She did not understand.
"In what money, Mrs. Tolliver. Gold or paper?"
"I don't know."
Sherwin began, very slowly, to smile. It was not a pleasant smile. It was the smile of a man who has been lying in a bed for two months listening to the world go on without him and has just heard a door open.
"Five hundred dollars," he said. "To five or six men. Made a public thing of, for the newspapers. He won't pay that in gold; gold's for the mine payroll and the Denver bankers. He'll pay it in crisp paper. Clean new notes, out of his own vault, to make a show." He reached for the pile on the quilt and dug through it and pulled out a narrow leather-bound book, a book of ruled pages. "And there's three or four thousand dollars of crisp paper in his vault right now that he thinks is his, and that he thinks nobody on God's earth could tell from any other."
He opened the book on the quilt and turned it toward her. Columns of figures in a neat clerk's hand.
"The Cerro Blanco payroll of October third," he said. "Fives, tens, and twenties, new issue, the First National Bank of Denver. Every sheet. Serial numbers running in blocks. The tens from 41,200 to 41,950. The twenties from 18,300 to 18,700. The fives I won't trouble you with." He tapped the page. "If he's fool enough to hand out a single one of those notes in front of witnesses—"
"He'll say it came from anywhere. From a depositor. From me."
"He will. And then we'll ask him which depositor, and we'll ask to see his books, and we'll ask Fenton Mudge what he did with my wire, and we'll ask Lafe Corder, if we can catch him, where he took the saddlebags." He looked at her. "One thread doesn't hold. Five threads do. Eli knew that. It was what he was doing up there. Gathering threads."
"Can you send men?"
"I've three deputies in Lincoln County. I wired them on the ninth. Frank Ruiz will be back by the twentieth or the twenty-first, and I can have him and two more in Cuervo by the twenty-third with a warrant from Judge Bristol in his pocket." His mouth tightened. "Saturday's the twenty-second."