On the Wrong Track

by Steve Hockensmith

  “If you can’t believe your eyes, you could always try touchin’ it,” I told him.

  Samuel peeked over my shoulder. “Personally, I’d be afraid to touch that much gold. I might never wanna stop.”

  “They can’t have gone far,” Lockhart announced, turning to survey the terrain. A thick tree line set in not far from the tracks, rising to rocky bluffs high enough to serve as perches for harp-strumming angels. “There’s nowhere to go.”

  “Maybe Morrison spotted ’em,” Old Red suggested. “Unscheduled stops don’t exactly sit easy with the man. I’m surprised he ain’t poppin’ off with his Winchester already.”

  “Good thinkin’,” Lockhart said with only the slightest hint of resentment, and he turned and headed for the express car.

  I jumped down from the baggage car and threw my arm around Gustav’s shoulders again. Samuel and Wiltrout followed us as we stagger-hopped after Lockhart.

  “I still haven’t seen any proof that Kip’s mixed up in anything,” the conductor said.

  “You better pray you don’t see any proof the next few minutes,” I shot back. “Cuz till we find the lady—”

  “Take cover,” Lockhart snapped. He pressed himself against the baggage car and waved for us to do the same.

  After a few seconds of fumbling, we got ourselves lined up one-two-three-four-five along the train.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked Lockhart.

  “The express car door,” he said. “It’s open.”

  I leaned out around him and took a look. The door couldn’t have been ajar more than a crack: You couldn’t see the opening from where we were at all. What you could see was a thin, dark line running from the door down to the ground—a trickle of crimson liquid.

  It was like taking a pair of spurs to the side. I bolted without even thinking about it.

  “Otto, wait!” my brother shouted, but there was no pulling the reins on me. Seconds later I was pushing the express car side door wide, ready to blast Kip to hell as he stood giggling over Miss Caveo’s lifeless body.

  Yet all I found was poor Milford Morrison, loyal Wells Fargo man, facedown in a puddle of his own blood. He’d been gagged with his vest, his hands tied behind his back with twine knotted so tight his fingers had turned purple. His head was a gore-splattered tureen, the back open bowl-style to offer a full serving of shattered bone and pulpy meat.

  “It’s Morrison,” I told Old Red, who was limping after me with Samuel serving as his new crutch. “Got his brains beat out.”

  I leaned into the car (careful to avoid smearing myself with blood) and saw a desk, slots for sorting letters and packages, a safe, and an unmade cot in the corner. What I didn’t see—and Morrison could have used, apparently—was a broom: The floor was covered with a layer of dust so thick the messenger had left tracks all around the car like footprints in the snow.

  “No sign of Kip,” I reported. “Other than the body, I mean.”

  “Still fresh,” Lockhart said coolly as he stepped up beside me. “Ain’t been dead more than fifteen minutes.”

  “Morrison … dead?” Wiltrout muttered hoarsely. He stayed rooted in place even as the rest of us gathered by the express car, and I knew for sure then that all his bullying was just paint slapped over the yellow streak down his back.

  “It don’t make sense,” Samuel said. “Why would the kid kill Morrison?”

  “I sure would like to ask the little bastard,” I said, turning away from the car. “He’s gotta be around …”

  My words trailed off as I caught sight of my brother. His eyes were as big and round as a couple fried eggs—and not because he was looking at Morrison’s cracked-eggshell skull.

  Gustav was staring at the man’s hands.

  “Goddamn my stupidity,” he whispered.

  He leaned forward for a peep inside the car, and some terrible realization drained what little remained of the color in his face. His next words were shouts directed at no one in particular.

  “The engineer! Why ain’t we seen the engineer?”

  Lockhart took a few quick steps away from the express car, angling for a better look at the locomotive.

  “You don’t think the kid’s crazy enough to try—?” he started to say.

  “Stop!” a voice cried out.

  Up ahead, a dark shape dropped from the engine cab. It was a husky man in overalls, covered in soot—the train’s replacement fireman. The second he hit the ground, he started jogging toward us, his hands in the air.

  “Stay back!” he said, his voice quivery with fear. “Stay back or I’m dead!”

  Beyond him, another figure appeared, leaning out of the cab. He had a gun in his hand and a grin on his face.

  “And he ain’t the only one!” Kip called to us, and he leveled his iron and pulled the trigger.

  Whether he was aiming at the fireman’s back or our fronts, I don’t know. But it was Samuel he hit, sending the porter spinning into my brother with an ugly splotch of red on his snow-white jacket. They fell together, landing side by side on the rocky sod.

  The rest of us hit the dirt, too, diving for cover just as the engine grunted and heaved forward.

  The Pacific Express was leaving without us.

  Thirty-six

  BURL LOCKHART’S DAY

  Or, The Train Falls Apart As the Last Pieces of the Puzzle Come Together

  Everyone was bellowing something—curses, questions, commands, screams—and then it was all drowned out by another blast of gunfire.

  “—stealing the express car and the baggage car!” Wiltrout was yelling when I could hear something as puny as words again. “They’re leaving the sleepers!”

  I looked back at the Pullmans and saw that Wiltrout was right—they weren’t going anywhere. The locomotive was pulling away with just the tender and the express and baggage cars in tow.

  “Goddammit!” Lockhart roared. “While we were playin’ hide-and-seek, that sneaky little shit was uncouplin’ the passenger cars!”

  “Vaya con Dios, assholes!” Kip called from his perch on the engine cab, and he punctuated his farewell with yet another potshot at us.

  We all buried our faces in the grass again. I peeked up just as the baggage car rolled past me.

  I jumped up and set after it.

  “Otto, wait,” I heard my brother say. “It ain’t—!” And then his words were blotted out by the ear-pounding clatter of the car I was chasing.

  There was no time to turn back and ask him to repeat himself. The kid’s wild lead slinging had actually given me a chance—but it wouldn’t last long. Shooting off a gun kicks up a considerable cloud of scorched powder, and that (combined with the black puffs blowing back from the smokestack) would hide me as I made my dash for the train. Maybe.

  By the time I drew up next to the door, the smoke was already starting to clear. I had to jump—quick—or I’d soon run headlong into a bullet.

  And then a hand was there, reaching down from above like it belonged to God Himself. It was bony and brittle looking, yet surprisingly steely when I grabbed hold and made my leap. I felt a jerk on my arm, and then my knees were settling on wood and the hand let go.

  “Thanks … Mr. Lockhart,” I wheezed, gasping for breath on all fours like a winded dog. “I didn’t … even know you’d … made it.”

  “I might be stewed half the time and old all the time, but I ain’t forgotten how to run just yet,” the Pinkerton said. He clapped his hands together and rubbed them the way some fellows do before they sit down to a steak dinner. “Now—two grown men oughta be more than a match for one runty pup. The kid’ll be distracted, what with the engineer and the lady to keep an eye on. So our only problem’s gonna be gettin’ up there to him.”

  “And makin’ sure the hostages don’t get hurt,” I added.

  “Yeah, that, too,” Lockhart said dismissively, as if hostages were a niggling detail he expected to take care of itself. “So … you wanna see how a bandit stopped a train back in ol’ Burl Lockhart’
s day?”

  I was dimly aware of some reason to pause, to ponder. But with my heart pounding and the car rocking and the wind ruffling my hair with its ghostly cold fingers—and, most of all, with Miss Caveo still in jeopardy, so far as I knew—I wasn’t going to slow down and deduce it through. Momentum isn’t just for trains: People get carried along by it, too.

  “Mr. Lockhart, seems to me this is your day,” I said. “What’s the plan?”

  Plan, it turned out, would be a charitable description for the course of action Lockhart proposed. Suicidal stunt hits closer to the mark. Lockhart had his own phrase for it: the blind-baggage hop.

  An old long-rider trick, he said, was to hitch a ride in the blind baggage—the space between the tender and the express car—then climb over the coal and pull a gun on the engine crew. Of course, I pointed out that we weren’t in the blind baggage, but Lockhart thought that was easy enough to fix. We’d just climb atop the baggage car, jump to the express car, and drop down into the tender from there.

  It was crazy, but there was a strong argument in its favor: It was our only choice.

  The best way to get onto the roof was to squeeze out one of the small windows toward the back of the car, then use the sill as a stepladder to clamber up. I went first, being the taller of the two of us and hence the more likely to reach the roof.

  Just as I came to the most dangerous part of my climb—the moment when I had to draw a foot up and actually try to stand in the windowsill—I felt a sudden, unexpected pressure on my legs.

  Lockhart had grabbed hold of me by the shins.

  The old man could tip me over as easy as shaking out a sheet, and my mind raced back to Gustav’s shout as I’d sprinted after the train. “It ain’t—!” were the last words I’d heard. Was this what he’d been trying to warn me about?

  It ain’t a good idea to let Lockhart talk you into squirmin’ through a window—cuz he’ll shove you out and splatter what little brains you got!

  I’d like to say it was coolheaded, Holmes-style logic that got me through. It was really just panic. In a frenzy of fear, I kicked away Lockhart’s hands, got my heels on the sill, and shoved myself upward. A stovepipe was sticking through the roof nearby, and I grabbed hold of it and swung myself up with all my might.

  I made it. I lay there a moment, facedown, letting myself breath a deep sigh of relief. I almost laughed, thinking how I’d spooked. Lockhart had been trying to steady me, that’s all. Why would he help me onto the train only to turn around and hurl me off?

  I couldn’t let go of my unease, though. My brother had been trying to warn me about something, I could feel it. But I couldn’t think it—not lying there spread-eagled on top of a speeding train.

  Lockhart was surprisingly easy to haul up: The lean old man was so light it felt like he’d blow away in the wind if he didn’t have Aunt Pauline to anchor him. Once he was up top, we crept forward with slow, cautious steps, our guns drawn. The whole train had taken on a tilt again, the angle growing steadily steeper as the tracks edged closer to a sheer drop-off to our left. Before long, the incline was so sharp it seemed like we could slide all the way to the cowcatcher like kids sledding down a snow-covered hill.

  But there were still jumps to make—from the baggage car to the express car, then from there to the tender. Lockhart went first, soaring over to the express car as graceful as an eagle in flight … before landing with all the grace of a moose dropped from a hot-air balloon. He tripped, stumbled, and went rolling toward the edge of the roof. Before I knew it, my hold on his gunbelt was the only thing keeping him from spinning over the side—I’d made the jump without even thinking about it.

  “Thanks, Big Red,” Lockhart said as I helped him from a sprawl back into a crouch. “It would have been mighty disappointin’ to go and get myself killed before I could go and get myself killed.”

  He turned toward the front of the train. Up ahead, the smokestack spewed out clouds of black that blew back fast into our faces. Through the smoke, I could just barely make out the tracks as they curved into a long spiral that clung to the mountainside like the stripe running down a barber’s pole.

  “Well, this is it,” Lockhart said. “Can’t dawdle now—not with a snowshed comin’ along any minute to scrape us offa here. So let’s move Indian-style, single file. Most likely Kip won’t be lookin’ for us, but just in case, we don’t want both our heads poked up like a couple tin cans on a fence.”

  I nodded and turned to go, taking point, but Lockhart reached out and grabbed my arm. When I looked back at him, he brought up Aunt Pauline and gave her a little shake.

  “Ladies first.”

  “You sure?”

  The old Pinkerton grinned, flashing me gap-spaced rows of crooked teeth as gray as headstones.

  “Son … ol’ Burl Lockhart was born sure.”

  He crept away in a bent-backed stoop. As I waddled after him, I tried to picture what he’d see when he reached the end of the express car. Aside from a little smoke in his eyes, he should have a good view down into the tender and engine cab.

  Where would the kid be? How would he have his hostages lined up? Could he keep an eye on them while watching out for the likes of us?

  I figured I knew the answer to that last question: He sure as hell could. After all, he’d managed to kill Morrison, uncouple the passenger cars, and get a gun on the engine crew, all while dragging Miss Caveo around as his prisoner. Anyone who could do all that by himself could do just about anything.

  Or could he?

  I’d spent the last few minutes ducking, running, jumping, climbing, reacting. Everything but thinking. And now that I paused to let a thought linger, I reacted again—by stopping cold, dread running down my spine like a trickle of ice water.

  “Mr. Lockhart, wait,” I whispered.

  I don’t even know if he heard me. He’d already reached the edge of the car and was poking his head up for a look at Kip … who was free to just stand there waiting for him, because he didn’t have to keep watch on his prisoners at all.

  “Shit! There he is! Up there!” I heard Kip screech, and I knew the rest of it now—the warning my brother had given me one second too late.

  It ain’t just Kip.

  He’s got help.

  Thirty-seven

  HELL ON WHEELS

  Or, The Situation Takes a Sharp Turn for the Worse

  The thought that Kip’s partner might be Diana Caveo tied my already kinked-up stomach in a knot. Yet the alternative didn’t loosen the cinch much. If Miss Caveo wasn’t in it with the kid, that meant she’d be in the engine cab as his prisoner—or somewhere else entirely as a corpse.

  So when Kip’s compadre hollered up at Lockhart with a gravelly voice that was both decidedly male and disturbingly familiar, there was actually a splash of relief mixed in with my shock.

  “Don’t move!” Augie Welsh barked. “Not unless you think the lady’d look prettier with a hole between her eyes!”

  “You pull that trigger, you’re dead,” Lockhart said. He’d gone perfectly still except for his right arm, which snaked around behind his back, the hand curling up to wave Aunt Pauline at me as I huddled out of sight behind him.

  I knew what he was asking me to do, though I couldn’t see the sense of it. I stretched out a hand and took his gun.

  “You ain’t in no position to make threats, old man!”

  Lockhart waggled his fingers, but I was at a loss this time. What did he want me to do? Give him a tickle?

  “You better throw down your iron, Mr. Lockhart!” another man called out, and though his voice was soothingly calm, it did anything but soothe or calm me.

  Mike Barson was down there, too.

  “Augie’s a bit on edge,” he said, “and enough innocent blood’s been spilled already, don’t you think?”

  Lockhart’s finger-wiggling grew frantic, and I finally understood what he had in mind. I took the snub-nosed Colt Samuel had given me and pressed it into his hand.

  “
Alright,” Lockhart said. “You win.”

  He eased the Colt around, then lifted it up over his head and held it there a moment before tossing it over the side of the train.

  “Thank you, sir,” Barson said amiably. “Now why don’t you come down here and join us? It’s a trifle crowded, but we’d be happy to make room for Mr. Burl Lockhart.”

  I was about to lose my cover, so I scooched back a ways, spreading out flat as Lockhart reluctantly rose to his feet. He took a step forward, paused, then jumped. There was a clatter and a grunt from below—Lockhart landing in the coal tender.

  The talk started up again then, but it was quieter now, no shouting necessary, and I had to slither up perilously close to the edge to hear it. I didn’t dare try for a peek—not yet.

  “ … saw you jump on. Said you look pretty spry for a gent your age,” I could hear Barson saying down in the cab. Even now, after all that had happened, he had a friendly, relaxed way of talking, as if he and Lockhart had just bumped into each other at an ice-cream social. “I’m glad to see Augie didn’t hurt you too bad with that beating last night. It was nothing personal. We just wanted to get you mad, that’s all. So you and those railroad dicks would leave the train and try to track us. We didn’t intend any disrespect by it. In fact, you’ve always been a hero of mine. When I was a boy—”

  “Ain’t nobody else up there, is there?” Welsh cut in, his gruff voice like a bucket of mud and twigs when set next to Barson’s honeyed tones.

  “Oh, sure. I brought Sherlock Holmes himself with me. Come on down, Sherlie! They’re onto you!”

  Naturally, I didn’t take this as a serious invitation, and I just lay there, barely daring to breathe.

  “Well, hell—I just remembered,” Lockhart said. “Ol’ Sherl’s dead, ain’t he? Guess I’m alone after all.”

  “Har har,” Kip jeered.

  “I wish you had brought help, old man—like them redheaded sons of bitches,” Welsh said. “We owe them something real special after all the trouble they put us to.”

  “Be careful what you wish for,” Lockhart shot back. “Those two might be green, but they’ve got grit. You never know when one of ’em might just get the drop on you.”