“Delicate of him.”
Things were going exactly as planned until a rifle barrel poked around the side of the barn and pressed hard against the telegrapher’s head.
29
A MUSICAL VOICE DRAWLED, “UNSEND THAT MESSAGE YOU just sent.”
The telegrapher looked up in disbelief into the grim, hawklike features of Van Dorn investigator “Texas” Walt Hatfield. Behind him stood a glossy bay horse, silent as a statue. “And in case you’re wondering, yes, I do know the Morse alphabet. Change a word and I’ll blow your head off and send it myself. As for you, mister,” Hatfield told Ross Parker, whose hand was creeping toward his holster, “don’t make any mistakes or you won’t have time to make another.”
“Yes, sir,” said Ross, raising his hands high. In addition to the Winchester pointed at Andy’s head, the tall Texan carried two six-guns in oiled holsters worn low on his hips. If he wasn’t a gun-fighter, he sure dressed like one.
Andy decided to believe him, too. He clattered out a cancellation of the false order.
“Now, pass along the original order you sidewinders intercepted.”
Andy sent along the original orders to tell the southbound extra to wait on the Azalea siding as the northbound work train was coming through.
“Much better,” drawled Hatfield. “We can’t have locomotives butting heads, can we?”
His smile was as pleasant as his musical drawl. His eyes, however, were dark as a grave.
“And now, gents, you all are gonna tell me who paid you to attempt such a dastardly deed.”
“Drop it.”
Lowell the lineman had come
around the back of the barn with his wide-barreled coach gun.
Walt Hatfield did not doubt that the gent with the coach gun would have blasted him to pieces if he weren’t concerned about accidentally killing his partners with the same swath of buckshot. Cussing his own stupidity-there was no other word for it because even though he hadn’t seen him, he should have reckoned there would be a third man to climb the pole-he did as he was told.
He dropped his rifle. All eyes shifted momentarily to the clatter of steel on stone.
Hatfield drove sideways and drew his six-guns with blinding speed. He sent a well-aimed slug at Lowell that drilled through the lineman’s heart. But even as Lowell died, he jerked the triggers of the coach gun. Both barrels roared, and heavy double-aught lead shot tore into Andy, nearly cutting the telegrapher in half.
Ross was already running for his horse. Andy had fallen on Hat field’s rifle, and in the time it took to retrieve it from under his body Ross had mounted and galloped away. Hatfield whipped up the weapon, which was slippery with blood, and fired once. He thought he winged him. Ross reeled in the saddle. But by then, he was in the trees.
“Tarnation,” muttered Hatfield. A glance at their bodies told him that neither man would ever talk about the Wrecker. He jumped on his bay, roared, “Trail!,” and the big horse sprang to a gallop.
MARION MORGAN KISSED ISAAC BELL good-bye at Sacramento. She was traveling on to San Francisco. He would change trains north to the head of the Cascades Cutoff. Her parting words were, “I can’t recall a train ride I enjoyed more.”
Half a day later, trundling through the Dunsmuir yards, Bell counted reassuring numbers of railway police guarding key switches, the roundhouse, and dispatch offices. At the station, he spoke with a pair of Van Dorn operatives in dark suits and derbies who took him on a brisk tour of the various checkpoints they had established. Satisfied, he asked where he could find Texas Walt Hatfield.
Dunsmuir’s main street, Sacramento Avenue, was a mud thor oughfare rutted by buggy wheels. On one side were frame houses and shops separated from the mud by a narrow plank sidewalk. The Southern Pacific tracks, rows of telegraph and electric poles, and scattered sheds and warehouses bordered the other side. The hotel was a two-story affair with porches overhanging the sidewalk. Bell found Hatfield in the lobby, drinking whiskey in a teacup. He had a bandage plastered across his brow and his right arm in a sling.
“I’m sorry, Isaac. I let you down.”
He told Bell how while riding the rounds of the watch points he had established along that vulnerable line, he had spotted what looked from a distance to be an attempt to sabotage the telegraph lines. “Thought at first they were cutting the lines. But when I got close, I saw they had wired up a key and I realized they were intercepting train orders. With a view to causing collisions.”
He shifted uncomfortably in his chair, clearly sore from head to toe, and admitted, “I also thought at first there were only two of them. Forgot they’d have a lineman to go up the pole, and he got the drop on me. I managed to wriggle out of that mess, but unfortunately two of them died in the process. The third lit out. I reckoned he was the boss, so I lit out after him, thinking he could tell us plenty about the Wrecker. I winged him with my rifle, but not enough to spoil his aim. The dry-gulching hellion shot my horse out from under me.”
“Maybe he was aiming at you and hit your horse instead.”
“I’m real sorry, Isaac. I feel plumb stupid.”
“I would, too,” said Bell. Then he smiled. “But let’s not forget you stopped a head-on collision of two trains, one of them full of workmen.”
“The sidewinder is still fanging,” Hatfield retorted morosely. “Stopping the Wrecker ain’t catching him.”