Jud’s eyes blazed.
“You could have told me.”
“I thought you were dead too!”
Silence.
Thomas swallowed.
“Until Catherine described you in her letters.”
Catherine froze.
“My letters?”
Thomas looked at her.
“The guard lets me read them before they take them away.”
Catherine remembered.
Her letter from the way station two winters earlier.
Descriptions of rumors she’d heard.
Of a scarred mountain man near Devil’s Backbone.
Her stomach dropped.
“You suspected?”
Thomas nodded.
“Not until months ago.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because Pike read everything.”
Catherine pressed both hands over her mouth.
Thomas looked at Jud.
“I tried to send a message through her.”
Jud whispered, “What message?”
Catherine suddenly remembered the strangest line in Thomas’s last letter.
Something she had assumed was a prisoner’s melancholy.
She recited it.
“Tell the mountains some ghosts still have families waiting beyond them.”
Jud closed his eyes.
Catherine began crying.
Thomas reached into his shirt.
His fingers produced a tiny folded scrap wrapped in oilcloth.
“I’ve carried this for six years.”
Jud took it.
Inside was an address.
Salt Lake City.
And beneath it, in a woman’s handwriting:
If Elias lives, tell him Noah still sleeps with the wooden horse his father made him.
Jud stopped breathing.
The huge man who had crossed avalanches, faced gunmen, and dragged Catherine through a blizzard sank slowly onto the steps beneath the gallows.
He covered his face.
Catherine knelt beside him.
His shoulders shook.
She had never seen him cry.
Perhaps no one had.
The family he had mourned for six years had been alive the entire time.
And the condemned man Catherine had crossed Wyoming to save had been the one protecting them.
By noon, a federal detachment from Fort Bridger rode into South Pass City.
The telegraph line, repaired during the night, had carried Dr. Sloan’s confession east.
Judge Vale, Sheriff Pike, and four deputies were taken into custody.
Hollis Breen was arrested two days later attempting to cross into Colorado.
Thomas Prescott’s conviction was formally vacated.
But none of that mattered to Catherine as much as watching her brother walk outside without chains.
They stood together beneath a bright blue Wyoming sky.
Thomas’s shoulder was bandaged.
Catherine touched his face.
“You look terrible.”
“So do you.”
“I crossed a mountain.”
“I spent six years in prison.”
She smiled through tears.
“I still win.”
Thomas laughed.
Then pulled her against him.
Catherine buried her face against his shoulder.
“I thought I was going to lose you.”
“You didn’t.”
“I almost did.”
“But you didn’t.”
Over Thomas’s shoulder, she saw Jud saddling Solomon.
Her happiness faltered.
She walked toward him.
“You’re leaving.”
He nodded.
“Salt Lake.”
“Of course.”
A silence settled between them.
Catherine understood what he needed to do.
He had a wife.
Perhaps still his wife in every way that mattered.
A son who had grown six years without him.
The kiss beneath the rocks suddenly felt like something stolen from another life.
Catherine forced herself to smile.
“You should go.”
Jud looked at her.
“Catherine—”
“No.”
She touched his hand.
“Don’t apologize for having something worth going back to.”
His eyes filled with pain.
“I didn’t know.”
“I know.”
“I thought they were dead.”
“I know.”
“I meant what happened between us.”
That hurt most.
Catherine nodded.
“So did I.”
Jud looked as though he wanted to say more.
