line leading to the cutoff threatened catastrophe. Streams and creeks jumped their banks. Rivers rose. Most ominously, rain-soaked hillsides began to move.
Dunsmuir’s Sacramento Street looked from the racing train like another brown river. People were paddling down it in canoes, dodging floating wooden sidewalks that the floodwaters had ripped from the buildings. In Weed, whole houses were afloat. On the run to Klamath Falls, farms looked like lakes, and Klamath Lake itself was as storm-tossed as an ocean. A lake steamer, torn loose from its mooring, was pressed by the current against a railroad trestle. Bell’s train squeezed by and kept going.
A landslide stopped them north of the lake.
A hundred feet of rail was buried under knee-deep mud and stone. Track gangs had come out from Chiloquin to clear it. The telegraph, they reported, had been dead when they left. No one knew how long it would take to repair. Bell sent the brakeman up a pole to tap into the wire. Still dead. At his command, the detectives piled down from the train in the driving rain and pitched in with shovels. They were moving again in a hour, the blistered, soaking-wet, mud-splattered men in a dangerous mood.
As night fell, they saw refugees from flooded farms huddled around bonfires.
Bell spotted a fleet of handcars parked on a siding when they stopped to water the locomotive in the Chiloquin yards. He ordered a lightweight three-wheeler, like the hand-pumped and pedaled track-inspection vehicle the Wrecker had stolen to derail the Coast Line Limited, tied onto his engine pilot. If the worst happened, if his train was stopped by another slide, they could carry it past the buried track and keep going.
A train dispatcher’s apprentice came running after them as they started out of the yards, piping in a thin voice that the telegraph wire had opened up from Sacramento. Bell learned that Southern Pacific linemen had encountered three separate acts of sabotage where cut wires were concealed with artful splicing. Proof, he told his operatives, that the Wrecker was swinging into action, isolating the head of the Cascades Cutoff for a final attack.
The second message through the repaired line was a wind-velocity warning from the U.S. Weather Bureau’s San Francisco forecast district. High winds meant more storms and more rain. Right behind that warning came reports that another storm had careened off the Pacific Ocean at Eureka. Eureka’s streets were flooded, a steamer had foundered in the approach to Humboldt Bay, and lumber schooners were adrift in the harbor.
It snowed in the north. Railroad traffic was at a standstill. Portland was paralyzed and cut off from Seattle, Tacoma, and Spokane. But the temperatures remained milder farther south, where heavy rains prevailed. On inland rivers, loggers drowned attempting to break up logjams that threatened to flood entire towns. The fast-moving new storm was already rampaging through the Klamath Mountains, catching up and combining with rear elements of the storm inundating the cutoff. The Portland forecast district’s eight p.m. forty-eight-hour forecast predicted more snow in the north and more rain in the south.
Bell tried again to telegraph Archie Abbott. The wires were still dead north of Chiloquin. The only way to communicate with the Cascade Canyon Bridge was to steam there on the Van Dorn Express.
The special pounded northward, triple headlights blazing. But it was forced repeatedly to slow when startled southbound train crews saw it coming, hit their brakes, and backed up onto the nearest siding many miles back. Only after the southbound freight was safely sidetracked could the Van Dorn Express surge ahead again.
Isaac Bell stayed all night in the locomotive cab. He spelled the fireman scooping coal into the firebox, but he was really there to encourage the frightened engineer to keep driving hard. They made it through the night without a collision. When a grim, gray dawn finally lit the stormy mountains, they were speeding along a narrow cut. A slope rose steeply to the left of the tracks and dropped sheer to the right.
James Dashwood came slipping and stumbling across the tender, balancing a pot of hot coffee. Bell portioned it out to the train crew before he took a grateful sip. When he looked up to thank Dashwood, he saw the newly promoted detective had fixed his gaze in wide-eyed horror on the mountainside.
Bell heard a deep growl, a low-pitched noise louder than the locomotive, that seemed to rumble from the depths of the earth. The rails shook beneath the heavy engine. A cliff detached from the side of the mountain.
“Hit your throttle!”
An entire forest of western hemlocks was sliding toward the tracks.
51
THE FOREST HURTLED DOWN THE STEEP MOUNTAIN ON A landslide of mud and tumbling boulders. Astonishingly, the sliding trees remained standing upright as the mass of ground they grew in bore down on the Van Dorn Express.
“Hit your throttle!”
The engineer panicked.
Instead of throttling the big Pacific to outrun the juggernaut of timber, mud, and rock, he tried to stop the train, hauling back his Johnson bar and slamming on his air brakes. With only one lightweight diner car behind the tender, the locomotive slowed abruptly. Bell, Dashwood, and the fireman were thrown against the firewall.
Bell scrambled to his feet and faced the rumbling mountain. “Ahead!” he shouted, wresting the throttle from the engineer. “Full ahead!”
The engineer recovered his nerve and jammed the Johnson bar forward. Bell shoved the throttle. The big engine leaped as if stampeding for its life. But the landslide picked up speed, the mass of towering trees still moving as one. Wider than the train was long, it tore down the mountain like an ocean liner launched sideways.
Bell felt a blast of wind so powerful it actually rocked the speeding locomotive. The airburst that the landslide pushed ahead of it was wet and cold. It chilled the hot cab as if the coal fire raging under its boiler had been extinguished.
Then the hurtling mass began to break apart. As it crumbled, it spread out wider.
The trees on the edges of the hurtling forest pitched forward, thrusting at the train like gigantic lances. Stones shoved ahead of the main mass bounced on the tracks and clattered against the locomotive. A boulder as big as an anvil burst through the cab’s side window and smashed the fireman and the engineer to the floor.
Dashwood jumped to help the bloodied men. Bell yanked him back. A second boulder tore like a cannon ball through the space his head had just occupied. Massive stones rocked the locomotive, thundered against the tender and shattered windows in the passenger car, showering detectives with broken glass.
The landslide split in two. Half tore ahead of the locomotive. Accelerating, it angled toward the tracks like a runaway train racing the Van Dorn Express to a junction where only one of them could pass. It was a race that Bell’s train could not win. A boiling torrent of rocks and mud buried the tracks ahead of the engine.
The larger half of the landslide impaled the passenger car with tree trunks. A boulder bigger than a barn crashed into the tender and swept it off the tracks. The heavy tender, which rode between the locomotive and the passenger car, started to drag both with it. Its coupler held tight to the locomotive, pulling its rear truck off the rails. The rails spread under the enormous forces, dumping the locomotive’s drive wheels onto the ties. The hundred-ton engine leaned toward the ravine and, still lurching ahead, began to tip over. Then her pilot wheels ran into the rocks heaped up by the landslide. She reared up onto them and stopped suddenly. The violent stop broke the coupling to the tender and the tender tumbled into the ravine.
Bell looked back, searching for the car carrying his detectives.