Cape Hell

by Loren D. Estleman

  I used our prisoner’s machete to cut the plush rope attached to one of the curtains and thrust it at him along with the crooked stick. “Tie him up and make sure he doesn’t sing out.”

  He gave me the shotgun and looked wistfully at the Winchester, but I shook my head and leaned it in a corner. “I said keep him quiet, not silence him forever.” He accepted the stick with a sigh. The window nearest the front of the car on the left was open. I poked the barrel outside, turning it until the guard near the locomotive was visible in the mirror. He yawned once, patting his mouth with the back of a hand; apart from that he was as immobile as a carved chief in a tobacco shop.

  “Ten minutes, you said?”

  A shoulder moved. His eyes remained on the man tied up at his feet, holding the stick in both hands poised to swing. “Poco más o menos. I do not own a watch.”

  “He seems to have cured himself since the last time. How long will that head of steam last?”

  “Not long. I stoked the fire as hot as the gauge would stand to give me time to tend to you—as much and then some—but each moment lost—”

  “Are you always this cheerful?”

  He uncased two rows of tobacco-stained teeth in a ghastly grin.

  The air was stifling; in that climate an open window brings no respite from the heat. The shotgun grew slippery in my grasp. I wiped one palm on my shirt, then the other. Steam drifting from the boiler condensed on the mirror in droplets that evaporated one by one before my eyes, and with them the life’s-blood that kept the locomotive alive. The man in the glass showed no more life than an image in a tintype. The man on the floor groaned again; clothing rustled as Joseph prepared to silence him with the stick. I was about to put down his report as a beggar’s wish when something rippled beneath the parched flesh of the man’s face, a distinct surge of discomfort. He lowered his weapon and slid out of the mirror’s range, walking rapidly with his toes turned inward, pigeon-fashion.

  “Go!” I swept the mirror to the floor and traded the shotgun for the crooked stick. In a flash the Indian was out the door, feet crunching through the cinderbed as he made a dash for the engine.

  Everything was against it, least of all the guard at the rear of the train stepping out far enough to see one of his charges making for the front. One well-placed shot and I’d be that most useless of creatures, a man with a contraption he didn’t know how to run. Try selling that to a man like Harlan A. Blackthorne.

  The guard he’d struck opened his eyes, saw me standing over him, and dropped his jaw to cry out. I swung the stick, catching him along the temple. His eyes rolled over white and his head fell back to the floor.

  In the next moment I nearly fell myself. The floor lurched forward, my ankles turned, and I flung my shoulder hard against the wall, dropping my stick. Then as the train continued to pull, the floor slid the other way, resisting the pull of the hitch, but by then I had a grip on the frame of the door Joseph had left open and kept my footing. I snatched my hand away just as the door swung shut, sparing my fingers. The boiler chuffed steam, a live cinder from the stack flew through the open window, sizzling when it landed on a rug. I stepped over to crush it out with the toe of a boot, then went back to grasp the senseless guard by the collar, swing the door back open, and heave him outside before we reached lethal speed. At that he struck on his hip and shoulder and rolled three times.

  As I pulled the door shut, something split the air by my left ear and knocked a piece out of the mahogany molding near the ceiling in the far corner, exposing raw yellow wood. I heard the report a quarter-second later, a shallow pop in the open air. Another slug starred a window, but had been fired at too shallow an angle to penetrate the glass. Through another window I saw Vigía Férreo running our way from the direction of town. He stopped, watching the train pick up speed. The face under the neat straw hat showed no emotion. The mathematics tutor–turned-policeman might have been calculating our rate of travel.

  There was a thud overhead. I followed the sound to the window Joseph had left open, but laid aside the shotgun in favor of the machete I’d confiscated from the guard he’d struck. I waited with it raised, staring at the opening.

  It took a week for a bone-handled Colt to come through it, clenched in the brown corded hand belonging to the man on the roof. I curled both hands around the machete’s handle, hesitated to make sure of my grip, and swung it down with the force of an axe. Something hot splashed my cheek. Someone screamed hoarsely. The revolver, still attached to the hand, fell to the floor and slid across it, spraying blood from the stump of the wrist. The trigger finger tensed. The report was deafening in the enclosed space, but the bullet plowed a harmless path across the rug, burrowing like a mole. A moment later something flashed past the window: the rest of the guard I’d crippled, falling to the earth.

  The adobe buildings sped past in a brown swipe. Just then the whistle brayed: a long and a short, followed by two longs, an impudent farewell. I thought that unnecessary. Adding train robbery to my employment history seemed enough without Joseph rubbing salt into an open wound. We were manufacturing enemies the way they cranked out machine parts in Chicago, and we hadn’t even begun the climb into the Sierras.

  FOURTEEN

  A dead hand would make a fierce opponent at arm-wrestling. Luckily for me, this one came without an arm.

  I pried the Colt loose, picked the hand and wrist up by the fingers, and pitched it out the window to rejoin its master in whatever afterlife awaited him. The fingers were warm and a little moist. They opened as it fell, like a crumple of paper losing tension or a supplicant asking for mercy.

  I see that hand in dreams. At times it pleads, at others beckons. If the damned thing would just strum a guitar, or play a few bars of “Old Dan Tucker” on the piano, I might be rid of it; but it refuses to erase itself by becoming ludicrous.

  I thought about packing the Colt along when I left the coach, but like the Winchester it was a Mexican copy of an American original made with inferior parts and unreliable, so I left them there and balanced myself out with the Deane-Adams and Bulldog revolver. The shotgun was too unwieldy and might pitch me to my death, so I left it as well and stepped out onto the car’s verandah.

  A steel ladder bolted to the back of the tender led to the top, but it was open, filled as recently as our stop in Alamos, rounded over with uneven chunks of mossy-smelling wood, and offered shifting and treacherous footing aboard a moving train. I climbed halfway up, gripped the top with both hands, and made my way around the corner, scrabbling with my feet until they found tenuous purchase on a nearly nonexistent ledge.

  The Ghost was approaching forty miles an hour, but from where I stood it might have been going a hundred. Hatless, in my shirtsleeves, I clung to the tender, the hot wind buffeting my ears and snapping the ends of the bandanna around my neck. Given the choice I’d have turned around and gone back to the safety of the coach, but a train needs a fireman and the man assigned to that post was busy operating the locomotive.

  Inch by inch, my fingers growing numb from the desperate tightness of their grip, I crept forward. I glanced down once, when my boot slipped, and saw the land dropping off nearly vertical to the piles of rocks at a base that seemed a mile below; and these were only the foothills. The mountains themselves shot straight up on the other side of the car, their peaks piercing the clouds like the tines of a fork.

  I wasn’t so much afraid of losing my grip as I was of surrendering it. In a flash—as if the train had turned a corner square into the sun—burning Mexico became frozen Nebraska, five years ago. I’d been either collecting or dropping off a prisoner, in a city I’ve forgotten the name of, when the clanging of the bell belonging to the pump-wagon, the town’s pride and joy, brought my attention to the half-finished steeple of the Methodist church, where a carpenter clung to the remnants of a scaffold that had collapsed beneath him. The ladder just reached him, but as the volunteer stretched to take his hands, the carpenter let go, plummeting without a cry to the stree
t below. He didn’t die immediately, but lingered on, succumbing to pneumonia on his third day on the cot in the doctor’s back room. My business was finished, but I stayed on to hear the end of the story. The Methodist pastor declared his passing the work of Satan during his services, but in his quarters later told me that Death was a siren, whose call was sometimes more strident than the will to live. At the thought, I felt the backs of my knees tingle with the thrill of instant release. That made me tighten my hold. I would not be ruled by my joints.

  I was nearly to the cab when we swung around a bend, the train seeming to lean out from the shelter of the hill forty-five degrees. My feet swung clear; I was like a shirt on a clothesline blown out straight by a gust of wind. An image flashed into my mind, a photograph I’d seen in a book, of a train lying full on its side, the hollow V-shaped underside of the cowcatcher exposed like the tender flesh under a man’s chin.

  I lost my grip, scrabbled wildly at the smooth side of the tender, but some infernal force had pulled the edge of the top beyond my reach; the car seemed to have increased in height. Groping in panic, I came to a rod of some kind mounted horizontally, and threw my other hand up beside the first just as the train entered a bend in the opposite direction. I didn’t know the rod’s purpose; probably not to encourage some reckless fool to suspend himself from it. For what seemed an hour I hung loose as a broken shutter, my legs dangling free two hundred feet above an earth made entirely of broken stones like eggs hatched by some extinct bird. I hung that way, arms dead to the shoulders, until we straightened out. A toe found the ledge. I groped with my other foot, placed it beside the first, spread my legs, braced myself, released and flexed each hand in turn until circulation came tingling back, grasped the rod again, bounced on my knees three times, counting, and hurled myself forward through the opening at the rear of the cab.

  For a third of a second I was airborne, prey to the first crosswind that would hurl me out the side into open air. Then I landed, throwing myself sideways to avoid colliding with Joseph, standing at the front with a hand on the throttle. I came up shoulder-first against something diabolically hard sticking out of the cab’s side, bruising the bone and turning my lungs inside out. I feel the tender spot still when the barometer drops; and it’s been forty years since I rode outside a train.

  The man at the throttle glanced back over his own shoulder. “I gave you up.”

  “You almost did on that last bend.” I rubbed the place where I’d struck, gasping for breath.

  “I dared not stop. These hills swarm with bandits who fall upon everything standing still and worry it to the bone.”

  I nodded. That last effort had exhausted the wind I needed for conversation.

  He pointed at the firebox and a pair of sooty leather gloves jammed inside the handle. “We are losing steam.”

  I nodded again, put on the gloves, and fell upon the woodpile. I wrenched free a squarish chunk, opened the box, and poked the wood inside. It caught like a curl of paper, the flames burning blue along the bottom edge. I repeated the action until there was no more room in the box. The heat drew all the moisture from my pores and baked my face until I was sure it was as dark as the Indian’s.

  “Take the wood from the bottom. The rest is green.”

  I was no longer senor to him. His promotion to master of the Ghost hadn’t come so suddenly he’d failed to note the shift in our relationship.

  From Alamos we climbed and climbed, the scenery turning from green to near black in its density; my ears popped, and still we were only in the foothills. To our left the country rose in succeeding folds of old-growth wood, the limbs pregnant with leaves, the trunks straight up and down and as close together as ribs of corduroy. They had no place to fall if they fell. It seemed nothing could squeeze between them: yet when I wasn’t stoking the fire Joseph kept me entertained with stories of marauding bears, half-human predators, and pumas that pounced without warning.

  “We have them up north,” I said.

  “Not like these cats. They strike with the sun at their backs, making no noise, so that you are aware of one only when it is eating you alive.”

  “You’ve seen this?”

  “Eben, my sister’s husband, died in this way. I could do nothing; so of course I watched.”

  His family, it turned out, was a wealth of uncles, cousins, and brothers-in-law whose deaths he’d witnessed, or whose remains had been found half-devoured after days of searching. To hear him tell it the local wildlife had been living on the sole diet of his people for generations. I couldn’t tell how much of what he said was truth and how much invention, to keep me under his influence; but I found the heft of the two revolvers reassuring.

  As I chucked wood, I couldn’t stop thinking about the pistol Hector Cansado had told me he had hidden somewhere in the cab, the one he claimed Joseph didn’t know existed. Just because the Indian had saved my life didn’t mean he wouldn’t reclaim it the moment I was no longer needed, and there was no sense in allowing him a weapon beyond the axe he’d used on the engineer. DeBeauclair, the vanished Pinkerton, had reported Oscar Childress’ recruitment of Indians into his private army. The promise of plunder would explain why Joseph had chosen to press on rather than turn back.

  Every time I pulled something out of the tender I expected the fabled pistol to fall out. There didn’t seem to be any other place in those close quarters, crowded as they were with levers, gauges, handles, and every description of cast-iron protuberances, to have concealed it, and I had to be ready to scoop it up when it appeared.

  Unless he’d found it already and had it hidden under his overalls.

  * * *

  Up and up we scaled into the black heart of the Mother Mountains, the engine laboring like a broken-winded mount, guided only by a map whose artists were dust and the memory of a fleeting glimpse at the updated chart in Felix Bonaparte’s office, with its bilious green blob representing what Blackthorne had called the ideal habitat of dragons.

  Thought of the attorney in his modern circumstances brought me back from the medieval nature of our present location.

  “Where’s the nearest telegraph office after Alamos?” I shouted above the straining of the engine.

  “Cabo Falso. Four hundred miles.”

  “We can expect a welcoming party there. Férreo wouldn’t have lost any time wiring the authorities we’re on our way.”

  “There are no authorities in Cabo Falso. It is run by whores and brigands.”

  “That’s a relief. I thought we might be in trouble.”

  Teeth showed in a face stained permanently by soot. Apart from that, his having taken full possession of the controls, I found it hard to tell him from the slain engineer.

  * * *

  Higher yet, and then we leveled off, chugging along the brawny shoulder of the mountains. The sun blazed red briefly, flickering like wildfire between passing trunks, then vanished, as if snuffed out between a monstrous thumb and forefinger. In the sudden darkness, pairs of eyes glittered green in the reflected light of the lamp mounted on the front of the boiler, like cold jewels strung out raggedly. Absent the pull of gravity, I found time between replacing logs to ask if there was a place where we might put up for the night. I wasn’t up to full strength yet, and the trip alongside a speeding train had been no remedy. My muscles burned from tugging loose logs and stooping to pitch them into the firebox. Belatedly, I realized that apart from the inevitable watery broth to keep up my constitution I hadn’t eaten in days.

  “In ten miles, perhaps,” he said, “if there are no rockslides to stop us before then. Pray there are not. If the tracks are blocked, we must reverse directions for as many miles as we have traveled, and since this train does not move as fast backwards, what bandits we have passed would find it a simple thing to board us from above, when we are too busy with the engine to defend ourselves. We must not stop below these rotten shelves of shale.” He pointed upward through the cab opening, to ragged escarpments of black against a sky only slig
htly less dark. Pallid starlight showed through semicircular spaces, like fresh bites taken from a crust of bread.

  “Does this country never relent?”

  “You have not yet seen her at her worst.”

  He said it with a kind of pride. Everyone has a proprietary interest in the place he calls home. In the absence of anything good to boast of, he’ll compete with anyone for the bad.

  He wasn’t exaggerating, as it turned out. I once survived three days and two nights in a barn stacked with frozen corpses in the comfort of knowing that at least it wasn’t the Sierras.

  For a long time we traveled in silence. Then he said:

  “There is a dugout, carved into the rock by no one knows who, no one knows how long ago, with logs for shelter from monsoons; the originals have rotted away, but those who come there to rest have replaced them from time to time. It has been used by trappers, missionaries, and other wanderers. If it is still there it would be a safe place to spend the night. Such rocks as might fall have fallen already, and one can see all the way to the valley below.”

  “What about above?”

  He tugged on the whistle. A bull elk that had been preparing to cross the tracks swung its great antlered head our way, eyes glowing in the light of the lamp, and backed away into the woods.

  “If you seek to be safe from everything, you should never have come to this place.”

  FIFTEEN

  At first I thought the dugout had fallen in, or been carried away by rocks; the Sierras were continually shifting shape, like the beasts in Indian lore. The spot Joseph had pointed out, cleared from forest that had grown right up to the tracks, looked swept clean in the shaft of light from the champing locomotive: A crumb-scraper couldn’t have been more thorough. Then the fog and drifting steam parted to expose something black and gaping, as if the mountain had opened its mouth to expel sulphurous smoke from its lungs. It was the entrance to a structure erected in partnership between nature and man.