"It won't," Butch said. "Not on its own. Purdy's already got a judge's ruling to stand behind and he's not inclined to second-guess it over a page number. We need something he can't ignore. Something the whole town sees at once before he's got time to decide not to look."
That night, for the first time since the ridge, Butch laid out something that resembled a plan. The plan required one more piece and it came from where none of them expected it. Ruth Hargrove herself provided it.
On the fourth night, with two days left before the deadline, she rode alone into the Cottonwood camp, a widow with two children asleep in a borrowed room at the boarding house, risking her reputation and her safety to sit across a campfire from five wanted men because she had run out of anyone else who might listen.
"There's something I haven't told the sheriff," she said. "My husband's cousin, Elias, clerked for the county two years back. Left under some cloud nobody explained to me. He wrote me a letter in June after David passed, asking after the ranch's papers in a way that struck me as strange for a man in mourning. I kept the letter. I don't rightly know why."
She produced it, folded soft from handling, and passed it to Carver.
"That's his hand," Carver said after a moment, comparing it against the notary's signature on a copy of the writ Butch still carried. "Or close enough to fool most eyes. But look here. The witness signature on the deed is looser, hurried. This letter's careful, even proud of itself. A man forging another man's confidence writes different than he writes his own name."
"There's your motive, and maybe your hand as well," Sundance said. It wasn't quite proof a court would take, but it was more than they'd had that morning.
"We tell Wren," Butch said.
"He'll not believe outlaws over his own company," Curry said.