Boots on the hard dirt of the yard. They came up under the ramada and stopped. Then a knuckle on the door, three times, light.
"Miz Tolliver," said a man's voice. It was a young voice with a rasp in it, a voice that had been drinking. "Miz Tolliver, I know you're in there. I ain't here to hurt nobody. I'm a friend of Eli's."
She knew the voice. She had heard it once before, in the summer, from the cottonwoods, calling Eli out in the middle of the night, and Eli had gone out and talked low with it for ten minutes and come back with his face closed. Lafe Corder. The one who rode alone to town with the saddlebag.
"Eli doesn't have any friends," she said through the door. "Ask anybody in town."
A pause. Then a laugh, not a nice one.
"Well, that's so. That's surely so." The boards of the ramada creaked as he shifted his weight. "Thing is, ma'am, Eli had something that belonged to the outfit. Something he wrote in. A little book. Hask wants it back, that's all. You give it to me, and I'll ride off and you won't never see none of us again. You got Hask's word."
"I don't know anything about any book."
"Now, I don't believe that. He come down here nights. We all knowed he did. A man tells his wife things." The latch rattled. It was barred inside with a length of cedar, and it held. "Open up, ma'am. Let me have a look around, and that's all."
"Mr. Corder," Nora said, and she heard him go still at his name, "I have my husband's ten-gauge in my hands, and I am standing four feet from you with only an inch of pine between us, and I have not slept above three hours a night since you people killed him. I don't believe I would miss."
There was a long silence. Perro went on growling.
"Wasn't us that killed him," Corder said at last, in a different voice. Lower. "Not the way they're telling it."