"Sheriff. I've brought you a letter."
She held it out. He looked at it, at the handwriting on the front, and his face did not change at all.
"From who?"
"From John Sherwin. The United States Marshal."
"I know who John Sherwin is." He did not take it. "Sherwin's been laid up since August. I don't know what he'd have to write me about you. Or how you'd come to be carrying it."
"Read it and you'll know."
"I don't believe I will." He folded the newspaper on his knee. He was a big man, gone heavy in the last year, and his eyes were red-rimmed in a way she recognized from her own glass. "Ma'am, I'll speak plain, since you have. I sat in this chair two years and watched your husband ride out to meet Hask Pruitt and ride back again, and I never once could put my hand on him. I listened to Lew Pettibone tell how a man with an East Texas voice held a rifle on him while his partner bled out on the coach floor. I buried that partner. And while I was doing it, my wife was dying in that house across the arroyo, and your husband was in the Gold Cross standing drinks." He took a breath. "I don't hold it against you. Mostly. A woman don't pick what she marries into. But I will not sit here and read some paper that says Eli Tolliver was a fine, misunderstood fellow, not from you, and not this week. Not with the bank's ceremony on Saturday. Whatever game you're running—"
"Sheriff Bedell."
"—whatever you and his friends up there in the hills—"
"Cal," she said, and he stopped, because she had never called him that, and because of how she said it. "I brought honey to Mrs. Bedell every Tuesday for four months. You remember. She liked it on her bread when she couldn't eat anything else. The last time I came, she told me to tell you to stop being a fool about the Tollivers. She said, You tell Cal, a man who'd cheat his neighbors doesn't sit up all night in the rain with a sick mule. She'd seen Eli do it. She saw it from her window."
Bedell's face went a dull red, and then gray.