The wagon was already loaded with her furniture when the five riders came over the ridge. A deputy stood on the porch steps of the Hargrove ranch house reading from a paper in a voice too loud for the words to mean anything kind. Ruth Hargrove stood in the yard with her two children pressed against her skirts, watching strangers carry her kitchen table out the front door like it belonged to them now.
"By order of the Johnson County District Court," the deputy read. "This property is to be surrendered to the Anglo Wyoming Cattle Company per writ of possession, possession effective immediately."
Nobody in the yard noticed the five men on the ridge yet. Will Carver noticed the paper in the deputy's hand first, not what it said, but how new the fold looked, like it had never sat in a drawer. Ben Kilpatrick noticed the fence line running crooked past the barn 30 yards short of where a fence like that should sit. Kid Curry noticed the littlest Hargrove boy, maybe six years old, trying not to cry and failing. And Butch Cassidy noticed all of it at once, the way he noticed everything, and said only, "Well, that's a poor way to spend an afternoon."
Five wanted men sat their horses on a ridge above a widow's ranch, and not one of them moved to ride away. What happened next would be worth talking about, whether Johnson County ever heard the whole truth of it or not.
They had come to Johnson County, Wyoming in the fall of 1900 for a simpler reason than justice. Butch had heard through a man in Buffalo who owed him a favor that the Anglo Wyoming Cattle Company kept a payroll safe in the town of Cottonwood Flats that was light on guards and heavy on cash. It was meant to be four days of quiet scouting, a look at the bank, a look at the roads out, and gone before anyone learned their names. Instead, they'd ridden over a ridge at the wrong hour and found a woman being put out of her house.
"Ain't our business," Curry said, though he didn't look away from the boy in the yard.
"No," Butch agreed. "It ain't."
Nobody moved their horse.
Down below, the deputy, a young man named Otis Reed who looked like he'd rather be anywhere else, finished reading his paper and folded it with the stiff care of someone who'd practiced folding it so he wouldn't have to look at the widow's face. Two men from the cattle company kept carrying furniture. A third, older, well-dressed in a gray coat too fine for a cattle outfit, stood near a buggy and watched without lifting a finger to help or to stop it.
"That the company man?" Sundance asked. He'd said nothing until now, but his eyes had been on the gray coat since they crested the ridge.