Rebel Train: A Civil War Novel

by David Healey

  Flynn thought of all those Yankee soldiers nearby and expected at any moment to hear gunshots. Seconds passed, and the only sound was the scrape and clatter of iron wheels on the rails. He realized his armpits were damp and his palms sweaty.

  Damn, he thought. We did it.

  "Stay here, lad, and don't move until I tell you," he ordered Benjamin, and stepped out into the aisle. He made his way to the front of the car. Flynn didn't want any of the passengers to leave the car, but he also didn't want to make it seem as if he were guarding the door. That would come soon enough. He stood by the stove in the corner of the car and spent some time fishing a cigar out of his pocket, then patting down his coat in a search for matches.

  "Someone ought to go up and tell that engineer to stop," the fat matron said. "People have been left behind at the station."

  Flynn didn't volunteer.

  She cleared her throat loudly. "Young man— "

  "I'm sure the engineer knows what he's doing, ma'am," he said easily, although he felt his armpits become more damp. Trouble was starting.

  She turned to her husband, a white-haired gentleman beside her. "Alfred, pull the signal cord. That engineer must stop this train."

  The signal cord was suspended by straps from the ceiling of the passenger car. The cord ran the length of the train, all the way to the locomotive, and was used when the conductor wished to signal the engineer. Tugging on the cord sounded a bell up in the locomotive's cab. This system saved the conductor from making a somewhat perilous trip across the tender to the locomotive itself.

  From the resigned way in which her husband silently complied, it was easy to see he knew better than to argue with his wife. He was past sixty, paunchy, and puffed a bit as he stood up and reached for the signal cord overhead.

  Flynn gave his pockets a final pat, then let his hand rest beneath his coat on the butt of his Le Mat revolver.

  "I'm afraid you'll have to sit back down, sir," said Flynn, as he walked down the aisle and came up beside the man.

  "What are you talking about?"

  "Conductor's orders, sir. Please sit down."

  "I'll do no such thing." The old man was as stubborn as his wife. "Now, if you'll kindly step aside— "

  Almost casually, Flynn pulled out the Le Mat and leveled it at the man's belly. The old man's eyes grew wide in disbelief. "What's all this about?"

  "Sit down."

  Wide-eyed, the old fellow retreated to his seat. His back had blocked Flynn's gun from view of most of the passengers, but some up front had seen the huge revolver. A woman gasped. A man cried out, "Now see here— "

  "Shut up," Flynn said harshly, and he moved down the aisle, the brutal-looking Le Mat revolver in plain view. "Listen up everyone. I am a Confederate soldier. Several of us on board have commandeered this train. We're taking it west. Now, we're not in the business of shooting civilians, but we will if we must. The best way not to get shot is to stay in your seat and keep quiet."

  The portly matron began muttering indignantly. "This is a travesty. Where's your uniform? Soldiers? I doubt it! You're nothing but common thieves."

  Flynn moved toward her.

  "Shut up, Henrietta," her husband said, clapping a hand over her mouth. "He's an outlaw. He'll shoot you."

  "That's right, sir. I'll shoot her if she opens that big mouth of hers again." He winked. "From the looks of it, I may be doing you a favor."

  No one else spoke. The train was moving even faster. Flynn was just beginning to think everything was going well when two hard-looking men who were sharing a seat stood up.

  Damn, thought Flynn. Quickly, he glanced at Benjamin, who nodded and quietly slipped his own revolver from a coat pocket.

  One of the men spoke up. "Way I see it, they ain't but one of you," said one of the men. He smiled. "And they's two of us."

  "Don't do it, lads," Flynn said.

  Everything seemed to happen in slow motion. Both men clumsily drew revolvers. Someone screamed.

  Flynn fired. His bullet missed and blew out one of the windows at the back of the car. He fired again and his bullet ricocheted off the stove pipe in a flash of sparks. More women were wailing. A bullet snicked past his ear.

  To his right, Johnny Benjamin jumped up and shot one of the men through the head. Flynn got off another shot, and this time he was dead-on, the Le Mat's .40-caliber slug knocking the remaining man into the seat behind him.

  "Nobody move!" Flynn shouted.

  The gunfight had lasted only seconds. Flynn's ears rang. The car was filled with bluish smoke and stank of sulfur. A woman cried hysterically, while a terrified hush had fallen over the other passengers.

  "Stop that wailing," Flynn shouted at the crying woman. He raised the Le Mat and swung the muzzle around the car, demanding, “Any other Yankees present?"

  No one moved. Finally, a bald, bespectacled man spoke up. "This one's still alive," he said. He was bent over the man Flynn had shot. There was a ragged hole in the wounded man's chest that was making ugly, bubbling noises. Pink froth showed at the man's lips and his eyes flicked desperately around the car. Flynn had seen enough men lung shot to know that the man had just minutes to live.

  "Help me drag him out," Flynn said to the man with the glasses.

  "He shouldn't be moved— "

  "Shut up and grab his feet, you four-eyed son of a bitch, or I'll shoot you, too."

  The man hurried to grab the feet.

  Flynn turned to Benjamin. For all his talk about shooting Yankees, the boy was white as a boiled shirt. Flynn clapped him on the arm to snap him out of it. "Keep an eye on the passengers," Flynn said, speaking loudly so everyone in the car could hear. "Shoot anyone who moves."

  Benjamin managed to nod, but kept his lips drawn into a tight line.

  The door opened and Captain Fletcher appeared. "Colonel Percy sent me to see what all the shooting was about."

  "Nothing we can't handle, Fletcher, unless you want to give us a hand with these bodies?"

  Fletcher gave him a horrified look, then withdrew.

  Flynn and the passenger carried the dead man out first, laying him on the small platform outside the car.

  "What's your name?" Flynn asked the passenger.

  "William Prescott."

  "What do you do, Mr. Prescott? Obviously, you're not a soldier."

  "I'm a lawyer," he said. "I have a practice in Baltimore."

  Flynn smirked. "It's a shame you couldn't have gotten a bit of business from these two writing their wills. Too bad."

  They went back for the wounded man. He was still alive, wheezing hard, his mouth ringed with pink froth from his lung wound. They laid him next to the dead man.

  "He needs help or he's going to die," Prescott said.

  "Oh, he's going to die, all right."

  Then, as Prescott watched in horror, Flynn kicked first the corpse and then the wounded man off the platform. The train was moving at a good speed and the bodies bounced and tumbled, then flopped in the brush along the tracks.

  "Oh my God," Prescott stammered. "You killed him."

  "That was the idea," Flynn said, enjoying himself just a little too much. "Lung-shot like that, he had a minute or two to live before he drowned in his own blood. We did the fellow a favor. Now shut up and sit back down—unless you want me to throw you off the train, too."

  White-faced, the fat lawyer scurried back into the car, and Flynn followed, wondering how long it would be before he had to shoot someone else.

  Chapter 11

  Greer dashed across the bridge and raced down the tracks after the Chesapeake.

  “Come on!” he shouted over his shoulder at Frost and Schmidt, who were already falling behind. Schmidt’s huge belly flopped like a tub of raw sausages as he ran and Frost wasn’t much faster than the big German.

  But someone was stealing his train, and blind rage was enough to propel Greer in a sprint down the tracks. The uneven railroad ties threatened to trip him at every stride and his leg ached from his old bat
tle wound, but Greer stuck out his chin, pumped his arms, and ran for all he was worth.

  Up ahead, he could just see the last car of the train, where two men stood on the platform. They were rapidly disappearing from sight.

  Greer knew damn well that a man on foot couldn’t overtake a train. However, he was counting on the train stopping before long. It was one thing to get a locomotive rolling—with a little luck, almost anyone could do it if there was still a head of steam in the boiler—but it was another thing altogether to keep it moving. He was sure they would find the train around the next bend.

  He took a quick look over his shoulder and saw Schmidt and Frost still lagging behind. Greer had hoped a few soldiers would join the chase, but so far only the engineer and fireman were in sight.

  "Run!" he shouted at them. "We've got to catch that train!"

  • • •

  Inside the passenger car, Flynn saw that Benjamin still had his Colt at the ready, and the lad was keeping a close eye on the passengers. He looked pale, but the hand that held his revolver was steady enough. The passengers themselves were coping by various degrees. Some sat stone-faced, others cried, a couple of men looked angry enough to try something foolish, but Flynn decided they must be unarmed, or else they would have acted along with the two men he and Benjamin had been forced to shoot.

  The blustery old couple, Alfred and Henrietta, looked indignant and rumpled, like hens caught in the rain. The image made Flynn smile, but his grin faded when he noticed the Baltimore tough and his woman. There was not the slightest hint of fear on their faces. Among all these hens, they had the look of foxes, Flynn thought. Cunning. The gunfight hadn't scared them a bit.

  He touched Benjamin's arm. "Keep an eye on those two," he whispered. "They'll be the next to make a move."

  "All right," the boy said.

  He gave Benjamin's arm a squeeze. "You did good, lad," Flynn spoke quietly. "Those men didn't give us any choice."

  "I know."

  "If it comes to using your gun again, lad, don't hesitate," Flynn warned him. "If you do, you'll be the dead man next time. Shoot first, think later."

  Benjamin nodded, as if he understood. Flynn hoped the boy did, because he was sure many more shots would be fired before the day was through.

  • • •

  Greer's arms were on fire and his legs felt heavy as logs, but he would be damned if someone was going to steal his train and get away with it. He kept running.

  Slow as the train had started, it quickly gathered speed. The harder Greer ran, the further ahead the train seemed to get. Soon he watched it disappear around a bend, and he staggered to a halt, doubled over, and gasped for breath. Frost and Schmidt ran up behind him. They hadn't been running nearly as hard and weren't as winded, and they had brought along a young captain astride a chestnut mare. No other soldiers were in sight.

  "Where were you five minutes ago?" Greer panted, glaring at the mounted officer. He hawked and spat, trying to catch his breath. "You could have caught them on that horse."

  "What seems to be the trouble?" the captain asked. He was no more than twenty-one or two, young and arrogant.

  "Deserters stole my train," Greer snapped, the captain's nonchalance beginning to gall him. "That's the trouble."

  "What deserters?" the captain asked.

  "From your regiment, most likely."

  "We don't have any deserters that I know of."

  Greer scowled, but the captain appeared not to notice. Greer started over from the beginning. In the distance, he could hear the sound of the train—his train—receding and finally being lost in the noise made by the nearby Patapsco as it gurgled over the rocky riverbed.

  "Someone took our train," he said. "If you send ten men with me, I'm sure before long we'll find the train stopped down the tracks a mile or two from here, and your boys can arrest— "

  The captain held up a gloved hand. "That train is your concern."

  "But deserters— "

  The captain wheeled his mare and started back toward the station. He called back over his shoulder: "Maybe deserters took your train, but they weren't ours. It's none of my concern."

  Greer cursed as the captain rode off. He couldn't believe the officer wouldn't help. Someone had stolen the train, and the captain didn't give a damn. With officers like that, no wonder it was taking so long to win the war. He was just like all the rest of the fools back at First Bull Run who had gotten him wounded and then lost the battle.

  "Come on," he growled at Frost and Schmidt. "We’ll find our own goddamn train."

  Greer started off down the tracks at a jog. Frost and Schmidt were right behind him.

  "This doesn’t look good," Schmidt said. "We let our train be stolen. If anything happens to the Chesapeake, we can say goodbye to our jobs on the railroad."

  They ran a little faster.

  • • •

  Colonel Percy left the first passenger car and climbed toward the engine, sending Cook, Hazlett and Forbes back to join Captain Fletcher in keeping watch over the passengers. He didn't trust Fletcher on his own. None of the passengers in their car had given them any trouble when they announced the takeover of the train. Of course, the Colt revolvers in the raiders' hands had not encouraged the passengers to speak up.

  Pettibone stayed to guard the engine. Percy climbed over the tender—an open car stacked high with wood—and onto the locomotive itself, where Cephas Wilson and Hank Cunningham worked like madmen to wring more speed out of the Chesapeake.

  Wilson sat in the engineer's seat to the extreme right of the cab. He had the throttle wide open, but he was now working the Johnson bar back toward the neutral position.

  "Give me a hand, Colonel," Wilson said by way of greeting. Because of all the steam pressure, the Johnson bar was incredibly difficult to move. Wilson had straddled the bar, with one foot on an iron stirrup and the other on a wooden chock. Both footholds had been put there to give an engineer leverage when wrestling the bar forward or backward. Percy grabbed hold, and the two men managed to work the bar back until it was nearly straight up and down.

  "Don't you want this all the way forward?" Percy asked. The Johnson bar was basically a combination of gear shift and throttle. Pushed all the way forward, the locomotive went at its greatest speed, while the middle position left the engine virtually in neutral.

  "We're rolling along pretty good now," Wilson explained. "With the reverse lever in that position we'll save wood and water and still make good time."

  The engine had been slow getting out of Sykesville and Percy was concerned that unless they built up speed and put some distance between the town and themselves, cavalry might catch them if they slowed down for any reason.

  "How is she running?" he shouted over the roaring engine.

  Wilson answered with a wide grin. "She can roll, yes sir, she can. With the throttle wide open she'll maybe do sixty miles an hour on a level stretch."

  "How fast are we going?" Percy shouted.

  Wilson looked out the window at the ground. Any experienced engineer could tell within ten miles per hour how fast his train was going by how blurred the ground below looked.

  "About forty," he said.

  "Can we go faster?"

  Wilson laughed and jerked his chin at the tracks ahead. The bright steel rails closely followed the river bed, twisting and turning with the narrow Patapsco.

  "You want us to end up in the river? She won't stay on the tracks at sixty. Not here, anyway. I'll keep her at forty, Colonel. There's still not a horse that can catch us."

  "All right," Percy agreed. He would have liked to run faster, but he had to admit that even forty seemed like a reckless speed as the gray, leafless trees flickered past.

  "We'll open her up once we get beyond the Patapsco," Wilson said. "It's good, flat country up ahead."

  Hank Cunningham shoved by with an armload of wood. His coat was off, his sleeves rolled up, and sweat stood out on his face as he threw open the door to the firebox and tos
sed a chunk of wood into the glowing red maw. He was careful to keep the wood in an even layer several inches deep so that it created an even heat inside the firebox.

  Turning, Percy leaned out from the locomotive's cab as far as he dared and looked back at the tracks leading to Sykesville. There was no sign of pursuit. Of course, they were traveling so fast that no cavalry squadron could keep up, especially over the rough, uneven footing of the track bed. Still, Percy thought it was a good thing that it had been infantry, not cavalry, camped back in Sykesville.

  "Wilson, we'll be crossing the Washington Road in about three miles," Percy said. "I want you to stop, and I'll have Willie Forbes shimmy up the telegraph poles to cut the wires. We can outrun cavalry, but we can't outrun the telegraph and we don't want the Yankees to put a barrier across the tracks somewhere ahead of us."

  "Yes, sir," Wilson said. He eased the throttle open a notch wider, and they roared along the twisting tracks as quickly as they dared.

  • • •

  Greer found the first body lying face down across the tracks.

  “Lord have mercy,” he said, stopping to flip the man over with the toe of his boot. From the man’s face, he recognized him as one of the passengers from the Chesapeake. There was an ugly purple bullet hole in the man’s temple.

  He felt a wave of nausea wash over him. The sight of the bullet wound brought back memories of the terrible things he had seen on the battlefield at Bull Run. He forced himself to look away from the dead man.

  A shout from Schmidt interrupted his thoughts. “Greer, up ahead!” Schmidt shouted.

  Another body was sprawled alongside the tracks. Blood stained the front of the dead man’s shirt.

  “They’re shooting the passengers,” Greer said in disbelief. The situation was even worse than he had imagined.

  “Maybe these two tried to stop them,” Schmidt pointed out.

  “If that’s what happened, then we’re dealing with murderers, not just train thieves,” Greer said. His horror at the sight of the dead men had turned to anger. He clenched and unclenched his fists. “Whoever is doing this needs to be brought to justice.”