And the proof of all of it had been sitting inside a box that no one could open, waiting 16 years for the one person in the world with the right hands and the right reason to open it. Arthur closed his fingers around his father's tools. The lamp had nearly burned out, and the window had begun to go gray at its edge, and somewhere past the rooftops the town that had laughed at him the day before was beginning to wake. He did not feel like weeping anymore.
He felt very clear and very steady and very much for the first time in his life like his father's son. Arthur did not sleep. He sat with his father's tools in his lap until the gray in the window turned to gold. And when the town below him had fully woken, he washed his ruined hands as best he could, wrapped the letter and the bonds and the tools in the same dark cloth, and put the money in the canvas feed sack he had used the day before.
Then he carried it all down the outside stairs and started up Mercer Street toward the county courthouse. Walking the same road he had dragged the safe down the evening before, only this time he carried what had been inside it. Word of the auction had spread far enough that there were already people about who knew his face, and they watched him pass this boy. They had laughed at walking up the middle of the street with a feed sack over his shoulder and an expression that made a few of them go quiet without knowing why.
By the time he reached the courthouse square, a small crowd had gathered in his wake, drawn by the simple strangeness of it. Half of them expecting, he supposed, to see the Callaway boy make a fool of himself one more time. Dale Coburn's white Lincoln was parked across two spaces in front of the courthouse, and Coburn himself was on the steps holding court with two of the county commissioners. And he turned when he heard the murmur of the crowd and saw Arthur coming.
"Well," Coburn called out loud for the benefit of the men beside him and the people gathering in the square, "if it isn't the richest fool in Harlan County. You get your boat anchor open, son. You bring us a bucket of soot. " The crowd laughed, but it was a thinner laugh than the day before, because something in the way the boy walked had taken the certainty out of it. Arthur went up the courthouse steps until he stood level with the commissioners, and he set the feed sack down, and he opened the dark cloth on the wide stone rail where everyone could see.