Breakheart Pass (8 page)

Claremont said: 'Now try for the telegraph operator at the Reese City depot. Find out if he has any information for us about Captain Oakland or Lieutenant Newell.'

Ferguson said: The depot, sir? that'll be the station-master. I mean, they don't have a telegraph office in Reese City any more. They tell me the telegraphist left for the Big Bonanza some time ago.'

'Well, the station-master.'

'Yes, sir.' Ferguson hesitated. 'The word is, sir, that he's not seen at the depot very often. He appears to spend most of his life in the back room of the Imperial Hotel.'

'Try, anyway.'

Ferguson tried. He transmitted the call-sign at least a dozen times, then looked up. 'I don't seem to be able to raise them, sir.'

O'Brien said,
sotto voce
, to Pearce: 'Maybe they should switch the telegraph to the Imperial.' The tightening of Claremont's lips showed that the remark hadn't been quite so
sotto voce
as intended, but he ignored it and said to Ferguson: 'Keep trying.'

Ferguson tried and kept on trying. His earphones remained obstinately silent. He shook his head and looked towards Claremont, who forestalled him. 'No one manning the other end, eh?'

'No, sir, nothing like that.' Ferguson was genuinely puzzled. 'The line's out of action. Dead. One of the relay repeaters gone, most like.'

'I don't see how it can have gone. No snow, no high winds – and nothing the matter with any of them when we called the Fort from Reese City yesterday. Keep trying while we have some breakfast.' He paused, looked first of all unenthusiastically at Deakin, then in grieved enquiry at Pearce. 'This criminal here, this Houston. Does he have to eat with us?'

'Deakin,' Deakin said. 'Not Houston.'

'Shut up,' Pearce said. To the Colonel: 'He could starve for all I care – but, well, he can sit at my table. If the Reverend and the Doctor don't mind, that is.' He glanced around. 'I see the good Doctor isn't up and about yet.' He took Deakin none too gently by the arm. 'Come on.'

The seven people taking breakfast were seated as they had been the previous evening, except that Deakin had taken the place of Dr Molyneux, who had yet to put in an appearance. Peabody, seated next to him, spent what was clearly a most uncomfortable meal: he kept glancing furtively at Deakin and had about him the look of a divine on the
qui vive
for the emergence of a pair of horns and forked tail. Deakin, for his part, paid no attention: as befitted a man who had just undergone an enforced absence from the pleasures of the table, his undivided attention was devoted to the contents of the plate before him.

Claremont finished his meal, sat back, nodded to Henry to pour him some more coffee, lit a cheroot and glanced across at Pearce's table. He permitted himself one of his rare and wintry smiles.

'I'm afraid Dr Molyneux is going to find some difficulty in adjusting to army breakfast times. Henry, go and waken him.' He twisted in his seat and called down the passageway. 'Ferguson?'

'No luck, sir. Nothing. Quite dead.'

For a moment, head still averted, Claremont tapped his fingers irresolutely on the table, then made up his mind. 'Dismantle your equipment,' he called, then turned to face the company again. 'We'll leave as soon as he's ready. Major O'Brien, if you would be so kind–' He broke off in astonishment as Henry, his measured steward's gait in startling abeyance, almost rushed into the diningroom, wide eyes reflecting the shock mirrored in the long lugubrious face.

'What on earth's the matter, Henry?'

'He's dead, Colonel! He's lying there dead! Dr Molyneux.'

'Dead? Dead? The doctor? Are you – are you sure, Henry? Did you shake him?'

Henry nodded and shivered at the same moment, then gestured towards the window. 'He's like the ice in that river.' He moved to one side as O'Brien pushed by. 'Heart, I'd say, sir. Looked as if he slipped away peaceful, like.'

Claremont rose and paced up and down in the narrow confined space available to him. 'Good God! This is dreadful, dreadful.' It was clear that Claremont, apart from the natural shock at the news of Molyneux's death, was aghast at the implications it held: but it was left to the Reverend Peabody to put it into words.

'In the midst of life …' For a person built along the lines of an undernourished scarecrow Peabody was possessed of an enormously deep and sepulchral voice that seemed to resonate from the depths of the tomb. 'Dreadful for him. Colonel, dreadful to be struck down in his prime, dreadful for those sick and dying souls in the Fort who were depending upon him, and him alone, to come to their succour. Ah, the irony of it, the bitter irony of it all. Life is but a walking shadow.' What was meant by the last remark was not clear and Peabody, it was equally clear, was in no mind to elucidate: hands clasped and eyes screwed tightly shut, Peabody was deep in silent prayer.

O'Brien entered, his face grave and set. He nodded in reply to Claremont's interrogative glance.

'Died in his sleep, I'd say, sir. As Henry says, it looks like a heart attack, and a sudden and massive one at that. From his face, it seems that he never knew anything about it.'

Deakin said: 'Could I have a look?'

Seven pairs of eyes, including those of the Reverend Peabody, who had momentarily interrupted his intercession with the hereafter, immediately turned on Deakin, but none with quite the cold hostility of Colonel Claremont's.

'You? What the devil for?'

'Establish the exact cause of death, maybe.' Deakin shrugged, relaxed to the point of indifference. 'You know that I trained to be a doctor.'

'Qualified?'

'And disbarred.'

'Inevitably.'

'Not for incompetence. Not for professional misconduct.' Deakin paused then went on delicately: 'For other things, shall we say? But once a doctor, always a doctor.'

'I suppose so.' Claremont was sufficiently a realist to allow his pragmatism to override his personal feelings. 'Well, why not? Show him, Henry.'

A profound silence enveloped the dining compartment after the departure of the two men. There were so many things to be said, but all those things were so obvious that it appeared pointless to say them: by common consent they avoided the gaze of each other and seemed to concentrate on objects in the middle distance. Even the advent of Henry with another pot of fresh coffee failed to dispel the funereal atmosphere, if for no reason other than the fart that Henry was a natural for the chief mourner at any wake. All seven pairs of eyes withdrew their gazes from the far distances as Deakin returned.

Claremont said: 'Heart attack?'

Deakin considered. 'I guess you could call it that. Kind of.' He glanced at Pearce. 'Lucky for us we have the law aboard.'

'What do you mean, sir?' Governor Fairchild looked even more distraught than he had the previous evening: with what was possibly very good reason, he now looked positively distressed.

'Somebody knocked Molyneux out, took a probe from his surgical case, inserted it under the rib cage and pushed up, piercing his heart. Death would have supervened pretty well immediately.' Deakin surveyed the company in an almost leisurely fashion. 'I would say that it was done by someone with some medical knowledge, at least of anatomy. Any of you lot know anything about anatomy?'

Claremont's voice was forgiveably harsh. 'What in God's name are you saying?'

'He was struck on the head by something heavy and solid – like a gun butt, say. The skin above the left ear is broken. But death occurred before there was time for a bruise to form. Just below the ribs is a tiny blue-red puncture. Go see for yourselves.'

'This is preposterous.' Claremont's expression didn't quite match the expressed conviction, there was a disturbing certainty about the way in which Deakin spoke. 'Preposterous!'

'Of course it is. What
really
happened is that he stabbed himself to death,
then
cleaned up the probe and returned it to his case. Tidy to the end.'

'This is hardly the time–'

'You've got a murderer aboard. Why don't you go and check?'

Claremont hesitated, then led an almost concerted movement back towards the second coach, even the Reverend Peabody pressing along anxiously if apprehensively in the rear. Deakin was left alone with Marica, who sat tensely in her chair, hands clenched in her lap and looking at him with a most peculiar expression. When she spoke it was almost in a whisper.

'A murderer!
You're
a murderer. The Marshal says so. Your Wanted notice says so.
That's
why you had me untie and tie those ropes, so that later you could wriggle out–'

'Heaven send me help.' Wearily, Deakin poured himself some more coffee. 'Clear-cut motive, of course – I wanted his job so I upped and did him in in the middle of the night. I killed him, faking to make it look like a natural death, then proved to everyone it wasn't. Then, of course, I re-tied my hands behind my back, using my toes to tie the knots.' He rose, moved past her, touched her lightly on the shoulder, then moved on to a steam-clouded window, which he began to clear. 'I'm tired, too. It's snowing now. The sky's getting dark, the wind's getting up and there's a blizzard lurking behind those peaks. No day for a burial service.'

'There won't be any. They'll take him all the way back to Salt Lake.'

'They'll do what?'

'Doctor Molyneux.
And
all the men who have died in the epidemic at Fort Humboldt. It's normal peacetime practice. The relatives and friends – well, they like to be there.'

'But it – it'll take
days
to–'

Not looking at him, she said: 'There are about thirty empty coffins in the supply wagon.'

'There are? Well, I'll be damned. A railroad hearse!'

'More or less. We were told that those coffins were going to Elko. Now we know they're going no further than Fort Humboldt.' She shivered despite the warmth of the compartment. 'I'm glad I'm not returning on this train … Tell me, who do you think did it?'

'Did what? Ah, the Doc. Set a murderer to catch a murderer, is that it?'

'No.' The dark eyes looked at him levelly. 'I didn't mean that.'

'Well, it wasn't me and it wasn't you. That only leaves the Marshal with about seventy other suspects – I don't know how many troops they have aboard. Ah! Here are some of them coming now.'

Claremont entered, followed by Pearce and O'Brien. Deakin caught his eye. Claremont nodded heavily and, just as heavily, sat down in silence and reached for the coffee-pot.

As the morning progressed, so did the snow steadily thicken, as Deakin had predicted. The increase of the wind had not kept pace with that of the snow so blizzard conditions were still some way off: but all the signs were there.

The train was now fairly into the spectacular mountain country. The track no longer ran along valleys with rivers meandering through them, but through steep, almost precipitously-sided gorges, through tunnels or along permanent ways that had been blasted out of the solid rock leaving a cliff-edge drop to the foot of the ravine below.

Marica peered through a lee-side window that was relatively free from snow and thought, not for the first time, that those mountains were no place for the faint-hearted and advanced sufferers from vertigo. At the moment, the train was rattling and swaying its way across a trellis bridge spanning an apparently bottomless gorge, the lowermost supports of the bridge being lost in the gloomy and snow-filled ravine below.

As the locomotive came off the bridge, it curved away to the right and began to climb up the lefthand side of a steep-sided valley, towering snowclad pines to the left, the ravine to the right. The brake van had just cleared the bridge when Marica staggered and almost fell as the train brakes screeched and jolted the train to a violent halt. None of the men in the dining compartment was similarly affected for the sufficient reason that they were all sitting down: but the explosive language of Claremont could be taken as being fairly representative of their general feelings. Within seconds, Claremont, O'Brien, Pearce and, more leisurely, Deakin had risen, moved out on to the rear platform of the leading coach and swung down to the ankle-deep snow of the track-side.

Banlon, his wizened face twisted with anxiety, came running down the track. O'Brien caught and checked him, Banlon struggled to free himself. He shouted: 'God's sake, let go! He's fallen off.'

'Who has, man?'

'Jackson, my fireman!' Banlon broke free and ran on to the bridge, stopped and peered down into the murky depths. He hurried on another few paces and looked again. This time he remained where he was, first kneeling and then lowering himself until he was prone on the snow. He was joined almost immediately by the others, including by now Sergeant Bellew and some soldiers. All of them peered gingerly over the edge of the bridge.

Sixty, perhaps seventy feet below, a crumpled figure lay huddled on a spur of rock. Over a hundred feet below that again the foaming white waters of the river at the foot of the gorge could dimly be discerned.

Pearce said: 'Well, Doctor Deakin?' The emphasis on the 'doctor' was minimal: but it was there.

Deakin was curt. 'He's dead. Any fool can see that.'

'I don't regard myself as a fool and
I
can't see it,' Pearce said mildly. 'He might be in need of medical assistance. Agreed, Colonel Claremont?'

'I have no power to ask this man–'

Deakin said: 'And neither has Pearce. And if I go down, what guarantee have I that Pearce won't arrange for a life-line to slip? We all know the high opinion the Marshal has of me and we all know that after my trial I'm for the drop. It would save the Marshal an awful lot of time and trouble if he were kind of accidentally to arrange for me to have this drop now – right down to the bottom of the gorge.'

'There'll be six of my soldiers belaying that rope, Deakin.' Claremont's face was stony. 'You insult me, sir.'

'I do?' Deakin looked at him consideringly. 'Yes, I do believe I do. My apologies.' He took the end of the rope, made a double bowline, thrust his legs through the loops and took a bight around his waist. 'I'd like another rope, too.'