She looked at his hand. She looked at the policemen walking Gabriel Tolliver away along the platform under the gas lamps, at the crowd parting for them, at a newspaperman with a pencil already moving. She held the ledger and the scorched tin box, one on top of the other, against her ruined bodice.
"No," she said. "It isn't. It belongs to the District Court of Arapahoe County, under a subpoena your own counsel accepted service of. I read the order myself, Edmund. Father left it on his desk."
"Louisa—"
"I am going to deliver it to the clerk. Tonight. You may come with me if you wish to see it done properly."
He did come. That was the thing she would remember about Edmund Quarles afterward, when everything else about that autumn had blurred: that he hesitated on the platform for perhaps five seconds, with his hand still out, and then he lowered it and hailed a cab and rode with her up Seventeenth Street in silence, and when the clerk of the court, a stooped man named Pettibone, came down in his carpet slippers to unlock the courthouse at half past eight, Quarles stood in the doorway with his hat in his hands and watched while Louisa laid the ledger and the box on Pettibone's desk and asked for a written receipt, itemized, with the time noted.
"Thirty-four contracts," she said, "and a quantity of ash. Please write that down. A quantity of ash."
Pettibone wrote it down.
Outside on the courthouse steps, Quarles said, without looking at her, "You understand what you've done."
"I've obeyed a court order."
"You've taken a side, Louisa."
She looked down Sixteenth Street, at the lit windows and the streetcar mules plodding home and the far black mass of the mountains under the stars. Her hat was gone, and her gloves, and the hem of her magenta dress was scorched to the knee, and she was more tired than she had ever been.
"Edmund," she said, "where is Mr. Mabry tonight?"
He did not answer that either.
She took the cab on alone to Capitol Hill.