The two fell together on the engine’s cold steel floor. Yakima looked up at the Easterner lying on his side beside him, then beyond him at the other two men in the engine’s tight quarters.
A beefy gent with thick, strawberry blond hair and matching mustache was sitting in the iron swivel chair, manning the controls. The other, compact and wiry, with a face that looked as though it had been hacked apart by Comanches, then sewn together with catgut, sat by the near wall opposite the roaring broiler, beneath the wood-handled rope dangling from a bell.
He had a bottle in his gloved hand. The bottle was resting against his thigh clad in pin-striped overalls. Smiling drunkenly at Yakima, he pooched out his thick lips, raised the bottle in salute, then tipped it back. Whiskey dribbled out from around the bottle to stream down his knobby chin and prominent Adam’s apple.
Yakima dropped his gaze to Harms, still grinning beside him. “What’s all this?”
“That’s Steve at the controls. This here’s Bob. Met ’em in Salida.” He lifted his chin toward the tender car rocking and rattling behind the engine. “This is their baby,” the Easterner added, reaching back to pound the iron bulkhead. “Repair crew. They’d been workin’ for the Santa Fe line for nearly twelve years, until two days ago.”
“Drinkin’ on the job!” Steve shouted, not looking at Yakima but ducking his head to put his face up against a pressure gauge.
“Not only drinkin’,” Bob said, offering the bottle to Yakima, who grabbed it around the neck. “But we decided to bring a couple of whores along, to keep us company while we were repairing a bridge down south of Coyotero Gulch. It gets cold up there of an evenin’, don’t ya know. The super got wind of it and fired us outright.”
“After five years!” Steve shouted, leaning forward to stare out the window, his pin-striped engineer’scap tipped back on his freckled head. “As though he’d never broken the rules. Bullshit! I’ve seen him with my own eyes”—he turned awkwardly toward Yakima and, as though there were some question about whose eyes he’d see it with, pointed at his watery blues with a gloved index and forefinger—“with buck-naked cleaning girls bent over his desk!”
Yakima turned to Harms, whose breath smelled like a vat of saloon-brewed busthead. “I thought I heard Wolf’s whinny.”
“We hitched up a stock car. Wolf and the three Indian ponies.” Harms squinted one brown eye behind his spectacles. “You know how hard it was to load three
Apache
ponies onto a train car? They screamed like we were dousing their mangy hides with kerosene.”
“The constable heard it,” Bob put in, though his words were so garbled that it took Yakima a second to translate. “Him and Turner—that’s the ramrod— come runnin’ as we were pullin’ out of the train yard. Course, they might have heard us fire up the boiler, too.” He grinned like the cat that ate the canary, showing two rows of large white teeth. “Probably got a posse out after us. They’ll never catch us. We got this thing so hopped up on pine and cottonwood, they’d need to sprout wings to run us down. And there ain’t no more locomotives for a good sixty miles in any direction.”
“Free as the friggin’ wind!” Steve shouted, holding up his arm in a victory salute and blowing the horn. “Piss on the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe!” His words were nearly lost beneath the blast, which was so shrill as it echoed around the bulkheads that Yakima thought his brains were going to dribble out his ears.
“Piss on it!” Bob agreed. “And piss on George Turner!”
Harms yelled in Yakima’s ear. “I think that, if I hadn’t talked them into stealing a train for me, they would have shot their former employer. So I guess you could say I’m saving them from a hang rope!”
Yakima was incredulous. “You mean to tell me they’re doing this just to get even with their boss?”
“That and”—Harms plucked a small, round burlap pouch from a boot well and hefted it in his hand—“and a half shot glass each of gold dust. They intend to buy themselves a little cantina somewhere in Mexico and start living the good life.”
“I’ll be damned,” Yakima said, staring at the pouch in Harms’s work-calloused hand. “You finally hit a vein.”
“Two weeks ago.”
Yakima laughed. “Christ! I’ll pay ya back . . . somehow.”
Harms returned the pouch to his boot. “No need.” He clamped a hand over Yakima’s shoulder, his head wobbling, eyes looking slightly out of focus. Tears squeezed out from under his glasses, and his voiced thickened with drunken sentiment. “It’s for you and Faith, you mangy redskin.”
Yakima laid his own gloved hand over the inebriated Easterner’s right ear and gave Harms’s head an affectionate shake. “Obliged.”
On the other side of Harms, Bob yelled, “You ain’t gonna hog the bottle, now, are ya?”
Yakima glanced at the bottle in his hand, from which he hadn’t yet drunk. He tipped back a liberal pull, enjoying the near instantaneous abatement of his aches and pains, then offered the bottle to Harms. Brody waved it off, shaking his head, as if to say he’d had his fill.
Yakima gave the bottle back to Bob, who held it up, squinting to check the level, then took several swallows before passing it on to Steve. The bottle went around a couple more times before Yakima had had his fill for medicinal purposes.
Brody Harms said, “Think I’ll go take a little snooze,” and climbed up into the tender car to snuggle down atop the wood.
“Think I’ll join ya,” Bob said, rising by pushing his shoulders against the bulkhead behind him with his feet. Then he staggered on out the back of the engine and climbed into the tender car behind Harms.
Yakima got up to look out the locomotive’s open left-side window, seeing little but rolling desert slowly lightening as the sun rose. He moved up to the left of Steve to peer over the Baldwin’s long, rusting nose and around the diamond-shaped stack.
Straight ahead, the red-orange sun peeked out from between distant ridges silhouetted against it.
“Where the hell are we?” he yelled above the chugging din, squinting as a black smoke plume brushed through the window to sting his eyes with hot soot.
Steve said nothing. Yakima turned toward him, opening his mouth to repeat the question, but closed it.
The engineer had passed out, his ruddy, freckled face pressed up against the cab’s front window. His mouth was open, and drool dribbled down over his bottom lip.
Yakima looked around anxiously, as if someone else capable of driving the train might be hidden somewhere in the cramped, smoky cab. He jerked Steve’s shoulder. “Hey, wake up, there, partner!”
It didn’t take much prodding to realize that Steve was out cold, and, judging by the stench of his breath, he’d be out a good, long time.
“Ah, hell!” Yakima grunted, throwing the man’s arm around his neck and pulling him off the stool. He eased him down against the bulkhead where Bob had been sitting.
Straightening, Yakima flicked his wary eyes around the cab, nervously rubbing his palms on his thighs. He was a good ten hours behind Faith, barreling through western New Mexico Territory on an ancient, rickety work train that no longer had a pilot. He had not only never driven a locomotive before, but he’d never, until now, been in the cab of one.
From the rear of the train, a whinny rose, swirling on the wind, and was nearly drowned by the train’s clatter. Yakima would have recognized Wolf’s skeptical bugling anywhere.
How did the beast always know when they were in trouble?
“Shut up, ya old cayuse,” Yakima muttered, raking his eyes across what seemed a good three dozen dials, levers, and knobs jutting from the bulkheads all around him, and then at the boiler’s dirty iron door.
He bit his cheek, then leaned down to scrutinize the dials and gauges, and gently probed a lever with an index finger. Uncertainly, he said, rubbing a sleeve over a glass dial, “I’ll get the hang of it in no time.”
Chapter 18
You can usually get the hang of anything when you’re placed between doing so and the bores of a double-barreled, ten-gauge shotgun with its hammers eared back.
And that in a sense was where Yakima was, with the work train’s two pilots having been rendered comatose by tanglefoot, and with him needing to make up precious time if he was going to keep Faith from falling into the hands of Bill Thornton in Colorado Territory.
He could only hope that he wasn’t going to wreck the train by blowing its boiler or running it off the track.
He quickly found out that keeping the rumbling, clamoring contraption on the rails and adjusting its speed, slowing for downgrades and turns and increasing for upgrades and long, flat stretches, was accomplished by a couple of levers and a round porcelain knob. The hard part was keeping the boilersstoked without letting a couple of needles leap into the red areas of their dials—in other words, without overheating the water in the locomotive’s huge belly boiler and threatening to blow himself and his passengers and horses into instant viscera and spreading them across ten square miles of New Mexico Territory.
He’d seen the result of boiler explosions before, when he’d been laying track for the Southern Pacific, and he never wanted to see such a twisted concoction of scalded wreckage and carnage again, much less become part of it.
At about noon of that day, when he felt he had a relative handle on the locomotive’s workings and had just finished stoking its boiler for the fourth time, he found a map in a cubbyhole under the front window, and leaned back in the pilot’s chair to smoke a quirley and study it.
According to the map this line of track dipped a good distance south before joining up with the north-south line in Belen, New Mexico Territory. That being so, the only way Yakima and Harms could make up time on Faith’s kidnappers was to disembark the train before the southern dip.
Riding hard and switching horses often, they’d sprint northeast for the Colorado border. The rail line the kidnappers would take to Denver curved sharply into eastern Colorado, with a couple more connections, before jogging back west and north to the city itself. If Yakima and Harms could make a beeline for Denver—or as much of a beeline as possible in this mountainous terrain—they might be able to reach it at about the same time the kidnappers did, and cut them off before they could light out for Thornton’s place farther north and west.
He lowered the map, inhaled a lungful of tobacco smoke, and squinted out across the sun-washed, cedar-tufted hills rumpling before him, making some quick mental calculations. Faith’s group would probably arrive in Denver in about two and a half days.
Yakima and Harms would have to push hard, but avoiding unforeseen obstacles and problems with the horses, it could be done.
He field-stripped the quirley, let the wind take it, then scrutinized the dials before retrieving wood from the tender car and stoking the boiler stove once more. He stood up near the pilot’s chair and watched the terrain fold, roll, and unfold slowly around him as the rattling train climbed hills between fir- and aspen-carpeted slopes, dropped into vast, devil’s playgrounds of red-rock canyons, and stretched out across yucca-and cedar-stippled plains under a clear, dry Southwestern sky.
Cloud shadows danced across the coppery terrain.
Deer grazed foothills, and hawks lazed on high thermals. A couple of times he spied Indian hunting parties—probably Navajo—riding in small clumps on spotted ponies along a distant, buckskin-colored slope or meandering over a pine-carpeted ridge, their dark, feather-limned heads bowed to study the terrain below them.
Mentally, Yakima pulled the miles back behind him, frustrated by the train’s slow progress and frustrated further by having been so close to getting Faith back only a few hours ago. He’d nearly had her.