Tomás Baca agreed to keep the place while she was gone. He did not ask where she was going. He looked at the carpetbag in the wagon bed and the shotgun under the seat and the mule in harness, and then at her face, and said, "The bees I don't touch. The dog I feed. Two of my grandsons will sleep in your ramada with my old Sharps, and if anybody comes in the night they will be very surprised."
"Don Tomás, I can't ask that."
"You don't ask," he said. "That is the difference between you and the other ones."
She went out by the back road over the ridge to Mora, so as not to go through the plaza, and from Mora down the long valley toward the plains. It was seventy miles to Las Vegas by that road. She made it in two days and a half, sleeping one night in the wagon bed under a buffalo robe at the crossing of the Sapello with the mule picketed close and the shotgun under her hand, and the second night at a stage station where the keeper's wife looked at her black ribbon and gave her the bed in the back without asking her name. She was sick in the mornings, quickly and neatly, over the side of the wagon, and then wiped her mouth and drove on, while the mountains fell back blue behind her and the grass ran away tawny under a sky so big it seemed to press on her bonnet.
The railroad had come to Las Vegas in the summer of '79 and built a raw new town of lumber and brick a mile east of the old plaza. She drove through it with her eyes straight ahead and found the address Eli had made her memorize three years before: a narrow adobe house on a side street off the old plaza, with a blue door and a dead geranium in a can on the sill.
A Mexican woman answered. Nora said, "I need to see Marshal Sherwin. Tell him it's Eli Tolliver's wife," and the woman's face changed, and she put her hand to her mouth and said something in Spanish that Nora did not understand except for the word pobrecita, and stood back to let her in.
John Sherwin was in bed in the back room, propped on pillows, with a blanket over his knees and a pile of papers on the quilt and a revolver on the chair beside him. He was a man of sixty, gaunt, with a white beard cut short and the deep vertical lines between his brows that come from squinting at long distances. His left leg was splinted from the ankle to the hip. The room smelled of camphor and cigar smoke. When Nora came in he looked up and stopped with his pen in the air, and then he set it down very slowly on the papers.
"Mrs. Tolliver," he said.
"Yes."
"Sit down. Please. Juana, coffee. Please, sit." He gestured at the chair, and then saw the revolver on it, and moved it to the quilt with a kind of clumsy hurry. "I read it in the Optic. I tried to come. A horse rolled on me in Anton Chico in August, and when I tried the doctor gave me laudanum and took my boots." His jaw worked. "I sent a letter to you in care of the Mora post office. I didn't dare send it to Cuervo."
"I didn't get it."