The Race (Isaac Bell 4)

There was no echo on the open range, just a single blast of thunder and the neighing of frightened horses. When the dead man’s gang got their mounts under control, Stotts and Mayhew were pointing revolvers in both hands, and Harry Frost himself had reloaded. His face was red with righteous anger.

“Who else?”

They uncrated the guns, mounts, ammunition boxes, and landing carriages in the meager shade of the scrub brush and low trees that grew beside the creek. They disassembled and cleaned the guns and mounted them on the two-wheeled landing carriages. The weapons weighed nearly four hundred pounds, including the ammunition boxes. Cursing the weight, they rolled them up and down the dry creek bed, which was deep and narrow as a military slit trench. Positioned two hundred yards apart and elevated on their carriages, the Colts commanded the railroad tracks that the aeroplanes would follow to Abilene.

To ensure the guns were in working order, they fed the canvas cartridge belts into the breeches and fired fifty rounds from each, killing some cows grazing half a mile away.

Harry Frost handed Stotts his hunting knife. “Go slice off some supper. Better cut enough for breakfast. We’ll be here awhile.”

He ordered Mayhew to climb a pole and tap into the wires.

The telegrapher strung wire down to the ground, connected it to a key, sat propped against the pole with the key in his lap, and translated the messages that railroad dispatchers were transmitting between their distant stations. Several times, he warned that a train was coming. They hid under the trestle that spanned the creek bed until the train had thundered overhead. Most of the telegraph traffic was about shunting extra trains – rich men’s specials and newspapers’ charters – into Fort Worth for the big wedding.

33

ISAAC BELL WAS SURPRISED when Preston Whiteway asked him to be his best man until he realized that the only people the newspaper magnate ever spent time with were people who worked for him, and the high-handed manner in which he treated employees guaranteed they would never be friends.

“I would be honored,” Bell said, glad to stand near Josephine to protect her personally if Harry Frost somehow pulled a fast one and breached th

e outer defense lines. He was not as pleased when Josephine asked Marion to be her maid of honor. It put his fiancée directly in the line of fire, but Marion made it clear there was no saying no to such a request from Josephine, who was thousands of miles from her family and the only woman in the race.

In answer to Joseph Van Dorn’s queries from Washington about “wedding hoopla,” Isaac Bell wired back:

PRESTON PREEMINENT PROMOTER.

Hundreds of invited guests and hordes of spectators converged on Fort Worth in automobiles, buckboard wagons, carriages, and on horseback. Packed trains steamed in from Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. The Northern Texas Traction Company ran extra trolleys from Dallas. A company of state militia was called up to control the crowds and protect the flying machines. Additional companies were under orders at Tyler and Texarkana. Marion Morgan’s camera operators were trampled by legions of newspaper sketch artists and photographers until Whiteway himself stepped in to remind them that, as owner of Picture World, he would not take kindly to his cameras being jostled.

The ceremony itself was delayed by every hitch imaginable.

The North Side Coliseum, which Whiteway had furnished with church pews and an altar shipped in from St. Louis, had been designed more for the movement of cattle than people, so it took a very long time to get everyone seated. Then summer thunderheads blackened the western sky, and every mechanician and birdman in the race, including the bride, ran out to the field to tie down their machines and shroud wings and fuselages with canvas.

Thunder shook the coliseum. Fierce winds swept in from the prairie. Steve Stevens’s biplane tore its anchors. The bride, though widely known to despise the obese cotton farmer, led another charge outdoors to save his machine. They got it nailed down, but not before torrential rain struck.

Josephine was dried off by her ladies-in-waiting – a rough-and-tumble crowd of Fort Worth society matrons who had volunteered to fill in for the famous aviatrix’s faraway family. The Bishop of San Francisco’s stand-in – the Right Reverend himself pleaded prior responsibilities raising funds to erect a cathedral on earthquake-ravished Nob Hill – had just reassembled the flock in front of the temporarily consecrated altar when the floor was set to shaking by a colossal jet-black 2-8-2 Mikado locomotive rumbling into the yard. With deep fireboxes, superheated boilers, and eight drive wheels, the powerful Mikados usually sped immense strings of boxcars at sixty miles per hour. This one towed a single long black private car, which it parked beside a cattle chute that led directly into the building.

“Good God,” whispered Preston Whiteway, “it’s Mother.”

From the private car, swathed head to toe in black silk and crowned with raven feathers, stalked the Widow Whiteway.

The newspaper publisher turned beseechingly to the Van Dorn Agency’s chief investigator. “I thought she was in France,” he whispered. “Bell, you’re best man. It’s your job to do something. Please.”

The tall, golden-haired detective squared his shoulders and strode to the cattle chute. Scion of an ancient Boston banking family, polished at boarding school and educated at Yale, Isaac Bell was steeped in the tradition of best men saving the day, whether by locating lost rings or defusing inebriated former fiancées, but this was as far beyond his ken, as if he were a Texas cowhand asked to rope a rhinoceros.

He offered his hand and a princely bow.

“At last,” he greeted the groom’s uninvited mother, “the ceremony can begin.”

“Who are you?”

“I am Isaac Bell, Preston’s best man and a devoted reader of your columns in the Sunday supplements.”

“If you’ve read them, you know I cannot abide divorce.”

“Neither can Josephine. Were her unfortunate marriage not properly annulled, she would never marry again. Here she is now.” Josephine was hurrying from the altar with an open smile.

Mrs. Whiteway muttered, “She’s braver than my son. Look at him, afraid of his own mother.”

“He’s mortified, madam. He thought you were in France.”