On the Wrong Track

by Steve Hockensmith

  Runty as he might have been, Crowe didn’t lack for lung power. When he snapped out “Close that door behind you,” the words cracked at us like a whip.

  “Now,” he said with only slightly less snip once I’d complied, “who are you and what do you want?”

  “Otto Amlingmeyer’s the name,” I replied with (what I hoped was) imperturbable smoothness. “This here’s my brother Gustav. Burl Lockhart sent us to you with this.”

  I pulled out the note and placed it on the desk before Crowe. He flipped it open, grunted, then crumpled the paper into a ball and jammed it into a pocket of his dark suit coat.

  “Either of you have experience as lawmen? Guards? Gunmen? Anything like that?”

  I put on a cocky grin and patted my holstered Colt, thinking I’d concoct some suitable flummery about our careers as pistoleros. But I could see in the squinty pucker of Crowe’s face that he was on guard for the slightest whiff of bullshit, so I stuck to the truth.

  “’Fraid not, sir. We’re just a couple drovers. Seen our fair share of trouble, that’s for sure, but never from behind a badge.”

  I half-expected Crowe to offer the same advice as the Pinkerton who’d collected Lockhart from the saloon: Get your ass back to cattle, cowboy. But instead his head snapped down and up in a brusque nod.

  “Good. Do you know who I am?”

  As honesty about our inexperience had seemingly served us well, I came clean on our ignorance, too.

  “I haven’t the foggiest notion, sir.”

  That got me another nod.

  “I believe you. Excellent. You’re just the sort of men I’d be looking for if I could be looking for men like you.”

  “Come again?” I said.

  “Spies!” Crowe spat the word out like it was a bee that had buzzed into his mouth.

  “Now, hold on. You think we’re—?” I began.

  Crowe dismissed the question with a flutter of his stubby fingers. “No, no. Not you. That’s why you’re here. Because of them. The spies.”

  “I hope you’ll pardon my askin’, sir,” Gustav said, “but … spies for who?”

  “Who do you think?” the colonel snapped. “Those dirty, thieving clodhoppers! Barson and Welsh! They’ve hit our big runs time and time again! The ones carrying payrolls and”—he dropped his voice to a hoarse, angry whisper—“gold.” Then he thumped his desk with a tiny, clenched fist, so bubbling over with rage I began to think he’d blow apart like an overstoked boiler. “There’s only one explanation! Spies inside the Southern Pacific! Informers! Goddamned traitors!”

  The colonel’s face grew redder and redder as he raved, but he managed to catch a deep, calming breath before he self-induced a stroke.

  “We’re doing what we can to root out such vermin, but it’s not easy,” he said as the angry blush faded from his face. “We’ve got all our best men hunting for the Give-’em-Hell gang, and I can’t just open up my doors and recruit more—not when anyone who comes to the S.P. looking for work could be another spy. So I’ve instituted a new policy: I only hire people I’d have no reason to hire, and they, in turn, must have no intention of being hired by me.”

  “Which is why Burl Lockhart sent us here,” Old Red said. “Instead of hirin’ for yourself, you’ve got friends—folks you trust—pickin’ fellers out and herdin’ ’em your way.”

  The colonel gave the deduction an approving nod. “That’s right. I see Lockhart chose well. He’s not what he used to be, but he’s still got an eye for judging men. Except … he wasn’t drunk when he gave you that note, was he?”

  “No, sir,” I said, sensing that honesty was no longer our best policy—it was time to lie like a sonofabitch. “He seemed a touch hungover maybe, but he was sober as a judge.”

  “Alright, then.” The colonel leapt up to his full height (which wasn’t much higher than he’d been in his chair) and put his right hand in the air. “Repeat after me: I do solemnly swear …”

  Old Red raised his hand. After a moment’s hesitation, I did likewise.

  “I do solemnly swear,” we said in unison.

  “That I am not a dirty damned spying bastard …”

  My brother and I gaped at the colonel.

  “Swear it!” he barked.

  We swore it.

  “And that I will do my utmost to protect the property and passengers of the Southern Pacific Railroad.”

  We swore this, too.

  “So help me, God.”

  Again, we repeated the words—though I meant them more as a plea than a pledge.

  Crowe pulled one of his desk drawers open and fished out a couple of silver-gray doodads. One he handed to me, the other to my brother.

  They were stars—badges. For Old Red’s benefit, I read out what was engraved on mine:

  POLICE SERVICE

  267

  S.P.R.R. CO.

  My brother stared down at his star, numbered 268. He rubbed it with his thumb as if he needed the feel of the cool metal to convince himself it was real.

  “So,” he said, “we’re off after Barson and Welsh, then.”

  Crowe scowled. “Certainly not. As I said, that’s for my best men. I want you on the next express over the Sierras—you’ll get your training in San Francisco. Oh, by the way …” The colonel pulled a pencil and a ledger from the same drawer that had held the badges. “What were your names again?”

  I answered for both myself and Old Red, as my brother had such a look of shock upon his face I was afraid for him to open his mouth lest a scream escape. His dream was finally coming true—but you’d have thought he was faced instead with his greatest nightmare.

  Four

  TERRA INCOGNITA

  Or, Colonel Crowe Gives His New Recruits Their Marching Orders

  It fell to me to offer the necessary head nods and yessirs as Crowe ran through the particulars of our employment, since my brother remained so thunderstruck I could’ve stuffed stogies in his hand and sold him as a cigar-store Indian.

  We’d be paid ten dollars a week, the colonel told us, and we’d report to a fellow named Jefferson Powless at S.P. H.Q. in San Francisco. We were to make our way there on a joint Union Pacific–Southern Pacific Chicago-to-Oakland special called the Pacific Express, which had arrived in Ogden that morning and would carry on shortly. While aboard the train, we were to keep our connection with the railroad under our hats, as we were “terra incognita” (in Crowe’s words) to the “turncoat sons of bitches” infesting the S.P.

  Old Red remained so catatonic through it all he didn’t even raise an eyebrow when the colonel concluded by throwing open his window and directing us to climb through.

  “It would be best if you weren’t seen leaving my office,” he said.

  Of course, two men climbing out a window in broad daylight might attract more attention than the same fellows strolling out by way of the door. But I thought it best not to argue, as Colonel Crowe struck me as the kind of military mind that could make Custer look like a model of common sense and coolheadedness.

  “Pick up your tickets at the Southern Pacific desk downstairs—they’ll be waiting for you under the name Dissimulo,” the colonel said as I maneuvered my substantial bulk none too gracefully through the window. (While my by-no-means-elderly elder brother is “Old Red,” I’ve been branded “Big Red” with no irony whatsoever.) “I’ll send a coded wire to Powless with word that you’re coming.”

  Once Gustav had followed stiffly after me, Crowe leaned out the window and crooked his stubby little arm into a salute.

  “Good luck, men.”

  “So … that’s it?” I asked, offering a limp salute in return. “There’s nothin’ you want us to do till we get to San Francisco?”

  “Of course, there is,” Crowe snapped. “I should’ve thought it went without saying.”

  Old Red and I merely stared back at him, making it clear that saying was indeed needed.

  “If anyone tries to rob the Pacific Express,” the colonel said, “kill them.
”

  He ducked inside and slammed the window shut.

  “You know … I’d have liked it better if that had gone without sayin’,” I said.

  A lone locomotive was puffing its way toward a roundhouse not far off, and my brother turned to watch its approach with an expression that was equal parts wistful and queasy.

  “I wasn’t expectin’ things to move so fast,” he said.

  “That don’t mean we gotta keep movin’ with ’em.”

  “We took the badges,” Old Red said, sounding curiously resigned. “We took the jobs.”

  “Jobs with the Southern goddamn Pacific,” I pointed out. “Come on, Brother … we got more in common with Mike Barson and Augie Welsh than with that little lunatic in there.”

  Gustav shook his head, shaking himself from his dreamy stupor in the process. “Barson and Welsh are outlaws,” he said firmly. “We’re detectives.”

  “Railroad detectives,” I corrected him.

  “Detectives.”

  “Well, if it’s really as simple as that, why’d you go all ghostly a minute ago? When Crowe said he was sendin’ us out on the next train, your face turned so pale it practically bleached your mustache.”

  “Like I said—things are movin’ fast, that’s all.” Old Red turned and headed away down the side of the building. “And we gotta move fast, too, if we’re gonna make that train.”

  I cursed, I grumbled, I dragged my heels—and I followed.

  After we’d collected our gear, changed into our nicest clothes (which is to say our clothes with the least number of stains and rips), and settled up at our boardinghouse, my brother took a mighty big step—a giant jump for the likes of us. He sold our horses. There was a practical reason, since it was unlikely we’d be allowed to stow our ponies under our seats on the train. But I figured there was a personal reason, too: Gustav was making it that much harder to back out.

  When we set off for Union Station again, we went via mule-drawn streetcar, an experience I enjoyed heartily as it offered seemingly endless opportunities to tip one’s hat to pretty shopgirls. Such charms were lost on Old Red, though—and not just because my bashful brother practically swoons at the sight of a skirt. Though our speed never topped a lazy amble, he stared wide-eyed at the tracks before us as if the streetcar line terminated not at Union Station but into the Grand Canyon. When I asked if he was alright, he just grunted out, “Fine,” and tightened his white-knuckled grip on the nearest pole.

  Once we reached the station, I took on more than my fair share of our gear, yet Old Red still lagged behind as we went inside. To say that he walked toward the ticket desk like a man headed to the gallows doesn’t do it justice. He walked like a man headed to the gallows with blocks of granite tied to his feet.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I said, dropping my load and waiting for my brother to catch up. “If you’re sick, just say so.”

  “I … ain’t … sick,” Old Red wheezed unconvincingly as he trudged past me into the station.

  Our tickets were waiting for us under “Dissimulo” like Colonel Crowe said, though the clerk behind the counter gave me the evil eye when I had trouble pronouncing what was supposedly my own last name.

  “Dissimulo—what kinda handle is that, anyway?” I asked Gustav as we went looking for a porter to take our things.

  “Sounds I-talian,” my brother muttered.

  “I guess I oughta start callin’ you Giuseppe then. You can call me Leonardo.”

  “How ’bout I just call you Chucklehead?” Old Red said wearily, as if making digs at me was an obligation he could barely muster the strength to meet. “If we’re gonna take on another name, it may as well be something that fits us.”

  That actually seemed sensible to me—which is why, soon afterward, I checked in our saddles and war bags under the name Gustav Holmes.

  “You’ve always wanted to be another Holmes. Well, now I went and made you one,” I told my brother, who’d plopped himself on one of the long benches stretching like cornrows through the huge station.

  Old Red nodded, his eyes on the pile of trunks, crates, and bags our gear had been tossed onto. “I hope you didn’t give that porter anything you wouldn’t wanna lose.”

  “Don’t worry. I got all the essentials right here.” I patted the worn carpetbag we’d purchased at a pawnshop before boarding the trolley. In it was everything I thought we’d need in the days ahead (extra clothes, toothbrushes, a shaving kit, Gustav’s Holmes yarns) and a few items I hoped we wouldn’t (our holsters and guns). But none of this was the irreplaceable “anything” my brother was referring to.

  “Otto,” Old Red said, “get over there and dig that book outta your war bag. We got us a few minutes yet. There’s still time to mail it.” He dabbed his sweat-beaded face with his handkerchief. “I admit it. I feel like shit. But if I can drag my achin’ carcass onto a train, you can walk your book a block to a damn post office.”

  “So what exactly’s ailin’ you, Brother? A bruised conscience, maybe?”

  I was just trying to change the subject, of course. And Old Red returned the favor, though he went about it with less finesse. He simply shook his head, got to his feet, and walked off toward the doors along the western wall of the station.

  The Pacific Express was just outside.

  Low as my opinion of the railroads was, that didn’t prevent me from appreciating the train. Looking at it for the first time, I understood what it must be like to step inside a grand opera house. When so much is sumptuous and shining, the gaudy spectacle of it is enough to make you forget, just for a moment, the ramshackle shoddiness of your everyday world.

  And that was the locomotive alone. It was dark green with red trim and gold leaf on top of that, all of it polished to such a gleam the huge headlamp mounted above the cowcatcher seemed unnecessary: Surely the engine was so well varnished it would glow in the moonlight as brilliantly as the brightest star. Yet I spotted a pudgy, fussy man in overalls—the engineer, no doubt—working a rag over the knobs and levers in the cab like a fellow giving a spit shine to a diamond.

  Behind the locomotive was a matching, equally ornate coal tender, which was followed by a Wells Fargo express car and a baggage car that were about as dazzling as a couple crates of cabbage. But then it was on to three Pullmans, a dining car, and finally an observation car, all of them done up in green, red, and gold so vivid you’d think the paint was still dripping wet.

  My wonder must have showed on my face, for someone called out, “A beautiful sight, isn’t she?”

  I turned to find a squat, curly-haired man looking down at me from the open side door of the baggage car. His lips were curved in a grin so gigantic the ends of his waxed mustache practically pointed straight up.

  “That she is,” I said.

  “Well, enjoy it now. By the time we’re twenty feet down the track, she’ll have so much dust on her you won’t remember if she’s green, purple, or pink.”

  I shared a chuckle with the man, then he wished us a pleasant journey and got back to his work, checking baggage tags and jotting down notes on a piece of paper attached to a clipboard.

  My brother didn’t seem to hear a word he’d said. He was gaping at two long wooden boxes resting side by side near the baggageman’s feet—a pair of coffins.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m sure they ain’t bringin’ those along for us.”

  “Come on,” Old Red growled, heading toward a burly, fifty-or-so fellow who was either a conductor or a steamboat captain, judging by his flat-topped cap and frock coat.

  “Howdy, Admiral!” I said, offering him my ticket. “Could you tell us where our seats might be?”

  The conductor glared at me with such undisguised disgust you’d have thought I was handing him a fresh cow pie. It was only then that I remembered something that hadn’t meant much to me before, given that I’d only been on a train once, and that as a lad: Railroad men hate cowboys.

  I suppose it’s because our profession attr
acts a boisterous breed that doesn’t make for the most mannerly of passenger. And the fact that drovers resent the railroads for a multitude of sins, not least of which is the withering away of the old cattle trails. And I’m sure it doesn’t help that many a waddy thinks it great sport to shoot out the headlamps of night-traveling trains.

  Although Gustav and I had given ourselves new names, we hadn’t acquired new duds, and it was plain to see that we weren’t doctors, lawyers, or Indian chiefs—all of whom would’ve been more welcome aboard the train than us.

  “Ask a porter,” a voice snapped at me. I could only assume the voice belonged to the conductor, as I couldn’t see his lips move—they were hidden beneath a thick mustache-goatee that flowed over his mouth and down his chin in a bushy, black-gray stripe.

  “Whadaya say—should I kick his ass?” I said to Old Red as the conductor moved off to harangue the baggageman about something or other. “I mean, what’s the good of havin’ a badge if you can’t abuse your authority, right?”

  Gustav didn’t reply. He was staring pensively at the steps up into the car.

  “Second thoughts?” I asked.

  It was as if that was just the prod he needed.

  “Nope. Still stuck to my first.” And he grabbed the handrail and hauled himself up. Then he turned and stretched a hand down to me like I was the one who needed help. “You comin’?”

  It wasn’t a question I heard from him often, since my brother tends to march around as if I’m little more than an extra spur attached to him at the heel. It rarely seems to occur to him that I might roll free one of these days. But it had occurred to him now—as it had occurred to me.

  “Occurred to” doesn’t always amount to much, though. Especially not when it’s stacked up against a “got to.”

  I took my brother’s hand and let him pull me up into the Pacific Express.

  “Welcome aboard,” he said once I had my feet planted inside.

  “Why, thank you, Mr. Holmes.”

  He let go of my hand and flashed me a thin grin.

  It was the last smile I’d see on his face from that day to this.