He pointed. To the west of the train, tracers of dust were piling up across the benchland.
John Lourdes got out his binoculars. 'It's not dragoons. And they're coming on like religion.'
'They're going to hit the train.'
The bandoleer of flares was slung over John Lourdes's neck. He shoved the binoculars back in his saddlebags. He got out the signal gun. The father rode up alongside him.
'Before you warn them. You know what I'm going to say. Tampico ... the oil fields. You don't need them back there. If they make it, well ... and the women are not your province. Tampico ... the oil fields.' John Lourdes loaded a flare.
'You can fill notebooks till you fall over dead but what you need to write ... Justice Knox shouldn't have entrusted you with this. You're not the right man for it.' His eyes were black and hard, the neck cords strained. 'You wanted to get there, we can get there. It ends when you say it ends, right. There it is out there. The practical application of strategy means you stay indifferent and take advantage when advantage can be taken. Isn't that why you ended up here, why I ended up here? Answer me, Goddamn it.'
ONE FLARE SIGNALED all was clear, two flares there was trouble and hold back. To that John Lourdes added a third option in his note. Three flares meant trouble, but come on quick. When Doctor Stallings, standing atop the tender, raised three fingers, Jack B ordered the trains out and weapons readied.
From the plateau John Lourdes could see banners of gray smoke against the haze and he knew the trains were on the move.
'You ... me ... and the truck!' shouted the father. 'Alright ... I hope the BOI taught you how to board a moving train under fire.'
The trains went through a gap in the hills. Small islands of dust with riders at the fore descended scrub ridges and rose up magically out of distant swales. Rurales with bandoleers crisscrossing their chests like ancient baldrics and filthy hats and straw sombreros, and they carried carbines and flintlocks and five-shot Colts and machetes and bows and arrows and their saddlebags and stirrups winged outward and the fronds of their hats bent back as they drove to flank the trains.
There were bursts of rifle smoke along the length of the cars and riders crumpled out of their saddles and horses crushed down upon their hooves and flipped over brokenly. Against a barren sky John Lourdes scanned that tableland with binoculars to see how and where fate might intervene for them to get back on the train.
As the lead train cleared a long shelf of battened stone, a mass of trampling shadows surged from hiding. The men in the coal car out front of the locomotive leaned up from their parapets and poured fire down into the clustered features of men close enough to touch.
A rurale with a leather breastplate and hair to his shoulders whipped his horse up alongside the rails and was cut down as he flung a stick of dynamite. It disappeared within the black hull and caromed off the casement with fuse hissing. Men scrambled to reach it but were too late.
The explosion rocked the coal car. Men were thrown over the rim. The black wheels lifted, then slammed down, missing the rails. The wheels sawed ties and scored earth and the plough-shaped pilot rammed the coal car housing and all that tonnage lifted and scythed across the engine tearing the stack and the menagerie of steel and steam was engulfed in smoke. A part of the frame housing tore across the connecting rods and they broke loose from the locomotive spearing the boiler and a gauge wheel in the cab blew into the chest of the engineer and drove his ribs right out through his back.
The locomotive surged and the coal car listed into a decline beside the tracks, only to be vaulted up again where it broadsided the engine. For a few moments this architecture of ruined metal and mangled steel plowed on at full speed and then the housing plates separated at the seams and there was a violent hiss and a rush of flame and the remains of train cars exploded into a volcano of dust and debris.
John Lourdes swept from the plateau and down a ravine with Rawbone in hard pursuit. Their horses struggled up a steep incline from where they could see through the settling smoke that the first train was a hissing mass strewn over the tracks.
The second train was a mile back and coming on fast. It was under heavy fire from a cavalry of poor wretches hunkered down in their saddles and firing over the outstretched heads of their mounts.
John Lourdes wiped the sweat and dust from his field glasses and surveyed the landscape again. If the train could get past the wreckage, he saw where the tracks traversed a rising battlement of hills and the train would have to slow drastically. He yelled to Rawbone and pointed to where they were to ride. The father shouted back, as his mount shouldered wildly, that the train would never get through. But the son had already spurred his horse toward where the walls of the canyon burned with daylight.
They came up out of a ravine. The ground before them was clouded
