She did not look at it until she was home with the door barred. Then she spread it on the table in the window light next to the two folded pages from John Sherwin's book.
The twenty was from a bank in St. Louis and meant nothing. The fives were from Kansas City. Two of the tens were from the First National Bank of Topeka.
The third ten was from the First National Bank of Denver. Series of 1875. And in the upper right and lower left corners, in red ink, the serial number: 41,388.
She sat and looked at it for a long time. Then she found the place on Sherwin's page, and ran her finger down the column, and there it was, in the neat clerk's hand, in the block from 41,200 to 41,950. Packed in a strongbox in Denver. Taken off the Monday coach at Piedra Lumbre on the third of October. Divided in the rocks while Hask Pruitt walked up behind her husband. Ridden down to Cuervo Springs in Lafe Corder's saddlebag. And counted out to her this morning, across the walnut counter of the Cuervo Springs Bank and Trust, by the man who had brought her husband home across a saddle and called it a kill.
She put her hand flat on the note, very gently, the way you put a hand on a sleeping animal.
"There you are," she said.
* * *
They came on Friday night, the night before the ceremony, a little after two in the morning, and they came to burn her out.
Tomás had expected it. "A man who has a reward paid on Saturday," he said, "does not want the widow standing in the plaza on Saturday. Also, I am old, and I don't sleep anyway." So on Friday night he came with his grandsons and his nephew Ascensión, who had scouted for the army against the Navajo, and they put out the lamp at nine and sat in the dark in the ramada and the corral and the bee yard, and waited.
Nora sat inside by the window with the Parker across her knees. She heard the horses a long way off, walking, and then stopping out on the stage road, and then nothing for a long while. Perro growled. Then she smelled it, sharp and sweet in the cold air, coal oil, and heard the slosh of a can somewhere behind the house, against the north wall where the woodpile was stacked under the eaves.
Ascensión fired first. The flash of it lit the whole yard white for an instant, the corral and the cottonwoods and two men frozen beside the woodpile with a can between them, and then everything was dark again and full of noise. A horse screamed. Somebody ran. Benito's Sharps boomed from the ramada, and a man yelled, high and terrible, and then there was the sound of a horse going away flat out toward the road, one horse, and Cruz shouting in Spanish, and Tomás's old cracked voice saying, very calmly, "Don't move, cabrón, or I will make you a saint."