And he did not say a single word at first. He simply laid out one piece at a time what the fire had failed to destroy. The banded cash, the folded bonds, the browned envelope with Harold Beaumont's careful hand across the front, and last of all, set apart from the rest, the worn locksmith's tools with the initials scratched into the brass. The square had gone very quiet by the time he straightened up.
"Mr. Beaumont left a letter," Arthur said, and his voice carried in the stillness better than any shout could have. "He wrote it himself, and he signed it, and he locked it in his safe so that the men he didn't trust couldn't get rid of it before the law could read it. He left everything he had to this town.
To a library and a school for any child in this county, no matter who their people were. " He looked at the two commissioners as he said it, and one of them had gone the color of paper. He named the man he figured would try to bury it. "I expect the law will want to read those names for itself. " He set his hand on the worn tools. "And these belong to the man Mr.
Beaumont trusted to lock that letter away. The man who went into that hotel the night it burned trying to carry the truth back out. For 16 years this town has said Samuel Callaway went into the Beaumont to steal. He didn't.
He went in because a man needed a lock kept honest, and he was the one folks trusted to do it. He was my father. And he died in there keeping a promise that some of the people standing in this square made sure nobody ever found out about. " No one laughed now. No one said anything at all.
It was Walt who broke the silence. The old locksmith had come out from his shop on Mercer Street with the rest of the town, and he was standing at the edge of the crowd, and he came forward now through the people, slow an old man's walk, until he reached the foot of the steps. He looked up at Arthur, and then he turned and looked at the commissioners, and at Dale Coburn, and whatever he had been carrying for 16 years. He set it down at last.
"The boy's telling it true," Walt said. His voice was rough and not loud, but the square was so quiet, it did not need to be. "Sam Callaway worked beside me for nine years. There wasn't a more honest man in this county, and there wasn't a better set of hands.