“What the heck is ‘Mile 342. SP’?” asked Archie Abbott.
Bell showed him a map.
“The Southern Pacific Railroad counts track miles from San Francisco. That puts Milepost 342 a hundred and twenty miles up the coast from Los Angeles, between Gaviota and El Capitan.”
The tracks hugged the Santa Barbara Channel shore.
“Middle of nowhere,” said Archie.
“Nothing but a water tank.”
“What if he pulls something?”
“If he doesn’t, I’ll be mighty disappointed.”
“Why don’t I just tag along a ways back?” Abbott asked.
“He’ll be looking for you.”
Abbott knew his friend too well. Because he blamed himself for Anna’s death, Isaac Bell would go alone—rather than risk frightening him off—fight alone, and come back alone with a captive or a body—or alone in a coffin—and no force on earth could stop him.
“Twenty-to-one, it’s a hoax,” Bell repeated.
“By whom?”
“My old friend Abbington-Westlake is ‘having me on,’ as the Britons say. His forgers could imitate the Ripper’s handwriting. But they made a mistake with this word.”
“‘Immortal’?”
“The Ripper wrote slang: ‘Fix me’ and ‘buckled’ for ‘arrest’; ‘codding’ for ‘playing jokes’; ‘work’ and ‘job’ for ‘murder.’ Calling me Boss, they got right. But not ‘immortal.’ More to the point, he’s never sent a letter since he left London. Scotland Yard did him a huge favor claiming he was dead, and he’s kept it that way.”
“He can’t resist playing his games—like the crescent code—now he’s playing games with you.”
“I hope you’re right,” said Isaac Bell.
“Isaac, let me come with you.”
“I want you here with Marion.”
“O.K. Of course. I’ll watch her. Listen, it’s still raining. I lifted a cowboy slicker from Wardrobe. You take it.”
Bell went to the Southern Pacific freight yards. The rain that had plagued Marion since they arrived in Los Angeles was falling steadier than ever, and he was glad of Archie’s full-length waterproof oilskin. He bribed a yard bull with a ten-dollar gold piece to put him into an empty freight car headed up the California coast. Six hours later, he jumped down when the slow-moving train shunted onto the Mile 342 water siding.
Dusk was gathering and the rain had thickened. Fair-size waves were breaking on the sandy shore, and the cold fog drifting off the water bore the icy breath of the Pacific Ocean, which the channel joined a few miles to the west. He lost sight of the red caboose lantern when the freight train trundled back onto the main line and crossed the trestle bridge that spanned the canyon.
He had four hours before midnight to ferret out surprises.
The water tank, which had a huge pivot spout to replenish steam engines’ boilers, was raised high above the tracks on legs. The single main line track paralleled the channel. The water siding ran just inland of it. Inland of the siding was a sandy path for maintenance carts. Just beyond the switch where the water siding rejoined the main line, the land dropped into a canyon. The rain-swollen arroyo that had scoured the canyon with eons of floodwater rushed thirty feet under a trestle bridge. Bell climbed down and confirmed that no one was hiding in the undersupports.
Thunder began rumbling. The rain fell harder.
The open area under the water tank offered shelter. But after inspecting it and climbing a side ladder to the roof of the tank to make sure he was alone, Bell chose to button up his slicker and conceal himself within girders of the trestle. From that forest of steel, he watched the tank and the tracks in both directions. If the letter was not fake, the Cutthroat would arrive as Bell had, on a train that stopped for water, or in a wagon or auto or on horseback on the cart path.
Several trains did pull in, watered, and steamed away. Others steamed past without stopping, and passenger Limiteds with locomotives and tenders designed to go longer distances roared by at seventy miles an hour, their golden windows glowing warm through the rain and fog.
Five hours later, at one in the morning, the Cutthroat had not shown up. The rain poured, lightning bolts split the black sky, and Bell surmised he had indeed been set up by Abbington-Westlake. A southbound freight pulled onto the siding. No one but the brakeman got off, and as it huffed slowly from the tank, Bell considered running after it to hop a ride back to Los Angeles. He decided to stick it out until dawn.
It was still pitch-dark when the rain stopped abruptly. The wind shifted north—crisp and chill. The fresh weather swept the clouds from the sky, and Bell saw his first stars since they crossed the Rocky Mountains. A million of them shone so brightly that they lighted whitecaps on the Santa Barbara Channel, a quarter-mile stretch of the railroad in both directions, and penetrated the dark within the trestle.
Bell sprinted to the black shadow under the water tank.
The starlight revealed something moving on the siding, about a hundred yards away at the switch where it linked to the main line. It was coming toward Bell very slowly. Long minutes passed before it hardened into a bent figure plodding on the rails. It drew within twenty yards, close enough for Bell to see that he was an elderly tramp, hobbling on a crooked staff.
Bell unbuttoned his slicker and loosened the Colt in his shoulder holster.
The tramp began to sing. He had a weak, reedy voice.
At first, Bell heard only faint snatches of a lyric:
“. . . mirth and beauty . . .
. . . frail forms fainting . . .”
At twenty yards, he recognized the Stephen Foster lament.
“Many days you have lingered around my cabin door,
Oh! Hard times come again no more . . .”
At ten yards, Bell could smell him.
The tramp reeked like death, the homeless man’s unwashed stench of months of filth accumulated deep in the fibers of his rain-drenched shirt and overalls. He had the long white beard of a Civil War veteran, which would make him a very old man in his seventies or eighties—as old as Bell’s father, whose Old
