The Circuit Judge of Jericho Junction

• Chapter 1 The Bench at Mile Marker 40
• Chapter 2 Dust and the Gavel
• Chapter 3 The Surveyors' Map
• Chapter 4 Docket of the Forgotten
• Chapter 5 The Last Stagecoach In
• Chapter 6 Asphalt and Mirage
• Chapter 7 The Phantom Detour
• Chapter 8 A Warrant for the Wind
• Chapter 9 The Oilman's Summons
• Chapter 10 Kerosene Nights
• Chapter 11 The Bypass Begins
• Chapter 12 Contempt of the New Route
• Chapter 13 The Dry County Line
• Chapter 14 Testimony in the Sun
• Chapter 15 The Empty Telegraph
• Chapter 16 Shadows on the Courtroom Porch
• Chapter 17 The Sheriff's Dilemma
• Chapter 18 Ghost Town Injunction
• Chapter 19 The Bribe at Midnight
• Chapter 20 Rust and Retribution
• Chapter 21 The Desert Verdict
• Chapter 22 Stranded Jurisdictions
• Chapter 23 The Last Line of Pavement
• Chapter 24 Appeals to the Horizon
• Chapter 25 The Law Stands Still
• Chapter 26 The Final Session at Jericho Junction

The heat off the Mojave didn’t just rise from the dirt; it sat on a man’s shoulders like a damp woolen coat. It was June of 1924, and the air at Mile Marker 40 smelled of hot iron, parched grease, and the sagebrush that baked dry in the washes. Jericho Junction consisted of three unpainted pine shacks, a hand-pumped gasoline standard, and a faded wooden sign declaring the settlement’s name in thick, crude lettering that was already blistering under the relentless desert sun.

Judge Silas Vance adjusted his wire-rimmed spectacles, leaning his thin frame against the cedar post that held up the porch of the general store. In his right hand, he held a heavy brass pocket watch that clicked with a metallic, steady rhythm. The 11:15 northbound stage—or what passed for it nowadays, a rumbling Model T bus with canvas side-curtains—was late. In the desert, time was an elastic concept, but the circuit calendar was supposed to be rigid. Silas was a man who believed in the calendar with the same quiet, unyielding faith that other men reserved for scripture.

"He ain’t coming today, Silas," said Oakes, the storekeeper, spitting a dark stream of tobacco juice onto the hard-packed earth. Oakes sat in a wicker chair that had lost most of its back, fanning himself with an outdated copy of the Los Angeles Times. "Road up north near the dry lake bed got rutted out by that gravel truck yesterday. Anyone with sense is staying in Barstow till the wind dies down."

"Sensible men do not have business before the Circuit Court of the Ninth District, Mr. Oakes," Silas replied smoothly. His voice was low, dry, and carried the quiet authority of a man who had spent thirty years listening to lying witnesses and apologetic cattle rustlers. "And as long as the state pays for my passage to this junction on the third Tuesday of the month, I shall be present on the porch of this establishment at the appointed hour."

Silas was fifty-eight years old, though the sun and the alkali dust made him look ten years older. He wore a dark, three-piece wool suit that defied the local climate, complete with a high starched collar that had long since surrendered to perspiration. To Silas, the suit was not a matter of comfort; it was a matter of jurisdiction. Strip a judge of his black coat and white linen, he often argued, and you were left with nothing more than an opinionated old man with a gavel.

A quarter-mile down the trail, a plume of tan dust signaled the approach of an automobile. It wasn't the northbound bus. The engine had the sharp, high-pitched whine of a light runabout, bouncing wildly over the corrugated washboard of the old territorial wagon road.

Silas watched through narrowed eyes as the vehicle chugged to a halt in front of the single gas pump. The radiator hissed like a disturbed rattlesnake, boiling over into the dust. Out stepped a young man in a tan linen duster, driving goggles perched high on his cap. He looked around the desolate intersection with a mixture of disbelief and profound irritation.

"Is this Jericho Junction?" the young man asked, pulling off his leather driving gloves and wiping his brow with a silk handkerchief.

"It is," Silas said, stepping off the porch with a measured, deliberate gait. "I am Judge Silas Vance. If you are here regarding the property line dispute involving the well at Black Rock, the plaintiff has failed to appear, but I am prepared to take your deposition."

The youth blinked, taken aback by the solemnity of the figure before him. "I'm not a plaintiff, sir. I'm Arthur Finch. I'm a surveyor's assistant with the State Highway Commission. I was sent out from San Bernardino to deliver a notice to the local magistrate."

Finch reached into the tonneau of his motorcar and produced a leather-bound folio. He pulled out a crisp sheet of parchment, heavy with the official seals of the state government. Silas took the paper, holding it at arm's length to read the black typescript.

The document was short and blunt. It stated that as of July 1, the official state route through the county would be shifted six miles to the west, bypassing the mountain pass and the old wagon road entirely. The new asphalt highway—a grand project funded by the recent bond issue—would run straight across the flat plain, bypassing Jericho Junction and rendering Mile Marker 40 obsolete. With the relocation of the road, the notice concluded, the temporary court circuit for Jericho Junction was hereby dissolved, and Judge Vance was directed to pack his bench and report to the court in San Bernardino for reassignment.

Silas read the page twice. His face remained as unreadable as a slab of granite. He carefully folded the document along its original creases and tucked it into his coat pocket.

"The Commission is very efficient," Silas noted quietly. "Though their spelling of 'jurisdiction' leaves something to be desired."

"You understand what this means, don't you?" Finch said, leaning against his steaming car. "The highway isn't coming through here. The pumps are moving. The mail route is moving. In two months, there won't be anything here but sagebrush and gophers."

"The State Highway Commission has authority over asphalt, Mr. Finch," Silas said, looking out across the vast, empty expanse of gray brush and red rock that stretched to the horizon. "It does not have authority over the law. Until the governor signs a statutory amendment altering the judicial boundaries of this district, Mile Marker 40 remains the designated seat for the Ninth Circuit court on the third Tuesday of the month."

"It's a desert, Judge," Finch said with a nervous chuckle, looking at the solitary store and the endless sand. "Who are you going to hold court for?"

Silas adjusted his wire-rimmed glasses and turned back toward the store porch, where Oakes was already fast asleep, the newspaper lying flat across his belly.

"The desert, Mr. Finch," Silas said softly, "has a surprising number of litigants."

The morning sun hit Jericho Junction with the force of a hot iron skillet. By seven o'clock, the pine boards of Oakes’s store were expanding with sharp, cracking sounds that mimicked distant rifle shots. Silas Vance sat at his improvised bench—a long pine table previously used for gutting catfish and salting pork—and dipped his steel-nibbed pen into a brass inkwell. The ink was thick as molasses, heavy with the dust that seeped through every seam of the building.

Across the clearing, Arthur Finch was struggling to crank his runabout. The young surveyor had spent the night in the back room of the general store, sleeping on a pile of burlap sacks and complaining bitterly about the scorpions. His engine gave a few wet, metallic coughs before belching a cloud of black smoke that hung motionless in the dead air.

"You're wasting your ink, Judge," Finch called out, wiping a streak of black grease from his cheek. "The mail truck didn't even turn off the main grade this morning. Passed right by at the ridge. He threw the bag into the ditch by the culvert, three miles out."

Silas didn't look up from his ledger. "The Post Office Department operates under its own regulations, Mr. Finch. The Judiciary Act of 1889 governs mine. If the mail clerk chooses to abandon government property in a ravine, that is a matter between him and his postmaster. My docket opens at eight o'clock."

"Docket for who?" Finch shouted over the sputtering of his motor. "Look around! There’s you, there’s Oakes, and there’s a deaf mule tied to the pump!"

As if on cue, the heavy oak door of the store creaked open. Oakes shuffled out, carrying a battered tin mug of chicory coffee. He set it on the edge of the judge's table, right next to the brass gavel that Silas had laid out on a square of red felt.

"Got a customer for you, Silas," Oakes said, nodding toward the road that stretched south toward the iron-red hills.

A slow-moving rig was creeping out of the heat shimmering on the horizon. It wasn't an automobile, nor was it the expected state transport. It was a high-wheeled farm wagon pulled by two bone-skinny horses whose coats were caked in dry gray sweat. Sitting on the buckboard was a woman wrapped in a dark blue cotton shawl, holding the reins with hands that were raw and reddened from sun and hard labor. Beside her sat a young man with a bandaged arm resting in a sling made from a flour sack.

Finch stopped fiddling with his carburetor and watched as the wagon pulled up to the hitching rack. The horses drooped instantly, their heads dropping until their muzzles almost touched the dirt.

The woman set the brake with a harsh, metallic clatter and turned to look at Silas. Her eyes were sharp and dark under the shadow of a wide straw hat.

"Are you the man who deals with the law?" she asked. Her voice had the gravelly rasp of someone who went days without speaking to anyone outside her own household.

Silas stood up, adjusting his coat and smoothing his tie. "I am Silas Vance, Circuit Judge for the Ninth District. This is an official session of the court. State your name and your business before the bench, madam."

"Martha Gidley," she said, descending from the wagon with a stiff, heavy motion. "And this is my son, Thomas. We come from the homestead four miles west of the dry wash. We need an order."

"An order of what nature, Mrs. Gidley?"

"An injunction," she said, pronouncing the word carefully, as if she had practiced it all the way down the trail. "Against the construction crew. The ones putting down that black pitch road across the valley."

Arthur Finch stepped forward, his leather gloves stuffed into his belt. "Now wait just a minute, ma'am. That's the State Highway project. That's public works. You can't put an injunction on a state highway."

Silas raised a single, thin hand. "The bench has not invited the testimony of the State Highway Commission’s assistant, nor has he been sworn in as an officer of this court. Stand back, Mr. Finch, or I shall cite you for interference with judicial proceedings."

Finch opened his mouth to protest, looked at the cold blue of the judge’s eyes, and stepped back toward his steaming automobile, muttering under his breath.

"Proceed, Mrs. Gidley," Silas said, sitting back down and laying his hand near the gavel.

"They blasted," Martha Gidley said simply. She pointed a thumb toward the ridge three miles out. "They used dynamite to clear the rock cut for their new grade yesterday afternoon. The shock threw down the stone lining of our deep well. The only fresh water within five miles. It’s caved in, Judge. Full of mud and shale. My boy Thomas went down with a bucket to try and clear the timbering, and a second charge went off without warning. A rock took him in the shoulder."

The young man on the wagon nodded once, his jaw tight with pain. "They didn't post no flag," he said quietly. "They just lit the fuses and ran."

Silas watched the boy’s face, then turned his gaze back to Finch. The young surveyor suddenly found his boots extremely interesting and began scraping a patch of dried mud off his heel with his pocketknife.

"Do you know the name of the contractor, Mrs. Gidley?" Silas asked.

"Sign on the steam shovel says Purdue Construction Company," she replied. "Out of Los Angeles. They got a tent camp set up by the railway siding at Mile Marker 34. The straw boss told me to go whistle if I didn't like the dust, said the state owned sixty feet of right-of-way on either side of their stakes and they could blow up whatever they pleased."

Silas pulled his ledger toward him. He dipped his pen into the thick ink and wrote down the names with meticulous, copperplate handwriting. The nib squeaked loudly against the coarse paper.

"The law of domain," Silas said quietly as he wrote, "gives the state the right to take land for public utility upon just compensation. It does not give a contractor license to collapse a citizen’s well or drop granite on their limbs. Mr. Oakes, fetch the red wax and the official seal from the desk in your back office."

Oakes turned and disappeared into the store without a word.

"Judge," Finch broke in, unable to keep silent any longer. "You can't issue a order against Purdue. Mr. Purdue has a direct contract signed by the Governor's board. They’re laying two miles of asphalt a week out there. If you halt their blasting, you’ll throw the whole schedule off by a month. The Chief Engineer will have the State Attorney General down here so fast your head will spin."

Silas blew gently on the wet ink of his entry. "The Attorney General is welcome to take the morning stage, Mr. Finch. Though as you previously informed me, it no longer stops here. In the meantime, this court maintains jurisdiction over all civil damages and torts occurring within the boundaries of the Ninth District."

Oakes returned with a small brass stamp and a stick of brittle red sealing wax. Silas held the wax over the small flame of a kerosene lantern that burned despite the daylight, letting three fat red drops fall onto the bottom of a hand-written summons. He pressed the heavy brass stamp into the wax until it hardened into the seal of the District Court.

He handed the paper to the storekeeper. "Mr. Oakes, you are hereby appointed temporary bailiff of this court. Take your horse, ride down to the camp at Mile Marker 34, and serve this order upon Mr. Purdue or his foreman. They are directed to cease all blasting within one thousand yards of established homestead wells until such time as they appear before this bench to show cause why they should not post bond for damages."

Oakes took the paper, looked at the wet red wax, and grinned, revealing a row of yellow teeth. "Always wanted to serve a paper on a city man," he muttered. He walked toward the lean-to behind the store where his old bay gelding was tied.

"This is insane," Finch said, throwing his hands up. "You’re an itinerant judge in a town that won't exist by autumn! The world is moving over to the asphalt, Judge Vance! You're sitting in the dirt trying to hold back forty-horsepower engines with a piece of paper!"

Silas rested his elbows on the rough table and folded his long fingers together. He looked out past Finch, past the rattling Model T, to the white expanse of the salt flat where the heat waves danced like liquid glass.

"The world may move where it pleases, Mr. Finch," Silas said softly. "But until the road reaches this bench, the law stays right where I sit."

He picked up his wooden gavel and brought it down once onto the pine table. The sound was flat and dry, swallowed instantly by the vast, silent heat of the Mojave, but it cracked through the morning like an iron bolt sliding into place.