Dillard nodded, and they stood a while longer, and then Dillard went back to his compartment to write his report, and Pruett was alone again with his sums. Thirty years of certainties, and this one wrong before the sun was up. He had put an innocent woman off his train in the night, in the Rockies, in October, on the word of a brooch in a berth — and the berth had been empty at six o'clock, and the real thief had been dining at eight oh five with a scratch on his hand, and Pruett had not asked, and had not waited, and had not doubted. The door had swung shut. That was all. That was everything.
A porter went past with a truck of luggage. The loudspeaker announced a departure. Pruett took off his cap and ran his hand over his hair, and put the cap back on, and walked into the depot with his shoulders back, because a conductor walked like that even when he didn't feel like it, especially when he didn't feel like it.
The telegraph desk was in the corner by the waiting room, and the operator was a young man with ink on his cuffs who looked up and said, "Conductor Pruett? Mr. Dillard said you'd be coming."
"I'll write it myself," Pruett said. "If you please."
The operator pushed the pad and pencil across the desk, and Pruett sat down, and for a long moment he did nothing but look at the blank paper. Thirty years on the railroad, and he had dictated a thousand wires and never once written one himself. This one he would write himself. Every word of it.
He chose the words the way a man chooses stones to build a wall — one at a time, and each one meant to stay.
He wrote his own name first. That was the hardest part, and he did it first so he couldn't flinch away from it later.
WALTER PRUETT CONDUCTOR ROCKY MOUNTAIN LIMITED BEGS MRS MARTHA ELLISON'S PARDON STOP.
He sat with the pencil over the pad. Begs. He had thought about "offers" and "extends" and all the railroad's soft words, and he had rejected every one of them. A man who had been wrong within the day did not extend. He begged. Let the wire carry that, too.
THE JEWEL CASE RECOVERED CAR SEVEN LINEN HAMPER STOP BROOCH HERS RESTORED STOP REAL THIEF IN DENVER POLICE CUSTODY STOP MRS ELLISON INNOCENT STOP.
He wrote it plainly. No one, reading that wire, would be able to call it anything but what it was. That was the point. He had spent the night letting the car call it what it wanted — suspicion, procedure, the unfortunate necessity — and he was finished with that. Innocent. The word stood on the pad like a stone.
Then the orders. He wrote them carefully, because orders were what a conductor was for, and these were the first orders in thirty years that he was writing to undo his own.
MRS ELLISON TO BE CARRIED WEST DRAWING ROOM EVENING LIMITED SATURDAY OCTOBER EIGHTEEN AT RAILROAD EXPENSE STOP EVERY CREW DOWN THE LINE TO KNOW HER AND WHY STOP NO ONE TO CALL THIS ANYTHING BUT WHAT IT IS STOP.
He read it over. The drawing room. The best room on the train. Not her little roomette — the drawing room, with its wide berth and its private washroom and its windows on both sides, the room Eleanor Vance had ridden in. Let Mrs. Ellison cross the mountains she had crossed last night as an accused woman, and cross them now as a guest, and let every man on the railroad know her name and know why.
He signed it with his name and his title and the train's number, and he pushed the pad across to the operator.
"Send it to Alder Creek first," he said. "Then the second one down the line."
The operator nodded and bent to the key, and the key began to click, and Pruett sat and listened to his own words going out over the mountains, east into the high country, to a little station where a woman was waiting with a station agent's blanket around her shoulders.
He had one more thing to do, and it was the thing he had been dreading, and he did it the way he did everything, by walking straight at it.
Eleanor Vance was in the depot waiting room with her nephew, sitting very straight on the bench with her hands folded, and when she saw Pruett coming she stood up. She was sixty-three years old, a wealthy widow from Chicago, and last night she had been frightened and imperious by turns, and this morning she was neither. She was simply waiting.
"Conductor," she said.
"Mrs. Vance." Pruett took off his cap. "Your case is recovered. All of it. The brooch is restored to you."
"I know," she said. "Mr. Dillard told me." She looked at him for a moment. "And the woman?"