"I want to have been wrong about you."
He looked up at her.
"Louisa," he said, "they'll call you. Fitch will call you. Vane will put you on the stand and you'll have to say, under oath, in front of every newspaperman in Denver, that your father—" He could not finish it.
"I will say what I saw," she said. "I will say I saw your mark on Amos Snell's revolver, and the ledger at the bottom of the shelf under the coal oil, and a quantity of ash. I won't say anything I didn't see. I won't say you wanted anyone dead. I don't believe you did." She stood up. Her legs were shaking and she did not let him see it. "But I won't lie for you, Father. Not even a little. Not even by keeping quiet."
He sat on the leather sofa with his hands on his knees and did not try to stop her.
She slept that night in her own bed because she had nowhere else to go, and in the morning she packed one trunk and took a room at the Windsor Hotel under her mother's maiden name. Her father was in the hall when she came down the stairs with her valise. He had not slept. He did not ask her to stay. He said, "Do you have money?" and she said, "Enough," and he nodded, and opened the door for her himself, and stood in it in his shirtsleeves in the cold until the cab turned the corner.
VIII.
The Rocky Mountain News had it on the front page Thursday morning: OUTRAGE ON THE KITTREDGE LINE — DYNAMITE AND DEATH NEAR PLUM CREEK — ARMED NEGRO HELD. The story beneath named Gabriel Tolliver as "a colored agitator long associated with the disaffected settlement at Freedom Creek," and noted that "the lady passengers were much alarmed by his conduct." It did not mention Louisa at all. Edmund Quarles had seen to that much, or her father had.
The Tribune, that afternoon, was more careful. By Friday it was less so, because by Friday Orrin Weatherby had been busy.
Weatherby was the lawyer Freedom Creek had found after three others turned them down: a lank, slow-spoken man from Ohio with a cough, ink on his cuffs, and a practice mostly in mining claims. He took down the statements himself, in a cramped hand, in a room at the Windsor. Mrs. Oberlin's, who said that the colored gentleman had asked her to sit with a frightened boy and had not raised his weapon until the masked man laid hands on a lady. The drummer's, whose name was Fenwick and who sold enameled cookstoves, and who said that he had never seen anything like it and hoped never to again but that he would swear on any Bible they liked that Mr. Tolliver went into that fire twice. Engineer Pruett's. Billy Ochs's, given from a hospital bed with his mother holding his hand.
And the rider with the shoulder wound, whose name was Lute Gannon and who had decided, after one night in the county jail and a visit from Weatherby, that he did not care to hang alone. He said that Corwin Mabry had hired him in Trinidad for one hundred dollars. He said Mabry had told him the coin would be fetched later by wagon from a ranch on the Fountain. He said Mabry had lit the fuse himself, on the gangway, from horseback, at a gallop, and that it had been a short fuse.
They let Gabriel out of the city jail on Saturday morning. He came down the steps into a thin cold sunshine with his coat over his arm because his hands were still too sore for the sleeves, and Louisa was waiting at the bottom in a plain grey walking dress, with Weatherby beside her.
"They kept my revolver," Gabriel said. "As evidence."
"I'm sorry," she said.