I can stay till this boiler gets up to the job, he thought. I can do that much for Ben. Then there's nothing to do but quit. I'm finished as a troublebuster. Willie made me see that clearly enough.
He had never really believed in the railroad; but he had taken his living from it, and he had given what it asked in return.
Willie had said he was tough. I've made a profession of toughness, he thought, but I've made it an honest profession. I've laid my life on the line to do what I've been paid to do. That's all I've ever been, an honest tough. It wasn't much, but it was something. Now I am a man in love. And I am nothing at all.
There was still the ranch he had dreamed of for so long—or was there? Persia had spoiled that for him, he realized. In spite of her show of interest, she would want no part of the modest spread he would have, of the years of frugal living while he built up a herd. No, there was not even that now. There was only the soft dream of a lovely woman whose eager tenderness absorbed a man ... and left him nothing of himself.
It was tenderness itself that was his enemy, he thought. He had toughened the shell around his loneliness to the point of brittleness; he had made himself defenseless against love for a woman when it had finally come to him....
He slept and woke and overtook the boiler a mile on its way. It was in little danger, he judged, as long as it was rolling along the road. And after another short pulley haul had been made with no attempt at interference, he decided that Palma probably was not in the vicinity.
That night he rolled up in his blankets under the wagon with the great weight of the boiler above him. He slept deeply and was wakened by one of the guards shining a lantern in his face. A messenger had arrived with a note from Ben Vickers:
Jack
Some drunken Indian says I got to get a message to you, I can't make out why. Something to do with a man named Palma.