by Frank Leslie
“Drinkin’ on the job!” Steve shouted, not looking at Yakima but ducking his head to put his face up against a pressure gauge.
“Not only drinkin’,” Bob said, offering the bottle to Yakima, who grabbed it around the neck. “But we decided to bring a couple of whores along, to keep us company while we were repairing a bridge down south of Coyotero Gulch. It gets cold up there of an evenin’, don’t ya know. The super got wind of it and fired us outright.”
“After five years!” Steve shouted, leaning forward to stare out the window, his pin-striped engineer’scap tipped back on his freckled head. “As though he’d never broken the rules. Bullshit! I’ve seen him with my own eyes”—he turned awkwardly toward Yakima and, as though there were some question about whose eyes he’d see it with, pointed at his watery blues with a gloved index and forefinger—“with buck-naked cleaning girls bent over his desk!”
Yakima turned to Harms, whose breath smelled like a vat of saloon-brewed busthead. “I thought I heard Wolf’s whinny.”
“We hitched up a stock car. Wolf and the three Indian ponies.” Harms squinted one brown eye behind his spectacles. “You know how hard it was to load three Apache ponies onto a train car? They screamed like we were dousing their mangy hides with kerosene.”
“The constable heard it,” Bob put in, though his words were so garbled that it took Yakima a second to translate. “Him and Turner—that’s the ramrod— come runnin’ as we were pullin’ out of the train yard. Course, they might have heard us fire up the boiler, too.” He grinned like the cat that ate the canary, showing two rows of large white teeth. “Probably got a posse out after us. They’ll never catch us. We got this thing so hopped up on pine and cottonwood, they’d need to sprout wings to run us down. And there ain’t no more locomotives for a good sixty miles in any direction.”
“Free as the friggin’ wind!” Steve shouted, holding up his arm in a victory salute and blowing the horn. “Piss on the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe!” His words were nearly lost beneath the blast, which was so shrill as it echoed around the bulkheads that Yakima thought his brains were going to dribble out his ears.
“Piss on it!” Bob agreed. “And piss on George Turner!”
Harms yelled in Yakima’s ear. “I think that, if I hadn’t talked them into stealing a train for me, they would have shot their former employer. So I guess you could say I’m saving them from a hang rope!”
Yakima was incredulous. “You mean to tell me they’re doing this just to get even with their boss?”
“That and”—Harms plucked a small, round burlap pouch from a boot well and hefted it in his hand—“and a half shot glass each of gold dust. They intend to buy themselves a little cantina somewhere in Mexico and start living the good life.”
“I’ll be damned,” Yakima said, staring at the pouch in Harms’s work-calloused hand. “You finally hit a vein.”
“Two weeks ago.”
Yakima laughed. “Christ! I’ll pay ya back . . . somehow.”
Harms returned the pouch to his boot. “No need.” He clamped a hand over Yakima’s shoulder, his head wobbling, eyes looking slightly out of focus. Tears squeezed out from under his glasses, and his voiced thickened with drunken sentiment. “It’s for you and Faith, you mangy redskin.”
Yakima laid his own gloved hand over the inebriated Easterner’s right ear and gave Harms’s head an affectionate shake. “Obliged.”
On the other side of Harms, Bob yelled, “You ain’t gonna hog the bottle, now, are ya?”
Yakima glanced at the bottle in his hand, from which he hadn’t yet drunk. He tipped back a liberal pull, enjoying the near instantaneous abatement of his aches and pains, then offered the bottle to Harms. Brody waved it off, shaking his head, as if to say he’d had his fill.
Yakima gave the bottle back to Bob, who held it up, squinting to check the level, then took several swallows before passing it on to Steve. The bottle went around a couple more times before Yakima had had his fill for medicinal purposes.
Brody Harms said, “Think I’ll go take a little snooze,” and climbed up into the tender car to snuggle down atop the wood.
“Think I’ll join ya,” Bob said, rising by pushing his shoulders against the bulkhead behind him with his feet. Then he staggered on out the back of the engine and climbed into the tender car behind Harms.
Yakima got up to look out the locomotive’s open left-side window, seeing little but rolling desert slowly lightening as the sun rose. He moved up to the left of Steve to peer over the Baldwin’s long, rusting nose and around the diamond-shaped stack.
Straight ahead, the red-orange sun peeked out from between distant ridges silhouetted against it.
“Where the hell are we?” he yelled above the chugging din, squinting as a black smoke plume brushed through the window to sting his eyes with hot soot.
Steve said nothing. Yakima turned toward him, opening his mouth to repeat the question, but closed it.
The engineer had passed out, his ruddy, freckled face pressed up against the cab’s front window. His mouth was open, and drool dribbled down over his bottom lip.
Yakima looked around anxiously, as if someone else capable of driving the train might be hidden somewhere in the cramped, smoky cab. He jerked Steve’s shoulder. “Hey, wake up, there, partner!”
It didn’t take much prodding to realize that Steve was out cold, and, judging by the stench of his breath, he’d be out a good, long time.
“Ah, hell!” Yakima grunted, throwing the man’s arm around his neck and pulling him off the stool. He eased him down against the bulkhead where Bob had been sitting.
Straightening, Yakima flicked his wary eyes around the cab, nervously rubbing his palms on his thighs. He was a good ten hours behind Faith, barreling through western New Mexico Territory on an ancient, rickety work train that no longer had a pilot. He had not only never driven a locomotive before, but he’d never, until now, been in the cab of one.
From the rear of the train, a whinny rose, swirling on the wind, and was nearly drowned by the train’s clatter. Yakima would have recognized Wolf’s skeptical bugling anywhere.
How did the beast always know when they were in trouble?
“Shut up, ya old cayuse,” Yakima muttered, raking his eyes across what seemed a good three dozen dials, levers, and knobs jutting from the bulkheads all around him, and then at the boiler’s dirty iron door.
He bit his cheek, then leaned down to scrutinize the dials and gauges, and gently probed a lever with an index finger. Uncertainly, he said, rubbing a sleeve over a glass dial, “I’ll get the hang of it in no time.”
Chapter 18
You can usually get the hang of anything when you’re placed between doing so and the bores of a double-barreled, ten-gauge shotgun with its hammers eared back.
And that in a sense was where Yakima was, with the work train’s two pilots having been rendered comatose by tanglefoot, and with him needing to make up precious time if he was going to keep Faith from falling into the hands of Bill Thornton in Colorado Territory.
He could only hope that he wasn’t going to wreck the train by blowing its boiler or running it off the track.
He quickly found out that keeping the rumbling, clamoring contraption on the rails and adjusting its speed, slowing for downgrades and turns and increasing for upgrades and long, flat stretches, was accomplished by a couple of levers and a round porcelain knob. The hard part was keeping the boilersstoked without letting a couple of needles leap into the red areas of their dials—in other words, without overheating the water in the locomotive’s huge belly boiler and threatening to blow himself and his passengers and horses into instant viscera and spreading them across ten square miles of New Mexico Territory.
He’d seen the result of boiler explosions before, when he’d been laying track for the Southern Pacific, and he never wanted to see such a twisted concoction of scalded wreckage and carnage again, much less become part of it.
At about noon of
that day, when he felt he had a relative handle on the locomotive’s workings and had just finished stoking its boiler for the fourth time, he found a map in a cubbyhole under the front window, and leaned back in the pilot’s chair to smoke a quirley and study it.
According to the map this line of track dipped a good distance south before joining up with the north-south line in Belen, New Mexico Territory. That being so, the only way Yakima and Harms could make up time on Faith’s kidnappers was to disembark the train before the southern dip.
Riding hard and switching horses often, they’d sprint northeast for the Colorado border. The rail line the kidnappers would take to Denver curved sharply into eastern Colorado, with a couple more connections, before jogging back west and north to the city itself. If Yakima and Harms could make a beeline for Denver—or as much of a beeline as possible in this mountainous terrain—they might be able to reach it at about the same time the kidnappers did, and cut them off before they could light out for Thornton’s place farther north and west.
He lowered the map, inhaled a lungful of tobacco smoke, and squinted out across the sun-washed, cedar-tufted hills rumpling before him, making some quick mental calculations. Faith’s group would probably arrive in Denver in about two and a half days.
Yakima and Harms would have to push hard, but avoiding unforeseen obstacles and problems with the horses, it could be done.
He field-stripped the quirley, let the wind take it, then scrutinized the dials before retrieving wood from the tender car and stoking the boiler stove once more. He stood up near the pilot’s chair and watched the terrain fold, roll, and unfold slowly around him as the rattling train climbed hills between fir- and aspen-carpeted slopes, dropped into vast, devil’s playgrounds of red-rock canyons, and stretched out across yucca-and cedar-stippled plains under a clear, dry Southwestern sky.
Cloud shadows danced across the coppery terrain.
Deer grazed foothills, and hawks lazed on high thermals. A couple of times he spied Indian hunting parties—probably Navajo—riding in small clumps on spotted ponies along a distant, buckskin-colored slope or meandering over a pine-carpeted ridge, their dark, feather-limned heads bowed to study the terrain below them.
Mentally, Yakima pulled the miles back behind him, frustrated by the train’s slow progress and frustrated further by having been so close to getting Faith back only a few hours ago. He’d nearly had her.
Around four o’clock that afternoon, with the sun angling down behind him and the country ahead bleeding shadows, he pulled down hard on the brake levers, then braced himself as the engine’s floor lurched beneath him. He fell up against the cab’s front panel but continued pulling down on the levers until the train had bucked, screeched, and chugged to a stop not far from a tin water tank on a high wooden pedestal.
They were in a shade-dappled valley strewn with boulders and spinelike stone ridges. Far ahead, down a gradual hill and just north of where the rails made their long, slow swing south around a distant mountain range, a village appeared—white adobe hovels and corrals nestled in sage and bordered on one side by a brush-sheathed stream.
Yakima grabbed his hat off the lever he’d snagged it on, then leaped down from the engine and began tramping back along the gravel-paved grade toward the stock car at the rear. The horses clomped and whinnied, bouncing the car as though it were still moving.
“Where the hell are we?” came a garbled cry from the flatcar behind the wood tender.
Yakima turned to see Bob, Steve, and Brody Harms sitting up from where they’d obviously been napping amongst the strapped-down crates and barrels sprouting picks, shovels, bars, and sundry other track-repair equipment. All three looked as though they’d just been awakened from graves in which they’d been moldering for fifty years.
“End of the line,” Yakima said, continuing on past the men toward the flatcar. “At least our line.”
He leaped onto the narrow ledge running along the side of the stock car and gave one of the doors a tug. He glanced back toward the flatbed from which Harms was easing himself down, placing his bowler ever-so-gently on his head, as though it were a crown of thorns.
The other two were still looking around blinking through the mussed hair in their eyes. Bob reached blindly around for a nearby bottle while Steve lay back against a burlap sack, hacking phlegm from his throat.
“I no comprende,” Harms said, wincing as he pulled his hands slowly away from his hat. “I thought we met up with the north-south line in Belen.”
“We would.” Yakima drew the other door open and was met with Wolf’s eager, bugling whinny. “But we’re takin’ a shortcut.” He turned to step into the stock car, then stopped suddenly and swung back around to Harms. “If you’re still in, that is. There’s only three of those sons o’ bitches left, and I reckon I can handle ’em if you wanna go on home. You look like you just throwed down from the moon.”
Judging by the Easterner’s pain-stretched lips and bloodshot eyes, his head must have felt like a barrel-sized, open wound. The hard ride they were facing might kill him . . . or make him wish he were dead.
“Ah, shut up,” he grouched, leaping up onto the stock car and doing his best to pretend the maneuver didn’t feel like a war club to his head. “You’re preachier than my old Presbyterian pastor. Why don’t you quit yackin’ so we can saddle these horses and get after your woman?”
When Yakima and his hungover Eastern friend had led their four fiddle-footing mounts down the stock car’s wooden ramp and rigged them up, they swung into their saddles and rode up to where Bob and Steve sat with their legs hanging down over the edge of the flat car, passing the bottle between them.
“Hair of the dog?” Steve said, raising the half-empty bottle, his big yellow teeth showing beneath his thick red mustache.
“Don’t mind if I do.”
Harms gigged his horse up to the car and reached down for the whiskey. When he’d taken a swig, he offered it to Yakima, who shook his head. The Easterner took another, smaller pull, then gave the bottle back to Steve.
“That should deaden the pain for the first few miles, anyway.” Harms looked at Steve and Bob. “You boys best head down to the village yonder, buy yourselves a couple of good horses and high-tail it to Mexico. The railroad will no doubt be along for their work train.”
“Ha!” Bob howled, slapping his thigh. “Mexico, here we come!”
Yakima pinched his hat brim to the two men, who’d resumed their dog-hair imbibing with the fervor of Irish track layers on their first trip to San Francisco. “Obliged for the ride!” he called over his shoulder as he jogged Wolf and the trailing Apache pony up beside the locomotive.
He turned the horses around the cowcatcher, then down the other side of the grade and up through the rocky, sparsely pine-stippled valley, angling northwest.
During that first hour of hard riding, he glanced behind a couple times, surprised to see Brody Harms staying close off the Apache pony’s bushy tail. The hungover prospector fell behind after dark, but never so far that Yakima didn’t hear his hoof thuds. Once, when they’d stopped to water the horses at a run-out spring in the foothills of a vast range humping up blackly in the east, he heard Harms retching off in the shrubs.
“You all right?” Yakima asked the man as he stumbled back toward the half-breed and the horses, wiping his mouth with a red handkerchief.
“Peachy,” Harms said as he swung back into his saddle.
They switched horses around nine o’clock that night, and continued riding until after midnight. As the terrain had grown rougher the farther they’d angled northwest toward Trinidad on the Colorado-New Mexico border, they stopped for a brief rest about three o’clock in the morning.
They threw down some jerky and biscuits that Harms had picked up in the rail town of Salida, and shrugged into their cold-weather gear. They were gaining elevation, and frost limned the piñons and lodgepole pines, and their breath puffed in the chill air, glinting in the starlight.