"Don't be. I'd as soon not have it back for a while." He looked at her grey dress. "You've changed your colors."
"The other one was ruined." She paused. "And it was my father's money. All of it. Every stitch."
He considered that, and didn't say anything kind or unkind about it, which she found she was grateful for.
That afternoon she went alone to the County Hospital to see Amos Snell.
They had put him in a long ward with thirty other men. His leg was in a plaster box hung from a frame, and they had saved it, though he would walk with a stick for the rest of his life. The burned side of his head was dressed in oiled lint. A girl of eleven with a red nose and a bad cough sat on a stool beside the bed doing sums on a slate, and when Louisa came down the ward she looked up with Snell's blue eyes.
"This is Ellen," Snell said. "Ellen, this is Miss Kittredge. Go and find the nurse and ask her for a cup of tea for the lady."
When the child had gone, Louisa said, "Mr. Weatherby says the district attorney will offer you a reduced charge if you swear to what you told us in the baggage car."
"He's already been. With a paper."
"Will you sign it?"
Snell looked down the ward. A man near the window was groaning in his sleep, regular as a pump.
"I've drawn Kittredge pay for eighteen years," he said. "Brakeman, yardman, special service. Your father stood godfather to my boy that died. He came to the burying. Stood in the rain with his hat off." He was quiet a moment. "And I read a notice at a woman's door in the snow and told her it was the law, and I knew it was a lie when I read it. And Dutch is dead because I told him it was gold."
"That isn't an answer, Mr. Snell."
"No, miss." He turned his head on the pillow and looked at her. "It's the reason for one. I signed it this morning. Before you came. I put down that Mabry told me it was the old man's wish, because that's what Mabry told me. I didn't put down that it was so, because I don't know that it was. That's as square as I can make it."
Ellen came back with a cup of tea in a thick hospital mug. Louisa drank it. It was terrible, and she drank all of it, and thanked the child, and went out into the cold.