Chapter 5: Santa Fe

“Did you keep the train tickets, Judah?” Marshal Garrison asked.

“Yes, sir, I’ve still got ‘em.”

“Well, then, give them to me. You don’t have to cover the train out of your travel allowance.”

I handed him the tickets and said, “That’s very generous, Marshal, but you may want to hear my report, first.”

“Not really generous, Judah. Train tickets are covered just like your other expenses, as long as you have a proper receipt.” He slipped the tickets into a manila envelope.

The two train tickets from Las Vegas to Lamy were two dollars sixty cents each plus a dollar fifty each for the horses; Hector brought his horse back and I promised to take it back to Taos for him if he was kept in jail.

For returning my prisoner from Mora to Santa Fe I would be paid ten cents a mile by the shortest available route. It was eighty-four miles by way of Palo Flechado Pass and Peñasco. But the route I came by, including the fifty-eight miles by train, totaled ninety-eight miles. So I would get eight dollars forty cents for the return trip, based on the shorter route.

The outgoing trip, from Taos to Mora, was forty-seven miles. I would be paid six cents a mile, or two dollars and eighty-two cents for the part of my journey with no prisoner in custody.

Since I’d be carrying no warrant or a prisoner, there’d be no pay for my ride back to Taos from Santa Fe, a bit over a seventy miles.

Finally, for the arrest itself, I earned two dollars.

Total earned for the six days since I left Taos: thirteen dollars twenty-two cents. By Marshal Service custom, twenty-five percent of a deputy’s mileage and arrest payment went to the District Marshal, so I took home nine dollars and ninety-two cents for the six days.

Cowed by his insistent manner, I may have neglected to mention to the Marshal that Hector paid for the train fares.

Anton Dahl, the Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Territory of New Mexico, was staring fixedly out the window from his seat behind the modest desk. Marshal Garrison and I were in the chairs in front of his desk. We were in the federal courthouse, two long blocks north of the Palace of the Governors. The rather modest “Palace” had served as the seat of Spanish, Mexican, and now the United States government in this part of the continent for nearly two hundred and seventy-five years. The U.S. courthouse had been built a mere thirty years ago.

I had presented Mr. Dahl the six affidavits from the citizens of Mora, which he had just finished reading.

Still gazing intently out the window, Dahl began shaking his head, finally saying, “I don’t like this. I don’t like this at all.”

He turned back to Marshal Garrison and me and his gaze moved from one to the other of us as he spoke.

“On the one hand, we have two upstanding citizens who were eye-witnesses to the crime of murder and who were acquainted with and can identify the killer.

“On the other hand, we have six upstanding citizens from a town forty-seven miles from the scene of the crime, on the far side of a snow-blocked mountain pass, who say that same man was in Mora at the time the murder took place, and there is a plausible story that supports their testimony.”

He shook his head again. “We can’t just go into court and tell the jury, ‘Here, you figure it out.’ No. We have to go in with a firm conviction that this man committed the crime and there are no two ways about it. So then it would be my job to paint all those fine citizens of Mora as lying scoundrels and to find someone to testify that Hector Guerrero was, in fact, in Taos during those weeks he claimed to be in Mora and that the cholera story is a fabrication by the doctor and several others who have no reason to lie, let alone those others who contracted the disease during that outbreak and the number of deaths that resulted.” He sighed.

Garrison said, “Why would it be the Mora people who are lying? Why not Stillwell? He’s a business rival of the Guerreros. He’s already benefited from Guerrero’s troubles by taking an army contract that the Guerrero mill held.”

Dahl, a slender, pale-skinned, blond-haired, pleasant-looking man, shook his head. “There’s been no indication that Stillwell has been underhanded in any way, at least not beyond the pale of what passes for commercial rivalry in this territory.”

I said, “What if he’s not lying? What if he’s simply mistaken?”