“I want your undertaking that what you intend is lawful, or that a man of good conscience could put his name to it.”
“There’s no harm in asking,” Placido Geist said.
None of us is entirely evil, and none of us, of course, entirely good. We are often what we least want to become, and perhaps Concho Jimmy would have turned out differently in what might be regarded as a more perfect world but the facts proved otherwise. He early on displayed a talent, a genuine enthusiasm it must be admitted, for depredation and a taste for easy money. The boy was father to the man.
The missing loot from the freight office robbery in Alpine had lain hidden in the Chisos all this time, and none of the surviving members of the gang had tried to go back for it until now, when Jimmy Pringle was the last of them still alive. There’d been a small amount of gold and silver coin, which they’d divvied up between them, but the bulk of the paper currency was issued by local banks and would attract notice as stolen when anybody tried to redeem it. They decided to bury it. Later, when there might be less suspicion attached to its ownership, they’d retrieve it. Thirty years after the fact, of course, it was red-dog money, worthless because the issuing banks had failed or called in their old notes long before in exchange for U.S. silver certificates backed by the Federal Reserve. At this point the banknotes were nothing more than a historical curiosity. Concho Jimmy wasn’t hazarding the rigors of the trail on a fool’s errand. He had more animal cunning than that.
“Railroad bonds,” Placido Geist explained to the constable.
“Stolen property,” Nightingale said.
“They disappeared a long time ago,” Placido Geist said. “There’s no way to determine their provenance. They might have been unearthed in an attic or found in the lining of a couch. Anybody could happen across them. They are payable to the bearer on demand.”
“Would these be Santa Fe bonds or Southern Pacific?”
“Some smaller road probably, one that’s since been absorbed by Harriman and Hill,” Placido Geist said. “That’s of no great moment.”
“It is if the railroad no longer exists.”
“They’re worth a like interest in the present road,” the older man told him. “Whatever the ownership of the company, such bonds are still hens for as much as twenty years after they mature. It’s not too late to cash them in.”
“He can’t profit from them if he committed the robbery.”
“We’d have to prove it,” Placido Geist said. “And to do that we have to catch him first.”
They’d camped in a draw just south of Maravillas Creek. The dusk was long and flat, but they were already in the shadow of the Santiago, the crooked mountains to the west. Nightingale wasn’t sure whether he’d convinced the old bounty hunter to take him along or whether Placido Geist had let the young constable talk himself into it. Either way, Nightingale was grateful for the opportunity.
“What persuaded you Pringle would come back into the Big Bend?” Nightingale asked.
“I’ve researched the man,” Placido Geist said. “I had a few strong leads as well.”
There was more, and Nightingale suggested as much.
Placido Geist sat back against his up-ended saddle, stretching his boots out toward the small campfire. “I figure it’s appropriate,” he said. “We’ve both come full circle.”
“In other words, you think it likely Concho Jimmy’s out here because you want it to be so,” Nightingale said. “You’d admire the symmetry.”
“I’d say that was true,” Placido Geist admitted, shifting his weight to pick a stone out from under his poncho, and got more comfortable.
“And the others?”
“Gone to a greater reward,” Placido Geist said, “but one not without its own perils.” He stared into the coals.
The coffeepot began to bubble, and Nightingale took it off the fire and set it in the warm ashes. He poured in some cold water to settle the grounds.
“I’m not mistaken to suppose you’ve an axe to grind,” he said. “Your dogged pursuit of this man is hard to fathom.”
“I was disappointed in love,” Placido Geist said.
Nightingale was wise enough to hold his tongue.
“It wasn’t of my own choosing,” Placido Geist told him, not looking up from the fire. “The girl’s family didn’t much approve of me. Can’t hardly blame them, an Indio halfbreed with no prospects. I wasn’t an educated man or a promising one, and I had little to recommend me.”
Nightingale poured them both a cup of coffee and handed one to Placido Geist.
Geist let the steam rise into his face. “I got her pregnant,” he said. “It’s common enough, but I didn’t know. I was chasing Iron Claw for the army. They’d trailed north into Colorado.” He seemed for a moment to have lost his train of thought, but he was only ordering things in his mind, cataloguing his sins. “Amarita was killed by the bunch that robbed the freight office. My child died with her.”
Nightingale felt compelled to comment but was silent.
Placido Geist glanced up from across the fire. “It’s an atonement,” he said.
“I can see how you’d feel that way,” Nightingale said.
Placido Geist smiled. “No,” he said. “I’m not blaming Concho Jimmy Pringle for what happened, any more than I could blame a scorpion or a snake, and no more than I blame myself for it in spite of what my friend Judge Lamar thinks. There are no innocents. We are all guilty of something. Amarita was guilty of too much affection, too simple a desire. Jimmy Pringle is guilty for the hate in his heart, not for what he did to her or me. My atonement is that I have to cleanse my own heart of hatred.”
Nightingale didn’t quite understand.
“I have to forgive him,” Placido Geist said.
“And then you’ll feel free to kill him?”
Placido Geist thought about it for a moment. “No, but I won’t lose any sleep over it,” he said.
It took three days before Concho Jimmy was sure he was being tracked. He hadn’t taken any thought to covering his back trail. Not to put too fine a point on it, but nobody should have known where he was headed or what he was up to. Unlike many cons, Jimmy had kept his own counsel inside and didn’t brag about his scores. Certainly there was talk, but he had never encouraged it. Enough mystery attached to him that he was spoken of, not to, and he was one of the few to have ever broken out of Huntsville, although it was twenty years ago. In stir, Jimmy was left alone, as befitted someone that high in the pecking order. He minded his own business, and only once did he kill a man, a pesky son-of-a-bitch who kept badgering him about the jobs he’d done with Wind River Bob. He made him for an informer and knifed him in the shower stalls one afternoon, but it wasn’t laid at his door. The dead man had no friends, and even the screws were glad to be shut of him. They looked the other way, and Concho Jimmy Pringle was off the hook. He had no reason to believe he was anything but golden when he got out of jail. Nobody else had lived to tell the tale, and he’d never told it. It was disturbing. Concho Jimmy circled behind himself, walking back the cat.
“He knows we’re here,” Placido Geist said, studying the track of the horse. He got to his feet and dusted off his pants.
“Why would he think anybody was after him?”
“Native caution,” Placido Geist said. “Concho Jimmy’s spent most of his life looking over his shoulder, and usually there was somebody there.”
“Does it matter what kind of somebody it is?”
“Not to Concho Jimmy.”
“What’s his next move?” Nightingale asked.
“He could double back and give us a sniff,” Placido Geist said, mounting up again. “Or he might be looking to dry-gulch us in one of those arroyos up ahead.” He gazed off toward the horizon. A heavy cloudbank was rolling up along the edge of the sky like rising dough. You could make out the occlusion of the weather front. It came on with ominous speed. “I don’t care for the way this is making up,” he said to Nightingale. “We’d best move to higher ground.”