Omie sat by herself in a corner of the shack, on a crate of tie spikes, her eyes closed. She had asked for silence, so she might “talk to the men,” and silence had been granted. Drew and Clay played cards with a deck found on a shelf, and Zoe spent much of her time staring out the only window, a tiny yellowed pane facing a snowbank. Fay thought she might scream if no sounds were uttered soon. She wished she had never accepted Jones’s offer of freedom from custody of the law if she would cooperate with him and bring Omie Brannan back to Denver, assisted by Clay. Once Clay recognized his siblings, any chance for honoring her agreement with Jones was gone, replaced by a foolhardy scheme that could not possibly succeed. They occupied the maintenance shack solely on account of a rejected woman’s desire for vengeance, and a peculiar young girl’s whimsical vanity. Even if everything proceeded as Omie wished, and no one was killed, Fay knew she would still have to share Drew with all of them.
It was to be Nevis’s final comment on Leo Brannan and Lovey Doll Pines before leaving Colorado. The golden elk was too great a target to ignore. Once Smith had been persuaded to take part, Winnie went along too. They had everything they owned in the wagon, and something else besides, a creation of Nevis’s that had been hidden beneath baggage and a tarpaulin. Smith sold his honey cart to an interested party, and left it behind for the new owner to collect. He had emptied his last shitcan, he said, and so had Nevis, and all three got drunker than they had been for some time.
It was to be a new life for them, somewhere far away from Glory Hole, but before they departed the region for good, one last insult must be hurled at the man and woman who had ruined them. The scheme was conceived in a mood of alcoholic euphoria, and executed without a moment’s sobriety to stand in its way. The ice wagon was loaded, and they drove it out of town to a place where the roadway began veering from the railroad tracks, at which point they drove up onto the tracks and proceeded by that route.
Arriving at the Sky Gorge bridge, they discovered that the mules were reluctant to cross. The bridge spanned a deep chasm with a torrent of water rushing far below it. Smith, who understood the nature of his beasts, unhitched them and led them across blindfolded, one at a time. He and Nevis and Winnie were obliged to haul the wagon across themselves, but the bridge had a downward slope to it, and they managed well enough. When the mules had been hitched again, they continued on to the snow shed, lit two lamps and proceeded through at a leisurely pace, drinking all the while. It was not until they reached the far end and pulled the wagon off the tracks that they considered what might have happened had a train come along during their confinement in the shed. The picture of disaster that came to mind, and their casual ignorance of danger until that moment, struck them as hilarious, and they laughed and drank some more, and fell into the snow and threw snowballs while the mules watched.
The shack at the Leadville end of the snow shed was perfect for their needs, and Smith broke the lock with a crowbar, then, in a fit of magnanimity, took the mules inside as well. “They’re God’s creatures too,” he said, burying his face in the nearest mule’s neck. The second mule shat on the earth floor. Winnie said she wasn’t going to clean it up, so Nevis did. Dumping the dung, he looked across the valley and saw a train steaming along the tracks on the far side. The line formed an enormous loop before entering the snow shed, and everything that would pass through it could be seen at least fifteen minutes before it arrived, on the opposite side of the loop. Nevis watched two locomotives linked in tandem slowly hauling a long string of coal cars behind them. Their steady chuffing came to him clearly, amplified by the valley itself. They would be able to hear every train approaching the snow shed, and look to see if it was the one bearing the golden elk. When it came, there would be plenty of time to arrange things.
The reaching, as Omie called it, was different for every man. Omie knew where they were simply by directing herself toward the elk. She did not know exactly where the train was located at any given time, but could go directly to it by way of its cargo, which belonged to her. She neither understood nor questioned the means by which this was accomplished; day or night, near or far, her golden elk was easily accessible to Omie.
Once aboard the train, she could not feel its vibrations or hear the whistle, or listen to the conversation of the men there, but Omie was able to whisper into the mind of any man who was asleep or in a state of lethargy, and a surprising number were. The words she used were simple and unchanging, and the men sometimes came awake instantly, as if her breath had tickled their ears, and sometimes they slept on, but she knew the message had been planted inside them anyway.
Between western Kansas and the central valleys of Colorado she had visited every man at least once, and thrust herself into the thoughts of their leader many times. Drew had instructed her not to bother with the engine drivers until the last, since these would be changed at regular intervals, whereas the same roster of guards would most likely be maintained throughout the trip. “Pinkertons,” he said, “they’ll do a job cheap if they can.” Omie told Drew the same men were always there, and he said that was good.
The train was closer now, much closer. There was something in the mood of the men aboard that told Omie they were becoming both excited and anxious; the end of their ordeal was near, but they feared a tunnel ahead that was not even there. A kind of jagged fog filled both boxcars at either end of the elk’s flatcar, a nervous flux, something unspoken.
Omie had done her work well, taking dozens of catnaps throughout the thirty-two hours the Dugans lived in the shack. Omie hated her blue face, but she fairly strutted when she considered the gift she had and was able to use with such skill. She would make a piece of history without lifting a finger; how many other people could do that. Everyone was depending on her to prepare the men aboard the train for her final onslaught, the thing for which Omie was holding much of herself in reserve.
The bottles were running low. Smith was drinking more than his share, Winnie complained, and when Smith denied it, she began to rant at him, blasting her words directly into his face, until Smith shoved her away. Winnie fell against the mules. She launched herself at Smith, who fended her off easily, laughing. Nevis witnessed their wranglings with a bleary eye; they really should not have been treating each other with such contempt, he thought, especially since he was so very fond of them both, but it was difficult to intervene; he had attempted it several times while they lived together in Glory Hole, and been told to mind his own business. Winnie in particular was adamant that no man should come to her rescue, and Smith, admitted Nevis, saw him as nothing that a strong man such as himself need worry about.
“Stop it …” he said, but they ignored him, and Nevis was too drunk to be sure he had spoken with sufficient loudness. “Stop it!” he yelled, and the protagonists both looked at him, distracted from the sound of their own voices.
Smith said, “Huh?”
“What …?” said Winnie.
“You mustn’t …,” Nevis told them. “We’re all friends.”
Smith and Winnie began to laugh. Nevis thought they were laughing at him, and when they saw his features begin to crumple, they laughed even louder, but let him know by much waving of the hands that their laughter was for themselves, or for no reason at all. Nevis began laughing also. That was when the whistle across the valley sounded.
“Train …,” said Nevis, and the other two began laughing again. “Train!” he screamed, and picked himself up to yank open the door. He fell into the snow after a few steps, but was able to see the train toiling along the far side of the loop, a short train, just two boxcars and a caboose, but on the flatcar riding midway stood the unmistakable shape of the elk, sunlight burnishing its flanks.
“There …,” breathed Nevis, pointing. “There …”
He heard Smith and Winnie struggling clumsily through the snow behind him. The whistle sounded again.
“That’s the one,” said Smith. “See it shine?”
They watched the train, a toy moving
of its own volition a mile away, carrying its precious Christmas tree bauble. Nevis was immobilized by its arrival; the train brought with it uncertainty that his plan would work as he wished it to. It seemed, now that the time had come, a silly kind of thing to do, but he had swept up Smith and Winnie by proposing it while drunk with his own belief. Now, seeing the train, he was less sure, and he found himself shaking from more than the snow that had passed into his boots. If he had been alone, Nevis would have hidden behind the shack until the train had followed the loop around to the snow shed, entered it and passed him by; then Nevis would have gone away, and never mentioned to anyone a single word concerning his silly plan. He could still do that, if he chose.
“Better get started,” said Smith, and Nevis felt his heart squeeze itself into a knot. It was too late. He was afraid, but could not imagine why. The plan was nothing more than a prank, one last thumbing of the nose at Leo Brannan, a poor man’s revenge, pitiful, inadequate, but necessary, or so he had felt when first he thought of it.
Winnie was pulling him up from the snow. “Come on.…”
Nevis rose and followed his friends to the wagon. The tarpaulin there was stripped away, his creation laid bare.
“Pitiful …,” he whispered, looking at it.
“Not beautiful,” said Winnie, misunderstanding, “but it’s not supposed to be, is it?”
Smith climbed into the wagon. “Take that end,” he said. Nevis took it. “Lift,” said Smith, and Nevis lifted.
When Omie’s skin became white and her breathing slowed to a series of shallow gasps, no one touched her. She sat in the corner, her eyes wide open, seeing what the other Dugans could not. Even Zoe had never seen her in so intensely physical a trance before, and for a brief moment considered shaking her to bring Omie back from the brink of whichever psychic pit she was approaching. Only Drew’s hand on her shoulder prevented it.
Clay was outside the shack, watching the train crawl around the loop that would bring it to the long snow shed and the trap laid inside, an invisible trap no man could anticipate. He was tense, his skin twitching, even if he had to do nothing more dangerous than wait and see if events transpired as Omie had said they would. He did not feel brave; he did not feel at risk of physical harm; he was not girding himself for gunplay or confrontation. Clay admitted to himself, as the train passed from his sight at the loop’s far end, that he felt superfluous, a man pretending to be doing a man’s work. A girl was doing a man’s work that day, and he was aware of not only his noninvolvement but an unsettling shame. He should never have allowed Omie to persuade any of them to be a part of this. It was for Zoe’s sake the trap was laid, and for no one else’s. Clay wanted it to succeed only because its conclusion would allow them all to go somewhere else and begin again together. The trap inside the snow shed was a settling, an act of reprisal, anything but a conventional robbery. He had to remember that.
54
Lyle Ingalls and Pat Cullen had taken over the locomotive in Pueblo shortly before dawn, having been granted the honor of taking the elk train, as it had come to be known, along the final stages of its journey to Glory Hole. The job was theirs because both men had exemplary records for safety and punctuality, and were model citizens to boot. The Pinkerton agency’s criteria had been well met by the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad.
Their mood, as the train began gathering steam on the run west to Canon City and Salida, was one of satisfaction and professional pride. This was their reward for years of diligent service for the company. They had stared at the elk in the predawn light and been awed by its frozen majesty. This was to be the run of their careers, both men were sure. Their wives had already begun treating them differently, and when the elk was delivered safely to Leo Brannan, and Lyle and Pat came home again, their lives would have been changed forever; it was a certainty. Pat shoveled coal into the firebox like a demon fueling the atmosphere of hell, and Lyle squinted into the cone of light the Baldwin 4-6-0’s powerful acetylene lamp cast along the track ahead. Nothing could be allowed to go wrong, or their status within the D&RG would be tarnished forever.
Sunlight from the east soon allowed Lyle to switch off the lamp. The Baldwin’s firebox roared hungrily, and the first leg of the trip was accomplished in perfect time, but soon afterward, somewhere between Canon City and Salida, both men began experiencing vague sensations of disquiet. Neither mentioned it to the other, since no specific thing was the cause, but as the run proceeded through the morning, they found themselves thinking of tunnels, deadly tunnels, the kind that had killed men over the years, not only during their construction, but afterward, when locomotives were stalled inside them, resulting in asphyxiation of the crew. These thoughts were irrational, both men concluded, still not having voiced their fears, because the line from Leadville through to Glory Hole had no such tunnel, just a three-mile snow shed.
No one had ever died in a snow shed that Lyle and Pat had heard of, but both men began considering the means by which a snow shed might be compared with a tunnel, and both, by the time Salida was reached and the train turned north toward Buena Vista, had reasoned that the one thing that might render a shed as potentially deadly as a tunnel was the presence of snow all around and above the timbered structure. Snow was not as dense as rock, but would that make any real difference if a train became stranded halfway through such a thing? Lyle and Pat had been through the shed during winter many times, when it was completely covered by snow, and they knew that those three miles of travel, even if accomplished at a steady speed, generally resulted in a throbbing headache before sunlight was seen at the far end. Once out in the open air, such pain as they had was wiped away by deep inhalations of fresh air. No train had ever stalled in the shed. There was no reason to surmise that one ever would. But they could not stop thinking that one might.
Boysie Frazier had to spend more time on the flatcar simply to draw a full breath. The air in both boxcars was ripe with the odor of unwashed males, but that was not the reason Boysie needed to be outside; there was something else filling his chest, a sense of dread so intense it clutched at him like a claw around his heart. And he was not alone; other men came out onto the flatcar, and made comments on their need to be away from the stale air they had lived in for too long. Their talk was mild, apologetic almost, but their faces were drawn with fatigue and some other emotion Boysie could not decipher, a kind of trepidation that lurked so far beneath the surface of their usual selves they would not acknowledge it, or discuss it with others. Boysie recognized himself in them all, but was likewise constrained from asking any man what it was that troubled him. Chances were they had simply become bone-weary. It had been a difficult assignment for everyone, despite the lack of actual danger. Before the day was out they would be in Glory Hole, freed from responsibility for Brannan’s elk, able to wash themselves clean in oceans of hot water, able to shave again, and dress in fresh clothing. They would eat the best food that town had to offer, and become drunk if they wanted, and sleep the sleep of the just on soft mattresses. It would be heaven. Their nearness to such luxury and indulgence should have rallied the spirits of his men, but all Boysie could see were faces made taut by fear, as was his own.
After Buena Vista was passed, the inner turmoil of the engineers worsened. They still did not speak of it to each other, or to the two miserable-looking Pinkertons sharing their cab. Pat had begun to fill every minute with thoughts of his eleven-year-old daughter, but found he could not hold her steady in his mind; no matter how hard he tried to picture her as she was, one side of her face became darkened by a swirling blueness, like ink poured into clear water. Pat could not erase the least part of it, and came to realize it was not his daughter at all, but some other girl who insisted on crowding aside anything else he might wish to see while he worked, and it was she who made him consider the deadly ways of railroad tunnels, even if her lips were motionless.
For Lyle, the trip had become fraught with inexplicable moments of anxiety. He kept turning his face away from
the track his locomotive traveled, expecting to see inside the cab someone other than Pat and the two Pinkertons, but there was no fifth person there, and after he had performed the same check a dozen times, Lyle began wondering if his mind had not somehow become addled, although there had never been any indications of madness in his family. He would have become angry over his own foolish behavior, if only the overwhelming fear of tunnels had receded and allowed him access to any emotion other than the foreboding that held him so tightly in its grip. His fingertips inside their heavy gauntlets were growing numb, and he knew it was not the cold that made them so.
She was out of the shack now, had stepped outside as if in a trance and positioned herself at the end of the snow shed, her feet set firmly between the tracks. No one had stopped her; Omie was a law unto herself, her blank face and rigid walk the very badge of her independence. She stood in the place of maximum danger, and began filling the snow shed with a viscous wave invisible to anyone but herself. Primeval fear, raw and shapeless, poured into the shed, an inky darkness thrust by willpower into the long and narrow receptacle prepared for its storage. Deep snow covering the shed made it impervious, a natural containing element. The waves of fear eddied along it without being dispersed, without losing any part of their strength, eventually filling the shed. In the process, Omie became weak, although her weakening was not of so obvious a nature as to alert Clay or Zoe or Drew, who stood nearby, waiting for what Omie had told them would happen.
As the final curve of the familiar loop ran beneath the wheels of the locomotive, Lyle Ingalls felt a lifting of his spirits, but when the Baldwin faced the entrance to the snow shed, Lyle’s hand reached instinctively for the brake lever. Ahead, blocking the entrance to the shed, stood something the like of which he had never seen before. The Baldwin came to a halt, its nose less than ten yards from the object, and the Pinkertons and engineers stared.
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