Gin Locklear--for that was how she was known--had a gift for making a man feel important.
Whether it was an art she had acquired, or something natural to her, I did not know, nor did it matter. She rested her hand upon my arm and no king could have felt better.
Then a Negro servant stepped to the door.
"Mr. Cosmo Lengroffwas he said, and I'll be damned if it wasn't the Tinker.
It was he, but a far different Tinker than any I had seen before this, for he wore a black tailored suit that was neatly pressed (he'd bribed a servant to attend to that for him) and a white ruffled shirt with a black string tie. His hair was combed carefully, his mustache trimmed. All in all, he was a dashing and romantic-looking man.
Jonas Locklear was within my range of vision when he turned and saw the Tinker. I swear he looked as if he'd been pin-stuck. He stiffened and his lips went tight, andfora moment I thought he was about to swear. And the Tinker wasn't looking at anybody but Jonas Locklear. I knew that stance ... instant he could pick a steel blade to kill whatever stood before him.
The Tinker bowed from the hips. "After all these years, Captainffwas Virginia Locklear threw a quick, startled look at her brother, and Franklyn Deckrow's expression was tight, expectant.
They were surprised, but no more than I was.
It was the first time I'd heard the Tinker's name, if that was indeed it, nor had I any idea he had that black suit in his pack, or that he could get himself up like that.
Jonas spoke to me without turning his head.
"Were you a party to this? Did you know he knew me?" His tone was unfriendly, to say the least.
"I never even heard his right name before, nor have I known of anybody who knew him outside the mountains."
Not until we were seated did I again become conscious of my appearance. This table was no place for a buckskin hunting shirt, and Deckrow was probably right. I vowed then that this should not happen to me again.
That snip of a Marsha did not so much as glance my way, but Virginia Locklear made up for it. "Virginia does not suit me," she said, in reply to a question about her name. "Call me Gin.
Jonas calls me that, and I prefer it."
The talk about the table was of things of which I knew nothing, and those who spoke might well have talked a foreign tongue for all the good it did me. Fortunately, I had never been one to speak much in company, for I'd seen all too little of it.
I'd no need to be loose-tongued, so I held my silence and listened.
But Gin Locklear would not have it so. She turned to me and began asking me of my father, and then of the cabin where I had lived so long alone. So I told her of the forest and the game I had trapped, and how the Indians built their snares.
"Tell me about your father," she said finally. "I mean ... really tell me about him."
It shamed me that I could say so little. I told her that he was a tall man, four inches taller than my five-ten, and powerful, thirty pounds heavier than my one hundred and eighty.
She looked at me thoughtfully. "I would not have believed you so tall."
"I am wide in the shoulders," I said. "My arms are not long, yet I can reach seventy-six inches--the extra breadth is in my shoulders. I am usually guessed to be shorter than I am.
"Pa," I went on, "was skillful with all sorts of weapons, with horses, too."
"He would be a man to know," she said thoughtfully.
"I think I'd like to know him."
It was not in me to be jealous. She was older than me, and a beautiful woman as well, and I did not fancy myself as a man in whom beautiful women would be interested. I knew none of the things about which they seemed to interest themselves.
Yet, even while talking to Gin, I sensed the strange undercurrent of feeling at the table. At first I believed it was between Jonas and the Tinker, and there was something there, to be sure; but it was Franklyn Deckrow of whom I should have been thinking.
After dinner, we three--Locklear, the Tinker, and I--stood together in Locklear's quarters. Deckrow had disappeared somewhere, and the three of us faced each other. Suddenly all the guards were down.
"All right, Lengro," Locklear said sharply, "you have come here, and not by accident. ...
Why?"
"Gold," the Tinker said simply. "It is a matter of gold, and we have waited too long."
"We?"
"In the old days we were not friends," the Tinker said quietly, "but all that is past. The gold is there, and we know it is there. I say we should drop old hatreds and join forces."
Jonas indicated me. "How much does he know?"
"Very little, I think, but his father knew everything.
His father is the one man alive who knew where it was."
"And is he alive?"
"You," the Tinker said carefully, "might be able to answer that question. Is he alive?"
"If you suggest that I may have killed him, I can answer that. I did not. In fact, he is the one man I have known about whom I have had doubts---
I might not be able to kill him."
"I don't know what you're talking about," I said, "but I am sure my father is alive-- somewhere."
"You told me he planned to come back," the Tinker said. "Do you think he would purposely have stayed away?"
For a moment I considered that in the light of all I knew of him. A hard, dangerous man by all accounts, yet a loving and attentive father and husband. At home I had never heard his voice lifted in anger, had never seen a suggestion of violence from him.
"If he could come," I said, "he would come."
"Then he must be dead," the Tinker said reluctantly.
"Or prevented from returning," Jonas interposed dryly, "as I was for four years."
Far into the night we talked, and much became plain which I had not understood until then--why the Tinker had come to the mountains, and where he had come from; and why, when we reached Jefferson, he had insisted upon turning south instead of continuing on to the west.
I knew now that he had never intended going further west than Texas, and that he had thought of little else for nearly twenty years.
This was 1868 and the War with Mexico lay twenty years behind, but it was during that war that it all began.
Captain Jonas Locklear had sailed from New York bound for the Rio Grande, with supplies and ammunition for the army of General Zachary Taylor. There the cargo would be transshipped to a river steamer and taken upstream nearly two hundred miles to Camargo. The Tinker had been bosun on the ship.
Captain Jonas had run a taut ship, respected but not liked by his crew--and that included the Tinker.
They had dropped the hook first off El Paso de los Brazos de Santiago, the Pass of the Arms of St. James. From there orders took them south a few miles to Boca del Rio, the Mouth of the River--the Rio Grande.
It was there, on their first night at anchor, when all the crew were below asleep except the Captain and the Tinker, that Falcon Sackett emerged from the sea.
The Tinker was making a final check to be sure all gear was in place. The sea was calm, the sky clear. There was no sound anywhere except, occasionally, some sound of music from the cluster of miserable shacks and hovels that was the smugglers' town of Bagdad, on the Mexican side of the river.
Captain Jonas Locklear was wakeful, and he strolled slowly about the deck, enjoying the pleasant night air after the heat of the day.
Both of them heard the shots.
The first shot brought them up sharp, staring shoreward. They could see nothing but the low, dark line. More shots followed--the flash of one of them clearly visible, a good half-mile away.
Then there were shouts, arguments. These were dying down when they heard the sound of oars in oarlocks, and a boat pulled alongside.
There was a brief discussion in Spanish, the Tinker doing the talking. At that time Jonas knew very little Spanish, although later he learned a good deal. There was plenty of time to learn ... in prison.