The Last Hard Men - Brian Garfield [8]
When he got up to shave each morning he was a little startled: he still expected to see a young face staring back at him out of the mirror. He didn’t feel old. It didn’t seem so long ago he had ridden scout for Crook in the campaigns against Geronimo. Hired on with the railroad to head up their train-robber-busting crew. Gone to work for the Inca Land and Cattle Company to demolish the hole-in-the-wall outlaw towns of Jack-Mormon rustlers that made an industry out of stealing beef by the herd from the Hatchet and the Arrowhead. Headed up the Arizona Territorial Police from 1902 to 1910. Organized the militia march into Bisbee to knock the steam out of the strikers’ bombings and assassinations at the great open-pit copper mines. Stumped for George Hunt in the campaign for Arizona’s first governorship after statehood.
That was just last year, that campaign. But when he’d got up to make speeches the crowd had treated him like an elder statesman—courteous respect, but inattention. Look at that poor old man, son, he used to be the toughest son of a bitch in Arizona, but that was before your time, that was in the Old Days.
Life had settled into dreary ritual. Mornings in the hotel, afternoons sitting on the sheriffs front porch or playing horseshoes with the old boys who’d soon move into the Pioneers’ Home, evenings in the genteel rubbed-oak-and-leather dimness of the Stockmen’s Club, reminiscing about Old Times with other old-timers.
Sam Burgade was in a mood all the time now, he didn’t care anymore one way or the other: a why-not mood of indifference. Nothing mattered very much. The century had turned thirteen years ago and Sam Burgade did not belong in this new one.…
The newspaper story took him back. It was Zach Provo’s name that did it. My God, I thought he was dead. Then he thought about it and did some arithmetic in his head, and realized Provo wasn’t all that old, after all. Provo had been almost a kid when Sam Burgade ran him to earth in 1885. Provo didn’t have to be much over fifty years old, even now. Think of that. Still a young man, after having spent three fifths of his life in the Yuma Penitentiary. What did a man feel like, busting out into this newfangled world after all that time?
It didn’t matter much, he supposed. They’d have Provo back soon enough. Not like the old days. In these modern times nobody could outrun the telephone and the horseless carriage, the railroads, the telegraph all over the place. The state militia up in Phoenix was even trying out one of those new flying machines.
No point fretting about Provo, anyway. Provo had got less than he deserved. He should have been hanged in the first place. He would have been, if he’d been tried by a cow-country jury instead of a crowd of city men in Phoenix who’d become soft where they sat and soft where they did their thinking. And that high-priced defense attorney pleading with the jury to take into account that Provo had already suffered grievously, been shot to pieces and had his young wife killed before his eyes: Provo had already been punished, the lawyer kept saying. He’s already paid a good part of the price for whatever crimes you may decide he committed, although nobody’s admitting he blew up that express car with the four men inside it; after all, this big-time railroad detective, this famous Samuel Burgade, searched every foot of the ground and every hiding place along the Navajo track line, and every inch of Defendant Provo’s homestead, and never found nary a trace of that forty-eight