She held her breath.
"Hask done it. Up there in the rocks, after, while we was dividing. Hask walked up behind him while he was tying the box onto the packhorse and put two in his back, and Eli never even turned around. Then Hask says, leave him, there's men coming. And there was. Bank men. Like they knowed right where to come." The boards creaked. "I liked him, Miz Tolliver. I want you to know that. He was the only one of the bunch ever give me the time of day. But Hask said he was a spy. Hask said he'd heard it from somebody that knowed. And Hask is generally right."
"Who did he hear it from?"
"I can't tell you that."
"Then you can't tell me anything I want to hear," she said. "Get off my place."
"Ma'am, if you got that book, you got to know—it ain't just Hask wants it. There's another party. And that other party ain't nice like me. You think on it. Next time it won't be me knocking."
She heard him go down off the ramada and the creak of the saddle and the horse moving off at a walk, and then a trot, toward the stage road. She stood with the shotgun until there was nothing left to hear but the creek and the cottonwoods and the bees in their boxes, humming in their sleep. Then she sat down on the floor with her back to the door, because her legs would not hold her any longer, and she put the gun across her knees and her two hands flat on her belly.
There was no book. Eli had never written anything down; he had kept it all in his head, every name and every trail and every date, because paper could be found. But they didn't know that. Pruitt didn't know it, and the other party, the one who wasn't nice, the one in the velvet-collared coat, didn't know it either. They thought she had something with names in it. And they would keep coming until they had it, or until they were sure she didn't, or until she was gone.
Eight hundred dollars and a ticket on the cars.
She sat on the floor until the window grayed. Then she got up and lit the stove and put the coffee on, the last of it, and while it boiled she took down the carpetbag from the nail over the bed and began to pack.
* * *