The Chase (Isaac Bell 1)

It was an exercise in futility. Nothing fell into place. He had begun with the stagecoach possibilities. Most of the stage lines were gone by 1906. Wells Fargo still held the monopoly, with lines extending several thousand miles over overland express routes in remote areas that were not serviced by railroads. But the schedules did not fall into the proper times.

There were sixteen hundred different company railroads across the nation in 1906, with two hundred twenty thousand

miles of track among them. Fifty of the largest had a thousand miles of track each. Curtis had narrowed the number of companies down to five. They were the railroads with scheduled runs through the towns hit by the bandit.

“Would you like a cup of coffee?”

Curtis looked up from a train schedule record into the face of a little man standing no more than five feet two inches. His name was Nicolas Culhane, and his biscuit brown–streaked graying hair was brushed forward over his head to cover the receding baldness. The ferret brown eyes shifted with amazing frequency, and he wore a thinly clipped mustache whose pointed ends extended a good inch on either side of his lips. He walked with a slight stoop and wore spectacles with lenses that magnified his eyes. Curtis was amused at the helpful little man with the springy step. He was the perfect stereotype of a keeper of musty records in an archive.

“No, thank you.” Curtis paused to glance at his pocket watch. “I never drink coffee in the afternoon.”

“Having any luck?” asked Culhane.

Curtis shook his head wearily. “None of the passenger trains ran close to the time the bandit robbed the banks.”

“I pray you catch the murdering scum,” Culhane said, his voice suddenly turned angry.

“You sound like you hate him.”

“I have a personal grudge.”

“Personal?”

Culhane nodded. “My closest cousin and her little boy were killed by the Butcher at the bank in McDowell, New Mexico.”

“I’m sorry,” Curtis said solemnly.

“You must catch and hang him!” Culhane struck a fist on the table, causing the schedule book lying open to tremble and flip its pages. “He has got away with his crimes far too long.”

“I assure you, the Van Dorn Agency is working night and day to bring him to justice.”

“Have you found anything at all that might trace him?” Culhane asked anxiously.

Curtis raised his hands in a helpless gesture. “All we’ve discovered is that he is missing the little finger on his left hand. Besides that, we have nothing.”

“Did you check out the stagecoach lines?”

“I spent a day in the Wells Fargo records department. It was a dead end. None of their schedules put them in town within four hours of the robberies. More than enough time for the bandit to evade capture.”

“And the passenger trains?”

“The sheriff and marshals telegraphed surrounding towns to stop all trains and examine the passengers for anyone who looked suspicious. They even searched all luggage in hopes that one of the bags might contain the stolen currency, but they turned up no evidence, nor could they make an identification. The bandit was too smart. The disguises he used to rob and murder were too original and too well executed. The law officers had little or nothing to go on.”

“Did time schedules work out?”

“Only two,” Curtis replied tiredly. “The departure times on the others didn’t coincide with the events.”

Culhane rubbed his thinning hair thoughtfully. “You’ve eliminated stagecoaches and passenger trains. What about freight?”

“Freight trains?”

“Did you check out the departure times on those?”

Curtis nodded. “There, we have a different story. The trains I’ve been able to find in the right place at the right time left the robbed towns within the required times.”

“Then you have your answer,” Culhane said.

Curtis didn’t reply immediately. He was tired, on the verge of sheer exhaustion, and depressed that he was no further along and had made no discoveries. Inwardly, he cursed the Butcher Bandit. It didn’t seem humanly possible the man could be so obscure, so will-o’-the-wisp, so able to defy all attempts at detection. He could almost see the man laughing at the inept efforts of his pursuers.