"I only mean you don't owe him that."
"I don't owe him anything," she said. "That's why I'm going."
The Lake County jail was a stone building behind the courthouse on Harrison Avenue, two stories, with barred windows that looked out onto a yard of trampled snow and a woodpile. The jailer was a heavy, friendly, incurious man named Ruddock who remembered Tallis and shook his hand, and who listened to Sabra's account with his mouth slowly opening, and who said at the end of it, "Well, I'll be God damned. Begging your pardon, ma'am. Well, I'll be. He never said a word. Two months in that cell and he never said a word." And then, recollecting himself: "You'll want to see him."
"Yes."
"I'll need to stay in the corridor."
"Stay where you like."
He took her down a whitewashed passage that smelled of lye and coal smoke and old tobacco, to the last cell on the left, and unlocked the outer door, and stood back.
Eben was sitting on the bunk with a book open on his knee. He looked up when the door opened, the way a man looks up who has learned to expect nothing from a door, and then he saw her, and the book slid off his knee onto the floor and lay there with its pages bent.
He had gone gray. That was the first thing. The beard was nearly white at the chin, around the crescent scar, and his hair had thinned, and there was a looseness to the skin of his face that had not been there two years ago, as if something underneath it had been taken out. He was thinner. He was wearing a canvas jumper that was too big for him, and his hands, lying open on his knees where the book had been, were a miner's hands now, black in the cracks. She looked at the left one. The stump of the little finger was there, pink and shiny, exactly as she remembered it.