The Wrecker

46

JAMES DASHWOOD LOCATED ST. SWITHUN’S MONASTERY FROM A clue dropped by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union orator Captain Willy Abrams: “A heck of a spread.”

Its boundaries encompassed thirteen thousand acres that sprawled from the foothills of the Santa Lucia Mountains to the bluffs that reared over the Pacific Ocean. A muddy road miles from the nearest town led through iron gates onto an undulating plateau planted in orchards of fruit trees, nut trees, and vineyards. The chapel was a spare, modern building with simple Art Nouveau stained-glass windows. Low stone buildings of similar design housed the monks. They ignored James when he asked to see a recent arrival, a blacksmith named Jim Higgins.

Man after man in swaying robes walked past him as if he did not exist. Monks harvesting grapes and picking nuts just kept working no matter what he said. Finally, one took pity, picked up a stick, and wrote in the mud vow OF SILENCE.

Dashwood took the stick and wrote BLACKSMITH?

The monk pointed at a cluster of barns and corrals opposite the dormitories. Dashwood headed there, heard the distinctive clank of a hammer on iron, and quickened his pace. Rounding a barn, he saw a thin column of smoke rising through the branches of a chestnut tree. Higgins was bent over a forge, pounding a horseshoe on the horn of his anvil.

He wore a brown robe under his leather apron. His head was bare to the cold drizzle. The robe made him look even bigger than Dashwood remembered. In one powerful hand, he gripped a massive hammer, and in the other long tongs that held red-hot iron. When he looked up and saw Dashwood in his city clothes carrying a suitcase, Dashwood had to suppress the strong impulse to flee.

Higgins stared long and hard at Dashwood.

Dashwood said, “I hope you haven’t taken vows of silence like the others.”

“I’m just a novice. How did you find me?”

“When I heard you stopped drinking, I went to temperance meetings.”

Higgins gave a snort that was half laugh, half angry growl. “Figured the last place the Van Dorns would find me would be in a monastery.”

“You were scared by the sketch I showed you.”

Higgins raised the hot horseshoe in his tongs. “Guess I figured wrong …”

“You recognized him, didn’t you?”

Higgins threw the horseshoe into a bucket of water. “Your name is James, ain’t it?”

“Yes. We’re both Jims.”

“No, you’re a James, I’m a Jim …” He leaned his tongs against the anvil and stood his hammer beside it. “Come on, James. I’ll show you around.”

Jim Higgins lumbered off toward the bluff. James Dashwood followed him. He caught up and walked beside Higgins until they had to stop at the bluff’s crumbling edge. The Pacific Ocean spread as far as they could see, gray and forbidding under a lowering sky. Dashwood looked down, and his guts clenched. Hundreds of feet below them, the ocean thundered on a rocky beach, hurling up spray. Had Higgins lured him to this lonely precipice to throw him to his death?

“I have known for some time that I was going to Hell,” the blacksmith intoned gravely. “That’s why I stopped drinking whiskey. But it didn’t help. Stopped beer. Still going to Hell.” He turned to James Dashwood with burning eyes. “You turned me inside out when you came along. Scared me into running. Scared me into hiding.”

James Dashwood wondered what he should say. What would Isaac Bell do under these circumstances? Try to clamp handcuffs around his thick wrists? Or let him talk?

“Bunch of big shots started this monastery,” Higgins was saying. “Lot of these monks are rich men who gave up everything to live the simple life. You know what one of them told me?”

“ No. ”

“Told me that I’m blacksmithing exactly like they did in the Bible, except I burn mineral coal in my forge instead of charcoal. They say that working like folks in the Bible is good for our souls.”

He turned his back on the cliff and fixed his gaze on the fields and meadows. The drizzle strengthening into rain shrouded the vineyards and the fruit trees.

“I figured I was safe here,” he said.

He stared for a long time before he spoke again.

“What I didn’t figure was liking it here. I like working outdoors under a tree instead of cooped up with trucks and automobiles stinking up the air. I like being with weather. I like watching storms …” He whirled around to face the Pacific, which was checkered with dark squalls. To the southwest, the sky was turning black as coal. “See there?” he asked Dashwood, pointing to the blackness.

Dashwood saw a grim, cold ocean, a crumbling precipice at his feet, and rocks far below.

“Look, James. Don’t you see it coming?”

It struck the apprentice detective that the blacksmith had gone crazy long before the train wreck. “See what, Jim?”

“The storm.” The blacksmith’s eyes were burning. “Mostly, they angle in from the northwest, a monk told me, down from the northern Pacific where it’s cold. This one’s coming from the south where it’s warm. From the south brings more rain … You know what?”

“What?” Dashwood asked, hope fading.

“There’s a monk here whose daddy owns a Marconi wireless telegraph. Do you know that right now, four hundred miles at sea, there’s a ship telegraphing to the Weather Bureau what the weather is out there!” He fell silent, contemplating that discovery.

It was a chance to prime the pump, and James seized it. “They got the idea from Ben Franklin.”

“Huh?”

“I learned it in high school. Benjamin Franklin noticed that storms are moving formations, that you can track where they’re going.”

The blacksmith looked intrigued. “He did?”

“So when Samuel Morse invented the telegraph, it made it possible to send warnings to folks in the storm’s path. Like you say, Jim, now Marconi’s wireless telegraph lets ships send radiotelegraph storm warnings from way out in the ocean.”

“So the Weather Bureau’s known about that one for quite some time now? Isn’t that something?”

Dashwood reckoned that the weather had taken them about as far as they could go.

“How did I scare you?” he asked.

“That picture you showed me.”

“This?” Dashwood took the sketch without the mustache from his suitcase.

The blacksmith turned away. “That’s who wrecked the Coast Line Limited,” he said softly. “Except you got his ears too big.”

Dashwood rejoiced. He was closing in. He reached into his bag. Isaac Bell had wired him to get in touch with a pair of Southern Pacific cinder dicks named Tom Griggs and Ed Bottomley. Griggs and Bottomley had taken Dashwood out, got him drunk and into the arms of a redhead at their favorite brothel. Then they’d taken him to breakfast and given him the hook that had derailed the Coast Line Limited. He pulled the heavy cast iron out of his bag. “Did you make this hook?”

The blacksmith eyed it morosely. “You know I did.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Because they’d blame me for killing those poor people.”

“What was his name?”

“Never said his name.”

“If you didn’t know his name, why did you run?”

The blacksmith hung his head. Tears welled in his eyes and rolled down his red cheeks.

Dashwood had no idea what to do next, but he did sense that it would be a mistake to speak. He turned his attention to the ocean in an effort to remain silent, hoping the man would resume his confession. The weeping blacksmith took Dashwood’s silence as condemnation.

“I didn’t mean no harm. I didn’t mean to hurt nobody. But who would they believe, me or him?”

“Why wouldn’t they believe you?”

“I’m just a blacksmith. He’s a big shot. Who would you believe?”

“What kind of big shot?”

“Who would you believe? A drunken smithy or a senator?”

“A senator?” Dashwood echoed in utter despair. All his work, all his chasing, all his running down the blacksmith had led him to a lunatic.

“He always hugged the dark,” Higgins whispered, brushing at his tears. “In the alley behind the stable. But the boys opened the door and the light fell on his face.”

Dashwood remembered the alley. He remembered the door. He could imagine the light. He wanted to believe the blacksmith. And yet he couldn’t.

“Where had you seen that senator before?”

“Newspaper.”

“A good likeness?”

“Like you standing there beside me,” Higgins answered, and Dashwood decided that the man believed every word as strongly as he blamed himself for the wreck of the Coast Line Limited. But belief did not necessarily make him sane. “The man I saw looked just like that big-shot senator. It couldn‘t’ve been him. But if it was-if it was him-I knew I was in a terrible fix. Big trouble. Trouble I deserved. By the work of this hand.”

Weeping harder, chest heaving, he held up a meaty paw wet with his tears.

“By the work of this hand, those people died. The engineer. The fireman. That union feller. That little boy …”

A gust of wind whipped Higgins’s monk’s robe, and he looked down at the crashing waves as if they offered peace. Dashwood dared not breathe, certain that one wrong word, a simple “Which senator?” would cause Jim Higgins to jump off the cliff.

OSGOOD HENNESSY WAS READING the riot act to his lawyers, having finished excoriating his bankers for bad news on Wall Street, when the meeting was interrupted by a short, amiable-looking fellow wearing a string tie, a vest, a creamy-white Stetson, and an old-fashioned single-action .44 on his hip.

“Excuse me, gents. Sorry to interrupt.”

The railroad attorneys looked up, their faces blossoming with hope. Any interruption that derailed their angry president was a gift from Heaven.

“How’d you get past my conductor?” Hennessy demanded.

“I informed your conductor-and the gentleman detective with the shotgun-that I am United States Marshal Chris Danis. I have a message from Mr. Isaac Bell for Mr. Erastus Charney. Is Mr. Charney here by any chance?”

“That’s me,” said the plump and jowly Charney. “What’s the message?”

“You’re under arrest.”

THE WINCHESTER RIFLE SLUG that had nearly blown the renegade telegrapher Ross Parker off his horse had shredded his right biceps and riddled the muscle with bone splinters. Doc said he was lucky it hadn’t shattered his humerus instead of just chipping it. Parker wasn’t feeling lucky. Two and a half weeks after the Van Dorn detective with the Texas drawl had shot him and killed two of his best men, it still hurt so bad that the act of lifting his arm to turn the key in his post office box made his head swim.

It hurt more to reach into the box to extract the Wrecker’s letter. It even hurt to slit the envelope with his gravity knife. Cursing the private dick who had shot him, Parker had to steady himself on a counter as he removed the luggage ticket he had been hoping to find.

The daily Weather Bureau postcard with the forecast stamped on it sat on the counter in a metal frame. The rural mail carrier had delivered one every day to the widow’s farm outside of town where he had been recuperating. The forecast today was the same as yesterday and same as the day before: more wind, more rain. Yet another reason to get out of Sacramento while the getting was good.

Parker took the luggage ticket around the corner to the railroad station and claimed the gripsack the Wrecker had left there. He found the usual wads of twenty-dollar bills inside, along with a map of northern California and Oregon showing where the wires should be cut and a terse note: “Start now.”

If the Wrecker thought Ross Parker was going to climb telegraph poles with his arm half blown off and two of his gang shot dead, the saboteur had another think coming. Parker’s plans for this bag of money did not include working for it. He practically galloped across the station to line up at the ticket window.

A big man shoved ahead of him. With his vest, knit cap, checked shirt, dungarees, walrus mustache, and hobnailed boots, he looked like a lumberjack. Smelled like one too, reeking of dried sweat and wet wool. All he was missing was a double-bladed ax slung over one shoulder. Ax or no ax, he was too big to argue with, Parker conceded, particularly with a bum arm. A bigger fellow, smelling the same, got on line behind him.

The lumberjack bought three tickets to Redding and paused nearby to count his change. Parker bought a ticket to Chicago. He checked the clock. Plenty of time for lunch and a snort. He left the station and went looking for a saloon. Suddenly, the lumberjacks who’d been on the ticket line fell in on either side of him.

“Chicago?”

“What?”

“Mr. Parker, you can’t take the train to Chicago.”

“How do you know my name?”

“Folks are counting on you right here.”

Ross Parker thought fast. These two must have been watching the luggage room. Which meant the Wrecker, whoever the hell he was, was several jumps ahead of him.

“I got hurt,” he said. “Shot. I can’t climb a pole.”

“We’ll climb for you.”

“Are you a lineman?”

“How tall’s a telegraph pole?”

“Sixteen feet.”

“Mister, we’re high riggers. We top spar trees two hundred feet off the ground and stay up there for lunch.”

“It’s more than climbing. Can you splice wire?”

“You’ll learn us how.”

“Well, I don’t know. It takes some doing.”

“Don’t matter. We’ll be doing more cutting than splicing anyhow.”

“You have to splice, too,” said Parker. “Snipping wires isn’t enough if you want to shut the system and keep it shut. You have to hide your cuts so the repair gang don’t see where the line is broken.”

“If you can’t learn us how to splice,” the lumberjack said conversationally, “we’ll kill you.”

Ross Parker resigned himself to his fate.

“When do you want to start?”

“Like it says on your map. Now.”