It was not noble.

But it was decisive, and the farm families whose land was stolen did not much care about the purity of the motive that finally freed them.

Sometimes the machinery of justice runs on courage.

Just as often, it runs on a coward doing the right thing for the wrong reason, at exactly the right time.

I have made my peace with that, though it took me some time, because it offended the part of me that wanted the story to be clean — that wanted the man who helped bring down the Prescotts to have done it out of conscience, out of a noble reckoning, out of some redemptive awakening.

Deputy Cole had no such awakening.