“Very handsome,” Lillian agreed. “But still too poor, too old, and too annoying.”
“How old?” Bell asked.
“At least forty.”
“He’s forty-two and extremely vigorous,” said Mrs. Comden. “Most girls would call him quite a catch.”
“I’d rather catch mumps.”
Lillian refilled her glass and Bell’s. Then she said, “Emma, is there any chance that you might hop off the train in Sacramento and disappear while Mr. Bell and I steam our way north?”
“Not in this life, dear. You are too young-and far too innocent-to travel without a chaperone. And Mr. Bell is too . . .”
“Too what?”
Emma Comden smiled.
“Interesting.”
THE WRECKER HURRIED UP the lumber-mill spur after dark, walking on the crossties so as not make noise crunching the ballast.
He carried a four-foot-long crowbar that weighed thirty pounds. On his back was a Spanish-American War soldier’s knapsack of eighteen-ounce cotton duck with a rubberized flap. Its straps tugged hard on his shoulders. In it were a heavy two-gallon tin of coal oil and a horseshoe he had lifted from one of the many blacksmiths busy shoeing the hundreds of mules that pulled the freight wagons.
The chill mountain air smelled of pine pitch, and something else that took him a moment to recognize. There was actually a hint of snow on the wind. Although it was a clear night, he could feel winter coming early to the mountains. He increased his pace, as his eyes adjusted to the starlight. The rails shone in front of him, and trees took shape along the cut.
A tall, long-legged, fit man, he climbed the steep slope with swift efficiency. He was racing the clock. He had less than two hours until moonrise. When the moon cleared the mountains, lancing the darkness with its full light, he would be a sitting duck for the railway police patrolling on horseback.
After a mile, he came to a Y junction where the spur split. The left-hand spur, which he had been climbing, descended to the construction yard. The spur to the right veered to join the newly completed main line to the south. He checked the switch that controlled which spur was connected.
The switch was positioned so that a train descending from the lumber mill would be routed toward the construction yard. He was tempted to send the heavy car on to the main line. Properly timed, it would collide head-on with a northbound locomotive. But such a collision would block the tracks so the dispatchers would have to stop all trains, which would block his only way out from this end of the line.
The grade continued, a little lighter, and he increased his pace. After another mile, he saw the dark gondola looming. It was still there!
Suddenly, he heard something. He stopped walking. He froze in place. He cupped his hands to his ears. He heard it again, an incongruous sound. Laughter. Drunken men laughing, farther up the mountain. Way in the distance, he could see the orange glow of a campfire. Lumberjacks, he realized, sharing a bottle of Squirrel whiskey. They were too far away to hear him or see him, blinded by the blaze of their fire. Even if they heard the car roll through the switch, by then there would be no stopping it.
He stepped from the spur across a ditch to the siding on which sat the laden gondola. He found the switch handle and threw it, closing the point where the two sets of tracks met, joining the siding to the lumber spur. Then he went to the gondola, kicked wooden chocks from under the front truck, found the cold rim of the brake and turned it until the brake shoes lifted from the car’s massive iron wheels.
Now she could roll, and he waited for her to start moving of her own weight since the siding was on an incline. But she sat fast, locked by gravity or the natural minute flattening of her wheels as she sat heavily on the rails. He would have to improvise a car mover.
He went to the back of the gondola, placed his horseshoe a few inches behind the rearmost wheel, propped his crowbar under the wheel where it met the rail, and lowered the bar to the horseshoe, which would serve as his fulcrum. He threw his weight down on the bar and rocked on it.
The bar slipped with a loud screech of metal on metal. He shoved it under the wheel again and resumed rocking. The wheel moved an inch. He jammed the crowbar in deeper, kicked the horseshoe to meet it, and again threw his weight on his makeshift car mover.
A voice spoke, directly overhead, almost in his ear.
“What you doing there?”
He fell back, astonished. Leaning down from the heap of crossties was a lumberjack, waking from a drunken sleep, breath reeking as he slurred, “Partner, you start her rolling, she won’t stop ‘til she hits bottom. Let me hop down before she sets off.”
The Wrecker swung the crowbar in a lightning blur.
The heavy steel crunched against the drunk’s skull and knocked him back on the ties like a rag doll. The Wrecker watched for movement, and, when there was none, calmly resumed rocking on the crowbar as if nothing had happened.
He felt the space between the wheel and fulcrum open. The gondola was rolling. He dropped the crowbar and jumped on the car with the tin of coal oil. The car rolled slowly toward the switch and rumbled through it and onto the spur, where it gathered speed. He scrambled past the body of the drunk and turned the brake, tightening it until he felt the shoes rub the wheels, slowing the gondola to about ten miles an hour. Then he opened the tin and splashed the oil on the ties.
The gondola rolled on for a mile to the Y junction, where the grade began to steepen.
He lit a match and, shielding it from the wind of passage, touched it to the coal oil. As the flames spread, he released the brakes. The gondola lunged ahead. He hung down behind the back wheels. The moon chose that moment to clear a mountain and cast light on the tracks brightly enough to illuminate a safe place for him to jump. The Wrecker took it as his just due. He had always been a lucky man. Things always broke his way. Just as they were breaking his way now. He jumped, landed easily. He could hear the gondola turning to the left, rumbling heavily through the Y junction and toward the construction yard.
He turned to the right, down the spur to the main line, away from the yard. The wheels made a humming sound as the gondola sped down the steep grade. The last thing he saw was orange flames moving rapidly down the mountain. In three minutes, every cinder dick on the mountain would be running hell-bent toward the construction yard while he was running the other way.
SWAYING AS IT ACCELERATED to thirty, forty, then fifty miles an hour, trailing flames behind it, the runaway gondola began to shake its cargo, causing the massive crossties to creak against one another like the timbers of a ship in a heavy sea. The lumberjack, whose name was Don Albert, rolled one way and then the other, arms and legs flopping. His hand slipped into a slot between two ties. When the squared timbers shifted back against each other again and slammed shut on his fingers, he awoke with a howl of pain.
Albert stuck his fingers in his mouth and sucked hard, and began to wonder why everything seemed to be moving. His head, which hurt like hell, was spinning. The cloying taste of red-eye whiskey in his craw explained both familiar sensations. But why did the stars overhead keep shifting position? And why did the splintery wood he was sprawled against seem to vibrate? He reached under his thick knit cap with the hand that didn’t hurt and felt a sharp pain in his skull and the stickiness of blood. Must have fallen on his head. Good thing he has a skull like a cannonball.
No, he hadn’t fallen. He’d gotten into a fight. He vaguely remembered talking to a tall, rangy jigger right before the lights went out. The damnedest thing was, he felt like he was on a train. Where he had found a train in a remote lumber camp halfway up a mountain in the Cascades was a mystery to him. Still sprawled on his back, he looked around. There was a fire behind him. The wind was blowing the flames away from him, but it was too close for comfort. He could feel the heat.
A whistle screamed so close he could touch it.
Don Albert sat up and was nearly blinded by a locomotive headlight right in his face. He was riding a train all right, rolling fast, a mile a
minute, with flames behind him and another train in front of him coming straight at him. A hundred lights whirled around him like lights inside a nickelodeon: the flames behind him, the locomotive’s headlamp flanked by green signal lights in front of him, the electric lights on poles glaring down at the freight yard, the lights in the yard’s buildings, the lights in the tents, the lantern lights bouncing up and down as men ran for their lives, trying to get out of the way of the runaway train on which he was riding.
The locomotive blowing its whistle was not coming straight at him after all but was on a track next to the one he was rolling on. That was a huge relief, until he saw the switch dead ahead.
At sixty miles an hour, the heavy gondola blasted through the closed switch as if it were made of straw instead of steel and side-swiped the locomotive, which was a switch engine shuttling a string of empty boxcars. The gondola slammed past the locomotive in a thunderstorm of sparks, screeched against the locomotive’s tender and into the empties, which tumbled off the tracks as if a child had swept a checkerboard with an angry fist.
The impact barely slowed the burning gondola. Upon jumping the tracks, it crashed into a wooden roundhouse filled with mechanics repairing locomotives. Before Don Albert could even think of leaping for his life, the lights went out again.
THREE MILES TO THE south, the right spur joined the main line where it began rising in a steep grade. The Wrecker climbed the incline for a half mile and retrieved a canvas gripsack he had stashed in a thick stand of lodgepole pine. He extracted wire cutters, climbing spurs, and gloves from the grip, strapped the spurs to his boots, and waited beside a telegraph pole for the first freight train of empties that regularly headed south for fresh loads. The northern sky began to glow red. He watched with satisfaction as the redness grew brighter and brighter, blotting out the starlight. As planned, the runaway had started a fire in the construction camp and rail yard.
No train came. He feared that he had been too successful and wreaked so much havoc that no freights could leave the yard. If so, he was trapped near the end of the line with no way out. But at last he saw the white glow of a headlight approaching. He donned his gloves, climbed the telegraph pole, and snipped all four wires.
Back on the ground, having severed the head of the cutoff from the rest of the world, he could hear the freight train’s 2-8-0 Consolidation huffing up the grade. The grade slowed it enough for him to jump aboard an open car.
He bundled up in a canvas coat he took from the gripbag and slept until the train stopped for water. Carefully watching for the brakemen, he climbed a telegraph pole and cut the wires. He slept again, scrambling awake to cut more wires at the next water stop. At dawn, he found himself still trundling slowly south on the main line in what was a bright green cattle car that stank of mules. It was so cold, he could see his breath.
He stood, cautiously, for a look around when the freight rounded a curve and ascertained that his green car was in a string of some fifty empties, midway between a slow but powerful locomotive in front and a faded red caboose in back. He ducked down before the brakeman looked out from the caboose’s raised cupola for his periodic inspection of the train. In just a few more hours, the Wrecker would jump off at Dunsmuir.
9
ISAAC BELL AWOKE BETWEEN FINE LINEN SHEETS TO FIND THAT Lillian’s special had been sidelined on a siding to allow an empty materials train to trundle through. From his stateroom window, it looked like the middle of nowhere. The only sign of civilization was a rutted buggy path beside the rails. A cold wind whipped through the clearing in the trees, scattering a gray mix of powder-dry soil and coal dust.
He dressed quickly. This was the fourth sidelining since Sacramento, despite Lillian’s boast about cleared tracks. The only time Bell had ridden on a special that had been stopped this often had been after the Great Earthquake, to let relief trains steaming to the aid of the stricken city pass. That passenger trains and the usually sacrosanct specials would bow to freight was a stark reminder of how critical the Cascades Cutoff was to the future of the Southern Pacific.
He headed for the baggage car, where he had spent half the night, to see whether the telegrapher had any new transmissions from Archie Abbott. In his last message, Archie had told him not to bother stopping at Dunsmuir, as his undercover investigations among the hobos had not panned out. The special had steamed through the busy yards and the hobo camp beyond, stopping only for coal and water.
James, the special’s steward, who was dressed in a snowy-white uniform, saw Bell rush past the galley and hurried after him with a cup of coffee and a stern lecture about the value of breakfast for a man who had been up all night working. Breakfast sounded good. But before Bell could accept, Barrett, the special’s conductor and telegrapher, stood up from his key with a message he had written out in clear copperplate script. His expression was grim.
“Just come in, Mr. Bell.”
It was not from Archie but from Osgood Hennessy himself:SABOTEURS SET RUNAWAY TRAIN AND CUT TELEGRAPH.STOP.HEAD-OF-LINE YARD A SHAMBLES. STOP.EXPANSION YARD IN FLAMES. STOP.LABOR TERRORIZED.
Isaac Bell gripped Barrett’s shoulder so hard it made him wince.
“How long would a freight train take to get from the cutoff railhead to here?”
“Eight to ten hours.”
“The empty freight that just came through. Did it leave the railhead after the runaway?”
Barrett looked at his pocket watch. “No, sir. He must have been well out of there.”
“So any train that left after the attack is still between us and them.”
“Nowhere else for him to go. It’s single track all the way.”
“Then he’s trapped!”
The Wrecker had made a fatal mistake. He had boxed himself in at the end of a single-tracked line through rugged country with only one line out. All Bell had to do was intercept him. But he had to take him by surprise, ambush him, before he could jump off his train and run off into the woods.
“Get your train moving. We’ll block him.”
“Can’t move. We’re sidelined. We could run head-on into a southbound freight.”
Bell pointed at the telegraph key. “Find out how many trains are between us and the railhead.”
Barrett sat at his key and began sending slowly. “My hand’s a little muddy,” he apologized. “It’s been a while since I did this for a living.”
Bell paced the confines of the baggage car while the key clattered out Morse code. The bulk of the open space was around the telegraph desk. Beyond was a narrow aisle between stacked trunks and boxes of provisions, cut short by Lillian’s Packard Gray Wolf, which was tied down under canvas. She had shown the car to Bell the previous night, proudly reminding him of what a man like him who loved speed already knew: the splendid racer kept setting new records at Daytona Beach.
Barrett looked up from his key warily. The cold resolve on Bell’s face was as harsh as the icebound light in his blue eyes. “Sir, the dispatcher at Weed says he knows of one freight highballing down the line. Left the railhead after the accident.”
“What does he mean ‘knows of’? Are there more trains on the road?”
“Wires to the north were down in a couple of places through the night. The dispatcher can’t know for sure what moved there while the wires were out. We’ve got no protection, no way of knowing what’s coming from the north, until the wires are fixed. So we have no authority to be on the main line.”
Of course, Bell raged inwardly. Each time the empty freight had stopped for water, the Wrecker had climbed the nearest pole and cut the telegraph wires, throwing the entire system into disarray to smooth his escape.
“Mr. Bell, I’d like to help you, but I can’t put the lives of men in danger because I don’t know what’s coming around the next bend in the road.”
Isaac Bell thought quickly. The Wrecker would see the smoke from the special’s locomotive miles before he would see the train itself. Even if Bell stopped their train to block the main line, the
Wrecker would smell a rat when his train stopped. Plenty of time to jump off. The terrain was gentler here south of the Cascade Range, less mountainous than up the line, and a man could disappear in the woods and hike his way out.
“How soon will that freight come through?”
“Less than an hour.”
Bell leveled an imperious hand at Lillian’s automobile.
“Unload that.”
“But Miss Lillian-”
“Now!”
The train crew slid open the barn doors in the side of the baggage car, laid a ramp, and rolled the Packard down it and onto the buggy road beside the track. It was a tiny machine compared to Bell’s Locomobile. Standing lightly on wide-spread airy wire wheels, the open car scarcely came up to his waist. A snug gray sheet-metal cowling over its motor formed a pointed snout. Behind the cowling was a steering wheel and a leather-backed bench seat, and little else. The cockpit was open. Below it, on either side of the chassis, bright copper tubes, arranged in seven horizontal rows, served as a radiator to cool the powerful four-cylinder motor.
“Strap a couple of gasoline cans on the back,” Bell ordered, “and that spare wheel.”
They quickly complied while Bell ran to his stateroom. He returned armed with a knife in his boot and his over-under two-shot derringer in the low crown of his wide-brimmed hat. Under his coat was a new pistol he had taken a shine to, a Belgian-made Browning No. 2 semiautomatic that an American gunsmith had modified to fire a .380 caliber cartridge. It was light, and quick to reload. What it lacked in stopping power it made up for with deadly accuracy.
Lillian Hennessy came running from her private car, tugging a silk robe over her nightdress, and Bell thought fleetingly that even the consequences of passing out from three bottles of champagne looked beautiful on her.
“What are you doing?”
“The Wrecker’s up the line. I am going to intercept him.”
“I’ll drive you!” Eagerly, she jumped behind the steering wheel and called for the trainmen to crank her engine. Wide awake in an instant, eyes alight, she was ready for anything. But as the motor fired, Bell leashed all the power of his voice to shout, “Mrs. Comden!”
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