bench seat, and little else. The cockpit was open. Below it, on either side of the chassis, bright copper tubes, arranged in seven horizontal rows, served as a radiator to cool the powerful four-cylinder motor.
“Strap a couple of gasoline cans on the back,” Bell ordered, “and that spare wheel.”
They quickly complied while Bell ran to his stateroom. He returned armed with a knife in his boot and his over- under two-shot derringer in the low crown of his wide-brimmed hat. Under his coat was a new pistol he had taken a shine to, a Belgian-made Browning No. 2 semiautomatic that an American gunsmith had modified to fire a .380 caliber cartridge. It was light, and quick to reload. What it lacked in stopping power it made up for with deadly accuracy.
Lillian Hennessy came running from her private car, tugging a silk robe over her nightdress, and Bell thought fleetingly that even the consequences of passing out from three bottles of champagne looked beautiful on her.
“What are you doing?”
“The Wrecker’s up the line. I am going to intercept him.”
“I’ll drive you!” Eagerly, she jumped behind the steering wheel and called for the trainmen to crank her engine. Wide awake in an instant, eyes alight, she was ready for anything. But as the motor fired, Bell leashed all the power of his voice to shout,
Emma Comden came running in a dressing gown, her dark hair in a long braid and her face pale at the urgency in his voice.
“Hold this!” he said.
Bell circled Lillian’s slender waist in his long hands and lifted her out of the car.
“What are you doing?” she shouted. “Put me down!”
He thrust Lillian, kicking and shouting, into Mrs. Comden’s arms. Both women went down in a flashing tangle of bare legs.
“I can help you!” Lillian shouted. “Aren’t we friends?”
“I don’t bring friends to gunfights.”
Bell leaped behind the steering wheel and sent the Gray Wolf flying up the buggy track in a cloud of dust
“That’s my car! You’re stealing my race car!”
“I just bought it!” he fired over his shoulder. “Send the bill to Van Dorn.” Although, strictly speaking, he thought with a last grim smile as he wrestled the low-slung car over the ruts gouged by freight wagons, once Van Dorn’s expense sheets were submitted Osgood Hennessy would end up buying his daughter’s Gray Wolf twice.
The look over his shoulder revealed that he was trailing a dust cloud as tall and dark as a locomotive’s smoke. The Wrecker would see him coming miles away, a sight that would put the murderer on high alert.
Bell twisted the steering wheel. The Wolf sprang off the buggy track, up the railroad embankment, and onto the rail bed. He wrenched the wheel again to force the tires over the nearest rail. Straddling it, the Wolf pounded on the crossties and ballast. It was a bone-jarring ride, though the banging and bouncing was far more predictable than the ruts in the road. And unless he punctured a tire on a loose spike, his chances of keeping the car intact at such speed were better than on rocks and ruts. He glanced back, confirming that the chief benefit of riding on the rail bed was he was no longer trailing a dust cloud like a flag.
He raced northward on the line for a quarter of an hour.
Suddenly, he saw a column of smoke spurting upward into the hard-blue sky. The train itself was invisible, hidden around a bend in the track that appeared to pass through a wooded valley between two hills. It was much closer than he had expected on first glimpsing the smoke. He instantly steered off the track, down the embankment, and bounced into a thicket of bare shrubs. Turning the car around in the thin cover, he watched the smoke draw nearer.
The wet huffing of the locomotive grew audible over the insistent rumble of the Gray Wolf’s idling motor. Soon it became a loud, smacking sound, louder and louder. Then the big black engine rounded the bend, spewing smoke and hauling a long coal tender and a string of empty gondolas and boxcars. Lightly burdened and rolling easily on the slope of a downgrade, the train was moving fast for a freight.
Bell counted fifty cars, scrutinizing each. The flatbeds looked empty. He could not tell about a couple of cattle cars. Most of the boxcars had open doors. He saw no one peering out. The last car was a faded red caboose with a windowed cupola on the roof.
The second the caboose passed by, Bell gunned the Wolf’s motor and drove it out of the thicket, up the gravel embankment and onto the tracks. He fought his right-side tires over the nearest rail and opened the throttle. The Wolf tore after the train, bouncing hard on its ties. At nearly forty miles an hour, it bucked violently and swayed from side to side. Rubber squealed against steel, as the tires slammed against the rails. Bell halved the distance between him and the train. Halved it again, until he was only ten feet behind the train. Now he saw that he could not jump onto the caboose without pulling alongside the train. He slewed the car back over the rail and steered on the edge of the embankment, which was steep and narrow and studded with telegraph poles.
He had to pull alongside the caboose, grab one of its side ladders, and jump before the race car lost speed and fell back. He overtook the train, steered alongside it. A car length ahead, he saw a telegraph pole that was set closer than the others to the rail. There was no room to squeeze between it and the train.
10
BELL GUNNED THE ENGINE, SEIZED THE CABOOSE’S LADDER IN his right hand, and jumped.
His fingers slipped on the cold steel rung. He heard the Packard Wolf crash into the telegraph pole behind him. Swinging wildly from one arm, he glimpsed the Wolf tumbling down the embankment and fought with all his strength to avoid the same fate. But his arm felt as if it had been ripped out of his shoulder. The pain tore down his arm like fire. Hard as he tried to hold on, he could not stop his fingers from splaying open.
He fell. As his boots hit the ballast, he caught the bottom rung of the ladder with his left hand. His boots dragged on the stones, threatening his precarious grip. Then he got both hands on the ladder, tucked his legs up in a tight ball, and hauled himself up, climbing hand over hand, until he could plant a boot on the rung and swing onto the rear platform of the caboose.
He threw open the back door and took in the interior of the caboose in a swift glance. He saw a brakeman stirring a vile-smelling stewpot on a potbellied woodstove. There were tool lockers, trunks on either side with hinged tops doubling as benches and bunk beds, a toilet, a desk stuffed with waybills. A ladder led up to the cupola, the train’s crow’s nest, where the crew could observe the string of boxcars they were trailing and communicate by flag and lantern with the locomotive.
The brakeman jumped as the door banged against the wall. He whirled around from the stove, wild-eyed. “Where the heck did you come from?”
“Bell. Van Dorn investigator. Where’s your conductor?”
“He went up to the locomotive when we took on water. Van Dorn, you say? The detectives?”
Bell was already climbing the ladder into the cupola from where he could see the train cars stretching ahead. “Bring your flag! Signal the engineer to stop the train. A saboteur is riding in one of the freight cars.”
Bell leaned his arms on the shelf in front of the windows and watched intently. Fifty cars stretched between him and the smoke-belching locomotive. He saw no one on the roofs of the boxcars, which blocked his view of the low-slung gondolas.
The brakeman climbed up beside Bell with a flag. The stew smell was worse in the raised cupola. Or the brakeman hadn’t bathed recently. “Did you see anyone stealing a ride?” Bell asked.
“Just one old hobo. Too crippled to walk. I didn’t have the heart to roust the poor devil.”
“Where is he?”
“About the middle of the train. See that green cattle car? The old man was riding in the box right ahead of it.”
“Stop the train.”
The brakeman stuck his flag out a side window and waved frantically. After several minutes, a head bobbed up from the locomotive cab.
“That’s the conductor. He sees us.”
“Wave your flag.”
