And then, suddenly, as the car brakes jammed tight and the train came to its full stop, he saw a white man standing beside the track, a traveling bag on the ground by his feet, plainly an American or an Englishman and the first the captain had seen at any station that afternoon. He wondered if, perchance, this man was one of the Tarbox outfit. It was not necessarily so, for there were other mining outfits in these hills, but it was possible.
A moment later the porter came bustling into Carmichael’s car, bearing the white man’s bag, which he put in a section almost opposite the captain, and the white man followed him. Presently, when the train was again in motion and the conductors came through, the Ranger overheard sufficient of their conversation to learn that the new passenger was bound for San Antonio.
The man was at least as old as Carmichael, who was fifty-three, and he looked rather more like an American than an Englishman, but the big bag that contained his belongings had never been made anywhere but in the British Isles. His dress was rough and worn, as would be expected of any Anglo-Saxon coming aboard there in the mountains, but Captain Carmichael’s experience was of a section where one gauges a man by everything but his clothes and there was something in this stranger’s bearing that gave an impression of success and prosperity.
He was tall and at first glance seemed thin, but his movements indicated a lean wiriness that bespoke an active life in the open, as did the sun-browned skin of his face and hands. His hair, short-trimmed by a barber not more than three weeks since, was wholly white, and his face, smooth shaven, might have been sternly handsome but for a scar, old and faded but deep and puckering, that crossed his upper lip almost from corner to corner and drew the lip upward into an expression of perpetual disdain.
Carmichael’s first thought, as he observed the scar, was that if it were on his face he would conceal it with a mustache; his second that hair, in all probability, would not grow on that lip.
The man settled into his seat and stared out of the window and it seemed to Captain Carmichael that there was something vaguely familiar about his profile. More than twenty-five years in the Ranger service had cultivated his memory for faces, yet if he had ever seen the man before the recollection of when and where evaded him. He felt positive he had never seen that unusual scar, and it obviously was an ancient one, which would mean that if he had ever seen the man it must have been long ago.
Until dusk fell the stranger sat quietly in his seat, seldom moving, his eyes on the passing landcape, his face stern and brooding. Carmichael might have tried to open a conversation with him but another passenger who did so was politely but firmly discouraged. And after having got a good full-face study of him in the dining car, Captain Carmichael became convinced that he did not know the man, that his impression of having met him somewhere was due merely to the stranger’s slight resemblance to somebody else.
The correctness of this judgment was borne out at the Rio Grande, when the train stopped in the middle of the International Bridge the next morning and he heard the conversation between the stranger and the American customs and immigration officers.
The man’s papers were in perfect order and he bore in his big British bag or on his person nothing dutiable and no firearms. His name was Andrew Miller, and he was a citizen of Argentina, of English birth. This was his first visit to the United States. He had had business in Mexico and wished to see a portion of the big northern republic. He expected to return to South America within a month or two.
The train rolled on to San Antonio, where the scar-lipped Argentinian left it. Captain Carmichael continued on to Austin.