Текст книги "The Wrecker"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

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Текущая страница: 20 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

Dashwood paused, momentarily distracted from scanning the men in the audience. Of the many temperance orators he had heard on his search for blacksmith Jim Higgins, Captain Willy Abrams was the first to promise relief of the National Debt.

When it was over and Dashwood saw no one in the dwindling crowd who resembled the blacksmith, he approached the dais.

“One more?” asked Captain Willy, who was packing up his notes. “Always time for one more pledge.”

“I’ve already pledged,” said Dashwood, flourishing a Total Abstinence Declaration registered four days earlier by the Ventura chapter of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. He had ten more in his suitcase, along with the train-wrecking hook fashioned from an anchor and a stack of the lumberjack’s sketches.

“I’m looking for a friend, whom I hope has taken the pledge but might have stumbled. He’s disappeared, and I fear the worst. A tall, strapping fellow, a blacksmith named Jim Higgins.”

“Blacksmith? Big man. Sloped shoulders. Dark hair? Sad and weary eyes.”

“You’ve seen him?”

“Seen him? You bet I’ve seen him. Thanks to me, the poor devil’s mended his ways. In the extreme.”

“How do you mean?”

“Instead of taking the pledge never to drink alcohol again, he’s pledged to give up everything a man could ever want.”

“I don’t follow you, Captain Willy.”

The speaker looked around, confirmed there were no women within earshot, and dropped a wrinkled lid over a bloodshot eye. “Gave up drink, gave up worldly possessions, even gave up girls. Now, I truly believe, brother, that drinking and drunkenness are inseparable evils. Our Savior Jesus Himself could not keep His customers sober if He ran a saloon. But never let it be said that Captain Willy advocates abandoning allearthly pleasures.”

“What did Jim Higgins do?”

“Last I heard, he became a monk.”

“A monk?”

“Joined a monastery, that’s what he’s done.”

James Dashwood whipped out his notebook.

“Which order?”

“Not sure about that. Order of Saint Somebody or other. I had never heard of them before. Not one of the regulars, sort of an offshoot… like you find in these parts.”

“Where?”

“Up the coast a ways. Understand they have a heck of a spread.”

“What town?”

“Somewhere north of Morro Bay, I believe.”

“In the hills or by the sea?” Dashwood pressed.

“Both, I heard. Heck of a spread.”

IT HAD BEEN FORTY years since the first transatlantic telegraph cable annihilated time and space. By 1907, more than a dozen stretched under the ocean between Ireland and Newfoundland. The latest could transmit a hundred twenty words per minute. As Isaac Bell rocketed west, a notable share of the cable’s capacity was taken up by the Van Dorn Detective Agency gathering information on the Wrecker’s European bankers.

Cablegrams poured aboard at every crew change and water stop. By the time he reached Buffalo in his chartered Atlantic 4-4-2-a high-wheeled racer born for the lakeshore water-level route-Bell had a suitcase full of paper. Van Dorn agents and research contractors joined him along the way, specialists in banking, and French and German translators. There were general reports, at first, on the European financing of railroads in China, South America, Africa, and Asia Minor. Then, as the agency’s contacts dug deeper, the reports grew more specific, with repeated references to Schane amp; Simon Company, a little-known German investment house.

Bell picked up a Pullman sleeper in Toledo for his growing staff and replaced the 4-4-2 with a more powerful Baldwin 4-6-0. He added a dining car in Chicago so the investigators could spread their work out on the tables as they sped through Illinois and Iowa.

They crossed Kansas, switching locomotives to the new, highly efficient Baldwin balanced compound Atlantics for speeding up the light but relentless grade of the Great Plains. They picked up wires at every stop. The diner’s tables were buried under their yellow paper. Isaac Bell’s operatives, accountants, and auditors named their special train the Van Dorn Express.

The Rocky Mountains came into view, blue as the sky, then hardening out of the mist into three distinct snowcapped ranges. The railroad’s Mountain Division superintendents, eager to help, wheeled out their best Prairie-type engines, with Vauclain compound cylinders, to suit the grade. So far on the cross-country run, a total of eighteen locomotives and fifteen crews had driven the Van Dorn Express at speeds that surpassed the previous year’s record time of fifty hours from Chicago.

Bell saw a pattern swirling around Schane amp; Simon, which was based in Berlin. Years ago, it had forged close ties with the German government through the powerful chancellor Otto von Bismarck. These ties had grown stronger under the current ruler, Kaiser Wilhelm. Van Dorn’s sources reported that the banking house appeared to have channeled government money to the builders of the Baghdad Railway secretly to maintain the fiction that Germany was not building the railroad to a Persian Gulf port to challenge British, French, and Russian interests in the Near East.

“Senator Charles Kincaid’s employer, I recall,” said one of the translators, who had served with the Department of State before Joseph Van Dorn lured him away.

“In his ‘Hero Engineer’ days.”

Bell wired Sacramento to look for transactions between Schane amp; Simon and members of Osgood Hennessy’s inner circle.

Charles Kincaid, of course, had remained foremost in Isaac Bell’s mind ever since his father had explained that foreign holding companies and their secret owner would be shielded by corrupt government officials. Surely, a U.S. senator could do much to promote the Wrecker’s interests and guard his secrets. But what motive would drive Kincaid to risk his already lucrative political career? Money? Much more than he got from Southern Pacific Railroad stock. Anger at Hennessy for not encouraging Lillian to marry him? Or was courting her a ruse, an excuse to hang around Hennessy’s ever-rolling headquarters?

But how did spying for the Wrecker jibe with his presidential aspirations? Or was he encouraging Preston Whiteway to launch the campaign merely to provide a smoke screen? Had Charles Kincaid surrendered political dreams to concentrate on accumulating an immense fortune in bribes? Or, as Bell’s father suggested, was he so arrogant as to believe he could get away with both?

EBENEZER BELL’S DEFINITION OF “beating the bushes” was broad and enterprising. The president of the American States Bank had started out querying trusted friends and associates in Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C., by telephone, telegraph, and private messenger. Learning what he could through lofty connections, he then delved deep into the middle of the country, paying particular attention to St. Louis, home of the burned-out Union Pier amp; Caisson Company. In the West, information he gathered canvassing the top bankers of San Francisco, Denver, and Portland led him to call in favors from smaller banks in California and Oregon.

A request from the patrician Boston banker prompted a private meeting in Eureka, a deepwater port serving the redwood timber industry two hundred twenty-five miles north of San Francisco. Stanley Perrone, the rough-and-ready president of the Northwest Coast Bank of Eureka, dropped by the office of up-and-coming lumberman A. J. Gottfried. Gottfried had borrowed heavily from Perrone’s bank to modernize the Humboldt Bay Lumber Company. His office overlooked his timber pier, which jutted into the rain-lashed harbor.

Gottfried pulled a bottle of good bourbon from his desk, and the men sipped whiskey for a while, chatting about the weather. That it was turning from awful to worse could be predicted by the sight of a red steam launch chugging purposefully between the moored and anchored lumber schooners.

“Son of a gun. Looks like we’re getting hit again.”

The red launch was piloted by the special messenger from the U.S. Weather Bureau who delivered forecasts of violent storms to the captains of vessels in the harbor.

The banker got down to business. “As I recall, A J., you bought Humboldt Bay Lumber with the proceeds of the sale of your timber operation in eastern Oregon.”

The lumberman, intending to make hay out of this unexpected visit from his banker, answered, “That’s exactly how it happened. Though Irecall that you made it easier by promising to help me replace the old equipment.”

“A.J., who bought your East Oregon Lumber Company?”

“A feller with more money than sense,” Gottfried admitted cheerfully. “I had despaired of ever unloading it ‘til he came along. It was just too expensive to snake the timber down off those mountains. Not like here, where I can load lumber schooners right at my own wharf. Provided, of course, the ship don’t founder trying to get into the harbor.”

Perrone nodded impatiently. Everyone knew that the entrance into Humboldt Bay deserved its title “Graveyard of the Pacific.” Pea-soup fog, pounding breakers that dissolved into spindrift, and a thick haze of smoke from the lumber mills made finding the channel an exercise that turned sea captains’ hair white. “I understand,” he said pointedly, “you’re considering adding a sash and door factory to your business.”

“If I can raise the means,” Gottfried answered, hoping he had heard right. “This Panic isn’t making it any easier to borrow money.”

The banker looked the lumberman in the eye, and said, “I suspect that favored borrowers will get a sympathetic ear despite the Panic. Who bought your East Oregon business?”

“Can’t tell you everything about him. As you can imagine, I wasn’t looking that particular gift horse in the mouth. Soon as we shook on the deal, I was gone from that place so fast you could hear me whiz.”

He drained his glass and poured another, and topped off the banker’s glass, which hadn’t gone down as far.

“What doyou know about the purchaser of the East Oregon Lumber Company?” Perrone pressed.

“For one thing, he had plenty of cash.”

“Where’d he draw his check from?”

“Well, that was interesting. I would have thought San Francisco or Portland. But his check was on a New York bank. I was a little suspicious, but it cleared lickety-split.”

“Was the fellow from New York?”

“Might’ve been. Sure didn’t know much about the lumber business. Now that you mention it, it occurs to me he was buying it for somebody else.”

The banker nodded, encouraging the lumberman to continue talking. Ebenezer Bell had made it clear that he didn’t expect the whole story from any one source. But every bit helped. And the powerful American States president had also made it clear that he would be grateful for every nugget Perrone could wire him.

45

THE VAN DORN EXPRESS PAUSED IN DENVER’S UNION DEPOT just long enough for a Van Dorn agent in bowler hat and checkerboard suit to swagger aboard bearing fresh reports from London and Berlin. “Howdy, Isaac. Long time no see.”

“Sit there, Roscoe. Go through these Schane and Simon Company records with a fine-tooth comb. Have your queries ready to wire at the next stop.”

A lawyer who connected in Salt Lake City brought more on Schane amp; Simon. The foundation of the German bank’s power was an investment network that backed modernization projects throughout the Ottoman Empire. But as far back as the nineties, they had begun doing business in North and South America.

The Van Dorn Express was racing across the Great Salt Desert when Roscoe, who had boarded in Denver, hit pay dirt in the heaps of cablegrams about Schane amp; Simon.

“Isaac! Who’s Erastus Charney?”

“Railroad attorney. Got rich on Southern Pacific stock. Seemed to know more than he should about when to buy and when to sell.”

“Well, he sure as heck sold something to Schane and Simon. Look at these deposits with Charney’s stockbroker.”

Bell wired Sacramento from Wendover, while the train quickly watered and coaled for the climb into Nevada, instructing them to follow up on Roscoe’s discovery. But he feared it was too little too late. If Simon amp; Shane did bankroll the Wrecker, then the evidence was clear that Charney had been bribed to pass information about Hennessy’s plans to the saboteur. Unfortunately, the fact that the crooked railroad attorney was still alive suggested that his link to the murderous Wrecker was circuitous, and Charney would know nothing about him. But at least they would take another of the Wrecker’s accomplices out of action.

Two hours later, the train was pulling out of Elko, Nevada, when a plump accountant sprinted for the last car. Thirty pounds overweight and a decade past his sprinting years, Jason Adler tripped. One soft pink hand was already clinging to the vestibule rail, the other gripping a fat satchel. As the train dragged him along the platform, he held on with all his might, coolly calculating that he was now flying too fast to let go without suffering grievous injury. An alert conductor rushed to the vestibule. He sank both hands into the folds of the accountant’s coat. Too late, he realized that the weight of the falling man was dragging both of them off the train.

Burly Van Dorn detectives sprang to their aid.

The accountant ended up on the vestibule floor, clutching his satchel to his chest.

“I have important information for Mr. Isaac Bell,” he said.

Bell had just fallen asleep for the first time in twenty-four hours when they tugged open the curtain to his Pullman berth. He was wide awake instantly, eyes glittering with ferocious concentration. The operative apologized for waking him and introduced an overweight man clutching a briefcase to a suit that looked like he’d been turning somersaults in a coal yard.

“This is Mr. Adler, Mr. Bell.”

“Hello, Mr. Adler, who are you?”

“I am an accountant employed by American States Bank.”

Bell swung his feet off the bunk. “You work for my father.”

“Yes, sir,” Adler said proudly. “Mr. Bell specifically asked for me to take on this audit.”

“What have you got?”

“We have uncovered the name of the secret owner of the Union Pier and Caisson Company of St. Louis.”

“Go on!”

“We should talk in private, Mr. Bell.”

“These are Van Dorn agents. You can say your piece here.”

Adler clutched his briefcase closer. “I apologize to you gentlemen, and to you Mr. Bell, but I am under strict orders from my boss, Mr. Ebenezer Bell, president of the American States Bank, to speak to you and only you.”

“Excuse us,” said Bell. The detectives left. “Who owns Union Pier?” he demanded.

“A shell corporation established by a Berlin investment house.”

“Schane and Simon.”

“Yes, sir. You are well informed.”

“We’re getting there. But who owns the shell corporation?”

Adler lowered his voice to a whisper. “It is wholly controlled by Senator Charles Kincaid.”

“You’re sure?”

Adler hesitated only a second. “Not beyond all doubt, but reasonably sure Senator Kincaid is their client. Schane and Simon supplied the money. But there are numerous indications that they did it on his behalf.”

“That implies that the Wrecker is well connected in Germany.”

Adler answered, “That was your father’s conclusion, too.”

Bell wasted no time congratulating himself on the discovery that Kincaid likely served the Wrecker just as he had suspected. He ordered an immediate investigation of every outside contractor hired by the Southern Pacific Company to work on the Cascades Cutoff. And he wired a warning to Archie Abbott to keep a close eye on the Senator.

“TELEGRAPH, MR. ABBOTT.”

“Thank you, Mr. Meadows.”

Archie Abbott broke into a broad grin when he decoded the message from Isaac Bell. He combed his red hair in the reflection of a railcar window and straightened his snappy bow tie. Then he marched straight to Osgood Hennessy’s private office with a fine excuse to call on Miss Lillian, who was wearing a ruby velvet blouse with a fitted waist, an intriguing row of pearl buttons down the front, and a riveting flow of fabric over her hips.

The Old Man was not in a friendly mood this morning. “What do you want, Abbott?”

Lillian was watching closely, gauging how Archie handled her father. She would not be disappointed. Archie had no trouble with fathers. Mothers were his weakness.

“I want you to tell me everything you know about outside contractors working on the cutoff,” Abbott said.

“We already know about Union Pier and Caisson,” Hennessy replied heavily. “Otherwise, several down in Cascade. Purveyors, hotels, laundries. Why do you ask?”

“Isaac doesn’t want a repeat of the pier problem and neither do I. We’re checking into all the outside contractors. Do I understand correctly that a contractor was hired by the Southern Pacific to supply crossties for the cutoff?”

“Of course. When we started building the cutoff, I arranged to stockpile crossties on this side of the Canyon Bridge so we’d be ready to jump as soon as we crossed.”

“Where is the mill?”

“About eight miles up the mountain. New owners modernized the old water mill.”

“Did they supply ties as promised?”

“Pretty much. It’s slow snaking timber down from there, but, by and large, it’s worked out. I gave them a long head start, and the creosoting plant has more than it can handle.”

“Is the plant an outside contractor, too?”

“No. It’s ours. We just knock it down and move it up the line where we need it.”

“Why didn’t you establish your own sawmill as you’ve done in the past?”

“Because the bridge was far ahead of the rest of the road. These folks were already up and running. It seemed the fastest way to get the job done. That’s all I can tell you.”

“By the way, have you seen Senator Kincaid today?”

“Not since yesterday. If you’re that interested in the timber operation, why don’t you ride up there and have a look?”

“That’s exactly where I’m headed.”

Lillian jumped up. “I’ll ride with you!”

“No!” chorused Archie Abbott and Osgood Hennessy.

Her father pounded the table for emphasis. Archie offered a heart-grabbing smile and an apology.

“I wish you could ride with me, Lillian,” he said, “but Van Dorn policy …”

“I know. I’ve heard it already. You don’t bring friends to gunfights.”

46

JAMES DASHWOOD LOCATED ST. SWITHUN’S MONASTERY FROM A clue dropped by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union orator Captain Willy Abrams: “A heck of a spread.”

Its boundaries encompassed thirteen thousand acres that sprawled from the foothills of the Santa Lucia Mountains to the bluffs that reared over the Pacific Ocean. A muddy road miles from the nearest town led through iron gates onto an undulating plateau planted in orchards of fruit trees, nut trees, and vineyards. The chapel was a spare, modern building with simple Art Nouveau stained-glass windows. Low stone buildings of similar design housed the monks. They ignored James when he asked to see a recent arrival, a blacksmith named Jim Higgins.

Man after man in swaying robes walked past him as if he did not exist. Monks harvesting grapes and picking nuts just kept working no matter what he said. Finally, one took pity, picked up a stick, and wrote in the mud vow OF SILENCE.

Dashwood took the stick and wrote BLACKSMITH?

The monk pointed at a cluster of barns and corrals opposite the dormitories. Dashwood headed there, heard the distinctive clank of a hammer on iron, and quickened his pace. Rounding a barn, he saw a thin column of smoke rising through the branches of a chestnut tree. Higgins was bent over a forge, pounding a horseshoe on the horn of his anvil.

He wore a brown robe under his leather apron. His head was bare to the cold drizzle. The robe made him look even bigger than Dashwood remembered. In one powerful hand, he gripped a massive hammer, and in the other long tongs that held red-hot iron. When he looked up and saw Dashwood in his city clothes carrying a suitcase, Dashwood had to suppress the strong impulse to flee.

Higgins stared long and hard at Dashwood.

Dashwood said, “I hope you haven’t taken vows of silence like the others.”

“I’m just a novice. How did you find me?”

“When I heard you stopped drinking, I went to temperance meetings.”

Higgins gave a snort that was half laugh, half angry growl. “Figured the last place the Van Dorns would find me would be in a monastery.”

“You were scared by the sketch I showed you.”

Higgins raised the hot horseshoe in his tongs. “Guess I figured wrong …”

“You recognized him, didn’t you?”

Higgins threw the horseshoe into a bucket of water. “Your name is James, ain’t it?”

“Yes. We’re both Jims.”

“No, you’re a James, I’m a Jim …” He leaned his tongs against the anvil and stood his hammer beside it. “Come on, James. I’ll show you around.”

Jim Higgins lumbered off toward the bluff. James Dashwood followed him. He caught up and walked beside Higgins until they had to stop at the bluff’s crumbling edge. The Pacific Ocean spread as far as they could see, gray and forbidding under a lowering sky. Dashwood looked down, and his guts clenched. Hundreds of feet below them, the ocean thundered on a rocky beach, hurling up spray. Had Higgins lured him to this lonely precipice to throw him to his death?

“I have known for some time that I was going to Hell,” the blacksmith intoned gravely. “That’s why I stopped drinking whiskey. But it didn’t help. Stopped beer. Still going to Hell.” He turned to James Dashwood with burning eyes. “You turned me inside out when you came along. Scared me into running. Scared me into hiding.”

James Dashwood wondered what he should say. What would Isaac Bell do under these circumstances? Try to clamp handcuffs around his thick wrists? Or let him talk?

“Bunch of big shots started this monastery,” Higgins was saying. “Lot of these monks are rich men who gave up everything to live the simple life. You know what one of them told me?”

“ No. ”

“Told me that I’m blacksmithing exactly like they did in the Bible, except I burn mineral coal in my forge instead of charcoal. They say that working like folks in the Bible is good for our souls.”

He turned his back on the cliff and fixed his gaze on the fields and meadows. The drizzle strengthening into rain shrouded the vineyards and the fruit trees.

“I figured I was safe here,” he said.

He stared for a long time before he spoke again.

“What I didn’t figure was liking it here. I like working outdoors under a tree instead of cooped up with trucks and automobiles stinking up the air. I like being with weather. I like watching storms …” He whirled around to face the Pacific, which was checkered with dark squalls. To the southwest, the sky was turning black as coal. “See there?” he asked Dashwood, pointing to the blackness.

Dashwood saw a grim, cold ocean, a crumbling precipice at his feet, and rocks far below.

“Look, James. Don’t you see it coming?”

It struck the apprentice detective that the blacksmith had gone crazy long before the train wreck. “See what, Jim?”

“The storm.” The blacksmith’s eyes were burning. “Mostly, they angle in from the northwest, a monk told me, down from the northern Pacific where it’s cold. This one’s coming from the south where it’s warm. From the south brings more rain … You know what?”

“What?” Dashwood asked, hope fading.

“There’s a monk here whose daddy owns a Marconi wireless telegraph. Do you know that right now, four hundred miles at sea, there’s a ship telegraphing to the Weather Bureau what the weather is out there!” He fell silent, contemplating that discovery.

It was a chance to prime the pump, and James seized it. “They got the idea from Ben Franklin.”

“Huh?”

“I learned it in high school. Benjamin Franklin noticed that storms are moving formations, that you can track where they’re going.”

The blacksmith looked intrigued. “He did?”

“So when Samuel Morse invented the telegraph, it made it possible to send warnings to folks in the storm’s path. Like you say, Jim, now Marconi’s wireless telegraph lets ships send radiotelegraph storm warnings from way out in the ocean.”

“So the Weather Bureau’s known about that one for quite some time now? Isn’t that something?”

Dashwood reckoned that the weather had taken them about as far as they could go.

“How did I scare you?” he asked.

“That picture you showed me.”

“This?” Dashwood took the sketch without the mustache from his suitcase.

The blacksmith turned away. “That’s who wrecked the Coast Line Limited,” he said softly. “Except you got his ears too big.”

Dashwood rejoiced. He was closing in. He reached into his bag. Isaac Bell had wired him to get in touch with a pair of Southern Pacific cinder dicks named Tom Griggs and Ed Bottomley. Griggs and Bottomley had taken Dashwood out, got him drunk and into the arms of a redhead at their favorite brothel. Then they’d taken him to breakfast and given him the hook that had derailed the Coast Line Limited. He pulled the heavy cast iron out of his bag. “Did you make this hook?”

The blacksmith eyed it morosely. “You know I did.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Because they’d blame me for killing those poor people.”

“What was his name?”

“Never said his name.”

“If you didn’t know his name, why did you run?”

The blacksmith hung his head. Tears welled in his eyes and rolled down his red cheeks.

Dashwood had no idea what to do next, but he did sense that it would be a mistake to speak. He turned his attention to the ocean in an effort to remain silent, hoping the man would resume his confession. The weeping blacksmith took Dashwood’s silence as condemnation.

“I didn’t mean no harm. I didn’t mean to hurt nobody. But who would they believe, me or him?”

“Why wouldn’t they believe you?”

“I’m just a blacksmith. He’s a big shot. Who would you believe?”

“What kind of big shot?”

“Who would you believe? A drunken smithy or a senator?”

“A senator?” Dashwood echoed in utter despair. All his work, all his chasing, all his running down the blacksmith had led him to a lunatic.

“He always hugged the dark,” Higgins whispered, brushing at his tears. “In the alley behind the stable. But the boys opened the door and the light fell on his face.”

Dashwood remembered the alley. He remembered the door. He could imagine the light. He wanted to believe the blacksmith. And yet he couldn’t.

“Where had you seen that senator before?”

“Newspaper.”

“A good likeness?”

“Like you standing there beside me,” Higgins answered, and Dashwood decided that the man believed every word as strongly as he blamed himself for the wreck of the Coast Line Limited. But belief did not necessarily make him sane. “The man I saw looked just like that big-shot senator. It couldn‘t’ve been him. But if it was-if it was him-I knew I was in a terrible fix. Big trouble. Trouble I deserved. By the work of this hand.”

Weeping harder, chest heaving, he held up a meaty paw wet with his tears.

“By the work of this hand, those people died. The engineer. The fireman. That union feller. That little boy …”

A gust of wind whipped Higgins’s monk’s robe, and he looked down at the crashing waves as if they offered peace. Dashwood dared not breathe, certain that one wrong word, a simple “Which senator?” would cause Jim Higgins to jump off the cliff.

OSGOOD HENNESSY WAS READING the riot act to his lawyers, having finished excoriating his bankers for bad news on Wall Street, when the meeting was interrupted by a short, amiable-looking fellow wearing a string tie, a vest, a creamy-white Stetson, and an old-fashioned single-action .44 on his hip.

“Excuse me, gents. Sorry to interrupt.”

The railroad attorneys looked up, their faces blossoming with hope. Any interruption that derailed their angry president was a gift from Heaven.

“How’d you get past my conductor?” Hennessy demanded.

“I informed your conductor-and the gentleman detective with the shotgun-that I am United States Marshal Chris Danis. I have a message from Mr. Isaac Bell for Mr. Erastus Charney. Is Mr. Charney here by any chance?”

“That’s me,” said the plump and jowly Charney. “What’s the message?”

“You’re under arrest.”

THE WINCHESTER RIFLE SLUG that had nearly blown the renegade telegrapher Ross Parker off his horse had shredded his right biceps and riddled the muscle with bone splinters. Doc said he was lucky it hadn’t shattered his humerus instead of just chipping it. Parker wasn’t feeling lucky. Two and a half weeks after the Van Dorn detective with the Texas drawl had shot him and killed two of his best men, it still hurt so bad that the act of lifting his arm to turn the key in his post office box made his head swim.

It hurt more to reach into the box to extract the Wrecker’s letter. It even hurt to slit the envelope with his gravity knife. Cursing the private dick who had shot him, Parker had to steady himself on a counter as he removed the luggage ticket he had been hoping to find.

The daily Weather Bureau postcard with the forecast stamped on it sat on the counter in a metal frame. The rural mail carrier had delivered one every day to the widow’s farm outside of town where he had been recuperating. The forecast today was the same as yesterday and same as the day before: more wind, more rain. Yet another reason to get out of Sacramento while the getting was good.

Parker took the luggage ticket around the corner to the railroad station and claimed the gripsack the Wrecker had left there. He found the usual wads of twenty-dollar bills inside, along with a map of northern California and Oregon showing where the wires should be cut and a terse note: “Start now.”

If the Wrecker thought Ross Parker was going to climb telegraph poles with his arm half blown off and two of his gang shot dead, the saboteur had another think coming. Parker’s plans for this bag of money did not include working for it. He practically galloped across the station to line up at the ticket window.

A big man shoved ahead of him. With his vest, knit cap, checked shirt, dungarees, walrus mustache, and hobnailed boots, he looked like a lumberjack. Smelled like one too, reeking of dried sweat and wet wool. All he was missing was a double-bladed ax slung over one shoulder. Ax or no ax, he was too big to argue with, Parker conceded, particularly with a bum arm. A bigger fellow, smelling the same, got on line behind him.

The lumberjack bought three tickets to Redding and paused nearby to count his change. Parker bought a ticket to Chicago. He checked the clock. Plenty of time for lunch and a snort. He left the station and went looking for a saloon. Suddenly, the lumberjacks who’d been on the ticket line fell in on either side of him.