The Chase

  Before they raced out of Ogden, Bell had procured a pile of blankets so the crews could catnap between shifts of driving the locomotive and feeding its boiler. At first, they found it impossible to sleep for short periods because of the clamor of the drive train, the hiss of steam, and the clatter of the steel wheels over the rails. But as exhaustion set in, they found it easier and easier to drift off until their turn came at the scoop and throttle again.

  Except for quick stops for coal and water, Adeline never slowed down. At one stop, in Spencer, Idaho, Bell learned that they were only fifty minutes behind Cromwell’s train. Knowing they were rapidly closing the distance inspired them to renew their efforts and work even harder.

  The mystery in Bell’s mind was the report given him by the Spencer stationmaster. It seemed that the Southern Pacific main track stopped at Missoula, with only a spur that went another eighty miles to the small port of Woods Bay, Montana, on Flathead Lake.

  “How do you read it?” Lofgren asked Bell after his place at the throttle was taken by Jongewaard.

  “Cromwell must have found another crew after driving the engineer and fireman from Winnemucca half to death,” said Bell.

  Lofgren nodded. “Without telegraph messages coming through and informing us otherwise, I have to believe he dumped them in the middle of nowhere, too, and forced a relay crew to come aboard for the final dash across the border.”

  “Then he’ll have to do it by driving over a road in an automobile.”

  Lofgren looked at him. “Why do you say that?”

  Bell shrugged. “The stationmaster at Spencer told me Southern Pacific’s tracks end at Woods Bay on the east shore of Flathead Lake. I assume the only way Cromwell can continue north into Canada is by road.”

  “I disagree. My guess is, he’s going to take his train onto the car ferry that runs across the lake.”

  Bell stared at Lofgren questioningly. “Car ferry?”

  Lofgren nodded. “Logs from timber operations in Canada are hauled on flatcars across the border to a small port on the west side of the lake called Rollins. From there, they are rolled onto a ferry that carries them across the lake. When they reach Woods Bay, they are coupled to trains that transport them to lumberyards around the Southwest.”

  “Why doesn’t Southern Pacific simply run their tracks north to Canada?”

  “The Great Northern Railroad received land rights from the government to cross the upper United States. They laid tracks that run from a landing on the west shore of Flathead Lake north to the border, where their locomotives are coupled to flatcars carrying logs hauled by the Canadian Pacific Railroad from the logging camps. Officials from both Great Northern and Southern Pacific refused to work together and never laid tracks that merged around the ends of the lake.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “My uncle lives in Kalispell, above the lake. He’s retired now, but he was an engineer for the Great Northern Railroad. He drove an engine between Spokane and Helena.”

  The interest in Bell’s voice gave way to trepidation. “So what you’re telling me is that Cromwell can ferry his train across the lake to the Northern Pacific tracks and go north into Canada without stepping off his freight car.”

  “That’s about the size of it.”

  “If he gets across on the car ferry before we can stop him…” His voice trailed off.

  Lofgren saw the apprehension in Bell’s eyes. “Don’t worry, Isaac,” he said confidently. “Cromwell can’t be more than ten miles up the track ahead of us. We’ll catch him.”

  For a long moment, Bell said nothing. Then he slowly reached in a breast pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. Slowly, he unfolded it and handed it to Lofgren.

  The engineer studied and then spoke without looking up. “It looks like a list of names.”

  “It is.”

  “Names of who?”

  Bell dropped his voice until it was barely audible above the clangor of the charging locomotive. “The men, women, and children Cromwell murdered. I’ve been carrying it since I was put in charge of chasing him down.”

  Lofgren’s eyes lifted and gazed through the front window of the track ahead. “The others should see this.”

  Bell nodded. “I think now is an appropriate time.”

  THREE HOURS LATER, with Lofgren back on the throttle, Adeline began to slow as she came into Missoula. He brought the locomotive to a halt fifty feet before a switch stand. Shea jumped from the cab, ran up the track, and switched the rails to those of the spur leading to Flathead Lake. He ignored the switchman, who came running out of a shack.

  “Here, what are you doing?” demanded the switchman, who was bundled up against a cold wind.

  “No time to explain,” said Shea as he waved to Lofgren, signaling that it was safe to roll onto the spur from the main track. He looked at the switchman as Adeline slowly rolled past and said, “Did another train pass onto the spur in the last hour?”

  The switchman nodded. “They switched onto the spur without permission either.”

  “How long ago?” Shea demanded.

  “About twenty minutes.”

  Without replying, Shea ran after Adeline and pulled himself up into the cabin. “According to the switchman,” he reported, “Cromwell’s train passed onto the spur twenty minutes ago.”

  “Eighty miles to make up twenty minutes,” Jongewaard said thoughtfully. “It will be a near thing.” He pulled open the throttle to the last notch and, five minutes after leaving the junction, he had Adeline pounding over the rails at eighty-five miles an hour.

  Flathead Lake came into view as they ran up the eastern shore. The largest freshwater lake in the western United States, it was twenty-eight miles long, sixteen miles wide, and covered one hundred eighty-eight square miles, with an average depth of one hundred sixty-four feet.

  They were in the homestretch now of a long and grueling chase. Lofgren sat in the fireman’s seat and helped Jongewaard survey the track ahead. Bell, Shea, and Long formed a scoop brigade to feed the firebox. Not having leather gloves like the firemen, Bell wrapped his hands with rags the engineers used to wipe oil. The protection helped, but blisters were beginning to rise on his palms from the long hours of shoveling coal.

  They soon reached a speed higher than the spur tracks were ever built to endure from a speeding train. There was no slowdown over bridges and trestles. Curves were taken on the outer edge. One double-reverse turn they whipped around in a violent arc rattled the bolts in the tender. Luckily, the tracks then became as straight as the crow flew. Jongewaard held the eighty-five-mile-an-hour pace for the next forty miles.

  “Eureka!” Lofgren suddenly yelled, vigorously pointing ahead.

  Everyone leaned from the cab, the icy wind bringing tears to their eyes. But there it was, four, maybe five, miles directly ahead, a faint puff of smoke.

  46

  MARGARET LOUNGED ON A SETTEE, WEARING AN embroidered silk robe, and stared at the champagne bubbles rising in her saucer-shaped coupe glass. “I wonder if it’s true,” she said softly.

  Cromwell looked at her. “What’s true?”

  “That this glass was modeled from the breast of Marie Antoinette.”

  Cromwell laughed. “There is an element of truth in the legend, yes.”

  Then Margaret gazed out the window Cromwell had raised in the back of the car—it was recessed into the rear wall and was inconspicuous when closed. The tracks that flashed under the wheels seemed to be stretching to infinity. She could see that they were traveling through a valley surrounded by forested mountains.

  “Where are we?”

  “The Flathead Valley in the heart of the Rocky Mountains.”

  “How much farther to the border?”

  “Another thirty minutes to the ferry landing at Flathead Lake,” said Cromwell, opening their second bottle of champagne for the day. “Half an hour to cross over onto the Great Northern tracks and we’ll be in Canada by sunset.”

  She held up her gl
ass. “To you, brother, and a brilliant flight from San Francisco. May our new endeavor be as successful as the last.”

  Cromwell smiled smugly. “I’ll drink to that.”

  AHEAD, in the cab of the locomotive, Abner was pressing the crew he had abducted at gunpoint from a small café beside the railyard in Brigham City, Utah: Leigh Hunt, a curly-red-haired engineer, and his fireman, Bob Carr, a husky individual who had worked as a brakeman before becoming a fireman, a step he hoped would eventually lead to his becoming an engineer. They had just come off a run and were having a cup of coffee before heading home when Abner held his gun to their heads and forced them into the cab of the engine pulling Cromwell’s fancy freight car.

  As was the earlier crew, Wilbanks and Hall were thrown from the engine in the middle of nowhere at the same time Abner cut the telegraph wires.

  Abner sat on the roof of the tender above the cab so he could prod Hunt and Carr to keep the Pacific locomotive hurtling over the rails to Flathead Lake. The black swirling clouds over the Rocky Mountains to the east caught his attention.

  “Looks like a storm brewing,” he shouted to Carr.

  “A chinook, by the look of it,” Carr yelled back over his shoulder as he scooped coal into the firebox.

  “What’s a chinook?” asked Abner.

  “It’s a windstorm that roars down out of the Rockies. Temperatures can drop as much as forty degrees in an hour and winds can blow over a hundred miles an hour, enough to blow railcars off the tracks.”

  “How long before it strikes here?”

  “Maybe an hour,” replied Carr. “About the time we’ll reach the train ferry dock at Woods Bay. Once we arrive, you’ll have to sit out the storm. The ferry won’t sail during a chinook.”

  “Why not?” Abner demanded.

  “With hundred-mile-an-hour winds, the lake turns into a frenzy. The wind whips the water into waves as high as twenty feet. The train ferry wasn’t built for rough water. No way the crew will take it out on the lake during a chinook.”

  “We telegraphed ahead to have the ferry waiting for our arrival,” said Abner. “We’re going across, wind or no wind.”

  BACK IN Cromwell’s rolling palace, Margaret had drifted into a light sleep from the champagne while her brother sat and relaxed with a newspaper he’d picked up when Abner abducted the train crew at Brigham City. Most of the news was about the San Francisco earthquake. He read that the fires had finally been put out and wondered if his mansion on Nob Hill and the bank building had survived.

  He looked up, hearing a strange sound different from the clack of the steel wheels on steel rails. It came faint and far off. He stiffened as he recognized it as a train whistle. Cromwell was stunned, knowing now for certain that he was being pursued.

  “Bell!” he exploded in anger.

  Startled at his loud voice, Margaret sat up awake. “What are you shouting about?”

  “Bell!” snapped Cromwell. “He’s chased us from San Francisco.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Listen,” he ordered her. “Listen.”

  Then she heard it, the unmistakable sound of a train’s steam whistle, barely perceptible, but it was there.

  Margaret rushed to the rear window and peered down the track. It was as if a fist had struck her in the stomach. She could see a stream of black smoke rising beyond a curve above a windbreak of small trees.

  “You must tell Abner!” she screamed.

  Cromwell had anticipated her and climbed a ladder to the vent opening in the roof of the boxcar. He pushed aside the lid to the vent, stood above the roof, and shot off his revolver to get Abner’s attention over the clamor of the locomotive. Abner heard and hurried over the top of the tender, until he was only a dozen feet away from Cromwell.

  “There is a train coming up behind us,” Cromwell shouted.

  Abner braced his feet apart against the pitch and roll of the tender and gazed over the roof of the boxcar. The onrushing train had come around the curve now and was visible in the distance. It looked to be a locomotive and its tender, pulling no cars. It was coming, and coming on fast, as evident from the smoke exploding from its stack and laid flat by the headwind.

  Now the two trains were in sight and sound of each other, with the ferry dock at Woods Bay on Flathead Lake only twenty miles away.

  47

  IT WAS AS IF ADELINE WAS A COME-FROM-BEHIND THOROUGHBRED pounding around the far turn into the back stretch, flying through the herd and vying for the lead. Her connecting rods were a blur as they whipped the massive drive wheels over the rails. No locomotive ever worked harder. From the Oakland railyard to the wilds of Montana, she had covered more distance faster than any locomotive in history. No one timed her speeds, but none on board her cab or those who had seen her hurtle past ever doubted that she had surpassed ninety miles an hour on straight and level stretches of track.

  Jongewaard had the throttle against its stop, throwing Adeline over tracks that were never meant for such speeds. Both engineers sat in the cab seats, their eyes fixed on the track ahead. Bell and Long shoveled while Shea systematically banked the fire to keep it burning evenly for the maximum amount of heat for proper combustion.

  The chugging sound of the steam exhaust became one continuous hiss and the smoke poured from the stack in an ever-growing cloud. Bell stopped shoveling every so often to stare at the train ahead, growing larger by the minute. There was no effort to sneak up on Cromwell now; he pulled the cord and gave the whistle a long shriek that cut through the breeze beginning to blow in over the lake. Bell’s lips were spread in a tight smile. He hoped Cromwell sensed that it was he who was charging down his throat.

  Bell turned, looked up to the sky, and saw it had changed from a blue sea to a gray shroud from the chinook wind that howled out of the Rocky Mountains to the east. Great swirls of dust, leaves, and small debris were thrown like wheat chaff through a threshing machine. The water of Flathead Lake had gone from a dead calm to a turbulent mass in less than twenty minutes.

  Then, suddenly, both Jongewaard and Lofgren shouted at once: “Wagon on the track!”

  Every eye swung and stared at the track ahead.

  A farmer with a hay wagon pulled by a team of horses was on a road crossing the tracks. He must have heard the engine’s whistle, Bell thought, but the farmer had badly misjudged the speed of the train, believing he could cross the tracks in plenty of time. Jongewaard heaved back the reverser Johnson bar, slowing the drive wheels until they stopped and spun backward in reverse, braking the speeding locomotive.

  When the farmer realized the iron monster was only a hundred yards away, he whipped his horses in a frenzied attempt to drive them out of the path of onrushing death. By then, it was too late.

  Adeline plowed into the wagon in an explosion of hay, wooden planks, splinters, and shattered wheels. The men in the cab instinctively ducked behind the protection of the boiler as debris clattered along the sides of the engine and flew over the roof onto the tender.

  Miraculously, the horses had jumped forward and escaped without harm. Bell and the others did not witness the farmer’s fate. As soon as Jongewaard brought Adeline to a halt a hundred yards down the track, Bell and crew leaped from the cab and ran back to the crossing.

  They were all vastly relieved to find the farmer lying no more than five feet from the rails with all his hands and feet intact. He had pushed himself to a sitting position and was looking around, befuddled at the demolished wreckage of his wagon.

  “Are you injured?” asked Bell anxiously.

  The farmer surveyed his arms and legs while feeling a rising bump on the head. “A rash of bumps and bruises,” he muttered. “But, wonder of wonders, I’m still in one piece, praise the Lord.”

  “Your horses also survived without injury.”

  Shea and Long helped the farmer to his feet. And led him to the horses that had seemingly forgotten their narrow brush with death and were eating the grass beside the road. He was glad to see his horses
in sound shape but angered that his wagon was scattered over the landscape in a hundred pieces.

  Bell read his mind and gave him a Van Dorn card. “Contact my detective agency,” he instructed. “They will compensate you for the loss of your wagon.”

  “Not the railroad?” the farmer asked, confused.

  “It wasn’t the railroad’s fault. A long story you’ll read about in the newspapers.” Bell turned and gazed in frustration down the tracks at the fading smoke from Cromwell’s locomotive. He refused to believe he had failed so close to his goal. But all was not lost. Already, Jongewaard had backed up Adeline to pick up Bell and the crew.

  Seeing the farmer able to fend for himself, Jongewaard yelled to Bell. “Hop aboard. We’ve got time to make up.”

  Bell, Lofgren, and the fireman had barely climbed back into the cabin when Jongewaard had Adeline barreling down the rails once again in hot pursuit of the bandit’s train. The chinook was upon them now. The wind blew the dust and loose foliage like foam flying from surf plunging onto a beach. Visibility had been cut to no more than two hundred yards.

  Jongewaard could no longer peer out the side of the cab or his squinting eyes would have filled with the dust. Instead, he stared though the cab’s forward window, having no choice but to cut Adeline’s speed from seventy-five miles an hour down to forty-five.

  He saw a semaphore beside the track with its flag in the horizontal position, signaling the locomotive to stop, but he ignored it. Next came a sign proclaiming the outer town limits of Woods Bay. Not knowing the exact distance to the ferry landing, he slowed down even more until Adeline was creeping along at twenty-five miles an hour.