Authors: Steve Hockensmith

On the Wrong Track (30 page)

BOOK: On the Wrong Track

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I flattened myself, more bullets blasting up at me from the cab below. As I lay there, the shimmying of the express car grew into a bucking as fierce as any bronc’s. The whistling of the wind grew stronger, too, building to such a gale I feared it would peel me right off the roof.

When I dared a peep up, I saw distant bluffs to my left and an all-too-close bluff to my right. We were running along the edge of a gorge, and doing it faster than would’ve been safe on the Kansas flats.

The lever Barson had stumbled into was the throttle.

The train hit a curve that put such a slant to the car I nearly slid off the roof like a johnnycake off a greased griddle. There was a sudden metallic clang and a piercing scream, followed by an awful thumping and ripping and cracking. Someone had been knocked over the side—and been snagged and chewed by the chugging gears.

The time for ducking was over. As soon as the track and train straightened up again, I did the same, popping up with Aunt Pauline at the ready.

Not only wasn’t I immediately shot, I wasn’t even noticed. The engineer was beyond noticing anything—most of him was crumpled on the floor, though a bullet had spread various bits from the neck up hither-thither around the cab. Lockhart and Welsh were grappling nearby, both of them clawing at Aunt Virgie, while Miss Caveo was trying to keep Kip at bay with the fireman’s shovel, the kid panting curses and waving his apparently emptied Colt at her like a hammer.

Barson was gone.

I didn’t have a shot at either Welsh or Kip that didn’t have a chance of hitting Lockhart or Miss Caveo, so it wouldn’t be Aunt Pauline to the rescue—it would have to be me. But as I got ready to jump in and join the fray, I saw something that nearly had me jumping right out of my skin instead.

Perhaps a quarter mile ahead of us, the rails wound around another rocky bend, this one so sharp it almost looked like the tracks weren’t turning but simply stopping. It was the kind of curve any sane engineer would take with the brakes on, the throttle back, and his fingers crossed. And we were about to head into at full speed.

Even if I could’ve reached the brake (assuming I could figure out where it was in the next thirty seconds), it was too late. The Pacific Express may have been built for the rails, but it was about to take its maiden voyage as an airship.

“We’re gonna crash! Jump! Everybody!” I shouted. Then I took my own advice—only I wasn’t heaving myself over the side of the train, but down into the tender.

It was like leaping onto a haystack … with a pile of bricks buried inside it. Despite the pain that slammed into my backside as I landed, I managed to slide quickly down the black mound of coal and get Aunt Pauline pointed at Welsh’s head—just as he twisted Virgie into Lockhart’s side and pulled the trigger.

My shot caught Welsh just above the right eye.

Lockhart and Welsh fell together, crumpling into one heap, as if they were two parts of the same, suddenly lifeless body.

“Augie!” Kip cried, dropping his gun and throwing himself onto the floor at Welsh’s side.

I knelt down next to him, hoping to find Lockhart still breathing. But there was no dime-novel miracle. The old Pinkerton’s flask hadn’t stopped the bullet. And there weren’t any whispered words about carrying on and getting the lady to safety, either—no jaunty wink as the death rattle set in. Ol’ Burl Lockhart was just plain dead.

“We gotta get outta here, kid!” I shouted at Kip as I got to my feet. “We gotta jump! Now!”

But Kip wasn’t listening. He was too busy trying to peel Aunt Virgie from Welsh’s hand. Tears were streaming down his face as he clawed uselessly at fingers wound as tight as the grip of Death itself.

Something slipped around my left hand, and I turned to find Miss Caveo by my side.

“Which way?” she said.

On the right side of the track was a sheer rock wall speeding by no more than six feet from the train. On the left side was nothing—not even ground, so far as we could see.

One side was instant death, the other … not so instant. So I picked the latter. Don’t we always?

“Trust me,” I said as we stepped to the edge of the cab hand in hand. “I think I’m gettin’ the hang of this.”

We jumped together and we fell together. And the last thing I knew when the impact came, bringing the darkness with it, was that her fingers were still entwined with mine.

Thirty-eight

MISS CORVUS

Or, I Meet a Dear Friend Again for the Very First Time

When I started to
come to, the first thing I became aware of was pain. Someone had been using my skull as an anvil, it seemed, and my whole body was still quivering from the pounding of the hammer.

The second thing I noticed was my brother. He was there with me, wherever “there” was. Maybe I heard his breathing or smelled the scent of pipe smoke and sweat on his clothes—something Holmes-y like that. But I don’t think so. His presence wasn’t something I deduced. It was something I felt.

“Gustav,” I said.

“Hey, Brother. How you feelin’?”

“Been better. Often. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever been worse.”

“You took quite a blow to the head, Otto,” said someone else—a someone else I was most relieved to hear. “We were worried about you.”

I opened my eyes, hoping the first sight they’d alight upon would be Miss Caveo’s pretty face. And I did indeed find myself dazzled, though not by the lady’s beauty: I was stretched out on my back, my face pointed up at a blinding-bright afternoon sun.

I winced and shut my eyes again.

“Landed on my head, huh?” I said. “Well, that’s a stroke of luck. I can get by without that ol’ thing—right, Gustav?”

“Been doin’ it for years.”

I turned toward the sound of my brother’s voice and dared a little eyelid crack. There he was sitting next to me, looking as bad as I felt: haggard and hurting, held together by little more than the last unripped stitches in filthy, frayed clothes. He wasn’t beaming down at me—he couldn’t even bring himself to smile. But I could see that he wanted to, and that was enough.

Miss Caveo was next to him, pressed up much closer than I would’ve thought my brother could withstand without melting like butter left too close to the stove. Her dark hair was tangled and frizzed, her face a patchwork of bruises and scratches, her dress torn and smeared with dirt.

She was a lovely sight.

As I lay there mooning up at her, my vision unfuzzed further, and I realized that the swirling shapes behind my brother and Miss Caveo were rocky outcroppings and overhangs—and that they were moving. Or seemed to be, anyway. Actually,
we
were moving.

The three of us were squeezed onto the battered remnants of the hand car, coasting down the mountainside with all the roaring speed of an arthritic snail.

“You came after me,” I said to Old Red.

“As best I could. Obviously, I was too late to be any help.”

“Don’t be modest, Gustav—you know that’s not true,” Miss Caveo said.

A flush as red as strawberry preserves smeared itself across my brother’s face.

The lady turned toward me. “After you and I jumped from the engine, we rolled down an incline into some boulders, and you were knocked unconscious. I could barely get myself back to the roadbed, let alone carry
you
. Fortunately, your brother soon came along, and we were able to improvise a rope of sorts and haul you up.”

“‘Improvise a rope’?”

Old Red’s blush went from red to purple.

Miss Caveo smiled coyly. “Let’s just say I’ve finally discovered an advantage to the ridiculous overexcess of modesty imposed on my gender by respectable society.”

I couldn’t help it—my eyes darted down for a peek at her skirts. It was hard to tell from the way she was sitting, but it did seem like they weren’t as fully rounded as one would expect.

Of course, a lady’s frilly underthings aren’t called unmentionables for nothing, and I thought it best to move the conversation along lest poor Gustav survive a run-in with the Give-’em-Hell Boys only to die of embarrassment less than an hour later.

“What happened to the engine?”

“It went off the rails, just as you feared it would,” Miss Caveo said. “The train’s at the bottom of a canyon in a million pieces.”

“Most of ’em still on fire,” Old Red added. “I was probably half a mile away when the boiler blew, and it still like to pop my eardrums.”

I nodded, silent, thinking of everything that had quite literally gone up in smoke.

Lockhart, Kip, Barson and Welsh, Morrison, the nameless engineer, Chan’s “treasure.” Even the Give-’em-Hell Boys’ stolen gold had probably melted in the blaze, slithering away into crevices and under rocks like snakes escaping the midday sun.

And I’d lost a treasure of my own, I realized with a queasy jolt. My war bag had been in the baggage car—and my book had been in my bag.

For weeks, I’d been trying to pretend that bundle of tattered, ink-splattered pages didn’t exist. And now that it truly didn’t, I tried to push it from my thoughts again. It seemed wrong to mourn a thing when so many people had just died, even if it wasn’t just a book that had been destroyed but a hope I’d been too cowardly to let myself feel.

“So,” I said, almost choking on the word, “how’d Samuel make out?”

He was fine, Gustav told me. Kip just winged him. In fact, the porter bounced back so quick, even with his arm in a sling he tried to come after us with Old Red. Wiltrout had put a stop to that.

My brother related all this reluctantly. Not so much like he didn’t want to tell me—more like there was something else he wanted to tell me first, something he wouldn’t or couldn’t say just yet.

“Miss?” he said shyly. “You’re gonna have to excuse my askin’ like this, but … now that we know Otto’s alright … well … ain’t it about time you told us who the heck you really are?”

The lady laughed. “I suppose proper introductions
are
past due, aren’t they?” She held out a hand to my brother. “I’m Diana Corvus.”

Old Red took the ends of her fingers and gave them a loose, gingerly shake, as if her hand might shatter should he wrap his around hers.

“Miss Corvus,” he mumbled.

Even flat on my back feeling like I’d just been fired out of a cannon into a brick wall, I managed a more enthusiastic handshake.

“So you’re what they call a spotter?” I asked.

She nodded. “An extremely inexperienced one, I’m afraid. This was only my third trip as a Southern Pacific agent. I’m supposed to be watching for confidence men, cardsharps, thieves—”

“And crooked railroad detectives,” Old Red said.

“Yes … and crooked railroad detectives,” Miss Corvus admitted. (I felt a little wistful thinking of her as “Miss Corvus” now. It was almost as though “Diana Caveo” was a sweetheart I’d never see again.) “Colonel Crowe wanted me to keep an eye on you. If I noticed anything suspicious, Jefferson Powless would have paid you for your time and sent you on your way.”

“Let’s see,” I said. “Murders, the Give-’em-Hell Boys, a wreck … nope, nothing suspicious about any of that.”

Miss Corvus fixed a quizzical gaze on Gustav. “Actually, I did see something … well, I wouldn’t call it suspicious, exactly, but it was definitely peculiar. That package you gave to the stationmaster in Carlin. What was in it?”

I turned a stare on Old Red, too. “Package? In Carlin?”

My brother squirmed and cleared his throat. “This ain’t how I wanted to tell you, Otto … I’m through keepin’ secrets from you.”

He glanced at Miss Corvus, clearly flustered by her presence but hardly able to ask her to step outside and give us a moment alone.

“After all our arguin’ yesterday, I wanted to do something for you. You were helpin’ me do what I wanted to do even though you didn’t wanna do it yourself. So I figured the least I could do was do for you what you wanted to do—whether you knew you wanted to do it or not.”

As there weren’t enough specifics in what Old Red had said from which to even forge a decent question, I had to make do with “Huh?”

“When I sent you outta the baggage car? As we were pullin’ into Carlin?” Gustav said sheepishly. “I dug your book out of our bags. And when you set off lookin’ for Lockhart, I took it to the stationmaster and asked him to mail it to
Harper’s Weekly
.”

“You
what
?”

“Book?” Miss Corvus asked.

“Yes, book,” I said. “
My
book. Which
I
wrote. For me to do with—or not do with—as I please.” I pointed a finger at Old Red and shook it like a switch I was itching to cane him with. “You sneaky, presumptuous, high-handed jackass.” I flattened out my hand and slapped my brother on the knee (careful not to hit the leg he’d boogered up earlier). “God bless you!”

“So … you ain’t really mad at me?”

“Of course, I am! But that don’t mean I ain’t grateful, too!”

Gustav looked relieved, Miss Corvus looked confused, and me—I just had to laugh.

My brother hadn’t just given me my dream back. Without meaning to, he’d showed me how to dream it better. A man doesn’t need to be fearless to get what he wants. He just needs to look his fears in the face … so he can thumb his nose at them.

If Old Red could drag himself onto the Pacific Express, I could weather a discouraging letter from
Harper’s Weekly
—and from
Collier’s, Scribner’s,
and every other magazine and publisher on through to
The Ladies Home Journal,
if that’s what it took. I had a story to tell. Hell, now I had
two
.

After another hour on our beat-up barn door of a train, Gustav, Miss Corvus, and I came gliding into a little jerkwater town called Cisco. A rescue engine was quickly dispatched to fetch what was left of the Express, and not long after that we were back amongst our fellow passengers—few of whom seemed particularly forgiving when told that their luggage was now cinders at the bottom of a ravine.
Refund
was a word I heard bandied about quite a bit.
Lawsuit
was almost as common.

While everyone around us grumbled, Miss Corvus and I chattered away cheerfully (if, in my case, rather woozily) about my book, my adventures with Old Red, and anything else I could think of to keep the conversation going. My brother even joined in from time to time when his stomach allowed it, bashfully but tenaciously debating the lady on the Lizzie Borden trial, which both she and he (through me) had followed in the papers the month before.

It was the lengthiest discussion I’d seen him have with a woman since our days on the farm in Kansas, when he and my sisters, Ilse and Greta, would spar over such weighty questions as the proper way to husk corn and who’d cut a fart in the kitchen. I was pleased to see him overcome his other great fear—females—so long as he didn’t get crazy ideas about courting this one. Those crazy ideas were reserved for
me
.

When we reached Oakland that evening, a dozen S.P. officials swooped down on the passengers with ticket vouchers, meal tickets, promises, sympathy, and lips ready, pursed for the smooching of butts. None of which was directed at me, my brother, or Miss Corvus. News of the crash had reached town hours in advance of the train, and before any reporters could get to us, we were hustled from the station (if it’s possible to be “hustled” when, like Old Red and me, you can barely walk).

Gustav and I were told to await instructions in a nearby boardinghouse. The lady was rushed off elsewhere—and I haven’t seen her since.

If I’d had any inkling our parting was to be so permanent, who knows what I might have said? Something painfully sincere and utterly mortifying, most likely: “It’s been a treat gettin’ to know you—and I’d sure like the chance to know you better.” Or “Let’s not let this be good-bye.”
Or even “Diana Corvus, I think I love you.” I had taken a blow to the head, remember.

But all she got from me was “Good night, miss. I hope we’ll be seein’ you round H.Q. real regular.”

“I hope so, too,” she said. Her high spirits had taken a curious dip after the S.P. men had scooped us up, and she sounded dead serious—almost dour—now. “You’re exceptional men … and that’s what I’m going to tell Colonel Crowe and Jefferson Powless.”

“Did you hear that?” I said as a jittery Southern Pacific functionary ushered her away. “‘Exceptional men,’ she called us.”

“She’s just sayin’ she’ll do what she can to help us.”

“Help us? We’re heroes, ain’t we?”

Gustav made a noise halfway between a growl and a grunted chuckle. He knew what was coming—and late the next afternoon, it came.

BOOK: On the Wrong Track

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