"It's going to be the third," he said. "The Monday coach out of Mora. Pruitt means to take it at Piedra Lumbre, where the road goes down between the rocks."
"You know that already?"
"He told us tonight. He knew a week ago. He always knows a week ahead." She felt him turn his head toward her in the dark. "Nora, this is the one. Sherwin and the mine's people fixed it up between them in Denver. That payroll's going to be twenty-two thousand dollars, and only about four of it in gold. The rest is new paper. National bank notes, fives and tens and twenties, fresh off the press from the Treasury, and every last one of them has had its number written down in a book before it went in the box. Sherwin's got one copy. The mine office in Denver's got the other."
"Why paper?"
"Because the man in town takes his share in paper." He said it slowly, so she would understand. "Pruitt keeps the gold. It's heavy and it don't burn and you can spend it anywhere in Sonora. But the man who tells him which coach to hit, he don't want gold. Gold's hard to explain. He wants paper, because paper goes into a vault with a lot of other paper and nobody looks at it twice. I've seen Pruitt count it out. Half the paper every time, into a saddlebag, and Lafe Corder rides off with it alone and comes back two days later without it."
"Rides where?"
"Down to town." He was quiet a moment. "To the bank, Nora."
She had known. She thought afterward that she had known for months, from the way Eli's jaw set whenever Ambrose Whitcomb's name came up, and from the way he had stopped keeping any money at all in the Cuervo Springs bank last winter except for the little account in her name that he said they kept for looks. But hearing it said aloud in the dark was different. It was like hearing a floorboard creak in a house you had thought was empty.
"Can you prove it?"
"Not yet. That's what the third's for. After the third, Whitcomb's going to have a few thousand dollars of that paper sitting in his vault, or in his house, mixed in with the town's money. Sherwin can get a warrant on what I've told him, maybe, and walk in there with the numbers, and there it'll be." He breathed out. "Then I come home. Then I'm done."
"Eli. You said maybe."
"A judge don't like to hang a banker on a cowhand's word. He'll like it fine on the Treasury's."