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know.’
    â€˜Mr Harte!’ the warden laughed with what seemed genuine amusement. ‘It’s only this latest charge for which you have not had your day in court. How badly has your head been damaged? You don’t recall breaking out of the jail in Phoenix after being convicted of bank robbery and assault on a law officer! My goodness, Mr Harte, we have enough black marks in our books that it’s only chance we didn’t hang you the moment we saw you.’
    â€˜I didn’t know,’ Cameron said lamely.
    â€˜You didn’t know!’ Traylor drew a cigar from his coat pocket and lit it. He waved the match out slowly and smiled at Cameron. ‘I guess it would be hard to remember the details of a life of crime such as you’ve led. Did that bullet glancing off your skull drive away all memory? If you plan to use that as a defense.…’
    â€˜My defense would be that I am not Stony Harte!’ Cameron said so violently that the warden flinched slightly and Cam’s headache began to stir angrily again.
    â€˜I see,’ the warden said as if pondering this seriously. The smoke from his cigar was rank in Cameron’s nostrils in this airless cell. The little man leaned closer. ‘Look here, Harte, I understand you – or think I do. There’s a lot of you Rebels out here. Listen, I am a Southerner myself originally, from Tennessee. But this raiding and looting has to be put to an end. The War is long over. They won. You have to live by Yankee law. It’s over. This raiding of their banks, of Union Army payrolls – which by the way is the current charge against you, aside from multiple murders – has to come to an end. And that man in the stage you believed to be an aggressive civilian was actually an army officer assigned to protect the soldiers’ pay. That won’t look good at all.’ He shook his head. ‘That’s four capital crimes against you, and two of them Federal crimes. You haven’t a chance, Harte.’
    The little man stubbed out his cigar on his boot sole. His smile now was much harder. ‘You might be able to wriggle free of the hanging sentences if you can convince a jury that the others in your gang did the actual killings.’
    â€˜And?’ Cameron asked, noting the hesitation in the warden’s voice.
    â€˜Well,’ he said, flipping an open hand in a careless gesture, ‘obviously returning the stolen payroll would help your cause. Fifty thousand dollars in scrip and coin is, after all, quite a bit of money, isn’t it?’
    It was an awful lot of money, Cameron conceded. And after the warden had gone it occurred to him through the confusion of his battered senses that most of the questioning he had been receiving was not about the crime itself, the murders, or the identity of his assumed accomplices at all.
    It was all about the stolen money.
    On the third morning two guards came to remove Cameron Black from his dungeon and he was assigned work duties. The bandages had been unwound from his head and he was judged fit enough to be a part of the labor force, that being the main reason, it seemed, for the prison’s existence.
    Outside in the white glare of the relentless sun men could be seen breaking rocks with sledgehammers, others wheeling the rocks to their destination in wooden barrows, their movements stiff and unnatural due to their leg irons.
    The rocks were intended to be used to lay a bed for the Eastern Arizona Railroad’s path across the relentless shifting sand of the desert. Cameron doubted such a project could ever be completed. His knowledge of the desert left him convinced that the implacable desert and its uncertain foundation would defy such a project forever.
    Nonetheless, men worked on. If they fell out it was of no importance to the prison officials, others could be found to take their place. Most of these prisoners were young, arrested for minor crimes such as brawling