The Wrecker

  “Go west, young man,” Isaac Bell wired back. “Don’t stop ‘til your hat floats.”

  Which brought him late the next afternoon by Red Train trolley to Santa Monica on the shore of the Pacific Ocean. He wasted a few minutes, uncharacteristically, walking out on the Venice Pier to smell the salt water and watch girls bathing in the low surf. Two in bright costumes had their legs bared almost to their knees. They ran to a blanket they had spread next to a lifeboat that was on the beach ready to be rolled from the sand to the water. Dashwood noticed another lifeboat a half mile down the beach poised in the distant haze. Each surely had an anchor under its canvas. He berated himself for not thinking of Santa Monica sooner, squared his scrawny shoulders, and hurried into town.

  The first place he walked into was typical of the many livery stables he had visited. It was a sprawling wooden structure big enough to shelter a variety of buggies and wagons for rent, with stalls for numerous horses, and a new mechanic’s section with wrenches, grease guns, and a chain hoist for motor repairs. A bunch of men were sitting around jawing: stablemen, grooms, auto mechanics, and a brawny blacksmith. By now, he had seen enough to know all these types and was no longer intimidated.

  “Horse or car, kid?” one of them yelled.

  “Horseshoes,” said James.

  “There’s the blacksmith. You’re up, Jim.”

  “Good afternoon, sir,” said James, thinking that the blacksmith looked morose. Big as the man was, his cheeks were hollow. His eyes were red, as if he didn’t sleep well.

  “What can I do for you, young fella?”

  By now, Dashwood had learned to ask his questions privately. Later, he would show the sketch to the whole group. But if he started off in front of all of them, it would turn into a debate that resembled a saloon brawl.

  “Can we step outside? I want to show you something.”

  The blacksmith shrugged his sloping shoulders, got up from the milk crate he was sitting on, and followed James Dashwood outside next to a newly installed gasoline pump.

  “Where’s your horse?” the blacksmith asked.

  Dashwood offered his hand. “I’m a Jim, too. James. James Dashwood.”

  “I thought you wanted horseshoes.”

  “Do you recognize this man?” Dashwood asked, holding up the sketch with the mustache. He watched the blacksmith’s face and, to his astonished delight, he saw him recoil. The man’s unhappy face flushed darkly.

  Dashwood’s heart soared. This was the blacksmith who had fashioned the hook that had derailed the Coast Line Limited. This man had seen the Wrecker.

  “Who are you?” asked the blacksmith.

  “Van Dorn investigator,” James answered proudly. The next thing he knew, he was flat on his back, and the blacksmith was running full tilt down an alley.

  “Stop!” Dashwood yelled, jumped to his feet, and gave chase. The blacksmith ran fast for a big man and was surprisingly agile, whipping around corners as if he were on rails, losing no speed in his mad turns and jinks, up and down alleys, through backyards, tearing through laundry hung from clotheslines, around woodsheds, toolsheds, and gardens and onto a street. But he hadn’t the stamina of a man just out of boyhood who neither smoked nor drank. Once they were out in the open, Dashwood gained on him for several blocks. “Stop!” he kept shouting, but no one on the sidewalks was inclined to get in the path of such a big man. Nor was there a constable or watchman in sight.

  He caught up in front of a Presbyterian church on a tree-lined street. Grouped on the sidewalk were three middle-aged men in suits, the minister in a dog collar, the choirmaster gripping a sheaf of music, and the deacon holding the congregation’s account books under his arm. The blacksmith barreled past them, with James hot on his tail.

  “Stop!”

  Only a yard behind, James Dashwood launched himself into a flying tackle. As he flew, he took a heel on the chin, but he still managed to close his skinny arms around the blacksmith’s ankles. They crashed to the sidewalk, rolled onto a lawn, and scrambled to their feet. James clung to the blacksmith’s arm, which was as thick as the young detective’s thigh.

  “Now that you caught him,” called the deacon, “what are you going to do with him?”

  The answer came from the blacksmith himself in the form of a wide fist ribbed with thick knuckles. When James Dashwood came to, he was lying on the grass, with the three men in suits peering down curiously at him.

  “Where’d he go?” said James.

  “He ran off.”

  “Where to?”

  “Anywhere he wanted to, I’d reckon. Are you all right, sonny?”

  James Dashwood rose swaying to his feet and wiped the blood off his face with a handkerchief his mother had given him when he moved to San Francisco to work for the Van Dorn Detective Agency.

  “Did any of you recognize that man?”

  “I believe he’s a blacksmith,” said the choirmaster.

  “Where does he live?”

  “Don’t know,” he answered, and the minister said, “Why don’t you let be whatever got between you, son? Before you get hurt.”

  Dashwood staggered back to the livery stable. The blacksmith was not there.

  “Why’d Jim run off?” a mechanic asked.

  “I don’t know. You tell me.”

  “He’s been acting strange, lately,” said a stable hand.

  “Stopped drinking,” said another.

  “That’ll do it,” said a groom, laughing.

  “The church ladies claim another victim. Poor Jim. Getting so a man’s not safe on the streets when the Women’s Christian Temperance Union holds a meeting.”

  With that, grooms, stable hands, and mechanics broke into a song that James had never heard but they all seemed to know:Here’s to a temperance supper,

  With water in glasses tall,

  And coffee and tea to end with—

  And me not there at all!

  James took out another copy of the sketch. “Do you recognize this man?”

  He received a chorus of nos. He braced for a “Broncho Billy” or two, but apparently none of them went to the pictures.

  “Where does Jim live?” he asked.

  No one would tell him.

  He went to the Santa Monica Police Department, where an elderly patrolman led him to the chief of the department. The chief was a fifty-year-old, well-groomed gentleman in a dark suit, with his hair cut close on the sides in the modern way. Dashwood introduced himself. The chief acted cordially and said he was happy to help a Van Dorn operative. The blacksmith’s last name was Higgins, he told Dashwood. Jim Higgins lived in a rented room above the stable. Where would he go to hide out? The chief had no idea.

  Dashwood stopped at the Western Union office to telegraph a report to the Sacramento office to be forwarded to wherever Isaac Bell was. Then he walked the streets, as darkness fell, hoping to catch a glimpse of the man. At eleven, when the last streetcar left for Los Angeles, he decided to rent a room in a tourist hotel instead of riding back to town so he could start hunting early in the morning.

  A LONE HORSEMAN ON a glossy bay rode a ridge that overlooked the remote single-tracked Southern Pacific line just south of the Oregon border. Three men, who were grouped around a telegraph pole squeezed between the track and an abandoned tin-roofed barn, spotted him silhouetted against the sharp-blue sky. Their leader removed his broad-brimmed Stetson and swept it in a slow full circle over his head.

  “Hey, what are you doing, Ross? Don’t wave hello like you’re inviting him down here.”

  “I’m not waving hello,” said Ross Parker. “I’m waving him off.”

  “How the hell is he going know the difference?”

  “He forks his horse like a cowhand. A cowhand knows damned well the cattle rustlers signal for Mind your own damned business and sift sand away from us.”

  “We ain’t rustling cattle. We ain’t even seen any cattle.”

  “The principle is the same. Unless the man is a total fool, he’ll
leave us alone.”

  “What if he doesn’t?”

  “We’ll blow his head off.”

  Even as Ross explained waving off to Andy, who was a city slicker from San Francisco, the horseman turned his animal away and dropped from sight behind the ridge. The three went back to work. Ross ordered Lowell, the lineman, to climb the pole with two long wires connected to Andy’s telegraph key.

  Had the cowboy on the ridge ridden closer, he would have seen that they were unusually heavily armed for a telegraph crew working in 1907. Decades after the last Indian attack, Ross Parker packed a .45 holster on his hip and a Winchester rifle behind his saddle. Lowell had a coach gun, a sawed-off shotgun, slung over his back within easy reach. Even the city boy, the telegrapher Andy, had a .38 revolver tucked in his belt. Their horses were tied in the shade of a clump of trees, as they had come in cross-country instead of along the tracks on a handcar.

  “Stay up there!” Ross ordered Lowell. “This won’t take long.” He and Andy settled down beside the old barn.

  In fact, it was nearly an hour before Andy’s key started clattering, having intercepted a train dispatcher’s orders to the operator at Weed, north of their position. By then, all three had backed against the barn, dozing in the sun out of the cool wind.

  “What’s he saying?” asked Ross.

  “The dispatcher is sending train orders to the Weed operator. He’s telling him to signal the southbound freight to take the siding at Azalea.”

  Ross checked his copy of the schedule.

  “O.K. The northbound work train is passing Azalea siding in half an hour. Change the orders to give the southbound freight authority clear to Dunsmuir.”

  Andy did as directed, altering the train orders to tell the southbound freight that the track was clear when in fact a work train was racing north with carloads of laborers. An experienced telegrapher, he mimicked the “fist” of the Dunsmuir dispatcher so the Weed operator would not realize a different man was operating the key.

  “Uh-oh. They want to know what happened to the scheduled northbound?” Scheduled trains had authority over extras.

  Ross was prepared for this. He didn’t bother opening his eyes.

  “Tell them the scheduled northbound just reported by telegraphone that it’s on the siding at Shasta Springs with a burned-up journal box.”

  This false message suggested that the northbound had broken down and its crew had switched it off the main line onto a siding. Then they had reached up to the telegraph wires with the eighteen-foot sectional “fishpole” carried in the caboose to hook a portable telegraphone on the wires. The telegraphone permitted rudimentary voice communication. The Weed operator accepted the explanation and passed on the false orders that would place the two trains on a collision course.

  “Get up there, Lowell,” Ross ordered, still not opening his eyes. “Pull your wires down. We’re done.”

  “Lowell’s behind the barn,” said Andy. “Went to take a leak.”

  “Delicate of him.”

  Things were going exactly as planned until a rifle barrel poked around the side of the barn and pressed hard against the telegrapher’s head.

  29

  A MUSICAL VOICE DRAWLED, “UNSEND THAT MESSAGE YOU just sent.”

  The telegrapher looked up in disbelief into the grim, hawklike features of Van Dorn investigator “Texas” Walt Hatfield. Behind him stood a glossy bay horse, silent as a statue. “And in case you’re wondering, yes, I do know the Morse alphabet. Change a word and I’ll blow your head off and send it myself. As for you, mister,” Hatfield told Ross Parker, whose hand was creeping toward his holster, “don’t make any mistakes or you won’t have time to make another.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Ross, raising his hands high. In addition to the Winchester pointed at Andy’s head, the tall Texan carried two six-guns in oiled holsters worn low on his hips. If he wasn’t a gun-fighter, he sure dressed like one.

  Andy decided to believe him, too. He clattered out a cancellation of the false order.

  “Now, pass along the original order you sidewinders intercepted.”

  Andy sent along the original orders to tell the southbound extra to wait on the Azalea siding as the northbound work train was coming through.

  “Much better,” drawled Hatfield. “We can’t have locomotives butting heads, can we?”

  His smile was as pleasant as his musical drawl. His eyes, however, were dark as a grave.

  “And now, gents, you all are gonna tell me who paid you to attempt such a dastardly deed.”

  “Drop it.”

  Lowell the lineman had come around the back of the barn with his wide-barreled coach gun.

  Walt Hatfield did not doubt that the gent with the coach gun would have blasted him to pieces if he weren’t concerned about accidentally killing his partners with the same swath of buckshot. Cussing his own stupidity—there was no other word for it because even though he hadn’t seen him, he should have reckoned there would be a third man to climb the pole—he did as he was told.

  He dropped his rifle. All eyes shifted momentarily to the clatter of steel on stone.

  Hatfield drove sideways and drew his six-guns with blinding speed. He sent a well-aimed slug at Lowell that drilled through the lineman’s heart. But even as Lowell died, he jerked the triggers of the coach gun. Both barrels roared, and heavy double-aught lead shot tore into Andy, nearly cutting the telegrapher in half.

  Ross was already running for his horse. Andy had fallen on Hat field’s rifle, and in the time it took to retrieve it from under his body Ross had mounted and galloped away. Hatfield whipped up the weapon, which was slippery with blood, and fired once. He thought he winged him. Ross reeled in the saddle. But by then, he was in the trees.

  “Tarnation,” muttered Hatfield. A glance at their bodies told him that neither man would ever talk about the Wrecker. He jumped on his bay, roared, “Trail!,” and the big horse sprang to a gallop.

  MARION MORGAN KISSED ISAAC BELL good-bye at Sacramento. She was traveling on to San Francisco. He would change trains north to the head of the Cascades Cutoff. Her parting words were, “I can’t recall a train ride I enjoyed more.”

  Half a day later, trundling through the Dunsmuir yards, Bell counted reassuring numbers of railway police guarding key switches, the roundhouse, and dispatch offices. At the station, he spoke with a pair of Van Dorn operatives in dark suits and derbies who took him on a brisk tour of the various checkpoints they had established. Satisfied, he asked where he could find Texas Walt Hatfield.

  Dunsmuir’s main street, Sacramento Avenue, was a mud thor oughfare rutted by buggy wheels. On one side were frame houses and shops separated from the mud by a narrow plank sidewalk. The Southern Pacific tracks, rows of telegraph and electric poles, and scattered sheds and warehouses bordered the other side. The hotel was a two-story affair with porches overhanging the sidewalk. Bell found Hatfield in the lobby, drinking whiskey in a teacup. He had a bandage plastered across his brow and his right arm in a sling.

  “I’m sorry, Isaac. I let you down.”

  He told Bell how while riding the rounds of the watch points he had established along that vulnerable line, he had spotted what looked from a distance to be an attempt to sabotage the telegraph lines. “Thought at first they were cutting the lines. But when I got close, I saw they had wired up a key and I realized they were intercepting train orders. With a view to causing collisions.”

  He shifted uncomfortably in his chair, clearly sore from head to toe, and admitted, “I also thought at first there were only two of them. Forgot they’d have a lineman to go up the pole, and he got the drop on me. I managed to wriggle out of that mess, but unfortunately two of them died in the process. The third lit out. I reckoned he was the boss, so I lit out after him, thinking he could tell us plenty about the Wrecker. I winged him with my rifle, but not enough to spoil his aim. The dry-gulching hellion shot my horse out from under me.”

  “Maybe he was aiming at you and hit your
horse instead.”

  “I’m real sorry, Isaac. I feel plumb stupid.”

  “I would, too,” said Bell. Then he smiled. “But let’s not forget you stopped a head-on collision of two trains, one of them full of workmen.”

  “The sidewinder is still fanging,” Hatfield retorted morosely. “Stopping the Wrecker ain’t catching him.”

  This was the truth, Bell knew. But the next day, when he caught up with Osgood Hennessy at the cutoff railhead, the Southern Pacific president was looking at the bright side too, partly because construction was roaring ahead of schedule again. The last long tunnel on the route to the Cascade Canyon Bridge—Tunnel 13—was almost holed through.

  “We’re beating him at every turn,” Hennessy exulted. “New York was bad, but, bad as it was, everyone knows it could have been so much worse. The Southern Pacific comes out smelling like a rose. Now your boys averted a catastrophic collision. And you say you’re closing in on the blacksmith who made that hook that derailed the Coast Line Limited.”

  Bell had passed on the essence of Dashwood’s report, that the blacksmith who had fled must know something about the hook and therefore about the Wrecker, too. Bell had ordered Larry Sanders to give Dashwood the full support of the Los Angeles office in running down the blacksmith, who had disappeared without a trace. With Van Dorn’s entire Los Angeles force hunting him, he should turn up soon.

  “That blacksmith could lead you straight to the Wrecker,” said Hennessy.

  “That is my hope,” said Bell.

  “It strikes me that you’ve got the murdering radical on the run. He won’t have time to make trouble if he’s running to stay ahead of you.”