Gabe caught the wagon. He clung frantically to the tailgate, his toes dragging in the dirt as he gasped for breath before pulling himself aboard.
Behind him Roscoe had picked up a trailing Vangie and was holding her under his arm as he barreled forward, looking very nearly as powerful and inexorable as the wagon itself. Trailing the pack came Ittzy, still clutching the dynamite book in one of his pumping hands.
Gabe, lying atop the jumbled ingots, reached back and down to the running Roscoe, who half-lifted and half-threw a squealing, kicking, red-faced Vangie over the tailgate and into his arms. Gabe and Vangie went rolling into the gold, and Roscoe lunged for the tailgate himself.
The guards were running, they were shooting into the air, one or two were even shooting at the wagon. Tourists were scampering in all directions. More guards were pushing against the massive slow-moving gates.
Ittzy scrambled over the tailgate, over Roscoe, over Gabe and Vangie, over the ingots, and finally reached the seat, where he grabbed the wagon-tongue as though it were a tiller, which it was. He didn't even bother to look at the brake, because with all this weight nothing short of total collision was going to stop this juggernaut.
It was roaring right into the gateway. The gates were closing, but not in time. Guards were running, shouting, shooting. Guns were going off and voices were bellowing orders and obscenities. The people on the wagon clung to fragile purchases with toes and fingernails and kept their heads down against the hail of bullets-all except Ittzy, who sat up in plain view and steered and ignored the occasional bullet that skinned a bit of nap from his hat.
Out of the firehouse roared the great fire engine behind its magnificent white horses.
The wagon full of gold and Gabe and Vangie and Roscoe and Ittzy gathered speed as it moved through the gates. A guard lunged for the side of the wagon and clung to it, his feet dragging, until Vangie removed her shoe and rapped his knuckles with the heel, whereupon the guard yelped and let go, and the wagon was through and rolling…
It tipped into the steep downslope beyond the paved apron of the gate area. Now it picked up speed ponderously, clattering and thundering like a battalion of artillery on the march. A block ahead of it, midway down the slope, the great fire engine roared into view preceded by the clangor of its bells.
The fire engine made the turn on two wheels, horses lunging, men straining forward. One or two of them glanced back and saw the gold wagon bearing down on them. Their faces went wide with amazement.
And on ahead of the fire engine the warning bells and sirens were being obeyed. The street emptied of pedestrians and wagon traffic all the way down to the waterfront.
As the fire engine topped the hump of the second hill, the gold wagon roared through the trough and swung up the other side. The wagon slowed perceptibly on the upslope, but Gabe was grinning because he could feel in the seat of his pants that it was going to make it.
And it did. It trundled up over the hump, seeming to hesitate for just a second. During that second the riders had a brief panorama of San Francisco spread out below them. The empty street stretched straight down through it all to the tiny listing absurdity of the San Andreas far away at the pier.
Gabe glanced to one side because a flash of red caught his eye. It was the red hair of Officer McCorkle, watching without expression. When the wagon began to gather speed on the downslope, McCorkle took his big notebook out, licked his pencil, and began to jot something in his laborious hand.
Now there was no time for anything but hanging on desperately while the fire engine preceded the wagon straight toward the docks, clearing the way, clanging and whooping, with the wagon catching up on it from behind.
"We're gaining too fast!" Gabe yelled at Ittzy. "Hit your brakes!"
"They won't work!"
The wagon was still accelerating, and the red rear end of the fire engine was getting closer and closer… A pool table wouldn't fit between the two vehicles now… A horse could jump between them now… A man couldn't squeeze between them now…
Gabe opened his mouth to yell, and the fire engine squealed around a corner to the right, and there in front was the panorama again, closer and emptier and clear all the way to the deck of the San Andreas.
Except for Francis.
He had just reached the pier after completing his false alarm task and was starting up one of the planks onto the ship. Gabe and Vangie and Roscoe and Ittzy all bawled at him at once to get out of the way, and their combined racket made him turn and look over his shoulder.
Here came the gold wagon, crossing the flats at the bottom of the hill, barreling this way with undiminished speed.
Ruffled for once in his life, Francis legged it up the plank. Behind him he could hear the booming thunder of the wagon as it shot out from the end of the street onto the wooden pier. The thunder was coming closer incredibly fast.
Francis dashed for the deck. The plank suddenly rumbled beneath his feet. He didn't look behind him, because he knew something was gaining on him; it was on the plank with him.
He dove from the plank, sideways toward the deck, trying to land on the relative softness of a coil of rope. The wagon flashed up the planks past the spot where he'd just been, thudded to the deck with a bone-rattling jar, careened across the ship and crashed to a shuddering stop against the pile of hay bales stacked up against the base of the mainmast.
There was a second of stunned silence, everywhere in the world. Francis sat up on the coil of rope and blinked. Then, like a lazy railroad semaphore, the mast tilted slowly and fell across the wagon, just behind Ittzy and just in front of Gabe, landing with a crackling, grinding roar and disintegrating itself into kindling.
Gabe looked at it. He seemed to be deaf. "Uh," he said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
As the last echoes of the self-destructing mast faded into history, Captain Flagway emerged from his cabin and walked forward toward the gold wagon as though the deck were heaving under his feet in a heavy storm. An almost empty whisky bottle was clutched in his right hand.
Roscoe's crew was swarming over the ship, casting off lines, raising sail, shouting nautical gutterances at one another. Ittzy and Roscoe were stretching a tarpaulin over the length of the gold wagon. Vangie was seated on a water barrel, fixing her hair with the aid of an ivory comb and a small mirror. Francis was brushing hemp flecks from the seat of his trousers. Gabe was standing by the side rail, tensely watching an endless stream of mounted men pouring from the main gate of the Mint, thundering downhill toward the pier.
And up in the rigging, there was no wind.
Gabe collared Roscoe. "Why the hell aren't we moving? They're after us!"
Roscoe looked up, shielded his eyes with his hand, and studied the sails. "No wind," he decided.
Everybody else also looked up. Captain Flagway, in looking up, overbalanced himself and sat down on the deck. He went on looking up.