Walter Pruett stood on the Denver platform in the thin bright morning and watched them take Raymond Kessler away, and he did not move until the two policemen and the smooth man in the good suit had gone through the depot doors and out of his sight. Then he stood a while longer, because there was nowhere in particular he had to be, and because standing still was the only thing he could think of to do.
He was fifty-eight years old. He had been a conductor for thirty years, twenty-six of them on this run, and he had made up his mind about a thousand things in those thirty years the way a door swings shut — quickly, finally, and with a sound that meant it. He was proud of that. Conductors were kings of their trains. A conductor who dithered was a conductor who lost his car, and Pruett had never lost his car. He had been certain about drunks and gamblers and ticketless riders and once, memorably, about a bishop. He had been certain the way other men were tall: it was simply a fact of him.
He had been certain last night, within the hour.
He could see it still, the way you can see a place you have passed at speed: the drawing-room door standing open, Mrs. Vance's hands shaking as she held the empty space where her case had been, the special agent's quiet questions, the car holding its breath. And then the search — his own proposal, made with the confidence of a man who knows how these things go — and the brooch in the quiet woman's berth, winking up at them all like a small blue eye. And he had been sure. He had looked at Martha Ellison — forty-seven, traveling alone, a schoolteacher with one suitcase and a library book — and he had decided, and the door had swung shut, and he had ordered her put off at Alder Creek at eleven forty, and he had stood in the vestibule and watched her walk down the steps into the mountain dark with her suitcase and her handbag, and he had not wavered. Not once. Not for a second.
He had been wrong within the day.
That was the arithmetic of it, and Pruett was a man who did sums. Thirty years of being sure, and he could line the certainties up like boxcars if he wanted to: the ticketless rider in '29 who had wept real tears and still been put off at Grand Junction; the card sharp in '36, taken apart by his own marked deck in the club car; the bishop — once, memorably, a bishop — traveling on a clergyman's half fare with a suitcase full of sample whiskey, whom Pruett had charged full fare to his face and never regretted for an instant. He had been right about all of them. That was the trouble with being right about all of them. It taught a man that the door always swung the same way.
He remembered the platform at Alder Creek last night with a clarity that shamed him. Eleven forty. The mountain dark beyond the platform lamps, the cold coming off the snowfields, the little station agent standing at the top of the steps with her lantern. He had walked Martha Ellison down himself — he would give himself that much, he had not sent a brakeman to do it — and he had handed the woman over with the paper, and she had taken her suitcase in one hand and her handbag in the other, and she had said, "Thank you, Conductor," in a voice that was perfectly level. Thank you. For being put off his train in the night, in the Rockies, in October, for a thing she had not done. He had lain awake afterward in his berth listening to the wheels, and he had told himself it was procedure, it was the railroad's way, it was what the evidence said. The evidence had been a brooch in a berth. He had not asked whose hands had put it there. The door had swung shut, and he had been glad of the sound it made.
Dillard found him on the platform before the depot, and the special agent stood beside him for a while without speaking, the two of them watching the porters work the baggage carts.
"She'll have the wires by noon," Dillard said at last.
"She'll have them," Pruett said.
"Conductor —" Dillard hesitated, which was unlike him. "I accepted your choice last night. I want that on the record between us, if not on paper."
Pruett looked at him. "It's on the paper that matters," he said. "My name's going on the wire. That's the record."