by Lou Cameron
“Let’s study on that,” he said. “Your dispatcher told me, while he was more sober than I suspect he is now, that the way you ran that combo was more or less up to you.”
“Aw, Jasus, MacKail, there’s limits to what a gorl can get away with, even with a drunken dispatcher and a crew that has to obey her. It’s true they’d know better than to argue if I was to tell them ye were coming along as say a guard I’d hired for the gold. But the engineer would surely mention it to the more severe dispatcher at the far end, and even if he didn’t, the real guards would.”
He grimaced in the dark. “Ouch. The company has hired guns as well as you and the engine crew riding their narrow gauge?”
“They do. Did ye think they’d ship gold unguarded? There’ll be two of thim riding atop the ore, with a boss gun riding in me caboose to guard me virtue or keep me honest. It’s hard to tell, when a man just sits there looking spooky. I can’t see them ignoring yer presence as we chug the gold over the Divide, MacKail. Even if they don’t throw ye off or gun ye, they’re sure to report me to the company as a careless lovestruck gorl. Then it’ll be back to peeling spuds for me.”
“I wouldn’t want that to happen,” he said. “But what would happen if you exerted your rights, as crew chief, to make sure the gold got through after you… well, heard a disturbing rumor in the Lady Luck just now?”
“The only disthurbing rumor I hord tonight was what ye told me about putting me money on the green. But what else do ye think I might have hord, MacKail?”
“You say the train is set to leave just before dawn. If you and your crew know that, isn’t it possible some others might know that?”
“Of course they do. They’d have to be stupid, or strangers in town, if they didn’t know the ore train always leaves at the crack of dawn.”
He chuckled. “That’s even better. All you have to say is that you heard two strangers gossiping about your timetable, and you’re off the hook. There’s no way to telegraph the head office from this camp. So naturally you had to act on your own, fast, to save their gold, see?”
“It’s clear as mud,” she said. “It’s true I have the power to change the time of departure. But I’d still have to gather up me crew, and we’d be right back where we started.”
“Not if you couldn’t find them. How would you know whether anyone was home in bed or playing cards with the boys at this hour? Suspecting bandits might be laying for your train in the wee small hours, you decided to take unusual methods to foil the plot. Is that combo already made up, Red?”
“It is, and ready to go. But not without a crew, ye loon!”
“I can drive a Shay,” he said. “You know how to man the brakes, no offense. Don’t you see how foxy it would be to run the ore to safety right now, Red?”
She told him he was daft, then laughed like a mean little kid. “I couldn’t drop ye off this side of the Divide. I’d need hands on the brake wheel as well as one at the throttle, this side of the far flats. And how would I tell them, then, I got the combo over the Divide with only meself in the cab?”
“With considerable skill. It’s tough but not impossible to run a short combo solo. I don’t mind getting off on the far side of the Divide. Most of the Yellowstone Park lies on the east slope in any case. So the few miles out of my way may beat crossing the divide a mite closer, the hard way, see?”
“I see a gorl can get in trouble listening to such a Blarney Scotsman,” she said, then grabbed him in her strong arms and kissed him hard.
He kissed back and cupped one of her big firm breasts in his free hand. Then she sort of spoiled it all by shoving him away, saying, “All right. We’ll have to foind some planks to get that horse aboard one of the reefers, and if ye get us all killed, I’ll never speak to ye again.”
CHAPTER
SEVEN
*
The dispatcher lay dead drunk at his desk when Red Fagan slipped in to pick up her onionskin orders. Since the form was still blank, it only took her a moment to change her time of departure and jot a note explaining her actions to her crew, which would show up later. Then she almost skipped out to the siding, where Stringer had already gotten up a bit of steam, and joined him in the cab.
“Aroo,” she said, glancing at the gauges, “even with hard coal it takes forever to fire the damned auld boiler, and if anyone comes by, I’ve no idea what to tell ’em!”
“It doesn’t take much pressure to roll downgrade,” Stringer said, “and the track ahead sure slopes a lot. Why don’t you go back, release the brakes, and we shall see what we shall see.”
“The car brakes ain’t set. They don’t have to be where the grade’s less than nine degrees. It’s on this Shay’s own brakes we arc. That lever, there.”
“I told you I’ve driven one of these things before,” he said, and released the brake. They began to roll.
“I’m glad this isn’t a Baldwin then,” she said. “Open the throttle, man!”
He did. But she shoved him out of the way and took over at the controls, muttering, “Jasus, Mary, and Joseph, I might have known, and now who’ll be on the car brakes as we go over the pass, ye big fibber?”
“Come on, I ran a Shay at a lumber camp one time,” he said, “and I just need a little time to get used to it again.”
They rumbled over a switch point and she growled, “And I’m sure ye could, on a mountain line in the dark of the moon. We’ll get out of this valley to a straight I know, and then we can light the headlamp and I may give ye another crack at it. Meanwhile I’ll be after keeping us on the track as we round a few dicey thurns ahead with low steam pressure and nobody on the car brakes at all at all!”
He didn’t argue, although he thought she was being unfair as well as bossy. He did know how to run one of these small narrow gaugers. The Shay locomotive had been designed for steep grades and sharp turns, with semiskilled operators in mind. Unlike the mightier main-line engines, the Shay’s drive wheels were turned by gear boxes rather than piston rods from steam box to wheel. So the little puffer got slow-and-forgiving high torque from its modest boiler. It was hard for even a novice to spin the wheels of a Shay or take a turn too fast, if one wanted to. As a patient powerful ox team was to high-stepping trotters, the Shay was to the fast eight wheelers that had gotten the late Casey Jones in so much trouble.
As they left the last lights of Rimrock behind, he wondered how much trouble Red Fagan was looking for as she opened the throttle a lot wider than he would have with neither running lights nor moonlight to see by. He chided her mildly and was told, “Aw, ye said ye was in a hurry, didn’t ye?”
He didn’t answer. He figured by standing in the opening on the high side, he’d have a better chance when she ran off the tracks. After a million years and perhaps five miles, at a speed the Shay had never been designed for, she slowed down.
“We’ll let her coast to a stop on this stretch and do something about the headlamp so we can go faster,” she said.
“I wish you wouldn’t,” he replied. “The moon will be coming up pretty soon, and you can spot a locomotive headlamp for miles, whether the moon’s up or not.”
“Oh, do ye think thim bandits really could be out to stop us, MacKail?”
“Nobody gathers a gang that size together unless they have something in mind. I’d hate to be aboard this thing when someone tried to stop it with you at the throttle. Fess up, you always wanted to be the first female engineer, right?”
She grinned roguishly in the red light from the firebox vents. “Ye’ve been reading me mind since forst we met. I wish I could be more certain of what’s going on in that Scotch skull ye think with, though. Ye never said ye thought there really was a plan to rob this train tonight.”
“There couldn’t be,” he assured her. “It was supposed to leave at daybreak for a daylight run. At the same time, anyone with such plans in mind would want to be waiting out ahead, long before we showed up. They had some riding to do if they’ve made it from that valley—from well t
o the south to north of us. But anything’s possible, and we are carrying a few tons of temptation in back of us.”
She instinctively built up speed. “Oh, Jasus, it’s me job and not the gold I’m worried about! It’s what I get for listening to a man who feels gorl’s titties in the dark. You’re right. It’s no headlamp for the likes of us this night. And if they lay logs across the track and we hit ’em in this murtherous darkness, it will be me own fault for listening to such a wild rover!”
“Don’t roll so wild then,” he said. “The sky outside is starting to lighten some. Slow down and we can make up the time once the moon is shining on the tracks ahead.”
She not only took his advice, but slowed to a crawl, or a crawl as railroad locomotives moved, at any rate. He could see just enough out the side to make out that they were still moving faster than the paint pony back in the empty reefer could have carried him at a steady walk. So he was still ahead of the game, bless her cautious hide.
At their new and more sedate speed he was able to roll a smoke and light it on the second match. “As long as ye’d be after playing with fire,” she said, “how about some more coal in the box, ye lazy thing?”
“Red, I filled the firebox back there in the yards just now.”
“Sure and what do ye think it’s been doing all this time, if it hasn’t been burning away?” she replied.
So, to mollify her, he opened the door, picked up the scoop, and shoveled in anthracite from the tender until it threatened to smother the fire entirely. Then he slammed the firebox shut, hung up the scoop, and said, “I hope you’re satisfied. Running that hot is sure to call for more water than the tanks of that tender back there could be carrying.”
“I know,” she said. “We always have to jerk water just this side of the Divide. There’s a handy place where the tracks cross a mountain stream. If ye hadn’t insisted on leaving me crew behind, we wouldn’t have to do it ourselves.”
They rolled on and on, and then the moon was up, and after running all that way by starlight, the tracks ahead and slopes around seemed almost as bright as day. “That’s better,” Red Fagan said, and opened her throttle wide. As they picked up speed, he asked if she had any idea where they were. She told him, “Sure and I know this line like the back of me hand or better. For it’s not much time I waste on staring at the back of me hands, as long as they’re at all clean. It’s almost halfway to that jerkwater I mentioned that we are. It’s over the Divide we’ll be going, just about the time the boys back in Rimrock show up for work to find me gone like the mad wild thing I’ve been since first we met.”
Since they’d made it halfway to the jerkwater crawling through the starlight, it took much less time to make it the rest of the way by moonlight. Some of the turns she took at full throttle made him glad this was a low-slung Shay, even as they scared him half to death. For they were in higher country now, and though the tracks had been laid as often as possible across the flat country they’d been able to find in these parts, there were places where the only way around a hogback was via a narrow ledge blasted from the mother rock, and some of the drop-offs were awesome.
But they were on a more or less straight stretch, moving fast across a flat-bottomed valley, when she eased off on the throttle. “We’re coming to that trestle across the creek,” she said. “I hope ye feel rested, for it’s some jerking of water we’ll be doing indeed, with buckets on the end of ropes. Ye’ll find ’em waiting for ye just in back of the coal. Ye may be able to fish up the forst bucket or more as I find us a grand place to stop on the trestle.”
But Stringer had been hanging out the side for a better view ahead, and as he spotted movement in the dark distance, he snapped, “Feed her full throttle, Red! We’re not the only folk who ever heard these trains stopped here for water!”
She gasped, and gathered some speed for them as Stringer drew his six-gun. “Keep your head below the sill as we hit that trestle,” he said. “The steel walls of this cab ought to stop most pistol balls, at least.”
“And what if they’ve blocked the tracks ahead to stop us?”
“Then they’ll stop us, of course,” he replied. “It’s a chance we have to take. I can make them out as riders now, on either side of the creek. Let’s hope they meant to take you and your crew the easy way when you stopped on the trestle for them. They couldn’t have been expecting us this early. Let’s hope they just had time to roll out of their bedrolls and may feel as confused about this as us. Hang on, honey, we’re almost there, and can’t this Shay go any faster?”
It couldn’t. But he noticed to her credit that Red Fagan wasn’t ducking as they rumbled toward the ambush set up near the trestle. Instead, she’d produced a bitty H&R .32 from somewhere in her bib overalls and pointed it out the right side, her left hand now on the throttle. “Cover the other side, ye loon,” she said, “for it’s from all sides the divels mean to kill us. If we don’t make it, I forgive ye for grabbing me titty that time. I wouldn’t want such a grand kisser to have to face his maker with that on his conscience.”
Stringer moved to the far window, just in time. As he did so he saw a rider tearing apace with them and shouting something that was torn away by the wind between them as Stringer fired—at the bigger target of the owl-hoot’s mount, of course—to spill pony and rider ass over teakettle across the trackside grass.
At the same time, Red Fagan popped her little whore pistol and shouted, “That’ll be after learning yez, yez dorty spawn of a tinker, and a hedgehog in the pay of the English!”
Then they were rumbling across the trestle and into the fire of the larger mass of owl hoots, mounted and afoot, on the far side of the creek. Stringer just had time to guess a camp fire he spotted in the middle distance explained the way they were positioned, when one of them somehow grabbed the cab irons on his side and came up the ladder like a pirate, a bowie gripped in his teeth. Stringer kicked him full in the face, and he vanished forever before Stringer could grasp all the details of what that did to a man with a knife blade already stuck in his face.
He turned, and sure enough, another rascal was trying to climb in just behind Red Fagan. But before Stringer could shoot him, the big redhead shoved her .32 in his face and pulled the trigger. From the results, it seemed a .32 was more than enough, at point-blank range. And then they seemed to have the right of way back to themselves as the Shay tore on across the alpine meadow as fast as its little wheels could carry them.
But, in truth, they hadn’t been going all that fast to begin with, if members of the gang had been able to even try and board them. So Stringer told Red Fagan to keep doing just what she was doing as he hastily reloaded—six in the wheel this time—and crawled up the sloping coal to see what he could see.
As he climbed up on the tender’s water tank, he saw why they were going so slow at full throttle. He took careful aim at the bozo atop the caboose back there in the moonlight and blew him off the brake wheel he’d been twisting so sneaky. Then Stringer began moving back to release it before brakes set one way and a locomotive pulling the other could do more damage. It wasn’t easy. Getting over the tarp of the ore car was no problem, but then he had to run back along the catwalks atop the empty reefers, leaping the gaps and trying not to consider the results of falling between cars.
He made it to the caboose and ran noisily across the red wooden roof. As he grabbed the brake wheel and swung around on it to help Red Fagan move this infernal train better, he saw why his progress had been so noisy. Lamplight from the caboose below was streaming up through the line of bullet holes that had followed him across the roof.
As he grasped the full meaning of this, another fusillade tore up through the roof’s edge to spang lead and splinters off the brake wheel he’d been gripping. But by then, of course, Stringer had slid down the rear ladder, and as his heels hit the rear platform, he was already firing through the back door. He kicked what was left of it in while he still had two rounds in his wheel.
He had no idea wh
o’d lit the overhead lantern, but he was glad they had. By its swinging rays he could see the one gent inside, dressed cow and sprawled facedown on the floorboards in a widening puddle of crimson gore. Stringer reloaded as he moved in warily. Then, covering the rascal, he rolled him over with a boot tip, and stared down at a blank-eyed bloody face.
“One-sided conversations don’t feed a man much information,” Stringer observed. “Since you haven’t anything to tell us, we’d best get you out before you mess up that floor even worse.”
But then Stringer had a better idea, and reached up to trim the overhead lamp. The law might want to study the dead man at the end of the line, he thought, since Red was surely going to be asked how she wound up with all those bullet holes in company property.
Leaving the dead train robber where he was, Stringer had the same fun working his way back up to the cab. He holstered his .38 and slid down the coal to join Red. “What happened?” she asked. “It felt like some fool was fiddling with the brakes. It’s all right now, though.”
He told her what had happened, and added, “You ought to get a promotion for this night’s work, honey. If there’s any bounty on the one you have in your caboose, you may come out even better.”
The moon was low to the west, but the sky to the east was starting to pearl when Red Fagan braked to a stop on the downgrade, with difficulty and considerable sliding. She sighed. “Sure and we made it over the pass, but now we’re almost out of water, thanks to thim dorty sons of worse than bitches back on the far side of the Divide.”
He glanced at the pressure gauge and said, “You’ve just enough pressure to crawl on, if you freewheel her most of the way down to the yards. Do you have any serious rises to worry about between here and the end of the line?”
