rails. Sharp-edged crushed ballast glistened in the wet. Bell watched for more bumps in the flat surface, disturbed stone, missing bolts, absent spikes, cracks in the rails. Tie after tie after tie.
For seventeen miles, the train trundled slowly. Bell began to hope against hope that his precautions had paid off. The patrols and constant inspections had ensured the line was safe. Only three miles to go and then the men could return to work, boring the vital Tunnel 13.
Suddenly, as they rounded a sharp curve that rimmed the deepest canyon on the route, something unusual caught Bell’s eye. He couldn’t pinpoint what it was at first. For an instant, it barely penetrated.
“Malone!” he said in a whipcrack voice, “Look! What’s wrong?”
The red-faced man beside him leaned forward, squinted, his face a mask of concentration.
“I don’t see nothing.”
Bell raked the tracks with his binoculars. Bracing his feet on the pilot, he held the glasses with one hand and drew his pistol with the other.
The ballast was smooth. No spikes were missing. The ties …
In seventeen miles, the work train had crossed fifty thousand ties. Each of the fifty thousand was a chocolate- brown color, the wood darkened by preservatives absorbed in creosoting. Now, only a few yards ahead of the locomotive, Bell saw a wooden tie that was colored yellowish white-the shade of freshly milled mountain hemlock that had not been creosoted.
Bell fired his pistol again and again as fast as he could pull the trigger.
The engineer slammed on the brakes. Wheels locked. Steel screeched on steel. The heavy locomotive slid along on the massive force of its momentum. The weight of twenty cars shoved behind it.
Bell and Malone leaped off the pilot and ran ahead of the skidding locomotive.
“What is it?” the track foreman shouted.
“That tie,” Bell pointed.
“God Almighty!” roared Malone.
The two men turned as one and raised powerful arms as if to stop the train with their bare hands.
33
THE ENGINEER THREW HIS JOHNSON BAR INTO REVERSE.
Eight ponderous drive wheels spun backward, showering sparks and slivers from the rails. For a moment, it looked as if two strong men were actually stopping a Consolidation locomotive. And when it did grind to a stop with a ground-shaking shudder, Isaac Bell looked down and saw his boots planted firmly on the suspect crosstie.
The tip of the pilot was hanging over it. The leading wheels of the engine truck had come within two yards of it.
“Back her up,” ordered Malone. “Softly!”
GENTLY SCRAPING AWAY THE ballast from either end, Bell discovered upon close inspection that the suspect tie had a round wooden plug like a whiskey barrel bung. It was the diameter of a silver dollar and almost indistinguishable from the timber’s end grain.
“Move everyone farther back,” he told Malone. “He packed the tie with dynamite.”
The triggering device was a nail positioned to set off a detonator. There was enough dynamite to blow rails out from under the locomotive, which would have tumbled off the cut and dragged the whole train down the side of the mountain. Instead, Bell was able to wire back to Osgood Hennessy that the Van Dorn Detective Agency had won another victory over the Wrecker.
Hennessy moved his special train to the head of the line, where the miners and trackmen who had arrived safely were hard at work boring through the last hundred feet of Tunnel 13.
EARLY NEXT MORNING, OSGOOD HENNESSY called Bell onto his private car. Lillian and Mrs. Comden offered coffee. Hennessy was grinning ear to ear. “We’re about to hole through. We always do a ceremony on the long tunnels where I clear the last stone. This time, the hands sent a delegation demanding that you take the last poke for what you did yesterday. It’s a big honor, I’d accept it if I were you.”
Bell walked into the tunnel with Hennessy, hugging the wall when they had to step off the tracks to let a locomotive pass with debris-filled dump cars. For hundreds of yards, the sides and arched ceiling were already finished with masonry shoring. Near the end, a temporary web of timbers shored up the ceiling. In the final yards, the miners worked under a shield of cast iron and timber that protected them from falling rock.
The chattering drills stopped as Bell and the railroad president approached. Miners cleared the crumbling stone with sledges and shovels, then stepped back from the wall that remained.
A towering hard-rock miner with long apish arms and a gap-toothed grin handed Bell a sixteen-pound sledgehammer.
“Ever swing one of these before?”
“Driving tent pegs for the circus.”
“You’ll do fine.” The miner leaned in and whispered, “See that chalk mark? Smack her there. We always set it to come down for the ceremony … Gangway, boys! Give the man room.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to do this?” Bell asked Hennessy.
Hennessy stepped back. “I’ve dug plenty of tunnels in my day. You earned this one.”
Bell whipped the heavy sledge over his shoulder and swung hard at the chalk mark. Cracks spread, and a gleam of light showed in the wall. He swung again. The miners cheered as the rock collapsed and daylight poured in.
Bell stepped into the jagged opening and saw the Cascade Canyon Bridge glittering in the sunlight. The long, layered latticework of steel spanned the deep gorge of the Cascade River on two tall, slim towers set on massive stone piers. Floating high above the watery mists and foam, the most important bridge on the cutoff line looked almost complete. Crossties were already laid on it in anticipation of steel rails arriving through the tunnel.
Bell saw that it was heavily guarded. Railroad police stood every fifty feet. A sentry house stood at either end and one at each pier. As Bell watched, a cloud passed over the sun, and the shadow turned the silvery girders black.
“What do you think, son?” Hennessy asked proudly.
“She’s a beauty.”
How would the Wrecker strike?
In the shadow of the bridge nestled the town of Cascade, established where the original lowland railroad from the desert terminated at the foot of the mountains. He could see the elegant 1870s Cascade Lodge, long a draw for intrepid tourists willing to brave the long, slow climb on endless switchbacks up the foothills. From that railhead, Hennessy had built a temporary freight line with even more switchbacks to lift materials to the bridge construction site. Almost impossibly steep, it was a jagged series of sharp climbs and hairpin turns that had been nicknamed by the railroad workers the Snake Line. The grade was so heavy that a string of freight cars Bell saw ascending were pulled by three smoke-billowing locomotives, with four pusher engines helping from behind. The Snake Line locomotives had done their job. From now on, materials would arrive on the cutoff line.
The Wrecker wouldn’t hit the Snake Line, its job was done. He wouldn’t hit the town. He would hit the bridge itself. Destroying the long truss-and-pier bridge would set back the cutoff project by years.
“What the deuce is that?” asked Hennessy. He pointed at a column of dust racing up a switchback buggy road from the town below.
Isaac Bell’s face opened in a broad grin of appreciation.
The bright yellow motor car topped the switchback, bounced over the rocky shelf, and skidded to a halt twenty feet away from where Bell and Hennessy stood in the mouth of the tunnel. The canvas top was down and folded back, and the only one in it was the driver, a tall man clad in boot-length duster, hat, and goggles. He jumped from behind the wooden steering wheel and strode toward them.
“Congratulations!” he called, whipping off his goggles with a dramatic flourish.
