I was lucky. I got one through the hand and broke the other’s shoulder.
Then I called to the cook to bring some rope, and made him tie them up while they cussed a blue streak and told me I couldn’t do that to the Texas law.
They were still cussing when I loaded them onto their horses and took them to the nearest town; ten miles south.
A ten-dollar bill is talking-money to a pueblo chief of police. They had an adobe jail that I hoped would hold together until the job was finished. I knew it would be at least that long before they could get a message across the river and any action on it.
That’s the whole truth about that affair — the first time it’s been told. Sam didn’t have a thing to do with it. He didn’t even see the deputies. I told the cook to keep his mouth shut, and I told Sam the two shots he heard were me plugging at a coyote. I don’t think he believed me, but he didn’t ask any questions.
I know the government kicked up a row over the jailing of the two deputies in Mexico, but it happened just like I’ve told you. They were out of their own back yard, and they got what they were asking for when they crossed the Border.
The job rocked along. We were getting dirt moved and no one else bothered us.
It’s a funny country that way. People don’t bother you much. Hell, there have been revolutions begun and ended without ever getting into the newspapers. The Mexicans have a queer way of tending strictly to their own business and letting the other guy tend to his.
That is, it’ll seem queer to an American newspaper man. You make a living sticking your nose into other people’s affairs and you wouldn’t understand a Mexican’s lack of curiosity.
But that’s the way they are. It was as though our construction camp was in a vacuum, and we slept and worked and ate in that vacuum with no contact with the outside world.
There was a feeling of tensity between Sam and me as we began to see the end of the job coming up. We were going to finish a week ahead of schedule, but neither of us was any too happy about it.
When the last wheeler-load was dumped in place on the fill it was going to mark more than just the end of another job. It had been swell going while it lasted, but everything has to end.
I didn’t know what Sam was thinking when I’d catch him looking at me queerly those last few days as the two ends of the fill came together, and I didn’t want to know.
After that last load was dumped to grade would be time enough to find out what Sam was thinking.
We were going on stolen time and we both knew it. But neither one of us slowed up to make the job last longer. Not even the extra week we might have taken before there was danger of rains.
It’s something you can’t do much about — the pressure to put a job on through when the end is in sight.
I knew Sam pretty well by that time, better than I’ve ever known another man, but his private thoughts still remained a secret to me.
I guess no man ever wholly knows what’s in another’s mind. There’s a certain barrier that you can’t quite squeeze past. No matter how hard both of you try.
Know what I mean?
You’re married, aren’t you? All right. Take an honest look at your own thoughts. How well does your wife know them?
Don’t kid yourself. Make an honest-to-God checkup on the secrets you keep in your mind from her.
That’s what I’m talking about.
There’s a part of you that’s you. Which is probably as close to a definition of the human soul as anyone will ever get.
That’s the difference between a man and an animal. You can pretty well figure what an animal will do under a given set of circumstances. Only God ever knows what a man is going to do.
Which pretty well brings us up to the morning Sam and I stood and looked at the completed railroad fill. It was ten o’clock in the morning and the last yard of dirt had been dumped and spread to grade.
Sam had been to the tent, and he came back to see it ended with me. It was in the cards.
All at once, it was over. Teams were standing idle, and the Mexicans were squatting on their heels, sucking on cigarillos.
The sun was searing down and there was a heat haze hanging over the valley and everything was pretty much like it had been for weeks except that our job was done.
The track-laying crew would be coming along with cross-ties and steel. Trains would soon be running on schedule over the grade we had sweated out our guts on, and no one would think a damned thing about it.
The job didn’t seem so important after all.
I looked at Sam and I saw the same bulge inside his shirt that had been there when he first rode up on a roan mare. He had gone back to the tent to buckle on his .45.
That gave me an idea what to expect, but I still wasn’t sure what he had on his mind. I said:
“I don’t know why it makes any difference, Sam, but I would have hated to quit before this was finished.”
He said: “I know how you feel,” and we both stood there without saying anything for a little.
I didn’t look at him when I said: “There’s other jobs waiting to be done, south of here.”
“I know. It’s too bad we can’t do them together.”
“Can’t we?” Hell, I was so choked up that’s all I could trust myself to say.
Sam wasn’t choked up. His voice was clearer, harder, than I had heard it before:
“I’m afraid not. They’re still looking for Bronson’s murderer across the Rio Grande.”
“Do we have to worry about that?”
“Haven’t you known all along that it was my worry?”
I had, of course. There wasn’t any use trying to lie to Sam. I saw that same gleam in his blue eyes that had been there the first time I saw him.
My lips were parched. I wet them with a tongue that felt like a dry sponge.
“What are you figuring on doing, Sam?”
“I’ve got to go back across the Border where I belong.”
Well, there it was. Things had been building toward that ever since he stepped off the roan and took hold of the level.
I had known it was coming all along. Sam was that kind of an hombre.
Enough of an engineer to stay and see the job through, but too much of a man to take the easy way and go on down into the tropics with me, where they don’t give a damn how many men you’ve murdered.
I said: “I’m ready whenever you are. It’s been swell knowing you, Sam.”
And we shook hands.
There, Mister, is your human interest yarn. You know the rest of it. The newspapers gave the story a heavy play when we crossed the Border together. There were headlines about the lone American who had gone into Mexico and brought out Bronson’s murderer single-handed.
The feature writers did a lot of guessing about what happened during those five weeks.
Your paper will be the first to carry the straight story.
Am I sore at Sam?
No. Not even when I sit down in that chair tomorrow to pay the price for killing Bronson.
You see, Mister, I know how Sam felt about finishing his job. They picked him to go after me because he’d studied engineering in college.
But his real job was with the Texas Rangers.
William Cole
(fl. late 1930s)
“Waiting for Rusty” originally appeared in the October 1939 issue of Black Mask, which, strangely enough, published only this one story by William Cole. What is even more astonishing, given the tale’s excellence, is that Cole published no other story anywhere, according to Michael Cook and Stephen Miller’s exhaustive Mystery, Detective, and Espionage Fiction: A Checklist of Fiction in U.S. Pulp Magazines, 1915–1974 (1988). Of course, it is possible that Cole wrote extensively for the pulps, but under another name or even a variety of other names. Or perhaps he was just a lowly editor assigned to fill some space in the magazine. Still, Cole’s true identity remains a mystery.