James T. Kettleman returned to his seat and sat down. Another ten minutes …
In the fifteen years following that night at The Crossing he had built his small stake to many millions, making many enemies and no friends in the process. He married a wife who tried to have him killed, and had no children.
Now he was stepping out of that life as he had stepped into it, leaving nothing behind that mattered. Nor would he take anything with him, not even a memory that he cared to keep.
Thirty years earlier, when he was two years old, he had been picked from the brush near a burned wagon train, where he had been overlooked by raiding Comanches. There were no other survivors. Nothing remained to tell who he was, and those who found him had no interest in learning. During the next four years he was handed around from family to family and finally abandoned on a cold night in a one-street Western town.
Kettleman walked to the rear of the car again, glancing back at the occupants. All were asleep, or apparently asleep. The train was slowing for the long climb. Lifting his bags through the rear door he closed it carefully behind him. The stars blinked coldly from an almost clear sky, the train whistled, the wind blew long across the high grass plains.
He threw his bags to the roadbed and put a leg over the rail, hesitating one brief instant to look back into the dimly lighted car. This was the end of everything and the beginning of nothing. He put the other leg over the rail and dropped to the roadbed.
He stood watching the red lights on the back of the train, which moved away, scarcely faster than a man could walk, until it rounded a curve and left no more than a humming of the rails to tell of its passing, and the long whistle of the locomotive echoing down the night sky.
The dry grass bent before the wind, and seed pods rattled in the brush along the right of way.
James T. Kettleman was ended, and the man who had borne that name, making it feared and respected, stood now where he had stood so many years before, without a name. He was now a man without a past as he had been a boy without one.
“Good-by,” he said, but there was nobody to say the word to, and nothing to remember.
Slinging the haversack over his shoulders, he retrieved the two bags and, climbing from the shallow cut where the track ran, he started off across the plain toward a high, comblike ridge, crested with trees.
A sharp pain struck him suddenly and he stopped abruptly, bending far over and retching violently. He dropped to his knees, caught by a sudden weakness, and remained there, frightened at the agony. He had never known physical pain — although often hunger — and anything that robbed him of strength left him shaken, for his strength was all he had. Now, here at the end, he needed it desperately.
Later there would be more pain, but in the last days, his doctor had said, there would be less of it.
Among the pines he searched for and found a hollow protected from the wind. He broke twigs from the lower trunks of the trees and built a small fire. He found a deadfall which he dragged nearer to use for a windbreak. With a razor-sharp bowie knife, he cut limbs to hold the fire. He took a kettle from his gear and put on water for coffee. He changed into jeans, a wool shirt, and a sheepskin coat. He put on flat-heeled hiking boots and got out his two pistols, one of which he belted on.
The pistols were Smith & Wesson .44 Russians, and the best gun built. He thrust the second gun into his waistband. Out of the longer case he took a high-powered custom-made rifle and assembled it, then a shotgun.
He made a bed on pine boughs, spreading a thin ground sheet and blankets atop the boughs. He loaded the remaining clothing, food, and ammunition into the big haversack. With his gear packed, the load weighed over eighty pounds.
Then he warmed some soup and drank it, and the gnawing pain in his stomach subsided a little. He carried the two bags into the woods and buried them under some thick brush.
A searching wind prowled the forest, far off a faint call sounded, and a shot. He listened, but the sound faded.
From a few yards off in the brush his fire was not visible, and he was pleased. He gathered more fuel, removed his boots, and crawled into his bed.
Every move of his disappearance had been carefully prepared. Fortunately he had dealt largely in cash and always kept large quantities of it available. Quietly he transferred some funds, shifted stock from one company to another, and made arrangements to cover every need in case he should live longer than expected.
On a trip to his Virginia farm he consulted an attorney in Baltimore, a former Supreme Court judge. Drawing up a will, he followed it with a carefully prepared document for the management of his affairs.
“I shall go away,” he explained, “as I have learned I have but a short time to live. If, after seven years, I have not returned I will naturally be declared legally dead and my affairs can be settled.”
“And if you die before that length of time?”
“I want nothing done until after seven years. As you will see, I have provided for my wife.”
“For a man of your means,” the judge suggested, “it is very little.”
“This I have not mentioned to anyone, nor do I want it mentioned, but last week in Saratoga my wife tried to have me killed — my wife and her father. You will find the reports from the Pinkerton Agency and my own statement among the papers in my safe-deposit box.”
“There is divorce.”
“They would fight it, and I might not live long enough. Also, I believe they will try again to have me killed, for I have not told them how much I know, and her father desperately needs money for some financial manipulations of his own.”
He shuffled the papers together. “I never had a family, sir, and knew little of women. I was a lonely man, and she made me very comfortable before we were married, and I suddenly began to want a home.”
“I am afraid I was very easy,” he added, “and I now know her father led her to marry me hoping to get inside information on some of my activities. What they did not realize is that all my business I carry in my head. I never discuss business, and keep no records where they can be seen.”
Returning to New York he screened all his actions with care. He liquidated some more stocks, purchased several pieces of land, and bought suddenly and heavily in railroad shares. He deposited money where he would have access to it in case of need, and selected a name under which to receive mail if that should be necessary. Then he shipped to himself, at two different addresses, using this name, a box of books and two other cases of various articles he might require.
With the Baltimore attorney he arranged a code name, a code for special dealings, and certain transfers of property. He also wrote checks closing his various accounts on specified days following his disappearance.
Announcing casually, as he often did, that he was going to Virginia for the shooting, he left New York.
As his wife had never wanted to go anywhere with him he was not surprised that she asked no questions. He had not told her that he knew of her plot to have him killed and, although they lived in the same house, they did not live together.
Neither she nor her father had any idea of the sort of man with whom they were dealing. The killing was planned to occur during a card game. The man hired was a Mississippi riverboat gambler who was promised his freedom on a plea of self-defense.
The gambler knew the story of the gunfight at The Crossing, but there was nothing to connect the youngster of that shooting with the immaculate New York financier.
The gambler received his first hint that all was not as he had expected during the early part of the game. Kettleman played shrewdly and with icy control, and the gambler quickly grasped that he himself was being studied with cool, calculated interest As part of his scheme, the gambler deliberately invited an accusation of cheating whenever a showdown developed between Kettleman and himself, but Kettleman ignored the opportunity, and the gambler grew worried.
Nothing was going as planned, and he began to realize that his opponent knew what he was trying to do, and was deliberately avoiding it. So anxious was he to lead Kettleman into an argument that his mind was not on the game, and suddenly he lost a large pot.