Part 2

“What did you buy that gun for?”

“I saw the game was up. You were closing in. When I saw you there in that Pullman I wondered if you’d recognize me--and I thought sure you didn’t. I’ve changed more than you have. My hair, last time you saw me, was thick, and its natural color. And this”--he touched the long ragged scar on his upper lip--“you never saw that. Nobody in Texas did. Nobody in Texas ever saw me without a mustache; I had it all raised when I came here. Not a living soul in the State knew I had this mark under it except my wife--and she never saw it. I got it falling off a shed onto a harrow back there in Kentucky when I wasn’t twelve years old. Just as soon as I was able to raise hair over it, I hid it. Then I raised whiskers, too. I was twenty when I came to Texas, you know.”

“So you thought I didn’t recognize you there on the train?”

“If I’d believed you did, I’d have left it the other side of the border. But when it seemed I’d got by you, I thought I could get by anybody, so I came on. Then there you were in the lobby last night but you didn’t seem to notice me much. So I still thought I was all right until your man followed me to-day.”

“How did you know him?”

“I didn’t, of course. He doesn’t date back to my time. But I ran into him three or four times this afternoon, and finally I asked a man, while he was in sight, who he was. And the man didn’t remember his name but said he was a Ranger.”

The man spread his hands.

“So then I knew it was all up,” he said, “and that I’d been a fool to come back into this country. And there was no getting away--so I decided to take the only way out. I got the gun. If you hadn’t come in here about when you did----”

Who _was_ the man? Even with a mustache and beard imagined on his face, Carmichael could not reconstruct a face he knew. He said, groping for a clew:

“Twenty-two years. Time goes, doesn’t it?”

“Twenty-two years. And in all that time I have never asked a question about Texas that would show any knowledge of it, never admitted I ever was in Texas, never more than three or four times seen a Texas paper. I went to England on a cattle boat right after my escape--with the whiskers and mustache shaved off, of course, so they never spotted me--and then, after a while, to the Argentine. I’ve been there ever since.”

“Prospered some, I take it.”

“Yes, I’ve prospered. I’m worth a good deal of money. It was one of my interests brought me to Mexico; I own more than half of the Buena Ventura Mine, there in the hills back of where you saw me get on the train. I had to come up to look it over and when I thought that I was only a few hundred miles from San Antonio--well, the thing pulled me. I just had to come. Why, I didn’t even know whether my girl was alive or dead. And I wanted to know. For one thing, if she was living I wanted to fix it so she’d get my property when I pass out. And I couldn’t write to anybody, of course, not without making talk.”

“Been going straight all this time, eh?” Carmichael was still groping.

“I never was anything else,” the man protested. “You never heard anything against me outside of that last killing, did you? And you never heard the truth of that. Nobody did.”

“I don’t remember all the details,” the Ranger said. “It’s a long time.”

“I was railroaded,” the man declared earnestly. “You may not believe it--convicts always say they were railroaded. But I was. The evidence was all against me. I didn’t have a chance. But as true as there’s a God in heaven I never killed a man that wasn’t trying to kill me. Not one of them. Everybody had to admit that until the last one. They got me that time without a friendly witness.

“Of course anything I say isn’t going to have any weight, after all this time. The records of the court show for themselves. But it’s a relief, somehow, to talk about it. The biggest thing in a man’s life and I’ve had to be dumb for twenty-two years! Twenty-two years without a word from home--although after a while it stopped seeming like home. Buenos Aires is my home now. People down there don’t think badly of me at all. If it wasn’t for the girl--and yet, until I got into Mexico there, so close to Texas, I never really intended to look her up in person. You see, I didn’t even know whether or not she’d lived.”

“So you said. Tell me about that killing. The straight of it.”

The man had quite recovered from the effects of his blow, except that an ugly lump was raising itself above his ear, which from time to time he patted softly.

“That feud between John Gater and me,” he said, “dated back a long time. He was the boss of Huevaca County in those days, of course, and I was a sort of leader of the faction that was trying to pull him off his throne and get halfway decent government. Sheriff Aristo Coyne was his man, and all Coyne’s deputies. And he was in with the Sarran gang.”

“A fine bunch of desperadoes and horse thieves,” Carmichael murmured.

“And Dick Sarran, the head of them, was a dirty killer, but nobody could do anything to him because Gater stood behind him. And Gater was above all the law there was in Huevaca County.”

“He was a powerful boss.”

“And I fought him, like a young fool. I was about twenty-five. I’m only forty-nine now. This white hair----

“Larry Beeson was governor and Gater was his man--and that meant that he had the State backing for anything he chose to do, murder included, provided he delivered the votes of the county. The first killing was on an election day, when ‘Buck’ Hamilton, one of Sarran’s gang, tried to vote a bunch of Mexicans solid that he’d brought across the river only that morning. He and I had words and he went after his gun. I was some fast in those days and I killed him. They couldn’t do a thing to me. It was self-defense and there were a lot of witnesses. But they had it in for me from that minute. I was a fool not to leave the county. But I was too stuffy.”

“It took more than stuffiness to stay in Huevaca County after John Gater and Dick Sarran wanted a man out of it,” the Ranger said sympathetically.

“So they laid for me, and inside of a year I had to kill two more of them.” Even the thought of it brought a harassed, haunted look into the man’s eyes. “I slept, those days, with a gun, not under my pillow, but actually in bed with me, under my hand. Sometimes, looking back on it, it seems as though I didn’t really sleep during that whole year. It was along in the early part of that time that the baby was born, and my wife died when it was four days old. And it seemed to me I didn’t much care whether they killed me or not. My wife’s sister here in San Antonio took the baby.

“Then that gubernatorial campaign came along where Jeff Rich was running against Larry Beeson, and you remember there never was bloodier politics in Texas. I was for Jeff Rice, to the limit. And when he was licked, after a close election, it looked as if word went out that it was an open season on the fellows that had fought Beeson the hardest. Anyway, a lot of them got killed pretty soon, one way and another.

Well, I wouldn’t leave the county, and my turn came.

“That man Bristow, of Sarran’s gang, had a good reputation compared to most of the rest of them. He hadn’t ever killed a man--at least it never had been proved that he had--and maybe Gater and Sarran had that in their minds when they set him to get me. I suppose the scheme had been all worked out for some time, waiting for the cards to fall just right. Anyway, he and I met one evening along about dusk near the post office--and there wasn’t one single man in sight that didn’t belong body and soul to Gater. And Bristow said fighting words to me and went after his pistol and I beat him to it. Seems funny that I could beat fast gunmen to the draw in those days, when you think how slow I went after that pistol of mine just now, doesn’t it? But after twenty-two years without practice----

“If another man, that they couldn’t manage, hadn’t come into sight just as I shot him, they’d probably have finished me right then and there, although perhaps I could have taken two or three of them along with me. But there was a preacher--one of these circuit riders--came around the corner just as Bristow fell. They didn’t know, I suppose, whether he saw Bristow go after his gun first or not, although it turned out at the trial that he didn’t. So they didn’t keep the fight going--but one of them sneaked Bristow’s pistol from where it lay beside him before the parson could get near enough to see what he was doing and everybody swore I’d deliberately killed an unarmed man that had always had a reputation of being peaceable.”

For three seconds the speaker stared gloomily before him, his eyes on that tragic past. Then:

“That’s all,” he said, simply. “Gater had the jury and why they didn’t hang me I don’t know. Perhaps he thought it would be a bigger punishment to send me to the pen. The sentence was life. And Deputy Sheriff Dominguez started with me for Huntsville.”

“And you jumped off the train, handcuffed, while he was asleep.”

“I jumped off the train, but he wasn’t asleep--and I had the handcuffs loose in my hand when I jumped, because they’d just been unlocked. And there was a thousand dollars in Miguel Dominguez’s pocket the next day that hadn’t been there before. It was pretty nearly all the money I had in the world and Dominguez was willing to double cross his own gang if the temptation was strong enough. He knew I’d never come back, and if I did, and told it, I’d be just an escaped lifer trying to make trouble for an officer.”

“I’ve been trying to think of your first name, Alsbury,” said Carmichael. “It is ‘Martin,’ isn’t it? You were always called ‘Red.’”

“Martin Alsbury,” the other agreed. “‘Red’ Alsbury to everybody, in those days. The color’s been gone out of my hair a good many years. The girl’s got it. That exact shade. She’s a fine-looking young woman, Carmichael. Just to think that until day before yesterday I didn’t even know whether she had lived or died! A man doesn’t have much affection for a little bit of a baby, less than a year old--especially if its mother died when it came. I never thought much about Edith till lately. But as a man gets older----”

Suddenly the grim stoicism with which he had been speaking departed. His face distorted and his voice broke, as he implored:

“Carmichael! Can’t I have that gun and settle it the easiest way? Is it necessary she should ever know? She’s going to marry that young Locke, and all day I’ve been checking him up, and he’s a regular man, just the kind I’d want her to marry, but if he and she knew that her father---- She’s never dreamed that I was alive. Is there any need for her to know? If you won’t give me a gun, can’t you slip me into Huntsville for the rest of my sentence without any of it ever getting into the papers, Cap’n? For those young folks’ sakes!”

And now there was huskiness in the Ranger’s throat, too, as he cried, harshly, to conceal his own emotion:

“Why, you darned old fool, you’ll be at the wedding to give her away! Jeff Rich ran again for governor and was elected, two years after you escaped. They never could get track of you to let you know, and finally, when it was in all the papers and you didn’t show up, everybody natchully supposed you were dead. One of the first things Jeff Rich did as governor was to sign your unconditional pardon.”

[Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the January 7, 1923 issue of The Popular Magazine.]