On the Wrong Track

by Steve Hockensmith

  And I’d lost a treasure of my own, I realized with a queasy jolt. My war bag had been in the baggage car—and my book had been in my bag.

  For weeks, I’d been trying to pretend that bundle of tattered, ink-splattered pages didn’t exist. And now that it truly didn’t, I tried to push it from my thoughts again. It seemed wrong to mourn a thing when so many people had just died, even if it wasn’t just a book that had been destroyed but a hope I’d been too cowardly to let myself feel.

  “So,” I said, almost choking on the word, “how’d Samuel make out?”

  He was fine, Gustav told me. Kip just winged him. In fact, the porter bounced back so quick, even with his arm in a sling he tried to come after us with Old Red. Wiltrout had put a stop to that.

  My brother related all this reluctantly. Not so much like he didn’t want to tell me—more like there was something else he wanted to tell me first, something he wouldn’t or couldn’t say just yet.

  “Miss?” he said shyly. “You’re gonna have to excuse my askin’ like this, but … now that we know Otto’s alright … well … ain’t it about time you told us who the heck you really are?”

  The lady laughed. “I suppose proper introductions are past due, aren’t they?” She held out a hand to my brother. “I’m Diana Corvus.”

  Old Red took the ends of her fingers and gave them a loose, gingerly shake, as if her hand might shatter should he wrap his around hers.

  “Miss Corvus,” he mumbled.

  Even flat on my back feeling like I’d just been fired out of a cannon into a brick wall, I managed a more enthusiastic handshake.

  “So you’re what they call a spotter?” I asked.

  She nodded. “An extremely inexperienced one, I’m afraid. This was only my third trip as a Southern Pacific agent. I’m supposed to be watching for confidence men, cardsharps, thieves—”

  “And crooked railroad detectives,” Old Red said.

  “Yes … and crooked railroad detectives,” Miss Corvus admitted. (I felt a little wistful thinking of her as “Miss Corvus” now. It was almost as though “Diana Caveo” was a sweetheart I’d never see again.) “Colonel Crowe wanted me to keep an eye on you. If I noticed anything suspicious, Jefferson Powless would have paid you for your time and sent you on your way.”

  “Let’s see,” I said. “Murders, the Give-’em-Hell Boys, a wreck … nope, nothing suspicious about any of that.”

  Miss Corvus fixed a quizzical gaze on Gustav. “Actually, I did see something … well, I wouldn’t call it suspicious, exactly, but it was definitely peculiar. That package you gave to the stationmaster in Carlin. What was in it?”

  I turned a stare on Old Red, too. “Package? In Carlin?”

  My brother squirmed and cleared his throat. “This ain’t how I wanted to tell you, Otto … I’m through keepin’ secrets from you.”

  He glanced at Miss Corvus, clearly flustered by her presence but hardly able to ask her to step outside and give us a moment alone.

  “After all our arguin’ yesterday, I wanted to do something for you. You were helpin’ me do what I wanted to do even though you didn’t wanna do it yourself. So I figured the least I could do was do for you what you wanted to do—whether you knew you wanted to do it or not.”

  As there weren’t enough specifics in what Old Red had said from which to even forge a decent question, I had to make do with “Huh?”

  “When I sent you outta the baggage car? As we were pullin’ into Carlin?” Gustav said sheepishly. “I dug your book out of our bags. And when you set off lookin’ for Lockhart, I took it to the stationmaster and asked him to mail it to Harper’s Weekly.”

  “You what?”

  “Book?” Miss Corvus asked.

  “Yes, book,” I said. “My book. Which I wrote. For me to do with—or not do with—as I please.” I pointed a finger at Old Red and shook it like a switch I was itching to cane him with. “You sneaky, presumptuous, high-handed jackass.” I flattened out my hand and slapped my brother on the knee (careful not to hit the leg he’d boogered up earlier). “God bless you!”

  “So … you ain’t really mad at me?”

  “Of course, I am! But that don’t mean I ain’t grateful, too!”

  Gustav looked relieved, Miss Corvus looked confused, and me—I just had to laugh.

  My brother hadn’t just given me my dream back. Without meaning to, he’d showed me how to dream it better. A man doesn’t need to be fearless to get what he wants. He just needs to look his fears in the face … so he can thumb his nose at them.

  If Old Red could drag himself onto the Pacific Express, I could weather a discouraging letter from Harper’s Weekly—and from Collier’s, Scribner’s, and every other magazine and publisher on through to The Ladies Home Journal, if that’s what it took. I had a story to tell. Hell, now I had two.

  After another hour on our beat-up barn door of a train, Gustav, Miss Corvus, and I came gliding into a little jerkwater town called Cisco. A rescue engine was quickly dispatched to fetch what was left of the Express, and not long after that we were back amongst our fellow passengers—few of whom seemed particularly forgiving when told that their luggage was now cinders at the bottom of a ravine. Refund was a word I heard bandied about quite a bit. Lawsuit was almost as common.

  While everyone around us grumbled, Miss Corvus and I chattered away cheerfully (if, in my case, rather woozily) about my book, my adventures with Old Red, and anything else I could think of to keep the conversation going. My brother even joined in from time to time when his stomach allowed it, bashfully but tenaciously debating the lady on the Lizzie Borden trial, which both she and he (through me) had followed in the papers the month before.

  It was the lengthiest discussion I’d seen him have with a woman since our days on the farm in Kansas, when he and my sisters, Ilse and Greta, would spar over such weighty questions as the proper way to husk corn and who’d cut a fart in the kitchen. I was pleased to see him overcome his other great fear—females—so long as he didn’t get crazy ideas about courting this one. Those crazy ideas were reserved for me.

  When we reached Oakland that evening, a dozen S.P. officials swooped down on the passengers with ticket vouchers, meal tickets, promises, sympathy, and lips ready, pursed for the smooching of butts. None of which was directed at me, my brother, or Miss Corvus. News of the crash had reached town hours in advance of the train, and before any reporters could get to us, we were hustled from the station (if it’s possible to be “hustled” when, like Old Red and me, you can barely walk).

  Gustav and I were told to await instructions in a nearby boardinghouse. The lady was rushed off elsewhere—and I haven’t seen her since.

  If I’d had any inkling our parting was to be so permanent, who knows what I might have said? Something painfully sincere and utterly mortifying, most likely: “It’s been a treat gettin’ to know you—and I’d sure like the chance to know you better.” Or “Let’s not let this be good-bye.” Or even “Diana Corvus, I think I love you.” I had taken a blow to the head, remember.

  But all she got from me was “Good night, miss. I hope we’ll be seein’ you round H.Q. real regular.”

  “I hope so, too,” she said. Her high spirits had taken a curious dip after the S.P. men had scooped us up, and she sounded dead serious—almost dour—now. “You’re exceptional men … and that’s what I’m going to tell Colonel Crowe and Jefferson Powless.”

  “Did you hear that?” I said as a jittery Southern Pacific functionary ushered her away. “‘Exceptional men,’ she called us.”

  “She’s just sayin’ she’ll do what she can to help us.”

  “Help us? We’re heroes, ain’t we?”

  Gustav made a noise halfway between a growl and a grunted chuckle. He knew what was coming—and late the next afternoon, it came.

  Thirty-nine

  THE END OF THE LINE

  Or, The Amlingmeyer Express Runs off the Rails

  We were on the front porch of the boardinghouse,
letting a cool breeze from the bay blow over our various lumps and scrapes, when we spotted a beefy fellow striding up fast. Even a block away, we could tell it was Jefferson Powless—and that he hadn’t come for a friendly chat in the sunshine. When the railroad dick reached the front steps, we were already on our feet, waiting to lead him upstairs to the privacy of our little room.

  “You saw the newspapers this morning?” he asked as soon as we had the door shut behind us.

  “Sure did,” I said. “They’re runnin’ the headlines so big they can’t squeeze in much more than a letter a page. ‘Butch Turns Butcher on S.P. Special’—that was a catchy one. ‘Lockhart’s Last Stand’ was pretty good, too.”

  “‘Fisherman Lands Chinaman,’” Old Red threw in, limping over to our bed and seating himself with his sore leg stretched out stiff.

  “Yeah, that was our favorite,” I said.

  It had been a pleasant shock to learn that Dr. Chan had actually survived his run-in with Kip: A man out for some early-morning angling had found him on the bank of the Truckee River, still out cold. By the time Chan came to and could convince someone his story about a killer news butch wasn’t sheer delirium, we were already beyond Summit and beyond help.

  “To tell the truth, that was the only story this morning I could stomach,” I told Powless. Our room had a single chair, in the corner, but I didn’t sit down—or offer the S.P. man a seat. “I mean, how is it we don’t rate so much as a mention in a single article? You know, seeing as we tangled with the most famous gang in the country and came out on top?”

  “And funny that all them stories make out like Barson and Welsh are still on the loose in Nevada,” Old Red added, not sounding like he found it funny in the slightest.

  “We’ve been telling the newspapers the truth as we know it,” Powless said, his tone flat, his gaze cold. “I’ve heard what you two claim happened. But any proof went up in flames with that engine.”

  I crossed my arms to hide my hands—which I couldn’t help but clench into fists.

  “You think we’re lyin’?” I spat. “Well, what about Miss Corvus? Surely she backs us up.”

  “Keep the lady out of it,” Powless rumbled. “Frankly, none of this reflects very well on her, either.”

  “Now hold on,” Gustav said. “If you don’t believe us and you don’t believe her, why’d you come all the way back to Oakland? Barson and Welsh ain’t dead? Alright. Shouldn’t you be up in the Humboldt Range on their trail?”

  “I had other business to attend to here.”

  “Oh, I know you did, Mr. Powless,” Old Red said. “Like us and Miss Corvus and makin’ sure the papers printed the right tall tales.”

  Unlike me, Powless didn’t bother hiding the clenching of his fists—his hands were curled into big red bricks he obviously wanted to slam down over my brother’s head.

  “Barson and Welsh really ran rings around you, didn’t they?” Gustav pressed on, almost daring the man to act on his anger. “It was only dumb luck that Otto and me was where we was when we was to stop ’em. I can’t believe you’d want the S.P. board knowin’ that—especially when you got the poor bastards scared out of their wits with that bogus ‘bounty’ Barson put on their heads.”

  Powless just scowled at my brother, conceding nothing. So Old Red gave him a heap more to concede.

  “And another thing—Mike Barson claimed his gang made off with a hundred bars of U.S. Treasury gold the first time they hit the Express. But all Wells Fargo and the S.P. admitted to was four or five thousand dollars cash. Well, Barson may have been a killer and a thief, but I know he was closer to the mark than y’all … cuz Otto and me seen a bunch of them bars with our own eyes. So as I figure it, you don’t want the truth out, cuz you got enough trouble with long riders as it is. If you fess up to losin’ a regular mint, every farmboy with a horse and an old flintlock’s gonna try to rob himself a train.”

  As much as my brother was goading him, Powless remained motionless, and if it hadn’t been for the deepening ruddiness of his broad face, it would have been easy to mistake the man for one of the life-sized waxwork dolls they dress up with fancy duds in department store windows.

  “And,” Old Red said, “there’s the reward. If you admitted Barson and Welsh died yesterday like we say they did, then the Southern Pacific would owe Miss Corvus and Otto here something on the order of twenty thousand dollars. That ain’t really much for the likes of the S.P., I know, but why pay it if you don’t have to?”

  Gustav finally stopped talking, and silence settled over the room. Powless still just stood there, looking like he was willing to keep on standing there forever if that’s what it took to prove his skin was infinitely thicker than any of my brother’s little pinpricks.

  “Well?” I prodded him.

  “Are you done?” he asked Old Red.

  Gustav shrugged. “That depends on what you’ve got to say.”

  Powless moved at last, swinging up his right hand, the index finger pointing at the ceiling. “A wrecked train.” He uncurled another finger. “A dead engineer.” He continued the count. “A dead messenger. A dead news butch. A dead baggageman. In baseball, you get three strikes and you’re out. You’ve already got at least five.”

  “But,” Old Red said—and stopped there. He knew there was more coming or we would’ve been fired already.

  “But,” the railroad man said with a nod, “we can get past all that. It could be forgotten, with time. You’re smart. The young lady told us as much, and I can see she was right … though you sure gab a hell of a lot more than she led me to expect. So the question becomes, can you be trusted? Will you do right by the Southern Pacific? If so, you can report to the Oakland yards tomorrow as guards. When you’ve proved you’re reliable, we’ll talk about other assignments.”

  Powless stepped toward Gustav and brought up his right hand again—to offer my brother a shake.

  “Do we understand each other?”

  I understood—and I fumed.

  Keep your precious badge, Powless was saying. Call yourselves detectives. And then go to the yards tomorrow and beat the crap out of tramps and collect your ten dollars a week for it. And maybe, maybe I’ll let you actually detect one of these days. But in the meantime, you best shut up and stay out of the big boys’ way.

  Gustav reached up and took Powless’s hand. It looked for all the world like my brother was striking a deal with the devil. Yet I had absolute faith it wasn’t so.

  That morning, after we’d had our first look at the papers, I’d seen Old Red unpin his badge and place it just so on the dresser near the door. And before we’d hobbled downstairs to stretch out on the porch, I’d placed my badge just so beside it. They were lined up together like railroad ties or hoofprints, depending on your preference. Either way, the important thing was they were pointed in the same direction.

  “I understand you, Mr. Powless,” Gustav said as he shook the railroad man’s hand, “but I can’t accept your terms.”

  Powless threw my brother’s hand away like it had scorched him.

  “Nothing personal,” Old Red went on, unruffled. “You’re just tryin’ to keep your ass outta the fire. I can appreciate that. But Otto and me, we ain’t gonna lie or crack skulls for the Southern Pacific Railroad. Am I right, Brother?”

  “You are undeniably, very, extremely right, Brother.”

  Gustav pointed toward the dresser—and the door.

  “Our badges are over there. You can take ’em on your way out.”

  “Oh, I’ll take them alright,” Powless snapped. “And understand this: You two didn’t quit. You were fired. You’re just saddle trash that couldn’t hack it as railroad police. If you go telling fairy stories to the newspapers, that’s the story I’m going to tell. And trust me—my story’s a lot more believable than yours.”

  He turned and walked away with calm, measured steps, pausing by the dresser to scoop up our badges. He replaced them with two five-dollar bills—our due for three days on the Sou
thern Pacific payroll. Then he left, pulling the door closed behind him with a gentle click that seemed to echo through the house like a clap of thunder.

  Old Red stared at the door glumly. “We just burned ourselves a bridge, Otto.”

  “Kind of a rickety-ass bridge, you ask me,” I said. “There’s better ones.”

  “Yup.” My brother shifted his gaze to me. “I reckon there are.”

  It’s been almost three weeks since then, and we’ve just about mended up. Old Red’s ankle still pains him, but he’s been getting out and about as best he can while I’ve been scribbling away on this new book of mine. Every few days, we take the ferry over to San Francisco and drop in on the offices of the Southern Pacific Railroad—Gustav told the stationmaster in Carlin to make that the return address on the package he sent to Harper’s. Going there doesn’t exactly conjure up happy memories, but I don’t mind: One of these days, we’ll bump into a certain S.P. employee I’d like to see again, and that’ll make it all worthwhile.

  Old Red’s been looking for the Pinkerton office over in San Francisco, too, although he says he’s not ready to go in even when he finds it—not with him still looking like something the cat hacked up. Yet even as the bruises on his face fade, another, deeper one remains unhealed.

  “Two days late and ten bucks short, that was me on that damn train—and just look what happened,” Gustav grumbled only yesterday. “Ol’ Holmes would’ve had the whole thing deducted before we reached the first station.”

  I know he’ll snap out of it sooner or later, though—because if he doesn’t, I’ll do the snapping myself.

  Last night, I looked up the Pinkertons’ address: 600 Market Street. One day soon, after this is in the mail to New York, I’m going to take him there.

  Also by Steve Hockensmith

  Holmes on the Range

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The author wishes to thank: