Wild Justice

by Loren D. Estleman

  At length I crept forward, leading the way with the revolver and steadying myself against the sway of the car with my free hand on the seats; swiveling my head left and right to determine that the swing-up footrests were the only things waiting on the floor. I didn’t neglect the brass-railed luggage racks overhead, looking for shadows that wouldn’t stay still. My pulse thumped in my ears. I could hear the sweat crackling down my back.

  Whoot-whoo-whoot! The locomotive’s whistle exploded hoarsely, sending my spine straight up through the crown of my head. My fingers dug holes through velvet and horsehair, the handle of the Deane-Adams creaked in my fist. I swallowed my heart and moved on.

  Finishing a search with nothing to show for it is almost as exhausting as hand-to-hand combat. It took as much out of a man as swinging a bat with all his might and connecting with nothing but air. At the front end of the car I leaned against the wall for a moment, waiting for my breath to catch up and the pounding in my chest to slow. I was getting too old for most things, and most especially this. I tore loose my bandanna, mopped my face, used the last dry patch to wipe my palms, changing hands in between, and put myself back together for the most challenging part of the operation.

  Just to exhaust all the options, I went out onto the vestibule, climbed three rungs up the ladder bolted to the front of the coach, and checked the roofs of all four cars, then hung by one hand and swiveled to take in the tender and what I could see of the cab in front. I was a man holding a revolver with no target in sight. I stepped back down.

  Of course, he might have ducked back down inside one of the cars I’d already searched. It was a shell game with an infinite number of shells, and all of them in control of the man running the game.

  Fleetingly, I again considered pulling the cord to alert the engineer to stop the train; but if there was a stowaway riding in, say, the tender, that would be the signal to bail out and try his luck again down the line. I’d outgrown whatever patience I’d had to postpone the inevitable: Cut off the head of the octopus now rather than deal with its tentacles later.

  Then I looked again at the tender.

  Staring at the blank black pebbled surface of the cast-iron rear panel of the car, the wind lifting my hair and snatching at my coattails, I remembered the last time I’d clambered over one. It was as good a barrier as anything made by man against someone wanting to board the engine while a train is in motion. There were no catwalks, and the only handholds were the steel ladders welded at the corners for the wood-gatherers to deposit fuel in the black recess. Years had passed since I’d tried it the last time; my joints were more flexible then. Even so, it was blind luck alone that had kept me from falling and being dragged for a mile along the cinderbed.

  I stepped back into the coach and jerked the cord.

  THIRTEEN

  Waiting for the engineer to come back and investigate the reason for the unscheduled stop, I returned to the vestibule, gun in hand, looking for anyone attempting to bail out of the tender. There was always the possibility that a stowaway had made his way to the locomotive, gotten the drop on the engineer and fireman, and having secured them was on his way to deal me out of the hand the same way he had the conductor; for by then I was convinced the young man was attracting ants somewhere in the wilderness between that lonely spot and where someone had bled on the floor of the caboose.

  At length, a man wrapped in hard fat, filthy overalls, a smeared red bandanna around his neck, and a cap made of ticking came alongside the ties, swaying a little on solid ground with an eight-gauge shotgun clapped against one hip. To avoid any misunderstanding I holstered the Deane-Adams and leaned sideways across the iron railing, hands level with my shoulders. A pair of cut-back muzzles pointed at the underside of my chin, looking like paired artillery on the prow of a battlewagon.

  “I been stuck up before,” he said in the bawling voice of a man who’d broken his windpipe shouting over charging pistons. “Once by a man with a badge, just like you. I’m still here. Where they are depends on what they said to their Maker on the way over.”

  I asked him when was the last time he saw the conductor.

  “You mean besides now, when he’s standing behind you with a pistol aimed at your kidneys?”

  I had to grin. It took sand to slide one from the bottom of the deck when you’re being watched closely. “That one had rheumatism the first time I heard it. I asked because I don’t think he’s aboard.”

  “That ain’t possible.”

  “Don’t tell me you never lost a crew member. You didn’t get that walk this week.”

  “What walk?” The shotgun drooped a little, but my trunk was still in his field of fire. “I lost a brakeman, two porters, and a fireman; dumb Hunky drank a pint of coal oil when he ran out of whiskey. I never lost no conductor and neither did any other engineer on the high line.”

  “That makes you a pioneer. He or somebody left some of his blood in the caboose.”

  “Probably barked his shin on the stove. Probably the young fool’s wearing his first pair of long pants.” He let the twin barrels dangle and planted a foot on the bottom step of the vestibule.

  “If you’re bent on covering the same ground I did, start with the caboose. I’ll break the news to the lady inside.”

  He lifted the corner of his bandanna to mop his bulging brow. His fist-shaped jaw worked at something, but there was no bulge in his cheek to suggest he was chewing anything more than the wall of his mouth. Finally his foot thudded back down and he started toward the rear of the train, the scattergun level with his hip.

  Mrs. Blackthorne was back in the day coach. She looked up from her basket of yarn. “Did we hit something?”

  I told her what had happened. At first I left out the patch of blood; but she’d shared a parlor with her husband for thirty years while he brooded over the men he’d tried, which to release, which to imprison, which to stretch their necks. She was no garden lily. She seemed preoccupied with her knits and purls, but then so had Blackthorne with his gold-rimmed spectacles and pages of notes while officers of the court argued for and against the men and women in the dock; he’d often interrupt the recorder when he was asked to read from the transcript, finishing the testimony in question from memory.

  “Could he have fallen off? Should we go back and look?” Her hands kept twirling at pace.

  “If he had help falling off, that could be just what whoever gave him a hand wants us to do. We might back square into a mounted ambush.”

  “If that was the intent, why go to such lengths? They could have attacked us at any stop we made.”

  “It’s an express. We stop only in settled cities, patrolled by officers. Anything can happen in this rough country, and no one can prove it happened at all.”

  “But to what purpose? Harlan gathered death threats the way some men amass stamps and silver, but the Almighty has beaten them all to the finish. Surely not I—”

  “Your pardon, ma’am, but men with a debt to collect don’t always write it off without looking back. When you’ve missed your chance at a buck…” I let it drop. I’d faced grizzlies and savages of all stripes, but a mannered woman in weeds is another challenge altogether.

  “… you bring down a doe. I think I understand you. A hot knife must temper itself in blood, any blood.” She shook her head, her hands at rest at last. “This place will never know civilization. All the schools, churches, and halls of justice a man can build cannot turn wild dogs into lap hounds. What was it all about, all those years? Did you spill your spirit on barren sand?”

  I had no answer for that, nor needed one. She wasn’t addressing me.

  A train at rest is a living thing, made though it is of planed wood and smelted iron; it throbs in place and shudders with every movement aboard. I felt the slight shift of a man’s weight on the platform outside the rear door. The Deane-Adams was in my hand without my being aware that I’d gripped the handle. The engineer entered, cradling his shotgun. When he saw I was alone with the widow, h
e fisted his cap and swept it off his head.

  “He’s gone, sure enough. I seen—well, it ain’t dry yet.”

  “I am aware the man bled,” said Mrs. Blackthorne. “What do you propose to do?”

  “We make a wood stop in Minnesota tonight. Company maintains a Western Union office, I suppose in case some squarehead logger chops his foot off. I’ll wire the railroad in Minneapolis from there. Track gang’s putting in a spur back in Bismarck. They can put together a search party. If he’s off on a drunk he’ll be digging coal come Decoration Day. Meanwhile we got a schedule to keep.” He unshipped a turnip watch and snapped open the face, as if he needed confirmation we’d fallen behind.

  “Anything could happen to the man before night,” she said.

  “Beg pardon, ma’am, but if it ain’t happened by now it’s already too late. Meanwhile the Northern Pacific’s bigger than any one man.” He swapped his watch for his cap, tugged it on, touched the bill, and swayed off through the door on the engine end.

  “Company men.” The needles resumed their blurring movement. “He left Washington to escape them and found one waiting at every stop.”

  * * *

  More than one; but I took my own leave before pointing it out.

  Back in the seat I’d selected I watched the scenery reverse itself momentarily while the train rocked back before resuming its eastward movement. The country resembled northern Oregon, where in 1889 I’d tracked a gang of bandits who’d been giving the stage line there one last dose of blue hell before the railroads shut it down. There an officious bastard with Wells and Fargo told me the company chief of detectives had the situation in hand, and why didn’t I leg it back to wild country and see to the riffraff that was the specialty of the federal court. By then I’d committed Holy Scripture to memory and had chosen for my escutcheon “Go thou from the presence of a foolish man when thou perceivest not in him the fruits of wisdom.” I wished him good luck and returned to the trail that had led me to Portland.

  I found the head riffraff soaking the poisons out of his system in the Forbidden City Bath House across from the local railroad hotel, bubbles in his beard and a stump of cigar singeing the stubble. It was an accident, not that I bothered to inform the Judge of the circumstances when I gave him my report; I was wearing only a towel around my middle, and although I’d taken the precaution to tuck a belly gun behind my back, the man’s own Smith Russian was closer to hand, hanging in its scabbard from the back of a wicked-looking chair carved into dragons and demons with a bottle of Black Tar finishing the process of ferment on the seat. He was starting to stir when I swept it up and laid the barrel across his near temple. Being a newly rediscovered Christian, I grabbed him by his hair as he slid into the water and saved him from drowning in a steaming tub stained with the blood of his scalp.

  Not that he took it as an act of charity. When he came around, dressed (more or less) in the filthy rags he’d worn into the establishment, he swung a fist the size of a slab of bacon at my chin as I was fastening the last button on my shirt. I ducked it—I had all afternoon to do it, as some poisons remained in his system, slowing him like a freight wagon laboring up a steep grade—and finished the job with an elbow.

  That was the easy part. Two blocks of muddy street separated us from the depot, where the 11:40 to Helena wasn’t due for a quarter of an hour, and he wasn’t likely to have billeted without the rest of his party somewhere about. I was dragging him down the boardwalk by his belt, his slack upper body bumping against my knee like scrap iron in a gunnysack, when a hornet buzzed past my jaw and slapped into clapboard belonging to a place that advertised itself as the only bowling alley between Salem and the Dominion of Canada. Not certain as to the angle, I drew, snapped a shot in the general direction of California, and slung my burden through the nearest unobstructed doorway, which happened to belong to a First Baptist Church: “Where the path to salvation is open to all.”

  Inside, wrapped in the odor of oiled wood, candle wax, and moth powder, a man who was as round as he was tall, with only a clerical collar separating the twin balloons of his torso and head, asked if my friend was in need of assistance. He had something between two slabs of coarse bread in one hand and a smear of mustard on his chin.

  In earlier days I’d have let my revolver do my palavering, but I summoned enough of my newfound faith to put my business in the form of a request. “Sanctuary, Reverend. My friend and I require protection from the designs of wicked men.”

  I’ll never know if my choice of words was sound. Just then another slug found its way through the door and took out a triangle of stained glass behind his left shoulder. The servant of Jesus threw his half-eaten sandwich toward where the shot had come from, swung about, and fled in the other direction through a door behind the pulpit.

  I didn’t judge him; it was the self-preservational version of turning the other cheek. Instead I found the edge of the door with my heel, swung it shut, and hauled my prize up the aisle the minister had gone (pausing briefly to ensure cooperation with a light tap from the handle of my revolver). Halfway to the pulpit I slung the baggage between pews and let it fall in a heap. I knelt beside it, leveling the barrel across the back of the pew.

  Experience had taught me better. Bushwhackers never choose the front entrance. A barrage of lead erased most of the Annunciation from a window to the right, hurling daggers of glass across the room and slashing the back of the fine canvas coat I’d bought in Oregon City when the weather turned. I emptied two chambers in that direction, ducking just as another fusillade obliterated a pastoral scene in the window to my left. I was in the crossfire.

  Any man who’d served Blackthorne as long as I had knew what to do in those circumstances. The bandit chief was slowing me down, and unlike the situation in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, his life was no safe conduct when it came to men fighting for their own liberty; his followers would have put a bullet through him to get to me.

  I shot him through both temples and was running for the door at the back before he hit the floor.

  A shard of yellow wood leapt from the back of a pew as I passed. I spun to return fire and struck the broken pew with my elbow. Pain shot up my arm. The revolver jumped out of my hand and fell into the narrow aisle between the end of the row and the wall. Bandits can be prescient. They opened up a volley, aiming low and splintering wooden bun feet and floor planks. I gave up on retrieving my weapon and went into a sliding dive for the back door.

  It led to a rectory, if that’s not too lofty for simple Baptists: small, with presses containing volumes of a pious nature, a leather-topped desk supporting more books, scribbled foolscap, and a scatter of pennies—probably collected during services and awaiting entry in a ledger spread out on a drawleaf—a swivel, a tired armchair, and the good reverend in a water closet the size of a priest’s hole, muttering what I took to be prayers. In the fetal position there was too much of him to close the door.

  I wanted to join him; there was no exit except back into the church proper. A plain window had a splintered frame and a pile of broken glass at its base. A fresh bullet passed through the jagged opening and decapitated the glass chimney of an oil lamp on the desk, sending me to the floor. The gang had me penned in. I had minutes before one or more of them got up the sand to rush the building.

  Just then a hoarse whistle entered the room, bent by distance; not enough to make up for the fact that probably for the first time all year the ll:40 was early. Unless there was a crowd of passengers waiting to board, the crew wouldn’t wait, wanting as all railroaders do to get ahead of any unexpected delays down the line. The next train wasn’t due for six more hours. Which unless I made this one was more than the sum total of my remaining lifespan.

  “Is there a gun in the room?” I had to repeat the question at the top of my lungs.

  “This is God’s house,” said the minister; but his one visible eye rolled upward.

  A musket hung on a stone chimney above a fireplace at the back of t
he room. It had probably been used last to supply the church founders with game when it was under construction. Before that it might have come over on the original Oregon Trail forty years ago. But a gun is a gun.

  I crawled and crabwalked to the fireplace, stood long enough to take the musket down off its pegs, and went back into a crouch when a new barrage destroyed the rest of the window frame. The musket was a wheel lock, and the iron pyrites some pioneer had last used to produce the spark was in place, likely rusted to the action. That was a break, if the mechanism wasn’t a solid lump of rust. But if it blew up in my face it wouldn’t change the odds against me.

  The mule-ear-shaped hammer worked, at least, with a grating complaint. I worked it forward and back with both thumbs a couple of times to break loose some of the granules and seated it carefully. Using my knife I spent three times as long as I should have prying open a half-dozen shells from my cartridge belt and dumping the powder down the rust-caked muzzle; I dropped them often and had to scoop them up before they rolled out of my reach. I dumped the slugs down after the powder, but I wasn’t satisfied.

  Pennies.

  I crawled and crabbed my way back to the desk, felt for the coppers, and threw a fistful down the barrel. Next I tore a piece off my shirttail for wadding and tamped it down with a length of shattered window frame. It was barely long enough with my thumb pushing it down the rest of the way. Another couple of minutes crawled past while I teased it back out with a little finger.

  The rest was up to the bandits. If they proceeded in standard fashion, they’d leave a skeleton force to watch the windows and launch a full attack through the front door. But since when did outlaws keep to the standard?