The sheriff burns the photographs

Sheriff Horace Quinn goes through the papers from Joe Valery's pockets and finds the two-line will and the envelopes of photographs. He confirms the will is good, shows one picture to a frightened lawyer, burns the lot in his office stove, and gives him a list of names to tell — knowing the man will hate him for the rest of his life, and that these guilt-feeling men will end his career. Then he sits in the Trask living room and waits. Told that Kate is dead, Adam weeps for his poor darling; told about the will and the hundred thousand dollars, he wants to tear it up. Quinn advises telling Aron everything at once — and Aron cannot be found. Adam thanks the sheriff, calls him George, and falls asleep. Cal, who took his brother to Kate's and has since drunk a quart of whisky behind the Abbot House, burns the fifteen thousand dollars bill by bill while Lee sits and waits, then punctures him — Caleb the magnificent, whose suffering should have its Homer. In the hall Lee finds Adam unable to read a government postcard.

Quinn's stove is the book's last piece of practical mercy, and it is priced exactly: he saves a dozen men and loses them all as friends, because nobody forgives a witness. Lee's cure for Cal is deliberate cruelty about the grandeur he is taking from his own guilt, and Cal recognises it as a job well done. The postcard arrives while Adam's hand is already failing.