"Well," he said, "now you will be in the plaza on Saturday after all, hijo. Only you will be riding in a wagon."
* * *
The ceremony was set for noon in the plaza in front of the bank. By eleven the whole town was there.
It was the sort of autumn day the high country gives as an apology for the winter coming after: still, bright, cold in the shade and warm in the sun, the sky a hard enamel blue over the mountains and the cottonwoods along the creek blazing. Somebody had hung red, white, and blue bunting from the gallery of the bank and from the balcony of the Gold Cross. The Cerro Blanco Brass Band sat on kitchen chairs on a platform of planks laid across two freight wagons and played "Garryowen" and, for reasons nobody could explain, "Silver Threads Among the Gold." The mine had shut down the stamps for the afternoon in honor of the occasion, and the silence where the thumping should have been was so strange that people kept stopping in the middle of sentences to listen to it. There was lemonade on a trestle table in front of Ostrander's, and children everywhere.
At noon Ambrose Whitcomb came down the steps of his bank in his velvet-collared coat with his wife on his arm, and the band played a flourish, and he mounted the platform. Dell Harlan came behind him, pale, with a sticking plaster on his cheek where something had cut him, standing very straight. Behind them came the four other men of the posse in their best shirts. The Reverend Lyle came last and stood at the end of the row of them with his Bible held against his chest.
Whitcomb spoke for some time, of law and order and statehood, of the two guards and the driver by name, and of Mrs. Pettibone on the front bench beside her husband with his empty sleeve pinned up. He said that Cuervo Springs had shown today that it would not shelter wickedness, and that it would not suffer wickedness to lie among its honored dead. There was applause at that. Then he took a long black leather wallet from his breast pocket and opened it.
"The bank's reward," he said. "Five hundred dollars, in full. One hundred and fifty to Mr. Delbert Harlan. Eighty-seven dollars and fifty cents each to Mr. Spence, Mr. Hoyt, Mr. Gallegos, and Mr. Pruden." He drew out the notes and held them up in a sheaf, so the sun caught them. "In good, new paper money, gentlemen, the best the bank can give."
He began to count it out. And Nora Tolliver came across the plaza.
She came from the north side, from the mouth of the creek road, walking. Behind her, slowly, came Tomás Baca's wagon with Tomás on the box and Ascensión beside him with a rifle across his knees and something long and blanketed lying in the wagon bed. Nora walked in front of it alone. She wore her gray dress, and over it, buttoned to the throat, much too big for her, with the sleeves turned back twice at the wrists, she wore Eli's brown duck coat.
People saw her. It went across the crowd the way a wind goes across a field of oats. Heads turned. A woman said "Oh, for pity's sake," loudly. Somebody laughed. Somebody else said, "Ain't she got any shame at all, wearing it here," and there was a growl of agreement, and a man near the lemonade table said, "Somebody take her home," and nobody moved to do it. The band faltered and stopped. Children went quiet, staring. On the platform Ambrose Whitcomb stood with the sheaf of notes still in his hand and watched her come, and for one moment, only one, his face did nothing at all.
She walked straight through them. They parted for her, not kindly. She walked to the foot of the platform, where Cal Bedell stood in his black coat with his star on it and his hat on, and she stopped in front of him.