She put her hand flat on his chest in the dark and felt the oilcloth square under the flannel of the coat, and his heart going under it, steady.
"There's something else," he said. "Something's changed with Pruitt. Last two weeks. He watches me. He used to watch everybody and now he watches me." He took her hand off his chest and held it. "I sent a wire to Sherwin from the depot at Mora on the twentieth. In the cipher we use, about the cattle prices. It was nothing anybody could read. But I've been thinking about that wire."
"Who'd see it?"
"The man at Mora sends it. But it don't go straight to Las Vegas. Line runs through the office here first, on account of the mine. Fenton Mudge sits at that key and every word that comes up the wire out of Mora goes past his ear." Eli was silent. "Mudge rooms at Whitcomb's. In the back of the house. Has for two years."
"Then don't go."
"If I don't go, Pruitt knows for sure."
"Then come away. Tonight. We'll take the mule and go to Las Vegas and you can tell Sherwin all of it and let somebody else—"
"Nora." Gently. "Two guards and a driver. Mrs. Pettibone's boy has to cut his father's meat for him now. Somebody in that bank sold those men for money and then went to church on Sunday and sang about it." He squeezed her hand. "I'm close. I won't ever be this close again."
She did not argue more. She had learned, in three years, the difference between a thing Eli could be talked out of and a thing he had already settled at the bottom, and this was the second kind. Instead she held on to him.
Before he went, a little before dawn, he said: "If it goes wrong. If I don't come back."
"Don't."
"I have to say it, so you'll know. If I don't come back, don't use the wire. Don't trust anybody in Cuervo Springs till Whitcomb's answered for. Not Bedell, not the preacher, not anybody who eats at that man's table. Go to Sherwin in Las Vegas yourself. In person. Tell him the third. He'll know." He was quiet. "And keep the star. Don't show it to a soul till the work's done. If they know what I was before Whitcomb's took, he'll burn every scrap of that paper in his stove and walk away clean, and everything I did up there was for nothing."