Just before I went on for the eleven o’clock show, McCawber calls me to tell me they are grounded for six weekends. And I tell her that’s cruel and inhuman punishment and that she should get herself a lawyer. Before I hang up, she wants to know if she and Flip really have to call me “Uncle Charles.” She doesn’t like “Uncle Charles.”
I’m about to say okay, but I can never resist an opening. “Maybe, if you’re really good for a while. But for the time being you can call me ‘Uncle Rocco.’ ” That ought to drive AH-thur up the wall a few times.
Right on, Chick!
The Raffles Special
by Barry Perowne[5]
Perhaps the most distinctive quality of E. W. Hornung’s original Raffles stories was the aura of decadent charm that emanated from the writing and the characterizations. Well, that is exactly the appeal Barry Perowne has infused into his new stories about A. J. Raffles, amateur cracksman-and-cricketer — into the writing, the characters, and the authentic turn-of-the-century background and color. And this newest Raffles exploit has an extra and special charm — as you will learn for yourself...
“Shh!” said A. J. Raffles suddenly. “Listen, Bunny!”
Tense beside him in the concealment of a thicket of wait-a-bit thorn, I held my breath.
Far off on the veldt, desolate and illimitable in the moonlight, a jackal howled. Twenty paces from us, a water-tank elevated on iron supports cast a long shadow across the glinting tracks of a single-line railway.
I heard a faint humming from the rails.
“A train,” I said
“At last!” said Raffles.
His grey eyes gleamed. His keen face was beard-stubbled. Any resemblance which either of us bore now to gentlemen, in this war which many people were predicting would be the last of the gentleman’s wars, was purely coincidental.
Our uniforms as subalterns, the rank in which we had been called up from the Reserve for active service with a Yeomanry regiment, were in tatters. We had had the bad luck to get captured, but had escaped from the crowded P.O.W. camp, and for many days now we had been on the run.
The humming from the rails was growing louder.
“A goods train, probably,” said Raffles.
I swallowed with a parched throat. We still were deep inside Boer territory.
“What if it’s a troop train,” I said, “crammed with Oom Paul’s sharpshooters?”
I had developed a considerable respect for grim old President Kruger and his fighting farmers.
“We’ll soon know,” said Raffles. “There’s the smoke!” Distant puffs of it, flame-tinted, billowed up against the vast sky limpid with stars. The locomotive came into view, the respirations from its smokestack becoming less frequent as it approached.
“Slowing down,” said Raffles. “Yes, they’re going to take on water here, Bunny.”
I could make out now the gleam of the locomotive’s piston-rods. They were beginning to idle. It was a train of half-a-dozen goods trucks, tarpaulin-covered, with the guard’s small van at the rear. The rails of the track vibrated, a jet of exhaust-steam hissed out between the wheels, and I felt the slight tremor of the earth under my feet as the locomotive came to a standstill abreast of the water-tower.
From the firelit interior of the cab a man jumped down, evidently the fireman, for his face, overalls, and railwayman’s cap were black with coal-dust. He had in his hand a long rod of iron with a hook at the end. The driver, an older, bearded man in overalls and peaked cap, with a short clay pipe in his mouth, clambered down after the fireman.
“And here comes the guard,” Raffles whispered.
The guard’s shadow, with widebrimmed hat, bandolier, and slung rifle, flickered over the sides of the goods trucks as he approached from the rear of the train.
Raffles breathed, “Ignore the old driver, Bunny. Keep the fireman occupied while I get that guard’s rifle. Right? Off we go!”
We darted out from the shadow of the bush, Raffles making for the guard, myself for the fireman, who was reaching up with the rod, his back to me, to unhook the cumbersome hose of the water-tank.
The driver, lighting his pipe, saw me and shouted a warning as I raced past him. The fireman turned quickly. I was almost upon him. He aimed an almighty sideswipe at me with the iron rod. I heard it whistle over my head as I butted him in the belly and we went down together, locked and wrestling, rolling over and over in the dust.
The man was all muscle and sinew, from stoking engines. I never had felt anything like it. I could not hold him. He got on top. His knee drove into my chest. His hands clamped on my throat. His eyes glared down at me from his mask of coal-dust. I clutched at his arms. They were like iron bars, but suddenly, blindingly, a solid deluge of water descended upon the pair of us. It was as though the heavens had opened. We rolled apart, gasping and spluttering, from the shock of it.
As I staggered to my feet, I saw that in our fight we had rolled right under the hose, from which the deluge was coming. Raffles had started it. He had one hand on the small wheel of the water-cock. In the other he held the rifle, menacing the driver and guard with it. They had their hands up, and the fireman, drenched like myself, his face washed almost white, also put up his hands rather sullenly.
“Now then,” said Raffles, as he turned off the downpour. “This train is from Pretoria, of course, and is bound for Beira, in neutral Portuguese territory. It just so happens that my friend and I are going that way ourselves, so we’ll gladly take the train there for you. There’s just one small point. When we steam across the frontier, we shall need to look less like a pair of tramps and more like a driver and fireman. So I’m afraid we must trouble you for your overalls and caps.”
Mutely glowering, the driver and fireman surrendered the garments, and Raffles and I, taking turns holding the rifle, put them on. Raffles found a clasp-knife in the pocket of his overalls. He told me to cut lengths from the rope that held down the tarpaulin on the nearest of the goods trucks. With the lengths of rope I bound the men’s wrists behind them and hobbled their ankles, not too tightly.
“You’ll soon be able to free yourselves,” Raffles told the captives. “It’s a pity trains are so rare on this line. You have a long walk ahead of you. But my friend and I have already done our share of walking, as you can see from the state our boots are in. Ah, well, fortunes of war! Ready, Bunny? Then come on!”
In overalls, mine soaking wet, and railwaymen’s caps, we clambered up into the locomotive cab.
“Can you drive this thing?” I asked anxiously, as Raffles examined the controls.
“I begged many a ride on the footplate when I was a kid, Bunny. I was train mad,” said Raffles. “This is an old London and South-Western Railway locomotive — ‘Brockenhurst’ class. I recognised it as soon as I saw it.”
He manipulated various levers. Steam hissed, and with a chugging and rumbling, and a clank of couplings from the goods trucks, the locomotive began to move.
“Get busy with that shovel!” Raffles shouted to me, above the din. “D’you want to find us back in Pretoria, behind barbed wire again? Stoke up! Give me a head of steam!”
A wild exhilaration filled me as, with the shovel, I opened the door to the red glare and hellish heat of the firebox.
“Steam for the Raffles Special!” I shouted, and went to work shovelling coals from the bunker as the first train we had ever stolen began to gather speed.
The veldt was streaking past at a great rate when at last dawn broke over the endless expanse. My overalls had long since dried, my face and hands were black, my muscles ached.