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Author of “A Rule of the Service,” “Too Much Golden Fleas,” Etc.

Captain Carmichael of the Texas Rangers does his duty and a little more.

Captain James Carmichael of the Texas Rangers, home-bound after a week in Mexico City on official secret business for the governor, let his gaze rove idly through the window of his Pullman as the train paused in the late afternoon at an unimportant Mexican hill village.

He saw a dingy station, around which stood and squatted expressionless, stolid, serape-draped Indian men. Behind it two or three square, flat adobe buildings, each a mean rabbit warren whose many doors were now crowded with staring women and babies. Beyond, in a disorder that made no reckoning of streets or avenues, fifty low jacals, barely higher than dog kennels, before which Indian women tended toy cooking fires or ground corn for tortillas. On a hill, a church. Far back beyond the hill’s shoulder a glimpse of the handsome hacienda whose master was feudal lord of this narrow corner of the republic--or had been, before the revolutions.

The village children of ages from five to a dozen--a swarm of them--were not with the men whose backs rested against the station walls or the women in their doorways or about the fires, but were strung along the track for the length of the train, trotting beside the Pullmans as they slowed. One could see them if he pressed his face to the screen and looked down. One could hear them whether he looked or not. They were all softly whining, their eyes upcast to the car windows, their high-pitched voices almost a chorus in unison.

“_Centavita! Centavita! Por gracias Dios, centavita!_”

Captain Carmichael was not thinking of the things his eyes saw or his ears heard. They were not unique. At least a half dozen times since noon the train had stopped where the passengers’ eyes rested upon a dingy station, many-doored adobe rabbit warrens, jacals with women tending toy fires before them, lounging men and swarming children who trotted beside the cars and begged, in the name of God, a little penny. The Ranger had noted the name of the station on its sign and it had brought his mind back to the errand that had taken him to the Mexican capital and the report that he should make to the governor at Austin, for it was not many miles back of this hill village that the Tarbox Exploration and Mining Company had one of its greatest concessions and what the Ranger captain would have to say to the governor would of necessity contain many a mention of the Tarbox Exploration and Mining Company.

And then, suddenly, as the car brakes jammed tight and the train came to its full stop, he saw a white man standing beside the track, a traveling bag on the ground by his feet, plainly an American or an Englishman and the first the captain had seen at any station that afternoon. He wondered if, perchance, this man was one of the Tarbox outfit. It was not necessarily so, for there were other mining outfits in these hills, but it was possible.

A moment later the porter came bustling into Carmichael’s car, bearing the white man’s bag, which he put in a section almost opposite the captain, and the white man followed him. Presently, when the train was again in motion and the conductors came through, the Ranger overheard sufficient of their conversation to learn that the new passenger was bound for San Antonio.

The man was at least as old as Carmichael, who was fifty-three, and he looked rather more like an American than an Englishman, but the big bag that contained his belongings had never been made anywhere but in the British Isles. His dress was rough and worn, as would be expected of any Anglo-Saxon coming aboard there in the mountains, but Captain Carmichael’s experience was of a section where one gauges a man by everything but his clothes and there was something in this stranger’s bearing that gave an impression of success and prosperity.

He was tall and at first glance seemed thin, but his movements indicated a lean wiriness that bespoke an active life in the open, as did the sun-browned skin of his face and hands. His hair, short-trimmed by a barber not more than three weeks since, was wholly white, and his face, smooth shaven, might have been sternly handsome but for a scar, old and faded but deep and puckering, that crossed his upper lip almost from corner to corner and drew the lip upward into an expression of perpetual disdain.

Carmichael’s first thought, as he observed the scar, was that if it were on his face he would conceal it with a mustache; his second that hair, in all probability, would not grow on that lip.

The man settled into his seat and stared out of the window and it seemed to Captain Carmichael that there was something vaguely familiar about his profile. More than twenty-five years in the Ranger service had cultivated his memory for faces, yet if he had ever seen the man before the recollection of when and where evaded him. He felt positive he had never seen that unusual scar, and it obviously was an ancient one, which would mean that if he had ever seen the man it must have been long ago.

Until dusk fell the stranger sat quietly in his seat, seldom moving, his eyes on the passing landcape, his face stern and brooding. Carmichael might have tried to open a conversation with him but another passenger who did so was politely but firmly discouraged. And after having got a good full-face study of him in the dining car, Captain Carmichael became convinced that he did not know the man, that his impression of having met him somewhere was due merely to the stranger’s slight resemblance to somebody else.

The correctness of this judgment was borne out at the Rio Grande, when the train stopped in the middle of the International Bridge the next morning and he heard the conversation between the stranger and the American customs and immigration officers.

The man’s papers were in perfect order and he bore in his big British bag or on his person nothing dutiable and no firearms. His name was Andrew Miller, and he was a citizen of Argentina, of English birth. This was his first visit to the United States. He had had business in Mexico and wished to see a portion of the big northern republic. He expected to return to South America within a month or two.

The train rolled on to San Antonio, where the scar-lipped Argentinian left it. Captain Carmichael continued on to Austin.

There the governor gave him an hour of earnest conference the following forenoon, as an outcome of which it was decided his next investigations had best be made in San Antonio. He took an afternoon train and that evening found him registered at the Hotel Bonham, in whose wide lobby and its overlooking mezzanine, if he but waits long enough, one may see practically every refugee, revolutionary and plotter against the peace of Mexico that visits the Texas metropolis. And there in the Bonham lobby, after dinner, he again saw Andrew Miller.

The man was in different clothing--new clothing of a smoother weave and more fashionable cut than he had worn on the train--and he sat in an armchair that gave him a view of the desk and the passing crowds. The Ranger thought he might be waiting for some acquaintance. But when an hour had passed and Carmichael had finished his evening paper, always with his eyes over the top of it for a sight of the Mexicans he had come there to watch, if they should drop in, Miller still sat idle, unspeaking and unspoken to.

And then at a moment when the Ranger’s gaze chanced to be upon him he saw something or some one near the main entrance that so affected his emotions that he could not wholly conceal them.

He did not start. He did not move so much as a finger. But his features stiffened ever so slightly and into his eyes came an expression such as comes into the eyes of the hunter when, after stealthily stalking, he comes into view of his quarry.

Carmichael looked quickly in the direction in which Miller was staring. He saw a score of men and half as many women entering and leaving the hotel. Discarding those who were going out as unlikely to have attracted Miller’s attention, since he had had opportunity to see them before, the Ranger swiftly appraised the new arrivals.

One or two were traveling men, just alighted from a depot street car, hustling with their bags toward the desk. The remainder were women in filmy dresses and their well-groomed escorts, who passed laughing and chattering toward the corridor that led to the big ballroom from which a crash of drums and saxophones some time since had signaled the opening of a dance. It was quite evidently to be a big dance, for a hundred or more festively dressed couples had already passed in to it and more were constantly arriving.

Miller’s eyes followed a group of these newly arrived dance patrons. He might be observing any one of the twenty or more. Captain Carmichael studied the group.

They were for the most part young people and Carmichael recognized several as sons and daughters of well-to-do business men of the city. Two of them were already successful in their own right--Morton Perry the real-estate operator and Wallace Locke the oil man. Each of these had inherited money and skillfully increased it, although there the comparison ended, because Perry’s initial stake had been not more than fifty thousand, while Locke’s father, an old cattleman, had left him close to half a million. Each of them although barely past thirty had at least doubled his original capital.

A pretty girl moved beside each as he passed on into the ballroom. Perry’s companion was his wife, a slight, bobbed-haired bunch of vivacity. With Locke was Edith Alsbury, a merry girl of twenty-three with a creamy complexion and flaming hair, whom Captain Carmichael had known slightly all her life, being an acquaintance of her aunt who had reared her since she was orphaned in infancy. He recalled that he had heard she was engaged to Locke; that they were to be married in a month or two.

The captain’s eyes, as the group disappeared and others coming from the entrance took their places, returned to the chair where the Argentinian had sat, to find it vacant. Miller now stood at the desk, talking to a clerk. Presently, nodding as though in thanks for some information, he left the desk and went to a chair, not the one he had vacated with its full view of the entrance, but another in a far corner. Seated in it he paid no more attention to the throng but fell into deep thought.

Captain Carmichael frowned as he studied the situation that had suddenly developed. Certain facts which aligned themselves in his mind seemed to have a bearing on one another and on the very assignment from the governor on which he was engaged.

Texas, as the next-door neighbor to Mexico, has many business relationships with the southern republic and Texans believe they understand Mexico and Mexicans better than do the residents of most other States. There was a period, during the early revolutions, the insane Plan of San Diago which set the border aflame, and the aftermaths of the Columbus raid, when the administration at Washington did not satisfy Texans because it watched and waited. Following the establishment of relative order below the Rio Grande certain of the Texas business citizenry became dissatisfied because watchfulness and waiting still continued and the Mexican government was not officially recognized.