"I have it."
"You've read the back."
"Yes."
"I had it made in Denver," Sherwin said. "Out of a twenty-dollar gold piece. The Service gives a deputy a nickel badge, if anything. But I knew what I was asking him to do. Live as a thief in front of everybody he knew. Get called every low thing there is and never once answer. Nobody was ever going to pin anything on him for it. So I did." He looked away, at the window. "My mother's verse, that. She had it worked on a sampler over the stove in Vermont. I never was much for scripture. That one stuck."
"It stuck with him too," she said.
When she went out, Juana followed her to the wagon with a sack of tortillas and a jar of green chile and a little bottle of something from the priest for the sickness in the mornings, which nobody had told her about, and kissed her on the cheek, and went back in without a word.
* * *
She got home late on the nineteenth to find the place standing and the dog fat and two of Tomás Baca's grandsons, Benito and Cruz, asleep in the ramada in their blankets with the old Sharps between them. They had seen nobody. One night they had heard horses on the stage road, stopping, and then going on.
On the morning of the twentieth she put on her gray dress and drove into town, and went to the jail.
Cal Bedell's office was a single whitewashed room at the front of the new stone jailhouse, with the cells behind it through an iron door. There was a desk, a stove, a rack of rifles, a feed company calendar, and on the wall above the desk a tintype in an oval frame of a fair-haired woman in a dark dress with a cameo at her throat. Bedell was sitting under it with his boots up, reading a week-old Santa Fe paper. When she came in he took his boots down, slowly, and did not stand.
"Mrs. Tolliver."