In the corridor afterward, in the press of people, Hollis Kittredge found himself face to face with Gabriel Tolliver. Neither man had planned it. They stood a yard apart while the crowd went around them like water around stones.
"I'm told," Kittredge said at last, "that you went into that car twice."
"Your daughter went in once," Gabriel said. "That was the time it counted."
Kittredge looked at him a long moment. "What do your people want, Mr. Tolliver? Say a figure."
"What we paid for. All forty-one."
"Seven of those contracts are ash."
"The contracts are," said Gabriel. "The money isn't. Those families paid your company every quarter for seven years, Mr. Kittredge. That money went into your bank. It's still there, in one form or another. It didn't burn."
Hollis Kittredge opened his mouth, and shut it, and put on his hat, and went down the stairs.
X.
The rest came the way weather comes on the plains: slowly, then all at once, then slowly again.
The Hartford underwriters voided the policy on the sixty thousand dollars and filed suit against the Kittredge Western for attempted fraud. The New York bondholders, reading the Hartford's complaint in the Herald, did not wait for January. By the middle of November a receiver had been appointed for the road, a careful Boston man who had never seen a prairie, and the Dunmore Land and Cattle Company of Edinburgh had withdrawn its offer by cable. A grand jury indicted Corwin Mabry for the death of Dutch Rennick; Mabry had last been seen buying cartridges in Raton, and the talk was Sonora. Lute Gannon pleaded guilty and drew six years. Amos Snell pleaded to a charge of riot and was given eighteen months in the penitentiary at Cañon City, and the judge, at Louisa's request and Weatherby's, recommended that the sentence begin after his leg had healed. Ellen Snell went to the sanatorium at Manitou. Nobody said aloud who paid for it.
Hollis Kittredge resigned the presidency of the road he had built. The grand jury indicted him too, for conspiracy to defraud an insurer. Vane posted his bond the same day. His trial was set for April. The Tribune ran a drawing of him on its front page, looking older than he was.
The Rocky Mountain News printed a correction regarding Mr. Gabriel Tolliver on page six, below an advertisement for liver pills. The Western Clarion, the colored weekly printed in a basement on Arapahoe Street, ran his whole story across two pages under the headline WHAT THE FIRE DID NOT TAKE, and somebody nailed a copy to the door of every colored church in Denver.
Louisa came down to Freedom Creek in the last week of November, on the cars, with Orrin Weatherby and a box of blank affidavit forms. It was cold. The first real snow had come and gone and left the bottomland brown and wet, and the creek ran clear between bare cottonwoods, and the houses stood along it at their careful distances, sod and plank and two of real milled lumber, smoke going straight up from every chimney.