"He that walketh uprightly walketh surely," she said. "Do you know the rest of it, Mr. Whitcomb? You're a deacon. You ought to." She waited. He did not answer. "'But he that perverteth his ways shall be known.'"
Then her legs went out from under her at last, and it was Pearl Ostrander, of all people in the world, who caught her before she hit the ground.
* * *
Frank Ruiz rode in on Sunday morning with two deputies and a warrant from Judge Bristol, a day late, exactly as promised, and found the banker of Cuervo Springs sitting on the bunk in one of the iron cells he had paid for, in his shirtsleeves, with his collar off. In the false bottom of the second of Mrs. Whitcomb's four trunks, packed and corded in the front hall of the white house for the cars, they found six thousand four hundred dollars in new national bank notes of the First National Bank of Denver, and in the safe in Whitcomb's study, under a bundle of deeds, they found more, from three other payrolls, going back two years. On Tuesday, with Lafe Corder's directions in his pocket, Ruiz and nine volunteers from Cuervo Springs went up toward the Rio Pueblo and found Hask Pruitt's cabin in a box canyon behind the aspens, and took him and four of his men after a fight of half an hour. Hask Pruitt was hanged at Las Vegas the following March. Ambrose Whitcomb and Delbert Harlan were tried in the federal court at Santa Fe that spring, and Fenton Mudge and Lafe Corder swore against them, and they were sent away to serve their time in the House of Correction at Detroit, Michigan, where the Territory sent its federal prisoners in those years, since it had no penitentiary of its own. People said Whitcomb wrote long letters from there to the Santa Fe paper about the injustice of it, and that the paper did not print them.
But that was later. That was all later.
What Cuervo Springs did first was dig.
They came out to the Archuleta place on the Monday after the ceremony, a dozen of them, with Cal Bedell at the front, and stood in her yard with their hats in their hands. She came out under the ramada to meet them. Nobody said anything for a while. Then Bedell held out the star.
"I kept it safe for you," he said. "I didn't want to give it back in the plaza, with everything." He looked down at it in his palm. "Mrs. Tolliver, we buried him wrong. We buried him like a dog, outside the fence, and I put the lock on that gate myself, because Ambrose Whitcomb asked me to and because I wanted to. I'd like to put that right, if you'll let us. I'd like to know if you'll let us."
She looked at the men in her yard. Hiram Ostrander. Orrin Spence. Amos Kettering, the undertaker, holding a new hat. Lew Pettibone with his empty sleeve. The Reverend Lyle, who had not slept either, by the look of him.
"He'd have said there was no need," she said. "He'd have said he knew what he was, and that was enough."
"I expect he would," said Bedell. "It isn't for him."