The Wrecker

47

HOUR AFTER HOUR, ISAAC BELL’S VAN DORN EXPRESS POUNDED up the steep approach to the Donner Pass. Cresting the summit at last, locomotive, tender, diner, and Pullman thundered between the stonework known as the “Chinese Walls” and roared through Summit Tunnel. Then it raced down the Sierra Nevada.

Gaining speed with every sloping mile, it topped a hundred five miles per hour. Even with another coal and water stop, Bell reckoned that at this rate they’d make Sacramento in an hour.

He wired ahead when the special stopped at Soda Springs. To save time changing locomotives, he asked the Sacramento superintendent to have a fresh engine standing by to race him north to the Cascade Canyon Bridge.

Bell kept making the rounds of his auditors, lawyers, detectives, and researchers, speaking repeatedly with every man on the train. They were closing in on the puzzle of which European bankers were paying for the Wrecker’s rampage. But how much closer was he to the Wrecker himself?

Ever since his father’s accountant had confirmed Charles Kincaid’s role as the Wrecker’s agent and spy, Bell had been mentally replaying the draw hand when he’d bluffed Kincaid on the Overland Limited. He recalled that he had bluffed the steel magnate James Congdon out of the hand first. That Kincaid had folded too had been more of a surprise. It was a smart fold. It had been the act of a calculating player, a player brave enough to cut his losses but a more cautious player than he had been all night. More cunning.

A strange phrase started churning in Bell’s mind: I am thinking the unthinkable.

ASTRIDE A CHESTNUT HORSE on a trail that overlooked his East Oregon Lumber Company, the Wrecker watched everything turn his way. The rains were arriving in earnest now. After many setbacks, his luck had changed. Snowstorms were sweeping the mountains to the north. Portland and Spokane were blizzard bound. But here fell rain, flooding the freshets, streams, and creeks that fed the Cascade River. “Lake Lillian” was topping its makeshift dam.

It was raining too hard to cut timber. East Oregon Lumber’s steam donkeys stood silent. The high-lead yarding lines, wire ropes that snaked logs to the mill, swayed idly in the wind. The greedy manager paced sullenly in his office. Mules dozed in the stables. Oxen huddled with their backs to the rain. Teamsters and lumberjacks sprawled in their bunkhouses, drunk on bootleg.

A Hell’s Bottom Flyer dugout canoe lay on the riverbank below the dam filled with rainwater. No work, no pay. Saloons rarely offered credit with winter coming on. Women never did.

The Wrecker turned his horse up the trail and rode the steep mile to Philip Dow’s cabin.

Dow did not come out to greet him. The Wrecker tied the horse under the lean-to, slung a saddlebag over his shoulder, and knocked on the door. Dow opened the door immediately. He had been watching through a rifle slit.

His eyes were feverish. The skin around the bandage that covered the remains of his ear was inflamed. Repeated douses of carbolic acid and raw whiskey were barely keeping infection at bay. But it was more than infection taking its toll, the Wrecker suspected. Dow’s failure to kill Isaac Bell and the subsequent shootout with the detective had left the assassin dangerously unbalanced.

“Powder, fuse, and detonators,” the Wrecker said, putting the bag down in the corner farthest from the fireplace. “Watertight. How is your hearing?”

“I can hear fine on this side.”

“Can you hear that locomotive whistle?” A Consolidation was blowing faintly nine miles down in the cutoff yards.

Dow cocked his good ear. “Now that you mention it …”

“You ought to have one of your boys up here with you so he can hear my signal to blow the dam.”

“I’ll leave the door open. I’m not deaf. I’ll hear it.”

The Wrecker did not argue the point. He needed to keep Dow in a loyal, cooperative frame of mind, and it was clear that in his current state a hulking, evil-smelling lumberjack inside his neat-as-a-pin cabin would provoke him to kill the man.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’ll tie down two whistles at once. You’ll hear them fine.”

The sound of simultaneously doubled locomotive whistles would fly up the mountain louder than winged banshees shrieking, “Blow Lake Lillian’s dam!”

“How are you going to manage that?”

“Do you believe that every trainman in those yards works for Osgood Hennessy?” the Wrecker asked enigmatically. “I’ll have two locomotives parked unattended at the edge of the yards. By the time anyone investigates why they’re blowing their whistles, you’ll have lit your fuse.”

Dow smiled. He liked that.

“You’re everywhere, aren’t you?” he said.

“Everywhere I have to be,” said the Wrecker.

Dow opened the saddlebag and inspected the explosives with a practiced eye.

“Blasting gelatin,” he said approvingly. “You know your business.”

The dam was soaking wet. Water would exude the nitroglycerine out of common dynamite. The Wrecker had brought gelignite, which would stand up to water. The detonators and the fuse passed muster too, liberally dipped in wax.

The Wrecker said, “I wouldn’t set the charge before noon tomorrow to be absolutely sure to keep the detonator dry.”

The ordinarily polite Dow revealed how tightly he was strung by snapping, “I know how to blow a dam.”

The Wrecker rode back down to the lake. Some logs had floated to the spillway, further impeding the flow. Excellent, he thought. By tomorrow afternoon, Lake Lillian would be even bigger. Suddenly, he leaned forward in his saddle, every nerve alert.

Down in the camp, a horseman was riding up the wagon trail from the Cascade Canyon Bridge. Eight miles of muddy ruts did not invite a casual ride even if it weren’t pouring rain. The man on that horse had come looking specifically for the East Oregon Lumber Company.

A Stetson covered his hair, a pale yellow slicker his torso and the rifle in its scabbard. But the Wrecker had a fair notion who it was. His first sight of him had been across Hammerstein’s Jardin de Paris theater seated next to Isaac Bell. Neither hat, slicker, nor the fact that he was astride a horse could conceal his shoulders-back, head-high, New York actor’s bearing that cried out Look at me!

A hungry smile twisted the Wrecker’s face as he pondered how to make use of this unexpected visit.

“Detective Archibald Angell Abbott IV,” he said aloud, “come a-calling …”

ARCHIBALD ANGELL ABBOTT IV liked nothing about the East Oregon Lumber Company. From the muddy eight-mile climb to the steam donkeys standing still and mute to the glum lumberjacks watching him from their bunkhouses, he saw nothing that made any economic sense. Even if he had never seen a timber operation-and he had, in fact, seen plenty in deep-woods Maine and the Adiron dacks while visiting Angell and Abbott family summer camps with his mother-he could tell that this remote and rugged site could not harvest enough timber to pay for all the new machinery much less make a profit.

He rode past the office and the bunkhouses.

No one even bothered to open a door to offer shelter from the rain.

He liked the lake even less. The ramshackle dam looked ready to burst. Water was leaking out top to bottom and pouring over the spillway in torrents. What was it doing here? He urged his horse up a steep trail for a closer look. The trail brought him to the top of the dam and a view of the lake. It was enormous, much bigger than it had to be. There was no race to channel the water. Besides, the modern circular saw blades he had seen down in the mill were powered by steam.

Abbott saw movement farther up the muddy trail. A horseman was coming down it at a dangerously fast trot. His flapping rain slicker was tucked to one side, exposing his rifle. Company cop on patrol, Abbott assumed.

Abbott leaned on the pommel of his saddle, rainwater dripping from his hat, and rolled a cigarette with the deft fingers of one hand. It was an old cowhand trick he had learned from Texas Walt Hatfield that suited his saddle-tramp disguise. He had just managed to get it smouldering with a damp match when he realized that the horseman descending on him was none other than Senator Charles Kincaid.

Well, well, well… The very man Isaac said to watch.

Abbott tossed his smoke in a puddle.

“Kincaid. What are you doing here?”

“I could ask you the same.”

“I’m doing my job. What are you doing?”

“I got curious about this operation.”

“So was Isaac Bell. Asked me to have a look.”

“What do you think?”

“You’ve seen more of it than me from up there.” Abbott nodded up the trail. “What do you think?”

“Strikes me as a thoroughly modernized operation,” answered the Wrecker as he weighed methods of killing Abbott. “All it’s lacking is a cable-draw works to snake timber down to the railhead.”

The heavy report of the Wrecker’s rifle would bring men running from the bunkhouse. So would the crack of the revolver he was carrying in his shoulder holster. Pressing the barrels of his pocketed derringer to the detective’s skull would muffle the sound. But to get close enough to do that, he would have to expose himself to a seasoned fighter, and Abbott looked thoroughly capable of killing him. So he had to use his telescoping sword. But it might tangle in his slicker. Best to get off their horses first, and farther away from the bunkhouses.

He was about to say that he had seen something up on the lake that Abbott would find interesting when he heard a woman call out. The Wrecker and Abbott turned toward the trail that entered into the skid road.

“Well, I’ll be darned,” Abbott said, smiling, and he raised his voice to call back, “Does your father know you’re here?”

“What do you think?”

Lillian Hennessy was mounted comfortably on the enormous Thunderbolt, the only horse in the company stables big enough to carry Jethro Watt. She touched her heels to Thunderbolt’s ribs, and the monster cantered amiably toward Abbott and Kincaid.

The young heiress’s cheeks were pinkened by the cold rain. Her eyes were an even paler shade of blue in the gray light. An alluring wisp of flaxen hair had escaped from her brimmed hat. If there was a more agreeable sight in Oregon at that moment, neither man could imagine it. Each produced his best smile.

“Charles, what are you doing here?”

“Whatever I’m doing here, I’m not disobeying my father.”

But she had already turned to Abbott with a smile. “Did you find the gunfight you were looking for?”

“Not yet,” he answered seriously. “I’m got to speak with the manager. Please wait for me. I’d rather you didn’t ride back alone.”

“She won’t be alone,” said Kincaid. “I’d ride her back.”

“That’s exactly what I meant,” said Abbott. “I’ll be back shortly, Lillian.”

He rode to the frame building that looked like an office, dismounted, and knocked on the door. A gaunt, hard-eyed man who looked to be in his late thirties opened it.

“What?”

“Archie Abbott. Van Dorn Agency. Have you a moment for a few questions?”

“No.”

Abbott stopped the door with his boot. “My client is the railroad. Seeing as how they’re your only customer, do you want me to complain?”

“Why didn’t you say so? Come in.”

The manager’s name was Gene Garret, and Abbott found it hard to believe that he was not aware that there was no way the operation could be turning a profit. When Abbott pressed, pointing out the expense that had gone into the operation, Garret snapped, “The owners pay me a good wage, plus a bonus for delivery. That says to me they’re making a profit and then some.”

Archie poked his head into the millhouse, looked over the machinery, and then joined Lillian and Kincaid, who were standing silently under the canvas lean-to with their horses. It was a slow ride down the awful road to the staging yards.

Abbott took Lillian’s horse to the stables so she could slip back onto her train undetected by her father. Then he went to telegraph a report to Isaac Bell, recommending that Van Dorn auditors delve deeply into the owners of East Oregon Lumber and reporting that he had discovered Kincaid on their property and would be keeping a close eye on him.

“I’ll send it the second the line’s repaired,” promised J.J. Meadows. “Wires just went dead as a doornail. Poles must have toppled from the rain.”

JAMES DASHWOOD LEAPED FROM the Southern Pacific Railroad ferry at Oakland Mole. White weather-warning flags with black centers were snapping in the stiff breeze blowing off San Francisco Bay. White with black centers forecast a sudden drop in temperature.

He ran full speed for the connecting train to Sacramento desperate to intercept Isaac Bell at that junction. His train was already rolling from the platform. He ran after it, jumped aboard at the last possible second, and stood on the rear vestibule catching his breath. As the train cleared the terminal building, he saw the white flags being hauled down. Up their staffs shot red flags with black centers. Just like the blacksmith predicted.

Storm warnings.