feeling like the first man who had gone over Niagara Falls in a barrel. He assessed his injuries: a collection of broken ribs in front where the branch had caught his chest, a similar amount at the back where he'd crashed on to the roof and a shoulder broken in an indeterminate number of places. It took a considerable amount of gingerly investigation to establish that in fact his skeletal system was still intact. Bruising, probably massive bruising there would be and a considerable amount of pain for some time to come, but those he could try both to ignore and forget. They would not incapacitate him. He pulled himself to his feet, opened the rear door of the supply wagon and passed inside.
He moved forward through the banked tiers of coffins and medical supply crates until he came to the front of the supply wagon, where he peered through one of the two small circular observation ports. Carlos was as he had been, pacing to and fro and clearly unaware that anything was amiss. Deakin shook off his sheepskin jacket, fixed it over one of the observation windows and put a piece of heavy sacking over the other. He then lit one of the oil- lamps which hung at intervals along the central length of the coach. Deakin noted with some concern that there was a very narrow chink between two of the planks on the right-hand side and it was barely possible that a thin line of light might show through. But then, to observe such a light, if light there was, one would have to be standing to the right of the coach and Carlos was at the front. Besides, there was nothing he could do about it anyway. Deakin dismissed the matter from his mind and turned to the task on hand.
With the aid of a screwdriver and cold chisel with which he had thoughtfully provided himself from Banlon's tool-box, Deakin prised open the lid of a yellow brass-bound oiled wooden box marked MEDICAL CORPS SUPPLIES: UNITED STATES ARMY. The lid came clear with a wrenching, splintering sound but Deakin paid no attention. Nefarious pursuits came much easier on a moving train than on a halted one. The combination of an elderly train, rusted wheels and ancient bogies made sufficient noise as it rattled along the track to preclude normal conversation at a distance of even a few feet. Any noise from within the supply wagon, short of something like a pistol shot, would have been quite inaudible to Carlos, who was in any event concentrating upon other matters. As on an earlier occasion, Carlos had stopped pacing and was relying heavily on liquid internal warmth.
The medical supplies were packed in unusual grey metal containers, unmarked. Deakin picked up one of the tins and opened the lid. The box was packed with gleaming metal shells. Deakin showed no reaction. The discovery, clearly, came as no shock. He opened another two tins. The contents were as before.
Deakin left the wooden crate with its lid wrenched off – he had apparently passed the point of no return and seemed indifferent as to whether his handiwork was discovered or not – and moved on to another box, the lid of which he levered open with the same disregard for what purported to be US Government property. The contents were as they had been in the previous box. Deakin left and moved towards the rear of the supply wagon, lamp in hand, ignoring all the other wooden boxes marked as containing medical supplies. He reached the stacked tiers of coffins and began to haul one out from the bottom rack. For a supposedly empty coffin, even allowing for the state of his back and shoulder, this manoeuvre seemed to cost him a quite disproportionate deal of effort.
Carlos wasn't indulging in anything like so considerable an amount of energy. It was apparent that he had not yet lost faith in the efficacy of bourbon as a means of warding off the intense cold; he had the neck of a bottle to his mouth, its base pointing vertically skywards. He lowered the bottle reluctantly, shook and inverted it, all to no purpose. The bottle was empty. Sorrowfully and perhaps a thought unsteadily, Carlos made for the side rail of the platform, leaned out and hurled the bottle into the night. His eyes wistfully followed the flight of the bottle until it disappeared almost immediately into the darkness and the swirling snow. Suddenly the wistful expression vanished, to be replaced not by his normal cheerful beaming expression but by a hard and chilling expression, the suddenly narrowed eyes incongruous in the moonlike face. He momentarily screwed shut those eyes and looked again but what he had seen was still there – a distinct line of light running along the side of the supply wagon. Moving with a speed and delicacy that one would not normally associate with so heavily built a character, he swung across from the rear platform of the second coach to the front platform of the supply wagon. He paused, reached inside his coat and brought out a very unpleasantlooking throwing knife.
At the far end of the wagon Deakin removed a rather sadly splintered lid from the coffin. He lifted the lantern and looked down. His face hardened into bitterness but registered neither surprise nor shock. Deakin had found no more than he had expected to find. The Reverend Peabody's resting-place was not incongruous. He had been dead for many hours.
Deakin loosely replaced the splintered coffin lid and dragged another coffin from its rack on to the wagon floor. From the time taken and the great degree of energy expended, this coffin was obviously very much heavier than the previous one. Deakin used the cold chisel ruthlessly and had the lid off in seconds. He looked down into the interior of the coffin, then nodded almost imperceptibly in far from slow comprehension. The coffin was full to the top with heavily-oiled Winchester repeater rifles, lever action, with tubular magazines on the forestocks.
Deakin threw the lid loosely on top of the coffin, placed the oil-lamp on it, hauled a third coffin to the floor and, with the expertise born of practice, had the lid off in seconds. He had just time to notice that this, too, was full of brand new Winchesters when something caught his sleepless attention and his eyes shifted fractionally to the left. The oil-lamp had flickered, just once, as if in some sudden draught in a place where there shouldn't have been a draught.
Deakin whirled round as Carlos, knife hand already swinging, flung himself upon him. Deakin caught the knife wrist and there was a brief but fierce struggle which ended, temporarily, when both men tripped over a coffin and broke apart in their fall, Deakin falling in an aisle between two rows of coffins, Carlos in the middle of the wagon. Both men were quickly on their feet, although Deakin, despite his aches and pains, or perhaps because of the cold appreciation of the fact that he was the one without a knife, was fractionally the faster. Carlos had changed his grip on his knife and now held it in a throwing position. Deakin, with no room to manoeuvre or take evasive action in those narrow confines, kicked savagely at the loose lid of the nearest coffin, the one on which the oil-lamp stood. The lid shot up in the air, momentarily obscuring Deakin from Carlos's view as the lamp shattered on the floor, plunging the supply wagon into comparative darkness. Deakin was in no mood to wait around. To fight in the darkness a man carrying a knife you cannot see is a certain form of suicide.
He ran for the rear door of the supply wagon, went through and closed the door behind him. He didn't even bother looking around him, there was no place to go except up. He scrambled to the roof via the safety rail, stretched himself out and looked down, waiting for Carlos to appear so that he could either jump him or, better, slide back when he did appear, wait for the appearance of his head over the top and kick it off. But the seconds passed and Carlos did not appear. Realization came to Deakin almost too late. He twisted his head around and peered forward into an opaque world filled with greyly driving snow. He rubbed the snow from his eyes, cupped his hand over them and peered again.
Carlos, less than ten feet away, was crawling cautiously along the centre of the roof, knife in one hand and teeth gleaming in a smile in the dark face. Carlos gave the marked impression of one who who was not only enjoying himself but expected to be enjoying himself considerably more in a matter of a second or two. Deakin did not share his feelings, this was one thing he could well have done without; the way he felt at that moment, a robust five-year-old could have coped with him without too much difficulty. There was, in fact, one consideration that slightly lessened the odds against Deakin. Though Carlos's physical faculties seemed quite unimpaired, it was very questionable if the same could be said for his mental ones: Carlos was awash in a very considerable amount of bourbon.
Deakin, on hands and knees now, swung round to face the oncoming Carlos. As he did so, he caught a fleeting glimpse ahead of what seemed, through the snow, to be the beginnings of a long trellis bridge spanning a ravine, but it could have been as much imagined as seen. He had no time for any more. Carlos, now less than six feet away and still with the same gleaming smile of wolfish satisfaction, lifted his throwing hand over his shoulder. He did not look like a man who was in the habit of missing. Deakin jerked his own right hand convulsively forward and the handful of frozen snow it held struck Carlos in the eyes. Blindly, instinctively, Carlos completed his knife throw but Deakin had already flung himself forward in a headlong dive which took him below the trajectory of the knife, his right shoulder socketing solidly into Carlos's chest.
It became immediately apparent that Carlos was not just the big fat man he appeared to be but a big and very powerful man. He took the full impact of Deakin's dive without a grunt – admittedly the icy surface had robbed Deakin of all but a fraction of his potential take-off thrust – closed both hands around Deakin's neck and began to squeeze.
Deakin tried to break the Negro's grip but this proved to be impossible. Savagely, Deakin struck him with all his power – or what was left of it – on both face and body. Carlos merely smiled widely. Slowly, his legs quivering
