"No." He looked at her. "I'm sorrier than I have words for. He was the best man I ever swore."
She had thought it would be easy to say what she had come to say, that she had said it to herself so many times on the road it had worn smooth. Instead she sat there with her gloved hands in her lap and could not say anything at all. Juana brought coffee in two tin cups and put one into Nora's hands and closed her fingers around it, and Nora drank some of it and burned her mouth, and that helped.
"Pruitt killed him," she said finally. "Not the posse. Pruitt. In the rocks, after, from behind. Somebody told Pruitt what Eli was. Eli thought it was the wire. The one he sent you from Mora on the twentieth."
Sherwin closed his eyes.
"I got that wire," he said. "Cattle prices. 'Steers firm at Mora, buyer confirmed, market closes on the third.' Buyer confirmed. That meant he was sure it was Whitcomb." He opened his eyes. "Who sits the key at Cuervo?"
"A man named Fenton Mudge. He boards at Whitcomb's house."
Sherwin said something under his breath that he did not apologize for.
Then she told him the rest. Lafe Corder at her door. Whitcomb's eight hundred dollars, and his question about names. The reward. She told it plainly and in order, the way Eli would have, and Sherwin listened without interrupting, and when she was done he lay back on his pillows and looked at the ceiling for a long time.
"The bank's reward," he said. "When is he paying it?"
"Saturday week. The twenty-second. There's to be a band."
"In what?"