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.”