Sheriff Purdy filed no charges against five men he could have sworn under oath he'd seen standing in his own town square. When a federal marshal asked him about it weeks later, he said only that he'd been occupied with a land dispute and hadn't gotten a clear look at anyone.
It cost the Wild Bunch a payroll they never touched, four days they hadn't planned to spend, and whatever safety anonymity might have given them in that stretch of Wyoming for a long while after. Reward notices in three counties grew a little more detailed that autumn, a little more determined. There is no version of this story in which outlaws ride away from a courthouse unpunished by their own choices. They remained wanted men. They rode on being wanted men.
They left before sunrise, before the town could decide what to do with gratitude it hadn't expected to owe.
Ruth Hargrove met them at the edge of her land anyway, her boy on her hip, her girl holding tight to her skirt the way she had on the day they'd first seen her.
"I don't know what to call what you did," she said.
"Don't call it anything," Curry said, and for once there was no edge in it. He looked at the boy a moment longer than the words required, then turned his horse north without waiting for a reply.
Carver lingered just long enough to fold a copy of the Buffalo paper, the one that would, in a week, run a small item about a fraudulent deed and a quietly corrected injustice, and hand it to Ruth's daughter, who had asked shyly whether they'd be in it.
"Might be," he said. "They never do get the details right, though. You remember it the way it happened, not the way they print it."
Ben paused by the fence line, the one that had first caught his eye four days before, now marked for the surveyor to set right. He said nothing, only nodded once, the way a man nods at a job he'd rather not have needed to notice in the first place.