The exodus was almost immediate to her grim pleasure. These might have been dandies and city folk, but all of Arizona knew of the Omegas. As the men stepped aside to let the woman and children out first, she ruefully thought that though they may have heard of Black Hawk, they didn’t appear to know that he would unlikely ever have shown any type of mercy as she had claimed. The Omegas, after all, had gained their nickname from the whites from the last letter of the Greek alphabet because of Black Hawk’s vow to fight to his last man if it meant ridding Arizona of its final white settler.
The whistle blast sounded again and repeated itself with urgency. The message was clear, the train had to get moving now! The men were now filing out, including the man with the perforated top hat who was now too frightened to even look at her. As she watched him go, she looked down at the bow she was holding and noticed for the first time that it had been so poorly constructed that the string had snapped when she had shot the arrow. Her attention was drawn away from it by the last man on the train. He was tall with a handlebar mustache made of prematurely graying hair, and he was suddenly jamming his hand into the inside breast pocket of his suit as Parker cried out “Ma’am!!”
It was about as close as Bright Feather ever wanted to come to being shot as the dandy yanked out a small derringer and swung it up as he firmly planted his feet in the aisle. Reacting on instinct, she raised the bow, broken it might be but it still made a good weapon and brought it down on his wrist to a cracking sound. The derringer tumbled to the ground but didn't stay there long as Parker snatched it up and turned it on the man, who was gritting his teeth and giving a strangled cry of pain as he clutched his injured wrist with his good hand.
"It's a trick! I'm not going out there to die! You're just trying to draw us out in the open to make the scalping easier!" the man's eyes frantically shifted to Parker. "Shoot her son! Shoot her now or that red hair of yours is going to be hanging in Black Hawk's tepee by nightfall!"
Lijuan's blasting of the whistle was near continuous now and Bright Feather was done with the man. She hadn't wanted to hurt him, but he had left her no choice, just like he was doing now. The Yavapai woman sprang at him and grabbed him by his coat and as Parker stepped aside she threw him out the open door as Parker looked on slack-jawed.
CHAPTER 9
* * *
In the cab, Lijuan dropped her hand off from the whistle's cord. "What is she waiting for?! Why hasn't she got everyone off the train!" she cried out in frustration. "Your little sweetie can't seem to get the job done!"
A spark of anger flared within Dutch, but he caught himself. Lijuan and the rest of them were under more pressure than anyone had a right to be. Assuming they survived what might be a suicide mission over the trestle, with each passing moment they weren’t steaming towards Stanton’s Gap, the less chance they had to save the town.
"No, wait! It's okay! She's done it!" he shouted as he looked back, from where he was hanging out of the door to the locomotive to see the inexplicable sight of a man being thrown from the passenger car, quickly followed by Bright Feather and Parker leaping down. Some people gathered around the ejected man, while others began to run in all directions. He couldn't worry about them when they had an entire town to save. He swung himself back into the cab and took his place in front of the boiler to the left of Lijuan.
“Go, Lijuan! Go!”
From the moment they had boarded the train Lijuan’s eyes had been darting about all the various gauges and control valves and had adjusted them as best she could remember from her times at the controls the previous summer. For one long second, she looked at Dutch and nodded at him and reached out and grabbed the directional lever and pushed it forward. Letting go of it she slipped into the engineer’s chair used her hand to grasp the horizontal metal bar that was the throttle control and slowly eased it into motion.
The locomotive shook around them for a moment as it slowly began to move forward. Instantly realizing her mistake, Lijuan latched onto the brake and gave it a hard squeeze bringing the train to a halt but not before the cowcatcher buried itself into the mound of earth from the landslide.
Looking over to Dutch, she smiled sheepishly. “Sorry, big brother, but it has been a year!” A second later she had thrown the Johnson bar into the reverse position, and the mammoth wheels on each side of the train began their revolutions as it began pushing its tender, four freight cars, the now abandoned passenger car and the caboose backward out of Stanton’s Gap.
While Lijuan remained focused, he peered out the window. The Keegans were still ministering to their patients, and Dutch felt buoyed as he saw Farnsworth was able to raise his hand and give a brief wave. It gave him hope that the engineer would survive his heart attack. Over the noise from the engine, he could just hear Molly Jane call out the words, "God bless!"
As the train began to pick up more speed he continued watching as the displaced passengers to his relief had stopped running and were constricting into a tight group watching dumbstruck as the train swept by them. His ears took in more than one angry shout from the group, but he wasn’t even listening then. His attention was focused on Bright Feather, who had regained her mount and was watching solemnly as the locomotive chugged by her.
His heart felt like it was being ripped asunder as he saw her silently mouth the words I love you. Dutch returned the pledge to her just as silently, knowing full well that even those three words couldn’t convey the depths of his feelings for Bright Feather. His sisters had their endless flings and he would never judge them for it, but there was one and one woman only for him, and she was sitting there looking at him for possibly the last time.
There had been a time he never thought he would be able to feel anything ever again, much less find love again, but one day that woman simply walked into his life. Bright Feather had a love for languages and had spent seven years tramping the Southwest in her attempt to learn as many as she could. But at last, she had come home, and through their shared brother, the woman he once had regarded as a casual friend, to his great surprise, soon grew to become the center of his universe.
Bright Feather slipped from his view leaving a pang of longing for her to be at his side, but he was thankful she was not on this train. There was every chance in the world sometime in the next few minutes he and Lijuan would be crushed to jelly inside the cab as it tumbled down the side of the mountain—if the bridge failed. His only solace was that she would be safe. What her life would be like after he was gone, he did not know. She had once told him more than once that she could not go on living if he were gone. He had long countered that he would want her to and have the best life possible, but she always shook her head and would speak no further.
He was about to turn away from the window and grab the coal shovel when he saw Pierce riding up, coming from the opposite direction they were traveling in. Dutch put his thumb up and watched as Pierce mimicked the gesture signaling that he had thrown the switch that would allow them to take the train up the grade and onto the tracks that hugged the side of the mountain higher up in the gap.
"We're good, Lijuan." He said quietly, causing her to turn in her chair and they looked at each other in silence for a few moments. Her mouth opened a couple of times but remained silent until she, at last, found her voice.
“David, you should get off the train. Let me do this alone.”
“No chance. I’m here to keep this boiler going at full tilt.”
“I don’t want you to die if that thing collapses.”
He winked at her as he threw her a tight grin. “I’m not dying before we strike gold on that claim! And you’re not dying because I know if we pull this off how much you are going to enjoy bragging about it to Cassie!”
Despite it all, they broke out laughing, and he went and laid his hand on her shoulder and gave her a squeeze of support, and she laid her right hand over his for a moment before he returned to his place at the firebox. In short order, he had pulled a lever that swung open two clamshell-like d
oors and gave a grunt as he shoveled a load of coal into the inferno in front of him.
***
Bright Feather and Niles Pierce, now side by side on their mounts, watched in the distance as the train drew to a halt. A blast of the whistle sounded and once more it began to move coming back in their direction. The moment came when it reached the switch and veered off to the left across the flat terrain that gradually gave way to the grade that would carry the train up the mountainside.
“There’s no turning back now,” The railroad executive said softly as he plucked a white handkerchief from his breast pocket and wiped his brow with it. “Do you think they can do it?”
“What do you know of the Wildes?” she asked just as softly.
“Not much outside of what everyone knows. Children of many different stripes and all. My dealings with them have only been regarding our contract for our Devil’s Canyon project.”
“Despite the way they look, they are all more similar than different, Mister Pierce. One of the similarities that they share is they do not give up, no matter what the risk. If they survive the trestle they will see this through to the end, and as you white men say … you can take that to the bank with you!”
“I pray that you are right.”
“Besides the trestle, are there other risks? I have to know. He’s the man I love.”
Pierce pushed back his bowler with two of his fingers as they continued watching the train begin to go up the grade. “Well, once they are coming down off the mountain, the track goes straight across the plain for a short way before it curves, and then it straightens out again by the old water tower. They are going to be traveling mighty fast, I dare say. That curve poses the only other true threat.”
Bright Feather’s mind traveled back. She remembered seeing the rail bed curving not far from where the switch to merge the tracks sat near the workman’s shack. Suddenly she went rigid in her saddle, squeezing her eyes shut before opening them again. Worry lines immediately flowed across Pierce’s forehead as he watched her.
“What is it?”
“In our grave concern to rescue the people of Stanton’s Gap we have all overlooked something!
“What?!” he demanded.
“You threw the switch from the position it was in that allows trains to come from the direction of Lake Bliss, but trains also head towards Lake Bliss from Stanton’s Gap. But what of the other switch? One I saw by a water tower!”
Bright Feather watched as a look of disorientation and horror swept over the man next to her. “By god, you’re right! If we don’t throw it before the train reaches the switch it won’t merge back on to the new track, instead …”
“What?”
“Instead it will keep on the original track which is a dead end. It will be a derailment for the ages!”
Bright Feather pressed her lips together and with her chin held high she looked down the gap. “Then it’s up to you and me to get there while they are still on the mountain and save them. Heyahhh!” she shouted urging her horse into a run, with Pierce following behind her. As they charged past the young conductor Pierce called out to him.
“You look after these folks, lad! They are in your hands now!”
“Yes, sir!” Parker called after them as they grew smaller and smaller in front of the cloud of dust being kicked up behind them as they raced back into the gap.
CHAPTER 10
* * *
Up on the grade, the Grand Western train was chugging along nearing the end of its long climb up the stubby little mountain ready to emerge where the tracks leveled out as they traveled along the side. Though they were maintaining a good speed upwards, with the thought of the cattle that were now surely through the gap and heading across the plain towards the town, it felt to Lijuan and Dutch as if they were barely moving.
“Pressure?” Lijuan called out from the operator’s seat.
Earlier she had told him her lover had usually kept the pressure in the engine at a steady one hundred and fifty, but that had been under normal operating circumstances, not a life or death dash to stop a catastrophe.
“One seventy-five and rising!” he said staring at hands behind the glass front of the circular brass gage crowning the boiler.
“Keep that fire blazing, David!”
Without another word, he thrust two more shovel loads of coal through the open door and slammed it shut with the lever just as he felt himself being jolted forward slightly. The engine had leveled off having reached the top of the grade and surged forward as Lijuan increased the speed on the throttle. Dutch looked out the side and far below he could see the floor of the gap, but the overhang and the closeness the new rail bed had been built to the side of the gap hid it from his view. Before he turned to face forward he caught sight of a pair of eagles in flight below them, flying down the gap in the direction that they had come.
“How much further to this infamous trestle?” he called out to Lijuan. Can you see it yet?”
"Not yet, but at our speed, it won't be much longer until we come to it and the tale will be told! If it doesn't hold, that will be it. We'll be finished. End of the line." Her voice was strained but her hand was rock steady on the throttle control.
Pride coursed through Dutch at that moment. As a little girl she had been so shy and mousy, desperate for Cassandra’s love and approval that took so long in coming. He had watched her grow from that timid waif she had been to be the intimidating woman she was now despite her small frame. He didn’t want to believe this could be her last day as well as his.
“Let’s hope that’s not our epitaph on our tombstones. I was hoping for something a little more profound!” he said, trying to lighten the tension. “What about you?”
“You kidding? Straight up simple is what my marker is going to be. No epitaph just Lijuan Wilde, Begin–1844 End–18—well, I hope not 1873 or 18 anything! I’m thinking I just might want to see this twentieth century a lot of folks are looking forward to!” she laughed.
“Yes, the big hazy future beyond the turn of the century! You know, a major at the fort just returned from a long furlough in Europe. Said he heard about a couple of Germans trying to come up with some plans for a horseless carriage. They were calling it the wave of the future. Imagine that!”
“I’ll believe that when I see it!”
The banter between the siblings died away as the engine swung around a curve on the mountainside and before them, the trestle at long last had appeared. They knew would be a long one from having seen portions of it on past occasions riding through the gap but now they were seeing it from a new angle for the first time. What they saw instantly made their blood run as cold as ice water.
The trestle was supported by a series of six support structures, each made up of four thick individual beams crisscrossed with smaller supporting beams. It ran nearly a quarter of mile long bridging a cut in the mountain that made up this side of the gap. The Wilde's attention was focused on one thing, however, the first of the six “legs” looked normal until about halfway down its length, then the beams were pitted black, supporting what Bright Feather had told them.
Worst of all, however, was below the pitted ones the leg terminated in open air. The bottom section had burned completely away. The next nearest support leg was still intact all the way to the ground but all the beams on its lower half were pitted black and none of the individual beams near the ground between the two damaged legs remained, all had been burned away in whatever blaze had struck.
Lijuan pivoted in her seat and stared at Dutch for a long moment before she asked the unanswerable.
“Will it hold?”
Dutch drew a deep breath, he didn’t want to give false hope, but the truth was there was no way of knowing. He was a cavalry captain and not a structural engineer. All he had to go on was that four of the six massive supports holding up the trestle looked undamaged, and they had to pray that would be enough to get them over to the other side.
"Once we come out of this cu
rve, the track straightens out for the run-up to the bridge. You have to give it everything you've got!" he said moving to stand behind her chair, his hands gripping its back. He wondered if she noticed just how white his knuckles had turned.
“Count on it!” she promised with a grimace as she turned and looked straight ahead while he returned to the boiler and stoked it with more coal.
His eyes glanced up at the gauge, the needle now at the two hundred pounds per square inch mark and it was wavering to inch past it.
The train lurched onto the straight away, its winding around the curves complete and Lijuan wasted no time pushing the throttle bar forward. Dutch left his position and drew near her again. He took her free hand in his.
“David, if we don’t get out of this … I want you to know how much it meant to me for you making my childhood bearable when Cassie refused to believe I really was a sister.” Her voice was shaking as she spoke and she blinked back a tear.
"You made it easy. I was a big brother at last! Later, of course, I would be to Honor, Cattie, and Blue River but … you … you were the first. I was proud … just as proud of I am of you right now … we're going to make it … you hear me. We’re going to make it!"
Underneath them, the steel rails sang their song as they supported the multi-ton train, but quickly the tune changed slightly. The rails were no longer on solid ground but were crossing over a void that was dozens of feet to the rocky bottom of the bowl-like enclave the trestle spanned.
As the train charged forward over the first damaged support pillar the pair in the cab held their breath as they felt the mighty locomotive vibrate. Out the front window beyond the mushroom-shaped smokestack on the front of the engine they saw the trestle appear to be steady but suddenly swaying slightly, rocking them back and forth.
Sing The Death Song: Dutch Wilde & Bright Feather Western Adventure (Half Breed Haven Book 6) Page 8
