The scaffold stood on the parade ground for three days after the burial, because the post carpenter had broken his arm falling off the commissary wagon and no one else would touch the timber.
Clara walked past it every morning at seven to collect the mail pouch from the Santa Fe stage. She did not look at the rope, and she did not look at the blood-stained pine platform. The garrison officers tipped their caps to her with awkward, averted eyes, murmuring condolences she never acknowledged.
They believed she was broken. They believed that when a woman loses her husband to a firing squad convened in the middle of the night without a jury, she should take the stage back to St. Louis and disappear into the respectable silence of mourning.
They did not know about the letter Matthew had slipped into her prayer book twenty minutes before the guard marched him out.