"Sheriff, I brought the dead men's belongings."
Taylor looked up from the tin plate of dinner sitting on his desk. The excitement of the afternoon had worn off. Only four men remained from the original lynch mob, along with Speaking Wind - the elder from his tribe - and four deputies. He had been trapped in his office nearly all day to deal with the complaints from the families whose men were murdered by Fighting Badger.
The beefy deputy standing guard outside his office didn't let the undertaker's apprentice enter. Taylor stepped onto the sidewalk for the first time since he'd arrived that morning. It was dark, and the chilled wind held droplets of rain.
"The others were returned to their families. We didn't know what to do with these," the apprentice said and held out a wooden box.
"I'll take them," Taylor said. Rather than return to the warm office, he sat down beneath the light of one of its windows to sort through the belongings of the two agents killed.
His agency had a protocol forbidding agents from carrying anything that identified them as someone other than who they pretended to be. Despite this, a sliver of desperate hope rendered his fingers clumsy as he sorted through everything. All he needed was one communications device, a single method to contact his agency or better yet, The Mongol, whose presence in town had been whispered about since shortly after Lance arrived.
There was nothing. Disappointed, he pushed the box aside and gazed out at the night. It was his first real breather this day, and he relished the undisturbed moment to think.
As they had since John's death, his thoughts went first to Josie. She'd been upset when she visited earlier. He hoped it was because of Fighting Badger's visit and not because there was something else wrong. He still smelled her scent on his skin, a reminder of the night that was supposed to be the first of a lifetime of peace and retirement.
Instead, his brother - and potentially grandfather - was about to be hanged, leaving Josie exposed to whoever it was that killed the others who came before her or worse, in the hands of The Mongol. Either way, she wasn't going to last long without protection. His best-case scenario: they'd be on the run the rest of their lives.
After all his years of service, this was how his agency repaid him?
He suppressed the anger, well aware that his agency had nothing to do with Fighting Badger taking out innocent people. He was torn between gratitude that his brother had saved Josie and regret, wishing she had never crossed paths with the native.