It was not the same alone. She noticed that within a day. The cabin was as it had been, the nine cords against the north wall gone down to seven, the harness mended on its peg, the four panes of glass in the south window throwing their short gold squares across the table in the afternoons. But something had gone out of the quiet, or come into it; she could not tell which. For two years the quiet had been a thing she held, the way a woman holds a cup she is afraid to set down. Now she found she could set it down. She would catch herself, at the table, in the afternoons, with her hands still in the light and nothing in them, and realize that she had not been listening for anything. Not for Eben's step, not for the sound of men on the trail come to collect on him, not for the knock of the truth at the door. The truth had come in and sat by the stove and eaten beans and darned a sock, and then it had gone down the mountain, and the door was only a door.
Word came up in February, by way of a freighter who had it from Ora Bettis, who had it from the Herald. The circuit judge had dismissed the Park County charge against the prisoner in the Lake County jail on the ground that the prisoner was not the man named in the warrant, and had declined, after some hours of argument, to bind him over for anything else. The faro bank's lawyer had appeared and made a speech. The judge had told him that if he wished to collect from a man who had been dead two years he could take it up with the man's executrix, and the executrix, in a sworn statement on file, had declared that the estate consisted of a cabin, a claim, two mules, and a dog, all of which were hers in her own right under the territorial law of married women's property, and that the dog had come with the cabin. There had been laughter in the court. The prisoner had been released on the twenty-third of January and was understood to have gone to work at a mine in the Ten Mile.
The freighter had a letter for her too. It was in Eben's hand, in ink this time, and it was short. It said that he had written to Mrs. Marten in Marion County, Kansas, and had told her everything, and had received an answer, which he would not repeat, except that it had not been what he deserved and had been a great deal kinder. It said that he would sign whatever the Denver man sent. It said that he was sorry about the note. It was signed with his whole name.
She read it once and put it in the tin box with the other, and with the claim papers, and with the Bettis receipt marked paid in full, and she shut the lid.
The ground in Corbel thawed in the second week of April. Tallis came back on the eleventh, on the cars to Buena Vista and then by horse, and with him came a second man, older, sandy, quiet, whom he introduced as their sister Thankful's husband, Zebulon Wex, come to help with the wagon. They brought the oak box Mr. Hurd had built in March and had been keeping in his shop with a tarpaulin over it. They opened the grave on the morning of the thirteenth, with Mr. Hurd and the sheriff's deputy and Reverend Sedgwick standing by, and Ora Bettis at the gate in her good black coat, and Sabra a little apart under the one cottonwood in the Corbel cemetery, which was just coming into a green so pale it was nearly yellow.
She had thought she would not look. She looked.
There was not a great deal. Mr. Hurd and the deputy did what was needed, quickly and with care, and Mr. Hurd said something to Tallis in a low voice and Tallis nodded and went down on one knee beside the open ground and stayed there a while, with his hat off and his head bowed, and nobody spoke. When he stood up he had something in his hand. He came across the wet grass to her under the cottonwood and held it out.
It was Eben's watch. Two years in the ground had turned the case black and stopped the hands at twenty past something, and the crystal was cracked straight across.