The Titans

by John Jakes

  He tried to pierce her air of certainty with another little laugh.

  “Miss Dorn, permit me to say with all politeness, you’re touched in the head.”

  “No, I’m not. You’re a man looking for a place, Michael Boyle. God has revealed it.”

  Hostile all at once because he felt threatened by her confidence, he exclaimed, “Not to me! My place is up the line, pushing those rails to the meridian. Do you realize I’m thirty-six years old? Before I’m too blasted feeble to do anything but sit in a chair and look back at all my mistakes—all the years I spent taking human life—I want once—once!—to know I’ve done something worthwhile. Something!”

  “Do it, then. But start back before the snows are too deep for travel.”

  “You’re the damnedest woman I ever met!”

  “I would appreciate your not cursing. This is too serious.”

  The whistle tooted. One of the train’s two brakemen waved his lantern from beside the last car.

  “Come back and help me build a good store. Then another. Those godless people will keep moving west, chasing the easy money. The territory will soon be ready for civilized things. Where we live, we’ll help build a town. A fine, decent one.”

  An impulse to say yes swept over him. He fought it.

  “No, Hannah.”

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t, that’s all.”

  “Why not? Am I unattractive?”

  “You’re very attractive. But—”

  He was unable to finish. Honesty would only hurt her.

  But she’d been hurt already. A tear sparkled on her face. Angrily, she wiped it away.

  “You don’t think you could ever love me? I don’t expect you to love me now, Michael.”

  “Hannah, stop!”

  “You love that other woman.”

  “No,” he lied. “But I like you too much to pretend I feel anything more.”

  “Love will come. Give it a chance. Give me a chance.”

  She flung an arm around his neck and kissed him on the mouth with unmistakable passion. He felt the sweet curve of her breasts against his body, then her tears on his face.

  With her mouth still close to his, she whispered, “I’ve love enough for both of us. Come back.”

  “And if it didn’t work, and I left again? I’d hurt you worse than I’m doing right now.”

  “I’ll accept the risk.”

  He shook his head. “I would never subject you to that kind of uncertainty, that kind of—”

  The whistle howled.

  He seized two of the stakes and hauled himself up to the rails. The train lurched forward.

  The trucks began to click slowly. Spark-filled smoke gusted around him. Through it, he heard her call, “Before the snow!”

  The smoke cleared. As the last car passed she stepped to the center of the track and waved.

  Damn! He didn’t love her. Better to hurt her again, this moment, than subject her to prolonged pain. He shook his head in an exaggerated way. She couldn’t mistake the finality of it. Yet her head remained unbowed and she blew him a kiss, as if she were supremely confident.

  ii

  He sat down on the stacked rails and watched her figure shrink in the starry dawn. Soon she was a speck against the widening band of red-gold on the eastern horizon. Then she was gone.

  He tried to excuse himself for hurting her by summoning anger.

  “I’ll be damned and double-damned. That queer, Bible-reading girl did bait a trap as if I were some woods animal!”

  The anger didn’t help. He almost wished he could have jumped right between the trap’s jaws. She was a fine, handsome woman. But he didn’t love her enough.

  Love?

  To the best of his recollection, it was the very first time he’d thought the word in connection with his unexpected fondness for her. He had lost his heart just a little, without realizing it. But what he felt for her wasn’t enough to make him change his mind about returning to the railhead.

  The iron train gathered speed on the Nebraska plain. Far to his right, a herd of shaggy buffalo swept down from a ridge, trampling the earth loudly enough to be heard above the train’s roar. Flickering light from the firebox reddened his cheeks as he stood up and faced west, one hand on a stake, his feet braced wide apart. The change of position didn’t help clear his mind of the confusion.

  That woman is mad!

  No, in her own way, that woman is as strong as Amanda Kent.

  Handsome, too.

  And not nearly so pious as she pretends. He well remembered the fervent feel of her mouth.

  He tried contempt.

  Outrageous, the way she picked a husband! “God’s made a place!” Fancy such nerve!

  She wouldn’t say it’s nerve, she’d say it’s faith.

  And would it be so bad a place?

  I cannot go there under false colors! About that, he was adamant.

  Yet he was beginning to loathe himself for having hurt her so badly.

  The buffalo veered off and vanished in the north. The train swayed. He gripped the stake tightly to keep from being hurled off.

  The points of his mustache and the ends of his bandana flicked against his face. He peered through the smoke and specks of soot but never saw the vast prairie rushing by.

  That’s all I do, hurt or kill others.

  That is all I ever do.

  iii

  Some eight miles further down the track, with the sun clear of the horizon, he was startled from his bleak reverie by a series of piercing blasts from the whistle. He recognized the signal; the train was stopping.

  On the roof of the last boxcar, the brakeman who’d been sitting with his legs dangling over the side struggled to turn the horizontal wheel. Its vertical rod applied pressure to the primitive brakes.

  Iron squealed back there, then up front, where the other brakie worked the wheel on the first flatcar. He leaped to the second car as the couplers crashed and the cars began to shunt against one another, slowing down with the kind of erratic jerking that frequently caused a break-in-two on a downgrade.

  The front brakie pointed to the south. Michael clambered to the top of the rails as the train came to a standstill. Near the river turkey buzzards wheeled and darted at the ground.

  A queasy feeling fluttered his stomach. Where the carrion birds swooped, patches of buffalo grass shone bright red.

  iv

  He jumped down from the flatcar, his Spencer cocked. The fireman had another, the engineer a third. The two brakies—boys working their way up from yard switchman to engineer—were unarmed. They followed the older men, looking as bilious as Michael felt. Suddenly he smelled the blood stench.

  “Appears to be a body lyin’ out there,” the fireman said, swallowing. The men started running. The noise sent the buzzards flapping away.

  Michael’s mouth was dry as he began to glimpse white and red lumps strewn along the bank. “More than one body.”

  “No horses—” the engineer muttered.

  “And they’d have been on the other side of the river if they was travelin’ in a settler’s wagon,” the engineer put in. “Buffla hunters, mebbe? Chasing that herd we seen?” They were a quarter mile south of the track now. Michael nearly stumbled on a foot-wide rock all but concealed in the waving grass. He glanced down.

  “Oh, Mother of God.”

  On the rock lay an ear cut from a human head. Blood was drying brown in the breeze. Beside the ear rested an eyeball, a crushed white globe with a dark spot—the pupil—turned up to the light.

  One of the brakies turned around and staggered back toward the tracks, coughing up vomit and slopping his trousers.

  They found the remains of what they calculated to be four men. At first Michael thought two of the victims might be the pair he’d seen at the water tank the preceding evening. Then he knew he was wrong. None of the flesh was brown. And he spied no wagon tracks.

  There was little doubt the men were hunters, though. Scraps
of deerskin shirts and pants were scattered everywhere. Not one body was whole.

  A mutilated head rested against another stone. The ears were gone, and the nose. The point of the chin had been worked off with a knife or hatchet. The hair had been lifted, and a pit opened in the top of the skull so the brain—or part of it, slimy gray and fly covered now—could be removed and placed beside it. Michael could barely stand to look.

  “Injuns?” the fireman asked.

  “Yeah,” the engineer said. “It’s the way they work when their tempers are up. I seen something similar once before.”

  Wherever Michael stepped, he found more evidence of the massacre. Amputated feet. Arms chopped at the shoulders. Entrails twining through the grass like lifeless red snakes. Mutilated genitals had been placed on what remained of a torso. One head covered with gashes still had part of an arrow jutting from the mouth. The arrowhead had been driven up behind the upper teeth and the shaft broken at midpoint.

  Tears in his eyes, Michael finally lurched away from the carnage. He was trembling.

  Who had done it? Guns Taken and his Cheyenne? It made little difference. The remains were mute proof of the savage level to which the coming of the railroad had raised the war between the whites and the Plains tribes.

  A conference was held, well away from the site of the massacre. The engineer would report to Casement, and ask for a work crew to come back, pick up the remains, and search for identification. “We stay here any longer, we’ll be late to the railhead,” the engineer said. It was an excuse, but Michael was thankful for it.

  Soon the train was headed west again. The memory of what he’d seen beat at Michael’s mind. The trembling returned. He was almost pitched off the flatcar before he closed both hands on one of the stakes. Jumbled images spun past his inner eye.

  The trees of the Wilderness bursting afire.

  A splendid green banner tumbling toward summer grass, its wounded bearer trying to hold it aloft, failing, and weeping as he stained the silken sunburst with his blood.

  Pickett’s line, human wheat scythed down slowly in the powder haze of a steamy July afternoon.

  Worthing’s face when Michael’s bullet hit him.

  The dismembered bodies of men who must have known fear, love, hope, laughter, and who had found death by following the twin tracks of what purported to be civilization—

  Clutching at the stake, Michael cried, “Enough!” Cannon thundered in his brain. All the hurt men of the endless wars seemed to wail in chorus.

  “Enough!”

  The rear brakeman shouted something he didn’t hear. Slowly, he gained control of himself. He wiped his tear-tracked face with the back of a hand.

  It wasn’t sufficient for a man to cry out against the struggles that rent the land. A man had to do something more than curse bloodletting when he too was responsible for it—

  A man had to do something to defy and defeat what he detested. Amanda Kent had taught him that long ago. He remembered the family motto. Take a stand. Make a mark.

  Seated again, he gazed at the sky.

  If you’re there, listen to me.

  Never again will I knowingly hurt another person the way I hurt Hannah Dorn.

  Never again while I breathe will I lift my hand against another human being, no matter what the provocation.

  Never.

  v

  At the railhead, Adolphus Brown was supervising the raising of a large tent. The girls were already inside, setting up cots, hanging canvas partitions, and uncrating whiskey bottles. Brown’s half-witted young helper, Toby Harkness, swung a sledge to peg the last guy rope.

  Although it was barely daylight, the feisty little construction boss, Casement, had already called on Brown to inform him his presence would be tolerated because Casement realized the men required certain diversions. But Brown was under orders not to open for business until the end of the workday. Something else was on Brown’s mind at the moment, though.

  Toby leaned on the sledge, grinning. “All done. Butt? I said all done.”

  “Oh. Good. Now hang up the sign the way I showed you.”

  “Boss, what’s chewing on you this morning?”

  Brown fanned himself with his hard felt hat. Going to be a sonofabitching hot day.

  “Boss?”

  “That Paddy we encountered driving out here.”

  Toby scratched his beard. “Hell, he seemed pretty harmless.”

  “Depends. He knows me from Omaha. Some of the others here might also. They could talk. Discourage trade.”

  “We got the place to ourselves!”

  “Not for long. I know of three gents who’ll be arriving with their outfits inside of a week. In a month, there’ll be a small city of tents following the line. We could end up sucking the hind tit.”

  “I promise you, Butt. Those micks get in our way, I’ll talk to ’em. They don’t listen”—Toby caressed the handle of the sledge—“I’ll talk a little louder.”

  Adolphus Brown felt a burden lift. He clapped his derby on his scarred head and laid an arm across the younger man’s shoulder. “Toby my boy, you know what I’m thinking almost before I think it. That’s why I admire you.”

  Toby smiled in a way Brown found hilarious. The lout had all the brains of a sparrow. Brown managed to keep a straight face as Toby declared, “Nobody ever admired me before I met up with you.”

  “That was their mistake.”

  “Because if some mick shoots off his mouth, I’ll fix ’em.”

  “And do a splendid job, too.” Brown grinned as they strolled toward the tent entrance. Inside, Nancy and Alice were bickering like ruffled hens. He must keep his patience. By sundown he’d have them on their backs, with their attention focused on the only spot where a woman’s attention belonged.

  “Yes, sir, a splendid job. I can count on that as surely as I can count on a winner when I need one.”

  He jutted his hand toward Toby’s face. The sleeve garter and attached elastic worked perfectly, popping the spade ace into his fingers as if it had materialized from the air.

  Toby giggled like a child, grimy fingers over his mouth. “Lordy, Butt.” He giggled again. “Not out here where everybody can see.”

  Brown pointed toward the dining car. “Everybody’s in there, stuffing. Getting ready to bust their asses and lay a mile of track quick, so they can pay us a visit. You get busy with that sign.”

  “Yes, sir,” Toby said in an almost worshipful way.

  Brown hid the card in a slit in his red velvet waistcoat and entered the tent whistling. Toby was a crackerjack. Stupid but a crackerjack. Any Irishman who flapped his mouth about Omaha would regret it.

  Chapter VIII

  Meridian 100

  i

  “DOWN!”

  On Michael’s signal, the five men lowered the rail. About two and a half feet of it projected beyond a splintered board stuck in the earth beside the right of way. Faded white numerals were painted on the board:

  247

  The moment the rail touched the ground, Sean Murphy whirled to the crew on the other side of the grade. “Beat you!” Disgruntled, they placed their rail as Murphy wigwagged his arms and bellowed in the direction of the perpetual train; “It’s done! We’re past!”

  Voice after voice took up the shout. Mass insanity seemed to seize the hundreds of men strung out at the railhead this crisp afternoon, the fifth of October.

  Christian, fully recovered, put his hands on his waist, bent backwards, shut his eyes, and wailed, “Whooo-aaaah” Artemus Corkle—permanently on the crew now; Michael had replaced the complaining O’Dey—ran down from the right of way, performed two quick somersaults, then raised himself on his palms and proceeded to walk with his legs in the air, bleating like a calf.

  “WHOOO-AAAAAAAH!” Christian howled again. Jostled by screaming men, Michael accepted a maul from one of them.

  “Take a lick, Boyle. Someday you’ll want to show this place to your grandchildren.”

  Wi
th a melancholy smile, Michael hammered the spike twice. He passed the maul to Murphy, who was laughing and crying at the same time.

  The shouting intensified, spreading eastward, picked up by hundreds of throats. The engineer of the locomotive behind the perpetual train doubled the noise by blowing the whistle and ringing the bell.

  In five minutes, all work had come to a stop. Greenup Williams snagged Michael’s waist and hand, danced him around in a circle, then cupped his mouth and yelled at the western horizon, “We done it, Charlie Crocker! You listenin’? Meridian one hundred! We’ll be all the way across the plains while you’re still sitting on your behind in those mountains!”

  Guards atop the cars of the work train fired their Spencers at the sky. North of the train, men and a few women poured from a disorderly collection of tents, the ever-growing movable town that packed itself into wagons and buggies every day or so, following the railhead. Someone had christened the tent village Hell-on-Wheels. It was appropriate, Michael thought. All sorts of riffraff had been attracted to it, exactly as Hannah had prophesied. Sean Murphy was fond of telling the more recent additions to the workforce, “The place is fast becoming civilized, several men having been killed here already.”

  Michael had already had a run-in with one of the tent town’s citizens—Harkness, the dull-witted young man, who worked for Butt Brown.

  Harkness had caught Michael alone one September evening when he was returning from a chat with the drovers. He demanded Michael stop talking to new workers about Brown’s curious habit of winning against all opponents.

  Patiently Michael explained that he never sought opportunities to discuss Mr. Brown. Though he didn’t admit it, the fact was he’d only volunteered information to a few close friends. The rest of the time he merely answered newcomers’ questions honestly. He put Harkness on notice that he’d continue to do so.

  Evidently trade at Brown’s Paradise was already suffering because Harkness replied with threatening language. He emphasized his warning by repeatedly jabbing a finger into Michael’s chest.