Read Chapter 4: The Pocket Watch

The bank sat at the north end of Main Street like a fat hen roosting over her eggs. Two stories of whitewashed brick, iron bars on the windows, and a door that looked like it had been carved from a single slab of oak. Eli stood in the alley across from it, watching the last lamp die on the upper floor. The tellers had gone home an hour ago. The night guard—a man named Hatcher who Eli had seen drinking at the saloon—had stumbled out the front door at half past nine, already loose in the shoulders.

That left only Moreau.

Eli had watched the clerk for two days now. Moreau was a thin, precise man who wore his spectacles on a chain and walked like he was carrying a full chamber pot. He left the bank at exactly ten minutes past six, ate at the boarding house, and returned to the bank at half past seven. Every night. He slept in a small room behind the vault, a cot and a lamp and a stack of ledgers. Calvin Cross trusted him with the keys and the numbers and nothing else.

The lamp in the upper window died. Eli counted to sixty, then crossed the street.

The lock on the side door was a simple lever mechanism, old and worn from years of use. Eli worked it with a length of spring steel he'd carried since the war, feeling the tumblers give one by one. The door swung inward on silent hinges—Moreau oiled them well, at least.

The bank's interior smelled of ink and lamp oil and the particular mustiness of money. Eli moved through the customer area with his boots wrapped in cloth, past the teller cages with their brass grilles, past the long oak counter scarred by years of impatient coins. The vault door stood at the back, a massive thing of iron and steel that would have taken a team of horses to move.

But the vault door wasn't the prize.

Jenkins had been drunk and weeping when he'd told Eli about the box. Moreau kept it in a cutout behind the filing cabinet in his office, a space barely large enough for a coffin. Calvin Cross had a sense of theater about his sins. The vault was for show. The real secrets lived closer to the man who guarded them.

Eli found the office at the end of a narrow hallway. The filing cabinet sat against the far wall, exactly where Jenkins had said it would be. Eli pulled it forward—it rolled on casters, the bottom drawer scraping against the floorboards—and found the cutout behind it.

The box was there.

It was smaller than Eli had expected. Made of iron, painted black, with a lid that curved like the top of a casket. A coffin, sure enough. Eli lifted it onto the desk and examined the lock. A simple padlock, but the mechanism was newer than the box itself. Cross had replaced it. Eli worked his spring steel into the keyhole, feeling for the pins.

It took him four minutes. His hands were steady, but his heart was not. Twenty years of running, twenty years of looking over his shoulder, and the truth of what happened on Deadman's Ridge was sitting inside this box. Jonas's last words echoed in his skull: *Make it mean something.*

The lock clicked open.

Eli lifted the lid.

Empty.

The box was lined with green felt, and there was a rectangular impression in it where papers had once rested. Nothing else. No unsigned deed. No letters. Just the ghost of what had been there, pressed into the fabric like a fossil.

Eli stood very still. The air in the small office was close and warm, and he could feel the sweat beginning to bead at the back of his neck. Jenkins had sworn the documents were here. Jenkins had wept about them, had described the way Cross had shown them to him one night, gloating about the insurance they represented.

Either Jenkins had lied, or someone had moved them.

Then Eli noticed the box was deeper than it needed to be. He ran his fingers along the inside bottom, felt a seam where the felt had been cut and re-pressed. He worked his fingernails into it and lifted.

Beneath the false bottom lay a single item.

A gold pocket watch.

Eli's breath caught in his throat. He knew the watch before he even picked it up. He'd bought it in Sacramento in '52, the year they'd struck enough color to buy new boots. John had admired it, turning it over in his calloused hands, and Eli had pressed it into his palm.

"Happy birthday," he'd said. "You're the only one of us who keeps proper time."

John had laughed. Had worn it every day after. Had checked it constantly, not for the time but for the comfort of it, the weight of it in his pocket.

Eli picked the watch up now. The case was warm against his fingers, as if it had been held recently. He flipped it open.

The face was the same. The hands were frozen at 4:22. But on the inside of the case, where there had once been nothing, someone had engraved an inscription.

*C.C. — From the Ridge, With Thanks.*

Calvin Cross had taken John's watch—taken it from John's body, most likely, or from the dirt where John had fallen—and had his own initials etched into it. A trophy. A reminder of what he'd done and what he'd gotten away with.

Eli's hand closed around the watch. The metal bit into his palm.

Something creaked in the hallway.

Eli turned. The watch disappeared into his vest pocket. The black coffin box sat open on the desk, its false bottom still lifted. He drew his revolver and stepped to the side of the door, pressing his back against the wall.

Footsteps. Soft ones. Slippered ones.

A figure appeared in the doorway. Moreau, in a long nightshirt with a lamp held high. His spectacles glinted in the light, and his thin face went pale when he saw the black box on the desk.

"Who—"

Eli's arm snaked around Moreau's throat from behind. The lamp clattered to the floor, the glass shattering, the flame guttering out. Moreau struggled, clawing at Eli's forearm, but Eli had twenty years of coal dust in his muscles and the grip of a man who had stopped running.

"Quiet," Eli said, his voice low against Moreau's ear. "You make a sound, I'll put you in the box Cross built."

Moreau went still. His hands trembled where they gripped Eli's arm.

"I know what Cross keeps," Eli said. "I know about the deed. The letters. The papers that were in this box. Where are they?"

"Gone," Moreau choked out. "He moved them. A week ago. Said he'd found a safer place."

The words hit Eli like a fist. A week ago. He'd been in the saloon a week ago, drinking bad whiskey and watching Cross strut through his town. A week ago, the evidence had still been here.

"Where?" Eli demanded.

"I don't know," Moreau gasped. "He didn't tell me. He never tells me. He just came in and took the box and I didn't see where he put it."

Eli could feel the man's pulse hammering against his arm, rabbit-fast with terror. He believed him. Moreau was a clerk, a bureaucrat. Cross wouldn't trust him with the new location. That was the kind of secret Cross kept for himself.

But the watch was something. The watch was proof that Cross had been at the ridge. Proof that he'd taken something from John's body. Proof that the whole story about the bandit attack was a lie.

Eli loosened his grip. Moreau sagged against the doorframe, gasping.

"You're going to forget this," Eli said. "You're going to tell Cross the box was moved and nothing was disturbed. You never saw anyone. You heard nothing."

Moreau nodded frantically. "Yes. Yes, I swear."

Eli studied him for a moment. The man was a coward, but cowards had their uses. A frightened clerk would go to Cross in the morning, certain that he'd covered his tracks. And Cross, arrogant as he was, would believe him.

"One more thing," Eli said. "When Cross asks—and he will ask—you tell him the box was empty when you opened it. That someone beat him to it and left nothing behind."

Moreau's face twisted with confusion. "But—"

"Tell him what I said. It'll make him wonder. It'll make him worry. And a worried man makes mistakes."

Eli stepped past Moreau, into the hallway, then turned back. The clerk still stood in the doorway, shaking, his nightshirt stained with lamp oil.

"Cross has a partner named John," Eli said. "Had a partner named John. Do you know what happened to John's body?"

Moreau's eyes went wide. "I—I don't know what you're—"

"You know," Eli said. "You know what Cross does with his problems. You've been here long enough."

He didn't wait for an answer. He moved down the hallway to the back door, slipping out into the night, the watch heavy and warm in his vest pocket. The cool air hit his face, and he walked quickly through the alleys until he reached the livery where his horse waited.

The watch was in his hand again before he realized he'd taken it out. He turned it over, feeling the engraving under his thumb. C.C. From the Ridge, With Thanks.

Calvin Cross had taken John's life and John's watch and John's name. He'd built his empire on the bones of Eli's partners and called it fortune.

Eli closed his hand around the watch. Then he mounted up and rode north, toward the ravine where he'd buried John Abel twenty years ago, a question burning in his chest that he was afraid to answer.

If Cross had taken the watch from John's body, what else had he taken?