The young man watching her had come aboard at one of the stations sometime later and began his furtive surveillance of Maude. In her own assessment of the young man, she noted that his clothing was of good quality. They spoke of some means but were not the clothes of the idle wealthy. He was obviously a working man in a field that left his hands smooth, but he had done a spot of rough work recently, and he had the blisters to show for it. She also saw in him the bearing of a man trained for war, but now looser, mostly relaxed or forgotten. He still carried the stress of combat in his lower spine, and that would catch up to him one day. He was handsome, though, she had to admit.
Gran entered Maude’s mind unbidden, swaggering, as she usually did. Maude knew what Gran would say about her admirer, if she were still alive. She’d cackle like one of Macbeth’s witches and say something like, “Go on, lass, have a go at ’im! Get all hot cockles with the pretty boy. Life is too damn short for mooning about and playing it safe. Nobody gets out of this world alive, ’cept for me, of course!”
The ghost she had summoned made her smile, and the young man almost dropped his book in response to it. Maude nearly laughed, but she lowered her eyes and held her composure.
The car’s rear door opened with a bang, and a group of men entered the compartment. There were seven of them. They were dirty with trail dust, and they reeked of the sweat of their horses and their own bodies, of leather and gun oil. All of them were armed—six-guns and knives; some carried rifles and shotguns too. They slowly advanced down the car’s center aisle. The leader, a burly man with a thick red beard and hooded eyes full of coiled violence, nodded to two of his men. They responded by dropping back from the pack and lingering near the rear door. The menace from them radiated like heat.
Maude silently prepared herself for what she knew was coming, had to come. She adjusted her posture subtly from one of avoiding notice to that intended to attract the eye, drawing the crew’s attention toward her and away from the immigrant family and the young man.
She altered her breathing, preparing for a fight with a fast-fast rhythm of breath—drawing on her abdominal muscles—just as she had been taught. She had practiced different styles of breathing for different purposes over many years and under a harsh teacher. Again she heard Gran’s cackle, saw the old woman beside the ocean with her wadaiko—her Japanese drum—on her lap, calling the tunes Maude’s muscles and lungs learned to obey.
“There is no learning before you learn to breathe proper, girl,” Gran had told her. “Technique’s called by many names in many lands. The Japanese call it Ibuki, and it’s the first step in making you truly free. The air in your lungs is the fuel.”
Her blood was filled with oxygen, now. Maude was ready. The menacing men were armed and, now, so was she.
“Excuse me,” the young man said, standing before her. “If I am not being too bold, may I join you?” He was pretty, to be sure. He was also the master of the worst possible timing imaginable.
“Of course,” Maude said, directing him to a seat with a nod, “please.”
“I’m not normally in the habit of being so forward,” Alter said as he sat, “but I was concerned.” He leaned closer and lowered his voice. “Those b’hoys coming in the car look like trouble, and a lady like yourself traveling alone…”
“That’s very kind of you, Mr.…”
“Cline,” he said, “Alter Cline.”
The men walked past Maude and Alter. She saw their brutal intent radiating from the tension in how they moved, ready for trouble, to explode, with every step. Cline was turning to face them—the worst possible thing he could do. The men each gave her a rapacious glance as they passed and then saw the grim look on Alter’s face. One of the men stopped before Cline and began to say something, his hand dropping to his six-gun. Maude placed a hand lightly on Cline’s shoulder and Alter suddenly shifted back toward her, a surprised look on his face. For such a slip of a woman, she seemed quite strong.
“If you want to stay alive, Mr. Cline, be still,” she said, whispering. Cline began to open his mouth. “And quiet,” she added.
“Leave this dude be,” one of the gunmen muttered to his kinsman whom Alter had riled, “We’re on a schedule. ’Sides, Nick and Jed will see to ’em. Shake a leg.”
The group of armed men opened the car’s front door. They stepped through, man by man. The leader looked back at the two men waiting in Maude’s car. He nodded to them and stepped through the door, shutting it behind him.
“Damn it,” Maude muttered. Only Cline heard her. The younger of the two gunmen, close to Cline’s age and with a lump of tobacco in his cheek, walked toward Maude and Cline. He paused, rested his hand on his holstered gun and looked Maude over like he was examining horseflesh to purchase.
“Well, ain’t you a little stick of an adventuress,” the boy said, laughing. The man by the rear door laughed, too, and turned toward the Chinese family. Maude’s face remained emotionless.
“She’s gotta be a whore, if’n she’s ridin’ in a car with these here yeller niggers, Nick,” the gunman, obviously Jed, said. He cradled a Winchester rifle as he looked at the husband and his family.
Nick grinned. His teeth were brown and stained. He looked over to Cline, who was reddening in response to the coarse words. “I hope you didn’t pay this scrawny little thing too much for her to upend her legs, boy. Or maybe you’re her pimp?”
“You filthy…” Cline growled. The reporter began to rise, his fists clenched. Nick drew his six-gun—a fluid motion as natural to the man as breathing. Nick cocked the pistol aimed at the young man’s face. Alter Cline was a dead man.
Alter and Nick were scarcely able to fully comprehend what happened next. The muscles in Nick’s arm, wrist and hand fluttered in response to the command of his brain to pull the trigger, the quicksilver language of nerves and electrical impulses. Maude’s eyes registered the movements; her body responded faster than thought allowed. Maude’s arm flashed out and clutched Nick’s wrist with a grip like iron. Her other hand chopped at his arm precisely above the elbow. Nick’s gun arm folded, the gun turned upward toward his face as he pulled the trigger. The sound of the .44 was a hammer shattering the world. Alter jumped back, his eyes squeezing shut, anticipating a spray of hot blood. It didn’t come. Nick crumpled to the floor. As he fell, Maude caught his still-smoking revolver. She flipped the gun in midair, clutching it by the hot barrel. She turned, using the strength of her pivoting hips as she hurled the gun at Jed like a tomahawk. Jed, just beginning to realize what was happening, raised his weapon. Nate’s six-gun caught him square in the face. There was a gush of blood from his shattered nose, and he collapsed in a heap against the train car’s rear door.
“How … how did you … do that?” Alter asked, looking down at Nick’s motionless form. “Is he…”
“Dead?” Maude stepped out into the aisle over Nick’s body. “No. The bullet grazed his chin, just knocked him out. The other one is alive too.” She knelt by Nick, tore a strip from her dress, and began to bind his hands behind his back. Alter looked out the window, so as to not gawk at the flash of Maude’s exposed leg. Nick groaned.
“Oh,” Alter said. “I’ve never seen anyone move that fast before. How—”
“We really don’t have time for that,” Maude said, moving down the aisle toward the other gunman and the Chinese family. “If it makes you feel better, you can consider it a lucky accident—a hysterical woman’s thrashing about that had a fortuitous outcome.”
“I will do no such thing,” Alter said. He knelt by Nick and examined the odd-looking but sturdy knot Maude had used to bind him. He did not recognize its make. “You are in complete control of your faculties, madame, and furthermore, your quick action saved my life. Thank you.”
Maude paused in tying the other outlaw up to look back at Alter. She looked mildly surprised and smiled. “You’re … quite welcome.”
“That smile,” Alter said, standing and adjusting his puff tie. “I imagine it gets you i
n a lot of trouble.”
“Apparently so,” Maude said as she stood. She handed Nick and Jed’s bloody revolvers to the immigrant father. She said something to him in Chinese that Alter didn’t understand. The father replied in his native tongue and took the guns. Maude knelt to retrieve the rifle. She spoke quietly to the little boy and ruffled his hair. His expression changed from fear to a smile. Maude stood and tossed the Winchester across the car to Alter. He caught it, and cocked the lever, chambering a round.
“You were in the army, and you know your way around a rifle, better than most,” Maude said. She was putting on Jed’s coat now and was tying his kerchief around her neck loosely. She walked past Cline, headed toward the door the rest of the outlaw crew had passed through.
“Yes,” Alter said. “But how on Earth could you possibly know that? Wait, I know, ‘no time.’”
“You’re a quick study, good,” Maude said.
She paused by the door and tore her dress in the front and back, giving herself enough freedom to run. Alter instinctively looked away again at the pale, bare skin. She tied the loose pieces of the brown dress together at each ankle—it now looked like she was wearing baggy ripped trousers. “Alter, I need you to backtrack, check the cars behind ours. See if they left any more men behind. If they did, I need you to deal with them, understand? Can you do that?”
“Yes,” Alter said, looking back at the rear door. “Where are you going?”
Maude slid the kerchief over her mouth and nose and tightened it. She picked up Nick’s floppy-brimmed felt hat from the floor and stuffed it on her head. Something in her posture, her way of walking, changed, and for an instant, Alter thought he was looking at a completely different person. “I’m going forward to do the same. Disarm these two completely before you head back.”
“I thought you already did,” he said.
“Nick has a knife in his left boot. This one has a parlor gun tucked in his vest pocket,” she said. Even her voice sounded different now, deeper—more like a man’s. “Be careful.”
“How do you know th—” Alter began. The car’s front door banged shut behind Maude. “The people you meet on the train, eh?” Alter said to the bewildered family as he pulled the blade from Nick’s boot.
* * *
Outside the passenger car the winter wind was bitter as the train sped along at over forty miles an hour. Maude directed the blood within her body, willing it to act against the decrees of biology. Her skin warmed. The condensation of her breath that had trailed away from her mouth in silvered streams vanished.
She crossed the narrow gap between the train cars, hearing the coupler, which held the cars together, clatter beneath her. The window on the door to the next car was painted in frost, so she crouched by the door and placed her palms against it.
The vibrations of the train car, the rattling, shaking song of the distant engine, became part of her. She closed her eyes and breathed through the filter of the outlaw’s filthy bandanna. Her senses began to reorder themselves—some growing still and silent, others opening wider … wider. She felt the pulse of the train, the hum of motion and vibration, the rhythm and pattern, and then she began to assign each pattern a distinctive identity.
One of the many games Gran had played with her when she was a young girl had involved three hard, thick, identical wooden boxes. She had to tell which box held the hornet’s nest by touch alone, by letting her hands drink in the vibrations and motion. Then she was to open the two boxes that didn’t hold the hornets. She had been stung so many times learning the game, but like all of Gran’s games, it served a purpose. Now Maude was thankful for the painful lesson. “Good!” Gran had said, clapping, when Maude had mastered the game, “Now, girl, tell me exactly how many hornets are in that nest…”
The vibrations that were counter to the heartbeat of the train were people—one was five feet north of her, on the other side of the door, the other twenty feet farther away—two more gunmen, pacing. The other counter vibrations were lesser and ordered in their locations—seated passengers, about fifteen. She could afford no mistakes in this or people would die.
The outlaw by her door was facing away from her now. She had felt the wobble in his vibration, the subtle shift of his weight as he turned to face his comrade and the passengers. She stayed low and leaned in as she swung the door open violently. Maude’s leg shot out like a snake striking and swept both of the outlaw’s legs. The gunman fell hard on his face. Maude was up and moving, a blur. As she stepped over the fallen man, she drove a well-placed heel into a cluster of nerves at the base of his spine. The man moaned in pain but then was abruptly silent—he’d be powerless to move for at least thirty minutes.
His companion was twenty feet away and less than a second from firing his pistol at Maude’s heart. The passengers were screaming and shouting, just beginning to comprehend the stimuli their brains were receiving. Maude launched herself off the paralyzed man, using his body like a ramp.
Her eyes read the language of the gunman’s muscles as the pistol barked. In midair she twisted, tumbled, changing her trajectory using the canvas support straps mounted vertically above the seats along the length of the car. Angry, buzzing heat fluttered past her cheek as she came down feet-first on the outlaw’s chest. Her legs folded and she followed him to the floor. With a single strike from the heel of her palm, she knocked him out.
“Thank the Almighty for you, stranger!” one of the passengers said as Maude stood.
“I’ve never seen a body move like that, fella,” another man said, starting to rise. “You with the carnival or circus or something?”
Maude moved quickly past them toward the next door. Four down, three to go. She pointed toward the forward car door. “The other men who went this way,” she asked, her voice still disguised as a man’s. “Did they say anything, anything at all?”
“They said something about the mail car and then coming back to fleece us,” a woman said, her children clinging to her. “The Lord be with you, brave sir.”
“Disarm these men,” Maude said. “Bind them. Stay here until you hear something from the conductor or the engineer. Any of the others come back, shoot them.”
“Don’t you need a gun?” one of the men called out, picking up one of the outlaw’s pistols.
“What for?” Maude asked. She was through the next door and gone.
* * *
Connolly “Big Tooth” McGrath held the shotgun to the head of the postal clerk in the mail car. The boy had wet himself when they had shot through the door and now was on his hands and knees, shaking like a sick dog. “I know you got the damn key to the lock box,” McGrath told the clerk. He gestured with the still-hot scattergun toward the mostly headless body of the other clerk that lay beside the locked and chained heavy metal chest. “He thought he’d play at hero, too, and you see what that got him.”
“They didn’t give me a key in case something like this happened!” the clerk screamed, looking down at the blood-soaked floor. “I’m no hero!”
McGrath stroked his heavy red beard and sniffed the air, catching the stench of gun smoke and piss. Even with the cold December air whistling through the car, it still reeked of fear. “Clearly,” he said. “Well, then,” McGrath said, addressing his two men—one gathering up the canvas sacks of postage, the other standing watch by the now-destroyed rear door. “I guess we blast the chains off the chest and carry it, then. That means we don’t need you, hero, so say so-long to your hat rest.”
McGrath glanced up at his men. The one by the door had vanished. There was a rapidly diminishing scream, then a sound like meat hitting the tracks at forty miles an hour. The scream stopped.
“What the hell?” McGrath snapped his head toward his other conspirator. The outlaw’s motionless body was slumped on a mattress of scattered mail sacks. A masked man stood beside the body, a postage envelope in the stranger’s hand. “Who the fuck are you?” McGrath asked.
“Postmaster General,” Maude said in her cou
nterfeit male voice. “You’re in a great deal of trouble.”
“I don’t care if you’re General fuckin’ Forrest!” McGrath shouted. “You picked the wrong desperado to mess with, stranger.” He brought up the shotgun, leveling it at the masked man. Maude flicked her wrist, and the letter whizzed across the room accompanied by a snapping sound. McGrath felt a sharp sting at his wrist, and his trigger finger no longer worked. He strained, but the finger drooped in the trigger guard. He struggled to shift the gun to his other hand, now seeing a slender line of his blood trailing from the wrist of his gun hand. He never had a chance to complete the task before Maude crossed the room, grabbed the shotgun barrel, and jerked downward on it. The butt of the gun caught McGrath in the face, and he collapsed in a heap.
“There any more?” Maude asked the terrified clerk.
“N … no,” the clerk said. “Whoever you are, thank you. I was sure I was dead, like … like Henry over there.”
“He’ll never shoot anyone with that hand ever again,” Maude said, picking up the letter from the floor and dropping it back into the pile of mail.
“Are you a passenger?” the clerk asked. There was no reply. The masked stranger was gone.
* * *
The train halted on the tracks near Promontory. The robbers were bound and gathered together by the train’s crew, then forced into one of the passenger cars and guarded at gunpoint. The passengers were all taken off the train while it was searched to make sure no additional members of McGrath’s crew had escaped notice. Alter, rifle still in hand, was talking with the conductor and the engineer.
“We were damned lucky you were on the train, Mr. Cline,” said the engineer, a balding man in greasy coveralls. “You have any clue who that masked fella was? He seems to have vanished just as quickly as he showed up.”
“And we didn’t even get a chance to thank him,” added the burly conductor, still managing to sweat in the numbing cold.
The Queen of Swords Page 3