I grinned. “We’ll see about that after I check up on our prisoner.”
Custer was whooping it up fit to be tied as I mounted the platform between the baggage car and the coach, whining piteously and doing his best to turn the door into kindling. He reminded me of an old hound I’d once had who would set all the other dogs to howling for miles around every time I stepped outside without him.
It struck me then. Drawing my belt gun, I propped the Winchester against the wall, kicked open the door of the coach, and threw myself into the first seat on my left, landing hard on my hurt shoulder.
That was a mistake. Somewhere someone crushed a fresh batch of walnuts and sparks of white-hot pain swirled before my eyes. For an instant I was blinded. Through sheer act of will I forced myself to see through the swimming red haze. Gun in hand, I scrambled over to the opposite seat and peered cautiously over the back.
I hadn’t missed much. Ghost Shirt was gone, along with my handcuffs and six inches off the arm of-the seat he had occupied.
Chapter Nineteen
The door opened at the other end of the coach as I was getting up from between the seats. I raised my revolver to the level of the handle and thumbed back the hammer. My injured shoulder throbbed a half-beat off from the rapid banging of my heart. Colonel Locke came in and closed the door gently behind him.
“Sleeping like a baby,” he said, turning. “I must have given him a stronger dose than I thought. Did you—” He stopped when he saw the gun.
“Ghost Shirt,” I barked. “Did you see him?”
“Why, no, I—” He realized the implication of my words and glanced at the seat in which he had last seen the Indian.
While it was still dawning on his sodden consciousness I retrieved my carbine and pushed past him roughly, heading for the door through which he had just passed. Outside I leaped to the ground and looked up and down the length of the train as if expecting the fugitive to be standing there waiting for me. He wasn’t. I did find the piece of wood he had taken with him when he finished the job the sudden halt had started, lying on the ground south of the tracks, but that was no clue at all, as he might have flung it there to throw me off while he lit a shuck north.
The first thing Locke and I did was search the train from top to bottom. I had learned my lesson the time a defendant on trial for murder in Judge Blackthorne’s court made a run for it while court was in session and officers scoured Helena for two hours without result, only to have the janitor stumble upon him crouched in the rear of a cloakroom down the hall from the judge’s chambers. We divided the train down the middle—or nearly so, Locke wanting nothing to do with the baggage car and its fanged occupant—me taking the front as far back as the coach, the colonel seeing to the caboose and the senator’s car just in case our quarry had slipped inside after his own exit. We checked under the carriage and up on the roofs. I even risked my skin looking through baggage, where I knew he couldn’t be from the way the dog was acting. The third time it went for my leg I should have shot it, but I didn’t. I’m like that sometimes. I considered letting it out to see if it would lead us to its master, but gave that up because there was no way ot telling whom it might attack when it did. Besides, the dog was Cheyenne. Silly as that sounds, I’ve seen horses brought up on Indian tradition throw their new riders when tracking down members of the same tribe for unfriendly purposes, and it was just possible that this mongrel would lead us into God knows what rather than betray the whereabouts of the man who took care of it. We didn’t have time to find out. So when I left the car I made sure Custer was still inside.
I met Locke outside the coach. He was carrying the lantern I had seen the conductor with earlier.
“Anything?” I demanded.
“Just the conductor.”
“What did he see?”
“I didn’t ask. He’s dead.”
“Ghost Shirt?” I snatched his sleeve.
He shook his head. “Not unless he rammed the poor man’s skull into the steel railing on the back of the caboose. That stop splattered his brains all over the platform. I dragged his body inside.”
“Well, that’s that.” I put away the Deane-Adams. “He’s either taken off on his own or gone to meet Lame Horse. I hope he decided to go it alone.”
“Why?”
“Lame Horse doesn’t know our firepower since we came on board. He may hold off attacking until dawn just to play it safe. If Ghost Shirt gets to him with what he knows, they’ll hit us right away. What are we, twenty miles from where you picked us up?”
He calculated. “More like fifteen.”
“Two hours, then.” I had him hold up his lantern and looked at my watch in the yellow light. “Seven if they wait till morning. With luck we’ll have the repairs done by then. How much have you got in that flask?”
He had produced the item in question and helped himself to a swig. He touched his lips with the back of his hand, held up the vessel, shook it and listened to the contents sloshing around inside, frowned.
“Two swallows.”
“Not enough.” I held out my hand. When he gave it to me I tipped it up and finished what was left in one long draught. As the warmth of it spread through my system: “Mind if I borrow this?”
“Be my guest.”
I climbed to the platform of Firestone’s car. Since Locke was his bodyguard I paused outside the door and shot him a questioning glance. Although perplexed, he nodded his permission. I entered the sanctum.
The lamp on the bar was still burning. Fortunately it was bolted down or the entire structure would have gone up in flames after that last stop. Even the chandelier, its chain clamped securely to the ceiling, was still intact. In the corner, the curtains on the great four-poster had been left open just enough for me to see Senator Firestone’s mountainous belly quivering beneath the counterpane as he slept in the grip of his opium-induced dreams.
Someone, probably the colonel, had had the foresight to place both decanters in the cabinet beneath the bar after his last visit, and neither was damaged. I uncorked the flask and poured into it what was left of the cognac. Locke had been hitting it hard, but there was more than enough to fill the pint container. The colonel was standing in the doorway as I turned to leave.
“This must be a first,” he observed. “A reverse conversion.”
“It’s not for me.”
“I’ve heard that before.”
“Nobody likes a drunk with a sense of humor.” I put the flask in my hip pocket and accompanied him outside. “I don’t suppose you’ve any firepower aside from that Remington,” I said when we were back on the platform.
He shook his head. If I hadn’t known how much he’d consumed already that night I might have sworn he was dead sober. He changed roles as often as a repertory company.
“How about ammunition?”
“Under the bar. Two boxes.”
“Get them.” I stepped down and struck out toward the engine.
Hudspeth, on his feet beside the locomotive as I approached, wasn’t surprised to learn that our prisoner had escaped. “Figured as much, the way you two was scrambling all over the train a while ago.” He patted his forehead from time to time with a bloodstained handkerchief. “Course you know if he gets to Lame Horse we’re dead as rocks.”
“Maybe not. Maybe they’ll leave us alone once they have him.”
“You said yourself they won’t.”
“It doesn’t cost us anything to hope.”
The engineer appeared from the front of the train. As he crossed the beam of the powerful mounted lantern I saw that his lower lip, although no longer bleeding, had swollen to nearly twice its normal size.
“Give Gus the Spencer,” I directed the marshal. “We need as many hands as we can get. You can’t fire two guns at once, and you’ve got enough ammunition to stop a war with just that Smith.” I indicated the cartridge belt he had liberated from one of the troopers at the Missouri, strapped around his waist.
“Got me a gun.�
� Gus patted the butt of the Walker Colt sticking up above the waistband of his pants.
“I give it to him,” announced Ephraim, descending from the cab. “It’s his’n anyways.”
“From now on you’re a rifleman.” I took the Spencer from Hudspeth and gave it to the fireman.
“She’s loaded up tight,” said the former, as Ephraim inspected the breech. “Used all the shells there was left. What was that you said before about bringing whiskey?” His eyes shone eagerly as he looked at me.
“Sorry. All out.”
His shoulders sank.
“Will brandy do?” I held out the flask.
He seized it with a noise a hungry St. Bernard might make accepting a raw steak. Suddenly his jaw tightened. He lowered the flask and rammed the cork back in with the heel of his hand.
“Reckon not.” He thrust it back at me.
We stared at each other for some time in silence. Then I felt a slow grin spread over my face. I was a father watching his son take his first step unaided. “Keep it,” I said. “For later.”
Ephraim cleared his throat loudly enough to drown out the ticking of the boiler as it cooled. We all looked at him. “Seems a shame to just put it away like that,” he ventured.
It might have been that my eyes played tricks on me in that poor light, but just then it looked as if the ends of Hudspeth’s handlebar moustache twisted upward in the first smile I had seen on his face since we met. He turned the flask over to the fireman, who held it out in front of him for a moment, admiring it. Then he yanked the stopper and did for a quarter of the vessel’s contents in one healthy pull. Drawing the back of his hand across his mouth, he returned the flask with a grateful nod to the marshal, who offered it to Gus.
The engineer shook his head. “I’m a man of temperance,” he explained. “When I ain’t, I don’t do a lick of work for days, and from the looks of them tracks that’s one thing we can’t afford.”
“Can they be fixed?”
“Won’t know that till we try.” He walked around Colonel Locke, who had just joined us bearing the two boxes of cartridges for his shoulder gun, and came back from the cab a minute later carrying a heavy sledge in each hand. “Who’s first?” He held out one of them.
I stepped forward without thinking and took the hammer in my left hand, the right still holding the Winchester. The weight of the instrument when he let go sent a bolt of lightning straight up my arm to the shoulder. I dropped it and was following it to the ground when Hudspeth caught me in both arms.
“Let’s have a look at that there arm,” he said, lowering me to the prairie. I lay on my stomach while his powerful fingers poked and probed my shoulder in the light of Colonel Locke’s lantern. The little shocks I felt as he did so were bearable after the big one I’d just experienced. His whistle of surprise was long and low and faintly reminiscent of the train’s throaty blast.
“Iron-butt Murdock,” he snarled finally. “Waltzing around with a dislocated shoulder like it’s a stubbed toe. Here.” He thrust something in front of my face. After a beat I recognized it as the knife I had given Pere Jac after capturing it from the Cheyenne back at the Big Muddy.
“What am I supposed to do with that?”
“You’ll figure it out. Open up.”
I did as directed. He jammed the hidebound handle into my mouth. I bit down on it. It tasted of leather and old sweat. He took my left hand in his own left, got himself set amid a general rustle of clothing, and then I felt the weight of his boot against the lump of displaced bone behind my shoulder. Realization came to me in a rush of panic. I tried to get up, but the pain and his boot held me down. I was wobbling the knife handle around in my mouth to find voice enough to protest when he pulled the arm tight and threw all his weight forward onto his foot.
Multicolored lights danced and exploded behind my eyelids. My blood sang in my ears. I bit down hard. My teeth ground through the rock-hard leather and into the wood beneath, dislodging splinters into the pocket beneath my tongue. Hudspeth’s grip tightened crushingly on my hand and he heaved every ounce of his two hundred-plus pounds against the stubborn knob. It fell into place with an audible pop.
He was still panting from the effort a moment later as I pushed myself to my knees with my good arm and then got up, swaying on willowy legs. It took me a while to spit out the last of the splinters. “You bastard!”
He snorted. “That’s the thanks I get. Back in Bismarck you’d pay a doc two dollars to do the same thing and be grateful to him afterwards.”
“Where’d you learn to do that?”
“I didn’t. Just thought I’d give it a whirl. It worked, didn’t it?” he added, reading the expression on my face.
“Maybe I can do the same for you someday.”
“No thanks. You done enough to me this trip.” He accepted one of the sledges from Gus. “You won’t be swinging no hammers for a spell. Which works out, us needing someone to look after the long guns just in case that injun’s still around.”
The engineer set the other hammer down on its head and turned toward the cab. “Come on, Ep, let’s fire her up and back her down onto the level.”
“No,” said Hudspeth.
Gus stopped, turned back. “You want her to flop over whilst we’re working?”
“We’ll need all the weight we can get on them rails to hold ’em down. Think you can take her forward all the way to the end?”
“The end is right! Hell, all she needs right now is a stiff breeze to turn her into scrap. I ain’t about to go back and tell James J. Hill—”
At this point the marshal interrupted with a suggestion as to what he could tell James J. Hill that I won’t repeat. What he said next was more significant. “All right, if you won’t do it I’ll get someone who will. What about it, Ep?”
The engineer made a nasty sound in his nose. “He don’t know the first thing about it! He’s just a—”
“Sho’ can, Marshal,” the fireman broke in. “Can and will. Mr. Gus, he been trainin’ me to be an engineer.”
“You won’t never make it now, boy!” He spat the words. “I’ll sure as hell see to that !”
“Shut up.”
Hudspeth was mostly bluster, but when he said that, people generally obliged him. His gaze lashed from the engineer back to the fireman. “Get up steam and take her as far up on them bent irons as she’ll go.”
Ephraim double-timed it back to the cab.
“Just don’t forget that I didn’t have nothing to do with it,” Gus insisted.
Hudspeth beat me to it. “Who the hell cares?” He hoisted his sledge over his shoulder—making the engineer duck—and strode off in the direction of the damaged rails.
Locke, hefting the other hammer, smiled at his retreating back. “Not bad for a man who doesn’t drink.”
I kept my mouth shut.
At length Gus unbent enough to go back and release the private car and caboose from the rest of the train so that if it did go over it wouldn’t take one of our more distinguished citizens with it. Meanwhile, Hudspeth and the colonel put the sledges and crowbar to work straightening out the worst kinks in the irons as Ep performed double duty as engineer and fireman, going back and forth between the box, the wood supply, and the throttle, all the time maintaining a vigil on the gauge to keep the boiler from doing the Indians’ job for them. All this time I stood over the rifles watching everything and feeling useless. My shoulder felt worse than it had before the marshal had put it right, but at least it was in a position where I could depend upon it in a pinch. When at last the engine was ready, Ep gave two blasts on the whistle to clear everyone out of the way, released the brake with a sigh of escaping steam, and gave the throttle a nudge that started the engine rolling forward.
The rails, or perhaps it was the train itself, groaned ominously as the incline was scaled. The wheels found traction only every third revolution, spinning in between with an unearthly squeal, and the twisted steel rails bent downward beneath the creeping weight.
Not enough, however, to keep the top-heavy engine from swaying like an Indian medicine man in a deep trance. I wiped that image out of my thoughts the instant it occurred. Indians and medicine men were on my mind too much of late.
A yard short of the irons’ uprooted ends, the cab began to tip. I cringed in anticipation of the inevitable.
“Back up!” Hudspeth bellowed, drowning out the engine’s snuffling wheeze.
The driving arm stopped, then began cranking backward even as the wheels on the far side were leaving the track. They fell back with a bang as the train lurched into reverse. As soon as the danger zone was past the marshal signaled stop by waving the lantern. The boiler exhaled its pent-up breath.
Ephraim alighted carefully, negotiating the extra couple of inches between the damaged rail and the ground in a smooth striding motion. He whooped his relief.
“You folks nearly had crushed nigger for dinner, and that’s a fact,” he said.
Gus, more active now that his own moral crisis was over, used the crowbar as a lever to take the twist out of each rail, holding it taut while Locke and Hudspeth secured it by pounding home the spikes first in one, then the other. The engineer then resumed his place at the throttle and backed up the locomotive a step at a time to make room for the repairs as they progressed. Ep spelled Locke to free him for crowbar duty, his great black muscles writhing with each swing of the sledge. The noise of steel on steel rang out over the prairie for the first time in five years.
It was back-breaking work, as the corkscrewed track had to be held straight while each spike was being driven, and the vibration of all that pounding made the hands holding the bar tingle until they grew numb and slipped off, and the end of the bar bounced up like a snake striking for the arm or skull that was not pulled out of the way fast enough. The second time that happened it caught Locke high on the right temple with a solid thump, stunning him. Hudspeth handed his sledge to Gus and took the colonel’s place until he had recovered himself enough to resume his task. In this manner the labor went on into the early morning hours.
Stamping Ground Page 19
