Isabella walked home thoughtful and pensive, and resolved to ask her father again about the man on the horse, this time with conviction.

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Charles Swan recognized Isabella's set expression as the one he often wore when determined to have his way. He gathered his thoughts around him and finally set adrift the burden he'd carried for years.

"He's a wanted man, Isabella," he told her grimly. "That there riding into town was Anthony Masen, and he's been on the run since those murders up at the Masen ranch, years ago."

Isabella sat wide-eyed and hanging on his every word, not one to shy away from dark tales, now imagining the mysterious horseman at the center of the gunfight she'd heard of as a girl.

Her adventurous and imaginative spirit had been very moved by the tragic story of the Masens and their doomed young son.

Seeing that hungry glint in her eyes, Charles despaired. He had hoped to warn her off, but the opposite was happening- she wanted more.

He sighed, knowing she would not rest until he told her the whole story.

"We thought he was dead, but I tell you, Bella, I won't never forget the look of that young man. It was a day from hell, and I thought I'd seen it all."

Charles was a seasoned sheriff at the time that young Masen's parents were gunned down by a gang of outlaws, and he told Isabella the story like a campfire tale on a starry night.

The Law rode out to the Masen farm, alerted by a "...plume of smoke from their burning stables. We thought they'd had a grass fire, though it was the wrong time of year," Charles mused. "We found several of the help, as well as Rancher Masen and his good lady wife there." Charles sighed, gazing out into the forest, trying not to recall too clearly what their contorted bodies looked like, lying lifeless in the dust, the rancher's wife's skirts hitched up where a lady's had no business being. Charles momentarily closed his eyes, remembering his own hand as it reached out to cover her modesty.

The boy, barely become a man, had been kneeling beside his mother's corpse, a "...rifle across his knees. One of the raiders killed by that very rifle had been lying close by, and I don't think he was the only one to have had a taste of it. Though, by the time we got there, they had looted what they could and were long gone. The fire'd been burning for an hour at least, most of the outbuildings were nothing but cinders and ashes. It was some kind of miracle that the ranch didn't burn, too. I remember how it looked, like a lone survivor among all that carnage. Just like that boy."

Sheriff Swan grieved for the orphan with dusty, streaked cheeks, dirt and tears mixing into mud on his face.

But as broken and helpless as young Masen appeared, it was the set of his shoulders and a certain glint in his eyes that had Sheriff Swan worried from the outset.

Isabella imagined that bereft young man, despair and grief mixed with a furious need for vengeance- she knew those feelings well.

She had come through that same fire with her blood boiling hotter than hell.

Charles shook his head, as though dislodging the painful memories from where they'd clung like haunting specters over the years.

"Not three years after the Masens were killed, members of that very same outlaw gang turned up with more holes in 'em than a sieve," Charles continued in a quiet, halting voice, sounding like he wished he could stop talking. "But, one of them, I cannot quite recall what he said his name was- Mark? Marcus? No matter. He was still gurgling blood when we got there. Before he finally kicked the bucket, that thieving bastard told us all about the kid with a death wish who'd killed his brothers, blinded by rage..."

Charles paused, his eyes full of faraway remembering. "He might've been full of rage and hatred, but he weren't blind enough to miss."

Isabella gasped with her hand at her throat. "Was it him? Was it young Masen that did it, Daddy?"

Charles nodded wearily. "I reckon he waited for 'em at their own hideout near the Sol Duc branch-off and he picked 'em off one by one with his father's own Winchester."

"Oh, God, he killed them all..." Isabella whispered, turning away to the window so her father would not see her over-bright eyes.

He killed the men who had killed his family.

"He wouldn't have been twenty years old yet," Charles continued, remembering that at the time, nobody knew who the shooter had been, only that he'd conveniently taken the law into his hands to dispatch the Volturi blight that had troubled the region for years.

Sheriff Swan had reached his own conclusions, and when he ventured up to the Masen ranch to check on young Anthony, he found the place long abandoned.

He'd even headed a small delegation up to La Push to see if a body had washed up downriver, to no avail.

Anthony Masen had disappeared, never to be seen since.

Nobody knew for sure if he was the killer and his body was never found, but there were those, Sheriff Swan among them, who "...thought that a young man paid with his own life to avenge the deaths of his parents that day."

Isabella remembered hearing of Anthony Masen's story now, though she hadn't heard it since she was a girl, and now envied him the one thing she never had- retribution, even if paid for with his life.

After her own bereavement, she'd wanted to die, too. The price had seemed small then.

It seemed now, though, that he wasn't dead at all, only dead to the world that had known him.

Now that she saw him still living, still paying the price for his retribution, Isabella's old anger suddenly burned out into ashes, dry and bitter in her mouth.

She couldn't imagine the weight he carried on his shoulders, amplified by so many years of having to hide and pretend he was dead.

She'd never imagined that he'd have to keep paying all his life just like she had been, giving up everything and everyone, hiding himself away just to survive.

"I imagined that Masen had been wounded in the gunfight and crawled off into the scrub, perhaps falling into the river and snagging tight under some waterlogged roots, you know how the river gets in late fall. Or maybe he'd been carried off by animals."

Charles finally looked at his daughter, sitting very still across the table. "Until I spied a man come riding into town on a big horse a while back."

The set of his shoulders, the way that man moved had been so familiar, the lawman in Charles Swan just had to investigate.

He'd followed that drifter into the General Store as inconspicuously as he could, and though he was a full-grown man and no longer the orphaned youth of all those years ago, Charles had become convinced that the broken boy, the vigilante killer and this bearded, mysterious drifter were one and the same person.

He'd watched that man do his business in a quiet and respectful manner, dealing fairly with John Banner and other merchants, sometimes accepting less than his pelts and skins were worth and taking them as trade on things he needed. That alone spoke for his character.

Had he harboured suspicions that Anthony Masen was still a killer, he "...would have paid a visit to the Sheriff and turned him in. I might not be Sheriff anymore, but I'm bound to the law, Isabella."

She nodded mutely, her mind spinning. "But you didn't."

Charles looked into the depth of green forest outside his home, as though all the answers were there, no matter the question. This place always made him feel like that- like he was a small part of something bigger. Like he didn't have to carry the burden alone. He loved this place. Loved his home. Loved his daughter.

"No, I did not." He felt nothing but sympathy for that despairing boy of long ago, and some grudging respect toward the avenger.

He'd often wondered if he would have done the same as young Masen when faced with such a tragic loss. He remembered all too well the pain of being left behind, and without saying as much, he thought Isabella might, too.

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A/N: Thanks for reading and reviewing if you are so inclined.