Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 12, No. 59, November 1948

Extradition by Brett Halliday

According to N. Y. Penal Law, Section 2445, the husband or wife of an accused person is in all cases a competent witness, but neither husband nor wife can be compelled to disclose a confidential communication made by one to the other during their marriage. This rule of evidence does not exist, however, in detective-story law. So, by editorial edict, we now compel Airs. Brett Halliday, better known to her own appreciative audience as Helen McCloy, to take the stand and disclose confidential opinions about her husband.

“Do you solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?” we ask Mrs. Halliday.

“I do,” she replies in her low but firm voice.

“What is your husband’s occupation?”

“He is a writer.”

“Will you tell the jury which part of your husband’s writing is best known?”

“I would say the Michael Shayne stories. They’ve appeared in magazines, books, movies, and on the radio.”

“Do you consider the Michael Shayne stories your husband’s best work?”

Mrs. Halliday ponders. Then she replies: “No. I think Shayne stories are very good of their type, but my husband has written a series of engineering tales which in my opinion are among the finest modern detective short stories.”

“That is your considered opinion?”

“Yes, indeed. I have said so in print.”

“Will you be good enough to mention the title of one of these engineering stories and tell us what you said about it in print?”

“Well, perhaps the best one was called ‘Human Interest Stuff.’ It was reprinted by Ellery Queen in his magazine and in one of his anthologies. You see, my husband began his professional life as an engineer and he has retained from his earlier vocation that sense of design which is so important to an engineer and an architect and equally to a writer. In ‘Human Interest Stuff’ the denouement accomplishes what too few detective stories do — not only to surprise the reader but also to emphasize the tragic resolution of the conflict between the hunter and the hunted, with the life of one and the integrity of the other at stake. In other words, the story does not depend for its effect on surprise alone. It is, more importantly, a story of true realism, with that suggestion of a quiet, impersonally brutal fate which one of the first realists, Turgeniev, believed the essence of life itself.”

“Does the story have any other significance?”

“Yes, I think it does. When you read a short mystery story like ‘Human Interest Stuff,’ you can’t help wondering if the humble mystery, so neglected by serious critics, may not really be the beginning of a movement back to design in writing. Remember that the serious novel itself began with the reading matter of the people, of the masses.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Halliday. Your witness.”

But the opposing counsel is wise enough to let well enough alone. He recognizes the truth when he hears it, and waives cross-examination.

Only one further item of evidence need be introduced. Brett Holliday’s prize-winning story, “Extradition,” is cut of the same cloth out of which the author wove “Human Interest Stuff.” Like that story and like “Big Shot” which also appeared in EQMM, “Extradition” represents the sincerest writing that has come from Brett Holliday’s fertile typewriter.

I recognized him as soon as I saw him sitting there at a rear table in the Juarez barroom. He was not only alone at the small table, but he also gave the impression that he was alone in the crowded room.

I don’t know exactly why. Something about the way he sat there drinking sotol out of a thick water glass, remote and withdrawn; the arrogant set of his wide shoulders that disdained the shabby clothes he wore; the cheapness of the rotgut he was drinking. It was in the cold, measuring quality of the blue eyes beneath shaggy brows.

They seemed to look through a man, past the confines of the room.

That’s what I remember about him now, as I look back on the scene, but at the moment I wasn’t very objective about his appearance. All I could think of was that he was alone. I remember thinking that it was destined to be like that with him always, that he had chosen a lonely path for himself so long as he lived.

Murder does set a man apart from his fellow-man.

I recognized him from his picture in the paper. He had strangled a girl named Lola in El Paso the night before, and the American police had a good description of him and were searching for him through the dark alleys of El Paso while he sat alone across the Border guzzling solo! in a Mexican dive.

That was back when extradition was more an empty word than a reality, and a man could leave a lot of fears behind him when he crossed the Rio Grande. But there was some law in Juarez even in those days, and you never could tell when a Mex cop might discover his conscience, or a couple of U.S. dicks might slip over in plain clothes and yank him back without due process of law.

Not that the killing had been important enough to arouse a lot of public indignation. Lola wasn’t the sort to get people excited about her murder. Just a crib girl on one of the dim side streets near the river. She’d been living with this guy for months, supporting him with money she earned from other men, and I suppose she finally got tired of it. But she made the mistake of telling him she was through while they were alone, and there was no one to stop him. So he strangled her and took a few dollars from the top of her stocking and beat it across the river before her body was found.

There were pictures of the dead girl in the paper, too. I’d known Lola for a long time, back when she hadn’t looked like that, and I’d been nagged all day by memories of her as she’d been then.

But that’s something just between Lola and me. Hell, I could remember the time when I was sore enough to kill her myself. Years back, when she first started down toward where she ended. I made a fool of myself that time. Lola had a nasty way of rubbing a man the wrong way.

That’s why I felt like I did about her killer sitting there in the saloon with a shoulder-holstered gun bulging his coat, probably without getaway money, and wondering how long Juarez would remain safe for him.

Remembering Lola, I knew I had to get him out of Juarez. The country south of the Border is a tough one without money or a job. I couldn’t just step up and offer him either. Not without overplaying my hand and maybe telling him what I knew about Lola and why I was making the offer.

Our train was pulling out at midnight. Just a couple of hours later. I had a feeling I’d regret it all my life if I left him sitting there like that, knowing what I did about the set-up.

Another thing I knew about the guy was the fact that he had once been a construction man. A good one, from all reports. A hightop rigger with all the savvy and nerve that job calls for. But you can’t handle sky-cables and a load of liquor at the same time, so he’d given up the cables.

It gave me a queer feeling way down in my belly to see him sitting there twiddling a water glass of sotol in his big, scarred hands, with a gun bulging his coat while he waited for whatever was going to happen. Hands that were muscled and calloused from cable work, and that had choked the life out of Lola just last night.

I suppose that had something to do with my feeling about him. Construction men have a personal pride in themselves and the men they work with. Maybe it sounds corny, but the real building stiff is like that underneath the hardboiled pose he shows to the world. It’s a tough, dangerous profession, and a man doesn’t stay in it long unless he has the absolute trust of his coworkers.

Take my gang — the three men drinking at the bar with me that night in Juarez: Larry Wheeler, Benny Arentz, and Walter Drake. We’d been together four years, and there had hardly been a day on any job that one of us hadn’t trusted his life to one of the others. Of course, we were a special sort of gang. I guess you’d call us trouble-shooters. Each one of us a specialist in his own line, and together we made a team that could whip any job flung at us.

Sure, that’s bragging, but we had a record to brag about. Larry Wheeler was past fifty, stringy as whipcord, bald and sarcastic. He knew more about concrete than Mr. Portland himself. He knew rock and water analysis, when to increase the water content to combat the solvency of aggregates, and tricks with reinforcing steel that let the rest of us forget all about waiting for the stuff to take an initial set.

My rigger was Benny Arentz. He had the shoulders of a Percheron on top of a short, grotesquely thin body. He had long arms, and the shoulder muscles flowed down into them and on to big hands that could reave a six-place block on the end of a steel cable while he hung by his knees from a strut three hundred feet above the ground and whipping thirty degrees each way in a tropical wind.

Benny had come up from the oil fields, and the only thing wrong with him was women. He was ugly enough to have to keep on proving to us and the world that he was irresistible to the ladies. On the job he was all right, but on a city street he was as hard to hold back as a stud horse.

Walter Drake was our powder man. He was a graduate of the Copper Queen in Bisbee, had worked all over the world, and had once lifted fifteen thousand tons of rock off one side of the Khyber Pass and deposited it where they wanted it down the slope. He knew all about rock formation and fissures and faults and bearing strata, and what three and a half sticks of forty percent would do in a drill hole.

Me? I was just the boss. I’ve got an engineering degree some place, but I managed to forget I had it twenty years ago. With Larry and Walter and Benny doing the work there wasn’t much bossing to be done. Every once in a while I got an idea, and generally it worked. More luck than anything else, and I always knew that some day I would run into one that was even too tough for me. Like the one we were headed south to look at when we stopped off in Juarez.

A rush job that had brought us up in a hurry from one of the Keys off Florida where we were fooling with a little problem of setting up hurricane-proof oil-drilling rigs. It was back in the days before the Elephant Butte dam above El Paso pulled all the flood water out of the Rio Grande, and in the spring the boundary river had a way of swelling to an unmanageable torrent through the big canyon below the Big Bend. There was an International Highway cutting across from Burnsville to Alixican that both Mexico and the United States had been pushing toward the river from both directions, and everything was set for big doings with speeches by both Presidents, and stuff like that, when the two countries were joined by the highway in just a month.

No one knew when the spring floods would come, but when they did it was a cinch there wouldn’t be much bridge building across that river until the waters subsided. No one had thought about that, apparently, until just a few days previously, when the water started rising.

Our job was to throw the bridge across before the floods got too high. Maybe in a day. Maybe a week. Or maybe not for a month. It was just chance that we stopped at Juarez between trains — a freak of fate that put us in the saloon for a few drinks that night with Lola’s murderer.

Trouble was, Benny was having more than a few drinks. Usually I don’t care how much one of my crew puts away, and it wouldn’t be smart to say anything about it if I did. But Benny worried me. He’d been away from women a long time and he was beginning to get that look about him. A widening of his nostrils and a deepset glow in his eyes. With a normal guy it wouldn’t have mattered. We had two hours till our train left, and two hours would do most men. But not Benny. If he went off the track he might stay off two or three days. I’d picked a saloon for our drinking that didn’t cater to women, and I was hoping for the best.

Then it happened.

I saw her push back the swinging doors and walk in. Part Indian, from the tall grace and the free-swinging stride of her. Young and supple and rounded enough to set a man’s blood racing, yet old enough to assure him he wouldn’t be wasting his time making a play for her. I turned my head and saw Benny looking at her, and his nostrils flared and the glow flamed in his eyes and he set his glass down on the bar slowly.

I put my hand on his forearm and said, “Hold everything, Benny. We’re catching a train in just two hours.”

I guess he didn’t hear me. He didn’t give any indication that he did. He was staring past my shoulder toward the girl, and from the look on his face I knew she was giving him the eye. God knows why. There were lots of other men there. But Benny had a way of telegraphing something to a woman like that. His upper lip tightened and twitched upward.

Walter Drake stood on the other side of Benny, their shoulders touching. He was turned away, saying something to Larry. He must have felt Benny’s muscles tense, because he broke off what he was saying and turned to look at the girl.

She took a few steps toward us and Walter switched his gaze to Benny’s face. I tightened my fingers on Benny’s arm. But Benny pushed away from us toward the girl. Walter shrugged and looked at a clock on the wall. “Still two hours before the train leaves. Maybe...”

“Nuts,” I said. “You know if Benny goes out that door we won’t see him until tomorrow.”

Benny and the girl already had their heads together and he was whispering to her. She nodded. Benny turned toward me with a grin.

“I’m going out for a few minutes.”

I said, “No, you’re not.”

He said, “The hell I’m not.”

I said, “We’ve got a job to do. We’re catching that midnight train.”

“Sure.” He tried to be placating. “I’ll be back like I said.”

People at the bar were watching us, grinning. I saw the killer turn in his chair to listen.

“Nothing doing, Benny,” I said. “If you walk out that door you needn’t come back.”

The grin went off of Benny’s face. He said, “If that’s the way you want it.”

“No, boss.” It was Walter Drake. He grabbed my shoulder and spun me around. “You can’t let the best rigger in the business go like that. My God! Maybe Benny could even follow us down tomorrow...”

I said, “Benny’ll never rig another hoist for me if he goes out that door.” I turned back to the bar and picked up my drink. My hand was shaking. I heard Benny and the girl walking out of the place together.

Walter and Larry both jumped me. I told them I couldn’t help it. If a dame meant more to Benny than sticking on the job, that was all right with me. We were all pretty sore and saying things we didn’t mean when a new voice horned in behind us.

It was the guy who had been sitting alone at the table. Lola’s murderer. He said, “If you can use a hightop rigger where you’re going, I’m it.”

We stopped arguing and looked at him. Walter and Larry looked at his cable-scarred hands first. Then at his face. Then at the gun-bulge under his coat. He was a little drunk. Just enough to sway on both feet as he stood there.

I said, “How do I know you’re a rigger?”

The man had loose lips. He pulled them away from yellow teeth in a smile, and he looked worse than when I’d first recognized him at the table.

“I can cut it, all right. White Construction for ten years. Top rigger on that big Rio job six years ago. My name is Smith.” He held out his hand.

I took it.

Walter Drake said roughly, “You were in Rio on another job six years ago, boss. If this mug was top rigger for White, you should’ve run into him.”

“I think maybe I did,” I said slowly. “Doesn’t seem like your name was Smith, though.”

“It’s Smith now. What’s this job all about?”

He pushed up to the bar with us and I gave it to him. I saw Walter looking at me speculatively, and later when the four of us were on the train together heading south, he sat beside me and said:

“I think I got it, boss. You knew Smith was a rigger when you told Benny off. Recognized him from Rio. That’s why you took a chance firing Benny. Smith looked like he’d jump at a job.”

I said, “Benny needed telling off.”

Walter nodded. I was still the boss and it wasn’t up to him to tell me how to run my crew. He said, “It’s taking a chance, though. Might be some fancy rigging waiting for us this time.”

I didn’t tell him how big a chance we were taking. The guy was a murderer and I was helping him make a getaway from Juarez where the police might have picked him up any time. I couldn’t tell Walter and Larry that. I couldn’t tell them about Lola and what had once been between us that caused me to give her killer a chance to escape from Juarez. Me, who always hated a killer.

The job didn’t look too tough when we reached the bridge site by truck about noon the next day. The Mexican side of the highway was subgraded all the way up to the jump-off, and there were some tents set up and a temporary field office. The graders and rollers were working half a mile back, with the surfacing pushing up on them.

The spot chosen to jump the Rio Grande was a wide depression in the cliffs that form the river canyon, and you could see it was flooded every year when the water got up. There was an eighteen-foot fill on the south side, and a corresponding fill about eighty-feet across on American soil. The sheer cliffs were limestone, and muddy water was rolling and leaping not more than twenty feet below the edge.

Two cables were strung across with buckets on pulleys and a steam winch on either side to drag men and supplies across. The resident engineer for the American end was waiting for us when we piled out of the truck. He was a mild-looking ginzo of about thirty, with tired eyes and lines of worry on his face. He introduced himself as Harry Blaine, and I liked him right off. I felt sorry for him when he explained that he was from the East and no one had bothered to warn him about the way the river flooded every spring and that was why he’d left the bridgework till the last.

The Mexican engineer was waiting for us outside the field office and took us in to look over the blueprints. He was slim and good-looking, with a little mustache and a lot of cocksureness. His attitude was one of polite regret about the whole matter, and a disposition to wash his hands of it. He blandly hinted that it was up to us and to fate, and that he planned to stand back on the sidelines.

The bridge design was orthodox. A single-arch span anchored in concrete abutments at each end. The steel was prefabricated and already on the site.

I took the blueprints and went out to see what we could figure out. There was a hot Mexican sun beating down, and the silence of the Border country broken only by the faraway sounds of road construction. My three men had slid off the fill and were grouped at the foot of it on the bank of the river. I went down toward them and saw that grouped wasn’t exactly the right word.

Walter Drake and Larry Wheeler were squatting down examining the limestone formation of the river bank. Smith stood alone, about two feet away in actual distance — with us, but not one of us. His hands hung loosely at his sides and his head was lifted and he stared across at the other side. At American soil. Separated from it by eighty feet of muddy water.

I took time off from the problem confronting me to wonder what was in his mind as he looked across the river. He stood solid and immobile, and I couldn’t see his face. This was the course he had chosen when he choked the life out of Lola. The wrong side of the river. He could never go back again. I wondered if that bothered him.

I stopped behind Walter and Larry and asked, “How does it look?”

Neither of them looked up. Larry said, “Not bad. Give me four days to get my forms set and I’ll start pouring concrete. I don’t care what the river does after my abutments and wing-walls get their initial set.”

I looked down at the water and then at my blueprints. The profile showed the opposite cliff to be five feet higher than where we stood. I said, “Have we got that long?”

“Quien sabe.” Larry spread out his hands and was cheerful about it. “Any other ideas?”

Walter was still studying the rock and the water beneath him. “One of the guys on the truck says he’s seen her rise twelve feet in twenty-four hours.”

I squatted down beside them. Smith stood in front of us looking across the river. Larry took the blueprints out of my hand and studied them. “Eight days,” he said after a moment, “and they can start on the trusswork.”

I shook my head. “That’s why we’re here. To beat the river if she takes a notion to come up fast.”

“Eight days,” Larry repeated stubbornly. “You’ve got some bad stresses here. My anchor plates won’t hold—”

“I’ve got a better idea,” Drake broke in. He pointed down the side of the cliff. “I’ll give you a set of steel braces about twelve feet down. We’ll build up from them, grouting into the cliff every two feet. If we’ve got the steel around to do it with, you can forget your anchor plates and just throw up wingwalls to protect the fill.”

Both of us looked at him and began shaking our heads. Smith acted as if none of this meant anything to him.

“Here’s what I mean.” Walter grabbed a pencil and began sketching his idea on the print. “Build up braces from twelve feet down — that’s all the bearing we need.” He paused to study the steel diagram. “Here’s stuff we can steal from the truss. These two I-Beams are only extra weight. We burn them off in six-foot lengths—”

“Wait a minute,” protested Larry. “How are you going to get into the rocks for anchorage and how—”

“Let me worry about that.” Walter was in his stride now. “They’ve got powder here, and drills. Drop me some scaffolding twelve feet down and give me four hours before the water hits that point. I can stay ahead of it after that.”

I said, “You might make it in time. The other side has five feet of elevation, so if we shoot this side first...” I stood up, staring across the river. “Let’s jump in the bucket and ride across. If it’ll work the same on that side, we’ll get started.”

The three of us went toward the bucket. I turned back and said, “Come on, Smith. We’ve got to decide this thing fast.” Larry and Walter stopped and looked back at us.

Smith turned slowly from the river. “You three go ahead. I’ll start rigging a boom for Drake’s scaffolding.”

“You’ll have to check the other side too and get your boom layout started there,” I told him impatiently. “No use jumping in on one side unless it’s workable from the other.”

He shook his head. There was still that remote quietude about him. “I’ll save time by booming the whole job from this side.”

Larry said, “You’re crazy.” He looked across the river. “It’s at least eighty feet across.”

Smith nodded calmly. “I’ve been figuring my end while you guys were arguing. We passed a five-yard dragline in that last cut. I’ll get it here and anchor it to use the boom.”

“It’s only a fifty-foot boom!” Walter ejaculated.

“Don’t you think I know what I’m saying?” Hot anger flared in Smith’s eyes and he took a step forward. I was conscious of that gun under his coat. He stopped and went on flatly, “I’m doing the rigging on this job. One of those pines on the hill behind us will extend the boom to handle the other side from here. Don’t try to tell me my job.”

Walter and Larry looked at me. I said, “Smith’s right. It’ll be faster if he can handle the whole thing from this side.”

Walter looked down at the swift water. He said in a queer voice, “I like to know my rigger when I work above fast water. If a man went into that, his body wouldn’t be recovered until it washed up somewhere beyond the other end of the canyon.”

A muscle jerked in Smith’s face. He said, “if you’re afraid of fast water, you’d better let somebody else do your job.” He turned and strode up the fill toward a truck to drive back for the dragline.

The three of us got in the cable bucket and started across to inspect the American side.

Walter Drake said, “I guess you know he’s packing a gun under his coat.”

“I know a gun-bulge when I see it,” I told him.

Larry said quietly, “I’ve got myself a hunch he feels happier on the south side of the river where the American law can’t touch him. That’s why he wants to boom the whole thing from the Mexican side.”

“Larry’s right,” Walter said. “Smith’s on the dodge. Hell of a guy for the controls of a boom,” he added morosely, looking down at the swirling, deadly water beneath our bucket.

“He’s our rigger for this job,” I reminded them. “No matter what he’s done, he’s still a construction man. When the chips are down, you can’t get the job out of a man’s blood. This is tough enough to take any man’s mind off his own trouble.”

I had to count on that, and I had to make them count on it. No matter what they thought about Smith personally. Time and the flood waters were catching up with us and the job called for teamwork above everything else.

And we got that teamwork. No matter how we felt about Smith, he was a top-hand rigger, and nothing else counted during the next forty-eight hours. A rush job gets hold of you like nothing else in the world. The throbbing pulse of men and machinery against the elements grips a man and puts everything else in the background. You don’t sleep and you don’t eat and you don’t notice the lack of either. It’s you against the job, and that’s all there is in the whole blasted world.

When dark came on, we set up searchlights on both sides of the rising river, and time ceased to exist. The floodwaters crept upward on the sides of the rock cliffs, snarling and angry at being thwarted by human beings. Smith anchored his big dragline back from the edge and lashed a 60-foot pine trunk to the spidery boom. He used the materials at hand and none of us tested the job. The rigging was up to him and we had our own work to do. He slung his blocks from the end and threaded them, and geared his winch for the extra load, and he had Walter’s scaffolds steady against the cliff five feet above the rising water by midnight.

Walter drilled his holes and shot them while I made up his steel the way he wanted it, and before daylight he had the first braces grouted in and was ready for the next set up the cliff.

The water kept rising, but we kept ahead of it. Larry was throwing his forms together out of anything he could get his hands on, and he had a mixer going on both sides by noon of that first day.

Walter Drake rode a hook over the chasm the first time Smith tried out his improvised boom. I saw Walter swinging across on the end of a cable and I remember only a feeling of pleased surprise at knowing he was ahead of the water on our side and ready to tackle the first set across the river. Smith was in it with us and we were a four-man team doing the impossible again, just as my four-man teams had done in the past. If any of us had wasted time wishing we had Benny, it would have been time we couldn’t afford to waste.

We weren’t conscious of Smith any more than we were of one another. He was an integral part of the whole, and we couldn’t function any other way.

It was noon of the second day when I stopped long enough to realize we’d pulled another one out of the fire. We had the job whipped and could afford to straighten up and look around us. The muddy water was already above the lowest steel braces in the side of the cliff, but a webwork of steel was bolted securely in place on both sides, and you could see the river was conceding defeat. It was turbulent and spiteful, eddying in swift whirlpools and roaring its frustration.

Suddenly the whole scene seemed calmly peaceful to me. Just an ordinary job moving along smoothly, when up to that moment it had been an electrified inferno of activity with success hanging in the balance.

Smith was at the controls of his rudely improvised boom and Walter was finishing up his anchor plates on the Mexican side. Larry had a mixer grinding out concrete into his forms on both sides of the river, and the steel erectors were calmly laying out their stuff for the end trusses. Blaine and the Mexican engineer were conferring together in front of the field office, and they both looked as smugly pleased with themselves as though they had figured out the whole deal.

On the other side of the river — the American side — a couple of well-dressed gents were leaning over the cliff’s edge to inspect the work beneath. You could tell they were big shots from the way they acted. Suddenly something went wrong with a block at the end of Smith’s tree-trunk boom and there was a snarl of cable up there as he tried to lift a piece of steel to swing it across the river.

It looked like a bad tangle from where I stood, and I started down to the winch to take the control for him if he had to go up the boom to straighten it out.

I stopped before I’d gone very far. I hadn’t paid much attention to Smith’s end of things during the past forty-eight hours and during that time he’d found a workman who could push the winch while he handled the rigging. A feeling of pleasure went through me at this evidence of the thorough way Smith had taken hold and put everything out of his mind except getting the work done. Some riggers I’ve known wouldn’t have thought of a small detail like that, wouldn’t have bothered to train a winchman during the stress Smith had been under, but it’s just those small details that differentiate a real craftsman from those who don’t quite succeed.

Smith left the workman at the winch and went hand over hand up the steep-sloping steel boom. I watched his big body snake upward and out over the river to the end of steel and then up the roughly trimmed trunk of the pine extension.

I walked on down to the edge of the river while he hung on at the top with one hand and worked at the twisted cables with the other. One of the big shots on the American side looked up and recognized me and I knew I’d have to go over and make my report to them in person. Well, the job was under control and I was ready to make my report. I nodded and waved that I’d be over, but the cable buckets were busy and I had to wait my turn.

Smith got the tangle loosened and signaled the winchman to take up the slack easy while he stepped down to a support on the boom and waited to see that it didn’t snarl again.

A twenty-foot piece of steel was slung on the end of the cable ready for hoisting, and it was on the bank behind me. I saw the cable tighten easily and the steel slide toward the edge.

I stepped onto the steel and grabbed the cable for a ride across. My responsibility was ended and I wanted to turn the whole thing over to someone else and get some sleep.

The steel beam slid off the bank smoothly and out over the water. The winchman lifted it a few feet as we swung so it would clear the higher bank on the other side. I glanced up and waved at Smith riding the end of the boom above me — it looked like a goodwill gesture to thank him for the part he’d played in filling up my gang and helping me out of a tight spot.

I was half-doped with weariness and lack of sleep, and as I waved, I shifted my weight just enough to unbalance the beam in its sling.

When a two-ton beam starts slipping, you don’t readjust it by shifting your weight back. One end of it lifted up and I started riding the other end down toward the water. My one-hand grip on the cable wrenched loose and things happened fast. We were near enough to the American bank so that I could jump for the steel framework jutting out from the cliff.

I went into the roaring water, and as I hit, I remembered the remark Walter had made two days previously about a man’s body being washed up at the other end of the canyon, miles below us, if he ever went into that fast water.

I was sucked under like a floating chip, and then heaved up and slammed on my right side against the steel I’d reached for. I got a left-hand grip, but the current was tearing at me and I knew I wouldn’t last long. My right arm hung limp and I couldn’t let go to grab the rope let down from above or the sling on the end of the cable which the winchman had let down for me when he saw what had happened.

There were people leaning over the edge above me shouting for me to hang on until they could let down a rope, but none of them seemed to realize that my right arm had been smashed and was useless.

None of them except Smith who was perched high above me on the boom. Looking straight down, maybe his perspective was better. Anyhow, he caught on at once and he acted with the hair-trigger speed that drives a man instinctively at a time like that.

He swung out from the boom and caught the swinging cable and came down it toward me. I saw him coming and I wasn’t surprised to see a killer risking his life to save mine. I knew that’s the way construction men are built. They get that way working together on jobs where death is everywhere.

He hit the water beside me and got the sling between my legs and signaled the winchman. We went up with a jerk and swung out over dry land and the cable set us down gently together on American soil.

We were surrounded before we got untangled, and the two well-dressed gents had hold of Smith before he could reach the gun under his wet coat. They flashed Ranger badges on him and took him away quietly. Back to El Paso to stand trial for strangling Lola.

Larry and Walter couldn’t get over how queer it was the way everything happened so opportunely. They wondered how a guy like me could so far forget himself as to shift his weight on a delicately balanced steel beam while riding it across the river, and they thought my right arm healed mighty quick after having been hurt so badly that it was useless while I was in the water.

I never explained those things to them, nor how the Texas Rangers happened to be on hand when Smith came back to the American side. A repentant Benny Arentz was waiting to go on the next job with us when we got back to headquarters, and I don’t think any of the three men needed to know that I had intentionally shuffled Benny aside that night in Juarez so we could take a killer along with us as rigger in his place.

There were still other jobs to be done, and a boss isn’t much good if his men begin to lose faith in him.

I think they might have understood and forgiven my deception if I’d told them the whole truth, but somehow that was part of the past I wanted to forget. I’ve always felt I was a poor brother to Lola, and it was partly my fault, I guess, that she ended up in an El Paso crib.