The train’s whistle gave a shriek and the bell clanged. The wheels were moving…slowly at first, grinding across the rails. White steam hissed from beneath the engine and coal smoke and cinders were beginning to plume from the flared bonnet stack. The big whale-oil headlamp was burning in its protective red tin box mounted just in front of the stack, and leading the engine was a badly-dented cowcatcher that looked as if it had already dispatched a few buffalo to their happy grazing grounds. In the cab the engineer stood at his controls and the black fireman was shovelling coal into the engine’s burning maw like he himself was a well-oiled machine.
As Lawson reached for the handrail to pull himself up the steps to the passenger car’s front platform, Fossie called out over the increasing noise of the moving wheels and song of steam. He said, “Whatever your illness is…good luck to you.”
Lawson did not answer nor look again at the doctor. He went into the passenger car, closed the door at his back, and set eyes first upon the thin, rigid figure of Eli Easterly seated to his left. The man wore a Bible-black suit with a white shirt and a black string-tie. His face and hair were nearly the same shade of gray. Beside him on the slatted wooden seat was a brown leather suitcase, worn by years of wanderings. Their eyes met, but very quickly Easterly shifted his expressionless gaze to watch the last lamps of Perdition slide past.
Lawson wondered what Easterly would think if he knew the vampire’s Eye—the flaming orb that entered a human mind and revealed all—had shown him on the train trip up from Helena that this individual had killed at least ten men, had fallen upon the salvation of whiskey and God in equal doses, had become a travelling preacher for years to atone for his sins of wife-beating, whoremongering, and murder in the name of bounty hunting, and had been in Perdition to visit the grave of his only son, shot in the back two months ago and laid to rest in a muddy field along with all the other sons and daughters.
It was a terrible dark justice that claimed the innocent, Lawson thought, because the Eye had shown him that nearly all of those men Easterly had killed were shot in the back.
The whistle blew again, a mournful sound. Snow whirled past the windows. Lawson smelled the rich perfume of Blue’s blood, and he wondered how in the name of Christ he was going to make these thirty long miles.
Five.
Lawson passed Eli Easterly and looked for a place to settle himself where he could close his eyes and try to mentally escape this confinement. They had set the ladder with Blue upon it down in the aisle between the seats, toward the rear of the car. Blue was still unconscious, a blanket supporting her head and the second tucked in around her. The bulldog conductor was standing over her, one hand braced against a seat and the other checking his pocketwatch to see how much time they’d lost. Ann sat in the seat ahead, her pistol on the slats uncocked but within quick reach. Mathias, Presco and Rebinaux sat on the other side of the aisle in varying stages of sullen resignation, though Mathias—having gotten a fearsome glimpse of something, he knew not what—kept a hand clasped over his eyes as if in terror of seeing it again, and he muttered to himself so much that his former cohorts in crime glanced at him as one might take in a pitiful wretch whose mind had crumbled.
Lawson sat down on the seat facing Eric, who had distanced himself by several rows from the others.
“Thank you,” the young man said. “I never would’ve—”
“Keep your voice down,” said Lawson, as quietly as possible over the rumble of the wheels. “What I have to say to you I don’t want anyone else hearing.”
“All right. What is it?”
“I want to know…did you ever try to get back home?”
“I couldn’t. I had no money of my own, so I couldn’t get very far even if I did get away. Mathias watched us all like a hawk and kept everything in his strongbox…and I have to tell you, we’re leaving about eight thousand dollars behind in that cabin.”
“Does Fossie know where the cabin is?”
“Maybe. It wouldn’t be hard for him to find. Why?”
“Your gang just bought the doctor a suitable office and surgery for the next person who needs it. I’ll telegraph him from Helena to let him know. You’ll of course tell me where the cabin is and where the strongbox is kept. Agreed?”
“Sure, but I wouldn’t doubt that Cantrell won’t try to find it first, knowing it’s there to be found.”
“Will he find it?”
“Not unless he pulls up the floorboards under Mathias’s cot. But he’ll have to break the box open. The key’s in Deuce’s pocket right now.”
“It won’t take us long to get to Helena,” Lawson said. “The telegraph office is right there at the station.” He leaned closer toward the young man. His senses were keen; he could smell the blood flowing through Eric’s veins. “Another thing,” he went on. “Listen to me carefully.” He paused for a few seconds to make sure he had Eric’s full attention. “In Helena you’re going to go with the girl on the hospital wagon. I’m going to give you three hundred dollars. You won’t be travelling to Cheyenne with the others. You’ll catch a train from Helena to Omaha as soon as you can and you’ll go home. Are you hearing me?”
Eric didn’t answer quickly enough. Lawson repeated with some force behind it: “Are you hearing me?”
“I am,” Eric said. He stared out the window beside him, at the darkness that spat snow against the dirty glass. The train was curving, probably going through a mountain pass. “I thank you for getting me out of there,” he said. “I will go home…but you don’t know what it’s like, living with my father. And my two brothers…both of them hung the moon, he thinks. I, on the other hand, am a maker of mud pies. I suppose he told you all about me.”
“Enough to know you’ve made some damn bad choices.”
“I didn’t choose to be born to this family. I didn’t choose to be different from my brothers. To want to live for anything but work, and stepping on people in the name of commerce and politics.” He spoke that last word as if it were a fatal disease. “To want adventure…freedom from the kind of life that’s chained them both down so they can’t take a piss without asking his permission. Oh, and they had to marry into the right families. Well, I’m made that way, Mr. Lawson. I’m made to turn my back on everything my father thinks is holy, because I’m telling you…I don’t fit in his church.”
Lawson nodded. He understood the young man’s point, but that was not why he was here doing this job. “I was paid to get you out of Perdition and aimed toward home. I’m also keeping you out of jail…possibly prison, or worse if Mathias could convince a judge you killed someone. Which I’m not sure you haven’t. But look at me and listen very closely, Eric…it’s not up to me whether you stay in Omaha, in your father’s house, or wherever. It is up to me to make certain you do at least go see your father. Then you can go and do as you please. But…you are going to Omaha, and you are going to see him. If you don’t, I’ll hear about it.” Lawson settled back against the hard slats. “I won’t like hearing that you’ve disobeyed me, after what Ann and I have done. I’ll track you from Helena if I have to, and I’ll find you. So do me the favor of time and yourself the favor of mercy, and at least let your father see his son.”
Eric kept his gaze directed out the window. He drew a long breath and released it, and from that action of resignation Lawson understood that Eric had been thinking of catching a train in Helena for anywhere but Omaha.