Chapter 19
The Rurales worked the train front to back, a sergeant and two troopers, and Will heard them coming a car ahead, the flat sound of the sergeant's voice saying the same thing over and over, and boots in the aisle, and the little silences where a man's papers were being read.
The door at the end of the second class car banged open and the sergeant came through with his lantern and his paper.
He was a thick, careful man with gray in his mustache, and he wasted no time on the women or the Mexican men.
Two rows up he stood an American drummer onto his feet and read his face against the paper and sat him down again. Then he came to Will and Isum.
"De pie. Up."
They stood. The sergeant held the lantern to Will's face.
"American?"
"Texan," Will said. "Will Fain. Marshal, Comal County, Texas, traveling home. I have no authority here, but it's my trade."
"Your business in Chihuahua."
"We thought the Rurales had captured an American fugitive in Chihuahua that we wanted to extradite, but when we got down there, we found it was the wrong man. So we're now returning."
The sergeant looked at his paper and back at Will, and at Isum, longer, and Isum looked back at him with a face that had outwaited better men.
A lone American, the paper said. Here were two Americans together, and neither one anything but calm.
No roan, no name that matched, and nothing to hold, and the sergeant knew his job too.
"Siéntense," he said, and moved on.
Will sat down. The sergeant's boots went away up the aisle toward the door of the first class car, where Del sat with his family and Lupita, and Will Fain sat in his seat with his hands on his knees, no badge worth anything, no play to make, nothing in the world to do but listen to those boots and wait, and it was hard work being so helpless.
In the first class car the door opened and the lantern came in.
Elena did not look up from her mending, a sock of the boy's, drawn out of her bag ten minutes before for exactly this.
Carlos sat between his mother and his father with his hands in his lap, a stone in a field.
Del sat by the window with his hat off, his son against his side, and watched the sergeant come with the mild, tired interest of a man being kept from his supper. Lupita sat in the seat facing them.
The sergeant passed a priest, passed two miners with papers in order, and stopped at their seat.
"Buenas noches, se?ores. Papers."
"Buenas noches, sargento," Del said, and reached inside his coat without hurry and handed across the letter.
The sergeant unfolded it and held it to the lantern.
The square parish hand, the seal of the church at Parral, the Hidalgo name, the sick father in the north, the request for Christian courtesy on the road.
He read it through. He looked at Elena, who bit her thread and glanced up at him with polite inquiry and went back to the sock.
He looked at the boy, who was asleep, or near it, against his father's arm, dark lashes down.
He looked at Del.
He looked a long time. The paper in his other hand said a lone American, tall, horseshoe mustache, dark headed, a blue roan, a horse thief running south of Parral.
That's what the wire said and that's what the sergeant was hunting, and hunted men do not look like one with a wife mending a sock.
It does not look like one with a boy asleep on a gray wool sleeve.
The sergeant folded the letter and handed it back.
"A sus órdenes, se?ora," he said, and touched his hat brim to Elena, who nodded before the sergeant walked on.
Nobody moved. The boots went away. The far door opened and closed, and after a while there were voices down on the ballast, and lantern light swung along the windows toward the rear of the train, and then the light climbed down and the voices moved off toward the horses.
The whistle went. The couplings rang out one by one down the train's length, and the car lurched and rolled, and the water tank slid backward past the glass and was gone, and the dark ran level again.
Carlos turned his face up to his mother who pressed his hand twice.
"Did I win?"
"You won," Elena said with a relieved laugh. "I'm going to be telling you stories till I'm old and gray." She looked across at Lupita and said, "You'll have to help me pay off my debt to him." Lupita laughed.
Del looked out the window for a long time.
Nobody on that train said it was finished, because it was not finished, and they all knew better than to say a thing before it was true.
The stations went by in the night and the day, Sauz and Gallego and Ahumada, names called down the car by the conductor, and at every stop Del's eyes went to the platform first, counting jackets.
And at every stop there were none, or there were soldiers with other business who never looked at the cars, and the train rolled on. Elena slept some.
Carlos asked the conductor twice if he could see the engine. Finally, the man took him forward at a water stop to see the engine again, and brought him back sooty and fulfilled.
Will came up through the cars on the second morning and stood in the aisle a moment like a stranger asking after a seat.
"Next stop's El Paso," he said, to nobody in particular, and went back the way he'd come.
The train ran out onto the bridge over the Rio Grande in the middle of the morning.
There was no speech in the car and none needed.
The girders went by the windows and the light came through them in bars, and below, the river ran thin and brown between its sandbars, indifferent to what it divided.
Del's right hand had been closed on his knee since the last station.
Somewhere out over the water it opened, the fingers spreading slowly on the gray wool, and lay flat, and that was all the ceremony there was.
Carlos had his face at the glass. "Is that Texas?"
"That's Texas," Del said.
"It looks the same as Mexico."
Del laughed. "Looks a whole lot better than Mexico to me."
Carlos turned from the window quickly and said, "Was it bad, Pa?"
"Uh huh, but we're in Texas now, and that means they're no longer hunting me."
Carlos crawled over on his knees and hugged his father. "We knew you'd come."
"And you were right," Del said. "I did come, thanks to Marshal Will and Isum."
In El Paso they came down onto the platform into the noise and the heat, and Will left them and was gone half an hour up the street, and when he came back his coat was lighter by one paper.
"Marshal's office has it," he said. "Vega's statement, signed and witnessed, and my own account alongside it, sworn before the deputy. It'll sit in a file in that office from now on. If Mexico ever comes asking after Delbert Cole, there's an answer waiting for them in writing, in Vega's own hand.
"And I left money to pay Castillo for the two horses we rented and had to sell off. Isum and I intended to bring them back, but I don't regret selling them off. It made sense to get us out of Mexico. I also sent a telegram to Judge Freeman and Virginia letting them know we were back in Texas."
"And Fuentes?" Del asked.
"Fuentes has got a warrant for a man on a blue roan who doesn't exist anymore.
" Will settled his hat. "Warrants die quiet, Del.
Not clean, but quiet. It'll sit in a drawer in Parral getting yellow, someday a clerk will need the drawer,but one thing's sure.
You better not go back down there any time soon.
"They had a few hours in El Paso, so Del took Carlos down to a dry goods store on El Paso Street where he bought denims and a light blue cotton shirt so that he could change out of the suit he'd been wearing.
As they were shopping, Del pressed down on Carlos's boot at the toe and said, "Your toe's at the end of those old boots, Carlos. Let's buy you a new pair."
When they returned, Carlos was anxious to show off his new boots to his mother and Tía Lupita. "They're beautiful," his mother said. She pressed down on the toe and said, "And they should last you a while."
"They're kinda stiff," Carlos said.
"You'll get used to them," Elena assured him.
Del changed into his range clothes at the station rest room.
He gave the suit to Elena, who folded it neatly and put it away in one of the valises.
Del stood at the station window and looked out at the line of the mountains to the north that were Texas mountains, not much different in their shapes from the Chihuahuan ranges, but to him they looked like home, and he felt a relief from being a hunted man.
Elena came and stood beside him. He put his arm around her.
"Next stop San Antonio," he said.
"And after that," she said.
"Home, sweet home," he said.