05 Ironhorse (7 page)

The coach was full of blue smoke, and except for the cowering and stunned passengers, the car was now empty of gun hands.

A fearful freckle-faced woman clutched a preacher holding up a tattered Bible like it was a shield as Virgil and I moved down the aisle.

“I’m Marshal Virgil Cole; this is my deputy, Everett Hitch!”

“God bless you,” the preacher said as I followed Virgil. “God bless you!”

We moved swiftly down the aisle. An old fellow with a beard stood, offered his hand. “Much obliged, Marshal.”

“Sit down!” Virgil said. “Stay seated! Everybody stay seated!”

The old man promptly sat down.

“We got them on their heels,” I said. “They’re backing up.”

“They are,” Virgil said.

We stepped over Dean and the other robber’s body. I thought about what Virgil had said to Dean. Virgil was a man of his word. He kept his promise to everyone, including Dean. He gave Dean a chance to be counted, but Dean did not take it, and now he was dead.

When we got to the rear door, Virgil shifted to one side and I shifted to the other. Virgil edged his body over so he was not in front of the door and lowered himself to where he was sitting back on his heels. He opened the loading gate on his Colt and reloaded.

“If it weren’t for that telegram you received in Laredo,” I said, “we’d be riding through hill country, watching dancing girls in San Antonio, taking our leisurely time getting back to Appaloosa. Fact, though, we’ve wound up on a train, chasing some of the meanest no-goods we’ve ever come across.”

“It’s what we do, Everett,” Virgil said. “We’re lawmen.”

I opened the loading gate on my revolver and dumped the empty casings.

“Beside that fact,” Virgil said, “we got unsettled business with the lot of them.”

“That we do,” I said as I reloaded bullets back into the Colt’s chamber. “Some point, though, I ’spect you’ll be telling me about that damn telegram?”

Virgil didn’t say anything. He slowly cracked open the door.

21

I DID NOT
see what Virgil saw until he stood up and opened the door wider. Vince was nowhere in sight, and the door of the next coach was wide open. Even though the hard falling rain blurred our vision, there wasn’t anyone moving about. Virgil moved out, and I followed onto the platform. We took post on each side of the door of the next coach, and again we were under a deluge from the pouring rain. I peeked around the door and saw no gunmen. Toward the rear of the coach a woman was kneeling over a man lying in the aisle. I stepped in the car, followed by Virgil. We trained our pistols on everybody and nothing.

An older man sitting at the second-row aisle started shouting, “We’ve given you all our money, just leave us!”

Another passenger, a chubby man sitting across the aisle, held his hands in the air.

“Don’t hurt us,” he said. “Please!”

“We are not here to harm you,” Virgil said. “We’re here to protect you!”

Again, Virgil told the passengers who we were. A young fellow wearing spectacles pointed toward the rear door.

“One of them came running back through here! Bleedin’ like a stuck pig!”

“Where was he shot?” I asked.

“Side of his head! He had his hand over his ear! He yelled at the others to go back, and they ran out the back door!”

“How many others,” I asked.

“Two other men.”

The young fellow pointed back down the aisle to the woman kneeling over the man and spoke quietly: “They shot that lady’s husband ’bout a half-hour ago. He tried to put up a fight when they wanted his wife’s ring, and they shot him. She’s been sittin’ over him, talkin’ to him, but he ain’t alive.”

We moved down the aisle with our pistols pointed toward the rear door.

“Everybody just try and remain calm,” Virgil said.

When I got to the woman kneeling over her husband, she turned and looked at me. Her face was streaked with tears. I showed her the badge on my vest but kept my gun pointed toward the rear door.

“We are here to help,” I said.

The man she was leaning over was sure enough dead. His eyes were open. He had a bullet hole in his cheek, and behind his head, a puddle of blood pooled in the aisle floor. She looked to her husband.

“It’s going to be okay now, darling,” she said. “Law officers are here now to help us.”

I moved on toward the door. Lightning flashed again, and the coach’s interior brightened for a brief moment. I glanced back to Virgil. He reached out his hand to the woman kneeling over her husband.

“Be better if you took a seat, ma’am,” Virgil said.

The woman looked at Virgil as if he were something curious, unrecognizable. Then, in almost a moment of haste, she took his hand.

“There you go,” Virgil said. “Just stay seated, that’d be best.”

Virgil moved on.

“Everybody!” Virgil said. “Just stay in your seats!”

A tall gent wearing expensive but tattered clothes leaned out into the aisle. He pointed to the dead man and spoke to Virgil.

“This is my trade. Name’s G. W. Tisdale, mortician. I tried to console her, tried to let her know her husband was with God, but she has her own agenda,” he said. “Women often do.”

“Might need your services in a bit,” Virgil said. “Right now, stay seated, don’t do nothing.”

Virgil’s focus remained in the same direction his Colt was pointing, the rear door, as he moved next to me.

“Next car is the Pullman,” I said. “The governor’s car.”

“Yep,” Virgil said. “Providing him and his wife are still among us. No guarantee. No telling what to expect with Bloody Bob on board.”

“What do you want to do going in there,” I said. “How do we go about it?”

“Just gonna have to be quick,” Virgil said. “And shoot straight.”

“Won’t be our first time.”

“No,” Virgil said. “It won’t.”

Virgil positioned himself on the right of the door. I was on the left. I nudged behind the doorjamb, lowered myself to one knee, cracked opened the door, and what was in front of me was on one hand predictable but on the other unfortunate.

22

I STOOD UP
and swung the door open wider for Virgil to see what I saw. The back half of the train, from the first-class Pullman car to the caboose, had been disconnected and, along with the governor and his wife, was rapidly drifting away from us.

“Good goddamn,” Virgil said.

Lightning cracked across the dark sky, and we could see the Pullman. It was at least one hundred feet behind us now. I could see someone. It looked like Vince, but I was not sure. He was getting up off the platform from closing the angle cock air valve on the coach brakes.

“They closed the air valve on the brakes,” I said. “We’re not slowing. They obviously closed us off first.”

I got on my knees to open the valve.

“What are you saying, Everett?” Virgil asked.

I reached for the valve and it wasn’t there.

“Got no lever,” I said. “The son of a bitch!”

I stood up and looked back. The cars were no longer visible. They had vanished as we continued forward.

“He closes that valve, Virgil, he overrides the automatic safety brakes. Without a lever, our valve stays closed and it does the same damn thing, overrides the brakes and we keep going. They keep going south, we keep going north.”

Virgil shook his head slowly, and the rain swirled up around us as we powered ahead.

“We’ve been traveling on an uphill grade ever since we crossed the river leaving Texas,” I said. “By them bypassing the safety brakes, they will roll freely downhill. Using the handbrakes to control their speed as they go.”

“So the air brakes,” Virgil said, “work disconnected from the engine?”

“According to George Westinghouse, they do.”

“George Westinghouse?”

“The fellow who invented the air brake.”

Virgil just shook his head, looking south into the dark night.

“The air line runs from the engine all the way back,” I said. “If that line loses pressure, the brakes close automatically on any coach that is disconnected, and that coach—”

“—stops by itself,” Virgil said.

“Yep, that’s right,” I said.

“Next thing you know they’ll be putting wings on these damn things and we’ll be flying around like birds.”

“Well, there’s one thing for certain those robbers will be thinking, Virgil.”

“The farther away from us, the better for them,” Virgil said.

“Yep, they are going to roll back as far as they can go,” I said.

“You think they planned this somehow?” Virgil said.

“Hard to figure,” I said. “Must have. Might have been a backup plan. Seems likely, more than likely, one or some of them are train hands, know what they’re doing.”

Virgil shook his head.

“What do you figure we do?” I said.

“We get up to the engineer. Get this train that’s rolling forward to get going backward,” Virgil said. “
En este momento
.”

23

VIRGIL WASTED NO
more time with words or thought. He started moving forward up the aisle at a quick pace, and I followed. He spoke to the undertaker as we stepped over the dead man: “Take care of this fallen fellow. And be diligent about it.”

We continued walking forward. When we crossed through the rain from one platform to the next, there was a hard jolt in the movement of the train.

When we reentered through the rear door of the uphill coach the passengers turned in their seats and looked back at us. They were wide-eyed watching us as we hurried up the aisle.

Virgil opened the front coach door, and when he did we quickly understood why the train had previously jolted.

We had been disconnected and were drifting away from the first passenger car and engine. Rain was swirling and it was dark, but we could vaguely see the silhouette of someone on the back platform. He was watching us as we faded away from the front section of the train.

“Hellfire,” I said.

Whoever it was, whoever had disconnected us, whoever had outmaneuvered us, was now traveling on into the distant darkness.

Virgil said nothing.

The train was now in three separate sections: the engine and first coach with Emma and Abigail on board, the second and third coach with us, and the fourth coach back to the caboose with Vince, the remainder of the bandits, Bloody Bob, and, if they were still alive, the governor and his wife.

I got down on my knees to check the air-line valve and quickly determined it had already been closed.

We were still moving forward from the momentum, but in no time we would soon be rolling backward.

“Looks like we’re now gonna be bumping into Vince and Bloody Bob sooner than we expected,” I said. “That’s a fact.”

I got back to my feet.

“And a hell of a lot sooner than they expected,” I said.

Virgil just shook his head slightly.

“They will roll slower than us,” I said. “With us in just these two coaches, we’ll be rolling downhill faster.”

Virgil didn’t say anything. He just remained looking forward.

“And when we do,” I said, “we’ll need to ride these handbrakes, controlling our speed.”

Virgil continued looking up the track as if he didn’t believe what was happening.

“They got a head start, but we’ll catch up to them,” I said. “Hopefully before they bottom out. They got more friction, more cars.”

I felt as though I was just talking so Virgil wouldn’t think what he was thinking.

“Vince and the others on those cars back there have to control their speed; otherwise, there will be a train wreck if they don’t,” I said. “Us too, we have to control our downhill speed or we will get to rolling too fast and lose control. We should turn off the lamps so we are dark. Don’t want them to see us coming up on ’em.”

“The fox got in the henhouse,” Virgil said as he continued looking up the track.

“The Yankee?”

“Might well be the Yankee,” Virgil said.

“You’re not thinking that sodbuster we left with my eight-gauge,” I said, “or the dandy had a hand in this, do you?”

Virgil stayed looking up the track.

“You didn’t see that preacher fellow back there, did you?” Virgil said.

“Preacher fellow?” I said.

“In this car. The preacher fellow that had been sitting row five, west side, aisle,” Virgil said.

24

I TURNED AND
looked back into the coach, row five, west side aisle. The seat was empty.

“No,” I said.

Virgil moved his head up and down very slowly.

“He’s not there,” I said. “There is no preacher sitting there.”

“That’s what I figured,” Virgil said.

Virgil did not turn around; he just remained looking forward up the dark track in front of us. We were still rolling north from the train’s forward momentum.

“I remember him, too,” I said, “but he’s not there now. There’s a freckle-faced redhead by the window.”

“Yep, she was holding on to him and was crying when we came by.”

Virgil had already identified the culprit. The fact that Virgil knew the man who had held up the Bible was not sitting where he was previously did not surprise me. Virgil saw way more than most. Even when things were on tenterhooks, Virgil had the ability to remain perceptive and steady.

Virgil turned and looked back through the open door into the coach. Except for the preacher who was previously sitting in row five, the west side aisle, everyone was looking at Virgil as if they needed some sort of answer. Virgil gave it as he crossed the threshold and walked a few steps down the aisle.

“Everybody get your this and thats in order,” Virgil said. “We will need you to turn off these lamps in a bit, and it will get dark.”

We dragged the dead gunmen out to the platform and slid them off the side. Virgil moved back down the aisle to row five. The redheaded freckle-faced woman who had previously been crying and holding on to the preacher was sitting by the window, looking up at Virgil. Sitting in the west side aisle seat was the preacher’s discarded Bible. Virgil picked it up. He opened the Bible and leafed through it as if he were looking for a passage or verse, then closed it. He looked at the back side of the Bible. Then he dropped it into the seat.