The Wrecker Read online

  He left the rooming house by the back door so no one would see him in his new persona and walked a roundabout route to the railroad station, checking repeatedly that he was not followed. He threw the gripsack behind a board fence but kept the suitcase.

  Hundreds of travelers were streaming into the Southern Pacific station. He blended in as he joined them, another well-dressed busi nessman embarking for a distant city. But suddenly, before he could stop himself, he laughed out loud. He laughed so hard he covered his mouth to make sure the beard didn’t shift.

  The latest Harper’s Weekly magazine was displayed on a newsstand. The cover cartoon depicted none other than Osgood Hennessy. The railroad president was rendered as a fearsome octopus extending train tracks like tentacles into New York City. Smiling broadly, the Wrecker bought the magazine for ten cents.

  The newsie was staring at him, so he went to another stand outside the station to ask, “Do you have pencils? A thick one. And an envelope and stamp, if you please.”

  In the privacy of a toilet in the nearest hotel, he tore off the magazine cover, wrote on it, and sealed it in the envelope. He addressed the envelope to Chief Investigator Isaac Bell, Van Dorn Detective Agency, San Francisco.

  He attached the stamp, hurried back to the station, and dropped the envelope in a mailbox. Then he boarded the flyer to Ogden, Utah, six hundred miles to the east, a junction city near Great Salt Lake where nine railroads converged.

  The conductor came through. “Tickets, gents.”

  The Wrecker had bought a ticket. But as he reached to pull it from his vest pocket, he sensed danger. He did not question whatever had sparked the premonition. It could have been anything. He had seen extra railway police at the Sacramento yards. The ticket clerk had eyed him closely. A hanger-on he had noticed in the passenger station could have been a Van Dorn operative. Trusting his instincts, he left his ticket in his pocket and flashed a railway pass instead.

  11

  BELL BATTLED HIS WAY THROUGH FORTY-EIGHT HOURS OF maddening delays to reach the Cascades construction site at the head of the cutoff line. The Southern Pacific dispatchers were beset by downed telegraph wires, making train scheduling haphazard. Lillian had given up and taken her special back to Sacramento. Bell had hitched rides on material trains and finally arrived on a trainload of canvas and dynamite.

  The Southern Pacific Company had used the time better than he had. The fire-ravaged locomotive roundhouse had been demolished and the debris carted away, and a hundred carpenters were hammering a new structure together with green wood hauled down from the lumber mill. “Winter,” a burly foreman explained the speed of repairs. “You don’t want to be fixing locomotives in the snow.”

  Heaps of twisted rail had been loaded on flatcars and new track laid where the runaway gondola had torn up the switches. Cranes were hoisting fallen boxcars onto the fresh rails. Roustabouts were raising giant circus tents to replace the cookhouse that burning embers from the roundhouse had set on fire. The workmen eating lunch standing up were in a sullen mood, and Bell overheard talk of refusing to return to the job. It wasn’t the inconvenience of having no tables and benches but fear that upset them. “If the railroad can’t protect us, who will?” he heard asked. And the answer came hot and heavy from several quarters. “Save ourselves. Pull out, come payday.”

  Bell saw Osgood Hennessy’s vermilion red private train gliding into the yards and he hurried after it, though he was not looking forward to the meeting. Joseph Van Dorn, who had joined Hennessy in San Francisco, met him at the door, looking grave. “The Old Man’s fit to be tied,” he said. “You and I are going to hunker down and listen to him roar.”

  And roar Hennessy did. Although not at first. At first, he sounded like a beaten man. “I was not exaggerating, boys. If I don’t connect to the Cascade Canyon Bridge before it snows, the cutoff is dead. And those sons of bitches bankers will cart me off with it.” He looked at Bell with mournful eyes. “I saw your face when I told you I started out driving spikes like my father. You wondered, how could that scrawny, fossilized rooster swing a sledgehammer? I wasn’t always skin and bones. I could have pounded circles around you in those days. But I got a bum heart, and it’s shrunk me down to what you see.”

  “Well, now,” soothed Van Dorn.

  Hennessy cut him off. “You asked about a deadline. I’m the one on a deadline. And no railroad man still alive can finish the Cascades Cutoff but me. The new fellows just don’t have it in them. They’ll run the trains on time, but only on track I laid.”

  “Bookkeepers,” Mrs. Comden said, “do not build empires.” Something about her attempt to comfort him made Hennessy roar. He yanked the blueprint of the Cascade Canyon Bridge down from the ceiling. “The finest bridge in the West is almost complete,” he shouted. “But it goes nowhere until my cutoff line connects. But what do I find when I get back here, having left highly paid detectives on guard? Another god-awful week lost rebuilding what I’ve already built. My hands are spooked, afraid to work. Two brakemen and a master roundhouse mechanic dead. Four rock miners burned. Yard foreman laid up with a split skull. And a lumberjack in a coma.”

  Bell exchanged a quick glance with Van Dorn.

  “What was a lumberjack doing in the railroad-construction yard? Your mill is high up the mountain.”

  “Who the hell knows?” Hennessy exploded. “And I doubt he’ll wake up to tell us.”

  “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know. Ask Lillian ... No, you can‘t, dammit. I sent her to New York to sweet-talk those lowdown bankers.”

  Bell turned on his heel and hurried off the private car to the field hospital the company had set up in a Pullman. He found the burned miners swathed in white dressings, and a bandaged yard foreman yelling he was cured, dammit to hell, just turn him loose, he had a railroad to fix. But no lumberjack.

  “His friends carried him off,” said the doctor.

  “Why?”

  “No one asked my permission. I was eating supper.”

  “Was he awake?”

  “Sometimes.”

  Bell ran to the yard superintendent’s office, where he had made friends with the dispatcher and the chief clerk, who kept enormous amounts of information at his fingertips. The chief clerk said, “I heard they moved him down to the town somewhere.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Don Albert.”

  Bell borrowed a horse from the railway police stable and urged the animal at a quick clip to the boomtown that had sprung up behind the railhead. It was down in a hollow, a temporary city of tents, shacks, and abandoned freight cars outfitted to house the saloons, dance halls, and whorehouses that served the construction crews. Midweek, midafternoon, the narrow dirt streets were deserted, as if the occupants were catching their breath before the next payday Saturday night.

  Bell poked his head into a dingy saloon. The barkeep, presiding over planks resting on whiskey barrels, looked up morosely from a week-old Sacramento newspaper. “Where,” Bell asked him, “do the lumberjacks hang out?”

  “The Double Eagle, just down the street. But you won’t find any there now. They’re sawing crossties up the mountain. Working double shifts to get ‘em down before it snows.”

  Bell thanked him and headed for the Double Eagle, a battered boxcar off the trucks. A painted sign on the roof depicted a red eagle with wings spread and they had found a set of swinging doors somewhere. As in the previous saloon, the only occupant was a barkeep, as morose as the last. He brightened when Bell tossed a coin on his plank.

  “What’ll you have, mister?”

  “I’m looking for the lumberjack who got hurt in the accident. Don Albert.”

  “I heard he’s in a coma.”

  “I heard he wakes up now and then,” said Bell. “Where can I find him?”

  “Are you a cinder dick?”

  “Do I look like a cinder dick?”

  “I don’t know, mister. They’ve been swarming around here like flies on a carcass.” He
sized Bell up again and came to a decision. “There’s an old lady in a shack tending him down by the creek. Follow the ruts down to the water, you can’t miss it.”

  Leaving his horse where he had tied it, Bell descended to the creek, which by the smell wafting up the slope served as the town’s sewer. He passed an ancient Central Pacific boxcar that had once been painted yellow. From one of the holes cut in the side that served as windows, a young woman with a runny nose called, “You found it, handsome. This is the spot you’re looking for.”

  “Thank you, no,” Bell answered politely.

  “Honey, you’ll find nothing down there better than this.”

  “I’m looking for the lady taking care of the lumberjack who got hurt?”

  “Mister, she’s retired.”

  Bell kept walking until he came to a row of rickety shacks hammered out of wood from packing crates. Here and there were stenciled their original contents. SPIKES. COTTON WOOL. PICK HANDLES. OVERALLS.

  Outside of one marked PIANO ROLLS, he saw an old woman sitting on an overturned bucket, holding her head in her hands. Her hair was white. Her clothing, a cotton dress with a shawl around her shoulders, was too thin for the cold damp rising from the fetid creek. She saw him coming and jumped up with an expression of terror.

  “He’s not here!” she cried.

  “Who? Take it easy, ma‘am. I won’t hurt you.”

  “Donny!” she yelled. “The law’s come.”

  Bell said, “I’m not the law. I—”

  “Donny! Run!”

  Out of the shack stormed a six-foot-five lumberjack. He had an enormous walrus mustache that drooped below his grizzled chin, long greasy hair, and a bowie knife in his fist.

  “Are you Don Albert?” asked Bell.

  “Donny’s my cousin,” said the lumberjack. “You better run while you can, mister. This is family.”

  Concerned that Don Albert was belting out the back door, Bell reached for his hat and brought his hand down filled with his .44 derringer. “I enjoy a knife fight as much as the next man, but right now I haven’t the time. Drop it!”

  The lumberjack did not blink. Instead, he backed up four fast steps and pulled a second, shorter knife that had no handle. “Want to bet I can throw this more accurate than you can shoot that snub nose?” he asked.

  “I’m not a gambler,” said Bell, whipped his new Browning from his coat, and shot the bowie knife out of the lumberjack’s hand. The lumberjack gave a howl of pain and stared in disbelief at his shiny knife spinning through the sunlight. Bell said, “I can always hit a bowie, but that short one you’re holding I’m not sure. So, just to be on the safe side, I’m going plug your hand instead.”

  The lumberjack dropped his throwing knife.

  “Where is Don Albert?” Bell asked.

  “Don’t bother him, mister. He’s hurt bad.”

  “If he’s hurt bad, he should be in the hospital.”

  “Cain’t be in the hospital.”

  “Why?”

  “The cinder dicks’ll blame him for the runaway.”

  “Why?”

  “He was on it.”

  “On it?” Bell echoed. “Do you expect me to believe he survived a mile-a-minute crash?”

  “Yes, sir. ‘Cause he did.”

  “Donny’s got a head like a cannonball,” said the old woman.

  Bell pried the story, step-by-step, out of the lumberjack and the old woman, who turned out to be Don Albert’s mother. Albert had been sleeping off an innocent drunk on the gondola when he interrupted the man who set the gondola rolling. The man had bashed him in the head with a crowbar.

  “Skull like pig iron,” the lumberjack assured Bell, and Don’s mother agreed. Tearfully, she explained that every time Don had opened his eyes in the hospital, a railroad dick would shout at him. “Donny was afraid to tell them about the man who bashed him.”

  “Why?” Bell asked.

  “He reckoned they wouldn’t believe him, so he pretended to be hurt worse than he was. I told Cousin John here. And he rounded up his friends to carry Donny off when the doctor was eating his supper.”

  Bell assured her that he would make sure the railroad police didn’t bother her son. “I’m a Van Dorn investigator, ma‘am. They’re under my command. I’ll tell them to leave you be.” At last, he persuaded her to take him into the shack.

  “Donny? There’s a man to see you.”

  Bell sat on a crate beside the plank bed where the bandage-swathed Don Albert was sleeping on a straw mattress. He was a big man, bigger than his cousin, with a large moon of a face, a mustache like his cousin‘s, and enormous, work-splintered hands. His mother rubbed the back of his hand and he began to stir.

  “Donny? There’s a man to see you.”

  He regarded Bell through murky eyes, which cleared up as they came into focus. When he was fully awake, they were an intense stony blue, which spoke of fierce intelligence. Bell’s interest quickened. Not only was the man not in a state of coma, he seemed the sort who might have made a sharp observer. And he was the only man Bell knew of who had been within just a few feet of the Wrecker and was still alive.

  “How are you feeling?” Bell asked.

  “Head hurts.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  Don Albert laughed, then winced at the pain it caused him.

  “I understand a fellow bashed you one.”

  Albert nodded slowly. “With a crowbar, I believe. Least, that’s what it felt like. Iron, not wood. Sure didn’t feel like an ax handle.”

  Bell nodded. Don Albert spoke as a man who had been slugged by at least one ax handle in his life, which would not be that unusual for a lumberjack. “Did you happen to see his face?”

  Albert glanced at his cousin and then his mother.

  She said, “Mr. Bell says he’ll tell the cinder dicks to lay off.”

  “He’s a straight shooter,” said John.

  Don Albert nodded, wincing again as movement resonated through his head. “Yeah, I saw his face.”

  “It was night,” said Bell.

  “Stars on the hill are like searchlights. I had no campfire down there on the car, nothing to blind my eyes. Yeah, I could see him. Also, I was looking down at him—I was up on top of the ties—and he looked up into the starlight when I spoke, so I seen his face clear.”

  “Do you remember what he looked like?”

  “Surprised as hell. Plumb ready to jump out of his skin. He wasn’t expecting company.”

  This was almost too good to be true, thought Bell, excitement rising. “Can you describe him?”

  “Clean-shaven fellow, no beard, miner’s cap on his head. Hair was probably black. Big ears. Sharp nose. Eyes wide-set. Couldn’t see their color. It wasn’t that bright. Narrow cheeks—I mean, a little sunken. Wide mouth, sort of like yours, excepting the mustache.”

  Bell was not accustomed to witnesses itemizing specifics so readily. Ordinarily, it took listening closely and asking many subtle questions to elicit such detail. But the lumberjack had the memory of a newspaper reporter. Or an artist. Which gave Bell an idea. “If I could bring you a sketch artist, could you tell him what you saw while he draws it on paper?”

  “I’ll draw him for you.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Donny’s a good drawer,” said his mother.

  Bell looked dubiously at Albert’s rough hands. His fingers were as thick as sausages and ribbed with calluses. But being an artist would explain the lumberjack’s recollection for detail. Again Bell thought, What an astonishing break. Too good to be true.

  “Get me pencil and paper,” said Don Albert. “I know how to draw.”

  Bell gave him his pocket notebook and a pencil. With astonishingly quick, deft strokes, the powerful hands sketched a handsome face with chiseled features. Bell studied it carefully, hopes sinking. Too good to be true indeed.

  Concealing his disappointment, he patted the injured giant lightly on the shoulder. “Thank you, partner. That’s a bi
g help. Now do one of me.”

  “You?”

  “Could you draw my picture?” Bell asked. It was a simple test of the giant’s powers of observation

  “Well, sure.” Again the thick fingers flew. A few minutes later, Bell held it to the light. “It’s almost like looking in the mirror. You really draw what you see, don’t you?”

  “Why the hell else do it?”

  “Thank you very much, Donny. You rest easy, now.” He pressed several gold pieces into the old woman’s hand, two hundred dollars, enough to carry them through the winter, hurried back to where he had tied his horse, and rode uphill to the construction yard. He found Joseph Van Dorn pacing outside Hennessy’s railcar, smoking a cigar.

  “Well?”

  “The lumberjack is an artist,” said Bell. “He saw the Wrecker. He drew me a face.” He opened his notebook and showed Van Dorn the first drawing. “Do you recognize this man?”

  “Of course.” growled Van Dorn. “Don’t you?”

  “Broncho Billy Anderson.”

  “The actor.”

  “That poor devil must have seen him in The Great Train Robbery.”

  The Great Train Robbery was a gripping motion picture of several years back. After shooting up the train, the outlaws made their get-away on the locomotive, which they uncoupled and rode to their horses waiting up the line, pursued by a posse. There were few people in America who had not seen it at least once.

  “I will never forget the first time I saw that motion picture,” said Van Dorn. “I was in New York City in the Hammerstein’s Vaudeville at Forty-second and Broadway. It was the kind of theater where they ran a picture between the acts. When the picture started, we all got up as usual to walk out for a smoke or a drink. But then a few turned back to look at it, and then slowly everyone took his seat again as the picture went on. Mesmerizing ... I’d seen the play back in the nineties. But the picture was better.”