He assumed that everybody involved would remain loyal to him.
They didn't.
The freight agent had a young bookkeeper who had spent three years copying invoices, receipts, and transportation records into a series of bound ledgers. He knew the deputy was frightened. He also knew the accounts contained payments that were difficult to explain.
When the agent ordered him to destroy several pages, the bookkeeper refused.
The agent threatened to dismiss him.
The bookkeeper packed his belongings and rode to the nearest marshal's office instead.
He carried duplicate records.
A list of transfers.
Names of intermediaries.
Payment amounts.
And copies of letters bearing the signatures of the two husbands.
The documents showed that the children had been removed from their mothers under false medical pretenses and transferred through a private network that presented the arrangements as legitimate placements.
They also showed that the deputy had received money for facilitating the transfers and helping suppress questions afterward.
The red-mustached man had not merely assisted the husbands.
He had helped organize the operation.
And the two Apache women were not the only mothers whose children appeared in the records.
There were other entries.
Other payments.
Other families.
The full extent of the operation would take months to establish.
But the documents provided the evidence the marshal had been searching for.
Within days, warrants were issued for several of the men involved.
The deputy was arrested at a remote freight station while attempting to leave the district.
One husband surrendered after learning that witnesses had identified him.
The other tried to flee south but was apprehended before reaching the territorial boundary.
The freight agent was taken into custody.
And the doctor, whose original statement had led investigators toward the children, was required to answer for his own participation.
I wasn't present for the deputy's arrest.
Part of me wished I had been.
But another part understood that watching a frightened man lose his badge would not restore a single hour of the years the mothers had lost.
I was at Black Canyon when the news arrived.
The older woman was sitting in the ranch garden with her son.
He had grown accustomed to seeing her over the previous several days.
At first, he approached her cautiously.
Then he began bringing her toys.
A little wooden horse.
A worn cloth ball.
A small carved wagon.
She spoke softly to him, sometimes in English and sometimes in the language she had grown up speaking.
He liked the sound of her voice.
I could tell.
Whenever she began singing, he stopped whatever he was doing and listened.
The first time he reached for her instead of the housekeeper, she began crying so suddenly that the little boy looked frightened.