What it's like to be the vigilante the Mojave never asked for

A weathered road sign, a rag, and a tin of kerosene: Elias Kade scrubs a dead man's blood off the letters outside Dos Palmas, and no one comes out to thank him. That morning opens two years of reckoning over the question that drives the whole account, whether a man can stand between people and the thing that means to hurt them without turning those people into a target. Kade tracks that cost from the dry wash where he first raised a rifle, through Harlan Finch dying eight days after his rescue because Kade called the debt closed, to eleven weeks of lantern wire and night watch at Nelson's Crossing, and finally to a reprisal raid that leaves nine of the town's own dead and a mayor's verdict he carries with him. The ledger he keeps in a notebook under his spare socks holds the names he earned and the ones he only guesses at, and every page tests what his own law is actually worth. Tell us in the comments which entry you think was his to answer for, and subscribe for more stories from the Mojave.