The Wrecker (Isaac Bell 2)

Speaking of young assistants, what was taking James Dashwood so long to catch up with the blacksmith who had fashioned the hook that derailed the Coast Line Special? Isaac Bell reread Dashwood’s meticulously detailed reports. Then he wired the apprentice care of the Los Angeles office.BLACKSMITH STOPPED DRINKING.INQUIRE TEMPERANCE MEETINGS.

ISAAC BELL RECEIVED A report from the Kansas City office that Eric Soares was an orphan whom Franklin Mowery had sponsored through Cornell University and had taken on as his assistant. Soares was by some accounts a talented engineer, by others an upstart riding the coattails of a famously generous man.

Bell reflected upon the fact that Mowery did not have the physical stamina or agility to do fieldwork without help. Eric would perform duties that required physical activity, such as inspecting work done on the bridge. He telegraphed Kansas City to keep digging.

“Private wire, Mr. Bell.”

“Thank you, Mr. Meadows.”

Bell took the telegram to his stateroom, hoping it was from Marion. It was, and he exclaimed with pleasure when he read:DO NOT-REPEAT NOT-WISH TO JOIN PRESTONWHITEWAY CASCADE LODGE FOR PICTURE WORLDNEWSREELS. BUT ARE YOU STILL THERE? IF SO, WHAT DO YOU WISH?

Bell called on Lillian Hennessy. His schemes to extricate himself from the girl’s infatuation and rescue Archie Abbott from his mother seemed to be working. Since his return from New York, most of their conversations veered toward the subject of Abbott, and she tended now to treat Bell as an adored big brother or older cousin. After they spoke, he wired Marion back.COME! BE HENNESSY’S GUEST ABOARD SPECIAL.

While Bell pursued his investigation, and kept honing his efforts to protect the Cascade Canyon Bridge, the railroad forged ahead. Two days after the cutoff had crossed the canyon, the staging area on the far plateau had room and track to accommodate the endless strings of freight cars arriving with steel rail, spikes, ballast, and coal. A creosoting plant arrived in parts. It was assembled alongside the stockpiled crossties and was soon belching noxious black smoke as raw wood entered one end and floated out the other steeped in preservative.

Wagons that had delivered the ties down twisted mountain trails from the remote East Oregon Lumber Company now carried planks and beams. An entire trainload of carpenters hammered together tin-roofed roundhouses for the locomotives, powerhouses to shelter dynamos for electricity, blacksmith shops, kitchens, bunkhouses for the track gangs, stables for the mules and horses.

Holed through the last tunnel, connected to the bridge and linked by it to strategically positioned staging yards, Hennessy could now bring in men and material directly from California. The task of guarding the four-hundred-mile route as well as the bridge fell to Van Dorn detectives and Southern Pacific railway police. Isaac Bell urged Joseph Van Dorn to borrow U.S. Army troops to assist their thinly spread force.

EIGHT MILES UPSTREAM FROM the Cascade Canyon Bridge, the East Oregon Lumber Company’s forest rang from dawn to dark with the incessant bite of double-bladed axes. Modern high-lead winches snaked logs from the steepest slopes. “Steam donkeys,” powerful stationary steam engines, turned drums of wire rope that hauled logs to the mill on a corduroy skid road. Tie after tie was sawn and squared and sent down the terrible roads by wagon. When work stopped at night, the exhausted lumberjacks could hear the distant moan of locomotive whistles, a reminder even as they slept that the railroad craved more timber.

The miles between the bridge and the camp felt more like eighty than eight to the teamsters who delivered lumber to the cutoff staging yard. So rugged were the mountain roads that Gene Garret, the ambitious, greedy manager of the sawmill, was grateful for the Panic that had brought hard times. If the economy had been booming, the mill would be short of hands. The mule skinners would seek jobs elsewhere rather than climb the mountains for another load. And the lumberjacks who had shot the rapids down the river in dugout canoes to celebrate payday Saturday nights would not walk eight miles back to work on Sunday.

An enormous artificial lake was filling beside the remote lumber camp. Muddy water crept daily up the sides of a natural bowl that was formed where three mountain slopes converged at the Cascade River. The fourth side was a rough dam built of tumbled stones and logs. It towered fifty feet above the original masonry constructed years before for a millrace to power the saws. Now power came from the steam donkeys that the new owners of East Oregon Lumber had delivered in pieces by oxcart. The original millpond had vanished under the ever-deepening lake. The mule barns and the bunk- and cookhouses had been moved twice to escape the rising water.

The Wrecker was proud of that dam.

He had designed it on the principle of a beaver dam, which controlled water flow without stopping it entirely. His design employed giant tree trunks instead of sticks, man-size boulders instead of mud. The trick was to impound enough of the river flow to fill the lake while letting sufficient through so that downstream it appeared normal. If the river seemed a little lower than usual for late autumn as it tumbled through the town of Cascade, few residents took notice. And because the Cascade Canyon Bridge was newly built, there were no ancient high-water marks to compare to the river rushing by the stone piers.

Manager Garret would never question the purpose of the lake nor the enormous investment in an operation too remote to deliver enough timber to earn it back. The Wrecker’s shell corporation, which had secretly purchased the timber operation, paid the sawmill manager a fat bonus for every board and crosstie delivered to the railroad. All Garret cared about was squeezing as much work as humanly possible out of his lumberjacks before winter snows shut them down.

The lake kept rising as autumn rains swelled the countless streams and creeks that fed the river. With bitter humor, the Wrecker named it Lake Lillian for the headstrong girl who spurned him. He calculated that more than a million tons of water filled the deep gorge already. Lake Lillian was a million-ton insurance policy in case the flaws he had built into the Cascade Canyon Bridge didn’t cause it to collapse on its own.

He turned his horse and rode up the trail for a mile to a log cabin nestled in a clearing by a spring. Firewood was stacked nearby beneath a canvas lean-to. Smoke rose from a mud-and-stick chimney. A single window overlooked the road. Rifle slits on all four sides of the cabin commanded a 360-degree field of fire.

Philip Dow stepped out the door. He was a compact, self-possessed man in his forties, clean-shaven, with a thick head of curly black hair. Originally from Chicago, he was dressed incongruously for his cabin in a dark suit and derby.

His sharp eyes and impassive face could belong to a veteran cop, or an Army sniper, or an assassin. He was the latter, with a ten-thousand-dollar dead-or-alive reward on his head posted by the Mine Owners’ Association. Through sixteen years of bitter Coeur d‘Alene strikes, Philip Dow had murdered, in his own words, “plutocrats, aristocrats, and all the other rats.”

A cool head, a talent for leadership, and a rigid code of personal honor that set loyalty above all made Dow a rare exception to Charles Kincaid’s rule that no accomplice survived who had seen his face much less knew his true identity. Kincaid had offered shelter when the murder of Governor Steunenberg had made the northern Idaho panhandle too hot for Dow to stick around. The deadly master of sap, knife, gun, and explosive was safe in his cabin in the Wrecker’s lumber camp, touchingly grateful and absolutely loyal.

“Isaac Bell is coming down to the lodge for the banquet tonight. I’ve worked up a scheme for an ambush.”

“Van Dorn dicks don’t kill easy,” Dow replied. It was a statement of fact, not a complaint.

“Are any of your boys up to pulling it off?”

Dow’s “boys” were a bunch of hard-bitten lumberjacks he had whipped into a powerful gang. Many were on the run from the law, hence the appeal of East Oregon Lumber’s remote site. Most would rather commit murder for money than break their backs cutting timber. Charles Kincaid never dealt with them directly-none knew his connection-but, under Dow’s command, they extended the Wrecker’s reach, whether to set up an attack on the railroad or terrorize his paid but at times tentative accomplices. He had dispatched a pair to kill the Santa Monica blacksmith who had seen his face. But the blacksmith had disappeared and the lumberjacks fled. Thinly treed, sun-drenched southern California was not safe for brawny, handlebar-mustachioed, wool-clad woodsmen with prices on their heads.

“I’ll do it myself,” Dow said.

“His woman is coming,” the Wrecker told him. “In theory, he’ll be distracted. That should make it easier for them to catch Bell off balance.”

“I’ll still do it myself, Senator. It?

??s the least I can do you.”

“I appreciate your kindness, Philip,” said Kincaid, aware that Dow’s code required a certain archaic formality of expression.