by Max O'Hara
Wolf fell instantly in love with the lovely child. He had a feeling he was in good company. She was about as ravishing and intoxicating a figure as he’d ever encountered—aside from his female express guard pal, Hank, that was. And, like the lovely Henrietta Holloway—Lori McCrae was obviously no hot-house flower. After what she’d just endured, most young ladies her age would need smelling salts to remain in charge of their faculties.
The engineer walked over and stared down at the dead kid, Riley Hennessey.
He called the kid by name and shook his head. “Oh, boy . . . this ain’t good.”
“Rotten to the core,” Wolf said.
“Oh, he was at that. You’ll get no argument from me or anyone else in the territory, but still . . .” Frye arched a grim eye at Stockburn. “He’s got him a powerful father.”
“Too bad he wasn’t powerful enough to get this little devil in hand.”
“You got a point there, Stockburn, but, still, Kreg Hennessey—”
“Is an evil man,” Lori chimed in. “He owns the Wind River Saloon and Gambling Hall in Wild Horse. He’s a vicious pimp and miser and does everything he can to discourage competition. Oh, he lets a few other saloons do business in town, but only because the men who patronize those saloons couldn’t afford his liquor, anyway . . . or a place at his gambling tables or upstairs with his girls.
“A man named Rumley tried to establish an opera house in Wild Horse, but Kreg Hennessey blocked him from doing so. He was afraid it would bleed off some of his own business. When sending his thugs out to threaten Rumley with physical harm didn’t work, Hennessey bribed the city council into passing an ordinance outlawing singing after ten P.M. within the Wild Horse town limits. Can you imagine? Hennessey claimed singing was disturbing the peace. Hah! When my father and other fair-minded men got the ordinance thrown out, and Rumley started to build his opera house, Rumley and his wife died in a mysterious house fire.”
Lori wrinkled her nose distastefully. “There you have Kreg Hennessey, Wolf. That is the demon that spawned this little devil here.” She glared down at the bloody corpse of Riley Hennessey then turned to Wolf with a warning in her eyes. “Best watch your back.”
“Don’t worry, I always sleep with one eye open.” Wolf turned to the engineer. “Any rail damage?”
“Nah, they just felled a telegraph pole. You and I can probably move it ourselves. My fireman, Melvin Blankenship”—he glanced at the man holding his arm over by the tender car—“took a bullet across his arm from one o’ them horseback little devils when Melvin snapped a shot at ’em to try to change their minds about robbin’ the train. Oh, he’ll live, but he’ll need a doc to take a look at him. The only crew is just him, me, and the brakeman back in the caboose. Since this is an irregular run with a small combination and only a dozen passengers, we don’t have a regular conductor.”
Stockburn had learned that when he’d boarded the train in Cheyenne, and the brakeman had collected the tickets. He’d seen the brakeman a minute ago, hustling up from the caboose to check on the passengers.
“Let’s do ’er, then,” Stockburn said. “I’ll throw that little Hennessey devil aboard and we’ll continue on into Wild Horse.”
“Sure you don’t wanna just bury him out here? Shovel a little dirt over him and call it done? No one will give one hoot except his father. I won’t tell Hennessey if you won’t.” Frye winked and smiled.
“I sure won’t tell,” Lori said, wrinkling her nose at the dead little coyote again. “Good riddance, Riley Hennessey!”
Stockburn chuckled. “Thanks for the offer, but I can handle Hennessey.”
The engineer and Lori shared a wary look. Turning back to Wolf, Frye said, “With Kreg Hennessey, even you might need some help. The entire U.S. cavalry, say.”
* * *
When Stockburn and the engineer had back-and-bellied the telegraph pole to the side of the rails, Wolf hauled Riley Hennessey’s body into the stock car, which also carried his prized smoky gray stallion, which he had aptly if unimaginatively named Smoke.
He and the brakeman laid out the other three dead would-be train robbers in the stock car, as well, and covered them with burlap feed sacks. No point in further pestering the passengers with the bloody carcasses. They still had an hour’s ride to Wild Horse, and it was smelly enough in the coach, with the fetor of sour wool, sweaty bodies, and the coal smoke slithering in through the open windows, without adding the stench of fresh blood to the mix.
After the engineer and the fireman had powered the locomotive back up, Frye blew the whistle three times sharply. The wheels spun, caught, and as the familiar chugga-chugga-chugga came roaring back from the engine, and steam clouds billowed out from the pressure release valves to sweep back against the passenger coach like morning fog, the couplings thundered, and the train rocked forward.
It shuddered, squealed, shuddered some more, squealed louder, and slid forward . . . forward . . . forward . . . gradually increasing speed.
The rail seams clacked, the clacks coming faster . . . faster . . . faster . . .
Stockburn finished up in the stock car and leaped onto the passenger car’s rear vestibule as the train was moving forward. Coal smoke billowed back over the coach’s roof and down over the vestibule to burn his eyes and pepper his nose.
He opened the coach’s rear door and stepped inside. Grateful smiles flashed at him now. Word of his legendary identity had spread. His fellow travelers were not only feeling fortunate and indebted to have been spared armed robbery and likely worse—who knows what those brigands would have done to the women?—but they also felt a little of the luster one feels when one finds oneself in the company of the rich or the famous.
Should have known that was him. Look at that thick thatch of gray hair . . . that golden tan . . . faded blue cat eyes . . . that height . . . those shoulders . . . the black suit . . . those big pretty pistols. Of course! A gunfighter detective straight out of Deadeye Dick—only this one was real and he was here!
One man rose to shake Stockburn’s hand. The old lady pressed her leathery lips to his cheek and thanked him for sparing her and her old husband’s life savings, which they were carrying in their carpet bags as they traveled west from Kansas to live with their minister son and his lovely wife in Oregon.
Stockburn patted the old woman’s hand, then paused when he saw that he was no longer sitting alone. Lori McCrae had changed positions; the pretty young lady now occupied the seat to the left of his former seat on the left side of the aisle. Stockburn’s Yellowboy rifle leaned against his seat as though saving it for him. His war bag and saddlebags and bedroll were in the overhead luggage rack.
As he approached, Lori looked up with a vaguely sheepish smile that made her cheeks dimple beautifully. “I hope you don’t mind.”
“Mind having a lovely young traveling companion? Surely you jest.” Wolf smiled as he picked up the rifle and folded his long body into the soot-stained green plush beside the pretty girl, his shoulder brushing hers. “Not even a little bit.”
CHAPTER 4
“To what do we owe the pleasure of having such a legendary railroad detective visit western Wyoming, Mr. Stockbu—I mean, Wolf? I have to admit, it feels a little funny to call one so famous by his first name.”
“Don’t be silly, Lori. And if you keep gushing over me so, you’re going to run the risk of my believing all that ink that’s been spilled over me. Liable to get a big head.”
“If you don’t have one by now, you never will,” Lori said, canting her head and lifting her face toward his, gazing up at him with her faintly saucy smile in place. “Back to my question. If you can tell me, that is. I don’t doubt that you often have to travel in secret.”
“Oh, no. There’s rarely anything so secretive about my work. This one’s right out in the open for everyone to see—at least, everyone up around Wild Horse and Hell’s Jaw Pass.”
“That’s my home territory.”
“So you said.”
&n
bsp; “Hmmm. I grow curiouser and curiouser . . .”
Stockburn pulled a three-cent Indian Kid cheroot out of his shirt pocket along with a lucifer match. He showed her the short cigar. “Mind?”
“Not at all. My father smokes cigars, and I’ve missed the aroma.”
Stockburn scraped a match to life on his thumbnail, lit the cigar, waved out the match, and tossed it out the half-open window to Lori’s left. He blew a long plume of smoke toward the window, as well, and watched the wind suck it out and away.
He said, “It seems someone is running crossways to a spur line of rails being laid up north of Wild Horse. The Hell’s Jaw Railroad Company intends to connect Wild Horse with the mining camp of Hell’s Jaw, to bring the gold being mined out of that neck of the Wind River Mountains more easily and safely than via mule train down to Wild Horse and then off on the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific to the U.S. Mint in Frisco.”
“Oh, the ol’ Hell’s Jaw Company, again, eh?” Lori said with a deep glower furling her brow.
“I take it you have a history with the company, Lori?” While he’d been talking, Stockburn had clamped the cheroot between his teeth and dug a manila file out of his war bag. Having reviewed the file recently, which had been provided by his Wells Fargo home office based in Kansas City, the file lay on top of a fresh change of clothes and other possibles, including toiletries, a flask of good Kentucky bourbon, and spare ammunition for his guns.
Now he flipped open the file, lifted a couple of pages, then frowned down at the typewritten page before him. “Yes, yes . . . I see why the McCrae name struck me as familiar.”
“Yes,” Lori said. “The owners of the Hell’s Jaw Company, Jamerson Stewart and his equally money-hungry son, Jamerson Jr., purchased a strip of land from my father—several of his original homestead claims—on which to lay their rails.”
The cheroot unfurling a gray ribbon of smoke in front of his face, Stockburn arched a brow at her. “You didn’t approve? Wasn’t your father adequately compensated?”
“Oh, he was more than adequately compensated. Believe me, my father made sure he was getting top dollar for his land. My father would never settle for anything less.”
“Then I’m not sure I . . .”
“Oh, don’t mind me. It’s just that the whole rail line stirred up trouble on the range, that’s all.”
“Really? Can you tell me more about that, Lori?”
“Oh, I’ll let my father tell it. Honestly, Wolf, the whole miserable affair tends to bite a little too deep. I can’t tell you why. It’s . . . well, it’s a personal matter. Deeply personal.” She looked up at him with beseeching in her pretty eyes. “Matters of the heart, if you get my drift.”
“Ahhh.” Stockburn did not get her drift but decided to probe the obviously tender area no further.
Lori stared straight ahead in deep thought for well over a minute. Then she turned to frown up at Stockburn, curious and troubled. “Wolf, you said someone was running crossways against the Hell’s Jaw line?”
“That’s right.”
“What did you mean by ‘crossways,’ exactly?”
“A party of horseback assassins raided the rail crew. Killed them all—every man jack of them—and tore up a couple hundred yards of freshly laid track.” Stockburn flicked his thumb against the now-closed file on his lap before him. “Apparently, one survived long enough to tell the tale. They rode in hard and fast at night—on a full-moon night, just like the Comanche did down in Texas. And, according to the file, they were every bit as brutal as the Comanche, as well.”
Lori stared up at him, her eyes stricken. For a moment, Wolf thought she was going to cry. “Oh, my God . . .”
Guiltily, Stockburn placed his hand on her forearm. “I’m sorry, Lori. Me an’ my big mouth. I should’ve been more delicate.” He would have been, too, but the stalwart way she’d handled Riley Hennessey had led him to believe she could handle almost anything. She looked more upset after hearing Stockburn’s tale of murder than after she’d lived through actual killings herself.
“It’s all right, Wolf. Never mind me. Like my father says, sometimes I can be a might high-strung.”
“Certainly not about train holdups! You weathered that better than a drunk Irishman.”
She feigned a smile at his attempt to lighten the mood, then glanced out at the sage-covered hills rolling past the window.
“Say,” Stockburn said, “why don’t you tell me where you went to school and why you quit? Homesick?”
His attempt to change the subject worked about as well as her attempt at levity. “I guess you could say that,” she said with a long, droll sigh, keeping her eyes glued to the window. After another minute, she turned back to him, her eyes grave. “You see . . . you see . . . there’s a young man, and, well . . .” She let her voice trail off as she looked down at the fingers she pressed together before her.
“Ah. A young man, eh?”
She looked up at him again. Emotion made her eyes glisten. “I’m sorry, Wolf. It’s too hard to talk about.”
“Totally understand. Love can be complicated.”
“What about you?” she said, her eyes brightening once more. “Is there a woman in your life, Wolf?”
“Me? Ah, hell, no! Uh . . . pardon my French.” Stockburn winked at her. “Oh, I reckon you could say there might be one little ol’ gal. But it’s nothin’ permanent, you know. We get together now and then when I’m in her neck of the woods. Or prairie would be more like it.”
“And what would her ‘neck of the prairie’ be?”
“Dakota Territory.”
“Hmm. And her name . . . ?”
“Comanche.”
“You mean like the Indians?”
“Exactly. Only, her real, Comanche name is Denomi. She was orphaned very young and raised by white parents. It was only many years later that she acquired the nickname Comanche given to her by some of the rough white men she ran with. Has only one eye, Comanche does,” Wolf added, pointing to his left eye. “Somehow, she’s all the lovelier for the patch.”
“Wow!” Lori said, thrilling to the tale. “She sounds every bit as romantic as a poem by Mr. Longfellow.”
“Well . . .”
“How did she lose the eye? A whip wielded by a jealous lover?”
“Uh, well . . . something like that,” Stockburn allowed with a pained expression.
He did not tell the romantic Lori the somewhat unromantic story about how his friend Comanche, as wild a woman who ever lived, had been caught by her first husband, a white deputy sheriff, sleeping with that husband’s friend in an Abilene hotel. The husband shot the friend then put Comanche’s eye out with a red-hot fireplace poker.
Not to take such an assault lying down, Comanche, fueled by liquor as well as a wicked temper, wrestled the poker out of her husband’s hand and beat him to death with it before stealing a horse and riding hell for leather out of town and into the tall and uncut beyond.
She hadn’t been back to Texas since.
“Yeah, somethin’ like that,” Wolf repeated. “Let’s just leave it at that, shall we?”
“Are you in love with Comanche, Wolf?”
“I guess as much as it is in me to love any woman, you could say I love Comanche.”
“And how does Comanche feel about you?”
“I guess as much as it is in Comanche to love any man, you could say she loves this old, untethered Wolf of the Rails.”
“How come you’re not together?”
“Ah, heck,” Stockburn said with a droll chuckle. “Why’d we want to ruin a good time?”
“You don’t believe in marriage, I take it?” Lori laughed.
“Not for me, no. Comanche, she’s been married several times. It never did work out. She’s happy enough now, living alone out in the lonely wilds of Dakota. We get together now an’ then, drink a little Kentucky bourbon, play some cards, cook some steaks, curl each other’s toes.” Again, Wolf winked at the girl.
Sh
e smiled up at him, blushing.
“I swear, Lori, you have the prettiest blush going.” Stockburn caressed her smooth cheek with his thumb.
The girl’s blush deepened, and her eyes grew dreamy. “I swear, Wolf, you are one charming man.”
“Pshaw!”
The engineer blew the whistle. The screeching wail caromed around on the wind blowing past the window. Outside, shacks and shanties slid up close to the rails, half-buried in brush.
“Oh, darn,” Lori said, peering out the window. “I think we’re in Wild Horse, and just when the conversation was starting to get interesting!”
Stockburn laughed.
Lori placed her hand on his forearm and leaned toward him, giving one brow a coquettish arch. “It’s nearly supper time, Wolf. I’d be happy to introduce you to the only palatable restaurant in Wild Horse. That would be the Cosmopolitan. Unfortunately, however, it’s right next door to Hennessey’s saloon.” She gave a nostril a revolted flare.
Wolf frowned curiously. “Surely, you must have someone waiting for you at the station to take you on home. Your father and mother, perhaps?”
“No.” Lori gave another grim sigh and stretched her lips back from her perfect teeth in one of her signature fateful winces. “They don’t know I’m coming . . . just as they don’t know that I’ve quit school.”
“Ah. I thought it strange that you’re not traveling with a chaperone—a pretty young lady such as yourself.”
“Oh, I’m sure they would, too. My older brother, Lawton, has accompanied me on previous trips. This one, however, is a complete surprise. I’m going to spend the night here in town, save the, uh, surprise for tomorrow. My father keeps a room in the Territorial Hotel. The owner, Mister Rose, will turn it over to me for the evening without argument.”
As if to show why she would have no dispute with the hotel owner, she cocked her head and fluttered her eyelids—a ravishingly beautiful coquette in full charge of all her charms, which she employed with neither reluctance nor shame.