05 Ironhorse (22 page)

“I’m your shoveler,” Berkeley said.

He reached out and took two of the horses’ leads.

“Packed us some rations, too.”

“Good of you,” I said.

“Least I can do.”

“Hard to know how this will play out.”

“One way or another, it will.”

“It will, indeed,” I said.

We crossed a dead-end set of rails just as the automatic coupler of the Ironhorse docked with the coupler on the stock car. Sam stepped up between the tender and the stock coach and connected the glad-hand coupler on the air line as we neared with the horses.

“Got us a fireman,” I said.

Everyone turned and looked at Berkeley.

“Don’t look so surprised,” Berkeley said. “Contrary to what makes perfect sense, I’m no stranger to hard work. Besides, you have a train station to manage, Sam.”

“Suit yourself,” Sam said.

She moved to the side of the stock car and uncleated the rope from the block-and-tackle system that lowered and raised the ramp.

“I don’t think Uncle Ted has bathed in six, maybe seven, years!” Sam said.

We lowered the ramp, and I got the two other horses familiar with getting up into the car and coming out of the car. The stud Cortez and the roan were knowledgeable train travelers and had no problem with the ramp, but the other two needed some encouraging. I loaded each horse a number of times and after a few smooth up and downs, making sure they felt comfortable, I removed their saddles and tack, set up the mangers with hay, and secured them in their stalls for the journey.

Uncle Ted got the Ironhorse and stock car onto the main track and let out three short whistles. He backed the tender under the water tank, where Sam and Charlie awaited. Sam swung out the spigot arm over the tender.

“Go ahead on, Charlie!” Sam said.

“Okay, Sam,” Charlie said.

Charlie jerked down on the chain and started filling the tender with water.

78

I ENTERED THE
side door of the depot and crossed the corridor to the telegraph office where Virgil was standing with the governor and Hobbs next to Jenny’s desk. When I entered the office, Virgil looked to me and shook his head slightly.

“No word from LeFlore?” I said.

Jenny looked at me and shook her head.

“Nope,” Virgil said.

“Reckon we go at it on our own,” I said.

Virgil nodded.

“That’s right,” he said.

“Just follow the line toward the camps,” I said.

“Yep,” Virgil said. “See where it leads us.”

The governor had his hands behind his back again and a troubled look on his face. He started shaking his head from side to side. I spoke up before he had a chance to say anything.

“Sir, if I may?”

The governor looked at me.

“Deputy.”

“Virgil and I have been doing law work together for over twenty years. There’s nobody better at law work than the man standing right there. Time and time again we have been in situations that have required every kind of can-do there is and we will do our very best to find your daughters and save them.”

The governor looked at Virgil and me for a long silent moment.

“I will, of course, be anxious and waiting. If the circumstances were different and my wife were not with me, I would of course go with you.”

“Me, too,” Hobbs said.

“Shut up, Chet,” the governor said.

The governor didn’t even look at Hobbs.

“Just . . .”

The governor stopped talking and looked to Virgil.

“I don’t know what else to say or do,” he said.

“There is nothing to say,” Virgil said. “As far as the doing goes, it’s like Everett said. We are gonna do everything we can to get your girls back safe and sound.”

“Thank you, Marshal,” the governor said.

He sat down in the chair by the desk.

“Thank you . . .”

Outside I saw Sam raise the spigot and say something to Charlie. Charlie hollered back and then ran toward the depot.

Uncle Ted pulled the cable, and two long whistle blasts rang out. Steam built, the brakes were released, and the Ironhorse moved away from the water tower and chugged slowly toward the depot.

Charlie ran ahead of the Ironhorse to the depot, hurried up the steps, and came through the front door breathing hard.

“Excuse me,” Charlie said. “Sam told me to tell you it’s time to go!”

79

SAM STOOD ON
the depot porch next to Charlie as Virgil and I stepped up onto the Ironhorse with Uncle Ted and Berkeley. Berkeley was sweating. He was already dirty with soot from coaling up the Ironhorse to traverse out of the switchyard and onto the main track.

Virgil and I had been introduced to Uncle Ted from afar, but this was my first up-close-and-personal look at him.

“Here we go,” Uncle Ted said.

Uncle Ted grinned. He was a big man. His arms and neck were covered with curly grayish red hairs, and he had a thick gray-and-red beard, but when he took off his cap and scratched his head there wasn’t one hair, red or gray, on top of his scalp. Even though he had a permanent smile on his face and exuded friendliness, Uncle Ted looked and smelled just as Sam said, as though he had not bathed in six or seven years. If it weren’t for the fact we needed to be alert, and to some degree cautious, I would be in the stalls with the horses. But the fact remained: we were on a mission with peculiar and dangerous circumstances, and readiness was important.

Virgil stayed on the Ironhorse step and looked back to Sam.

“What time will we get up there, you figure?” Virgil asked.

Sam looked at her conductor’s watch.

“Well, like I tol’ Uncle Ted, you have to take the pass between here and Standley Station for the Southbound Express by five. Once they pass, and you stay a steady pace, make all the drops, you should get to Crystal Creek, by, oh, daylight,” Sam said. “There is a turnaround wye there on the north side of Crystal Creek. You get to that wye and switch off there. Give you plenty of time to get your horses unloaded and ride up to the pass south of Tall Water Falls.”

“The other engine with the car that got stopped and ran dry, past Crystal Creek,” Virgil said. “Where did that end up when it was removed from the track?”

“Good question. I don’t know for sure; the wire didn’t say. I would hope, and I would figure, they got it to the yard and did not leave it sitting on the wye. If the engine and car are left on the wye, Uncle Ted will just have to maneuver them off the track until he gets the Ironhorse around.”

“I reckon we will cross that bridge when we get to it.”

“That’s right, best you can do is do what you have to do,” Sam said. “Worst case is you can’t get the engine and car off the wye for some reason, and in that case, you’d have to back out of there.”

“There are worst cases,” Virgil said. “There always are, just got to be prepared.”

“Sure, anyways, I tol’ Uncle Ted what to do.”

“She tells me everything to do,” Uncle Ted said. “Stop, go, pass, sit, you name it. Hell, I can’t remember the last time I even did something on my own.”

“Main damn thing is, you make the pass like I say, Uncle Ted, or you’ll blow ol’ Ironhorse here and all y’all to smithereens.”

“Goddamn, child, I got schedules running in my blood. I was runnin’ comin’s ’n goin’s for Robert E. Lee before you was off the teat!”

“Yeah, and look where you ended up, lost the war and puttering around on a Yard Goat in Half Moon Junction,” Sam said. “Just get off the track by five, then, once you get up to the Crystal Creek depot to the wye, you’ll be good to go.”

“See what I told ya?” Uncle Ted said.

Virgil looked north and nodded as if he could actually see Crystal Creek.

“All right, then,” Virgil said. “Let’s get going.”

“Good luck, Marshal,” Sam said.

I thought for sure Virgil would tell Sam the same thing he told the yard hand Whip and many others through the years, about how luck involved skill, but he just tipped his hat to Sam.

“Much obliged, Sam.”

I guess for once Virgil was thinking perhaps a little luck might not be such a bad thing.

80

UNCLE TED LET
off the brake, moved the Johnson bar forward, pulled back on the throttle. The Ironhorse shuddered as it built up combustion in the boiler.

“Here we go, boys,” Uncle Ted said. “Here we go.”

Billowy white clouds of steam escaped from the drain cocks on the cylinders wafting across the depot steps. Uncle Ted pulled the whistle cord twice, letting out two long blasts, and the big engine started to chug. After a moment we were rumbling slowly away from the depot. I looked in the window of the office and saw the faces of Hobbs, Jenny, and the governor watching as we moved off up the track.

Sam tipped her bowler and put her arm around Charlie’s shoulder. Charlie waved enthusiastically.

As we got going faster, Uncle Ted’s odor drifted away with the wind, and for the moment all I could smell was the burning of the coal.

Virgil settled in on the off side of the cab. He lit a cigar he got from Berkeley and watched the scenery pass by. I settled on the engineer’s side and found myself a place to sit on the front of the tender. I took off my coat, rolled it up, and made myself a seat. I got as comfortable as I could possibly be under the circumstances and even found a place to rest my head.

Uncle Ted was inching up the throttle as Berkeley was feeding the boiler with coal, and we were starting to move pretty fast.

I looked back to Half Moon Junction as we moved up the incline, and it wasn’t long before the town was no longer in sight.

We made our way through the dynamited cut where Virgil and I left the coach and around the wide bend as the Ironhorse thundered strongly up through the quartz hills covered with oaks, pinions, and junipers.

Again, like the day before, we traveled the winding rail heading up the Kiamichi. When it got close to five in the afternoon we slowed on a long, flat stretch and stopped just past a red-painted switch target. Berkeley got out, made the switch and Uncle Ted throttled the Ironhorse off the main track and stopped on the pass where a stand of elm shrubs divided the pass lane from the main line. We waited for about thirty minutes before we saw it coming. The Southbound Express came upon us fast, and within a moment it passed with a short blast of its whistle and was gone.

Berkeley again switched the track, and within a few moments we were back on the main rail and heading north. Uncle Ted gave the Ironhorse some throttle, we picked up steam, and in no time we were on our way, running strong.

The late-afternoon sun pushed through faraway copper clouds, prompting rich shades of deep purple, red, and orange. I saw some doves heading south, and I wondered about the day, the month, the time of year, and I wondered when the weather was going to turn and start getting cold.

81

WHEN I WOKE
up it was dark out. The Ironhorse was pulling away from a water drop. Berkeley returned from across the top of the slope-back tender and into the cab. There was a lantern burning in the cab, and up ahead there was light shining on the trees passing by from the engine’s mantled oil headlight that brightly illuminated the track ahead. Uncle Ted increased the throttle, and the Ironhorse built up speed. The cab glowed a bright golden yellow color as Berkeley opened the firebox and shoveled a scoop of coal into the boiler.

“Where are we?”

Uncle Ted turned and looked at me.

“I’ll be damn,” Berkeley said. “You’re awake. Marshal said you was the only person he knew that could fall asleep in a fistfight.”

I looked at Virgil. His chin was on his chest, and he was asleep.

“Said the blackbird to the crow,” I said.

I got up slowly to my feet and stretched.

“This is the stop before Standley Station,” Berkeley said as he shoveled another scoop from the tender and into the firebox.

“We got a ways to go,” Uncle Ted said, “but we are ahead of schedule.”

Berkeley took out a canteen from his carpetbag and handed it to me.

“Gracias,”
I said.

“Got some hardtack, jerky, cat-heads, cans of beans, peaches, if you’re hungry,” Berkeley said.

I stretched some of the stiffness from my shoulders and back and drank some water from the canteen. I leaned out the cab and saw a small cabin pass by as the Ironhorse slowly built up speed. There was an aqueduct behind the cabin that trailed off into the woods toward the Kiamichi, but in a moment we were past it and there was nothing but trees.

“We been moving fast,” Uncle Ted said.

“We have,” Berkeley said.

“The old Ironhorse has got good goddamn giddyup,” Uncle Ted said as he patted the throttle lever like a house cat.

“I believe we will be to Crystal Creek way before what Sam figured,” Berkeley said.

“Little woman ain’t so smart as she thinks she is,” Uncle Ted said affectionately, with a raspy chuckle in his voice.

“Like to hear you say that to her face,” Berkeley said.

“Not on your life,” Uncle Ted said. “Not on your goddamn life.”

“Give this old blackbird a drink, Everett,” Virgil said.

The three of us looked at Virgil as he lifted his chin from his chest and yawned real wide.

“You say we’re ahead of schedule?” Virgil said.

I handed Virgil the canteen.

“That’s what they say,” I said.

“We are,” Uncle Ted said.

“It’s because there has never been a fireman quite as capable as me,” Berkeley said.

He posed like a boxer.

“Never been one that smelled as good as you,” Uncle Ted said, “or who was a pimp with a fancy whorehouse, I’ll give you that.”

“I’ll have you know, I’m no pimp,” Berkeley said. “I’m simply the entertainment supplier for mining executives.”

“Pink paint on a pigsty,” Uncle Ted said.

Virgil grinned a bit and took a drink from the canteen. He swirled the water around in his mouth, spit it off the side, and got to his feet.

“So how long do you think it will be before we get up to Crystal Creek?” Virgil asked.