The handles worn to the shape of a hand that was not Arthur's. And on the brass handle of the driver, scratched in by the point of a knife, the way a man marks a tool so it will come home to him, were two letters. S. C.
Arthur did not need anyone to tell him. That was the cruelty and the gift of it. Both that no letter explained this part, that there was no voice to hand him the answer and let him doubt it. He was a locksmith.
He knew a locksmith's hands by the wear they left, and he was holding the tools of a man who had worked them until the brass remembered his grip, and the man's initials were scratched into the handle, and the man's last name was his own. And slowly in the failing lamplight, he understood why those tools were on the inside of a safe instead of out in the world where a workingman keeps them. Harold Beaumont had needed someone he could trust to set the combination on this safe and lock his letter away where his enemies could not reach it. And in all of Harlan County, the man he had trusted was a black locksmith with gifted hands.
Samuel Callaway had done the work the way Arthur now knew he did everything with care. And he had left his own key inside as the last thing before he closed the door, not by accident, but the way a man leaves his mark on a thing he wants known later. A locksmith's signature. Proof for whoever finally opened it of exactly whose hands had been trusted with the secret.
And then the fire had come fast and from somewhere it had no honest reason to start, and Samuel had gone back into the burning hotel for the one thing a man like him would risk his life for, not gold, not bonds, but the truth he had just sealed away. And the fire had taken him before he could carry it back out. The story the town had told for 16 years was not merely unkind; it was a lie, and it was a lie that had been told on purpose by the very man Harold Beaumont had named in his letter to bury a will that would have changed who got to learn and who got to grow rich in Harlan County. They had allowed a good man to be remembered as a thief because a thief made a tidier story than a witness.