Breakheart Pass (10 page)

'You have done well, White Hand. You and your men. How much time do we have?'

'Before the soldiers from the west could reach here?'

'Yes. Not that there's any reason to assume that they think that there is anything wrong in Fort Humboldt and will be coming here anyway. But chances we cannot take.'

'The stakes are high, Sepp Calhoun.' He thought briefly. 'Three days. Not less.'

'More than enough. The train arrives tomorrow between noon and sundown.'

'The soldiers on the train ?'

'No word yet.' Calhoun hesitated, then cleared his throat apologetically. 'It would be as well, White Hand, if you and your braves have some hours of rest. You may need to ride again before dark.'

There was silence during which White Hand regarded a highly uncomfortable Calhoun with total impassivity, then he said: 'There are times, Calhoun, when White Hand questions your judgment. We had an agreement, you remember, about capturing this fort. You and your friends were to come here in the hours of darkness and seek lodging for the night. You would be invited to spend the night, for you are white men and the night was full of snow. So much came true. Then you were to kill the night guards, open the gates, let us in and fall upon the soldiers in their bunks.'

Calhoun reached for his bottle of bourbon.

'It was a wild night. White Hand. We could not see well. The night, as you say, was full of snow and there was a great storm blowing. We thought–'

'The storm was in your minds and the snow came from that bottle of fire-water. I could smell it. So two of the guards they did not kill and there was time for a warning. Not enough time, Calhoun, but enough that fifteen of my best men lie dead. Fire-water! Bourbon! And the white men are better than the red!'

'Now look. White Hand. You must understand–'

'I understand everything. I understand that you care only for yourself, your friends who are all bad men, but not for the Paiutes. Then we ride a night and a day to destroy the Anitoba bridge. This, too, we did. And now you ask us to ride again.'

Calhoun was at his most nervously soothing. 'Only perhaps. White Hand. Those troops
must
be prevented from arriving here. You know that.'

'I may lose more men, it is sure that I will lose more men. I may lose many more men. But not for you, Calhoun, not for your evil bourbon, but for what they have done to my people the army of the white men are my enemies and will be while White Hand lives. But they, too, are brave and skilful fighters. And if they find out that it is White Hand and the Paiutes who have attacked them they will never rest until they have hunted down and destroyed each last one of us. I say the price is too high, Sepp Calhoun.'

'And if there is no white man left to tell what happened?' Calhoun let this thought take hold, then went on softly, persuasively: 'The rewards are even higher.'

After a long pause. White Hand nodded several times. 'The rewards are even higher.'

Fifteen minutes after the troop train had embarked on its laborious crawl up Hangman's Pass, Marica stood gazing through the day compartment window, oblivious both of the six men seated behind her and the icy chill of glass against which her forehead rested. She said to no one in particular: 'What a fantastic view!'

She could hardly be faulted for her comment. The blizzard-like squall had passed away and from where she stood she could see the track curving round and downwards for the space of almost two miles as it followed the breathtaking contours of the conifer-lined white valley until it reached the spidery bridge spanning the gorge at the foot of the valley. As was so often the case after snow had ceased to fall, everything could be seen with preternatural clarity.

Claremont was uninterested in the view; he had more pressing and disturbing matters on his mind. He said: 'Made any progress with your enquiries. Marshal?'

'No, sir.' Pearce wasn't demonstrably unhappy, because it wasn't in his nature either to feel or express such an emotion, but he certainly couldn't have been described as ebullient. 'Nobody knows anything, nobody's seen anything, nobody did anything, nobody heard anything and nobody as much as suspects anybody else. No, sir, you can take it that I haven't made any progress.'

'Oh, I don't know.' Deakin spoke encouragingly. 'Every little elimination helps, doesn't it, Marshal? For instance, I was tied up, so it couldn't have been me. Means you've got only eighty-odd suspects left. Marshal. For a man of–'

Deakin broke off as a sharp report was heard. Claremont, already half out of his seat, said in the voice of a man who knew that impending doom was no longer at hand but had arrived: 'In God's name, what was that?'

Marica must have left him in no doubt as to the accuracy of his diagnosis. Her voice rose to a scream. 'No! No! No!'

Apart from Claremont, Pearce and Deakin there were three other men in the compartment – O'Brien, the Governor and the Rev. Peabody. Within two seconds the last of them had propelled himself to his feet and flung himself towards the nearest window on Marica's side. The faces of the six reflected, or appeared to reflect, all the consternation, shock and horror that Marica's voice had held.

The last three wagons of the train – the two troop-carrying coaches and the brakevan – had broken away from the main body of the train and were already rolling quite quickly back down the long steep descent of Hangman's Pass. The rapidly widening gap between the leading troop coach and the second of the horsewagons showed just how rapidly the three runaway wagons were accelerating.

Deakin shouted: 'For God's sake, jump! Jump now! Before it's too late.'

But nobody jumped.

The middle wagon of the three runaways – the second troop coach in which Sergeant Bellew was quartered – was already beginning to sway and rattle in the most alarming fashion. The clicketyclick of the wheels crossing the expansion joints in the lines increased in tempo with the passing of every moment; and as the fish-plates which held the lines were secured to the sleepers by spikes and not by bolts there was a mounting danger that the track itself might begin to work loose from the bed.

The confusion among the soldiers in the coach was total, their expressions ranging from the dumbfounded to the panic-stricken. Most of the men – all of them struggling to maintain their balance – were milling about wildly without any set purpose or intent, but two pairs of soldiers, lashed by the urgency of Bellew's voice, struggled desperately to open two side doors. After only a few fruitless moments they gave up. One of the soldiers raised his voice above the bedlam of sound.

'Godalmighty!' His voice was only one degree short of a shriek. 'The doors are locked! From the outside!'

In fascinated horror, the six men and the girl in the day compartment, completely without any power to help, continued to watch the runaways, now quarter way round the quarter circle curve of Hangman's Pass and at least a mile distant, remorselessly accelerating and terrifyingly swaying to the extent that wheels were now beginning to lift clear of the track.

Claremont shouted : 'Devlin! The brakeman! Why in God's name doesn't he do something?'

The same thought, though understandably with even more urgency, was in the mind of Sergeant Bellew.

'The brakeman! The brakeman! Why doesn't he do – what in God's name is he doing?'

Bellew ran or more correctly staggered along the wildly shaking and vibrating aisle towards the rear door, a matter made easier by the fact that the central space was clear, nearly all the soldiers having their terrified faces pressed close against the windows, their minds mesmerized by the blurring landscape and hypnotized by shock into the blind acceptance of the inevitable.

Bellew reached the rear door. He tugged desperately and completely without avail at the handle; this door, too, was locked. Bellew drew his Colt and shot above and to the side of the handle. He fired four times, oblivious of two ricochets which whistled with lethal potential through the coach; by this time there were more deadly dangers abroad than ricochets. After the fourth shot the door yielded to the desperate pressure of Bellew's hand.

He emerged on to the rear platform and was almost immediately thrown off by the combination of a wind which had now reached near-hurricane force and an exceptionally violent lurch of the coach. To save himself he had to grab desperately at the rail with both hands. His Colt had been in his right hand: now it went spinning over the side.

Bellew took a suicidal chance, but between sudden death by suicide and sudden death through external causes there lies no difference. He flung himself towards the front platform on the brake van, caught the rail, dragged himself to temporary safety and seized the door of the brake van. This he twisted, pulled and pushed with a close to fear-crazed violence, but this door, by now predictably, was also locked. Bellew flattened his face against the glass panel to the side of the door and peered inside; his eyes widened and his face became masked in the total and final despair of a knowledge that comes too late.

The big brake wheel was at the end of the van but there was no hand on this wheel. Instead, the hand clutched a Bible, which was opened, face down, on the floor of the van. Devlin himself, also face down, lay beside his makeshift bed; between the thin shoulders protruded the hilt of a knife.

Bellew turned his stricken face sideways and stared, almost uncomprehendingly, at the snowladen pines lining the track-side stream whizzing by in a hundred-mile-an-hour blur. Bellew crossed himself, something he hadn't done since boyhood, and now the fear was gone from his face. In its place there was only resignation, the acceptance of the inevitability of death.

In the day compartment the seven horrified watchers were without speech for there was no longer anything to say. Like Bellew, although with a vastly different outlook, they too had dumbly accepted the inevitability of death.

The runaway coaches, two miles away now and still somehow miraculously remaining on the track, were hurtling towards the final curve leading to the bridge. Marica jerked convulsively away from the window and buried her face in her hands as the runaways failed to negotiate the last bend. They shot off the track – whether they ripped the track off with them or not it was impossible to tell at that distance – toppled sideways as they then sailed out across the void of the gorge, turning over almost lazily in mid-air until the three coaches, still locked together, had assumed a vertical position, a position they still occupied when all three smashed simultaneously into the precipitous far cliff-side of the gorge with the explosive thunderclap of sound of a detonating ammunition dump. Unquestionably, for every man aboard those coaches death must have super- vened instantaneously. For a long second of time the flattened, mangled coaches remained in that position, seemingly pinned against the canyon wall as if unwilling to move, then, with a deliberation and slowness in grotesque contrast to their speed at the moment of impact, dropped reluctantly off and tumbled lazily into the unseen depths below.

The eleven survivors of the original trainload from Reese City, most of them shivering violently, were gathered round the rear end of the second horse wagon – now, in effect, the end of the train – examining the coupling, the free end of which had formerly been bolted to the front of the leading troop wagon. Three of the four massive securing bolts were still loosely in place in the plate. Claremont stared unbelievingly at the plate and the bolts.

'But how, how,
how
could it have happened? Look at the size of those bolts!'

O'Brien said: 'Not that I have any intention of going down into that ravine to investigate – even although all the evidence is smashed to pieces anyway – but what
I'd
have liked to see was the condition of the timber to which those bolts were attached.'

'But I thought I heard a report–'

'Or,' Deakin suggested, 'a baulk of heavy timber snapping in half.'

'Of course.' Claremont dropped the chain and plate. 'Of course. That's what it must have been. But
why
should it – Banlon, you're the engineer. In fact, you're the only trainman we have left.'

'Before God, I've no idea. The wood may have rotted – it can happen without showing any signs – and this
is
the steepest climb in the mountains. But I'm only guessing. What
I
can't understand is why Devlin did nothing about it.'

Claremont was sombre in both face and voice. 'Some answers we'll never know. What's past is past. First thing is to have another try to contact Reese City or Ogden – we must have replacements for those poor devils at once, God rest their souls. What a way to die! The only way for a cavalryman to die is in the face of the enemy' Claremont wasn't quite as pragmatic as he would have liked to sound and he had to make a conscious effort to return himself to the realities of the present. 'At least, thank God, we didn't lose those medical supplies.'

Deakin was clearly in no mood to commiserate with Claremont. 'Wouldn't have made any difference if you had.'

'Meaning?'

'Medical supplies aren't much good without a doctor to administer them.'

Claremont paused for a few seconds. 'You're a doctor.'

'Not any more I'm not.'

They had a close circle of listeners. Even a trace of interest was beginning to show in Marica's still rather shocked face.

Claremont was becoming heated. 'But, damn it all, Deakin, that's cholera they have up there. Your fellow man–'

'My fellow man's going to hang me. Probably, in spite of Pearce's protestations, from the nearest cottonwood tree. The hell with my fellow man. Besides, as you say, that's cholera they've got up there.'

Claremont showed as much contempt as it is possible for a man to do without actually sneering. 'And that's your real reason?'

'I think it's a very good reason.'

Claremont turned away in disgust and looked around the shivering company. 'Morse I've never learnt. Can anyone–'

'I'm no Ferguson,' O'Brien said. 'But if you give me time–'