The Wrecker

8

WITH MARION’S GOOD-BYE KISS STILL SWEET ON HIS LIPS, Isaac Bell settled into his seat on the flyer to Sacramento and waited for the train to pull out of Oakland Terminal. She knew him well, better than he knew himself. On the other hand, there were things she might never know. How could you be jealous of Preston? Let me count the ways, thought Bell. Starting with, Whiteway is there with you and I’m not, because I’m falling behind in my race to stop the Wrecker.

He closed his eyes. He hadn’t slept in a bed for days, but sleep eluded him. His mind was racing. From the state capital, he would take a series of trains north toward distant Oregon. He needed a fresh look at the Cascades Cutoff tunnel collapse, with an eye toward reckoning whether the Wrecker intended another attack at the front end of the tunnel. On the way, he would meet with Archie Abbott, who’d wired him that he might be hitting pay dirt with the hobo jungle outside Dunsmuir.

“Mr. Bell?”

The conductor interrupted Isaac’s thoughts. The man touched a knuckle to his polished visor in a respectful salute, and said with a sly wink, “Mr. Bell, there’s a lady asking if you would be more comfortable sitting with her.”

Suspecting he would find the enterprising young Miss Hennessy in the next Pullman, Bell followed the conductor up the aisle. The conductor led him off the train and directed him across the platform toward a private car coupled to a baggage car hauled by a sleek Atlantic 4-4-2 so shiny it looked like it had just come from the shop.

Bell stepped aboard the car and through a door into a plush red parlor that would not have looked out of place in Anne Pound’s brothel. Lillian Hennessy, who had changed out of the pale blue that matched her eyes into a scarlet tea gown that matched the parlor, greeted him with a glass of champagne and a triumphant smile. “You’re not the only one who can charter a special.”

Bell replied coolly, “It is inappropriate for us to be traveling alone.”

“We’re not alone. Unfortunately.”

As Bell was saying “Besides, may I remind you that I am committed to Marion Morgan,” a jazz band struck up in a room at the rear of the car. Bell peered through the door. Six black musicians playing clarinet, bass fiddle, guitar, trombone, and cornet were gathered around an upright piano improvising on Adaline Shepherd’s brisk hit rag, “Pickles and Peppers.”

Lillian Hennessy pressed close to look past Bell’s shoulder. She was tucked into a swan-bill underbust corset, and Bell felt her breasts soft against his back. He had to raise his voice to be heard over the music. “I’ve never met a jazz musician qualified to act as a chaperone.”

“Not them.” She made a face. “Her: Father caught wind of my scheme to ambush you in San Francisco. She sent her to keep an eye on me.”

The cornet player wheeled his horn in the air, as if to spear the ceiling. In the gap he opened in the circle of musicians, Bell saw that the piano player arched over the keys, with fingers flying, eyes bright, and full lips parted in a gleeful smile, was none other than Mrs. Comden.

Lillian said, “I don’t know how he found out. But thanks to Father and Mrs. Comden, your honor will be safe, Mr. Bell. Please stay. All I ask is that we become friends. We’ll have a fast ride. We’re cleared straight through to the Cascades Cutoff.”

Bell was tempted. The line north of Sacramento was congested with materials and work trains heading to and from the cutoff. He had been considering ordering up one of Hennessy’s specials. Lillian’s was ready to roll. Steaming northward on cleared tracks, the railroad president’s daughter’s special would save him a day of travel time.

Lillian said, “There’s a telegraph in the baggage car, if you need to send messages.”

That tipped it. “Thank you,” Bell said with a smile. “I accept your ‘ambush,’ though I may have to hop off at Dunsmuir.”

“Have a glass of champagne, and tell me all about your Miss Morgan.”

The train lurched into motion as she handed him the glass. She licked a spilled drop from an exquisitely delicate knuckle and flashed her eyes in French-actress mode. “She was very pretty.”

“Marion thought you were, too.”

She made another face. “‘Pretty’ is rosy cheeks and gingham dresses. I am usually called more than pretty.”

“Actually, she said you were unspeakably beautiful.”

“Is that why you didn’t introduce me?”

“I preferred to remind her that she is unspeakably beautiful, too.”

Lillian’s pale blue eyes flashed. “You don’t pull your punches, do you?”

Bell returned a disarming smile. “Never in love, young lady-a habit I recommend you cultivate when you grow up. Now, tell me about your father’s troubles with his bankers.”

“He has no trouble with his bankers,” Lillian shot back. She answered so quickly and so vehemently, Bell knew what to say next.

“He said he would by winter.”

“Only if you don’t catch the Wrecker,” she said pointedly.

“But what of this Panic brewing in New York? It started last March. It doesn’t appear to be going away.”

Lillian answered with sober deliberateness. “The Panic, if it remains one much longer, will bring boom times in the railroad business to a crashing halt. We’re in the midst of wonderful expansion, but even Father admits it can’t go on forever.”

Bell was again reminded that Lillian Hennessy was more complicated than a coddled heiress.

“Does the Panic threaten your father’s control of his lines?”

“No,” she said quickly. Then she explained to Bell, “My father learned early on that the way to pay for his second railroad was to manage his first so well that it was solvent and creditworthy and then borrow against it. The bankers would dance to his tune. No railroad man in the country would fare better. If the others collapsed, he’d snap up the pieces and come out of it smelling like a rose.”

Bell touched his glass to hers. “To roses.” He smiled. But he was not sure whether the young woman was boasting truthfully or whistling past the graveyard. And he was even less sure of why the Wrecker was so determined to uproot the tangled garden of railroads.

“Ask any banker in the country,” she said, proudly. “He will tell you that Osgood Hennessy is impregnable.”

“Let me send a wire telling people where to find me.”

Lillian grabbed the champagne bottle and walked him to the baggage car, where the conductor, who doubled as the train’s telegrapher, sent Bell’s message reporting his whereabouts to Van Dorn. As they were starting to head back to the parlor car, the telegraph key started clattering. Lillian listened for a few seconds, then rolled her eyes and called over her shoulder to the conductor, “Do not answer that.”

Bell asked, “Who is that transmitting, your father?”

“No. The Senator.”

“Which Senator?”

“Kincaid. Charles Kincaid. He’s courting me.”

“Do I gather that you are not interested?”

“Senator Charles Kincaid is too poor, too old, and too annoying.”

“But very handsome,” called Mrs. Comden, with a smile for Bell.

“Very handsome,” Lillian agreed. “But still too poor, too old, and too annoying.”

“How old?” Bell asked.

“At least forty.”

“He’s forty-two and extremely vigorous,” said Mrs. Comden. “Most girls would call him quite a catch.”

“I’d rather catch mumps.”

Lillian refilled her glass and Bell’s. Then she said, “Emma, is there any chance that you might hop off the train in Sacramento and disappear while Mr. Bell and I steam our way north?”

“Not in this life, dear. You are too young-and far too innocent-to travel without a chaperone. And Mr. Bell is too . . .”

“Too what?”

Emma Comden smiled.

“Interesting.”

THE WRECKER HURRIED UP the lumber-mill spur after dark, walking on the crossties so as not make noise crunching the ballast.

He carried a four-foot-long crowbar that weighed thirty pounds. On his back was a Spanish-American War soldier’s knapsack of eighteen-ounce cotton duck with a rubberized flap. Its straps tugged hard on his shoulders. In it were a heavy two-gallon tin of coal oil and a horseshoe he had lifted from one of the many blacksmiths busy shoeing the hundreds of mules that pulled the freight wagons.

The chill mountain air smelled of pine pitch, and something else that took him a moment to recognize. There was actually a hint of snow on the wind. Although it was a clear night, he could feel winter coming early to the mountains. He increased his pace, as his eyes adjusted to the starlight. The rails shone in front of him, and trees took shape along the cut.

A tall, long-legged, fit man, he climbed the steep slope with swift efficiency. He was racing the clock. He had less than two hours until moonrise. When the moon cleared the mountains, lancing the darkness with its full light, he would be a sitting duck for the railway police patrolling on horseback.

After a mile, he came to a Y junction where the spur split. The left-hand spur, which he had been climbing, descended to the construction yard. The spur to the right veered to join the newly completed main line to the south. He checked the switch that controlled which spur was connected.

The switch was positioned so that a train descending from the lumber mill would be routed toward the construction yard. He was tempted to send the heavy car on to the main line. Properly timed, it would collide head-on with a northbound locomotive. But such a collision would block the tracks so the dispatchers would have to stop all trains, which would block his only way out from this end of the line.

The grade continued, a little lighter, and he increased his pace. After another mile, he saw the dark gondola looming. It was still there!

Suddenly, he heard something. He stopped walking. He froze in place. He cupped his hands to his ears. He heard it again, an incongruous sound. Laughter. Drunken men laughing, farther up the mountain. Way in the distance, he could see the orange glow of a campfire. Lumberjacks, he realized, sharing a bottle of Squirrel whiskey. They were too far away to hear him or see him, blinded by the blaze of their fire. Even if they heard the car roll through the switch, by then there would be no stopping it.

He stepped from the spur across a ditch to the siding on which sat the laden gondola. He found the switch handle and threw it, closing the point where the two sets of tracks met, joining the siding to the lumber spur. Then he went to the gondola, kicked wooden chocks from under the front truck, found the cold rim of the brake and turned it until the brake shoes lifted from the car’s massive iron wheels.

Now she could roll, and he waited for her to start moving of her own weight since the siding was on an incline. But she sat fast, locked by gravity or the natural minute flattening of her wheels as she sat heavily on the rails. He would have to improvise a car mover.

He went to the back of the gondola, placed his horseshoe a few inches behind the rearmost wheel, propped his crowbar under the wheel where it met the rail, and lowered the bar to the horseshoe, which would serve as his fulcrum. He threw his weight down on the bar and rocked on it.

The bar slipped with a loud screech of metal on metal. He shoved it under the wheel again and resumed rocking. The wheel moved an inch. He jammed the crowbar in deeper, kicked the horseshoe to meet it, and again threw his weight on his makeshift car mover.

A voice spoke, directly overhead, almost in his ear.

“What you doing there?”

He fell back, astonished. Leaning down from the heap of crossties was a lumberjack, waking from a drunken sleep, breath reeking as he slurred, “Partner, you start her rolling, she won’t stop ‘til she hits bottom. Let me hop down before she sets off.”

The Wrecker swung the crowbar in a lightning blur.

The heavy steel crunched against the drunk’s skull and knocked him back on the ties like a rag doll. The Wrecker watched for movement, and, when there was none, calmly resumed rocking on the crowbar as if nothing had happened.

He felt the space between the wheel and fulcrum open. The gondola was rolling. He dropped the crowbar and jumped on the car with the tin of coal oil. The car rolled slowly toward the switch and rumbled through it and onto the spur, where it gathered speed. He scrambled past the body of the drunk and turned the brake, tightening it until he felt the shoes rub the wheels, slowing the gondola to about ten miles an hour. Then he opened the tin and splashed the oil on the ties.

The gondola rolled on for a mile to the Y junction, where the grade began to steepen.

He lit a match and, shielding it from the wind of passage, touched it to the coal oil. As the flames spread, he released the brakes. The gondola lunged ahead. He hung down behind the back wheels. The moon chose that moment to clear a mountain and cast light on the tracks brightly enough to illuminate a safe place for him to jump. The Wrecker took it as his just due. He had always been a lucky man. Things always broke his way. Just as they were breaking his way now. He jumped, landed easily. He could hear the gondola turning to the left, rumbling heavily through the Y junction and toward the construction yard.

He turned to the right, down the spur to the main line, away from the yard. The wheels made a humming sound as the gondola sped down the steep grade. The last thing he saw was orange flames moving rapidly down the mountain. In three minutes, every cinder dick on the mountain would be running hell-bent toward the construction yard while he was running the other way.

SWAYING AS IT ACCELERATED to thirty, forty, then fifty miles an hour, trailing flames behind it, the runaway gondola began to shake its cargo, causing the massive crossties to creak against one another like the timbers of a ship in a heavy sea. The lumberjack, whose name was Don Albert, rolled one way and then the other, arms and legs flopping. His hand slipped into a slot between two ties. When the squared timbers shifted back against each other again and slammed shut on his fingers, he awoke with a howl of pain.

Albert stuck his fingers in his mouth and sucked hard, and began to wonder why everything seemed to be moving. His head, which hurt like hell, was spinning. The cloying taste of red-eye whiskey in his craw explained both familiar sensations. But why did the stars overhead keep shifting position? And why did the splintery wood he was sprawled against seem to vibrate? He reached under his thick knit cap with the hand that didn’t hurt and felt a sharp pain in his skull and the stickiness of blood. Must have fallen on his head. Good thing he has a skull like a cannonball.

No, he hadn’t fallen. He’d gotten into a fight. He vaguely remembered talking to a tall, rangy jigger right before the lights went out. The damnedest thing was, he felt like he was on a train. Where he had found a train in a remote lumber camp halfway up a mountain in the Cascades was a mystery to him. Still sprawled on his back, he looked around. There was a fire behind him. The wind was blowing the flames away from him, but it was too close for comfort. He could feel the heat.

A whistle screamed so close he could touch it.

Don Albert sat up and was nearly blinded by a locomotive headlight right in his face. He was riding a train all right, rolling fast, a mile a minute, with flames behind him and another train in front of him coming straight at him. A hundred lights whirled around him like lights inside a nickelodeon: the flames behind him, the locomotive’s headlamp flanked by green signal lights in front of him, the electric lights on poles glaring down at the freight yard, the lights in the yard’s buildings, the lights in the tents, the lantern lights bouncing up and down as men ran for their lives, trying to get out of the way of the runaway train on which he was riding.

The locomotive blowing its whistle was not coming straight at him after all but was on a track next to the one he was rolling on. That was a huge relief, until he saw the switch dead ahead.

At sixty miles an hour, the heavy gondola blasted through the closed switch as if it were made of straw instead of steel and side-swiped the locomotive, which was a switch engine shuttling a string of empty boxcars. The gondola slammed past the locomotive in a thunderstorm of sparks, screeched against the locomotive’s tender and into the empties, which tumbled off the tracks as if a child had swept a checkerboard with an angry fist.

The impact barely slowed the burning gondola. Upon jumping the tracks, it crashed into a wooden roundhouse filled with mechanics repairing locomotives. Before Don Albert could even think of leaping for his life, the lights went out again.

THREE MILES TO THE south, the right spur joined the main line where it began rising in a steep grade. The Wrecker climbed the incline for a half mile and retrieved a canvas gripsack he had stashed in a thick stand of lodgepole pine. He extracted wire cutters, climbing spurs, and gloves from the grip, strapped the spurs to his boots, and waited beside a telegraph pole for the first freight train of empties that regularly headed south for fresh loads. The northern sky began to glow red. He watched with satisfaction as the redness grew brighter and brighter, blotting out the starlight. As planned, the runaway had started a fire in the construction camp and rail yard.

No train came. He feared that he had been too successful and wreaked so much havoc that no freights could leave the yard. If so, he was trapped near the end of the line with no way out. But at last he saw the white glow of a headlight approaching. He donned his gloves, climbed the telegraph pole, and snipped all four wires.

Back on the ground, having severed the head of the cutoff from the rest of the world, he could hear the freight train’s 2-8-0 Consolidation huffing up the grade. The grade slowed it enough for him to jump aboard an open car.

He bundled up in a canvas coat he took from the gripbag and slept until the train stopped for water. Carefully watching for the brakemen, he climbed a telegraph pole and cut the wires. He slept again, scrambling awake to cut more wires at the next water stop. At dawn, he found himself still trundling slowly south on the main line in what was a bright green cattle car that stank of mules. It was so cold, he could see his breath.

He stood, cautiously, for a look around when the freight rounded a curve and ascertained that his green car was in a string of some fifty empties, midway between a slow but powerful locomotive in front and a faded red caboose in back. He ducked down before the brakeman looked out from the caboose’s raised cupola for his periodic inspection of the train. In just a few more hours, the Wrecker would jump off at Dunsmuir.