Part 2
The lock gave with a small click, and the two cattle buyers stepped into the dark office with pistols in their hands.
The small dark one had a bandanna over his face. The big one had not bothered. He held a shuttered lantern, and when he opened the shutter, the yellow light fell across the counter and onto Cordelia Pike, sitting very straight in her chair, in her black dress, with her hands folded in her lap.
The big man jumped so hard he nearly dropped the lantern.
"Good evening," said Cordelia. "I thought you might come tonight."
"Don't you scream," said the small one, low and fast, pointing the pistol at her. "Don't you make one sound, lady. Open the safe."
"I wasn't going to scream," said Cordelia. "The messenger is asleep across the yard, and he's very young, and if he woke up and came over here with his shotgun, someone would get killed. I'd rather it was nobody." She stood up, slowly. "The safe is in the back room. I'll open it. Don't hurry me. My hands aren't as quick as they were."
She took the lamp from her counter, and lit it, and walked into the back room, with the small man's pistol at her back.
The station safe was a squat black iron box on legs, in the corner. Cordelia knelt in front of it and turned the dial, slowly, left and right and left, the way Amos had taught her. The bolts slid back. She swung the heavy door open.
Inside, filling the safe, sat a green-painted Wells Fargo strongbox, with the company's name across the lid.
"Thank you, ma'am," said the small man, with a little bow, and laughed. "You've been very obliging."
It took both of them to lift it. It was very heavy. They staggered with it to the door, and out across the yard in the dark, and Cordelia heard them grunting as they heaved it up across a saddle. Then the soft thud of hooves going away into the sagebrush, toward the hills to the east.
She stood in the doorway and watched them go.
Then she walked back to her chair behind the counter, and sat down, and put her feet back up on the little footstool under the rag rug.
It was not a footstool. It never had been. Under the rug, under her two stout shoes, sat a green-painted iron strongbox, nearly new, with eleven thousand two hundred dollars in coin and silver bullion inside.
At dawn, she woke the messenger.
Young Coombs came running across the yard with his shotgun in his hands and his shirt half buttoned, and stopped in the door of the office, and stared. At the open safe. At Cordelia. At the strongbox under her feet, with the rag rug pulled back.
"I don't understand," he said.
"The box in the safe was the old one," said Cordelia. "From the back room. I changed them over at ten o'clock, after you went to bed. The company retired it two years ago. Moses mended the hasp for me on Wednesday night. He riveted it shut, hot, so it can't be opened without a cold chisel and an hour's work." She smiled a little. "And I filled it with rocks from the corral. And two sacks of Moses's horseshoe nails, for the weight. And a fifty-pound sack of flour from the station kitchen, with a slit in the bottom."
Coombs looked at her.
"A slit?"
"Go and look outside, Mr. Coombs," said Cordelia Pike.
He went outside. In the gray light, across the dark sand of the yard, out past the corral, and away through the sagebrush toward the eastern hills, ran a thin, wandering, unmistakable line of white.
They followed it. Coombs and the hostler and the station keeper, with rifles, and old Moses Harlan with his blacksmith's hammer, because he would not be left behind.
Four miles out, in a dry wash under a ledge of red rock, the trail of flour ended. The two cattle buyers were sitting there on the ground beside the old strongbox, red-eyed and filthy, covered to the elbows in flour, with a cold chisel and a broken knife. They had been hammering at the riveted hasp since three in the morning. They had got it open twenty minutes before.
The big one was sitting with his head in his hands, staring at a heap of corral rocks and horseshoe nails. His hand was bleeding where the chisel had slipped.
Neither of them fired a shot. They were too tired, and too ashamed.
They brought them back to the station by noon, roped on their own horses, and Coombs telegraphed the sheriff at Austin.
Cordelia came out of her office to look at them. The big one held up his bleeding hand without a word, and she went and got hot water and a clean cloth, and washed it and bound it up, standing in the yard in the sun.
The small dark one watched her do it.
"We watched you two days," he said. "Tuesday and Wednesday. From the hills, with a glass. We said there's nobody here at night but a woman." He shook his head slowly. "You never once looked scared."
"I was scared," said Cordelia. "I was scared all night. I just didn't see what good it would do to look it."
Wells Fargo sent her a reward of five hundred dollars, and a letter from the general superintendent in San Francisco, which she framed and hung beside the stage times on the office wall.
She gave a hundred dollars of the reward to Moses Harlan, who used it to buy a new anvil and would not hear a word about it. She gave fifty to young Coombs, who had been very kind about being slept through. She put the rest in the bank at Austin.
The company sent her a new safe that winter. A big one, with a time lock.
But the old green strongbox, the one with the riveted hasp and the dents, Cordelia Pike asked to keep. The company let her.
She kept it under her counter at Sulphur Springs for eleven more years, with a rag rug over it. And she rested her feet on it every day.