On the Wrong Track

by Steve Hockensmith

“Unhand me, you great brute!” the hobo commanded, his voice surprisingly deep, his diction highfalutin. He even rolled his r’s. “Have you no respect for royalty?”

  “Anybody hurt here?” Wiltrout asked us, ignoring the tramp’s protests.

  After a moment of head shakings and mumbled noes, the conductor turned toward the express car.

  “I’ll have a word with you later, Morrison,” he said sternly.

  I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I heard a whimper rise up from inside the car.

  “Now.” Wiltrout faced us again and jerked his head at the Negro. “Bedford here says this little yegg crawled out from under one of the cars. Anybody see where he came from?”

  “I did.” I pointed at the baggage car. “He was tucked away under there.”

  While Wiltrout walked to the baggage car and shined his lantern underneath, Bedford and the engineer turned suspicious glares on their prisoner, the both of them practically growling and baring their teeth.

  “He was riding the rods, alright,” the conductor announced, leaning in to inspect the undercarriage. “His bindle’s still here. When’d you get on, ’bo? When we took on water at Wells? Or was it Promontory?”

  With a sudden twist of his shoulders, the tramp freed himself from Bedford’s clutches. But rather than flee, he began brushing off his ragged clothes with leisurely, exaggerated dignity. The dust flew from him in great billowing clouds that swirled like smoke in the lamplight, and he ended by giving his beard a shake that turned it from ash white to coal black.

  “I embark and disembark where I please,” he said when he was through preening. “The particulars are no concern of yours.”

  “Is that a fact?” Wiltrout said coldly. He turned to the crowd with a stuffed and mounted smile on his face. “Alright, folks. Everything’s under control. Return to your seats. We’ll be under way shortly.”

  “Oh, no, you don’t—I know what you’re up to!” the tramp jeered at him. “Hustling away the witnesses so you can beat the helpless ’bo into a false confession. Well, it won’t work.” He took a step forward and spread his arms wide. “Ladies and gentlemen! Hear my words! I am El Numero Uno, King of the Hoboes—and I had nothing to do with that man’s death!”

  This pronouncement landed amidst the passengers like an anvil in a pond, and a wave of excited jabber rose up and swept across the crowd.

  “There won’t be no beatin’s,” my brother assured the hobo. “Just a proper investigation.”

  Lockhart coughed out a mocking guffaw.

  “All anyone needs to ‘investigate’ are the stains on this filthy yegg’s clothes,” Wiltrout said, moving his lantern closer to El Numero Uno. “Fresh blood.”

  The passengers’ babblings turned to gasps. Forget Buffalo Bill—old Will Shakespeare himself couldn’t have put on a better show.

  “Of course, I was splattered with some blood!” the King of the Hoboes protested. “The man got caught in the gears not four feet from me. Why, I saw his head plucked from his neck like a grape off the vine. But that’s all I did. See. He fell off the train with no help from me.”

  “You expect us to believe you? A dirty bum?” Kip wailed, his eyes wide and wet. He aimed a finger at the hobo like the barrel of a gun. “You killed Joe! You killed my friend!”

  “I’m sorry, kid,” Old Red said, giving his head a slow, sorrowful shake. “But the data don’t back that up.”

  “‘Data’?” Lockhart sneered.

  “Facts.” Gustav pointed at the baggage car. “This El Numero Uno feller was tucked away under there, right? So tell me how he could swing up to the side of the car, open the door from the outside, kill the baggageman, and swing back down again without gettin’ chopped to mincemeat himself? And if you can give me all that how, then I’ll just ask you for a single good why.”

  What Lockhart gave him instead was a tremendous raspberry. (It’s entirely possible the Pinkerton produced the sound via another method—it was so dark out there I couldn’t say for certain. Nevertheless, I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt in this account.)

  “The how and the why of it are plain as day,” he said. “The King of the Riffraff there didn’t start out ridin’ the rods. He sneaked inside with the baggage before we left the station. The baggageman found him and got knifed for his trouble, and the tramp pushed him out the side door. When the train stopped, El Assholio Grande knew someone had spotted the body, and he needed a new place to hide. So he ducked up under the car.”

  There was a flurry of motion through our audience—two dozen satisfied nods. The crowd hadn’t gotten a gunfight, but it was seeing a duel, and just then Lockhart looked to be the winner.

  “Poppycock!” El Numero Uno blurted out. “I never stepped foot inside that—”

  Bedford clapped one of his big hands on the tramp’s arm and gave him a jerk that sent a puff of dust into the air.

  “Shut up, you,” the Negro snapped.

  “Hel-lo,” Old Red mumbled, his spine snapping up straight. Then, louder: “Hey, Bedford—do that again.”

  “Do what again?”

  “Give him a good shake.”

  Bedford looked bewildered, but he wasn’t going to pass up another chance to beat out the hobo like a dirty rug. He yanked the man left and right, and so much dust went billowing off him that Wiltrout and the engineer started coughing. Seeing as a fireman like Bedford needs the muscle to shovel a ton of coal a day into a white-hot furnace, El Numero Uno was lucky his arms and legs didn’t go flying off, too. Not that he looked particularly grateful.

  “Stop this at once, you black devil!” he protested, his words fading in and out as Bedford snapped him like a bullwhip.

  “Thank you, that’ll do,” my brother said.

  The fireman let El Numero Uno go.

  “Barbarians,” the tramp spat as he set about straightening his rags again.

  “Tell me, Bedford,” Old Red said, “did you bread El Numero Uno after you caught him?”

  “Bread?”

  “You know—roll him in flour for fryin’. Cuz if you didn’t, I’d have to say that’s dust the man’s coated in head to foot. And if it is dust, well … where did it come from?”

  Bedford and his fellow railroaders responded with mere glares, leaving it to their prisoner to offer the answer.

  “From riding under the train!” El Numero Uno shouted out like a “Hallelujah!” He laughed and ran his fingers roughly through his hair, sending out yet another cloud of dust. “Yes, indeed! Ride the rods through the Great Salt Desert and you’ll look like you’ve been bathing in talcum. You’ll end up looking like me!”

  “Please,” Lockhart snorted. “So he’s dirty. So what? The man’s a goddamn bum.”

  “It had to be him,” Kip blurted out, practically sobbing. “There’s no other—”

  “Enough!” Wiltrout roared. He hoisted his lantern high over his conductor’s cap, and suddenly he seemed a foot taller. “The Southern Pacific has a schedule to maintain, and we’re late enough as it is. Everyone—back aboard!”

  “Hold on,” Gustav said. “I need to do some more clue-huntin’ before—”

  “Now!” Wiltrout bellowed. When he spoke again, he wasn’t talking to my brother so much as through him. “We’re less than ninety minutes from Carlin, Nevada. It’ll be up to the law there to sort all this out.”

  “What about him?” Bedford asked, jerking a thumb at El Numero Uno.

  “We’ll keep him in the baggage car till we reach town.” Wiltrout shifted his gaze back to my brother and me. “I suppose I’d be hoping for too much if I were to ask if you brought handcuffs with you?”

  “You most certainly would,” I said.

  The conductor looked disgusted but unsurprised. “How about you Lockhart?”

  The name sent yet more murmurs through the crowd.

  “I told you it was him,” a fellow nearby said.

  “I didn’t think he’d look so old,” his friend replied.

  If Lockhart heard the
m—and he’d have to have been deaf not to—he didn’t let on.

  “Just get me some rope, and I’ll take care of the son of a bitch.”

  El Numero Uno shuffle-stepped backward until he was stopped by Bedford’s brick wall of a chest.

  “Keep him away from me!”

  Lockhart grinned. “What I meant to say is, ‘I can tie him up for you.’”

  The King of the Hoboes wasn’t put at ease by this rephrasing, yet it hardly mattered. Bedford clamped down on him, dragged him to the baggage car, and tossed him inside like he was little more than a carpetbag stuffed with feathers. Then the brawny fireman hopped up into the car and reached down for Lockhart. After he’d hauled the old Pinkerton up next to him, he shut the side door with a thunderous slam.

  “Anyone who doesn’t wish to be left here should return to his seat at once,” Wiltrout announced in a tone of voice that suggested he not only wasn’t joking, he’d enjoy the chance to prove it.

  As everyone else scurried toward the Pullmans, my brother headed in the opposite direction, toward Wiltrout.

  “Listen, all I need’s two minutes to look for—”

  “All aboard!” Wiltrout bellowed straight into Old Red’s face.

  Gustav stood there, wiping spittle from his cheeks, as the conductor stomped away.

  “I think that meant no,” I said.

  “Undoubtedly,” said someone behind us—someone who shouldn’t have been anywhere near us, given that mingling with a mob’s not the sort of thing a lady does, no matter how “modern” her sensibilities might be.

  “I’m afraid it also means our conductor isn’t very fond of you, Mr. Holmes,” Miss Caveo said as I spun around to face her. She was drifting back toward the Pullman with Chester Q. Horner at her side.

  “Well,” Old Red said, his gaze suddenly so downcast it almost looked like his eyes were closed, “it ain’t my job to be liked.”

  “You can thank God for that,” I said to him.

  “Now, Otto—show some respect,” Miss Caveo scolded. “That was quite a display of ratiocination your brother put on. I daresay your late ‘cousin’ would’ve been proud.”

  “That’s right,” Horner threw in. Then he leaned in closer to the lady and added, “It’s just too bad the man can’t deduce the difference between the ladies’ room and the gents’.”

  He was snickering at his own funny as he helped Miss Caveo up the steps into the car.

  “Why a gal like that would be within a mile of a jackass like him …” I grumbled, shaking my head.

  “Women,” Old Red said, as if this one word solved a multitude of mysteries. “The real question is what the hell was she doin’ out here in the first place?”

  I shrugged. “She’s adventurous.”

  My brother sighed in a sad, long-suffering sort of way, though I couldn’t tell if it was my thickheadedness causing the suffering or something else entirely. The last of the passengers had just reboarded the train, and the time had come either to hop back on ourselves or spend a very long, very cold, very dry night in the desert.

  Gustav almost seemed to be thinking it over. He closed his eyes and took in a deep breath, holding the cool night air in his lungs for a moment before letting it go.

  Then his eyes popped wide, and he marched back to the Pacific Express on legs that looked about as steady as jelly.

  Ten

  BLACK CURTAINS

  Or, The Passengers Get Ready for Bed As Gustav Goes to Work

  The train’s porters hadn’t been lollygagging while the rest of us worked our jawbones outside. In our absence, the sleeper cars had been transformed. Where once had been rows of well-cushioned settees was now a narrow passage hemmed in on either side by dark, velvet draperies. Behind these curtains were our beds—pulled down from ceiling cabinets in the case of the upper berths, folded together from our seats for the lower.

  It was a jarring sight to return to. What had seemed like a long sitting room when we’d left now had the cramped, clammy feel of a mausoleum.

  But the real tomb was up ahead of our Pullman, in the baggage car. Word quickly spread that porters had deposited the baggageman’s body there … stuffed in a stewpot from the dining-car kitchen.

  Oh, that’s bunk, I almost replied upon hearing this from Horner, who relayed it with the eyebrow-waggling leer men usually reserve for off-color jokes. The body was banged up, sure, but you couldn’t squeeze it into no pot. You’d need at least a washtub.

  I held my tongue out of deference to the ladies milling about nearby. The Pacific Express was under way again, and our fellow passengers were preparing for bed. As a result, a steady stream of females pressed past us, either going to or coming from the women’s washroom Gustav had so briefly toured earlier that day.

  Pullman travel, it turned out, had a side benefit of which I hadn’t been aware—a relaxation of the normal rules of decorum. Most of the ladies were attired only in their nightgowns and perhaps a flimsy robe or wrap, and I had to be careful to conceal the degree to which I found such sights distracting.

  My brother was unable to pull off such a masquerade himself. In fact, he was quite obviously mortified, and he shuffled up the aisle sideways, his face pressed into the drapes and his hands plastered to his sides lest they accidentally brush against female flesh.

  He was headed for the privy at the front end of the car—the men’s privy, he was careful to confirm—and I’d been instructed to follow once I’d recovered our carpetbag from our berth. It was hard to escape from Horner once he got his lips up to a gallop, though.

  “I’ll bet this is it for the Pacific Express,” the drummer was saying. “It’s supposed to keep on through October, when the Exposition ends, but I don’t see that happening. The Give-’em-Hell Boys hit the very first run back in May, and now a drifter murders one of the crew? When word gets out, you won’t be able to pay people to take the Express.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure,” Mrs. Kier said. She was still in her day clothes, having been roped into conversation with Horner before she could flee to the WC. “After all, what some consider ‘danger,’ others consider ‘excitement.’ I don’t think one robbery and one unfortunate death are going to scare many customers away. Just look at me. I was on that first run to Chicago myself—I saw Barson and Welsh with my own eyes. And I came back.”

  I didn’t think Horner’s mouth could open any wider, but his jaw dropped so low I could’ve rolled a doughnut down his throat.

  “You were on the Express when … oh, pardon us, Miss Caveo. Do you have room to get through?”

  I had to fight to keep my gaze at eye level as the lady joined us. I could see enough of her shoulders to know she was in sleeping attire of a frilly, lacy design, and the urge to peek lower was difficult indeed to resist.

  The three of us stepped back to let her maneuver into her bed (though I couldn’t help noticing that Horner didn’t give her quite the leeway Mrs. Kier and I did). But rather than retreat behind the curtains of her berth, Miss Caveo lingered in the passageway.

  “Reviewing the day’s excitement, are we?”

  “That’s right, miss,” I said. “We ain’t covered much you don’t know, though, seein’ as you were outside for a lot of it yourself.”

  “I hope you’re not about to tell me that was no place for a lady.” She was smiling as she spoke, but it was the kind of smile a man learns not to trifle with if he wants to stay in a woman’s good graces.

  “Oh, no. I’m simply relieved you didn’t come to any harm, what with all those bullets whizzin’ about.”

  “Mr. Horner here was concerned, as well. When the gunfire started, he threw himself right on top of me. Shielded me with his own body.”

  Horner pressed his hands to his heart and offered a bow as deep as the crowded corridor would permit. “Any gentleman would have done the same.”

  “Truly, chivalry is not dead,” Miss Caveo said drily.

  “Truly,” Mrs. Kier agreed, and the two women shared a little sm
irk.

  “You and your brother were in the thick of things yourselves,” Miss Caveo said, turning to me.

  “Gustav likes it thick, alright.”

  “In an occupational capacity?” Mrs. Kier asked. “Or more as a hobby?”

  “Yeah, what’s the story with you two?” Horner threw in.

  I found myself surrounded by quizzical stares. I was still hunting for an escape (which is to say, a decent lie) when a familiar voice barked out, “Otto!”

  I turned to see Old Red up at the far end of the car, looking peeved.

  “You’ll have to excuse me, folks—I hear my mother callin’ me.”

  I pulled back the curtain to our berth, snatched our carpetbag off the bunk, and hustled away up the aisle. Before I got out of earshot, I heard Horner steer the conversation back to Mrs. Kier’s encounter with the Give-’em-Hell Boys. He seemed quite insistent that Miss Caveo stay to hear the tale with him—most likely to keep the scantily clad young lady from disappearing into her berth.

  As I neared the end of the corridor, I was stopped by a waist-high roadblock in matching nightshirts: the twin boys I’d seen boarding the train with a widow woman that afternoon. They were cute enough as kids go—perhaps six years old, chipmunk-cheeked and wide-eyed, with such voluminous golden curls they could have been hiding slingshots and frogs in their hair with their mother none the wiser.

  “What’s your name?” one of them asked me.

  “Otto. But my friends call me Big Red. What are your names?”

  “Oh,” said one twin.

  “Oh,” said the other.

  The boys glanced at each other, looking disappointed.

  “I’m Marlin. He’s Harlan,” said the one who’d spoken first.

  “We heard Burl Lockhart was on the train,” his brother added. “We thought it might be you.”

  “Thanks, boys. That’s quite an honor. But I ain’t no Pinkerton.” I brought up a thumb and waggled it at the corridor behind me. “You heard right about Lockhart, though. He’s right back there—the feller with a checked suit and a head of hair that looks like a coonskin cap.” I leaned down and dropped my voice to a whisper. “He’s in disguise, you understand. Calls himself Chester Q. Horner. But I bet you could get him to bring out his six-guns if you asked him enough times.”