IN MEXICO.
BALKAN WAR DISPATCHES:
BULGARIA ATTACKS SERBO-GREEK
POSITIONS.
RUMANIA AND TURKEY ENTER WAR
AGAINST BULGARIA.
GOV. GEORGE P. HUNT ANNOUNCES
ARIZ.
1912 COPPER OUTPUT REACHED
200,000 TONS.
PRESIDENT WILSON PROPOSES
FEDERAL RESERVE BANK SYSTEM.
SOLONS LODGE OBJECTIONS TO NEW
FEDERAL INCOME TAX.
NEW ELECTORAL REFORM LAW IN
EGYPT.
Sam Burgade swallowed a yawn, and some coffee, and blinked, and then his eyes fell on the two-column item near the bottom corner of the page:
PRISON BREAK AT YUMA: TWO
GUARDS MURDERED,
CONVICTS ESCAPE. FOURTEEN
DESPERATE MEN STILL
AT LARGE. LATEST DISPATCHES
BY TELEPHONE.
His instincts and interests stirred, he folded the paper to read the article. He took the reading glasses out of their pocket case and wiped them with methodical deliberation, hooked them over one ear at a time, and settled down to read.
Sam Burgade was a striking man, a straight-backed long-legged figure with thick white hair, deeply tanned saddle-leather face, hand-tailored black business suit, old-style wing collar and cravat, glossy black walking boots. He wore his white hair bushy at the back, in a mane. Deep creases, knotted muscularly, ran like painful wounds from the nostrils to the lip-corners of his seamed brown face. All his bones were long; he was lean, but his chest hadn’t caved in with age. Eyes were the color of quicksilver, slotted between sun-shuttered lids. He was an old man now, sixty-one, but folks still said there was moss growing down his north side. Not that it mattered much what folks said. Sam Burgade was an anachronism, all used up. There wasn’t much call for overage ex-fighting men. With the help of rich acquaintances for whom he had done work in the old days—railroad bosses, bankers, corporate managers of big stock ranches—he had run his savings and pension up into a tidy sum for his old age, but clipping coupons and living in comfort didn’t make up for the boredom.
When he got up to shave each morning he was a little startled: he still expected to see a young face staring back at him out of the mirror. He didn’t feel old. It didn’t seem so long ago he had ridden scout for Crook in the campaigns against Geronimo. Hired on with the railroad to head up their train-robber-busting crew. Gone to work for the Inca Land and Cattle Company to demolish the hole-in-the-wall outlaw towns of Jack-Mormon rustlers that made an industry out of stealing beef by the herd from the Hatchet and the Arrowhead. Headed up the Arizona Territorial Police from 1902 to 1910. Organized the militia march into Bisbee to knock the steam out of the strikers’ bombings and assassinations at the great open-pit copper mines. Stumped for George Hunt in the campaign for Arizona’s first governorship after statehood.
That was just last year, that campaign. But when he’d got up to make speeches the crowd had treated him like an elder statesman—courteous respect, but inattention. Look at that poor old man, son, he used to be the toughest son of a bitch in Arizona, but that was before your time, that was in the Old Days.
Life had settled into dreary ritual. Mornings in the hotel, afternoons sitting on the sheriffs front porch or playing horseshoes with the old boys who’d soon move into the Pioneers’ Home, evenings in the genteel rubbed-oak-and-leather dimness of the Stockmen’s Club, reminiscing about Old Times with other old-timers.
Sam Burgade was in a mood all the time now, he didn’t care anymore one way or the other: a why-not mood of indifference. Nothing mattered very much. The century had turned thirteen years ago and Sam Burgade did not belong in this new one.…
The newspaper story took him back. It was Zach Provo’s name that did it. My God, I thought he was dead. Then he thought about it and did some arithmetic in his head, and realized Provo wasn’t all that old, after all. Provo had been almost a kid when Sam Burgade ran him to earth in 1885. Provo didn’t have to be much over fifty years old, even now. Think of that. Still a young man, after having spent three fifths of his life in the Yuma Penitentiary. What did a man feel like, busting out into this newfangled world after all that time?
It didn’t matter much, he supposed. They’d have Provo back soon enough. Not like the old days. In these modern times nobody could outrun the telephone and the horseless carriage, the railroads, the telegraph all over the place. The state militia up in Phoenix was even trying out one of those new flying machines.
No point fretting about Provo, anyway. Provo had got less than he deserved. He should have been hanged in the first place. He would have been, if he’d been tried by a cow-country jury instead of a crowd of city men in Phoenix who’d become soft where they sat and soft where they did their thinking. And that high-priced defense attorney pleading with the jury to take into account that Provo had already suffered grievously, been shot to pieces and had his young wife killed before his eyes: Provo had already been punished, the lawyer kept saying. He’s already paid a good part of the price for whatever crimes you may decide he committed, although nobody’s admitting he blew up that express car with the four men inside it; after all, this big-time railroad detective, this famous Samuel Burgade, searched every foot of the ground and every hiding place along the Navajo track line, and every inch of Defendant Provo’s homestead, and never found nary a trace of that forty-eight thousand dollars in gold that my client’s supposed to have stolen from that train.…
“Hot enough for you, Sam?”
Gus Leggett’s abrasive voice brought him out of his reverie. He looked up in resignation: Gus Leggett was the town bore. But Gus was also the accountant who had invested Burgade’s money for him, mostly on the advice of Burgade’s former employers, and Gus was good-hearted.
“Hot enough,” Burgade said judiciously, and Gus seemed to take it as sufficient invitation. Gus pulled up a chair and sat down.
“I see you’ve been reading the paper.” Gus had a narrow body, thinning blond hair, the rheumy eyes of a bloodhound, and an infuriating tendency to chuckle at everything he said—a nervous habit; every sentence ended with an awkward, neighing laugh.
Gus beamed. “Funny thing about old Zach Provo, isn’t it? You’re the one who captured him way back in the Dark Ages, aren’t you, heh? I hear they captured that bunch in the farmhouse downriver from Quartzsite, but there’s still nine at large, and Provo’s one of them, heh. What do you think of that, now?”
“They’ll get run down. They always do.”
“Maybe they got across into Mexico by now, what do you think, heh?”
“Maybe they did.”
“Not like the old days when you and the Rurales had to make a private deal because there wasn’t any extradition treaty between the States and Mexico. You ever wish it was the old days again, Sam?”
“No,” he lied.
His unenthusiastic monosyllables finally penetrated Gus’s awareness, and Gus stood up. “Well,” Gus said, and trailed off, and started again, “Well, I got to get up to the office, lot of work to do these days. Things are booming all over. You ought to stop up sometime and we can go over your portfolio, heh.”
“I’ll do that.”
Gus went, hobbling a little; a colt had stomped his foot once, he had lost a toe, and after that he had taken up desk work. He hated horses—“One end bites and the other kicks”—and hadn’t ridden one in thirty years. But then, Burgade thought, How long since I got aboard a horse? Last year, the statehood parade. He couldn’t remember a time since then.