The railroad dick reached down and, insensibly, tried to beat out the flame. Ike grabbed for an iron rung as Kinchloe stumbled past him. His hands caught Ike’s coat sleeve and tore it. For an instant, the two stared at each other, inches apart.
Then Kinchloe seemed to melt. He sagged down. His grip weakened. And he finally tumbled over the low railing between the cars. As he flailed about, one arm bounced off the steel track. The rest of his body followed.
Ike recoiled as a spray of blood blasted upward. Kinchloe was no longer a threat. To anyone ever again.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Ike stared for a moment, frozen by shock of what had happened, then brushed off Kinchloe’s blood from his coat the best he could. He completed his small cleaning by constantly wiping his hands on his pants until most of the grease was transferred, along with dollops of blood and gore. He looked as if he had been hanging on to the underside of a freight car as it sped through a charnel house. He smiled grimly at that.
Kinchloe had suffered the fate he had intended for Augustus Yarrow—for Isaac Scott.
With a shaking hand and head still spinning from the sudden death, he opened the door into the third passenger car. Mostly everyone slept or stared numbly out the window as dawn heated the desert once more. Ike reached up and yanked hard on the cord above the seats. The entire train shuddered as the engineer got the signal and threw on the brakes. Ike caught himself against a seat, then sank into it until the train completed its emergency stop.
The conductor pushed his way down the aisle, coming from the front cars.
“Who pulled that stop cord? Who did it? You’ll be thrown off if it isn’t a real emergency. Who did it?” He stopped demanding that the other passengers fess up when Ike signaled him by raising a still-bloody hand.
The conductor stormed back and towered over him.
“What’re you up to now?”
“He fell off the train and got run over,” Ike said. “I saw it through there.” He pointed to the window in the door leading out onto the platform between this car and the Pullman.
“What’s that? Who you talking about?”
Ike shrugged. “One of them from the next car.” He pointed again. A slow drip of blood puddled on the floor, sneaked between the boards and fell to the ties under the passenger car.
“Show me.” The conductor held his nose as Ike obeyed.
He gagged when he saw what remained of Kinchloe spattered over the cars. The conductor spat, wiped his mouth with his sleeve and said in a choked voice, “He fell between the cars?”
“The train lurched. I turned in time to see him throw his hands up and disappear from sight. I didn’t know he was run over. I thought he just fell off and was out there in the desert somewhere. I got all bloody when I reached down to give him a hand.” The excuse was jumbled, but Ike got away with it. The conductor was too shaken to poke holes in the description of the “accident.”
The conductor almost gagged again when he hopped down and looked under the Pullman car.
“I heard tell that Indians are roving around this part of Texas and do terrible things to prisoners. This has got to be worse than anything they’d do,” Ike said.
“No way he suffered.” With distaste, the conductor pulled a piece of Kinchloe loose and dropped it onto the ground. As he did so, Schofield shouted from a lowered window in his car.
“What’s going on? Why’d we stop?”
“Mr. Schofield, sir, you better see this. It is—it was—one of your detectives. I think.”
Ike slipped back into the passenger car as Schofield boiled from the Pullman. Smitty and the other railroad bull were a step behind. He watched through the window in the connecting door as the three men crowded around the conductor. From the hand gestures and the conductor gagging again, Ike pieced together the story being told. Not once did the conductor point back to the passenger car. He tried his damnedest to not look at the mess plastered under the Pullman and still satisfy his boss with a decent explanation.
He tried and he failed. He vomited beside the tracks.
Schofield was beside himself. When he started yelling at his men, Ike heard through the closed door and over the distant sound of the steam engine puffing and groaning.
Through the side window, Ike saw the stoker running back. The youngster’s frightened expression told the story. He knew what he was going to find, and he knew who had to scrape the gore off the car. He carried his coal shovel for the distasteful chore. Ike took the opportunity to move forward and leave the men behind.
He ignored everyone shouting questions and tugging at his sleeve. Only one woman jerked away when she realized that her hand stroked through a patch of gore. Ike got into the second car and settled down by Lily. She sniffed and made a face, then involuntarily moved away from him as she saw his condition.
“You’re quite a sight. What happened? The cars are all attached.”
“Shush,” Ike cautioned. He bent over and whispered in her ear, “Kinchloe fell under the wheels. Parts of him are strung out between here and the siding.”
She looked at him sharply.
“What did you do?”
“I defended myself,” Ike said sharply. “He tried to throw me off again. Things went different this time.” He rubbed his hands along his filthy trousers. He wanted nothing more than to take a good, long, hot bath. And to burn his clothing.
“Are they going to back up the train and find the body?”
He shook his head. There wasn’t going to be much to find by now. The desert sand already sucked up Kinchloe’s blood. Coyotes, insects and vermin had themselves a fine meal. By the time the train could be reversed and run back along the route, only a crushed skeleton would remain. And maybe there wasn’t much in the way of bones. Train wheels were efficient grinders.
“Knowing Martin Schofield for the monster he is, he wouldn’t go back for his own mother, much less a hired hand,” Lily said primly. The words had hardly left her lips when the train lurched.
She was right. The engineer had been ordered to continue on to El Paso. The passengers muttered among themselves. From what Ike overheard, they had no idea a man had been dismembered by the train. One look at the conductor should have told them something serious had happened. The usually friendly man went forward, looking neither left nor right, and ignored any questions put to him.
Ike didn’t blame him much. He had seen how the conductor reacted to the sight of Kinchloe smeared all over the bottom of the Pullman car. What puzzled Ike more, though, was why he hadn’t responded in the same way. His life had been hard, and he had seen men die, but nothing like that.
Kinchloe trying to kill him and ending up dead himself seemed like poetic justice. But Ike felt nothing about the man’s death. If anything, he worried more about the untold hundreds who would die if Schofield successfully sold the rifles to Comancheros to peddle throughout the state and across the Llano Estacado into Indian Territory.
Lily retreated into herself. That suited Ike just fine. He had a powerful lot of thinking and planning to do, but somehow his thoughts jumbled up and all he could do was stare at the desert rolling by. Smitty and the remaining railroad bull went forward, probably to talk to the engineer, but they hurried so they never even glanced in his direction.