Gid stood in the open yard with his cut bonds hanging loose and his hands free to do nothing, and waited, the way he had promised her he would, for whatever came down the road next.
Chapter 26 — Marked Money
The riders came in at a walk, which was how Gid knew they were law before he saw the star. Men in a hurry galloped. Marshal Tom Weaver came down the Cerro Blanco street with four deputies strung behind him and a dust of road on all of them, and he did not hurry, and the freight yard — which a minute before had been deciding whether it was a mob — settled the way a team settles when a good hand takes the lines.
Gid stood where the staged escape had left him, wrists still bound in front of him, Jo Hartley a step to his left with her hat gone and her hair coming down and the numbers she had shouted still ringing off the freight sheds. A teamster Gid did not know by name stepped in with a skinning knife and cut the rope without being asked, and then stepped back, embarrassed to have been part of either side of the morning.
Weaver swung down in front of the office porch. He was a heavy man gone gray at the temples, with a face that had never once been surprised in fifty years. "Morning, August," he said to Pruitt, as if they had met on a church step. "You're up early."
"Marshal." Pruitt had his genial mask back on — Gid had to admire the workmanship of it, even now. "There's been an outrage here. This woman — this stowaway — has been making wild accusations in my yard, and this freighter —"
"I know who the woman is," Weaver said mildly. "I've had her reports all autumn. In code, mostly, which the telegraph office found very tiresome." He took off his hat and beat the dust from it against his leg. "What I don't have yet is the money. Miss Hartley tells these men it walked out of a sealed box in the night and into Tobe Riggs's pockets. That's a hard thing for money to do, August. Money in a sealed box generally stays where the seal puts it."
"It does," Pruitt said. "It has. The box is in my vault, untouched —"
"Then you won't mind if we look at the seal." Weaver turned his head slightly, not toward Pruitt at all, but toward the crowd at the office door. "I'll want the clerk who keeps that vault. Step out, son. Nobody's going to hurt you. That's more than a promise; it's a schedule of my whole morning."
There was a silence, and then the crowd at the door made a hole, and the vault clerk came down the steps with his hat in both hands. He was a narrow young man with ink on his cuffs and a face the color of whey, and he had not slept — Gid could see that from twenty feet, the way you can see a mule that has stood all night in harness.
"Tell it the way you told it to yourself at two o'clock this morning," Weaver said, "when it was just you and the Lord."
The clerk swallowed. "Mr. Pruitt sent for me a little after midnight," he said. "He said the company had wired — no. He said there was an inspection. He had me open the strongbox that came in on Mercer’s wagon. The sealed one." His voice gained a little as it went, the way a wagon gains going downhill, for better or worse. "He broke the seal himself. He counted out bills and he paid Riggs's boys, in the office, off the top of the box. He told me to enter it as a transfer and to keep my mouth shut, and he said if it ever came out he'd see I was the one who'd opened it, because my key was the one that fit."
"That's a lie," Pruitt said, almost gently. "The boy's frightened out of his wits and saying what he's been told to say."
"Then the money will back you," Weaver said. "Miss Hartley. The numbers."
Jo recited them — seven serial numbers, unhurried, the way a woman might recite a psalm she had learned against her will — and a deputy spread an oilcloth on the freight platform and emptied Riggs's pockets and money belt onto it, and the clerk read the numbers off the bills one at a time against the list he had copied from the box's sealed manifest before he resealed nothing and slept not at all. Six of the seven. The seventh was the coin Pruitt had meant for Gid's kit bag, and it was already spoken for.
"August," Weaver said, with something almost like sorrow, "you paid your road agents out of a bait box, in front of a witness, with money the express company had marked bill by bill. I've arrested smarter men than you, but I don't recollect arresting one who did my work for me so complete."
"My authority as superintendent—" Pruitt began.
"Ended at the seal," Weaver said. "Same as everybody's." He nodded once, and two deputies took August Pruitt by the elbows — courteously, the way you'd move a man who might be carrying something breakable — and a third walked the bought camp deputy out of the crowd with his own badge already off his shirt and in his own hand, which told Gid the man had known all along how this ended and had only been waiting to be told.
Pruitt tried one more door. "You'll hear from the territorial governor. You'll hear from lawyers in Santa Fe who eat marshals."