"I remember," Wade said. "I was wrong. I'd like it to go to youth court. I'd like it on the record that the restitution's been near paid in full, in labor, and that I'm satisfied. I'm withdrawing my money from the reward. And I'd like you to go find that son of a gun in Roundup, because he's the one who's been buying slicks off every desperate kid from here to Winnett, and he's the one I'd actually like to see in Deer Lodge."
Tom almost smiled. Almost.
It did not resolve that day, or that week. The county attorney was a careful woman from Billings who did not like being rushed and did not like ranchers who changed their minds, and she made Wade come in twice and sign a statement, and she made Claire come in once and sat her down for forty-five minutes with the door closed, and Claire came out pale and would not say what had been said except that she had deserved every word. In the end the county attorney declined to charge Claire with anything, though she made it clear in a letter that this was a decision and not an oversight. Danny's case went to youth court in Lewistown in the second week of November. He stood before the judge in a borrowed sport coat with Lynette beside him and Wade and Claire in the row behind, and he said guilty in a clear voice, and the judge, who had been raised on a place outside Moore and had seen this kind of thing before, gave him a consent decree: a year of probation, sixty hours of community service at the county fairgrounds, restitution as already agreed, and a sealed record if he kept his nose clean until he was eighteen.
Six weeks after that, acting on a name and a description and the make of a stock trailer, two brand inspectors and a deputy from Musselshell County drove out to a backgrounding lot south of Roundup with a warrant and found forty-one head of unbranded and freshly branded calves that the owner could not account for. Wade read about it in the Lewistown News-Argus. He cut the article out and put it in one of the pigeonholes of his father's desk. He was not sure why.
Not everybody understood. A few men at the Stockgrowers' Christmas meeting would not quite meet his eye, and one of them, an old-timer from up by Winifred, told him to his face that he'd gone soft and that his father would be ashamed. Wade said that might be so, and that his father had been wrong about a fair number of things, and that he'd buy the old man a cup of coffee anytime he wanted to talk about which ones. Nobody took him up on it. But in the parking lot afterward, the younger of the Kessler brothers walked him to his truck and said, without preamble, that if he'd caught his own boy doing what the Ferris kid did, he hoped to God somebody would have done the same, and then he got in his own truck and drove off before Wade could answer.
* * *
The marriage did not fix itself because the case did. That was the part Wade had not expected, and maybe should have.