“But what I don’t see are any signs of recent digging. These stones have been sitting awhile. See the coal dust undisturbed?”
Malone stepped closer reluctantly. Then he knelt beside Bell, scratching his head. He ran his fingers over the coal dust crusting in the rain. He picked up some chunks of ballast and examined them. Abruptly, he rose.
“Shoddy work, not explosives,” he said. “I know exactly who was in charge of laying this section and he is going to hear from me. Sorry, Mr. Bell. False alarm.”
“Better safe than sorry.”
By then, the train crew had disembarked. Behind them, fifty workmen gawked, and others were piling off the cars.
“Everyone back on the train!” Malone roared.
Bell took the engineer aside.
“Why didn’t you stop?”
“You caught me by surprise. Took me a moment to act.”
“Stay alert!” Bell retorted coldly. “You’ve got men’s lives in your hands.”
They got everyone back on the train and rolling again.
The ties slid by. Squared timber after squared timber. Eight spikes, four on each rail. Fishplates securing the rails. Sharp-edged crushed ballast glistened in the wet. Bell watched for more bumps in the flat surface, disturbed stone, missing bolts, absent spikes, cracks in the rails. Tie after tie after tie.
For seventeen miles, the train trundled slowly. Bell began to hope against hope that his precautions had paid off. The patrols and constant inspections had ensured the line was safe. Only three miles to go and then the men could return to work, boring the vital Tunnel 13.
Suddenly, as they rounded a sharp curve that rimmed the deepest canyon on the route, something unusual caught Bell’s eye. He couldn’t pinpoint what it was at first. For an instant, it barely penetrated.
“Malone!” he said in a whipcrack voice, “Look! What’s wrong?”
The red-faced man beside him leaned forward, squinted, his face a mask of concentration.
“I don’t see nothing.”
Bell raked the tracks with his binoculars. Bracing his feet on the pilot, he held the glasses with one hand and drew his pistol with the other.
The ballast was smooth. No spikes were missing. The ties ...
In seventeen miles, the work train had crossed fifty thousand ties. Each of the fifty thousand was a chocolate-brown color, the wood darkened by preservatives absorbed in creosoting. Now, only a few yards ahead of the locomotive, Bell saw a wooden tie that was colored yellowish white—the shade of freshly milled mountain hemlock that had not been creosoted.
Bell fired his pistol again and again as fast as he could pull the trigger.
“Stop!”
The engineer slammed on the brakes. Wheels locked. Steel screeched on steel. The heavy locomotive slid along on the massive force of its momentum. The weight of twenty cars shoved behind it.
Bell and Malone leaped off the pilot and ran ahead of the skidding locomotive.
“What is it?” the track foreman shouted.
“That tie,” Bell pointed.
“God Almighty!” roared Malone.
The two men turned as one and raised powerful arms as if to stop the train with their bare hands.
33
THE ENGINEER THREW HIS JOHNSON BAR INTO REVERSE.
Eight ponderous drive wheels spun backward, showering sparks and slivers from the rails. For a moment, it looked as if two strong men were actually stopping a Consolidation locomotive. And when it did grind to a stop with a ground-shaking shudder, Isaac Bell looked down and saw his boots planted firmly on the suspect crosstie.
The tip of the pilot was hanging over it. The leading wheels of the engine truck had come within two yards of it.
“Back her up,” ordered Malone. “Softly!”
GENTLY SCRAPING AWAY THE ballast from either end, Bell discovered upon close inspection that the suspect tie had a round wooden plug like a whiskey barrel bung. It was the diameter of a silver dollar and almost indistinguishable from the timber’s end grain.
“Move everyone farther back,” he told Malone. “He packed the tie with dynamite.”
The triggering device was a nail positioned to set off a detonator. There was enough dynamite to blow rails out from under the locomotive, which would have tumbled off the cut and dragged the whole train down the side of the mountain. Instead, Bell was able to wire back to Osgood Hennessy that the Van Dorn Detective Agency had won another victory over the Wrecker.
Hennessy moved his special train to the head of the line, where the miners and trackmen who had arrived safely were hard at work boring through the last hundred feet of Tunnel 13.
EARLY NEXT MORNING, OSGOOD HENNESSY called Bell onto his private car. Lillian and Mrs. Comden offered coffee. Hennessy was grinning ear to ear. “We’re about to hole through. We always do a ceremony on the long tunnels where I clear the last stone. This time, the hands sent a delegation demanding that you take the last poke for what you did yesterday. It’s a big honor, I’d accept it if I were you.”
Bell walked into the tunnel with Hennessy, hugging the wall when they had to step off the tracks to let a locomotive pass with debris-filled dump cars. For hundreds of yards, the sides and arched ceiling were already finished with masonry shoring. Near the end, a temporary web of timbers shored up the ceiling. In the final yards, the miners worked under a shield of cast iron and timber that protected them from falling rock.
The chattering drills stopped as Bell and the railroad president approached. Miners cleared the crumbling stone with sledges and shovels, then stepped back from the wall that remained.
A towering hard-rock miner with long apish arms and a gap-toothed grin handed Bell a sixteen-pound sledgehammer.
“Ever swing one of these before?”
“Driving tent pegs for the circus.”
“You’ll do fine.” The miner leaned in and whispered, “See that chalk mark? Smack her there. We always set it to come down for the ceremony ... Gangway, boys! Give the man room.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to do this?” Bell asked Hennessy.
Hennessy stepped back. “I’ve dug plenty of tunnels in my day. You earned this one.”
Bell whipped the heavy sledge over his shoulder and swung hard at the chalk mark. Cracks spread, and a gleam of light showed in the wall. He swung again. The miners cheered as the rock collapsed and daylight poured in.
Bell stepped into the jagged opening and saw the Cascade Canyon Bridge glittering in the sunlight. The long, layered latticework of steel spanned the deep gorge of the Cascade River on two tall, slim towers set on massive stone piers. Floating high above the watery mists and foam, the most important bridge on the cutoff line looked almost complete. Crossties were already laid on it in anticipation of steel rails arriving through the tunnel.
Bell saw that it was heavily guarded. Railroad police stood every fifty feet. A sentry house stood at either end and one at each pier. As Bell watched, a cloud passed over the sun, and the shadow turned the silvery girders black.
“What do you think, son?” Hennessy asked proudly.
“She’s a beauty.”
How would the Wrecker strike?
In the shadow of the bridge nestled the town of Cascade, established where the original lowland railroad from the desert terminated at the foot of the mountains. He could see the elegant 1870s Cascade Lodge, long a draw for intrepid tourists willing to brave the long, slow climb on endless switchbacks up the foothills. From that railhead, Hennessy had built a temporary freight line with even more switchbacks to lift materials to the bridge construction site. Almost impossibly steep, it was a jagged series of sharp climbs and hairpin turns that had been nicknamed by the railroad workers the Snake Line. The grade was so heavy that a string of freight cars Bell saw ascending were pulled by three smoke-billowing locomotives, with four pusher engines helping from behind. The Snake Line locomotives had done their job. From now on, materials would arrive on the cutoff line.
The Wr
ecker wouldn’t hit the Snake Line, its job was done. He wouldn’t hit the town. He would hit the bridge itself. Destroying the long truss-and-pier bridge would set back the cutoff project by years.
“What the deuce is that?” asked Hennessy. He pointed at a column of dust racing up a switchback buggy road from the town below.
Isaac Bell’s face opened in a broad grin of appreciation. “That is the Thomas Flyer automobile you and I were talking about. Model 35, four cylinders, sixty horsepower. Look at him go!”
The bright yellow motor car topped the switchback, bounced over the rocky shelf, and skidded to a halt twenty feet away from where Bell and Hennessy stood in the mouth of the tunnel. The canvas top was down and folded back, and the only one in it was the driver, a tall man clad in boot-length duster, hat, and goggles. He jumped from behind the wooden steering wheel and strode toward them.
“Congratulations!” he called, whipping off his goggles with a dramatic flourish.
“What the hell are you doing here?” asked Hennessy. “Isn’t Congress in session?”
“Celebrating your cutoff hole through,” said Charles Kincaid. “I happened to be meeting with some very important California gentlemen at the Cascade Lodge. I told my hosts they would have to wait while I drove up to shake your hand.”
Kincaid seized Hennessy’s hand and pumped it heartily.
“Congratulations, sir. Magnificent achievement. Nothing can stop you now.”
THE BRIDGE
34
NOVEMBER 1 , 1907
CASCADE CANYON, OREGONi
RED-FACED, FIERY-EYED SOUTHERN PACIFIC TRACK BOSS MIKE Malone stalked from the mouth of Tunnel 13 trailed by handlers gripping heavy lengths of rail in their tongs and a locomotive behind them belching smoke and steam. “Somebody move that automobile before it gets squashed,” he bawled.
Charles Kincaid ran to rescue his Thomas Flyer.
Isaac Bell asked Osgood Hennessy, “Are you surprised to find the Senator waiting here?”
“I’m never surprised by men hoping for my daughter’s inheritance,” Hennessy answered over the clatter of Malone’s track gangs spreading roadbed stone ballast in front of the engine and laying down crossties.
Senator Kincaid came running back.
“Mr. Hennessy, the most important businessmen and bankers of California wish to throw a banquet for you in the Cascade Lodge.”
“I’ve got no time for banquets before I lay track across that bridge and build my staging yards on the other side.”
“Can’t you come down after dark?”
Mike Malone barreled up.
“Senator, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble would you please move that goddamned automobile before I have my boys throw it off the cliff?”
“I just moved it.”
“It’s still in our way.”
“Move it,” growled Hennessy. “We’re building a railroad here.”
Bell watched Kincaid hurry off to move his car again, and said to Hennessy, “I’d like to see what they’re up to at that banquet.”
“What the hell for?”
“It is a strange coincidence that Kincaid is here today.”
“I told you, he’s hanging around my daughter.”
“The Wrecker has inside knowledge of the Southern Pacific. How does he know about your plans?”
“I told you that too. Some busybody put two and two together. Or some fool blabbed.”
“Either way, the Wrecker is no stranger to your circle.”
“All right,” said Hennessy. “I can stand a banquet if you can.” He raised his voice over the din to shout. “Kincaid! Tell your friends if the invitation still holds in three days, I’ll take it.”
The Senator professed astonishment. “Surely you won’t be across and set up in only three days.”
“Heads will roll if I’m not.”
The shrunken old man snapped his fingers. Engineers rushed to his side, unfurling blueprints. Surveyors were right behind, propping transits on their shoulders, trailed by chainmen with red-and-white ranging rods.
Isaac Bell intercepted Kincaid as he climbed into his car.
“Funny coincidence that your meeting is here, of all places.”
“Not at all. I want Hennessy on my side. As the California gentlemen were willing to rent an entire lodge to persuade me to run for president, I figured it might as well be one near him.”
“Still playing hard to get?” asked Bell, recalling their conversation at the Follies.
“Harder than ever. The moment you say yes to their sort, they think they own you.”
“Do you want the job?”
In answer, Charles Kincaid slipped a big hand under the lapel of his coat and flipped it over. A campaign button that had been hidden by the cloth read KINCAID FOR PRESIDENT.
“Mum’s the word.”
“When will you turn your button out?”
“I’m planing to surprise Mr. Hennessy at his banquet. They want you to come too, seeing as how you’re the man who saved the line from the Wrecker.”
None of this rang true to the detective.
“I’m looking forward to it,” Bell said.
The Wrecker pretended not to notice Bell’s probing gaze. He knew his presidential ruse would not fool the Van Dorn detective much longer. But he stood his ground, allowing his eyes to rove curiously over the gleaming bridge as if he hadn’t a care in the world.
“That broad plateau on the far side of the gorge,” he remarked casually, “seems the likely spot for Hennessy to build his head-of-the-line staging yards.” There were times, he thought proudly, he really should have been an actor.
“Do you regret leaving engineering?” Bell asked.
“I would if I didn’t enjoy politics so much.” Kincaid laughed. He let his smile fade as he pretended to reflect soberly. “I might feel differently if I had been as brilliant an engineer as Mr. Mowery who built this bridge. Look at that structure! The grace, the strength. He was a star. Still is, despite his years. I was never more than a capable journeyman.”
Bell was staring.
Kincaid smiled. “You’re looking at me strangely. That’s because you’re still a young man, Mr. Bell. Wait until forty overtakes you. You’ll learn your limitations and find other lines at which you might do better.”
“Such as running for president?” Bell asked lightly.
“Exactly! ”
Kincaid laughed, slapped the detective’s rock-hard arm, and vaulted into his Thomas Flyer. He engaged the motor, which he had left running, and started down the mountain without looking back. Any hint that he was concerned would only fuel the detective’s imagination.
In fact, he was exultant.
Osgood Hennessy was charging forward at full steam, obliviously putting his head in a noose. The faster the cutoff crossed the bridge, the sooner Osgood would hang. For if new staging yards at the front end of the construction represented Hennessy’s head and his torso was the Southern Pacific Railroad empire, then the Cascade Canyon Bridge was his neck.
35
ISAAC BELL PLANTED MEN IN EVERY WORK GANG TO WATCH FOR sabotage.
Hennessy had told him that holing through was just the beginning. He intended to build as far across the bridge as he could before the first snow. Even the most cowardly Wall Street banker, the railroader boasted, would be assured by the proof that the Southern Pacific was primed to continue cutoff construction when it melted in the spring.
Bell directed horse patrols to guard the route that the railroad was surveying deep into the mountains. Then he asked Jethro Watt to take personal command of his railroad police. They walked the bridge and agreed to beef up the contingents guarding the piers below and the span above. Then they inspected the surrounding area on horseback, the giant Watt mounted on an enormous animal named Thunderbolt who kept trying to gnaw the police chief’s leg. Watt subdued the animal by swatting its head, but any judge of horse-flesh knew that Thunderbolt was merely biding his time.
By nightfall that first day of frenzied activity, carpenters had erected temporary shoring in Tunnel 13 and a timber rock shed around its freshly hewn portal. Masons were following close behind with stonework. And track gangs had laid rail from the tunnel to the edge of the gorge.
Osgood Hennessy’s red train streamed through the tunnel, pushing a string of heavily laden materials cars ahead of it and up to the closely guarded bridge. Track gangs unloaded rails and work continued by electric light. Ties supplied by a timber operation upstream in the mountains were already laid on the bridge. Spike mauls rang through the night. When the rails were secured, Hennessy’s locomotive pushed the heavy materials cars onto the span.
A thousand railroaders held their breath.
The only sounds were mechanical, the chuff of the locomotive, the dynamo powering the lights, and the grinding of cast iron on steel. As the lead car, heaped with rails, edged forward, all eyes shifted to Franklin Mowery. The elderly bridge builder was watching closely.
Isaac Bell overheard Eric, Mowery’s bespectacled assistant, boast, “Mr. Mowery was the same cool as a cucumber when he finished Mr. Hennessy’s Lucin Cutoff across the Great Salt Lake.”
“But,” said a grizzled surveyor, peering into the deep gorge, “that one was a lot nearer the water.”
Mowery leaned nonchalantly on his walking stick. No emotion showed on his round face, no worry rippled his sweeping jawline, or twitched his Vandyke beard. He had a cold, smokeless pipe firmly clamped in his broad, good-humored mouth.
Bell watched Mowery’s pipe. When the materials car reached the far side without mishap and the workmen greeted it with a cheer, Mowery removed his pipe from his mouth and picked splinters of crushed stem from his teeth.
“Caught me,” he grinned at Bell. “Bridges are strange critters, highly unpredictable.”
They double-tracked the bridge by noon.
In a long burst of action, they laid dozens of sidings. Soon, the remote plateau had been transformed into a combination railroad yard and construction staging arena. Hennessy’s red special steamed across the gorge and parked on an elevated sidetrack from which the president of the Southern Pacific could oversee the entire operation. A steady stream of materials trains began crossing the bridge. Telegraph wires followed, transmitting the good news back to Wall Street.