The Wrecker (Isaac Bell 2)

Eric stood up, hooked his glasses around his ears again, and took up the older’s chant.

“Build it so strong that it will never fail, we risk building too heavy. Build it light, we might build it too weak.”

“Eric’s a metallurgist,” Mowery said, chuckling. “Speaking of essence. He knows forty types of steel that didn’t even exist in my day.”

Bell was still studying the telescoped wreckage of the caboose stuffed inside the boxcar when an intriguing idea struck him. These men were engineers. They understood how things were made.

“Could you make a sword that starts short and gets longer?” he asked.

“Beg your pardon?”

“You were talking about telescoping and steel, and I was wondering whether the blade of a sword could be hidden inside itself then extended to make it long.”

“Like a collapsible stage sword?” asked Mowery. “Where the actor appears to be run through but the blade actually retracts into itself?”

“Only this one would not retract. It would run you through.”

“What do you say, Eric? You studied metallurgy at Cornell. Could you make such a sword?”

“You can make anything, if you’ve got the money,” Eric answered. “But it would be difficult to make it strong.”

“Strong enough to run a man through?”

“Easily strong enough to thrust. Strong enough to pierce flesh. But it could not endure lateral impact.”

“Lateral impact?”

Mowery explained. “Eric means that it would not stand up to whacking it sideways in a real sword fight against a real sword.”

“The beat,” said Bell. “A sharp blow to push your opponent’s blade aside.”

“You compromise strength in the interest of compactness. Two or three short lengths of steel joined cannot be as strong as one. Why do you ask, Mr. Bell?”

“I was curious what it would be like to make a knife turn into a sword,” said Bell.

“Surprising,” Mowery said drily, “to the fellow on the business end.”

The bridge builder took a final look around and steadied himself on Eric’s arm.

“Let’s go, Eric. No putting it off any longer. I’ve got to report to the old man exactly what Mr. Bell reported, which is exactly what the old man doesn’t want to hear. Who the heck knows what happened. But we found no evidence of sabotage.”

When Mowery did make his report, an angry Osgood Hennessy asked in a low, dangerous voice, “Was the engineer killed?”

“Barely a scratch. He must be the luckiest locomotive driver alive.”

“Fire him! If it wasn’t radical sabotage, then excessive speed caused that wreck. That’ll show the hands I don’t tolerate reckless engineers risking their lives.”

But firing the engineer did nothing to calm the terrified workmen employed to finish the Cascades Cutoff. Whether the wreck had been an accident or the work of a saboteur, they didn’t care. Although they were inclined to believe that the Wrecker had struck again. Police spies reported that there was talk in the camp of a strike.

“Strike!” echoed the apoplectic Hennessy. “I’m paying them top dollar. What the hell else do they want?”

“They want to go home,” Isaac Bell explained. He was keeping close track of the men’s mood by polling his covert operatives in the cookhouses and saloons and visiting personally to gauge the effect of the Wrecker’s attacks on the Southern Pacific labor force. “They’re afraid to ride the work train.”

“That’s insane. I’m about to hole through the last tunnel to the bridge.”

“They say that the cutoff has become the most dangerous line in the West.”

Ironically, Bell admitted, the Wrecker had won this round, whether he intended to or not.