Nicholas Meyer (23 page)

increasingly painful during all those occasions when Freud and I had jumped on and off the train in order to change the points. At the time, in my state of excitement and exasperation, I had not noticed it but now the leg throbbed with alarming regularity. I was all too aware of the Jezail bullet that had passed through it so many years before, when, during my service in Afghanistan, I had been struck at the battle of Maiwand.

I stoked as far as Neulengbach, where I had to give it up and Holmes took over. He surrendered the weapon to me and I collapsed on the floor of the cab with my back propped against one of the iron sides, nursing my leg but keeping the gun within easy reach. I felt the night wind in earnest now and commenced shivering, though I clenched my teeth and determined to say nothing about it. My friends had their hands full, as it was.

Holmes noticed me, however, as he turned from the boiler with an empty shovel. Without a word he set down the tool, undid his Inverness, and threw it over me. There was no time to speak. My eyes merely flickered in gratitude and he nodded briefly and gave my shoulder a reassuring squeeze before returning to the work.

It was a sight I shall not soon forget—the world's greatest detective and the founding father of that branch of medicine known today as psychoanalysis, side by side in their shirt-sleeves, piling coal into that boiler as though it was work for which they had been born.

Freud, however, was losing strength rapidly. He had done as much as I, and though he had no wound to hamper him, it was nevertheless clear that he was unused to such exertions.

Holmes perceived his plight and ordered him to stop, telling the stationmaster we should be obliged it he would take the doctor's place. The man said he would be happy to work and reached for the shovel.

(Had not the space between the engine and the tender been so slight, he would doubtless have assisted us earlier but there was room for only two stokers at the most.)

Freud refused to relinquish the shovel, maintaining that he was yet fit, but Holmes insisted, pointing out that if he got no rest now, he would be unable to relieve anyone later. The argument continued as we passed through Boheimkirchen, whose sign caught my eye momentarily, but the doctor at length relented and surrendered the shovel to the stationmaster, who went to work with a will.

Freud resumed his jacket with a sigh and sat down opposite to me in the cab. "Cigar?" he shouted.

He held one out to me and I accepted it gratefully. Freud smoked excellent cigars and he smoked them incessantly, much the way Holmes consumed pipes, though, as I have noted, Holmes was less than particular about his tobacco—with predictable olfactory results.

Freud and I smoked in silence. Holmes and the stationmaster continued heaping coal into the boiler, whilst the engineer kept watch on the pressure gauges, the governors, and the track ahead, his worried expression proclaiming his misgivings about the manner in which his locomotive was being handled.

At one point he turned back from a brief examination of a gauge and called to the stokers to slow down.

"She'll burst if you don't!" he protested above the din.

"She will not!" the stationmaster retorted angrily. "Pay no attention to him, Herr Holmes. I was driving these engines when he was in knee-pants. Burst, indeed!" he swore, throwing a heaping shovelful into the bowels of the machine. "Why this engine was built by Von Leinsdorf, and who ever heard of a Von Leinsdorf boiler going, ever? Ha! Don't mind him, Herr Holmes. It's the younger generation: no courage, no daring—and no respect for their elders!" he concluded with a backward sweep of his hand in the direction of the timid engineer.

"One moment," Holmes interrupted. "Do you mean to tell me this engine was manufactured by Baron Von Leinsdorf's company?"

"Yes, sir. Yes, indeed! You see the plate?" He heaved another shovelful into the boiler fires, which were glowing white through the door and providing some welcome heat for the cab, and then scraped at a grimy plaque above my head with his sooty handkerchief.

"You see?" he yelled.

Holmes regarded the plaque curiously and drew back with a smile on his face.

"What is it, Herr Holmes?"

"Irony, my friend. Irony. Come, keep working!"

And so we thundered on through the night. The stationmaster informed us that the Baron's train consisted of three cars as opposed to our one, and that his locomotive, retained at only a few hours'

notice, was not so large or powerful as our own. These facts buoyed our spirits as we whizzed through the sizable town of St. Polten, where there was one set of points to be changed, and Melk, which we rushed past at a speed I dared not guess.

"We must make a decision," the stationmaster shouted above the roar of the engine, as we left Melk behind. "Do you want to go through Linz, or not?"

"What are the alternatives?" Holmes enquired, speaking into the stationmaster's cupped ear.

"Well, if you go through Linz, you will be taking the shorter route to Salzburg," the worthy man informed us, now cupping his hands over his mouth to make himself heard, "but Linz itself will slow you down. There are many points to be changed. If we go south, on the other hand, we pass through Amstetten and Steyr, but they are easier, with fewer points and fewer railroad people to see you do it.

But you must make up your mind before we reach Pöchlarn. Also, the track may not be as good in the south," he added as an afterthought

"But is it usable?"

The stationmaster turned to the engineer, who shrugged and nodded. Holmes looked down at Dr. Freud and me, his face a question.

"How do we know the Baron is going through Salzburg?" Freud inquired. "Perhaps he is headed for Braunau."

"No, that I can promise you," the man answered. "When a special is arranged, the route is chosen and the points are signalled by telegraph, ahead of the train. I cleared the tracks for the Baron myself and I know what route he has chosen."

"That is most fortuitous," Holmes broke in. "What do you recommend?"

The stationmaster thought for a moment, pulling at his moustache and dirtying it with coal dust. "Go south."

"Very well."

And so it was that we slowed down at the little town of Pöchlarn and Holmes himself descended the train and switched the points.

Dr. Freud and I, rested from our labours, were now in a position to renew them, and did so as we sped towards Amstetten. At the time, I noticed that our coal supply was giving out rapidly, and I said as much to Holmes when I returned to the cab with a load, leaving Freud inside the tender, scraping the remainder of our fuel towards the front. He nodded but said nothing, being in the act of shielding a vesta from the wind as he attempted to light his pipe.

"How much have we left?" he demanded of the stationmaster when this had been accomplished. The man returned with me to the tender, then inspected the gauges presided over by the engineer.

"If we make it to Steyr we'll be lucky."

Holmes nodded once more, got to his feet and, grasping the iron rails on the edge of the tender, hauled himself down the outside of it towards the lone car we were pulling behind. I stopped shovelling and involuntarily held my breath, praying that our speed would not cause him to lose his grip and be swept over the side. His cloak, which he had resumed, was billowing about him like a sail, and the wind blew so strong that it made off with his ear-flapped travelling cap.

He disappeared from view for some time and I went back to shovelling the remainder of our fuel with Freud, but his continued absence worried me. I was on the point of saying so to the doctor, when Holmes climbed into the tender from the rear, throwing before him a pile of curtains and other flammable material from the ulterior of the car.

"Work on these," he instructed. "I'll be back with more." Saying which, he climbed out of the tender again.

It might be instructive—and even amusing—to detail the manner in which we tore apart that

unfortunate car and burned it piece by piece, chair by chair, window frame by window frame, door by door. I say it might prove instructive, but the moment is scarcely appropriate for such a digression.

Suffice it to say that we all took turns, except the engineer, who refused to collaborate and informed us bleakly that we were destroying railway property. The stationmaster favoured him with an oath in German, whose import I was unable to decipher save that it was connected in some way with the man's mother and sounded singularly effective in that language, and then removed an axe from its niche above the plaque and went to work on the carriage himself, by way of example.

As we tore through the night on our mad chase, that car disappeared entirely under our ministrations, and our speed did not slacken. We stopped only to change points in order to maintain our circuitous route, and once, towards five in the morning, at the engineer's insistence, we halted at Ebensee to take on water. It was an operation that lasted some minutes, and a good deal of steam escaped into the predawn air with a shriek and a shower of sparks, but the engineer was considerably relieved to have done it, and we gathered speed once more, contenting ourselves with the stationmaster's assurance that the Baron had no doubt encountered worse obstacles negotiating the big terminus at Linz.

Light was piercing the sky and brightening our way in orange and red streaks as we threw the last set of points at Bad Ischl, where the railway men stared in astonishment, then yelled after us as we roared through the station. Leaning out of the cab, I could see them scurrying in a dozen different directions like so many ants.

"They'll telegraph ahead," I prophesied. The stationmaster nodded heavily and threw out his hands in a gesture of helplessness.

"We must take that risk," Holmes decided, "there is nothing for it. Keep the throttle open, engineer!"

On we plunged, the sun rising behind us and some charming lakes glistening in its early rays to our right. Indeed, though we scarcely had time to admire it, the scenery repeated the magnificence I had observed passing through the district on our way to Vienna.

Now, however, instead of sitting idly in a comfortable compartment, gazing out of the window at the snowcapped peaks and philosophizing, I was in the act of breaking down a very similar window, whilst Holmes with other tools at his disposal from the engine cab was standing on the roof of the car, pulling it apart, piece by piece, and dropping it into a hole he had gouged for the purpose onto the aisle beneath. There Dr. Freud collected it and dumped it into the tender from where the station-master transferred it to our still-burning fire.

The city of Salzburg was in plain view, and I was adding my lot to the pile of debris in the corridor, when shouts from the engineer and station-master drew us to the front of the car.

Wonder of wonders! Not three miles off, as I should judge, a train was heading south-west, with an engine, a tender, and three cars in tow.

"There they are!" Holmes cried with satisfaction, his eyes gleaming. "Berger, you are a genius!" He gave the astonished stationmaster an enthusiastic hug, then paused to watch the train ahead of us cross the nose of our engine a mile or two away as it switched effortlessly into the line for Salzburg. If the Baron and his party saw our train, or suspected from its presence that anything was amiss, they gave no outward sign. A mile further and we were obliged to stop and change the last set of points to put ourselves directly in the wake of the Baron's special.

*16*—What Happened Next

"Now, we must pour on every ounce of steam we can," Sherlock Holmes ordered, cupping his hands to make himself heard, "and don't worry about the points. They have all been switched to accommodate the Baron's train, but we must catch them before they reach the frontier at the Salzach."

We had been exhausted moments before, each man on the point of collapse, but now, fired by the sight of our quarry, we did as Holmes bid and rushed frantically about, heaping the boiler fires higher and whiter than ever with the fragments of a once proud railway carriage. As we entered the city of Salzburg, the tracks branched before us into a labyrinth as complex as the bloodstream in a human body. If just one of these points had already been switched back we were dead men, and the engineer lost his nerve totally. His place was assumed at once by the lusty stationmaster, Berger, while the frightened man contented himself with timidly tossing pieces of wood into the stoke hold, no longer daring to look ahead.

Once again we drew near the Baron's train and Holmes discharged the revolver into the air to gain their attention. It was a needless gesture for we had already been seen. I could perceive two heads sticking out the cab window, looking back at us, and moments later the Baron's engine picked up speed.

The city of Salzburg whipped past at a dizzying speed. I found—like the unfortunate engineer—that it did not pay to look too closely at the track. Nevertheless, it was impossible not to see the station rushing up at us as we roared through it, and the stares of amazement on the faces of the people there.

The Baron's train was travelling at a far greater speed than was permitted by the rules of the station, but to watch another train hurtling through right behind it—this was clearly as astonishing as it was hazardous! I was dimly aware of whistles blowing (one of them was ours, pulled by Berger) and people yelling.

Once through the station it was only a matter of moments before the Baron's train reached the River Salzach and crossed into Bavaria. Oblivious to everything now, we scuttled the remains of that car faster than one would have supposed possible.

"They've closed the barriers!" Freud cried, pointing up ahead to the frontier, which the Baron's special had just passed through.

"Ram them," ordered Sherlock Holmes, and we did, sending a spray of wood and splinters in every direction.

In Bavaria now, our locomotive proved its worth, and we began gaining in earnest on the fugitive special. In pauses for breath we could see someone shaking a fist at us, and a moment later we heard shots.