He looked at her, and at the coat. There was a fold of paper sticking out of the breast pocket of his vest, she saw. Sherwin's letter. It had been opened. He had read it, then. He had read it, and he had come to the ceremony anyway, and he was standing here, and she did not know what that meant and had no time left to wonder.
She took her sewing scissors from the pocket of the coat. She opened the coat and turned back its left breast so that the gray flannel lining showed, and the square of close, even stitches over the heart, and in front of the whole of Cuervo Springs she cut them, one, two, three, four, five, and put two fingers in, and drew out the star.
It flashed in the sun. Somebody in the crowd made a sound.
She held it out to Cal Bedell on her open palm, face down.
"Read the back," she said.
He took it. His big fingers were not steady. He turned it to the light and looked at it a long moment, and then he looked up at her, and she saw his throat move.
"Out loud, Cal," she said. "Please. They need to hear it."
He cleared his throat. When he spoke it was in the voice he used for reading out proclamations, too loud, and it carried to the back of the plaza in the strange stamp-mill silence.
"'Eli J. Tolliver,'" he read. "'Deputy United States Marshal. Territory of New Mexico. Sworn at Las Vegas, March the ninth, 1878.'" He stopped. He wet his lips. "'He that walketh uprightly walketh surely. Proverbs ten, nine.' And under that it says, 'Faithful where none could see. J. S.'"
For a breath there was no sound in the plaza at all.
Then Ambrose Whitcomb laughed. It was a good laugh, rich and easy and full of pity, and it broke the silence like a stone through a window. "Cal," he said, "Cal, my dear fellow. Any bandit in the Territory can take a badge off a dead lawman. Or have one struck by a jeweler in Santa Fe for ten dollars. The poor woman—"