The Wrecker

50

“WE’VE BEEN HAVING TROUBLE ALL DAY.”

“Wire Dunsmuir!” said Bell. He had posted Van Dorn operatives at that railroad center. He would order them to commandeer a locomotive north to tell Archie to arrest the Wrecker.

The telegrapher tried, with no success. “Dead to Dunsmuir.”

“Wire Redding.” Texas Walt Hatfield was watching Redding.

“Sorry, Mr. Bell. It appears all lines are dead from here in Sacramento north.”

“Find a way around it.”

Bell knew that multiple telegraph lines connected Sacramento to the rest of the country. Commercial networks linked large towns and cities. The second system was the railroad’s private network for transmitting train orders.

“I’ll get right on it.”

With Bell at his shoulder, the telegrapher polled train-order stations in the region, trying to gauge the extent of the system’s failure.

The anxious dispatcher hovered, explaining, “North of Weed, Western Union lines follow the old Siskiyou route to Portland. The new Cascades Cutoff has only the railroad wires.”

“They’ve been deluged by rain,” said the telegrapher, still waiting for responses. “Ground gets soft, poles fall.”

Bell paced the floor.

All wires down?

Not due to weather, he was certain.

This was the Wrecker’s work. Kincaid was taking no chances that Bell would figure out who he was. He had isolated the Cascades Cutoff railhead for a final assault on the bridge to bring the cutoff to a standstill and bankrupt the Southern Pacific. He would attack the reinforcement effort while the piers were still vulnerable.

“Avalanches of mud, too,” said the dispatcher. “And there’s more rain coming.”

Desperate to placate the grim-faced, furiously pacing detective, the dispatcher snatched the morning papers off his desk. The Sacramento Union reported rivers twenty feet above the low-water mark and numerous washouts already. Preston Whiteway’s San Francisco Inquirer ballyhooed the “Storms of the Century” with a luridly embellished illustration of the Weather Bureau map that showed a series of Pacific storms hot on the heels of the first.

“‘The floods could be the most serious in Oregon’s history,”’ the dispatcher read aloud. “‘Railroad tracks in the valleys are underwater and may be washed away.”’

Bell kept pacing. A freight trundled by, rattling windows in their wooden frames. Clouds enveloped the building as Bell’s locomotive, parked alongside, was forced to let off steam she had built to speed him to the Cascade Canyon Bridge.

“The wires are open to San Francisco and Los Angeles,” reported the telegrapher, confirming Bell’s worst fear. The Wrecker-Kincaid-was concentrating on the Cascades route.

“Loop around through San Francisco or from Los Angeles up to Portland and then down from there.”

But the Wrecker’s telegraph saboteurs had thought about that, too. Not only was all telegraph dead from Sacramento to the north, lines from farther north-from Dunsmuir, Weed, and Klamath Falls-were down, too. Charles Kincaid had completely isolated the cutoff railhead at the Cascade Canyon Bridge.

Bell whirled toward a commotion at the door. Jason Adler, the American States Bank auditor, burst in.

“Mr. Bell. Mr. Bell. I’ve just gone through the telegrams we picked up when we arrived here. We’ve found a company he controls through the Schane and Simon Company. They bought East Oregon Lumber, which has a contract with the Southern Pacific Railroad to supply crossties and lumber to the cutoff.”

“Where?” Bell asked with a sinking heart. But the name said it all.

“Above the Canyon Bridge on the Cascade River. That’s the same bridge his Union Pier and Caisson-”

“Clear the track!” Bell commanded the Sacramento dispatcher in a voice that rang like steel.

“But materials and work trains have priority on the cutoff, sir.”

“My train has authority straight through to the Cascade Canyon Bridge,” Bell shot back.

“But with the lines dead, we can’t clear the track.”

“We will clear the track as we go!”

“I protest,” said the dispatcher. “This is a breach of all safety procedures.”

Bell hurried out to the train, shouting orders.

“Uncouple the Pullman. Accountants, lawyers, translators, and auditors: stay here. Keep digging until we know everything Kincaid planned. We don’t want any more surprises blowing up in our faces. Armed operatives, get on the train!”

Brakemen scrambled. When they had uncoupled the extra car, Bell saw James Dashwood standing forlornly in the Pullman’s vestibule.

“What are you waiting for, James? Get on the train.”

“I don’t have a gun.”

“What?”

“You said ‘armed operatives,’ Mr. Bell. Van Dorn apprentices are only allowed to carry handcuffs.”

Guffawing detectives exchanged incredulous looks.

Hadn’t anyone told the kid that that was the first rule you broke?

Bell raised his voice. “Boys, meet James Dashwood, former apprentice with the San Francisco office. He’s just been promoted for uncovering a key clue that exposed Senator Charles Kincaid as the Wrecker. Can anyone lend him a firearm?”

Fists plunged into coats, hats, waistbands, and boots. An arsenal of automatics, revolvers, derringers, and pocket pistols flashed in the rainy light. Eddie Edwards got to Dashwood first and thrust a nickel-plated six-gun into his hand.

“Here you go, Dash. It’s double-action. Just keep squeezing the trigger. Reload when it stops making noise.”

“Get on the train!”

Bell climbed up into the Pacific’s cab.

“We’re cleared through to Cascade Canyon,” he told the engineer.

“How they gonna know we’re coming with the telegraph dead?”

“Good question. Stop at the roundhouse.”

Bell ran inside the dark and smoky cavern, where twenty locomotives were undergoing noisy repairs on the giant turntable. The Southern Pacific rail cops standing guard led him to the black and greasy foreman.

“Heard all about you, Mr. Bell,” the foreman shouted over the din of steel and iron. “What can I do for you?”

“How long will it take you to pull the headlamps off two of these locomotives and attach them to mine?”

“One hour.”

Bell pulled out a stack of double-eagle gold coins. “Make it fifteen minutes and these are yours.”

“Keep your money, Mr. Bell. It’s on the house.”

Fourteen minutes later, the Van Dorn Express accelerated out of Sacramento with a triangle of headlights blazing like a comet.

“Now they’ll see us coming!” Bell told the engineer.

He tossed the fireman his scoop.

“Shovel on coal.”

THE PACIFIC STORM THAT Jim Higgins had shown James Dashwood slammed into the mountain range that rimmed the coasts of northern California and southern Oregon and drenched the Siskiyous with eight inches of rain. Then it leaped the Coast Range as if lightened of its watery burden. Instead, it rained harder. The storm lumbered inland, deluging the narrow valleys of the Klamath River. The detectives aboard the Van Dorn Express saw logjams damming rivers, steel bridges swept away, and farmers in tall rubber boots trying to rescue stranded livestock from flooded fields.

Moving from southwest to northeast, the storm battered the eastern Cascades. The effect on the line leading to the cutoff threatened catastrophe. Streams and creeks jumped their banks. Rivers rose. Most ominously, rain-soaked hillsides began to move.

Dunsmuir’s Sacramento Street looked from the racing train like another brown river. People were paddling down it in canoes, dodging floating wooden sidewalks that the floodwaters had ripped from the buildings. In Weed, whole houses were afloat. On the run to Klamath Falls, farms looked like lakes, and Klamath Lake itself was as storm-tossed as an ocean. A lake steamer, torn loose from its mooring, was pressed by the current against a railroad trestle. Bell’s train squeezed by and kept going.

A landslide stopped them north of the lake.

A hundred feet of rail was buried under knee-deep mud and stone. Track gangs had come out from Chiloquin to clear it. The telegraph, they reported, had been dead when they left. No one knew how long it would take to repair. Bell sent the brakeman up a pole to tap into the wire. Still dead. At his command, the detectives piled down from the train in the driving rain and pitched in with shovels. They were moving again in a hour, the blistered, soaking-wet, mud-splattered men in a dangerous mood.

As night fell, they saw refugees from flooded farms huddled around bonfires.

Bell spotted a fleet of handcars parked on a siding when they stopped to water the locomotive in the Chiloquin yards. He ordered a lightweight three-wheeler, like the hand-pumped and pedaled track-inspection vehicle the Wrecker had stolen to derail the Coast Line Limited, tied onto his engine pilot. If the worst happened, if his train was stopped by another slide, they could carry it past the buried track and keep going.

A train dispatcher’s apprentice came running after them as they started out of the yards, piping in a thin voice that the telegraph wire had opened up from Sacramento. Bell learned that Southern Pacific linemen had encountered three separate acts of sabotage where cut wires were concealed with artful splicing. Proof, he told his operatives, that the Wrecker was swinging into action, isolating the head of the Cascades Cutoff for a final attack.

The second message through the repaired line was a wind-velocity warning from the U.S. Weather Bureau’s San Francisco forecast district. High winds meant more storms and more rain. Right behind that warning came reports that another storm had careened off the Pacific Ocean at Eureka. Eureka’s streets were flooded, a steamer had foundered in the approach to Humboldt Bay, and lumber schooners were adrift in the harbor.

It snowed in the north. Railroad traffic was at a standstill. Portland was paralyzed and cut off from Seattle, Tacoma, and Spokane. But the temperatures remained milder farther south, where heavy rains prevailed. On inland rivers, loggers drowned attempting to break up logjams that threatened to flood entire towns. The fast-moving new storm was already rampaging through the Klamath Mountains, catching up and combining with rear elements of the storm inundating the cutoff. The Portland forecast district’s eight p.m. forty-eight-hour forecast predicted more snow in the north and more rain in the south.

Bell tried again to telegraph Archie Abbott. The wires were still dead north of Chiloquin. The only way to communicate with the Cascade Canyon Bridge was to steam there on the Van Dorn Express.

The special pounded northward, triple headlights blazing. But it was forced repeatedly to slow when startled southbound train crews saw it coming, hit their brakes, and backed up onto the nearest siding many miles back. Only after the southbound freight was safely sidetracked could the Van Dorn Express surge ahead again.

Isaac Bell stayed all night in the locomotive cab. He spelled the fireman scooping coal into the firebox, but he was really there to encourage the frightened engineer to keep driving hard. They made it through the night without a collision. When a grim, gray dawn finally lit the stormy mountains, they were speeding along a narrow cut. A slope rose steeply to the left of the tracks and dropped sheer to the right.

James Dashwood came slipping and stumbling across the tender, balancing a pot of hot coffee. Bell portioned it out to the train crew before he took a grateful sip. When he looked up to thank Dashwood, he saw the newly promoted detective had fixed his gaze in wide-eyed horror on the mountainside.

Bell heard a deep growl, a low-pitched noise louder than the locomotive, that seemed to rumble from the depths of the earth. The rails shook beneath the heavy engine. A cliff detached from the side of the mountain.

“Hit your throttle!”

An entire forest of western hemlocks was sliding toward the tracks.