'Yes, but…' He looked strained, the full enormity of the situation sinking in. 'You'll have to go back along the track and plant fusees.'
'Fusees?'
'Flares, of course. You're younger than me… you'll have to go… you'll be faster.'
He opened a cupboard in George's office and pulled out three objects, each about a foot in length, with a sharp metal spike at one end, the rest being tubular with granulations on the tip. They looked like oversized matches, which was roughly what they were.
'You strike them on any rough or hard surface,' he said. 'Like a rock, or the rails. They burn bright red… they burn for twenty minutes. You stick the spike… throw it… into the wooden ties, in the middle of the track. The driver of the Canadian will stop at once when he sees it.' His mind was going faster almost than his tongue. 'You'll have to go half a mile, it'll take the Canadian that much time to stop… Hurry, now… half a mile at least. And if the engineers are not in the cab…'
'What do you mean,' I asked aghast, 'if they're not in the cab?'
'They aren't always there. One of them regularly flushes out the boiler. the other could be in the bathroom… If they aren't there, if they haven't seen the fusees and the train isn't stopping, you must light another flare and throw it through the window into the cab. Then when they come back, they'll stop.'
I stared at him. That's impossible.'
'They'll be there, they'll see the flares. Go now. Hurry. But that's what you do if you have to. Throw one through the window.' He suddenly grabbed a fourth flare from the cupboard. 'You'd better take another one, just in case.'
'In case of what?' What else could there be? '
'In case of bears,' he said.
Chapter Eighteen
With a feeling of complete unreality I set off past the end of the train and along the single railway track in the direction of Toronto.
With one arm I clasped the four flares to my chest, in the other hand I carried George's bright-beamed torch, to show me the way.
Halfa mile. How long was half a mile?
Hurry, George's assistant had said. Of all unnecessary instructions…
I half walked, half ran along the centre of the track, trying to step on the flat wood of the ties, the sleepers, because the stones in between were rough and speed-inhibiting.
Bears… my God.
It was cold. It had stopped snowing, but some snow was lying… not enough to give me problems. I hadn't thought to put on a coat. It didn't matter, movement would keep me warm. Urgency and fierce anxiety would keep me warm.
I began to feel it wasn't totally impossible. After all, it must have been done often in the old days. Standard procedure still, one might say. The flares had been there, ready. All the same, it was fairly eerie running through the night with snow-dusted rocky tree-dotted hillsides climbing away on each side and the two rails shining silver into the distance in front.
I didn't see the danger in time, and it didn't growl; it wasn't a bear, it had two legs and it was human. He must have been hiding behind rocks or trees in the shadow thrown by my torch. I saw his movement in the very edge of my peripheral vision after I'd passed him. I sensed an upswept arm, a weapon, a blow coming.
There was barely a hundredth of a second for instinctive. evasion. All I did as I ran was to lean forward a fraction so that the smash came across my shoulders, not on my head.
It felt as if I had cracked apart, but I hadn't. Feet, hands, muscles were all working. I staggered forward, dropped the flares and the torch, went down on one knee, knew another bang was travelling. Thought before action… I didn't have time. I turned towards him, not away. Turned inside and under the swinging arm, rising, butting upwards with my head to find the aggressive chin, jerking my knee fiercely to contact between the braced legs, punching with clenched fist and the force of fury into the Adam's apple in his throat. One of the many useful things I'd learned on my travels was how to fight dirty, and never had I needed the knowledge more.
He grunted and wheezed with triple unexpected pain and dropped to his knees on the ground, and I wrenched the long piece of wood from his slackening hand and hit his own head with it, hoping I was doing it hard enough to knock him out, not hard enough to kill him. He fell quietly face down in the snow between the rails, and I rolled him over with my foot, and in the deflected beam of the torch which lay unbroken a few paces away, saw the gaunt features of the man called Johnson.
He had got, I reckoned, a lot more than he was used to, and I felt intense satisfaction which was no doubt reprehensible but couldn't be helped.
I bent down, lifted one of his wrists and hauled him unceremoniously over the rail and into the shadows away from the track. He was heavy. Also the damage he'd done me, when it came to lugging unconscious persons about, was all too obvious. He might not have broken my back, which was what it had sounded like, but there were some badly squashed muscle fibres somewhere that weren't in first-class working order and were sending stabbing messages of protest besides.
I picked up the torch and looked for the flares, filled with an increased feeling of urgency, of time running out. I found three of the flares, couldn't see the fourth, decided not to waste time, thought the bears would have to lump it.
Must be lightheaded, I thought. Got to get moving. I hadn't come anything like half a mile away from the train. I swung the beam back the way I'd come, but the train was out of sight round a corner that I hadn't noticed taking. For a desperate moment I couldn't remember which direction I'd come from: too utterly stupid if I ran the wrong way.
Think, for God's sake.
I swung the torch both ways along the track. Trees, rocks, silver parallel rails, all exactly similar.
Which way?
I walked one way and it felt wrong. I turned and went back. That was right. It felt right. It was the wind on my face, I thought. I'd been running before into the wind.
The rails, the ties seemed to stretch to infinity. I was going uphill also, I thought. Another bend to the right lay ahead.
How long did half a mile take? I stole a glance at my watch, rolling my wrist round which hurt somewhere high up, but with remote pain, not daunting. Couldn't believe the figures. Ten minutes only… or twelve… since I'd set off.
A mile in ten minutes was ordinarily easy… but not a mile of sleepers and stones.
Johnson had been waiting for me, I thought. Not for me personally, but for whomever would come running from the train with the flares.
Which meant he knew the radio wouldn't work.
I began actively to worry about George being missing.
Perhaps Johnson had fixed the hot box, to begin with.
Johnson had meant the trains to crash with himself safely away to the rear. Johnson was darned well not going to succeed.
With renewed purpose, with perhaps at last a feeling that all this was really happening and that I could indeed stop the Canadian, I pressed on along the track.
George's voice floated into my head, telling me about the row between Johnson and Filmer. Filmer told Johnson not to do something, Johnson said, 'I'll do what I frigging like.' Filmer could have told him not to try any more sabotage tricks on the train, realizing that trouble was anyway mounting up for him, trouble from which he might not be able to extricate himself if anything disastrous happened.
Johnson, once started, couldn't be stopped. 'Easier to start a train running downhill than to stop it, eh?' Johnson with a chip on his shoulder from way back; the ex-railwayman, the violent frightener.
