Moving cautiously, hunched over on the slope, digging his boots in, he felt in the dark for the crosstie. He smelled pine pitch and traced the odor to the broken tree. Several feet down, he bumped into the square end of the tie. He felt for his tools. Still tied on. He looked up the slope. The rim of the rail bed towered above him.
How would he climb up it carrying the tie?
He tipped it on one end, worked his shoulder under it, and struggled to stand.
Every mile he had come so far, every escape, meant nothing. This was the real test: to climb back up the embankment. It was only twenty feet, but each foot could have been a mile. The combination of the weight he was carrying and the distance he had come and the steepness of the embankment seemed insurmountable.
As his strength failed, he saw his dreams of wealth and power fading before his eyes. He slipped and fell, then struggled to his feet again. If only he had killed Isaac Bell. He began to realize that he was battling Bell more than the tie, more than the cutoff, more than the Southern Pacific.
The nightmare of Bell stopping him gave him the strength to rise. Inch by inch, foot by foot. Attack:
The pounding of his heart was growing louder and louder, so loud that he eventually realized it couldn’t be his heart. A locomotive? He stopped dead in the middle of the tracks, stunned and dismayed. Not another patrol. Thunder? Lightning flickered. He was hearing the rumble of thunder. Cold rain began to fall. He had lost his hat. Rainwater streamed down his face.
The Wrecker laughed.
The rain would drench the patrols, chase them indoors. He laughed deliriously. Rain instead of snow. The rivers were rising, but the tracks would not blocked by snow. Osgood Hennessy must be delighted. So much for the experts predicting an early winter. The railroad president had given up on the meteorologists and had actually paid an Indian medicine man to predict the weather, and he told Hennessy that the snows would come late this year. Rain instead of snow meant more time to complete the cutoff.
The Wrecker steadied the tie on his shoulder, and spoke aloud.
A huge bolt of lightning lit everything stark white.
The tracks curved sharply, clinging to the narrow cut. Below was a dizzying view of a rampaging river at the bottom of a deep canyon. This was the spot. The Wrecker dropped the hemlock tie, loosened the ropes that held his tools, and pried up the spikes on both sides of an existing tie and set them carefully aside. Then he scrabbled at the crushed rock with the spike puller, loosening the sharp stones. He raked them out from under the tie and spread them carefully so they didn’t roll down the embankment.
When he had dug the ballast away, he used the puller as a lever to work the tie out from under the rails. Then he shoved his hemlock tie with the dynamite in it into the space and began scooping back the stone ballast, packing it under the tie. Last, he hammered in the eight spikes. With the tie securely under the rails and the ballast carefully spread, he attached the trigger, a nail wedged under the rail into a hole drilled in the tie.
The nail rested in the wood an inch above a fulminate-mercury detonator. He had calculated carefully, driving a hundred nails to measure the force, so that a patrol walking the ties or a handcar rolling on the rails would not press the nail deeply enough to detonate the explosive. Only the full weight of a locomotive could trigger the detonator.
One last brutal task remained. He tied his tools to the crosstie he had removed, tipped it onto his shoulder, and rose on shaking legs. He staggered a quarter mile from the trap he had laid and heaved tie and tools down the cliff where no patrol could see it.
He was reeling with exhaustion, but his heart set with icy resolve.
He had crippled the cutoff with dynamite, collision, and fire.
He had shaken the mighty Southern Pacific by derailing the Coast Line Limited.
So what if Bell had twisted his New York attack to Hennessy’s advantage?
The Wrecker raised his face to the storming sky and let the rain cleanse him. Thunder pealed.
“It is mine!” he roared back. “Tonight I earned it.”
He would win this final round.
Not one man on the work train would survive to finish Tunnel 13.
31
A THOUSAND MEN MILLED ABOUT THE CUTOFF CONSTRUCTION camp at dawn. Twenty cars of wooden benches stood empty behind a locomotive venting excess steam. The men stood in the rain, preferring the cold and wet to shelter on the work train.
“Stubborn bastards!” Hennessy raged, watching from his private car. “Wire the Governor, Lillian. This is insurrection.”
Lillian Hennessy placed her fingers on the telegraph key. Before she tapped, she said to Isaac Bell, “Is there nothing else you can do?”
In Bell’s opinion, the men bunched in the rain did not look stubborn. They looked afraid. And they looked embarrassed to be afraid, which said a lot for their courage. The Wrecker had erased innocent lives by dynamite, train wreck, collision, and fire. Death and injury had attended attack after attack. Men had died in derailments, the tunnel collapse, the ditched Coast Line Limited, the runaway railcar, and the terrible explosion in New Jersey.
“The patrols have inspected every inch of rail,” he answered Lillian. “I don’t know what I can do that they haven’t done already. Short of riding on the cowcatcher to check it myself …”
The detective spun on his heel, strode from Hennessy’s car, crossed the rail yard at a rapid pace, and shouldered through the crowd. He climbed the ladder on the back of the work train’s tender, nimbly crossed the heaped coal, and jumped on the roof of the locomotive’s cab. From the vantage of the pulsing machine, he could see sullen track layers and hard-rock miners spread from one end of the yards to the other. They fell silent. A thousand faces were rising toward the incongruous sight of a man in a white suit standing on the locomotive.
Bell had once heard William Jennings Bryan address a crowd at the Atlanta Exposition. Standing in front near Bryan, he had been struck by how slowly the famous orator spoke. The reason, Bryan told him at a later meeting, was that words bunched up as they moved through the air. When they reached the back of the crowd, they arrived at a normal cadence.
Bell now raised his hands. He brought his voice up from deep within. He spoke slowly, very slowly. But every word was a challenge thrown in their faces.
“I will stand watch.”
Bell reached slowly into this coat.
“This locomotive will steam slowly to the railhead.”
Slowly, he drew his Browning pistol.
“I will stand on the cowcatcher on the front of this locomotive.”
He pointed the pistol at the sky.
“I will fire this pistol to signal the engineer to stop the train the instant I see danger.”
He squeezed the trigger. A shot echoed off the roundhouse and shops.
“The engineer will hear this shot.”
He fired again.
“He will stop the train.”
Bell held the weapon pointed at the sky and continued speaking slowly.
“I will not say that any man unwilling to ride behind me is the lowest coward in the Cascade Mountains.”
Another shot echoed.
“But I will say this … Any man unwilling to ride should go back to where he came from and live in the care of his
Laughter rumbled from one end of the yard to the other. There was a tentative surge of movement toward the
