but a name nobody would say kindly and he left it the way such men leave quietly in the early part of a day with no crowd to see him off. The last anyone in town saw of him, he had stopped his loaded car at the corner of Mercer Street and Arthur happened to be standing in the doorway of the locksmith shop and for a moment the two of them looked at each other across the distance that had once been the whole weight of Harlan County and was now only the width of a street.
Coburn's mouth worked as though he meant to say something, some last cut, some final word to put the boy back in his place. But there was no word that fit anymore. Whatever he had counted on his whole life, the certainty that he could read the true price of a thing by the look of it had failed him completely the one time it mattered and he knew it. The boy knew it, too. There was nothing to say. Coburn looked away first.
He drove on and he did not come back. The town did its reckoning the way towns do unevenly and incompletely, but it did it. The people who had laughed loudest in the auction barn were the quietest now, and some of them found their way to the locksmith shop in the weeks that followed to say a thing or two to Arthur that they should have said years before. And he received them with the same steady patience he had shown the steel, which was to say without bitterness and without quite forgetting either.
Harold Beaumont's wish was carried out at last. The money built what he had wanted built and over the door of it by a vote that surprised no one, the town put a name. Not Beaumont's. Beaumont had asked for a library and a school, not a monument to himself.
The name they put over the door was Callaway for the man who had carried a secret into a fire and let the town call him a thief for 16 years rather than break a promise. The Samuel Callaway Library and Learning Center where any child in the county could go, no matter who their people were, exactly as the letter had asked. Arthur would not take the money. There was a great deal of it that the court said was his by rights, the share Harold Beaumont's letter had set aside for the family of the man who kept his trust, and Arthur let it go into the building with the rest.