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exposing battered, wood-colored teeth. He released Pruett’s hand, picked up the tray of food, took it back to his bunk, and started eating hungrily.
    The sheriff walked the hallway back to the office. He again felt cowardly. It was not a feeling he planned on befriending. Maybe it was too soon to be back. Baptiste and Munney argued against his returning so soon, and only with what candor they could muster. It was clear that he was pushing the line, but that was how he lived and worked; he wasn’t planning on changing that. And Pruett prided himself in his ability to detach from the personal. He knew how to work; how to put the job first and be a sheriff.
    But after the stupid mistake back in lockdown, he now wondered if he’d misjudged the place of his heart in all of it. No one would blame him, but that wasn’t the point. He would not be able to stand the look of his own mug in the mirror.
    Back in his chair, shame and fury swirled in his head like a chimney fire. Fueled by the self-embarrassment of his failure back at the Willow Saloon, he returned to Ty’s cell.
    “I'd kill you if duty didn’t say otherwise,” Pruett said.
    Ty did not look up from his plate.
    “Guess I have it coming,” he said.
    “You do,” Pruett said. “But my job is to treat you like any other. Let the jury decide and the State hang you.”
    “Don’t hang ‘em in Wyoming anymore, Sheriff. You know that. It’s been a few years at least.”
    “You and I never cared much for one another, Ty. But I’m guessin’ we both loved Bethy.”
    “I always thought highly of you, Sheriff. Really I did, no matter what me or some of the fellas mighta said on a drunk occasion or two. You’re a good man, sir, and over the years, I became grateful you found Bethy and did right by her. You always treated me fair, too, every damn time I was in the poke.”
    Ty was a brawler and a drunk and had spent many nights cooling off in the very cell that he now occupied. “Is that all you come back to say?” Ty said.
    “No,” said Pruett.
    Ty looked up at him with coal-colored, scurrilous eyes.
    “Then say it.”
    “I don't know what happened on the ranch for sure,” the sheriff said. “I know what you already said. Your pa and brother aren't saying anything else. Neither is Honey. I would advise you to get a lawyer and follow suit.”
    “Already happenin’,” said Ty. “Niece in Laramie is tryin’ to gather one up. Some professor.”
    “A professor?”
    “Like that'll help, I says to her. But she said to shut my trap just the same.”
    “Give a shout when the food’s done,” Pruett said. “I’ll send a deputy.”
    “I meant what I said about sorry,” Ty said, returning to his plate. “But just so we’re clear…I won't be sayin’ it again.”
    “I meant it, too,” Pruett said. “All of it.”
    As the sheriff walked away, a cold line of sweat ran down his spine. The gun on his right hip felt dense; as heavy as the world atop his shoulders.
     

    McIntyre boys stacked hard time. Life in many ranch households left few choices for the sons—or sometimes even the daughters. Fathers wore the ranching mentality into a boy, long and relentless. A rancher's son would unlikely ever choose any other type of life. Psychologists called such conditioning institutionalization. Ranchers passed it forward decade by decade, century by century. Not a rite of passage but rather an inheritance of duty, burned hotly and deeply into a child; as permanent as any brand.
    Ranch country made for a hard living. The land was unkind to those who worked it, so families sometimes became commensurately unkind to their own. Few, however, were as unkind to their own as the McIntyres.
    Ty’s father, Rory, inherited the entirety of the McIntyre property when his own father died of a weak heart. Two-thousand upper acres of rough terrain and hayfields; a lower four-thousand acre parcel. The ranch house, a barn, a stable, two corrals, and all the heavy equipment were on