Harold Beaumont came to me when he wanted that letter locked away where these gentlemen couldn't reach it, and I sent him to Sam because Sam was the one I trusted, and Sam was the one who could do it, so it had stayed done. " He looked at Arthur, and something gave way in the old face that had been shut tight for 16 years. "I knew. I knew what they said about him was a lie. And I held my tongue because I was afraid of these same men, and I have been ashamed of it every day since.
I should have told you, son. I'm sorry I let you grow up hearing it." The thing the town had believed for 16 years came apart right there in the square, in the space of two men speaking, and there was no putting it back together. What happened to Dale Coburn happened slower than the laughter had, but it was surer. The letter and the names in it went where Arthur said they would go, to the law, and the law in those years was not always quick to listen to a Black boy in a Southern town, but a signed will in a dead man's hand locked in his own safe, naming the very man who had spent 16 years getting rich off land that should have gone to a library was not a thing that could be laughed away.
It came out over the months that followed that Coburn had bought the Beaumont land and the hotel ground for almost nothing in the confusion after the fire, buying it from a county that had no right to sell it because Harold Beaumont had already given it away in a letter those same officials had pretended did not exist. The fortune Dale Coburn had built on Mercer Street had its first stone laid on a buried will and a slandered dead man. He fought it the way men like him fight with lawyers and bluster and a great deal of noise about his good name. But the names in Harold Beaumont's hand could not be unsaid and the worn tools with the scratched initials could not be unseen and one by one the people of Harlan County who had been afraid of Dale Coburn for 30 years discovered that they were not afraid of him anymore.
The long white Lincoln was sold to cover what the courts said he owed. The storefronts went. By the time the trust was settled and the land returned to the purpose Harold Beaumont had set for it, Dale Coburn had nothing left in Harlan County