Whitcomb did not move.
On the end of the platform, Dell Harlan suddenly moved instead. He jumped. He landed badly on the hard dirt of the plaza and scrambled up and ran for the horses at the rail in front of the Gold Cross, and as he ran he dragged a short revolver out from under his coat, and the crowd screamed and broke away from him on every side.
He did not reach the horses. From the box of Tomás Baca's wagon, without seeming to hurry, Ascensión raised his rifle and put a ball through the meat of Harlan's thigh at forty yards, and Harlan went down in the dirt howling, and two miners fell on him.
And Ambrose Whitcomb, standing alone at the front of the platform now with his black wallet in one hand, put his other hand inside his velvet-collared coat and brought out a little two-barreled derringer, nickel-plated and pearl-handled, a pretty thing, and pointed it down from the platform at Nora's face.
She did not step back. She could not have said afterward why not. She only stood and looked up at him in her husband's coat, and found she was not afraid of him at all, not one particle, as though everything in her that could be afraid had been put into the ground outside the fence on the eleventh of October.
It was the Reverend Josiah Lyle who stepped between them.
He did not do it gracefully. He was a thin, narrow-chested man of fifty who had never in his life done a physical thing more strenuous than pumping the church organ when the boy was sick, and he stumbled on the edge of a plank and nearly fell off the platform. But he got there. He stood in front of Ambrose Whitcomb with his Bible still clutched to his chest and his spectacles crooked on his nose and the little derringer six inches from his breastbone, and he said, quite clearly, so the whole plaza heard him: "No, Ambrose. Not her. Not in front of all of us. Not again."
Whitcomb's hand shook. For a long moment, in front of a whole town that had sat under his bell and drunk his lemonade and buried his enemy for him, he stood with the gun out and nowhere at all to point it.
Then Cal Bedell reached up from the step below and took it out of his hand, the way you would take a knife from a child.
In the wagon bed behind Nora, Lafe Corder, who had been propped up under the blanket with his splinted leg in front of him and had seen all of it, began to talk. He talked very loudly, the way frightened men do, to anyone who would listen, about saddlebags of paper money ridden down the canyon at night and handed in at the kitchen door of the big white house behind the bank, and about the night in September that Hask Pruitt came back from that same door with a face like death and said that Eli Tolliver was a federal man, and how the old man in the white house had said so, and had got it off the telegraph. And then a thin, consumptive young man with ink-stained cuffs pushed his way out of the crowd in front of the depot and climbed up into the wagon box beside Tomás without being asked, and stood there with his hands knotted together, and said in a voice that cracked in the middle: "It's true. I'm Fenton Mudge, and I gave him the wire. I gave Mr. Whitcomb the Mora wire, on the twentieth. He paid me ten dollars. I didn't know they'd—I didn't know. I've known since they brought him in. I haven't slept." He began to cough. "I'll swear to it. Whatever judge. I'll swear."
Nora turned and looked up at Ambrose Whitcomb, standing with his empty hands at his sides on the platform with the bunting stirring behind him.