The Wrecker

31

A THOUSAND MEN MILLED ABOUT THE CUTOFF CONSTRUCTION camp at dawn. Twenty cars of wooden benches stood empty behind a locomotive venting excess steam. The men stood in the rain, preferring the cold and wet to shelter on the work train.

“Stubborn bastards!” Hennessy raged, watching from his private car. “Wire the Governor, Lillian. This is insurrection.”

Lillian Hennessy placed her fingers on the telegraph key. Before she tapped, she said to Isaac Bell, “Is there nothing else you can do?”

In Bell’s opinion, the men bunched in the rain did not look stubborn. They looked afraid. And they looked embarrassed to be afraid, which said a lot for their courage. The Wrecker had erased innocent lives by dynamite, train wreck, collision, and fire. Death and injury had attended attack after attack. Men had died in derailments, the tunnel collapse, the ditched Coast Line Limited, the runaway railcar, and the terrible explosion in New Jersey.

“The patrols have inspected every inch of rail,” he answered Lillian. “I don’t know what I can do that they haven’t done already. Short of riding on the cowcatcher to check it myself …”

The detective spun on his heel, strode from Hennessy’s car, crossed the rail yard at a rapid pace, and shouldered through the crowd. He climbed the ladder on the back of the work train’s tender, nimbly crossed the heaped coal, and jumped on the roof of the locomotive’s cab. From the vantage of the pulsing machine, he could see sullen track layers and hard-rock miners spread from one end of the yards to the other. They fell silent. A thousand faces were rising toward the incongruous sight of a man in a white suit standing on the locomotive.

Bell had once heard William Jennings Bryan address a crowd at the Atlanta Exposition. Standing in front near Bryan, he had been struck by how slowly the famous orator spoke. The reason, Bryan told him at a later meeting, was that words bunched up as they moved through the air. When they reached the back of the crowd, they arrived at a normal cadence.

Bell now raised his hands. He brought his voice up from deep within. He spoke slowly, very slowly. But every word was a challenge thrown in their faces.

“I will stand watch.”

Bell reached slowly into this coat.

“This locomotive will steam slowly to the railhead.”

Slowly, he drew his Browning pistol.

“I will stand on the cowcatcher on the front of this locomotive.”

He pointed the pistol at the sky.

“I will fire this pistol to signal the engineer to stop the train the instant I see danger.”

He squeezed the trigger. A shot echoed off the roundhouse and shops.

“The engineer will hear this shot.”

He fired again.

“He will stop the train.”

Bell held the weapon pointed at the sky and continued speaking slowly.

“I will not say that any man unwilling to ride behind me is the lowest coward in the Cascade Mountains.”

Another shot echoed.

“But I will say this … Any man unwilling to ride should go back to where he came from and live in the care of his mother.”

Laughter rumbled from one end of the yard to the other. There was a tentative surge of movement toward the train. For a second, he thought he had convinced them. But an angry voice bawled, “You ever work on a track gang?” And another voice: “How the hell will you know if something’s wrong?” Then a big man with a beefy red face and hot blue eyes clambered up the tender’s ladder and stalked across the coal to where Bell stood atop the locomotive’s cab. “I’m Malone. Track boss.”

“What do you want, Malone?”

“So you’re going to stand on the cowcatcher, are you? You don’t even know enough to call the engine Pilot by its proper name, and you’re going to spot what’s wrong on the rails before it blows you to kingdom come? Cowcatcher, for the love of God … But I’ll give you one thing: you got guts.”

The foreman thrust a callused hand at Bell.

“Put ‘er there! I’ll ride with you.”

The two men shook hands for all to see. Then Malone raised his voice, which carried like a steamship horn.

“Any man here says Mike Malone won’t know trouble when he sees it?”

None did.

“Any of youse wants to live with his mother?”

With a roar of laughter and a thousand cheers, the workmen jumped aboard the train and crowded into the wooden benches.

Bell and Malone climbed down and mounted the wedge-shaped pilot. There was room to stand on either side, hanging into a rail just under the locomotive’s headlamp. The engineer, conductor, and fire-man came up front for orders.

“How fast you want to go?” the engineer asked.

“Ask the expert,” said Bell.

“Keep her under ten miles a hour,” said Malone.

“Ten?” the engineer protested. “It’ll take two hours to get to the tunnel.”

“You prefer a shortcut over a cliff?”

The train crew trooped back to the cab.

Malone said, “Keep that pistol handy, mister.” Then he grinned at Bell. “Just remember, if we hit a mine or jump a loose rail, we’ll be the first to experience the consequences.”

“The thought had occurred to me,” Bell said drily. “But, fact is, I’ve had every foot of this line scoured for the past two days. Handcar, on foot, horse patrol.”

“We’ll see,” said Malone, grin fading.

“Would you like these?” asked Bell, offering his Carl Zeiss binoculars.

“No thanks,” said Malone. “I’ve been inspecting track with these eyes for twenty years. Today’s not the day to learn something new.”

Bell slung the binoculars strap over his head so he could drop the glasses and draw his pistol to fire a warning shot.

“Twenty years? You’re the man to tell me, Malone. What should I look for?”

“Missing spikes that hold the rails to the ties. Missing fishplates that join the rails. Breaks in the rails. Signs of digging in the ballast in case the bastard mined it. The roadbed’s newly laid. It should look smooth, no dips, no humps. Look for loose rock on the ties. And whenever we round a bend in the road, look extra hard ‘cause the saboteur knows that around the bend is where the engineer will never see it in time to stop.”

Bell raised the binoculars to his eyes. He was acutely aware that he had persuaded the thousand men behind him to risk their lives. As Malone had observed, he and Bell, riding in front, would take the brunt of an attack. But only at first. A derailment would tumble them all to their deaths.