Hell on Wheels (A Fargo Western #15)

by John Benteen

  “Fargo!” Rawhide Blaine’s voice rasped through the stillness of the room, before he could pull the gun from leather. As Fargo turned, Blaine stood there, a towering figure only dimly seen. His hands swung low, by the Colts in their buscadero holsters.

  Fargo froze. Blaine, he knew, was waiting for him to draw, and then Blaine would blast him down. And, in this moment, could do it, easily. Like taking candy from a baby. Fargo felt a flare of rage, of contempt. Blaine had him, had him good. Pull that iron and he was dead. Refuse the challenge and the word would get around—Rawhide Blaine had made him crawfish. No matter that he’d just had a brutal fistfight. The story would be twisted, changed, that fact forgotten. All that would be remembered was that Blaine had faced him down ...

  For a half second, he stood there frozen, vision clearing just enough to see the triumph and the killer light in Rawhide’s eyes. Draw or run—And if he ran, Blaine might kill him anyway. Fargo braced himself to draw, long chance that it was—

  And then the bar’s front door slammed open. A voice bawled: “Blaine! Where’s Rawhide Blaine?”

  Instinctively, Blaine jerked around, and Fargo pulled the Colt, lined and cocked it, but did not fire.

  The man who’d just barged in wore the green-eyeshade and sleeve-garters of a station agent. “Rawhide! All hell’s broke loose! The Snake Mountain water tower just blew sky-high right in front of Number Seven as she was comin’ up the grade! She’s out of water and the tank’s across the track and got her blocked. They seen the flash when it went, heard the noise—dynamite! They tapped on the telegraph line—they got to have a wrecker crew and a tank-car full of water!”

  “Dynamite! Snake Mountain—” Fargo was forgotten for the instant. Blaine gaped.

  “That ain’t all! We can’t get no crew or water out there! The signalman at Sage Creek Crossing just come in on the wire, too! Same time that tower went, the Sage Creek bridge went up too, not a stringer left in place! We can’t even get a relief out to Number Seven until we rebuild the bridge!”

  Blaine wheeled, face a mask of fury. “Fargo! Damn you, you dynamited—” He broke off as he saw the Colt centered on his belly, cocked.

  The breath went out of him. “You did it,” he whispered. “You was the one.”

  “Not me,” Fargo croaked through split lip. “Didn’t you hear the man? They just went up. Me, I been here all evenin’. Even you can swear to that.”

  “Then somebody from Cayuse Mountain—”

  “Every man in our outfit’s been where he belonged all night, and can prove it.” Fargo jerked the gun barrel. “Know what, Blaine? You got a lot of other places up and down the line might blow, too. And looks like there’s a dynamiter workin’ out there in the night. If I was you, I’d get my men out of here and put ’em on guard. Hawk’s not gonna be tickled that you lost a tower and a bridge. You lose some more, he’ll be even madder.”

  Blaine’s face worked.

  “And you can’t tell,” said Fargo, “who it was or where he’ll strike again.”

  Blaine stared at him. “Another time, then, damn you,” he whispered. He swung around. “All right, dammit!” he roared. “Every C & W man out of here! Meet me at the depot with all your guns and gear in fifteen minutes, hear!” Then, without another look at Fargo, he stalked out. There was a rush as men followed him.

  Fargo waited tensely until the room was almost empty. Then he limped back to the table he had occupied, took a long swig from the bottle still there. Ridge lay face down on the floor in a pool of blood, breathing hoarsely. The bartender stood over him, face pale. “Mr. Fargo,” he asked a little fearfully. “What do I do with him?”

  “That’s your problem,” Fargo said. “He ain’t my customer.” Then, corking the bottle, tucking it under one arm, gun still drawn, he went out.

  Chapter Seven

  Whitmore and Ellen were still up when Fargo, close to rope’s end, lurched into the bungalow. The girl’s face went chalky with horror at the sight of him. “Neal! What happened?”

  Somehow Fargo grinned. “You should see the other feller.” Collapsing into a chair, he opened the bottle, took another swig. “Ellen, you might pull off my boots. Will, you got a clear track for the next few days, anyhow. That I’ll guarantee. Our flanks are safe now—for a while.”

  And then he explained about Emmett Ridge.

  “He was the one that blew the Hallelujah Tunnel, had to be. And he was planning to blow it again and I had to stop him.”

  He took another drink, went on.

  “It all added up, piece by piece. I know dyno, and when I saw that tunnel, I knew it would take a damned good powder man to blow it, a real pro. Then I bumped into Ridge at the mine. He near bit my head off when I was lookin’ over one of them Iron Mule ore-cart haulers they got there, and for no good reason ... except, it hit me, that I might notice they were the same gauge as your track.

  “Even got headlights,” he continued painfully. “No trouble for Ridge to steal one late at night, run it over to your tunnel, use the lights to work by, set his charges, blow the tunnel, ride on back to the mine. It had to be that way, because he’d have needed a train—or something like a train—to haul the necessary gear: drills, hammers, dyno, fuse, all that. It couldn’t have been a train, so it had to be an Iron Mule. Then, tonight, Ridge and Blaine got together in a way they tried to hide, and that was all I needed. Rawhide was settin’ it up for him to blow the tunnel again or somethin’ else. I braced Ridge, and the minute he saw I was on to him, he panicked and slugged me.” Fargo’s mouth twisted. “Which made it easier. Gave me an excuse to put him out of action for good. It’ll be a month before he can chew again, much less set a powder charge.”

  “Why would Emmett Ridge want to do such a thing to me?” Whitmore was shocked.

  “Money. What else? Haven’t you ever looked into his eyes? He’s a pitcher that’s been to the well too many times. He’s cracked, lost his nerve; it happens to the best of powder men. He wanted to get out, get a stake, never have to cap another stick of dyno. Blaine offered him that and he took it, because anything was better than going down into that mine every day never knowin’ if it was the day he was gonna be blown to bits.”

  “I almost feel sorry for him,” Ellen said.

  “Don’t. He was the one that sprung that rail, too, and killed six men.”

  Ellen had his boots off now. “Anyhow, that cleared the mine flank of our operation. The other flank, here in Felspar, is cleared now, too. Because damned if somebody didn’t blow up a water tower and a bridge on the C & W line—and from now on, Rawhide Blaine and all his men will be tied down standin’ guard to make sure it don’t happen again.”

  “Somebody,” Whitmore said.

  “Don’t look at me. Forty men can swear I was in The Johnson Bar when it happened, havin’ my go-round with Ridge. Anyhow, there’s plenty more bridges, culverts and crossings, and it’ll take every man Blaine’s got to guard them. So, for a spell, your flanks are clear and you can run.”

  “I hope so,” Whitmore said dully.

  Fargo stared at him. “What’s wrong? You don’t sound very happy.”

  “I don’t know, Neal.” Whitmore paced the room. “You’ve done a good job, but maybe we’re fightin’ a losin’ battle. We’ve been havin’ trouble all day with Engine Number One, and Number Two’s not in much better shape. Either one or both’s likely to go out any time. They both need to be taken out, down to Cheyenne for rebuilding.”

  He halted, sighed. “The trouble is, Fargo, since we lost that extra engine, we’ve had to push these two to the limit. It’s an old rule of thumb in railroadin’—to keep two engines on the line, you got to have three all told, because one will always need to be in the shop. A locomotive looks like the strongest thing there is, but it’s delicate as a watch, really, and got near as many parts. It’s got to have downtime for repairs, adjustments, maintenance—and we ain’t been able to afford it since we had that wreck. We’ve just stretched these two farther than the
y can go. You can ruin an engine just like you can windbreak a horse by ridin’ it too hard.”

  He helped himself to a drink from Fargo’s bottle, while Ellen mopped Fargo’s face with hot water. “I need to buy two more locomotives and send these two out for rebuilding. It would cost, but I can find the money. But they’d all have to travel in and out on C & W line, and Hawk Morrison wouldn’t stand for that. And not even you can fight two locomotives out and two more in over a hundred and fifty miles of track if Hawk don’t want you to.”

  Wearily he dropped into a chair. “We’ll keep on runnin’ long as we can. But it’s just a matter of time. When these two go, near as I can see, we’re finished. I reckon I was foolin’ myself. David and Goliath makes good readin’ in the Bible, but David never bucked a big railroad like the C & W. And what the hell, even if you killed Hawk, it wouldn’t change things. We still couldn’t use the C & W line. That order comes down from Chicago. So I wonder if we ain’t beatin’ a dead horse.”

  Fargo sat up in the chair. “Maybe. One thing sure, if you think you’re finished, you are finished. But, Will, I been in a lot of fights in a lot of places, and I figured it out a long time ago: while a man still breathes, even if it’s only one second more, he’s still got hope, and he ain’t whipped. Nobody’s whipped until he’s dead. But if he thinks he is, he’s dead already.” His voice rasped. “You hired me to fight and win. Unless you fire me here and now, I aim to do that. You worry about keepin’ those hogs runnin’ long as you can, and let me worry about what happens when they quit. Okay?”

  Some of Whitmore’s glumness faded. “Okay. I’ll do my best.”

  “And I’ll do mine. We don’t win, you don’t owe me a penny more’n you’ve already paid. We do, I want the full twenty thousand and a bonus. Right?”

  “Right,” Ellen said, before her father could answer. “Absolutely right. Don’t mind Dad. He’s under strain. He gets down in the dumps sometimes.”

  “Sure,” said Fargo. “You see he keeps in there pitchin’.” Then he stood up, stiffly. “Me, I’ve had damned little sleep in the past two days and I been working hard. I’ll get some shuteye now, and maybe tomorrow I’ll have some more ideas about how David can make Goliath throw in the sponge.”

  ~*~

  He slept for ten hours straight. Then a hot bath and that hard-muscled frame was nearly fully restored. It still ached in places, but Fargo never allowed himself self-pity because of pain. That natural human trait kept more men out of action when they could be effective—and cost them battles, got them killed—than any other.

  After eating an enormous breakfast prepared by Ellen, he sat for two hours at the kitchen table, soaking his hands in steaming salt water, while she worked on accounts. Presently he dried his hands, flexed them. No longer swollen, they were as limber and dexterous as ever. “Well,” he said, looking at Ellen, “that completes the treatment—all except for one thing.”

  “What—?” Then she met his gaze, and, slowly, she smiled. “Well, we do have the house to ourselves all morning …”

  Later, all the long whiteness of her body unashamedly naked as she lay stretched on the bed, she watched him dress. As he buckled on his gun belt, she asked: “Neal, do you intend to live the way you do forever?”

  “I don’t intend to live forever.”

  “You know what I mean. Roaming, fighting … Don’t you ever want to settle down, marry, raise a family?”

  Fargo looked at her a moment. “No. There’s no woman I hate that much.”

  “Hate?”

  “To put her through it. Oh, it might be good for six months, maybe I could even stand it for a year. After that ... living in the same place all the time, going to the same work, coming home, eating meals, even doing what we just did ... same time, same way, every day, week, month … That would kill me, sure as any bullet. And no woman wants to be married to a dead man.” He bit down on a cigar. “Too many places I ain’t seen yet, too many things I ain’t done, too much liquor I ain’t drunk and ... yeah, women I ain’t had. Sorry, Ellen, but that’s the way it is. I’ll earn my money here, blow it on a spree, then drift on and find another job. Keep goin’ until somebody notches me. And until that happens, at least I’ll know every minute that I’m alive.”

  She turned her face away. “All right, Neal. At least you’re honest. So we’ll leave it at that. We live while we can and part with no regrets.”

  “We’re both better off that way,” said Fargo. Then, slinging his shotgun, he went out.

  ~*~

  For Fargo, the next week was a blur of activity. It was necessary that Blaine and all his men be kept pinned down out on the C & W line, that the pressure never ease. Fargo worked hard, taking great pleasure in his work.

  He wanted no trains wrecked, no innocent crewman killed, nothing to bring down the law or turn public opinion against Will Whitmore and the Cayuse Mountain Line. But there were many ways he could hurt the C & W, Blaine and his guards or no. The place to make the railroad feel the pain was in its pocketbook. So Fargo studied the railroad map, timetables, queried Will, who knew the C & W line like the back of his hand, chose his targets, and pitched in.

  Blaine watched the line all right, but, for example, he forgot the Elk Mountain dam. It was, after all, a good seven miles from the track itself, an earthen structure in a narrow seam of valley in the hills, put there to control the flow of water in Elk Creek, which the C & W had bridged below the Snake Mountain tower which Fargo had already blown. Until the building of the dam, Fargo had learned, periodic flashfloods had washed out the Elk Creek bridge; now, though, the dam contained drainage from the mountains, released it gradually, and the bridge had stood intact for nearly five years.

  It had been raining hard for three days in the mountains, for one in Felspar. On the night Fargo blew the dam, Elk Creek was already a churning, angry flood, its waters swirling fiercely but harmlessly around the pilings of the bridge guarded by two of Blaine’s best men.

  In the mountains seven miles away, Fargo, clad in slicker, worked his way out along the four-foot wide dam. Rain, falling in a cloudburst torrent, made the darkness of the night even darker. Behind the dam, a huge lake had formed; the overflow swirled around Fargo’s ankles, sucking, tugging, making footing risky, though he’d taken the precaution of wearing hobnailed boots.

  He carried a strange assortment of gear: a two-foot steel picket pin with a length of rope looped through its eye, a hammer, a five-gallon kerosene can with a spout. Five yards out on the dam he halted, drove the picket pin in deep with the hammer. Uncapping the kerosene can spout, he spread his slicker as a shield and lit a match. The dynamite fuse protruding from the spout began to hiss and sizzle. Fargo waited until it had burned well down inside the spout. Then, carefully, he lowered the re-capped can by the rope tied to the picket-pin. When the rope was taut, the can swung on the dam’s outside face, water pouring over it, just above the swirling current. Fargo hurried off the dam, and once he slipped and fell as he scrabbled up the muddy slope to where he’d left the mule. There, high above the dam, he held the animal’s reins tightly, waited.

  Two minutes passed, then another. Fargo began to wonder if he’d miscalculated; water might have gotten into the can or maybe there had not been enough oxygen left in it for the proper combustion of the carefully arranged fuse inside it. He’d have hated to make such a long, wet ride for nothing.

  Then, with a satisfying roar that shook the mountains, all twelve sticks of dynamite in the can went at once. Mud and water geysered high. The lake behind the dam stirred like a huge animal suddenly aroused. The thick structure, weakened by the blast, shuddered, then collapsed. A huge wall of water poured down Elk Creek valley, sweeping everything before it. Fargo laughed, mounted, rode hard through the rain toward Felspar. A half hour later, for the first time in five years, the Elk Creek bridge washed out.

  Two days later, hot summer sun had baked everything bone dry again. Still, Fargo wanted to make sure the timbers that had been broug
ht up to repair the Sage Creek bridge, blown earlier, would burn. Again, as he moved through the night like a shadow, he was amused at Blaine’s stupidity. Of course, there really was no reason to guard a bridge that wasn’t there. And yet there was a bridge—all the pieces, components, brought up from Junction Flats and offloaded from the flat cars at the construction site. It simply had not yet been assembled. Blaine lacked imagination to understand that. Besides, the C & W had a lot of dams scattered through the hills: now each must be inspected and each guarded.

  The poles and lumber were, of course, creosoted, which made it even better. Fargo poured the contents of two five-gallon cans of gasoline over the enormous pile. Carrying the empty cans, he disappeared into the night. A half hour later, from the high ground above the valley, something like a shooting star arced lazily from the brush. Fargo’s aim with the crude bow was good. When the flaming arrow hit the gas-soaked wood, there was first a flicker, then a whooshing roar as a great orange column split the darkness. Fargo rode.

  The next four nights yielded dynamited landslides on four separate C & W spurs leading to mines in the mountains. Fargo was careful to drop each where a watchful engineer would have a fair chance to stop his train in time. But each would take a while to clear, and likely the C & W hoggers would push their strings more slowly, fearing to encounter one unexpectedly, thus hampering the line’s operations. Fargo was proving to Hawk Morrison what he’d already told Will Whitmore: a hundred gunmen could not protect a railroad against a determined enemy, no more than an elephant could save itself from an attack by hornets.

  Meanwhile, Will Whitmore hauled ore without interference. He was careful to make no comment about Fargo’s activities, and Fargo was equally careful to tell him nothing. Occasionally, Fargo dropped into The Johnson Bar for a drink; with the C & W men on the line day and night, it was always nearly empty.