Ora Bettis was harder. Ora had been kind to her for two years in the steady, practical, slightly managing way of a woman who has buried two husbands of her own, and when Sabra told her, standing at the end of the store counter with the cracker barrel between them, Ora did not say anything at all for nearly a minute. Then she said, "You knew."
"I suspected."
"You stood next to me at that grave."
"I did."
Ora looked at her a long time across the counter. Then she reached under it and brought out the account book and opened it to Sabra's page and turned it around so Sabra could see the line at the bottom, in Ora's square hand: Paid in full, 14 August 1880.
"He borrowed that on the mules and never told you," Ora said. "I knew that much. I always knew he was a fool. I didn't know he was a coward." She closed the book. "I'll not say I'm not hurt, Sabra Hale. But I'd be lying if I said I didn't understand you. Go on to Leadville. When you come back, come by. I'll want to hear it."
The stage from Corbel ran to Leadville twice a week when the road was open, a long day over the shoulder of the range in a mud wagon on runners with buffalo robes on the seats and a drummer in patent medicines who talked the whole way about the coming of the railroad. Sabra did not hear a word he said. She sat by the window with her hands in her lap and watched the country go by, the long white parks and the black timber and the sudden raw scars of the mines, the gallows frames and the tailings dumps steaming in the cold, and she tried to think what she would say to Eben, and could not. Every time she reached for it there was nothing there, as if the place in her where those words should have been had been scraped out and left clean.
Tallis sat across from her. Once, when the drummer had gone to sleep and the wagon was laboring up the last grade with the driver swearing at the leaders, he leaned forward and said, low, "You don't have to see him. You can give it to the judge in writing and go home."
"I know it."