Emma Comden smiled.
“Interesting.”
THE WRECKER HURRIED UP the lumber-mill spur after dark, walking on the crossties so as not make noise crunching the ballast.
He carried a four-foot-long crowbar that weighed thirty pounds. On his back was a Spanish-American War soldier’s knapsack of eighteen-ounce cotton duck with a rubberized flap. Its straps tugged hard on his shoulders. In it were a heavy two-gallon tin of coal oil and a horseshoe he had lifted from one of the many blacksmiths busy shoeing the hundreds of mules that pulled the freight wagons.
The chill mountain air smelled of pine pitch, and something else that took him a moment to recognize. There was actually a hint of snow on the wind. Although it was a clear night, he could feel winter coming early to the mountains. He increased his pace, as his eyes adjusted to the starlight. The rails shone in front of him, and trees took shape along the cut.
A tall, long-legged, fit man, he climbed the steep slope with swift efficiency. He was racing the clock. He had less than two hours until moonrise. When the moon cleared the mountains, lancing the darkness with its full light, he would be a sitting duck for the railway police patrolling on horseback.
After a mile, he came to a Y junction where the spur split. The left-hand spur, which he had been climbing, descended to the construction yard. The spur to the right veered to join the newly completed main line to the south. He checked the switch that controlled which spur was connected.
The switch was positioned so that a train descending from the lumber mill would be routed toward the construction yard. He was tempted to send the heavy car on to the main line. Properly timed, it would collide head-on with a northbound locomotive. But such a collision would block the tracks so the dispatchers would have to stop all trains, which would block his only way out from this end of the line.
The grade continued, a little lighter, and he increased his pace. After another mile, he saw the dark gondola looming. It was still there!
Suddenly, he heard something. He stopped walking. He froze in place. He cupped his hands to his ears. He heard it again, an incongruous sound. Laughter. Drunken men laughing, farther up the mountain. Way in the distance, he could see the orange glow of a campfire. Lumberjacks, he realized, sharing a bottle of Squirrel whiskey. They were too far away to hear him or see him, blinded by the blaze of their fire. Even if they heard the car roll through the switch, by then there would be no stopping it.
He stepped from the spur across a ditch to the siding on which sat the laden gondola. He found the switch handle and threw it, closing the point where the two sets of tracks met, joining the siding to the lumber spur. Then he went to the gondola, kicked wooden chocks from under the front truck, found the cold rim of the brake and turned it until the brake shoes lifted from the car’s massive iron wheels.
Now she could roll, and he waited for her to start moving of her own weight since the siding was on an incline. But she sat fast, locked by gravity or the natural minute flattening of her wheels as she sat heavily on the rails. He would have to improvise a car mover.
He went to the back of the gondola, placed his horseshoe a few inches behind the rearmost wheel, propped his crowbar under the wheel where it met the rail, and lowered the bar to the horseshoe, which would serve as his fulcrum. He threw his weight down on the bar and rocked on it.
The bar slipped with a loud screech of metal on metal. He shoved it under the wheel again and resumed rocking. The wheel moved an inch. He jammed the crowbar in deeper, kicked the horseshoe to meet it, and again threw his weight on his makeshift car mover.
A voice spoke, directly overhead, almost in his ear.
“What you doing there?”
He fell back, astonished. Leaning down from the heap of crossties was a lumberjack, waking from a drunken sleep, breath reeking as he slurred, “Partner, you start her rolling, she won’t stop ‘til she hits bottom. Let me hop down before she sets off.”
The Wrecker swung the crowbar in a lightning blur.
The heavy steel crunched against the drunk’s skull and knocked him back on the ties like a rag doll. The Wrecker watched for movement, and, when there was none, calmly resumed rocking on the crowbar as if nothing had happened.
He felt the space between the wheel and fulcrum open. The gondola was rolling. He dropped the crowbar and jumped on the car with the tin of coal oil. The car rolled slowly toward the switch and rumbled through it and onto the spur, where it gathered speed. He scrambled past the body of the drunk and turned the brake, tightening it until he felt the shoes rub the wheels, slowing the gondola to about ten miles an hour. Then he opened the tin and splashed the oil on the ties.
The gondola rolled on for a mile to the Y junction, where the grade began to steepen.
He lit a match and, shielding it from the wind of passage, touched it to the coal oil. As the flames spread, he released the brakes. The gondola lunged ahead. He hung down behind the back wheels. The moon chose that moment to clear a mountain and cast light on the tracks brightly enough to illuminate a safe place for him to jump. The Wrecker took it as his just due. He had always been a lucky man. Things always broke his way. Just as they were breaking his way now. He jumped, landed easily. He could hear the gondola turning to the left, rumbling heavily through the Y junction and toward the construction yard.
He turned to the right, down the spur to the main line, away from the yard. The wheels made a humming sound as the gondola sped down the steep grade. The last thing he saw was orange flames moving rapidly down the mountain. In three minutes, every cinder dick on the mountain would be running hell-bent toward the construction yard while he was running the other way.
SWAYING AS IT ACCELERATED to thirty, forty, then fifty miles an hour, trailing flames behind it, the runaway gondola began to shake its cargo, causing the massive crossties to creak against one another like the timbers of a ship in a heavy sea. The lumberjack, whose name was Don Albert, rolled one way and then the other, arms and legs flopping. His hand slipped into a slot between two ties. When the squared timbers shifted back against each other again and slammed shut on his fingers, he awoke with a howl of pain.
Albert stuck his fingers in his mouth and sucked hard, and began to wonder why everything seemed to be moving. His head, which hurt like hell, was spinning. The cloying taste of red-eye whiskey in his craw explained both familiar sensations. But why did the stars overhead keep shifting position? And why did the splintery wood he was sprawled against seem to vibrate? He reached under his thick knit cap with the hand that didn’t hurt and felt a sharp pain in his skull and the stickiness of blood. Must have fallen on his head. Good thing he has a skull like a cannonball.
No, he hadn’t fallen. He’d gotten into a fight. He vaguely remembered talking to a tall, rangy jigger right before the lights went out. The damnedest thing was, he felt like he was on a train. Where he had found a train in a remote lumber camp halfway up a mountain in the Cascades was a mystery to him. Still sprawled on his back, he looked around. There was a fire behind him. The wind was blowing the flames away from him, but it was too close for comfort. He could feel the heat.
A whistle screamed so close he could touch it.
Don Albert sat up and was nearly blinded by a locomotive headlight right in his face. He was riding a train all right, rolling fast, a mile a minute, with flames behind him and another train in front of him coming straight at him. A hundred lights whirled around him like lights inside a nickelodeon: the flames behind him, the locomotive’s headlamp flanked by green signal lights in front of him, the electric lights on poles glaring down at the freight yard, the lights in the yard’s buildings, the lights in the tents, the lantern lights bouncing up and down as men ran for their lives, trying to get out of the way of the runaway train on which he was riding.
The locomotive blowing its whistle was not coming straight at him after all but was on a track next to the one he was rolling on. That was a huge relief, until he saw the switch dead ahead.
At sixty miles an hour, the heavy gondola blasted through the closed switch as if it were made of straw instead of steel and side-swiped the locomotive, which was a switch engine shuttling a string of empty boxcars. The gondola slammed past the locomotive in a thunderstorm of sparks, screeched against the locomotive’s tender and
