as he could before the first snow. Even the most cowardly Wall Street banker, the railroader boasted, would be assured by the proof that the Southern Pacific was primed to continue cutoff construction when it melted in the spring.
Bell directed horse patrols to guard the route that the railroad was surveying deep into the mountains. Then he asked Jethro Watt to take personal command of his railroad police. They walked the bridge and agreed to beef up the contingents guarding the piers below and the span above. Then they inspected the surrounding area on horseback, the giant Watt mounted on an enormous animal named Thunderbolt who kept trying to gnaw the police chief’s leg. Watt subdued the animal by swatting its head, but any judge of horse-flesh knew that Thunderbolt was merely biding his time.
By nightfall that first day of frenzied activity, carpenters had erected temporary shoring in Tunnel 13 and a timber rock shed around its freshly hewn portal. Masons were following close behind with stonework. And track gangs had laid rail from the tunnel to the edge of the gorge.
Osgood Hennessy’s red train streamed through the tunnel, pushing a string of heavily laden materials cars ahead of it and up to the closely guarded bridge. Track gangs unloaded rails and work continued by electric light. Ties supplied by a timber operation upstream in the mountains were already laid on the bridge. Spike mauls rang through the night. When the rails were secured, Hennessy’s locomotive pushed the heavy materials cars onto the span.
A thousand railroaders held their breath.
The only sounds were mechanical, the chuff of the locomotive, the dynamo powering the lights, and the grinding of cast iron on steel. As the lead car, heaped with rails, edged forward, all eyes shifted to Franklin Mowery. The elderly bridge builder was watching closely.
Isaac Bell overheard Eric, Mowery’s bespectacled assistant, boast, “Mr. Mowery was the same cool as a cucumber when he finished Mr. Hennessy’s Lucin Cutoff across the Great Salt Lake.”
“But,” said a grizzled surveyor, peering into the deep gorge, “that one was a lot nearer the water.”
Mowery leaned nonchalantly on his walking stick. No emotion showed on his round face, no worry rippled his sweeping jawline, or twitched his Vandyke beard. He had a cold, smokeless pipe firmly clamped in his broad, good- humored mouth.
Bell watched Mowery’s pipe. When the materials car reached the far side without mishap and the workmen greeted it with a cheer, Mowery removed his pipe from his mouth and picked splinters of crushed stem from his teeth.
“Caught me,” he grinned at Bell. “Bridges are strange critters, highly unpredictable.”
They double-tracked the bridge by noon.
In a long burst of action, they laid dozens of sidings. Soon, the remote plateau had been transformed into a combination railroad yard and construction staging arena. Hennessy’s red special steamed across the gorge and parked on an elevated sidetrack from which the president of the Southern Pacific could oversee the entire operation. A steady stream of materials trains began crossing the bridge. Telegraph wires followed, transmitting the good news back to Wall Street.
Hennessy’s telegrapher handed Bell a wad of encoded messages.
No telegraph operator on the continent had been more closely scrutinized than J. J. Meadows had been by the Van Dorn Agency. “Honest as the day is long and beholden to no man,” was the verdict. But with the memory still fresh of the Wrecker’s renegade telegraphers shooting it out with Texas Walt Hatfield, Bell was taking no chances. All his Van Dorn correspondence was encrypted. He locked the door to his private stateroom, two cars back on the special, and decoded them.
These were the first results of the background reports Bell had ordered to ferret out the spy in the railroad president’s inner circle. Nothing in the record of the Southern Pacific’s head engineer suggested he was less than respectable. He was loyal to the Southern Pacific, loyal to Osgood Hennessy, and loyal to the high standards of his profession.
The same was said for Franklin Mowery. The bridge builder’s life was an open book studded with professional accomplishment. His many charitable deeds included serving as a director of a Methodist orphanage.
Lillian Hennessy had been arrested a surprising number of times for such a young and privileged woman, but only while demonstrating for the right to vote. The charges had always been dismissed. Testament, Bell assumed, to overzealous policing or the power of a doting father who happened to be president of the nation’s biggest railroad.
Of the two bankers Hennessy had named who might have deduced his plans, one had been convicted of fraud, the other named as a correspondent in a divorce. One of the attorneys had been disbarred in Illinois, another had amassed a fortune in railroad stock by buying with foreknowledge of the railroads’ intentions. On closer examination, the Van Dorn investigators reported, both bankers had transgressed in their youth, while the disbarred attorney had subsequently been readmitted. But the holder of the fortune, Erastus Charney, drew Bell’s interest, as he was clearly a man who traded on the power of knowing ahead of time which way the wind blew. Bell wired to dig deep into Charney’s affairs.
Bell was not surprised that the lively Mrs. Comden had lived a colorful life even before she became consort to the railroad magnate. A child piano prodigy, she’d made her concert debut with the New York Philharmonic at age fourteen, performing Chopin’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 2 in F Minor-“a bear to play at any age,” noted the Van Dorn operative. She had toured the United States and Europe, where she stayed to study in Leipzig. She had married a wealthy physician connected at the German court, who’d then divorced her when she ran off with a highborn officer of the First Guards Cavalry Brigade. They had lived together in Berlin until the officer’s scandalized family intervened. Emma then married a struggling portrait painter named Comden, only to be widowed within the year. Penniless, her concert-playing days behind her, the Widow Comden had landed in New York, drifted to New Orleans and San Francisco, and answered a newspaper ad to tutor Lillian Hennessy. Her nomadic ways continued on the luxurious special employed by the ever-moving Hennessy. On the rare occasions that the irascible Osgood appeared socially, the lovely Mrs. Comden was at his side. And woe, noted the Van Dorn operative, to the fortunes of the politician, banker, or industrialist whose wife dared snub her.
Charles Kincaid’s life had been far less colorful than Preston Whiteway’s newspapers led readers to believe. He had studied engineering briefly at West Point, switched to civil engineering at the University of West Virginia, done postgraduate work in civil engineering at the Technische Hochschule of Munich, and hired on with a German firm building the Baghdad Railway. The facts behind his “Hero Engineer” moniker were questionable. That Turkish revolutionaries had frightened American nurses and missionaries tending to Armenian refugees was likely. The Whiteway newspaper accounts of Kincaid’s role in their rescue were, the Van Dorn operative noted acerbically, “less so.”
Bell fired back two more queries: “Why did Kincaid leave West Point?” and “Who is Eric Soares?”
Franklin Mowery’s assistant was always at his side. Whatever special knowledge of Hennessy’s affairs that the bridge builder knew, young Eric would know, too.
Speaking of young assistants, what was taking James Dashwood so long to catch up with the blacksmith who had fashioned the hook that derailed the Coast Line Special? Isaac Bell reread Dashwood’s meticulously detailed reports. Then he wired the apprentice care of the Los Angeles office.BLACKSMITH STOPPED DRINKING.INQUIRE TEMPERANCE MEETINGS.
ISAAC BELL RECEIVED A report from the Kansas City office that Eric Soares was an orphan whom Franklin Mowery had sponsored through Cornell University and had taken on as his assistant. Soares was by some accounts a talented engineer, by others an upstart riding the coattails of a famously generous man.
Bell reflected upon the fact that Mowery did not have the physical stamina or agility to do fieldwork without help. Eric would perform duties that required physical activity, such as inspecting work done on the bridge. He telegraphed Kansas City to keep digging.
“Private wire, Mr. Bell.”
“Thank you, Mr. Meadows.”
Bell took the telegram to his stateroom, hoping it was from Marion. It was, and he exclaimed with pleasure when he read:DO NOT-REPEAT NOT-WISH TO JOIN PRESTONWHITEWAY CASCADE LODGE FOR PICTURE WORLDNEWSREELS. BUT ARE YOU STILL THERE? IF SO, WHAT DO YOU WISH?
Bell called on Lillian Hennessy. His schemes to extricate himself from the girl’s infatuation and rescue Archie Abbott from his mother seemed to be working. Since his return from New York, most of their conversations veered
