'I know, I do not like it. I am a warrior and I live to fight. But massacre I do not like.'
'The rewards are great.'
White Hand nodded in silence. Both men reentered the telegraph room where Carter was tapping out a message. Calhoun waved him into stillness, sat at his purloined desk, wrote a brief message, handed it to one of the guards to give to Carter and said to Simpson: 'Listen good, friend.'
Carter sent out the communication while Simpson wrote. At the end of the transmission Calhoun said: 'Well, Simpson?'
'“Instruct Banlon halt train two hundred yards inside east entrance to Breakheart Pass.”
Calhoun nodded approvingly towards Carter. 'You may yet live to be an old man.' As he finished speaking another message in Morse came in over the headphones. It was very brief and Carter read it out without waiting for the usual confirmation from Simpson.
“Affirmative. Signing off.”
Calhoun smiled in as benign a fashion as he was capable of and said: 'We have them. White Hand.'
Judging from the barely perceptible expression on his face, Deakin was not quite of the same opinion. He removed his headphones, with a strong tug pulled the telegraph lead clear from overhead, then gave the telegraph set a shove which sent it tumbling down a steep slope to vanish in the darkness below. He walked away quickly, gave the train a wide berth, arrived at the cab's footplate, brushed the snow from his face, then peered at the steam-gauge.
The needle had fallen dangerously below the blue line. Deakin opened the fire-box, looked at the very dully glowing embers and began to feed cordwood into the fire-box. This time, either through tiredness or concern, he seemed to be in no hurry to go. Instead, he watched the gauge in an almost proprietorial fashion and waited patiently until the needle had climbed up from below the blue line to fractionally above the red one. Banlon had intimated that this was the danger area, but Deakin didn't seem to care. He closed the door on the now fiercely- burning firebox, took an oil-can and two railroad spikes from Banlon's tool-box, turned up his sheepskin collar and dropped down to the track-side.
He made his by now advisedly circuitous route towards the rear of the train and fetched up stealthily in the close proximity of the rear platform of the supply wagon. Carlos was there, a huddled and shivering Carlos, vainly endeavouring to combat the rigours of the night with the assistance of a bottle of bourbon. Deakin nodded to himself, as if in satisfaction, dropped silently to his hands and knees, crawled under the side of the coach and on to the middle of the track, lowered himself on to his elbows and made his stealthy and extremely slow way along the ties between the rear bogies of the coach. He finally stopped and twisted round with infinite care until he was looking upwards.
Immediately above him was the screwed coupling attaching the rear of the supply wagon to the front of the first horse wagon. Above that again could be seen the rear platform of the supply wagon and the front platform of the horse wagon. On the former and no more than five feet away from Deakin was the clearly observable figure of Carlos.
Very cautiously, so as to avoid any metallic clanking, Deakin gripped the two coupled central links and tried to unscrew them. He desisted almost at once, partly because the task was clearly impossible, partly because of the realization that if he persisted in his effort he was going to leave much of the skin of his palms attached to the frozen metal when the time came for removing his hands. He lifted his oil-can and squirted a generous amount of lubricant on to the screw threads. He heard a sound, lowered the can gently to the snow and turned round very very slowly indeed until he was once more looking upwards.
The sound he had heard was clearly that of Carlos placing his bottle down, for he had just straightened and then started to clump to and fro on the metal platform, stamping his feet and beating his arms, in an attempt to restore circulation. After a few moments he opted for the certainty of internal warmth as opposed to the manifest uncertainty of external warmth and returned to his bottle of bourbon.
Deakin returned to the task on hand. Again he seized the links, again he twisted and again the result was the same. Nothing. With delicate care he released his grip, fished inside his coat and brought out the two railroad spikes; compared to the coupling links, the metal he now held in his hands felt almost warm. Slowly and carefully he inserted the spikes into the links and twisted again. This time the extra leverage did what was required and the screw turned a fraction, making a slight squeaking noise. Deakin remained absolutely still, then looked slowly upwards. Carlos stirred, straightened from the rail, looked around unenthusiastically, then went back into a huddle with his bottle of bourbon.
Once again Deakin resumed his assault on the bottle screw. Using alternately the oil-can and spikes, he reached, in very short order indeed, the stage where there were not more than two or three threads left. He withdrew the spikes and made the last couple of turns by hand. The two halves of the bottle screw came apart and he lowered them, slowly and in complete silence, until they were dangling vertically at the foot of their respective chains.
Deakin looked up. Carlos hadn't moved. On elbows and knees again Deakin inched back the way he had come, crawled out on to the trackside and made his circumspect way back to the locomotive cab. The needle of the steam-gauge was, predictably, on the blue mark. Some little time later, after another stint of feeding the insatiable maw of the fire-box, an operation that Deakin clearly found to be increasingly distasteful, the needle stood on the red once more. Deakin sank wearily on to a bucket seat in the corner and closed his eyes.
Whether he was asleep or not wds impossible to say, but if he were he must have set some sort of timing mechanism in his brain for at fairly regular intervals he started awake, fed some more fuel into the box, then returned to his seat. When Banlon and Rafferty, accompanied by O'Brien, returned to the footplate, they found him hunched on the bucket seat, his head bent, his chin sunk on his chest. He appeared to be asleep. Suddenly he started and looked upwards.
'No more than I expected.' O'Brien's voice was coldly contemptuous. 'Sleeping on the job, eh, Deakin?'
Deakin said nothing, merely pointed a thumb in the direction of the steam-gauge. Banlon crossed and examined it.
'Pretty short sleep, I'd say, Major. Pressure's right up.' He turned round unconcernedly and glanced at the tender; the cordwood was neatly stacked with no signs of having been disarranged. 'And just the right amount of fuel gone, I'd say. A fair enough job. Of course, with all the experience he's had of fires, such as burning down Lake's Crossing–'
'That'll do, Banlon.' O'Brien jerked his head. 'Come on, you.'
Deakin rose stiffly and glanced at his watch. 'Midnight ! Seven hours I've been here. You said four.'
'Banlon needed it. What do you want, Deakin? Sympathy?'
'Food.'
'Carlos has made supper.' Deakin privately wondered how Carlos had found time to make supper. 'In the galley. We've eaten.'
'I'll bet you have.'
O'Brien and Deakin descended to the trackside and made their way to the front platform of the leading coach. O'Brien leant far out and waved a hand. Banlon waved an acknowledging hand and disappeared inside the cab. O'Brien turned away and opened the door to the officers' day compartment.
'Coming, then?'
Deakin rubbed his brow. 'In a moment. Don't forget that when the train is stopped no fresh air gets into that cab. After seven hours there I've got a head like a pumpkin.'
O'Brien regarded Deakin for a speculative moment, then obviously and rightly concluding that Deakin could do no mischief standing where he was, nodded and passed inside, closing the door behind him.
Banlon opened up the throttle. The wheels spun on the icy rails, the laboured puffing of the locomotive increased as clouds of smoke belched from the high stack, the puffing slowed abruptly as the wheels bit and the train slowly got under way. With his hand on the grab-rail Deakin leaned far outwards and looked backwards. It was difficult to be certain in the snow-filled darkness, it could have been as much imagination as anything else, but it seemed to him that there was a slight gap opening up between the supply wagon and the first of the horse wagons. A half-minute later, with the train now rounding a gentle curve and so making rearward observation that much easier, Deakin knew for sure that his imagination was not at work. Rapidly fading ghostly blurs in the darkness, the
