"There's a letter," Bedell said, not turning around. "From John Sherwin. In his own hand. I know his hand. I served under him in '74."
"A letter. Paper." Whitcomb's voice was still warm. "Is that what we're to—"
"Paper," Nora said. "Yes, Mr. Whitcomb. Let's talk about paper." She turned to the posse men on the platform. "Mr. Spence. Would you hold up one of the notes Mr. Whitcomb just gave you, please. Any of them. The tens."
Orrin Spence, a big, slow freighter who had once helped Eli pull a wagon out of the Mora River, looked down at the bills in his fist as though they had turned into a snake. Then, slowly, he held one up.
"Sheriff, would you read the bank on it, and the number in red. And then would you read this." She took Sherwin's two folded pages from inside the coat and held them out. "That's the list of the notes in the Cerro Blanco payroll that Hask Pruitt took off the Monday coach at Piedra Lumbre on the third of October. Every note was written down in Denver before it was ever packed. Marshal Sherwin has the book. The mine office has the other."
Bedell took the pages. He climbed up two steps of the platform, heavily, and took the note out of Orrin Spence's hand. He looked at the note and then at the list, and then at the note again, and then he turned and looked at Ambrose Whitcomb, and his face had gone the color of old ashes.
"First National Bank of Denver," he said. "Number forty-one thousand, six hundred and two."
"Nonsense," said Whitcomb.
"It's on the list."
"Then it was deposited," said Whitcomb, and for the first time his voice moved, very slightly, up. "The bank takes in thousands of dollars a week. Some miner, some saloonkeeper, any of Pruitt's people might have—that woman herself might have—"
"You paid that out of your own wallet, Mr. Whitcomb," Nora said. "Not from the window. From your own breast pocket. Let the sheriff see the rest of what's in it."