The Chase (Isaac Bell 1)

Keeping a sharp eye on Hall and Wilbanks, Abner moved past the tender to the door of the freight car. He rapped twice with the butt of his Smith & Wesson, waited a moment, then knocked again. The door was unlatched from the inside and slid open. Jacob and Margaret Cromwell stood there, looking down at Abner.

“What’s the delay?” asked Cromwell.

Abner tilted his head toward the locomotive. “We switched to a siding to let an express relief train through. While we’re waiting, the crew is taking on coal and water.”

“Where are we?” asked Margaret. She was dressed uncharacteristically in men’s pants, with the legs tucked into a pair of boots. A blue sweater covered the upper half of her body, and she wore a bandanna on her hair.

“The town of Reno,” answered Abner. “We’re out of the Sierras. From now on, the landscape flattens out into desert.”

“How about the track ahead?” inquired Cromwell. “Any more relief trains to delay our passage?”

“I’ll check with the switchman for scheduled westbound trains. But we’ll have to stand aside as they come.”

Cromwell jumped to the ground and spread out a map on the ground. The lines drawn across it displayed the railroads in the United States west of the Mississippi. He pointed to the spot signifying Reno. “Okay, we’re here. The next junction with tracks going north is Ogden, Utah.”

“Not Salt Lake City?” asked Margaret.

Cromwell shook his head. “The Southern Pacific main line joins the Union Pacific tracks north of Salt Lake. We swing north at the Ogden junction and head toward Missoula, Montana. From there, we take the Northern Pacific rails into Canada.”

Abner kept his eyes trained on the crew. He saw the fireman struggle with the coal flowing from the chute into the tender and the engineer moving about as if he were in a trance. “The crew is dead on their feet. We’ll be lucky if they can run the locomotive another four hours.”

Cromwell consulted the map. “There’s a railyard in Winnemucca, Nevada, about a hundred seventy miles up the track. We’ll pick up another crew there.”

“What about these two?” inquired Abner. “We can’t let them run to the nearest telegraph office and alert law enforcement up the line that we’re coming.”

Cromwell thought for a moment. “We’ll keep them with us, then make them jump the train in a desolate part of the desert. We’ll take no chances of Van Dorn agents getting wise to our leaving San Francisco and wiring officials down the line to stop our train, so we’ll cut the telegraph lines

as we go.”

Margaret took a long look toward the Sierras and the track they had traveled. “Do you think Isaac is onto us?”

“Only a question of how long, dear sister,” he said with his usual high degree of self-assurance. “But by the time he realizes we’ve flown San Francisco and finds a locomotive to give chase, we’ll be halfway to Canada and he’ll have no chance to stop us.”

43

ADELINE WAS LOFGREN’S PRIDE AND SWEETHEART, and he spoke to her as if the locomotive were a beautiful woman instead of a steel, fire-breathing monster that charged up the curving grades of the Sierras and through Donner Pass. Without having to pull two hundred tons of cars weighed down with passengers and luggage, she performed effortlessly.

The spring air was cool and crisp, and snow still covered the ground. Donner Pass was the notorious section of the mountains where the most poignant event in western history had taken place. A wagon train made up of a dozen families that would pass into legend as the Donner party became trapped in the winter blizzards of 1846 and suffered terribly until rescued. Many survived by eating the dead. Out of the original eighty-seven men, women, and children, only forty-five lived to reach California.

Bell had been fully awake since passing through Sacramento and was finding the scenery spectacular—the towering, rocky peaks; the forest of fir trees, some with branches still laden with snow; the summit tunnels, which were blasted out of granite by Chinese laborers in 1867. Adeline plunged into the black mouth of a long tunnel, the roar of the train’s exhaust reverberating like a hundred bass drums. Soon, a tiny circle of light materialized ahead in the darkness and quickly grew wider. Then Adeline burst into the bright sunlight with a noise like thunder. A few miles later came the panoramic view of Donner Lake, as the train began its long, curving descent to the desert.

Bell stared with some uneasiness down the sheer thousand-foot drop that was within a step or two of the edge, as the locomotive swung around a sharp bend. He did not need to urge Lofgren to go faster. The engineer was pushing the big locomotive at nearly thirty-five miles an hour around the mountain curves, a good ten miles faster than was considered safe.

“We’re across the summit,” announced Lofgren, “and have a downgrade for the next seventy-five miles.”

Bell stood and gave Long his fireman’s seat on the left side of the cab. Long thankfully sat down and took a break, as Lofgren closed off steam and allowed Adeline to coast down through the pass in the mountains. Long had been shoveling coal almost nonstop since they had swung onto the main line at Sacramento and up the steep grade into the Sierras.

“Can I give you a hand?” asked Bell.

“Be my guest,” said Long, lighting up a pipe. “I’ll tell you how to shovel the coal into the firebox. Even though we’re loafing along for the next hour, we can’t let the fire die down.”

“You don’t just throw it in with a shovel?”

Long grinned. “There’s more to it than that. And it’s not called a shovel; it’s a fireman’s scoop, size number four.”

For the next two hours, Bell labored in front of the maze of pipes and valves as he learned the intricacies of firing a locomotive. The tender was rocking from side to side around the turns, making it difficult to shovel coal into the firebox. It was easy work, however, with Adeline running downhill. He shoveled just enough coal to keep the steam up. He quickly learned to open the firebox door wide, after hitting the scoop against it and spilling coal over the floor. And instead of stacking the coal in a fiery pile, he developed the knack for making a level fire that burned bright and orange.

The sharp curves were left behind as their arc increased as they dropped down to the foothills. An hour after Bell turned the scoop over to Long, the fireman shouted to Lofgren: “We’ve only got enough water and coal for another fifty miles.”