There was more fear in this last condition of affairs, more terror in the idea of this prolonged line of sleepers, with their nickelled fittings, their plate glass, their upholstery, vestibules, and the like, loaded down with people, lost and forgotten in the night and the rain, than there had been when the actual danger threatened.
What was to become of them now? Who was there to help them? Their engine was gone; they were helpless. What next was to happen?
Nobody came near the car. Even the porter had disappeared. The wait seemed endless, and the persistent snoring of the whiskered gentleman rasped the nerves like the scrape of a file.
“Well, how long are we going to stick here now?” began one of the drummers. “Wonder if they hurt the engine with their dynamite?”
“Oh, I know they will come through the car and rob us,” wailed the schoolteachers.
The lady with the little children went back to bed, and Annixter, assured that the trouble was over, did likewise. But nobody slept. From berth to berth came the sound of suppressed voices talking it all over, formulating conjectures. Certain points seemed to be settled upon, no one knew how, as indisputable. The highwaymen had been four in number and had stopped the train by pulling the bell cord. A brakeman had attempted to interfere and had been shot. The robbers had been on the train all the way from San Francisco. The drummer named Max remembered to have seen four “suspicious-looking characters” in the smoking-car at Lathrop, and had intended to speak to the conductor about them. This drummer had been in a holdup before, and told the story of it over and over again.
At last, after what seemed to have been an hour’s delay, and when the dawn had already begun to show in the east, the locomotive backed on to the train again with a reverberating jar that ran from car to car. At the jolting, the schoolteachers screamed in chorus, and the whiskered gentleman stopped snoring and thrust his head from his curtains, blinking at the Pintsch lights. It appeared that he was an Englishman.
“I say,” he asked of the drummer named Max, “I say, my friend, what place is this?”
The others roared with derision.
“We were held up, sir, that’s what we were. We were held up and you slept through it all. You missed the show of your life.”
The gentleman fixed the group with a prolonged gaze. He said never a word, but little by little he was convinced that the drummers told the truth. All at once he grew wrathful, his face purpling. He withdrew his head angrily, buttoning his curtains together in a fury. The cause of his rage was inexplicable, but they could hear him resettling himself upon his pillows with exasperated movements of his head and shoulders. In a few moments the deep bass and shrill treble of his snoring once more sounded through the car.
At last the train got under way again, with useless warning blasts of the engine’s whistle. In a few moments it was tearing away through the dawn at a wonderful speed, rocking around curves, roaring across culverts, making up time.
And all the rest of that strange night the passengers, sitting up in their unmade beds, in the swaying car, lighted by a strange mingling of pallid dawn and trembling Pintsch lights, rushing at breakneck speed through the misty rain, were oppressed by a vision of figures of terror, far behind them in the night they had left, masked, armed, galloping toward the mountains pistol in hand, the booty bound to the saddle bow, galloping, galloping on, sending a thrill of fear through all the countryside.
The young doctor returned. He sat down in the smoking-room, lighting a cigarette, and Annixter and the drummers pressed around him to know the story of the whole affair.
“The man is dead,” he declared, “the brakeman. He was shot through the lungs twice. They think the fellow got away with about five thousand in gold coin.”
“The fellow? Wasn’t there four of them?”
“No; only one. And say, let me tell you, he had his nerve with him. It seems he was on the roof of the express car all the time, and going as fast as we were, he jumped from the roof of the car down on to the coal on the engine’s tender, and crawled over that and held up the men in the cab with his gun, took their guns from ’em and made ’em stop the train. Even ordered ’em to use the emergency gear, seems he knew all about it. Then he went back and uncoupled the express car himself.
“While he was doing this, a brakeman—you remember that brakeman that came through here once or twice—had a red mustache.”
“That chap?”
“Sure. Well, as soon as the train stopped, this brakeman guessed something was wrong and ran up, saw the fellow cutting off the express car and took a couple of shots at him, and the fireman says the fellow didn’t even take his hand off the coupling-pin; just turned around as cool as how-do-you-do and nailed the brakeman right there. They weren’t five feet apart when they began shooting. The brakeman had come on him unexpected, had no idea he was so close.”
“And the express messenger, all this time?”
“Well, he did his best. Jumped out with his repeating shotgun, but the fellow had him covered before he could turn round. Held him up and took his gun away from him. Say, you know I call that nerve, just the same. One man standing up a whole trainload, like that. Then, as soon as he’d cut the express car off, he made the engineer run her up the track about half a mile to a road crossing, where he had a horse tied. What do you think of that? Didn’t he have it all figured out close? And when he got there, he dynamited the safe and got the Wells-Fargo box. He took
