Later, Louisa walked down to the creek in the dark. Gabriel was there, as he was most evenings, on a cottonwood stump by the ford, with a lantern on the ground and his coat buttoned against the cold. His hands were healing. The burns had drawn the skin of both palms tight and shiny, and he could close his right hand only most of the way. He said it was enough to hold a pen.
She told him what Hester had said, and what she had said back.
"You'll go home at Christmas," he said.
"For his birthday. I missed it."
"And ask him for the book."
"Yes."
"And if he won't give it to you?"
She looked at the black water moving over the stones. "Then I'll know," she said. "And so will Judge Fitch, in April. I won't open the safe myself, Mr. Tolliver. I won't steal from him. I'll ask him to his face, and then I'll tell the truth about what he answers."
Gabriel nodded. He did not tell her it would be all right. She had come to understand that he never said things he did not know.
"He's not a wicked man," she said. "My father."
"I don't know what he is," said Gabriel. "I've met him once, in a hallway. I know what he did, and I know he hasn't undone it. Those are different things. I expect you'll be finding out the difference for a while."
Far off along the ridge to the north, a light moved: the evening freight on the Kittredge Western, which was no longer anybody's Kittredge Western, crawling east toward Kansas with its whistle sounding for the Freedom Creek crossing, long and low and lonely. They watched it go. Gabriel counted the cars under his breath, out of a habit older than either of them knew. Nineteen. Twenty. Twenty-one. Louisa counted with him, though she didn't know why.
The light dwindled to a spark, and then to nothing, and the cold came down off the mountains. In April there would be a trial, and in the spring term another hearing, and seven families waiting on a book that might be in a safe behind a dead woman's portrait, or might be ash already, or might never have been anything but a lie. Nobody at the ford could say which.
Gabriel picked up the lantern. Louisa pulled her shawl closer. They walked back up the bank together toward the houses, toward the lit windows, not quite side by side.