by Jake Logan
That man was a dangerous sort. Bubba thought for sure that the man would get the upper hand when they had fought in this boxcar, then up on the roof. But he hadn’t, thank God. Only now Rupe was dead and their sister, Arlene, was angry with him, like she always was. Wouldn’t be so bad, but now he didn’t have three other brothers around to help take the blame for all those things he knew were really her fault, not theirs.
“Yes,” she said. “As a matter of fact, I do have an idea of how we can get in there.” She looked at him as if she had a plan in mind for him. That bothered him. He’d seen that look before, and it usually required lots of work.
“Dammit all anyway, I am some hungry. I got to eat before we do anything, Arlene. Chucking that crazy gunman off the train was a sight of hard work.” He looked at his sister for some sort of sympathy. Maybe she’d take him to the dining car.
She continued, as if he hadn’t spoken. “It’ll work, but only if you do as I say. That includes not doing anything stupid.”
“I can make my own decisions.”
“That’s what I mean. Same thing.”
Bubba said nothing, but rubbed a hand on his belly.
“What’s that?” She pointed at the ebony-handled Colt wedged in his waistband.
He lifted it free and showed her. “It’s the dude’s pistol. I found it over there, on the floor. Must be where it landed when I kicked it out of his hand.” He admired the pistol, forgetting for a moment the glowering woman at his side.
She reached for it, but he jerked it away. “Hey, I aim to keep it. I took it from him fair and square.”
“Okay, okay. Just make sure you keep it hidden for now. Wouldn’t do to have someone recognize it as his.”
He shook his head, but barely heard her. He was remembering the fight. That had felt good. Especially after that hard case had made fun of his hat. Who was he to say anything about hats? His had looked to be an old beat-up thing, something some old cowboy might wear. Come to think on it, that was in the boxcar, too. He’d chucked it into a dark corner. Ain’t nobody wanted an old hat off a dead man. He’d have liked to have gotten the man’s holster, too, but he knew the gun belt would not have fit him. He’d have to pay for a new one, which was all right, ’cause the gun was the most expensive part of a rig like that anyways.
“Let’s go get you fed, then, and you can listen to my plan. Not that it will do much good. Getting anything through that thick skull of yours is nearly impossible.”
He knew she was talking again, but he’d be danged if he knew what she said. Always going on about money, she was. He smiled again at the thought of having thrown the man off the train. Ain’t no way anybody would ever find him. He’d be a dinner for buzzards or maybe a wolf or mountain lion.
15
Slocum guessed he had about ten feet to go, but they looked to be the hardest ten feet of all. Not only was his strength gone—he felt sure it had been sapped from him hours before—but night was falling with the speed that only happens in the high country. He cursed the short daylight hours of winter.
The snow above him was a hard-packed ridge, the one he’d seen from far below. It had been caused by the buckers, the massive engine-mounted snowplows, and it marked the line of train track that he had worked all day to get to. But how to get himself up and over it? It felt as though it were stone instead of crusted snow, and each plunge of the knife became more difficult, until finally the blunted tip of his blade had merely bounced off the hardened mass.
“Has to be…better way.” Slocum wondered then if he couldn’t go over it or around it—for the ridge seemed to him to stretch for miles to either side of him—he’d gouge his way through it and hopefully, with any luck, something he felt he sorely deserved a shot of by now, he’d be able to emerge at the tracks.
The problem remained, however, of chipping his way through the surface crust to what he hoped was a softer core of snow. The other problem, of course, was that after climbing that entire slope, Slocum was exhausted and his knife thrusts were increasingly ineffective. He needed rest and he needed food and warmth. But he’d settle for warmth.
After pausing for little more than a minute, Slocum resumed his attack on the crusted embankment and managed, after long minutes, to have only gouged a hole as big as a man’s head. He realized that his plan of tunneling through it was folly.
He regarded the hole he’d dug and reasoned that if he repeated that process a few more times, they might provide enough of a handhold for him to get up and over this calcified ridge.
He also knew that by the time he did so, if he made it, it would be full dark. And since the temperature had already dropped significantly as the sun died away in the west, far to his left, he’d be screwed, lying out in the open in the winter tunnel that was the rail line. But he saw no alternative, and so he kept at it.
And in what seemed like no time at all, a common feeling to a man who is occupied to the full of his abilities, Slocum found himself scrabbling not for another raw-gouged hole, but he felt, with his raw, bleeding fingers, a loose drift of powdered snow atop the ridge. His heart pounded harder as he mustered up a series of final lunges, until he felt himself atop the ridge.
He teetered there a moment, then rolled down the other side. He didn’t care if he had been wrong and it was another sheer drop-off. But relief broke over him as a wave when his numbed hand rapped the hard edge of a railroad tie protruding from the snowpack. He’d made it.
A few moments of rest unspooled into ten minutes. With a supreme effort of will, he raised himself to a sitting position, knowing that waiting any longer might prove a death sentence. That he hadn’t died the night before of exposure to the cold was pure luck. He didn’t want to tempt fate again. He half stumbled on his knees across the track bed to the inner rail, and hoped like hell he could find a rocky overhang. And that there wasn’t much in the way of snow drooping down from above that might avalanche down on him. At that point, he didn’t much care.
What he found when he crossed the tracks was more piled snow thrust into an embankment by the plow. As he lay back against it, the bright moon glow reflected off the snowpack, and he watched his ragged exhalations plume into the night sky.
Before I droop off into sleep—or worse, he thought, I had better see if I can make a flame. He first had to pry free the fingers that had locked themselves, rictus-like, around the handle of his boot knife. He was mildly thankful that it was cold enough to mask the pain from his hands he surely would have felt.
He rummaged in the coat pocket where he kept his lucifers, used for lighting campfires and cigars. The only appeal a cigar had for him at the moment was the humorous thought of a pile of them, tall as a man, blazing away. The meager smile this brought his face slipped away when he withdrew three matchsticks, the heads of which had long hours before become pasted, smeared, and useless in his coat pocket.
Next his thoughts turned to his flint and steel…which it occurred to him were still in the bottom of a saddlebag, resting on a chair in Miss Augusta Barr’s fancy railcar. The very thought of the rich girl and her rich father and their vicious little Chinese kicking chef set his teeth together hard even as his mind searched for another way to make flame. A thought occurred to him, something he’d found useful a few times in the past. He felt his gun belt, and though there were many empty bullet loops, neither the brawl in the car nor the fall had dislodged all the bullets. The brass beauties could well save his life. Or rather the gunpowder within them.
And then that grim smile, too, faded. So what if he could create a flame? What did he have that might burn? He was in the High Sierra along a wind-stripped rail line that had also been blasted out of raw rock face. Any trees he might have set fire to were well downslope—there was nothing on God’s green earth that could make him head back down that way—or they were far upslope of him.
He sank back into the snow and realized this side proved more forgiving. He dug at it and in little time had a cavity opened enough to crawl into. He
did so and then pulled in snow after himself, until the entrance hole of his tiny dugout was barely big enough to fit his head through. He pulled his collar up tight, pulled his arms back through his sleeves, and did his best to ball up and keep his benumbed hands jammed tight under his armpits. He tried not to think about how many miles a train might cover in twenty-four hours, which seemed about the length of time that had passed since he’d been hurled off the damned train.
Tomorrow, he thought. If there is a tomorrow for me, I will keep on moving forward.
16
“At least we got the key to the fancy car. That’s a good start, ain’t it?” The big man wiped the beer from his sparse beard with the cuff of his shaggy coat.
“A start, you said.” The woman in the black veil regarded him for a long moment.
He grinned and nodded. He was happy as hell to be in the dining car.
“A start?” She looked around them, waited for people to look away again, then lowered her voice. “A start? You idiot!” she growled. “You have half the intellect of a barrelful of spent horseshoes. The time for a start ended when your dimwitted brothers failed to kill that hired gun of hers. The time for a start ended when we pulled out of the station back at Salt Lake with the hired gun aboard and the chest locked up in that fancy armored parlor car back there.”
She leaned even closer to him, and he could see her narrowed eyes and gritted teeth through the dark lacy veil.
“The time for a start, dear oaf of a brother, ended when your other brother got himself killed by the hired gun. The time for a start, I thought, came and went when you threw that bastard off the train.”
“But at least we got the key…” The big man leaned away from the growling woman.
“Who got the key? Who is this ‘we’ you mentioned? You have a mouse in your pocket, oh, dolt of a brother of mine?”
He shook his head. “No, no mice. Not in my pockets. Oh God, but that would be odd to reach into your pocket—”
She uttered a sharp growl of anger and rubbed her temple through the veil. “With any luck, we will be through these nasty mountains and into warm weather. Though I had hoped that by now we would have been in possession of the chest. You understand?”
He nodded, not sure which part he was supposed to have understood.
“Good, so now what we’ll do is use the key I procured, then we’ll enter Miss Barr’s private rail car, retrieve the key from around her neck—”
“Rupe’s the one who told you about that key. That was Rupe!” He smiled at her and took another bite of beefsteak.
“Yes, I know. Even a blind hog will find an acorn once in a while.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means…Oh, never mind. The thing we have to do is get in that car before they suspect something odd is afoot. Besides you, that is.” She snorted a quick laugh.
“Why you gotta wear that lacy thing over your face all the time?”
“I told you that already. I can’t risk being seen by the other passengers, so they won’t recognize me…later. So, unless we’re hidden from view and away from the rest of these sheep…” Her lips pulled back to reveal her teeth. “Then I must remain hidden.”
“Well, why don’t I have to?”
“Because you are different. Trust me, if I am seen, then we will both lose our money.”
He said nothing, but gave her one of his angry pinched looks to show her that he knew more than he really did. He thought it worked, but he couldn’t be sure.
“Hurry up and finish your meal. We have to get this show on the road.”
He chewed the last of the steak, then gulped the beer in two swallows. “It’s a train.”
“What?”
“A train. We’re on a train. You said ‘road,’ but trains run on tracks.”
“That, dear brother, is nothing I can argue with. Your logic is impeccable.”
He smiled broadly as they left the dining car, the gaze of their fellow passengers following the odd pair. Minutes later, outside the double-doored entry to the Barrs’ private car, she held up a hand. “Now, let’s get this straight. We are not going to use the special knock.”
“But that was me. I found that out, through the roof vent, just like Rupe did with the key around the pretty girl’s neck.”
“She’s not pretty, she’s foul. And yes, I know you and Rupe found out valuable information through the roof vents. And look where it got him. Shot dead in a boxcar. Brilliant, he wasn’t. And you? Your face is a frostbitten mask. Now, where was I? Oh yes, you use the key to open the door. Do it quickly. I will slip in, hold out my pistol to kill or disable anyone in my way. Then I will snatch the key. I will protect you while you tie up our captives. Then we can enjoy the private rail car all for our very own for the duration of the trip.”
“Really? Can we do that? Isn’t that illegal?”
“Idiot,” she whispered. “Now, on the count of three, you will unlock this door.”
He nodded and watched her. Finally, she said, “Three, damn you. Three!”
As the man’s brawny hand worked the key and they heard the triple mechanisms sliding open on the other side of the door, they also heard a flurry of indistinguishable words from inside the car, just on the other side of the door.
The big man pushed on the door, and as it swung open, the veiled woman ducked under his arm and, her purse pistol drawn, pushed her way into what was obviously the car’s kitchen. She saw movement to her right and sidestepped a chopping blow by the sneering Chinaman. The big man pushed open the door wider and grabbed at the little cook. While the two of them grappled, the veiled woman edged by them and stopped short.
There in the doorway to the next room stood Miss Augusta Barr, who also had her purse pistol drawn.
“You! How dare you enter this private car!”
“How dare I? I dare anything I damn well please, you spoiled bitch!” the veiled woman growled, even as she lunged at the other woman’s throat. She came away with a handful of white lace, two pearl buttons, and the brass key, its snapped chain dangling from her closed fist.
“Ling!” screamed Miss Barr, clutching her throat, but too late.
With eyeblink speed, Ling’s foot shot out to the side, snapping into the intruding woman’s hand, sending the pistol pinwheeling back through the door, into the entryway between the cars. She howled in pain as the little pistol hit the steel walkway and fired. The crack and ping of the shot paused the four combatants for a brief moment, unsure who had squeezed the trigger.
When it was apparent none of them had been hit, they resumed their struggles. Miss Barr brought her tiny two-shot to bear once again on the veiled woman, but was ignored as the woman dashed for the door, clutching the key in one hand and cradling her injured hand to her breast.
“Shoot them!” she shrieked at the big man. “Shoot them, dammit!”
“What? You never said nothing about—”
“Gaaah!” The veiled woman shouted her exasperation. She slipped out the door and was gone.
Ling doubled his efforts and managed to drive the hefty brute back to the open doorway. Suffering under the little man’s flurry of shrieks and stinging open-handed snaps to the gut and chest, the derby-hatted Goliath staggered backward under the dizzying assault.
“Ling!” shouted Augusta. “The key! He still has Slocum’s key!” She held the pistol out before her, unable to aim it at the big man without seeing Ling dart in and out of her sightline.
The little dervish made it to the doorway just as the big man backed through into the outer entryway. Ling slammed the door hard against a large arm as the man reached to turn the skeleton key in the lock on the outside of the door. The big man howled in pain as his arm wrenched hard in the door, then he, too, pulled back and fled.
Ling whipped the door wide inward. He heard Miss Barr shout to him and resisted the overpowering urge to chase after the intruders.
“Don’t chase them, Ling. That will give them what they want,” sh
e said. “I need you here with me!”
“But…key?” he said.
“That is the least of our worries, Ling. We need to barricade these doors. Once they regroup and consider what it is they have, they’ll be back—and this time I’m not sure we’ll be able to fend them off!”
17
Slocum knew from past experience in harsh, extreme situations, that a man might live for several days without food, but he could live a lot longer if he had water. And if one good thing could be said about winter in the Sierra, it was that it provided plenty of water. Hard water, in the form of snow, but at least it would sustain him for another day, if he didn’t freeze to death first. Weak as he was, he hoped he had another day in him.
He’d been on the move for an hour. He guessed he’d covered a mile or so. Not nearly the progress he hoped he could make, but considering the alternatives, he guessed he had little to complain about. He’d awakened at daybreak with the sun’s hopeful light reflecting off the snow. The burrow he’d dug the night before had partially collapsed, not so much so that it had blocked off his access to cold, fresh air, though he had to work a few minutes to extricate himself.
Then he set about testing his body to see what had broken. At first blush, the night’s rest balled up in the snowbank seemed to have done him more harm than good—he was so damned stiff, unkinking the minor knots was plenty painful enough. He forced himself to stand fully upright, something he’d not done since the fight atop the roof of the boxcar.
He was pleased to note his legs both worked and felt free of breaks, though his right knee and left ankle, while not broken, were tender and swollen. He blamed the battered ankle on Big Red’s harsh twisting treatment of his foot in the fight. Slocum decided to keep the boot in place, otherwise he doubted he’d be able to slip it back on.
Likewise, his arms were battered, bruised, and scraped raw where his sleeves had been shoved up when he’d tumbled down the slope. But he could use them, and they appeared unbroken. He had a thumb and a finger that were bubbled up with swelling, misshapen and bent, one at an odd angle. It was his ribs, though, and his throbbing head, that bothered him the most—and worried him, too. A busted rib was one thing, but then to put it through what he did yesterday was a far more dangerous undertaking.
