Near the end of September Tristan received a telegram from Asheville, North Carolina, from Alfred saying, "You have won her. I am sending her home . . ." He rode to Choteau and checked the return address by phone, and found out disturbingly that it was the address of a private asylum. He borrowed a Ford truck and drove over to Great Falls to meet the train, a little puzzled but somehow imagining that he would spend the rest of his troubled life caring for Susannah though he envisioned that she might finally get well at the ranch. He met the train feeling cold in his stomach but disregarding it. A politician friend of Alfred's approached Tristan, led him to the baggage car, handed him a list of burial instructions as the porter unloaded the highly polished rosewood coffin.
There's little more to tell. Susannah was buried next to Samuel and Two and the reader, if he or she were a naive believer, might threaten God saying leave him alone or some such frivolity. No one has figured out how accidental is the marriage of the blasphemy and fate. Only a rather old-fashioned theologian might speculate on Tristan damning God so many years before in France when he and Noel encased Samuel's heart in the paraffin. The contemporary mind views such events properly as utterly wayward, owning all the design of water in the deepest and furthest reaches of the Pacific.
One warm Sunday morning in mid-October a few weeks after the burial Samuel and Three were playing on the porch swing with their ponies saddled and tethered to the railing. Isabel had brought breakfast upstairs to Ludlow who wasn't feeling well. She was reading to him from Melville's Pierre, or the Ambiguities. Ludlow loved Melville while Isabel found the author tiresome.
In the kitchen Pet packed lunches for Tristan and the children's outing. She listened carefully to the talk of Decker and Tristan. They were trying to speculate themselves out of an impossible quandary: the fact that the Irish could very well return out of simple vengeance. Tristan stretched and walked over to Pet and asked her opinion. She said that they all cared most about the children and that the only important thing to her was that they were safe. Three came in and tugged at her father's arm. Tristan kissed her and said ten more minutes and she ran through the parlor yelling ten minutes to Samuel.
Decker suggested Cuba where Tristan had a small finca he had bought years before and now managed by his two Cuban crew members who had shipped up two good mares the previous spring for breeding. Tristan worried aloud about the children's schooling and Decker said their father's life was more important than schooling. Pet went rigid, first hearing the car, but Samuel called out that the police were here and she relaxed. Decker followed Tristan out onto the porch and paused with his grandchildren as Tristan approached the two troopers standing by the Ford coupe.
Tristan was easeful and almost bored as he nodded to the troopers but then his heart jumped against his ribs when he saw that one was actually the elegant Irishman from San Francisco, and the other a thug looking ungainly in a uniform. They studied each other for a moment.
"I've lost my two brothers. We best settle this," the man said.
Tristan glanced back at the porch where Decker stood next to Samuel and Three and One Stab. He knew he had come to the end and his heart ached for his children standing in the sunlight on the porch.
"Would you mind if I went with you, I don't want the children to see," Tristan said.
The Irishman nodded yes then was startled at Ludlow tottering across the dry brown grass barefoot in a nightshirt with the big buffalo robe wrapped around him. Tristan said politely that this was his father but Ludlow shook his white head holding his slate upon which he had written "What is the meaning of this?"
The Irishman began a quiet speech with an apology saying that he was sorry but Tristan must pay his debt to society by a long term in prison. Ludlow shook, his body jerking as if he were a hawk hooding its prey. He lifted the Purdey twelve-gauge shotgun along his leg up through the parting in the robe and blew the two Irishmen into eternity.
EPILOGUE
That October morning was the end of Tristan's story for our purposes. In the stunned aftermath Ludlow collapsed but revived by dinner. Tristan embraced his children to whom Pet later explained that the evil men had come to murder their father. Isabel was quietly hysterical. Decker, the Cree and Norwegian buried the bodies and that night the Cree dumped the car in a deep pool in the upper Missouri. But it was One Stab who went mad before the full echo of the shots had faded. He danced and sang around the bodies, his body arched and prancing and his voice crooning, then he stooped and held the fainting Ludlow in his arms. Tristan knew if it were not Ludlow's kill, One Stab in the excitement might have taken scalps. Tristan took the children then to Cuba on the schooner and left only twenty-three years later during the beginning of the revolution for a ranch owned by Three and her husband up near McLeod in Alberta. If you are up near Choteau and drive down Ramshorn Road by the ranch, now owned by Alfred's son by his second marriage, you won't get permission to enter. It's a modern efficient operation, but back there in the canyon there are graves that mean something to a few people left on earth: Samuel, Two, Susannah and a little apart Ludlow buried between his true friends, One Stab and Isabel; and a small distance away Decker and Pet. Always alone, apart, somehow solitary, Tristan is buried up in Alberta.