The Great Train Massacre

by William W. Johnstone

  “Damn, now ain’t that goin’ to be a fun thing to see?”

  “Yeah, it’ll be somethin’ all right. Most likely it’ll kill ’em all, but we’ll hang around till afterward, just to make sure they’re dead.”

  “All of’em? Or just Gillespie ’n his daughter?” Mo asked.

  “I expect all of ’em will be kilt. But the only ones we’ll worry about is the Gillespies,” Hank said. He pulled the lever to move the tracks.

  “Hey,” Mo said. “When you moved them tracks that sign moved too. You think that means anything?”

  “Yeah, it’ll tell him that the track has been switched.”

  “That ain’t good, is it?”

  “No, but I can take care of that.”

  It took a little doing, but Hank managed to move the little circle sign back to indicate that the track was clear ahead.

  Dooley had the steam pressure at the maximum, and Sharp had the throttle to the full-open position. The engine, pulling only one car, was going so fast that when Sharp looked down, he couldn’t make out individual cross ties, and all he could see was a blur.

  “Look at this, Dooley,” Sharp said, tapping his finger on the speedometer. The needle was quivering near sixty miles per hour. “Whoowee, in all my days of railroadin’, I ain’t never gone this fast before.”

  “Lord, if there was wings on this thing, we’d near take off’n fly,” Dooley said.

  Sharp was leaning out the window, staring at the long straight track in front of him when, all of a sudden, the engine lurched hard to the left, doing it so unexpectedly that Dooley, who had just picked up another shovel full of coal, was thrown down. He started sliding across the engine deck and might have gone all the way out if Sharp hadn’t seen what was happening and grabbed him by the leg at the last minute.

  In the private car Matt was immediately aware of the drastic change of direction, because centrifugal force pressed him back against the chair in which he was sitting.

  Mary Beth had been reading on the side of the car opposite Matt, which was also opposite the curve. As a result of that, the same force that had pressed Matt back into his chair threw Mary Beth from her seat, all the way across the car, and she wound up in Matt’s lap.

  “Oh!” she said. “I’m sorry!”

  “Don’t be, I’m just glad I was here for you,” Matt replied.

  John had been in his bedroom, and because he was lying on the bed, he was tossed somewhat but was uninjured.

  “What in the world is wrong with that engineer?” John asked, angrily.

  Almost immediately they were aware of a severe braking action by the train.

  “Better grab something and hold on,” Matt said. “I don’t know if we’re going to get stopped in time or not.”

  “In time for what?” Mary Beth asked.

  “In time to keep from hitting whatever it is that Mr. Sharp is trying to stop for.”

  Even as the train was skidding along the track, Matt went out the front door and climbed over the tender. Gleaming gold sparks spewed up from the sliding wheels, steel on steel as the train dissipated its high speed, and finally ground to a stop. Matt had just dropped down onto the deck of the locomotive when, with a final bump, the train came to a complete halt.

  “What happened?” Matt asked. “Why the sudden stop?”

  Sharp pointed to the right through the window of the cabin. “You see that track?” he asked.

  “Yes. What about it?”

  “That’s high iron. That’s the track we’re supposed to be on. Someone left the switch track throwed, ’n here we are. If I hadn’t got us stopped in time, we woulda hit the closed switch, ’n gone off the track. Anyone hurt back there?”

  “No, thrown around a bit, but nobody was hurt.”

  “Here’s the thing,” Sharp said. “If the switch was throwed, the warning sign shoulda told us. Only the sign was turned like as if the track was clear.”

  “Then that means it was deliberate,” Matt said.

  “Yeah,” Sharp replied. “Yeah, I hadn’t thought about that, but you’re right. Someone throwed that switch, then turned the sign so as to make it look like nothin’ had happened.”

  “Harry,” the fireman said. “We better back up. The engine is sittin’ over the switch ’n I can’t throw it with the engine sittin’ here.”

  “All right,” Sharp replied. “I’ll back us up, then you jump down and throw the switch for us.”

  Sharp put the engine in reverse, and they backed away from the point where the two tracks joined.

  “Sumbitch! How the hell did he get that thing stopped in time?” Mo asked.

  “We forgot to figure that it wasn’t a whole train, it was just one car,” Hank replied. “If it had been a whole train, it woulda never got stopped in time, and it woulda gone off the track for sure ’n certain.”

  The two men were lying down in a dry ditch, about fifty yards from the track.

  “What do we do now?”

  “They’re goin’ to have to throw that switch to get back out onto the main track,” Hank said. “When they do, we’ll shoot ’em.”

  “What good will that do?” Mo asked. “Hell, you know it ain’t goin’ to be Gillespie hisself that’s goin’ to change the switch. It’ll more ’n likely be the engineer or the fireman.”

  “We’ll kill whoever comes out,” Hank said. “If the engineer or the fireman gets kilt, then we know for damn sure, the train won’t be goin’ nowhere. And with they train stopped, why there won’t be nothin’ to keep us from a-goin’ aboard the car ’n shootin’ the passengers.”

  “Yeah,” Mo said. He giggled. “Yeah, that’ll be the way to do it.”

  “Shh! There comes one of ’em.”

  Dooley climbed down from the engine and went forward to the switch. He was just about to move it when gunfire rang out, and he went down.

  “Dooley!” Sharp’s calling of his fireman’s name was more of an anguished cry than it was a shout.

  Sharp started to climb down from the engine.

  “Sharp, no!” Matt shouted, but his warning was too late. Again shots rang out, and Sharp fell from the train and rolled down the ballast-strewn berm.

  This time Matt had seen where the shots came from, and he saw two men lying in the ditch. They may have thought that their position afforded them some cover, and it would have had Matt been on the same level as they. But Matt was in the cabin of the engine and thus elevated. He could see both of them from his position.

  “You men come out of there with your hands up!” he shouted.

  “The hell we will!” one of the two men called back. Their response was augmented by more gunfire as the two, realizing now that there was a third man in the engine, began shooting.

  Although the two men in the ditch fired many times, Matt fired only twice.

  That was all it took, and the men, both with head wounds, were lying dead in the same ditch from which they had conducted their ambush.

  Matt jumped down quickly and saw the engineer grimacing in pain.

  “Where are you hit?’ Matt asked.

  “In my hip,” Sharp replied. “I don’t think none of my vitals was hit. Check on my fireman, would you? How bad hurt is Dooley?”

  Matt hurried over to the switch to check on the fireman. It didn’t require much of a check to see that he was dead. He walked back toward Sharp, who was now sitting up, holding his hand over his wound.

  “Dooley?”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Sharp. Dooley is dead.”

  “Did you say Mr. Dooley is dead?” The question came from Mary Beth who had climbed down from the car.

  “I’m afraid so,” Matt said.

  “That means I’ll have to stoke the boiler myself,” Sharp said, and he tried to stand but fell right back down with a groan of pain.

  “You won’t stoke and you won’t drive,” Matt said.

  “Who will?”

  “I will,” Matt said.

  “Have you ever stoked or driven a locomo
tive?” Sharp asked.

  “No.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you right up front, you won’t be able to do both. You might be able to stoke it, but I’m going to have to drive.” Again Sharp tried to stand up, and again he fell back in pain.

  “How are you going to drive the engine when you can’t even stand?”

  “Well, someone has got to drive it, and like I said, you can’t stoke and drive it, too.”

  “I’ll drive,” Mary Beth said.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  “That’s impossible. A woman can’t drive a locomotive,” Sharp said, in response to Mary Beth’s offer to act as the engineer.

  “Why not?”

  “Because it just ain’t done. It wouldn’t be fittin’. It wouldn’t be fittin’ at all. And besides, you wouldn’t even know what to do.”

  “That’s no problem. I’ll have a real good teacher.”

  “Who?”

  Mary Beth smiled coquettishly at Sharp. “Who do you think?”

  “You’re talkin’ about me, ain’t you?”

  “I don’t know who else I can get to teach me.”

  “All right,” Sharp said. “When you think about it, I reckon that’s about the only way we’re goin’ to be able to get out of here.”

  John stepped out of the car then and glanced over toward the ditch where the two shooters had been.

  “Dead?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Matt answered.

  “Good.”

  “Papa, Mr. Dooley is dead, and Mr. Sharp is hurt.”

  “Dooley is dead?” John asked.

  “I’m afraid so,” Matt replied.

  John looked at Sharp. “I’m very sorry about your friend,” he said. “How are you doing?”

  “Didn’t hit no vitals, so I reckon I’ll be all right,” Sharp replied.

  Matt helped Sharp to his feet, made a preliminary assessment of his wound, then helped the engineer into the cabin. After that, he hoisted Mary Beth up to the mounting step.

  “Mary Beth, what are you doing climbing up there?” John called up to her. “This is no time to get in the way.”

  “I’m not getting in the way, I’m going to be driving this thing.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” John said.

  “She’s not being ridiculous, John,” Matt said. “We need to get this train out of here now.”

  “It will be all right, Papa. Mr. Sharp is going to tell me what to do.”

  John shook his head and shrugged his shoulders. “Do it if you must. I’m just glad your mother isn’t here to see such a thing. I would hear no end of it.” John turned and climbed back into the private car.

  “All right, what’s the first thing we do?” Matt asked after he, Mary Beth, and the engineer were all in the engine cab.

  “First, we have to open the switch to let us back on the main track. Check the gauge; what’s the steam pressure?”

  “The needle is on one seventy,” Matt answered.

  “It needs to be a little higher. It needs to be at least one ninety. Throw a few more shovels of coal. It’ll come back up.”

  “Oh, wait!” Matt said. “I expect we had better get that other switch put back, too, hadn’t we?”

  Sharp smiled through his pain. “Good memory,” he said.

  While waiting for the steam pressure to recover, Matt walked out to look down at Dooley, then he picked him up, draped him over his shoulder, and carried him back. He laid him out in the front vestibule of the private car, then he opened the door.

  “John, I have Dooley’s body. I don’t want to just leave it out here for the wolves and the buzzards, do you mind if I bring him in here?”

  “No,” John said. “I don’t mind at all. What about the men who shot him?”

  “Well, the wolves and the buzzards have to have something to eat, don’t they?”

  “We’ve got enough pressure,” Sharp said when Matt returned to the engine cab. “I think Miss Gillespie is about ready to give it a try.”

  “What do I do first?” Mary Beth asked.

  “Turn this shuttlecock to direct the steam in such a way as to make us back up,” Sharp directed. “Now, reach up there and grab that Johnson bar. That’s your throttle. Squeeze the release handle and shove it forward.”

  “Oh, we are moving!” Mary Beth said excitedly. “We are moving, and I’m the one making it happen!”

  Once they were back on the main track, Sharp showed her how to change the shuttlecock so that they could move forward. “Better keep it at about twenty miles per hour,” he suggested.

  Mary Beth adjusted the shuttlecock, then moved the Johnson bar into position. As the train started forward, she stuck her head through the cab window and let the wind blow through her hair.

  “This is fun!” she said. “I could take us all the way to Chicago!”

  “I think we need to get Mr. Sharp to a hospital first, don’t you?” Matt asked.

  “Oh, yes, of course. Mr. Sharp, I’m sorry.”

  “No need to apologize, Miss Gillespie,” Sharp said. “I agree with you, it is fun. That’s why I do this for a living.”

  “Anyway,” Matt said, as he threw another shovel of coal into the fire. “I don’t think I want to do this all the way to Chicago. What is the next town we come to, Mr. Sharp?”

  “Decatur,” Sharp replied.

  When they pulled into Decatur less than an hour later, they attracted some attention, because the engine was pulling only one car, and it was a highly varnished private car.

  “I’ll be damned! Would you look at that?” someone shouted, and he pointed to the engine as it rolled by. Mary Beth, with her left hand back on the Johnson bar, was leaning out the window, looking ahead of the engine. Her auburn hair was hanging down across her shoulder.

  “That’s a woman drivin’ that machine!”

  “No, it ain’t. It’s just a man with long hair,” someone else said.

  “If it is, it’s the prettiest man I’ve ever seen,” another added, and by now everyone standing alongside the track realized that it was, indeed, a woman who was driving the locomotive.

  With Matt’s job of shoveling done, he was standing on the deck just behind the engine cab. He laughed when he saw the reaction of the people who had noticed Mary Beth at the throttle of the locomotive.

  “Mary Beth, you seem to be attracting a lot of attention,” he said.

  Mary Beth looked out toward the men who, with mouth agape, had been watching, and with a broad smile, she waved at them. Only one of the men at trackside had the presence of mind to return the wave.

  Sharp was sitting on a bench in the cab, still giving instructions.

  “Stop here until the track is switched to put us onto the side,” he said.

  Mary Beth stopped, then when the track was switched, started up again. The trackman gave a casual wave, thinking it would be a regular engineer, but did a double take when he saw that the driver was a woman.

  Mary Beth proceeded slowly to the end of the sidetrack, then stopped.

  “Now, open that valve to vent off all the pressure,” Sharp directed, and Matt did so.

  By now, nearly a dozen trackmen, most of whom were merely curious, had gathered around the engine, having followed it up the sidetrack.

  “What’s a woman doing running that engine?” someone asked.

  “She’s driving it because our engineer is hurt and our fireman dead,” Matt called down to them. “Please, if you will, get an ambulance in here to take Mr. Sharp to the hospital.”

  Fifteen minutes later Dooley’s body was removed from the private car, and a couple of attendants came into the cab to put Sharp on a stretcher. Matt, Mary Beth, and John were standing down on the ground alongside the train as Sharp was being loaded into the ambulance.

  “Mr. Sharp, I’ve made arrangements with the hospital,” John said. “You are to be given the best care possible, and I will be paying for all of it.”

  “I appreciate that, Mr. Gillespie,” Sharp replied
then, with a smile, he looked over at Mary Beth. “And young lady, if you ever want to work as an engineer, I’ll be glad to give you a recommendation. You did a fine job bringing us in.”

  Mary Beth leaned down and kissed Sharp on the cheek.

  “Well now,” Sharp said with a big grin. “That was almost worth getting shot for.”

  Matt, John, and Mary Beth watched the team pull the ambulance away. Then, more somberly, they saw the hearse take Dooley away.

  “Poor Mr. Dooley,” Mary Beth said.

  After the hearse left, Mary Beth wiped tears from her eyes, then noticed that her face was blackened with soot.

  “Oh, I bet I look just like I did when we came out of the coal mine,” she said. “Papa, is there any way I can get cleaned up before we go on to Chicago?”

  “Yes, I’ll have to make arrangements for Mr. Sharp and Mr. Dooley, and I’ll have to get a new train crew. You’ll have plenty of time.”

  Chicago

  Lou Borski ground the rest of his cigar out in an ashtray, then leaned forward.

  “I hear what you’re sayin’ about how ever’body else has been unable to get the job done, but here’s your problem. You’ve been dealin’ with amateurs. You shoulda come to me in the first place.”

  “I didn’t expect them to ever get this far. But from what I understand, they’ll be here tonight. Gillespie is going to be giving a speech at Northwestern University tomorrow.”

  “No he ain’t,” Borski said. “That is, unless you want him to give the speech. How soon do you want the job done?”

  “When you do it isn’t as important as that you do it. Tonight, tomorrow, I don’t even care if you wait until after he gives the speech. The point is I need him and his daughter dead.”

  “What about this man that’s been lookin’ after him and the girl? You want him dead as well?”

  “I don’t care whether you kill him or not. Although you might find it necessary to kill him before you can take care of Gillespie and his daughter. I won’t lie to you, this man, Matt Jensen, has proven to be quite a formidable adversary.”