Past All Dishonor (16 page)

After we got two or three things straightened out, like a shed for the horses, and her riding over to Mouton and paying him some rent under the name of Davis, and a book started, to write down all those things we needed but would forget if we didn’t make a note of them, I went over and got started on my main job for the next two weeks. I mean I got myself hired on, firing the George F. Bragg, which was the freight engine of the Sacramento Valley Railroad. Because the one thing I had to know before anything else was how to handle a locomotive, and it wasn’t something you could pick up by peeping through a spy glass while the cars went down Front Street. I had to be able to do whatever I had to do, and it was tough the way I had to learn it. The engineer was Cap Nixon, and he thought he was the onriest, crustiest article, next to a gator man, that had been seen up to then, and he was crazy on the subject of the goddam firemen being no good. So for the first few days I rolled the sweat and he cussed me out. And then he decided I was an exception, a young fellow that really wanted to learn, and began teaching me. He didn’t only show me every gauge and petcock and reverse bar in his cab, but he gave me all the fine points on how to make the run to Folsom, how to slow down for the curves and twists, how to pick up time on the straight stretches, and all the rest of it. It bothered me, at Folsom, when we’d pull away for the transfer to the Sacramento, Placer & Nevada, for the run up to Auburn, because they made kind of a railroad man’s convention out of it, with everybody on both lines cussing each other out one minute and passing the time of day the next. I didn’t want to get acquainted, because the more of them that knew me, the worse it was for what I was up to. I might have to throw down on men that knew me, no matter how many bandannas I wore. So when the shifting would go on, I’d take that time to shine up the Bragg, and get her brass nice and bright, and bring out her colors. So of course Cap he loved that. He began spreading it around that at last he had a fireman, and by God he was going to make an engineman out of him, too.

“I heard something today, Roger. About Caskie.”

“Yes, what was it?”

“He has a girl. In San Francisco.”

“Ah, that’s important!”

“I thought so. Because it looks like, whenever he goes down, he’d lay over at least one night, the way he did last time, instead of coming hack the same day he got there.”

“That’s it.”

“It makes everything much simpler.”

“Where’d you hear this?”

“From a girl I used to know in New Orleans. I ran into her when I went down to buy clothes that time. It was before Biloxi caught me with the wire, and I was telling her—a whole lot of things. And I happened to mention Red. Last time he was down, she met him, and this blonde he’s got. Between what he told her and what I did, she decided to try her luck in Nevada.”

“Now we can really line things up.”

While I was firing the Bragg, it seemed like the first of the month would never come, and then all of a sudden it was here, and it seemed there wasn’t enough time in the day for all we had to do. At last I had sat down with a pencil and paper and figured up the load on my horses. My horse, with me, my saddle, and my pack, would be carrying 225 pounds, at least. I figured the gold at 100 pounds, so her horse, with her saddle and the metal split into two saddle bags, and her pack, would be carrying 225 and over, well over, close to 240. That meant, if we were going to make any time at all, we had to have another horse for feed, rations, and all the other stuff we had to take with us. So with my railroad wages I bought one, with pack saddle. Then, the more I worked it out, the clearer I saw it: however we split it up while we were traveling, she would have to be the one to handle the horses at the time we were doing the job. So all day long I’d make her saddle them, unsaddle them, stake them out, saddle up again, strip them again, get so she could do it in her sleep, and do it quick. Then another thing began to bother me. It was all right, the idea to split the train, and steal that baggage car with the gold and Caskie in it, and leave the coaches behind. But those coaches could roll. They could roll, and as soon as the brakeman, conductor, and passengers found out what had happened, they’d be out on that platform, and how could I tell how soon they’d slacken speed? Half the hombres in California carried guns, and that meant they’d be shooting at her forever before she got far enough ahead to be safe. There was only one thing that would leave us safe. That string of coaches had to be derailed. But how to do it was something I couldn’t figure out, and I figured plenty. But at last, just after I quit the fireman job, I had it, or thought I had. I went to the Hopkins store on K Street and bought me a two-foot length of one-inch quarry steel, the eight-sided stuff they use to block-hole with before they put in powder. When I got it home I rigged up a little forge with two bricks and a charcoal fire, and all one Sunday I pounded on it, putting a point on one end and a bulge on the other, what they call upsetting it. Then I laid a broomstick on the ground for the rail, and made her stand on the back stoop and pitch for it. I got it through her head she didn’t have to be accurate, didn’t have to be good. Anywhere inside the rail was all right, so that steel bar fell across it and laid there half a second till the car wheel hit it. Then I figured something had to bust. She was the one that thought up the idea of carrying it in a basket over her arm.

“Roger, he’s here.”

“Is he aboard his boat for San Francisco?”

“Yes, the
Chrysopolis.”

Two more days, and we were ready now, and all we could do was lie there and smoke these
cigarrillos
of hers, that I’d got in the habit of in the last few weeks, and hold each other close, and sometimes tremble a little. “Morina.”

“Yes, Roger?”

“I tell you one thing. If we get away with this, I’m going in the Confederate Army, and so are you. That’s one way we can prove we mean what we say we mean.”

“What can I do in the army?”

“Whatever they’ve got.”

“How about our mine?”

“It’ll have to wait.”

“Do you love me?”

“Yes.”

“Then all right.”

The train ran out R Street, but didn’t pick up speed until it passed Seventeenth. She was to buy her ticket early, in the station at the foot of K Street, and keep out of sight until his boat was in and he was aboard the baggage car, which was the first car back of the engine, with the gold. Then she was to keep the station between herself and him, and board the front coach, by the rear end. Then she was to walk through it to a seat up front. She had on her same little traveling dress, with poke bonnet, but in the bonnet she had sewed a ruff, so it was hard to see her face. If anything went wrong, like he didn’t come after all, she was to go to the front platform at Thirteenth Street, take a sandwich out of the basket, unwrap the newspaper around it and throw that off the train, and eat the sandwich. Then she was to ride to Folsom and come back. But I, where I was posted at Seventeenth, would see the paper and keep off, and next day we’d start over.

But here came the train, coasting along easy with the bell ringing, and no newspaper. I looked around, and nobody was in sight. I stepped out from the Chinese laundry on the corner and walked over to the track. Neither the fireman nor the engineer could see me. The engineer hangs out of his cab on the right, where all his signals are, and the fireman doesn’t look anywhere but at his woodpile, as I knew better than anybody else. The locomotive was the Sacramento, and when it came even with me I turned and started to trot beside it up the track. I wasn’t so spry with it as I’d been when I practiced it on the George F. Bragg when Cap Nixon wasn’t looking, as I’d taken the horses up the day before, and had to foot it back, thirteen miles of it, early in the morning. But I had speed enough, and as she pulled ahead and the tender was going by I sprinted a few feet, caught the handhold with my left hand, and the rear tender step with my right foot. That was the hardest thing I had had to learn, I guess, to reverse the natural right-handed, left-footed grab when you’re boarding the left side of the train. But I had it down pat by now, and slammed up against the iron exactly right. I held on a few seconds to get steady, then leaned over to see if I could hear anything in the baggage car. In the compartment next the engine was the Wells, Fargo stuff, in the middle was United States mail, and on the other end was baggage. The partitions had doors in them, but they bolted on the side of the mail, and they stayed bolted, if the mail clerk did what he was supposed to do. In Wells, Fargo, if anybody was riding with the messenger, they generally played cards, and that meant they wouldn’t be noticing much up front, because they’d be below the level of the little window high up in the end door. I heard somebody count high, low, jack, and game, so that part was like I figured on.

Next, I raised up, to see what was going on in the cab. The train had picked up a little now, and if they ran this locomotive like Cap had run his, she was due for a little wood. But the fireman was just looking at the scenery and wasn’t doing anything about wood at all. It came to me, we generally had three times as many cars as this engine was hauling, and probably she didn’t need firing quite as quick. And there wasn’t a thing I could do, because before I could move, the drop gate had to be up, to screen me. The tender has tanks on the sides and at the back, but in the middle is a narrow place filled with wood stacked crosswise, and to keep it from sliding all over the cab there’s a drop gate, an iron plate that runs in grooves between the tanks and that raises with a bar. When you fire, you up with the gate, and I had to have it up, because unless it was, the tips of my fingers, where I’d be sliding along the outside of the tender, could be seen from the cab. And unless it was up, I couldn’t be sure the fireman would be stooped over, pitching chunks into his firebox.

I began to get nervous somebody would see me, from out in a field, and I changed my position, so I’d look like one of the train crew that just happened to be riding there, for some reason. I kept peeping, and then began to wonder what I’d do if we overshot the horses and still I couldn’t move.

Then all of a sudden I heard a squeak, and it was up. I hooked my fingers over the top of the tender, kept my head down, and slid out on the flange that runs around the bottom of the tender body, like a little catwalk. I had practiced it forty times, and I knew exactly how long it would take me to get to the handhold and the step at the front of the tender, just behind the cab. It would be six seconds. This time, though, it took a little longer. I kept worrying about people seeing me from the field, and stopped two or three times to look around, and that slowed me. So far as I could see, I wasn’t seen. It was open country, with nobody around.

When I got my foot on the step and caught the handhold, the fireman was still pitching wood. I had expected to throw down on him, from my coat pocket where I had shifted the gun so I could use it with my left hand, and wigwag him to jump without hollering at the engine driver, because if that hombre threw his reverse bar and shot his steam, I’d be out there in the middle, with a stalled locomotive and five hundred passengers swarming over me and nothing to look forward to but a necktie party that wouldn’t do Jeff Davis any good at all. But when I started to draw I changed my mind. Because when the fireman finished pitching and kicked shut his firebox door, he did what I’d done a thousand times. He stood there gawping at his gauge, hoping for a little rise. His back was to me and I reached for the back collar of his shirt. I grabbed, jerked, and pitched, and out he went on his head, and didn’t move, that I could see, after he hit the dirt. The engineer never noticed a thing, and we kept rolling along, him leaning out of his window, looking straight ahead. I stepped inside, threw down, and touched him on the shoulder. “Jump, pardner, jump.”

He rolled down the other bank, and at last I had my train. But before I could even reach for the throttle, which was still on the notch he had given it, or sound the three shorts on the whistle she was waiting for, there came this jerk that threw me up against the tender, the signal gong snapped once, and there went the cord, whistling over the tender and to hell and gone through the eyehole in the baggage car. That was the first thing I figured out wrong. I don’t know why, but I had been picturing it that if we cut the train back of the baggage car, that’s where the signal cord would part too, and we were ready for what we thought would happen on that basis, because first off we thought all attention, for a minute or two anyway, would be centered behind. But it never occurred to me the cord would break at its weakest point, which of course was the frazzled part next to the gong in the cab. So of course that meant eyes front. So of course that meant Caskie recognizing me where my bandanna slipped off, and opening up without waiting to hear any more.

But that was only the first thing that went wrong. On her end of it, at the wrecked Conestoga wagon she came out on the platform of the first passenger car like she was supposed to, to wait for my whistle signal that would tell her I was cutting the steam so the car would run up and make slack in the coupling, then step across to the baggage car platform, lift the pin, and throw her steel. Then she had things to do with the baggage man when he came running out, if he did. But, like I said, I couldn’t take care of my end of it as soon as I had figured on. And that left her standing there. And the baggage man, when he saw a pretty girl out there, came out and started to chin. So she was afraid to be short with him, and that put ideas in his head. He began inviting her in with the baggage, and by now she didn’t know what she was going to do about my signal, even if she got it. She had to do something, so she told him she’d come in with him if he’d go back in the car and get her valise, because if she’s in there with him she can’t watch it. So he went on back there. And that was when Mr. Fireman, that had lit on his head and been knocked out for a second, jumped up almost under her feet from where he was laying on the side of the track, and began yelling at the top of his lungs to the people in the passenger cars that train-robbers have stole the engine and they’re holding up the train. She didn’t wait then for any signal. She heaved her spike, and pretty near went head first off the baggage car when the first passenger car went up in the air, then banged down on the ties with a jerk that broke the coupling, then went slamming off to the ditch with the other three cars piling up behind it.