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!”
52
THE WRECKER WAS HURRYING TOWARD THE LOCOMOTIVES TO signal Philip Dow to blow the dam when he heard their boots pounding behind him.
He looked back. Two brakemen were running fast, signaling with white train-yard lanterns. A skinny youth and a tall, rangy man, wide of shoulder and narrow in the waist. But where was the locomotive they were guiding with their lights? The pair he was hurrying toward were sidetracked, with only enough steam up to keep them warm.
The tall one wore a broad-brimmed hat instead of a railroader’s cap. Isaac Bell Running after him was a boy who looked like he should still be in high school.
Kincaid had to make a instant decision. Why was Bell prowling the yards pretending to be a brakeman? Assume the best, that Bell still had not tumbled to his identity? Or walk toward them, wave hello, and pull his derringer and shoot them both and hope no one saw? The second he reached for his gun, he knew he had made a mistake wasting time to think about it.
Bell’s hand flickered in a blur of motion, and Charles Kincaid found himself staring down the barrel of a Browning pistol held in a rock-steady grip.
“Don’t point that pistol at me, Bell. What the devil do you think you’re doing?”
“Charles Kincaid,” Bell answered in a clear, steady voice, “you are wanted by the law for murder and sabotage.”
“Wanted by the law? Are you serious?”
“Remove your derringer from your left pocket and drop it on the ground.”
“We’ll see about this,” huffed Kincaid. His every mannerism bespoke the aggrieved United States senator put upon by a fool.
“Remove your derringer from your left pocket and drop it on the ground before I blow a hole in your arm.”
Kincaid shrugged, as if humoring a madman. “All right.” Moving very slowly, he reached for his derringer.
“Careful,” said Bell. “Hold the weapon between your thumb and forefinger.”
The only eyes Charles Kincaid had ever seen so cold were in a mirror.
He lifted the derringer from his pocket between his thumb and forefinger and crouched as if to place it gently on the ground. “You realize, of course, that a private detective cannot arrest a member of the United States Senate.”
“I’ll leave the formalities to a U.S. marshal ... or the county coroner, if your hand moves any closer to the knife in your boot.”
“What the devil—”
“Drop your derringer!” Bell commanded. “Do not go for your knife!”
Very slowly, Kincaid opened his hand. The gun fell from his fingers.
“Turn around.”
Moving as if in a trance, Kincaid slowly turned away from the grim detective.
“Clasp your hands behind your back.”
Slowly, Kincaid placed his hands behind his back. Every sinew was poised. If Bell was going to make a mistake, he would make it now. Behind him, Kincaid heard the words he was praying to hear.
“Your handcuffs, Dash.”
He heard the steel clink. He let the first cuff snap around his wrist. Only as he felt the cold metal of the second cuff brush his skin did he whirl into motion, turning to get behind the youth and clamp his arm around his throat.
A fist smashed into the bridge of his nose. Kincaid flew backward.
Knocked on his back, stunned by the punch, he looked up. Young Dashwood was still standing to one side, watching with an excited grin on his face and a shiny revolver in his hand. But it was Isaac Bell who was looming over him, triumphantly. Bell, who had knocked him down with a single punch.
“Did you really think I would let a new man within ten feet of the murderer who killed Wish Clarke, Wally Kisley, and Mack Fulton?”
“Who?”
“Three of the finest detectives I’ve had the privilege to work with. On your feet!”
Kincaid got up slowly. “Only three? Don’t you count Archie Abbott?”
The blood drained from Bell’s face, and, in that instant of total shock, the Wrecker struck.
53
THE WRECKER MOVED WITH INHUMAN SPEED. INSTEAD OF attacking Isaac Bell, he rushed James Dashwood. He ducked under the boy’s pistol, got behind him, and slid his arm around his throat.
“Is it all right now if I reach for my boot?” the Wrecker asked mockingly.
He had already pulled his knife.
He pressed the razor-sharp blade to Dashwood’s throat and sliced a line in the skin. Blood trickled.
“Table’s turned, Bell. Drop your gun or I’ll cut his head off.”
Isaac Bell dropped his Browning on the ground.
“You too, sonny. Drop it!”
Only when Bell said, “Do what he says, Dash,” did the revolver clatter on the wet ballast.
“Unlock this handcuff.”
“Do what he says,” said Bell. Dashwood worked the key out of his pocket and fumbled it into the cuff on the wrist that was crushing his windpipe. The cuffs clattered on the ballast. There was silence, but for the huffing of a single switch engine somewhere, until Bell asked, “Where is Archie Abbott?”
“The derringer in your hat, Bell.”
Bell removed his two-shot pistol from his hat and dropped it beside his Browning.
“Where is Archie Abbott?”
“The knife in your boot.”
“I don’t have one.”
“The Rawlins coroner reports a prizefighter died with a throwing knife in his throat,” said the Wrecker. “I presume you purchased a replacement.”
He cut Dashwood again, and a second trickle of blood merged with the first.
Bell lifted out his throwing knife and placed it on the ground.
“Where is Archie Abbott?”
“Archie Abbott? Last I saw, he was mooning over Lillian Hennessy. That’s right, Bell. I tricked you. Took advantage of your terrible penchant for caring.”
Kincaid let go of Dashwood and slammed an elbow into the boy’s jaw, knocking him senseless. He gave his knife a peculiar flick of his wrist. A rapier-thin sword blade flew at Bell’s face.
BELL DODGED THE THRUST that had killed his friends.
Kincaid lunged like lightning and thrust again. Bell dove forward, hit the crushed stone, tucked his long legs and rolled. Kincaid’s sword whipped through space he had occupied a second earlier. Bell rolled again, reaching for the double-action revolver Eddie Edwards had given James Dashwood.
As Bell extended his hand, he saw steel gleam as Kincaid got to it first. The needle-sharp tip of his telescoping sword hovered over the gun. “Try to pick it up,” he dared Bell.
Bell slid sideways, grabbed the brakeman’s signal flag that James had dropped, and rolled to his feet. Then he advanced in a fluid motion, holding the flagstaff in the en garde position.
Kincaid laughed. “You’re brought a stick to a swordfight, Mr. Bell. Always one step behind. Will you never learn?”
Bell held the tightly rolled cloth end and thrust the wooden staff.
Kincaid parried.
Bell respo
nded with a sharp beat, striking the thin metal just below the tip of Kincaid’s weapon. The blow exposed him to a lightning thrust, an opportunity Kincaid did not waste. His sword pierced Bell’s coat and tore a burning crease along his ribs. Falling back, Bell delivered another sharp beat with the flagstaff.
Kincaid thrust. Bell avoided it and beat hard for a third time.
Kincaid lunged. Bell whirled, sweeping him past him like a toreador. And as Kincaid spun around swiftly to attack again, Bell delivered another hard beat that bent the front half of his sword.
“Compromise, Kincaid. Every engineering decision involves a compromise. Remember? What you grasp in one fist you surrender with the other? The ability to conceal your telescoping sword weakened it.”
Kincaid threw the ruined sword at Bell and drew a revolver from his coat. The barrel tipped up as he cocked it. Bell lunged, executing another sharp beat. This one rapped the tender skin stretched tightly across the back of Kincaid’s hand. Kincaid cried out in pain and dropped the gun. Instantly, he attacked, swinging his fists.
Bell raised his own fists, and said derisively, “Could it be that the deadly swordsman and brilliant engineer neglected the manly art of defense? That’s the clumsiest fisticuffs I’ve seen since Rawlins. Were you too busy plotting murder to learn how to box?”
He hit the Wrecker twice, a hard one-two that bloodied his nose and rocked him back on his heels. Holding the clear advantage, Bell moved in to finish him off and cuff his hands. His roundhouse right landed square on target. The punch would have knocked most men flat. The Wrecker shrugged it off, and Bell realized to a degree he never had before that the Wrecker was extraordinarily different, less a man and more an evil monster that had climbed fully born out of a volcano.
He regarded Bell with a look of sheer hatred. “You will never stop me.”