So they did it on the last day of October. Tomás Baca supervised, sitting on an upturned bucket with his hat over his eyes, and did not lift a shovel, and nobody asked him to. The men of Cuervo Springs dug Eli Tolliver up out of the red clay on the north side of the fence and carried him in through the gate, which stood wide open on its leather hinges with the chain gone and the new padlock gone too, because Cal Bedell had walked down the slope that morning before anybody else came and thrown it as far as he could into the chamisa in the arroyo. Six men carried the box. The sheriff and Orrin Spence at the head, Lew Pettibone at the side with his one arm, Hiram Ostrander, Frank Ruiz in his marshal's star, and at the foot, because she would not let anyone else have it, Nora. They put him in the top row, under the cedars, between the mine's first superintendent and the stage driver Pruitt had killed in '79, whose widow had asked for it.
John Sherwin came from Las Vegas against his doctor's orders, in the back of an ambulance wagon with his leg out straight on a board. The whole town came. They stood inside the fence this time, all of them, and the women had brought candles in their hands, unlit, beeswax candles. Pearl Ostrander had come out to the Archuleta place with her cheeks blazing to ask, very stiffly, whether Mrs. Tolliver had any candles to sell, the altar committee had voted, and Nora had gone and got a whole crate of them from under the bed, where she had kept them two years against the day, and would not take a cent.
The Reverend Lyle read the service. When he came to the end of it he closed the book and stood holding it and could not seem to go on, and the wind moved in the cedars, and at last he said, in a voice nothing like his pulpit voice: "I refused this man. I told his wife I could not put him among Christian people. God forgive me, I did not know which of us he was being put among." And then he read them the tenth chapter of Proverbs, all of it, slowly, to the end.
The stone came from Las Vegas in December, paid for by a subscription Pearl Ostrander got up, which the posse men began with their own gold, since the reward paper had gone to Santa Fe as evidence. It was gray granite, plain. The stonecutter had copied the back of the star exactly:
ELI J. TOLLIVER
DEPUTY UNITED STATES MARSHAL
TERRITORY OF NEW MEXICO
1850 – 1881
HE THAT WALKETH UPRIGHTLY WALKETH SURELY
FAITHFUL WHERE NONE COULD SEE
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