"You told me," she said, "that the money from August was a horse sale in Trinidad."
"I know what I told you."
He had not reached for her hand. That was what she remembered best. Another man would have reached for her hand to soften it, and Eli had kept his own flat on the table, a foot away from hers, because he had decided she should have the whole of it to look at before he touched her, so that whatever she chose she would be choosing it with her eyes open. He was like that. He thought things through to the bottom and then he did them.
"There's a man named Hask Pruitt," he'd said, "who's been taking the Cerro Blanco payroll off the coach about every third month for two years. Him and seven or eight others. They've killed two guards and a driver. They've got a hole somewhere up toward the Rio Pueblo that nobody can find. And somebody in Cuervo Springs is telling them which coach carries the money, because the mine changes the day and the coach and the route, and it don't matter, Nora. They know. Every time, they know."
"And you—"
"John Sherwin swore me in at Las Vegas in March of last year. Before I ever met you. I was supposed to work the freight roads and listen. Then Pruitt's people started buying their grain off the wagon I was driving, and one thing led on to another." He'd looked at the star. "This summer I went up into the hills with them. I'm in, now. Not all the way. Pruitt don't trust anybody all the way. But I'm in."
"Eli."
"I couldn't tell you before. I'm telling you now because I can't keep coming home to you with a lie in my mouth, and because if something happens to me I want there to be one person in this world who knows what I was doing." Then, for the first time, he'd put his hand out, palm up, on the table between them, and left it there. "I'll understand if you want to go home to your sister in Independence. I'll put you on the cars myself. I'll send you every dollar I get."
She had not taken his hand. Not right away.
"How long?" she'd asked.
"Till I know who in town is talking to Pruitt. Till I can prove it to a judge."
"And everybody here will think you're one of them."