Bell reflected upon the fact that Mowery did not have the physical stamina or agility to do fieldwork without help. Eric would perform duties that required physical activity, such as inspecting work done on the bridge. He telegraphed Kansas City to keep digging.
“Private wire, Mr. Bell.”
“Thank you, Mr. Meadows.”
Bell took the telegram to his stateroom, hoping it was from Marion. It was, and he exclaimed with pleasure when he read:DO NOT-REPEAT NOT-WISH TO JOIN PRESTONWHITEWAY CASCADE LODGE FOR PICTURE WORLDNEWSREELS. BUT ARE YOU STILL THERE? IF SO, WHAT DO YOU WISH?
Bell called on Lillian Hennessy. His schemes to extricate himself from the girl’s infatuation and rescue Archie Abbott from his mother seemed to be working. Since his return from New York, most of their conversations veered toward the subject of Abbott, and she tended now to treat Bell as an adored big brother or older cousin. After they spoke, he wired Marion back.COME! BE HENNESSY’S GUEST ABOARD SPECIAL.
While Bell pursued his investigation, and kept honing his efforts to protect the Cascade Canyon Bridge, the railroad forged ahead. Two days after the cutoff had crossed the canyon, the staging area on the far plateau had room and track to accommodate the endless strings of freight cars arriving with steel rail, spikes, ballast, and coal. A creosoting plant arrived in parts. It was assembled alongside the stockpiled crossties and was soon belching noxious black smoke as raw wood entered one end and floated out the other steeped in preservative.
Wagons that had delivered the ties down twisted mountain trails from the remote East Oregon Lumber Company now carried planks and beams. An entire trainload of carpenters hammered together tin-roofed roundhouses for the locomotives, powerhouses to shelter dynamos for electricity, blacksmith shops, kitchens, bunkhouses for the track gangs, stables for the mules and horses.
Holed through the last tunnel, connected to the bridge and linked by it to strategically positioned staging yards, Hennessy could now bring in men and material directly from California. The task of guarding the four-hundred-mile route as well as the bridge fell to Van Dorn detectives and Southern Pacific railway police. Isaac Bell urged Joseph Van Dorn to borrow U.S. Army troops to assist their thinly spread force.
EIGHT MILES UPSTREAM FROM the Cascade Canyon Bridge, the East Oregon Lumber Company’s forest rang from dawn to dark with the incessant bite of double-bladed axes. Modern high-lead winches snaked logs from the steepest slopes. “Steam donkeys,” powerful stationary steam engines, turned drums of wire rope that hauled logs to the mill on a corduroy skid road. Tie after tie was sawn and squared and sent down the terrible roads by wagon. When work stopped at night, the exhausted lumberjacks could hear the distant moan of locomotive whistles, a reminder even as they slept that the railroad craved more timber.
The miles between the bridge and the camp felt more like eighty than eight to the teamsters who delivered lumber to the cutoff staging yard. So rugged were the mountain roads that Gene Garret, the ambitious, greedy manager of the sawmill, was grateful for the Panic that had brought hard times. If the economy had been booming, the mill would be short of hands. The mule skinners would seek jobs elsewhere rather than climb the mountains for another load. And the lumberjacks who had shot the rapids down the river in dugout canoes to celebrate payday Saturday nights would not walk eight miles back to work on Sunday.
An enormous artificial lake was filling beside the remote lumber camp. Muddy water crept daily up the sides of a natural bowl that was formed where three mountain slopes converged at the Cascade River. The fourth side was a rough dam built of tumbled stones and logs. It towered fifty feet above the original masonry constructed years before for a millrace to power the saws. Now power came from the steam donkeys that the new owners of East Oregon Lumber had delivered in pieces by oxcart. The original millpond had vanished under the ever-deepening lake. The mule barns and the bunk- and cookhouses had been moved twice to escape the rising water.
The Wrecker was proud of that dam.
He had designed it on the principle of a beaver dam, which controlled water flow without stopping it entirely. His design employed giant tree trunks instead of sticks, man-size boulders instead of mud. The trick was to impound enough of the river flow to fill the lake while letting sufficient through so that downstream it appeared normal. If the river seemed a little lower than usual for late autumn as it tumbled through the town of Cascade, few residents took notice. And because the Cascade Canyon Bridge was newly built, there were no ancient high-water marks to compare to the river rushing by the stone piers.
Manager Garret would never question the purpose of the lake nor the enormous investment in an operation too remote to deliver enough timber to earn it back. The Wrecker’s shell corporation, which had secretly purchased the timber operation, paid the sawmill manager a fat bonus for every board and crosstie delivered to the railroad. All Garret cared about was squeezing as much work as humanly possible out of his lumberjacks before winter snows shut them down.
The lake kept rising as autumn rains swelled the countless streams and creeks that fed the river. With bitter humor, the Wrecker named it Lake Lillian for the headstrong girl who spurned him. He calculated that more than a million tons of water filled the deep gorge already. Lake Lillian was a million-ton insurance policy in case the flaws he had built into the Cascade Canyon Bridge didn’t cause it to collapse on its own.
He turned his horse and rode up the trail for a mile to a log cabin nestled in a clearing by a spring. Firewood was stacked nearby beneath a canvas lean-to. Smoke rose from a mud-and-stick chimney. A single window overlooked the road. Rifle slits on all four sides of the cabin commanded a 360-degree field of fire.
Philip Dow stepped out the door. He was a compact, self-possessed man in his forties, clean-shaven, with a thick head of curly black hair. Originally from Chicago, he was dressed incongruously for his cabin in a dark suit and derby.
His sharp eyes and impassive face could belong to a veteran cop, or an Army sniper, or an assassin. He was the latter, with a ten-thousand-dollar dead-or-alive reward on his head posted by the Mine Owners’ Association. Through sixteen years of bitter Coeur d‘Alene strikes, Philip Dow had murdered, in his own words, “plutocrats, aristocrats, and all the other rats.”
A cool head, a talent for leadership, and a rigid code of personal honor that set loyalty above all made Dow a rare exception to Charles Kincaid’s rule that no accomplice survived who had seen his face much less knew his true identity. Kincaid had offered shelter when the murder of Governor Steunenberg had made the northern Idaho panhandle too hot for Dow to stick around. The deadly master of sap, knife, gun, and explosive was safe in his cabin in the Wrecker’s lumber camp, touchingly grateful and absolutely loyal.
“Isaac Bell is coming down to the lodge for the banquet tonight. I’ve worked up a scheme for an ambush.”
“Van Dorn dicks don’t kill easy,” Dow replied. It was a statement of fact, not a complaint.
“Are any of your boys up to pulling it off?”
Dow’s “boys” were a bunch of hard-bitten lumberjacks he had whipped into a powerful gang. Many were on the run from the law, hence the appeal of East Oregon Lumber’s remote site. Most would rather commit murder for money than break their backs cutting timber. Charles Kincaid never dealt with them directly-none knew his connection-but, under Dow’s command, they extended the Wrecker’s reach, whether to set up an attack on the railroad or terrorize his paid but at times tentative accomplices. He had dispatched a pair to kill the Santa Monica blacksmith who had seen his face. But the blacksmith had disappeared and the lumberjacks fled. Thinly treed, sun-drenched southern California was not safe for brawny, handlebar-mustachioed, wool-clad woodsmen with prices on their heads.
“I’ll do it myself,” Dow said.
“His woman is coming,” the Wrecker told him. “In theory, he’ll be distracted. That should make it easier for them to catch Bell off balance.”
“I’ll still do it myself, Senator. It�
��s the least I can do you.”
“I appreciate your kindness, Philip,” said Kincaid, aware that Dow’s code required a certain archaic formality of expression.
“What does Bell look like? I’ve heard about him but never set eyes on him.”
“Isaac Bell is about my height … Actually, a hair taller. A build like mine, though perhaps a little leaner. Stern face, like you’ve seen on lawmen. Yellow hair and mustache. And, of course, he’ll be wearing fancy clothes for the banquet. Here, I’ll show you the scheme. The woman is staying on Hennessy’s train. The time to do it is late, after they come back from the banquet. Hennessy has trouble sleeping. He always invites his guests for a nightcap …”
They went into the cabin, which Dow kept spotless. On the oilcloth-covered table, the Wrecker spread a chart that depicted the layout of Hennessy’s special.
“Working back from the locomotive and tender, N1 is Hennessy’s own car, as is N2. Next is the baggage car, with a passage through it. The stateroom cars, Car 3 and Car 4, are behind it, then the diner, Pullman sleepers, lounge. The baggage car is the divider. No one goes forward of it without an invitation. Bell’s fiancee will be in Car 4, Stateroom 4, the rearmost. Bell is in Car 4, Stateroom 1. She will go to bed first. He will linger for appearances.”
“Why?”
“They’re not married yet.”
Philip Dow looked baffled.
“Am I missing something here?”
“Same as a weekend in the country except it’s a train,” Kincaid explained. “An agreeable host arranges bedrooms to serve the guests’ liaisons so no one has to tiptoe too far down the hall. Everyone knows, of course, but it’s not ‘public knowledge,’ if you understand my meaning.”
Dow shrugged as if to say it was more important to kill aristocrats than understand them.
“Bell will enter Car 4 from the head end, walking back from Hennessy’s parlor. He will pass to the rear and knock on her door. As she opens it to let him enter, you will emerge from this alcove-the porter’s station. I recommend your sap since it is quiet, but, of course, I leave such details to you.”
Philip Dow traced the route with a manicured finger, thinking it through. To the extent that he could feel affection for anyone, he liked the Senator. He would never forget that the man had gone to bat for him when anybody else would have turned him in for the reward. Plus, Kincaid knew how things worked. It was a pretty good scheme, clean and simple. Although the woman could be trouble. With the hangman waiting for him in Idaho, he could not afford to get caught. He would have to kill her too before she screamed.
The sap made sense. Guns, of course, were noisy, while the slightest mistake with a knife could set off loud howling. Besides, from what he could remember of his bloody lifelong rampage, he had killed more enemies with a sap than guns, knives, and explosives combined. The concentrated weight of loosely bagged lead shot shaped itself to a man’s temple so tightly that it usually shattered bone and always blew out brains.
“Let me ask you something, Senator.”
“What?”
“You’re out to destroy Osgood Hennessy, aren’t you?”
Kincaid looked away so that Dow could not see in Kincaid’s eyes that Dow was only an instant from having his skull smashed in with the poker on the hearth.
“Why do you ask?” Kincaid asked.
“I could kill him for you.”
“Oh.” Kincaid smiled. Dow was only trying to help. “Thank you, Philip. But I prefer to keep him alive.”
“Revenge,” Dow nodded. “You want him to know what you’re doing to him.”
“Correct,” the Wrecker lied. Revenge was for fools. Even for a thousand insults, revenge was not worth the trouble. Osgood Hennessy’s untimely death would throw all his plans into a cocked hat. Lillian, heir to his fortune, was only twenty. Hennessy’s bankers would bribe a probate judge to appoint a guardian to protect their interests. J. P. Morgan himself would seize that opportunity to control the Southern Pacific by making Lillian Hennessy his ward. None of this would serve Charles Kincaid’s scheme to be first among the “favored few.”
Philip Dow had turned his attention back to the chart. He foresaw another problem. “What if the porter is in his station?”
“He’s not likely to be at that hour. If he is, how you deal with him is up to you.”
Philip Dow shook his head. “I don’t kill workingmen. Unless I have no choice.”
The Wrecker looked at him, inquiringly. “He’s only a porter. It’s not like he’s white.”
Dow stood back, expression darkening, eyes hard as anthracite. “The worst job on the train is the best job their people can get. Everyone is the Pullman porter’s boss. That makes him workingman enough for me.”
The Wrecker had never met a unionist who welcomed blacks to the labor movement. He hurried to assuage the angry assassin. “Here, take this.”
He gave Dow a six-pointed sterling silver star.
“If in your judgment, Philip, you would be safe merely ordering the porter off the train, show him this.”
Dow hefted the badge in his hand and read the inscription.
“Captain of the Southern Pacific Railway police?” He smiled, clearly relieved that he would not have to kill the porter. “The poor porter won’t stop running until he hits Sacramento.”
36
MARION MORGAN ARRIVED FROM SAN FRANCISCO WITH ONLY an hour to spare before Preston Whiteway’s banquet for Osgood Hennessy. Lillian Hennessy welcomed her aboard the special and took her to her stateroom in Car 4. She offered to stay to help Marion with her gown, but it was soon apparent to Isaac Bell’s fiancee that the beautiful young heiress’s main purpose was to ask questions about Archie Abbott.
Isaac Bell had already ridden down to the town to inspect the guardhouses protecting the piers of the Cascade Canyon Bridge. He spoke sternly to the guard captain, reminding him for the third time that sentries should change position at irregular intervals so that an attacker could never predict what he was going to run up against. Satisfied for the moment, he hurried to the Cascade Lodge.
It was a vast log-and-timber building decorated with stuffed game, Navaho rugs, rustic furniture that was more comfortable than it looked, and gas lamps with Louis Comfort Tiffany shades. A band was warming up with “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight” as he removed the linen duster he had worn over a midnight-blue single-breasted tuxedo. Moments later, Osgood Hennessy arrived with Mrs. Comden, Lillian, Franklin Mowery, and Marion.
Isaac thought Marion looked stunning in her low-cut red gown. If he had never seen her before in his life, he would have walked right up to her and asked her to marry him. Her green eyes sparkled. She had her blond hair swept high on her head and her decolletage artfully screened by the ruby necklace he had given her for her birthday. She had removed the bandage that had covered the cut on her cheek from the flying glass. A touch of rouge made it invisible to any eye but his.
“Welcome to Cascade Canyon, Miss Morgan,” he smiled, greeting her formally since there were too many people around to sweep her into his arms. “I have never seen you more beautiful.”
“I am so happy to see you,” she said, smiling back.
Preston Whiteway, trailed closely by waiters bearing champagne and looking flushed like he’d had a few already, bustled up to greet them. “Hello, Marion.” He smoothed his blond waves. “You look great … Oh, hello there, Bell. How’s that Locomobile running?”
“Like a top.”
“If you ever want to sell-”
“I don’t.”
“Well, enjoy your dinner. Marion, I’ve seated you between me and Senator Kincaid. We’ll have a lot of business to talk about.”
Osgood Hennessy muttered, “I’ll deal with this,” went directly to the head table, and coolly switched all the place cards.
“Father,” Lillian protested. “It is uncouth to change place cards.”
“If they want to honor me, they can start by seating me between th
e two best-looking women in the room who aren’t my daughter. I’ve put you by Kincaid, Lillian. It’s dark work, but someone has to do it. Bell, I moved you between Whiteway and Miss Morgan so he’ll stop staring down her dress. O.K., let’s eat!”
No SOONER HAD PHILIP Dow set foot in the enormous Cascade Canyon yards than a railway cop stopped him. “Where you going, mister?”
Dow turned cold eyes on the cinder dick and flashed the sterling silver star.
The cinder dick practically fell over himself backing away.
“Sorry, Captain. I forgot I’d seen you before.”
“Better safe than sorry,” said Dow, doubly glad to have the badge. Any cop who’d seen him before had a sharp memory for wanted posters.
“Anything I can do to help, Captain?”
“Yeah. Keep it under your hat ‘til morning. What’s your name, Officer?”
“McKinney, sir. Darren McKinney.”
“You’ll be on the right side of my report, McKinney. I barely put my foot on the property before you spotted me. Good work.”
“Thank you, Captain.”
“Continue your rounds.”
“Yes, sir.”
Sauntering briskly, relying on his suit and derby to look like an official who belonged among the tank engines shuttling strings of gondolas, Dow crossed track after track. At the head end, Osgood Hennessy’s special glowed gold and red just beyond the harsh glare of the bridge lights. The president of the railroad’s special was parked on a raised siding with a view of the entire yards.
BELL DANCED WITH MARION between courses.
“When are you going to let me teach you that slow Boston Waltz?”
“Not when they’re playing ‘There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.”’
As Preston Whiteway wandered over to cut in, a sharp glance from the Van Dorn detective changed his mind and he returned to the floor with Mrs. Comden.
Dessert was Baked Alaska, a cake-and-ice-cream concoction wrapped in meringue. Guests who had never been east of the Mississippi swore it was the equal of any served in New York City’s famous Delmonico’s Restaurant.
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