uncombed curly light brown hair.
“I was told by Sheriff Huey that you saw the bank robber.”
The boy answered while chewing on the gumdrop. “Sure did. The only trouble is, nobody believes me.”
“I do,” Bell assured him. “Tell me what you saw.”
Jackie was about to reach in the sack for another gumdrop, but Bell stopped him. “You can have them after you’ve told me what you know.”
The boy looked peeved but shrugged. “I was playing baseball in the street with my friends when this old guy—”
“How old?”
Jackie studied Bell. “About your age.”
Bell never considered thirty as old, but to a young boy of ten he must have appeared ancient. “Go on.”
“He was dressed like most of the miners who live here, but he wore a big hat like the Mexicans.”
“A sombrero.”
“I think that’s what it’s called.”
“And he was toting a heavy sack over his shoulder. It looked like it was plumb full of something.”
“What else did you notice?”
“One of his hands was missing the little finger.”
Bell stiffened. This was the first clue to identifying the killer. “Are you sure he was missing a little finger?”
“As sure as I’m standing here,” answered Jackie.
“Which hand?” Bell asked, containing his mounting excitement.
“The left.”
“You’ve no doubt it was the left hand?”
Jackie merely nodded while staring longingly at the gumdrop sack. “He looked at me like he was really mad when he saw I was looking back.”
“Then what happened?”
“I had to catch a fly ball. When I turned around, he was gone.”
Bell patted Jackie on the head, almost losing his hand in a sea of unruly red hair. He smiled. “Go ahead and eat your gumdrops, but, if I were you, I’d chew slowly so they last longer.”
AFTER HE checked out of the Rhyolite Hotel and before he boarded the train, Bell paid the telegraph operator at the depot to send a wire to Van Dorn describing the Butcher Bandit as missing the little finger on his left hand. He knew that Van Dorn would quickly send out the news to his army of agents to watch out for and report any man with that disfigurement.
Instead of traveling back to Denver, he decided on the spur of the moment to go to Bisbee. Maybe—just maybe—he might get lucky again and find another clue to the bandit’s identity. He leaned back in his seat, as the torrid heat of the desert grilled the interior of the Pullman car. Bell hardly noticed it.
The first solid clue, provided by a scrawny young boy, wasn’t exactly a breakthrough, but it was a start, thought Bell. He felt pleased with himself for the discovery and began to daydream of the day he confronted the bandit and identified him by the missing finger.
THE CHASE QUICKENS
11
MARCH 4, 1906 SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA
THE MAN WHOSE LAST ALIAS HAD BEEN RUSKIN stood in front of an ornate brass sink and stared into a large oval mirror as he shaved with a straight razor. When finished, he rinsed off his face and patted on an expensive French cologne. He then reached out and clutched the sink as his railroad boxcar came to an abrupt stop.
He stepped up to a latched window, disguised from the outside as if it were a section of the wooden wall of the car, cautiously cracked it, and peered outside. A steam switch engine had pushed ten freight cars uncoupled from the train, including the O’Brian Furniture car, through the Southern Pacific Railroad’s huge terminal building, called the Oakland Mole. It consisted of a massive pier built on pilings, masonry, and rock laid in the San Francisco Bay itself, on the west side of the city of Oakland. The slip where the ferryboats entered and tied up was at the west end of the main building, between twin towers. The towers were manned by teams of men who directed the loading and unloading of the huge fleet of ferries that moved to and from San Francisco across the bay.
Because the Oakland Mole was at the end of the transcontinental railway, it was filled twenty-four hours a day with a mixed crowd of people, coming from the east and heading across the continent in the opposite direction. Passenger trains commingled with freight trains that carried goods and merchandise. It was a busy place in 1906, since business was booming in the sister cities of the bay. San Francisco was a thriving commercial center while much of the actual goods were manufactured in Oakland.
Ruskin checked a schedule and saw that his cleverly disguised mode of secret travel was on board the San Gabriel, a Southern Pacific Railroad ferry built to haul freight trains as well as passengers. She was a classic ferry, double-ended, her stern and bow surmounted with a pilothouse on each end. She was propelled with side paddle
