"In October I found his name." Tallis looked at the stove. "There's a man in the Lake County jail who was arrested on the twentieth of September in a camp outside Kokomo, on the old Park County warrant. A deputy recognized the name in a payroll book. He'd been working under it for close to two years. He didn't deny it when they took him. He said, I'm told, 'I wondered when you'd get around to it.' And he went quiet, the way a man does who's been expecting a thing, and they put him in a cell to wait for the circuit judge, who's due in January. The charge is grand larceny of a horse, and he'll get five years in Cañon City if he's lucky, and he won't contest it." Tallis lifted his eyes. "I read the name in the Herald on the second of October. I was in Buena Vista. I rode all night. I walked into that jail with my hat in my hand thinking I was going to see my brother, and I'd worked out what I was going to say to him, I'd been working it out for two years, and the jailer opened the door, and it was a man of forty with a gray beard and a mark on his chin I'd never seen in my life."
Sabra said nothing. She knew the mark. A pale crescent on the left side of the chin where Eben's own father had once struck him with a bridle bit, when he was twelve. She had touched it with her fingertip on their wedding night and he had turned his face away.
"I stood there," Tallis said. "I couldn't think. I said, 'You're not him.' And he looked at me for a long time, and then he said, 'No. You'd be the brother, I expect. He told me about you. He said you'd come.' And then he asked the jailer if we might have a quarter of an hour, and the jailer said ten minutes, and gave us fifteen."
"What did he tell you?"
"That my brother was dead." Tallis's voice did not change. "That he'd died in a line shack on the Halfmoon trail in a storm in the first week of December two years ago, of a fever, in the night, and that he'd been buried in Corbel under another man's name. Under his name. He told me where. He told me how. He said there was a letter that explained the rest, and that it was for you, and that he'd been carrying it written in his coat for most of a year and hadn't had the courage to post it. He gave it to me through the bars. He asked me to bring it." Tallis paused. "He asked me to bring it by hand, because he said if it came by post you'd burn it without reading, and you'd be right to."
"And you said yes."
"I said yes." He met her eyes. "I'll tell you plainly, ma'am, I didn't say yes for him. I'd have liked to put my hands through those bars. I said yes because I needed to come here regardless, to see the grave, and to see you, and to know what you'd do. Because I can't take Lem home without somebody opening that ground. And I can't have it opened without telling the county why. And once I tell the county why, the man in that jail stops being Lemuel Marten and starts being Eben Hale, and you stop being a widow." He looked down at his hands. "It seemed to me you had a right to know that before I did it. I didn't think you'd thank me for it either way. But it seemed to me you had a right."
The wind had risen. It came up the bench now in long, heavy surges that she could feel in the floor, and the snow had gone from a hiss to a steady whisper against the glass. The light was nearly gone. She got up and lit the lamp, and the room jumped closer around them, the shadows of the table legs reaching across the puncheons, and in the yellow light Tallis Marten looked younger still, and more tired, and she thought that he had probably not eaten a real meal since Leadville.
"You'll not get down tonight," she said.