him. I gave him a chance to walk away clean instead of facing a judge. He told Josie that evening. Turning the whole business over with visible unease.
Seemed the decent thing at the time. I wonder now whether decent and foolish weren't sitting a good deal closer together than I realized. You can't govern a man's choices by being generous to him once. Josie said, firm in the particular way she got when she'd already thought a problem through fully before speaking on it. Pharaoh chose robbery over honest work with his eyes wide open.
Same as he chose to hold up a stagecoach full of strangers rather than settle whatever grievance he thought he had directly with you. That's his choosing Nate, not yours to carry. He did not entirely stop carrying it. Not fully. Not for a good while yet.
But her plain reasoning settled something in him regardless. The particular relief of hearing a hard truth spoken by someone who had earned the right to speak it plainly. Having faced the consequence of his old decision at closer range than either of them would have chosen. The Cimarron breaks. They rode out at first light.
Six men and Josie, following a line of broken country toward the old shack Farrow had once used tending the Holt herd's furthest pastures. And Josie found herself working her way along a trail she'd ridden a dozen times before under entirely different circumstances. Thinking less about the danger ahead than about the strange, sudden shift that had settled between herself and Nate Holt over the course of a single difficult day. They had known each other 20-some years without either of them, by her own honest reckoning, ever really looking closely enough to notice what stood in front of them. And it had taken a robbery, a ruined bouquet, and a stranger's rifle to force the kind of attention neither had previously made time for.
She caught him watching her more than once on that ride. Not with the worried, protective concern he'd shown cleaning her wound the evening before, but with something quieter and more searching. And she found she did not particularly mind being looked at that way. The shack, when they reached it, held exactly what the sheriff had predicted. Dutch Farrow laid up on a cot with his shoulder wound gone ugly and untreated, and two nervous partners who surrendered without much fight once they saw the size of the posse arrayed against them.
Farrow himself managed only a weak, bitter laugh at the sight of Josie among the riders. "Should have finished you first," he said through clenched teeth as the sheriff's deputies bound his good arm. "Would have saved myself this whole mess if I had." "You had your chance yesterday and used it poorly," Josie told him without particular heat, already turning her horse toward the ride back. "I'd think considerably harder next time about picking a fight with someone who knows the ground better than you do.
Except, I expect there won't be a next time given where you're headed. Faro's confession, delivered to the county prosecutor over the following days, closed out all three of the autumn holdups cleanly. And Nate's ranch, along with the stage line itself, settled back into its ordinary rhythms with a relief that took several weeks to fully register after months of quiet worry over the route. It was nearly a month later, on an evening warm enough to sit out on the porch after supper, that Nate finally said aloud what both of them had been circling around since the day the wagon came up his lane with the wrong woman driving it. I wrote to Adelaide, actually, he told Josie, watching her reaction carefully.
Wanted her to know Faro was caught. And that whatever happened that day wasn't any failure on her part. She wrote back kind words, wished us both well. In fact, having apparently pieced together considerably more from my letter than I intended to reveal about how the day actually ended. He paused, working up to the rest of it with visible effort.
I keep thinking about something my mother used to have framed above her writing desk. Words she always said belonged to a man who understood something true about living bravely. Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat. Theodore Roosevelt said that near enough 20 years back, and I never much thought about what it meant until I watched you climb down off that wagon holding a rifle you'd earned instead of the flowers I'd sent for someone else entirely. Those flowers survived considerably rougher treatment than most bouquets manage, Josie said.
And there was warmth under the dry humor now. Warmth she was no longer particularly interested in hiding. I've still got what's left of them pressed in my mother's old Bible if you're curious. Didn't seem right to just let them go to waste after everything they'd been through to get here. He asked her properly that same evening without any of the careful formality he'd once planned to offer a stranger stepping off a coach.
And she said yes without any hesitation at all. Because whatever uncertainty either of them had carried into that difficult Tuesday had long since burned away into something considerably steadier. They married that autumn at the Holt Ranch, a modest gathering of both families and half of Cottonwood Bend besides. And Nate had the confiscated Winchester mounted above the parlor mantel afterward. Not as a trophy exactly.
But as a plain reminder of the day his whole future had arrived nine miles late. Considerably worse for wear and exactly right regardless. The pressed flowers went into a frame beside it eventually. Faded but intact. Proof enough for anyone who asked that some things however roughly handled on the way still arrive precisely where they were always meant to.