On the Wrong Track

by Steve Hockensmith

  “They’re gonna have a long damn way to drop, right, fellers?” Kip said. “Like a thousand miles!”

  “Shut up, kid,” Welsh snapped.

  Lockhart whistled. “A thousand miles? Don’t tell me you’re sneakin’ to California just to catch the next boat to Panama or Peru or some such. And here I figured ‘the Robin Hoods of the Rails’ was goin’ after the S.P. on its home turf.”

  “Actually, that’s exactly what the gang thinks we’re doing,” Barson said lightly, gliding back into the conversation smooth as soft butter across hot bread. “They’re up in the Humboldt Mountains at this very moment leading Colonel Crowe and Jefferson Powless on a merry little chase while we slip out to San Francisco unseen. You see, Augie and I needed special travel accommodations on account of our legions of admirers. You know how it is, Mr. Lockhart. Fame does have its drawbacks.”

  A new voice joined the conversation—though it wasn’t new to me.

  “You say the gang thinks you’re going after the Southern Pacific,” Miss Caveo said. “So what is it you’re really doing?”

  Her words rang out strong and clear: She didn’t sound like a woman who’d been brutalized or injured. Yet I allowed myself only a small measure of satisfaction from that. Anything more would have been presumptuous, as there were still opportunities aplenty for brutalizing, injury, and worse.

  “You know what, miss? I’m going to tell you,” Barson said. “Because once you see how harmless it is, you won’t mind helping us.”

  “Helping you?” Miss Caveo scoffed.

  “By serving as our escorts,” Barson explained. “We might need to take on more coal and water before we find a good spot to ditch the train. If we run across a stationmaster who’s not inclined to be accommodating, you’ll provide a little additional persuasion.”

  “By standing there with guns to our heads.”

  “Exactly! That’s all it’ll take!” Barson enthused, glossing over the scorn in Miss Caveo’s tone. “And then we’ll slip out of the country, and the Southern Pacific will be rid of its two greatest enemies. Why, you’ll be heroes, really.”

  Barson kept going, speaking faster, his manner so slick it finally crossed over into outright oily.

  “You see, miss, lucking into that gold shipment changed everything for Augie and me. The prospect of living rich … it can lighten a fellow’s outlook. We don’t feel the need to carry on this feud with the railroad any longer. Unfortunately, the rest of the Give-’em-Hell Boys aren’t inclined to be so practical. They think we’re taking a share of the gold back to California so we can wage war on the S.P.—pay off assassins, buy dynamite … blow up the Oakland terminal!”

  I couldn’t hear Barson’s sigh or see the rueful shake of his head, but I sensed them even from my hiding place.

  “Insanity. They’re good men—but at heart they’re still just angry farmers. They’re bitter, and it’s going to get them killed. Augie and I aren’t like that anymore. We’ve changed.”

  “Into what?” Lockhart sneered.

  “Professionals,” Barson said. “Speaking of which, it’s time we—”

  “I have something to say,” Miss Caveo announced.

  “Sit back down,” Welsh growled at her.

  “Don’t rile the man, miss,” said a panicky-sounding fellow I hadn’t heard yet—most likely the engineer.

  “No. I won’t sit down. Not until I’ve had a chance to speak my mind. I know what’s in store for us, and—”

  “Shut your damn mouth!”

  “Or what, Mr. Welsh? You’ll shoot me? That’s not much of a threat, considering it’s what you’re going to do eventually anyway.”

  “Jesus, lady … do like he says!”

  “You can’t leave witnesses behind who know your plan,” Miss Caveo went on, ignoring the engineer’s pleas. “But tell me this: Will killing us really keep you safe? Anytime your backs are turned, you’re in danger. You’ll be looking at your next victim, and the law will sneak right up behind you. You might be in control now. But now can end awfully fast.”

  If I’d waited much longer, she probably would’ve just come right out and said, “For God’s sake, Otto—do something!” Fortunately, I realized what she was up to before she had to be quite so blunt. Lockhart’s crack about Sherlock Holmes had tipped her off that either my brother or I was with him, and she’d done her part by whipping up a distraction. Now, it was my turn.

  I got up on my knees and pointed Aunt Pauline down into the engine cab.

  And there they were. As Miss Caveo had hinted, Barson, Welsh, and Kip all had their backs to me. And a glance at those backs was all it took to solve the final mystery: how Barson and Welsh could be there at all. The bandits’ clothes were powdered white with dust, just as El Numero Uno’s had been the day before. So after killing the King of the Hoboes, they’d made like hoboes themselves, hitching a ride underneath the Express. They got into the Wells Fargo car sometime later—probably in Carlin, when Kip was “guarding” the train while we were in the ticket office.

  All Old Red needed to put it together was one Morrison’s purple hands (which must have been bound for hours, I could see now) and the dust covering the express-car floor. All I’d needed was to have the facts shoved in my face like a fist.

  This was no time to fret about my shortcomings as a deducifier, though. I had something much more important to stew on: how to get through the next couple minutes alive.

  Barson, Welsh, and Kip were lined up in the center of the cab, facing the controls—and Miss Caveo. Her hair was mussed, and there were smudges on her dress and a bruise just to the left of her jaw that someone was going to regret. But her back was so straight and her gaze so steady you’d have thought riding in hijacked locomotives was her hobby, something she squeezed in between suffragette rallies, choir practice, and bicycle rides in the country.

  In contrast, a terror-stricken man in engineer’s dirty overalls cowered at the controls, his eyes bulging from his soot-blackened face like a couple baseballs floating in a bucket of tar. Lockhart was sprawled atop the coal in the tender, and though Barson and Kip were looking at the lady, their .45s pinned him in place. Welsh had Aunt Pauline’s sister, Virgie, pointed at Miss Caveo. The gun’s shine was gone, replaced by a darker, wetter sheen—Milford Morrison’s blood.

  There was no way I could shoot Barson, Welsh, and Kip without at least one of them squeezing off a shot, as well. So I could sacrifice Miss Caveo or I could sacrifice Lockhart. Or I could try to do things the hard way, lawman style … and maybe just sacrifice myself.

  “Hold it right there, boys!” I called out. “I got the drop on you!”

  “Well, it’s about damn time,” Lockhart grumbled.

  “Really, Mr. Amlingmeyer—I was beginning to think I’d have to send up a flare,” Miss Caveo added.

  For once, I was in no mood for joshing with the lady.

  “No tricks,” I said, squinting at Barson, Welsh, and Kip in a way that I hoped was intimidating. (I had to hope so, for the squinting wasn’t voluntary—the wind and smoke blowing into my face had my eyes watering as bad as peeling an onion.) “Y’all just ease your guns down and let ’em go.”

  Kip looked at Barson. Barson looked at me. Welsh kept his eyes on Miss Caveo. And not a one of them lowered their guns.

  “No. I think you’re the one who’d better disarm himself,” Barson said, genial and composed, and even from my perch more than twenty feet away, I could see his piercing blue-gray eyes crinkle with what looked like amusement. “I hate to tell you this, but if you don’t, Augie here is going to blow your lady friend’s brains out. And I know you don’t want to see that.”

  “You’re right. I don’t,” I told him. I swiveled my wrist just a bit, pointing my gun squarely at Barson’s oh-so-pleasant face. “Which is why I’m going to kill you—you, Barson, you—in three seconds if he doesn’t lower his gun. One, two—”

  I counted fast. I didn’t want to give Barson—or myself—time to think. He didn�
�t know if I’d shoot, and I didn’t know if I’d shoot, but ultimately he was the one taking the bigger risk if I reached three.

  “Alright, alright!” Barson blurted out, finally losing his air of unflappable cool. “Do as the man says, Augie.”

  Welsh cursed bitterly, but pointed Aunt Virgie downward all the same. He finally looked over his broad shoulder at me, hate etched into his feral, stubble-covered face as plain as the name above a mausoleum door.

  “That’s a start,” I said. “Now I wanna see all them hands empty.”

  “Sure, sure,” Barson said, and he and Kip and Welsh began to bend slowly at the knee, lowering their six-guns toward the floorboards.

  “Miss,” I said, “why don’t you move over to—?”

  Just a flick of the eye toward Miss Caveo—that was all the opportunity Barson needed. He spun around, bringing his Peacemaker up while simultaneously stepping back and pulling the engineer in tight to his chest. He got off a wild shot that thudded into the side of the express car beneath me, and either from the kick of his hogleg or the struggles of his would-be shield, he jerked back hard into the train’s controls, pressing down on a red bar that protruded from amongst the various gauges and valves.

  I flattened myself, more bullets blasting up at me from the cab below. As I lay there, the shimmying of the express car grew into a bucking as fierce as any bronc’s. The whistling of the wind grew stronger, too, building to such a gale I feared it would peel me right off the roof.

  When I dared a peep up, I saw distant bluffs to my left and an all-too-close bluff to my right. We were running along the edge of a gorge, and doing it faster than would’ve been safe on the Kansas flats.

  The lever Barson had stumbled into was the throttle.

  The train hit a curve that put such a slant to the car I nearly slid off the roof like a johnnycake off a greased griddle. There was a sudden metallic clang and a piercing scream, followed by an awful thumping and ripping and cracking. Someone had been knocked over the side—and been snagged and chewed by the chugging gears.

  The time for ducking was over. As soon as the track and train straightened up again, I did the same, popping up with Aunt Pauline at the ready.

  Not only wasn’t I immediately shot, I wasn’t even noticed. The engineer was beyond noticing anything—most of him was crumpled on the floor, though a bullet had spread various bits from the neck up hither-thither around the cab. Lockhart and Welsh were grappling nearby, both of them clawing at Aunt Virgie, while Miss Caveo was trying to keep Kip at bay with the fireman’s shovel, the kid panting curses and waving his apparently emptied Colt at her like a hammer.

  Barson was gone.

  I didn’t have a shot at either Welsh or Kip that didn’t have a chance of hitting Lockhart or Miss Caveo, so it wouldn’t be Aunt Pauline to the rescue—it would have to be me. But as I got ready to jump in and join the fray, I saw something that nearly had me jumping right out of my skin instead.

  Perhaps a quarter mile ahead of us, the rails wound around another rocky bend, this one so sharp it almost looked like the tracks weren’t turning but simply stopping. It was the kind of curve any sane engineer would take with the brakes on, the throttle back, and his fingers crossed. And we were about to head into at full speed.

  Even if I could’ve reached the brake (assuming I could figure out where it was in the next thirty seconds), it was too late. The Pacific Express may have been built for the rails, but it was about to take its maiden voyage as an airship.

  “We’re gonna crash! Jump! Everybody!” I shouted. Then I took my own advice—only I wasn’t heaving myself over the side of the train, but down into the tender.

  It was like leaping onto a haystack … with a pile of bricks buried inside it. Despite the pain that slammed into my backside as I landed, I managed to slide quickly down the black mound of coal and get Aunt Pauline pointed at Welsh’s head—just as he twisted Virgie into Lockhart’s side and pulled the trigger.

  My shot caught Welsh just above the right eye.

  Lockhart and Welsh fell together, crumpling into one heap, as if they were two parts of the same, suddenly lifeless body.

  “Augie!” Kip cried, dropping his gun and throwing himself onto the floor at Welsh’s side.

  I knelt down next to him, hoping to find Lockhart still breathing. But there was no dime-novel miracle. The old Pinkerton’s flask hadn’t stopped the bullet. And there weren’t any whispered words about carrying on and getting the lady to safety, either—no jaunty wink as the death rattle set in. Ol’ Burl Lockhart was just plain dead.

  “We gotta get outta here, kid!” I shouted at Kip as I got to my feet. “We gotta jump! Now!”

  But Kip wasn’t listening. He was too busy trying to peel Aunt Virgie from Welsh’s hand. Tears were streaming down his face as he clawed uselessly at fingers wound as tight as the grip of Death itself.

  Something slipped around my left hand, and I turned to find Miss Caveo by my side.

  “Which way?” she said.

  On the right side of the track was a sheer rock wall speeding by no more than six feet from the train. On the left side was nothing—not even ground, so far as we could see.

  One side was instant death, the other … not so instant. So I picked the latter. Don’t we always?

  “Trust me,” I said as we stepped to the edge of the cab hand in hand. “I think I’m gettin’ the hang of this.”

  We jumped together and we fell together. And the last thing I knew when the impact came, bringing the darkness with it, was that her fingers were still entwined with mine.

  Thirty-eight

  MISS CORVUS

  Or, I Meet a Dear Friend Again for the Very First Time

  When I started to come to, the first thing I became aware of was pain. Someone had been using my skull as an anvil, it seemed, and my whole body was still quivering from the pounding of the hammer.

  The second thing I noticed was my brother. He was there with me, wherever “there” was. Maybe I heard his breathing or smelled the scent of pipe smoke and sweat on his clothes—something Holmes-y like that. But I don’t think so. His presence wasn’t something I deduced. It was something I felt.

  “Gustav,” I said.

  “Hey, Brother. How you feelin’?”

  “Been better. Often. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever been worse.”

  “You took quite a blow to the head, Otto,” said someone else—a someone else I was most relieved to hear. “We were worried about you.”

  I opened my eyes, hoping the first sight they’d alight upon would be Miss Caveo’s pretty face. And I did indeed find myself dazzled, though not by the lady’s beauty: I was stretched out on my back, my face pointed up at a blinding-bright afternoon sun.

  I winced and shut my eyes again.

  “Landed on my head, huh?” I said. “Well, that’s a stroke of luck. I can get by without that ol’ thing—right, Gustav?”

  “Been doin’ it for years.”

  I turned toward the sound of my brother’s voice and dared a little eyelid crack. There he was sitting next to me, looking as bad as I felt: haggard and hurting, held together by little more than the last unripped stitches in filthy, frayed clothes. He wasn’t beaming down at me—he couldn’t even bring himself to smile. But I could see that he wanted to, and that was enough.

  Miss Caveo was next to him, pressed up much closer than I would’ve thought my brother could withstand without melting like butter left too close to the stove. Her dark hair was tangled and frizzed, her face a patchwork of bruises and scratches, her dress torn and smeared with dirt.

  She was a lovely sight.

  As I lay there mooning up at her, my vision unfuzzed further, and I realized that the swirling shapes behind my brother and Miss Caveo were rocky outcroppings and overhangs—and that they were moving. Or seemed to be, anyway. Actually, we were moving.

  The three of us were squeezed onto the battered remnants of the hand car, coasting down the mountainside with all
the roaring speed of an arthritic snail.

  “You came after me,” I said to Old Red.

  “As best I could. Obviously, I was too late to be any help.”

  “Don’t be modest, Gustav—you know that’s not true,” Miss Caveo said.

  A flush as red as strawberry preserves smeared itself across my brother’s face.

  The lady turned toward me. “After you and I jumped from the engine, we rolled down an incline into some boulders, and you were knocked unconscious. I could barely get myself back to the roadbed, let alone carry you. Fortunately, your brother soon came along, and we were able to improvise a rope of sorts and haul you up.”

  “‘Improvise a rope’?”

  Old Red’s blush went from red to purple.

  Miss Caveo smiled coyly. “Let’s just say I’ve finally discovered an advantage to the ridiculous overexcess of modesty imposed on my gender by respectable society.”

  I couldn’t help it—my eyes darted down for a peek at her skirts. It was hard to tell from the way she was sitting, but it did seem like they weren’t as fully rounded as one would expect.

  Of course, a lady’s frilly underthings aren’t called unmentionables for nothing, and I thought it best to move the conversation along lest poor Gustav survive a run-in with the Give-’em-Hell Boys only to die of embarrassment less than an hour later.

  “What happened to the engine?”

  “It went off the rails, just as you feared it would,” Miss Caveo said. “The train’s at the bottom of a canyon in a million pieces.”

  “Most of ’em still on fire,” Old Red added. “I was probably half a mile away when the boiler blew, and it still like to pop my eardrums.”

  I nodded, silent, thinking of everything that had quite literally gone up in smoke.

  Lockhart, Kip, Barson and Welsh, Morrison, the nameless engineer, Chan’s “treasure.” Even the Give-’em-Hell Boys’ stolen gold had probably melted in the blaze, slithering away into crevices and under rocks like snakes escaping the midday sun.