The Wrecker

51

THE FOREST HURTLED DOWN THE STEEP MOUNTAIN ON A landslide of mud and tumbling boulders. Astonishingly, the sliding trees remained standing upright as the mass of ground they grew in bore down on the Van Dorn Express.

“Hit your throttle!”

The engineer panicked.

Instead of throttling the big Pacific to outrun the juggernaut of timber, mud, and rock, he tried to stop the train, hauling back his Johnson bar and slamming on his air brakes. With only one lightweight diner car behind the tender, the locomotive slowed abruptly. Bell, Dashwood, and the fireman were thrown against the firewall.

Bell scrambled to his feet and faced the rumbling mountain. “Ahead!” he shouted, wresting the throttle from the engineer. “Full ahead!”

The engineer recovered his nerve and jammed the Johnson bar forward. Bell shoved the throttle. The big engine leaped as if stampeding for its life. But the landslide picked up speed, the mass of towering trees still moving as one. Wider than the train was long, it tore down the mountain like an ocean liner launched sideways.

Bell felt a blast of wind so powerful it actually rocked the speeding locomotive. The airburst that the landslide pushed ahead of it was wet and cold. It chilled the hot cab as if the coal fire raging under its boiler had been extinguished.

Then the hurtling mass began to break apart. As it crumbled, it spread out wider.

The trees on the edges of the hurtling forest pitched forward, thrusting at the train like gigantic lances. Stones shoved ahead of the main mass bounced on the tracks and clattered against the locomotive. A boulder as big as an anvil burst through the cab’s side window and smashed the fireman and the engineer to the floor.

Dashwood jumped to help the bloodied men. Bell yanked him back. A second boulder tore like a cannon ball through the space his head had just occupied. Massive stones rocked the locomotive, thundered against the tender and shattered windows in the passenger car, showering detectives with broken glass.

The landslide split in two. Half tore ahead of the locomotive. Accelerating, it angled toward the tracks like a runaway train racing the Van Dorn Express to a junction where only one of them could pass. It was a race that Bell’s train could not win. A boiling torrent of rocks and mud buried the tracks ahead of the engine.

The larger half of the landslide impaled the passenger car with tree trunks. A boulder bigger than a barn crashed into the tender and swept it off the tracks. The heavy tender, which rode between the locomotive and the passenger car, started to drag both with it. Its coupler held tight to the locomotive, pulling its rear truck off the rails. The rails spread under the enormous forces, dumping the locomotive’s drive wheels onto the ties. The hundred-ton engine leaned toward the ravine and, still lurching ahead, began to tip over. Then her pilot wheels ran into the rocks heaped up by the landslide. She reared up onto them and stopped suddenly. The violent stop broke the coupling to the tender and the tender tumbled into the ravine.

Bell looked back, searching for the car carrying his detectives.

Shattered telegraph poles dangled from their wires. Two hundred yards of track were buried in mud, rock, and crushed timber. Had the coupling to the passenger car snapped, too? Or had the tender dragged it into the ravine with it? Where the detectives’ car had been was a jagged mound of trees. Bell rubbed the rain from his eyes and stared harder, hoping against hope. Then he saw it. It was still on the road, shattered wreckage held in place by fallen trees thrust through its windows like knitting needles in a hank of yarn.

Bell cupped his hands to shout across the debris-strewn gouge in the mountain that had been railroad tracks. “Eddie! Are you O.K.?”

Bell cocked his ears for an answer. All he could hear was a river tumbling through the ravine and steam hissing from the wrecked engine. He called again and again. Through the rain, he thought he saw a familiar flash of white hair. Eddie Edwards waved one arm. The other hung limp at this side.

“Busted up,” Eddie shouted back. “None dead!”

“I’m going ahead. I’ll send a doctor on the wreck train. James. Quick!”

The boy was white as a sheet. His eyes were round with shock.

“Handcar. Move. Now!”

Bell led the way out of the leaning cab to the front of the precariously balanced engine. The handcar was intact. They untied it from the pilot and carried it, slipping and stumbling over fifty feet of rock that had tumbled onto the rails. Minutes later, Bell was pumping the handles and pedals with all his strength.

Fifteen miles up the line, they came upon a freight train waiting on a siding. Bell ordered the locomotive unhitched, and they drove it backward the last ten miles to Tunnel 13. They thundered through the tunnel. The engineer slowed her as they emerged into the yard, which was crowded with material trains that had been barred from crossing the weakened bridge. Bell was surprised to see a heavy coal train parked on the bridge itself. The black cargo heaped on fifty hopper cars glistened in the rain.

“I thought the bridge can’t bear weight. Did they fix it already?”

“Lord, no,” replied the engineer. “They’ve got a thousand hands down at the piers, working round the clock, but it’s touch-and-go. A week’s more work, and the river’s rising.”

“What’s that coal train doing there?”

“The bridge started shaking. They’re trying to stabilize it with down pressure.”

Bell could see that the main staging yard on the far side of the bridge was also packed with trains. Empties, with no way back to the California shops and depots. Having all hands working at the piers explained the eerie sense of a deserted encampment.

“Where’s the dispatch office?”

“They set up a temporary one on this side. In that yellow caboose.”

Bell jumped down from the locomotive and ran to the caboose, Dashwood right behind him. The dispatcher was reading a week-old newspaper. The telegrapher was dozing at his silent key.

“Where is Senator Kincaid?”

“Most every one’s down at the town,” said the dispatcher.

The telegrapher opened his eyes. “Last I saw, he was heading for the Old Man’s special. But I wouldn’t go there, if I was you. Hennessy’s hoppin’ mad. Somebody sent him four trains of coal instead of the traprock they need to riprap the piers.”

“Round up a doctor and a wreck train. There’re men hurt at a landslide fifteen miles down the line. Come on, Dash!”

They ran across the bridge, past the parked coal train. Bell saw ripples in the rain puddles. The weakened structure was trembling despite the weight of the coal train. A glance over the side showed that the Cascade River had risen many feet in the nine days since he left for New York. He could see hundreds of workmen ganged on the banks, guiding barges with long ropes, dumping rock in the water, trying to divert the flood, while hundreds more swarmed over new coffer dams and caissons being sunk around the piers.

“Have you participated in many arrests?” Bell asked Dashwood as they neared the special on its raised siding. Train and yard crews were changing shifts. A row of white yardmen’s lanterns and signal flags were lined up beside Hennessy’s locomotive, the lanterns glowing in the murky light.

“Yes, sir. Mr. Bronson let me come along when they captured ‘Samson’ Scudder.”

Bell hid a smile. The ironically named Samson Scudder, a prolific second-story man who weighed ninety pounds dripping wet, was known as the sweetest-natured crook in San Francisco.

“This one’s poison,” he warned soberly. “Stick close and do exactly what I say.”

“Should I draw my firearm?”

“Not on the train. There’ll be people around. Stand by with your handcuffs.”

Bell strode alongside Hennessy’s special and up the steps to Nancy No. 1. The detective he had assigned to guard the car since Philip Dow’s attack was covering the vestibule with a sawed-off.

“Senator Kincaid aboard?”

Osgood Hennessy stuck his head out the door. “You just missed him, Bell. What’s going on?”

“Which way did he go?”

“I don’t know. But he parked that Thomas Flyer up the line.”

“He’s the Wrecker.”

“The devil, you say.”

Bell turned to the Van Dorn detective. “If he comes back, arrest him. If he gives you any trouble, shoot first or he’ll kill you.”

“Yes, sir!”

“Send word to Archie Abbott. Railway cops to guard the bridge and the town in case Kincaid doubles back. Van Dorns, follow me. Dash! Grab a flag and a couple of lanterns.”

Dashwood picked up a signal flag, which was rolled tightly around its wooden staff, and two yardman’s lanterns and ran after Bell.

“Give me one!” Bell said, explaining, “If we look like we’re railroad men, it will buy us a few seconds to get closer.”

From the vantage of the raised siding, Bell scanned the ranks of still trains and the narrow walkways between the sidings. He had less than six hours of daylight to catch up with Kincaid. He looked toward the bridge. Then he looked toward the end of the line where new construction had ceased when they learned the bridge had been sabotaged. The road was brushed out, cleared of trees and shrubs, well past the point it crossed the mud road to East Oregon Lumber.

He could not see Kincaid’s Thomas Flyer from where he stood. Had Kincaid already reached his car and driven away? Then, on the edge of the deserted yards, he saw a man emerge from between two strings of empty freight cars. He was walking briskly toward a pair of locomotives that were parked side by side where the tracks ended.

“There he is!”