The Border
Through the window of his ground-floor quarters in the El Paso rooming house, Race glowered at the guards on the bridge leading across the Rio Grande into Mexico and waited for darkness. The room was a reconditioned pantry with a side door leading into the kitchen and through it to freedom outside if someone he didn't want to see came to the front. He had a bed and a washstand, and it was all costing him only a thousand dollars a day. His face was on every wall and post for a dozen blocks.
He made himself as comfortable as possible on his back in the hollow of the mattress and contemplated the cracks in the ceiling, thinking of Jim Shirley. He missed the cripple more than he missed Merle, with whom he had never really gotten along and whom he had more than once considered cutting from the gang because of his constant grousing over the conditions of life on the scout. Shirley's quiet strength had been a thing to rely on in emergencies, and Race had liked him besides. The Indian woman was already a shadow, as easily forgotten in death as she was in life.
Too late, the fugitive had discovered that outlaw income was directly related to the cost of being wanted, that the things ordinary citizens took for granted came at a premium when one was forced to depend on less conspicuous channels. The seven thousand dollars left in his possession would buy him a week's lodging at the going rate. He knew now that the stories of the James gang's buried wealth were just stories; the shovel alone would have cost them at least five hundred.
Merle had been right about one thing: there would be no quitting. Though Mexico beckoned, it was too poor a country to support a man, and there was only one occupation on this side of the border that would keep food in his stomach. He would need help, of course. El Paso was full of talent. In four or five months, when his heels stopped burning, he'd come back across the river to recruit.
He paid the sour-faced landlady fifty dollars for a fresh newspaper and spread it out on the floor to read, the way he had done since childhood. His eyes fixed on the item headed FAMED LAWMAN DEAD. The black-bordered piece was brief, drawing most of its material from newspaper accounts of Irons St. John's adventures in the Nations. Little of his early life was public knowledge. The writer mentioned St. John's recent bid for Congress and ended with the various rumors surrounding his activities at the time of his death.
Race Buckner stopped reading and sat back on his heels. "So that's who it was," he muttered.