“My need is quite urgent, gentlemen. There are other considerations which I am not at liberty to share with you at this time. We are beyond the range of the autogyros, and I cannot delay my mission by turning back. We will finish the Atlantic crossing in less than two days. If you still wish it, I will put you off as soon as we are within range of an airport.”
Although his hospitality had been nearly perfect, something about Barron’s tone told Newcombe that further debate would be a very bad idea. “Cheer up,” he told the writer. “This is the sort of thing Dodge Dalton does all the time.”
Chapter 6—In the Valley of Death
Dodge hurled himself to the side and tumbled away from the rail bed. He felt a rush of air as something whooshed by. By the time he stopped rolling, the disturbance had passed. Whatever it had been, it was gone now, vanished into the deepening darkness.
His attacker had also vanished.
Dodge lay motionless for a few seconds, expecting the Asian man to appear on the other side of the rail bed, and when that did not happen, he gingerly got to his feet and went looking for the man. There was no sign of him whatsoever; it was as if the strange manifestation from the tunnel had erased all memory of the man.
“What was that thing?” Dodge muttered.
His words were swallowed up by the ominous quiet that had settled over the woods. After the dual exertion of his apparently futile pursuit of Anya and the one-sided battle with the stranger, the silence was surreal. He gazed back up at the tunnel mouth, which was now almost indistinguishable from the benighted mountainside into which it led.
Anya jumped in that tunnel. Why?
Something came out of the tunnel. What?
Standing there, gazing into the black void, Dodge realized that the two questions might have the same answer.
A lot of good that does me.
He realized that he would not find that answer given his present circumstances. He was going to need some help, and that meant finding some vestige of civilization. Resignedly, he turned away from the tunnel and using the rails as his guide, started walking.
Dodge never once suspected that he was being watched. He passed within five feet of the shadowy figure hiding in the brush near the rail bed, but neither saw nor heard anything. A few minutes after he went by, the figure emerged from concealment, and without making a noise louder than whisper, followed.
The next morning, Dodge arrived in the small town of Burden Valley, Pennsylvania. He had not walked all night, though. In fact, his best guess was that he walked for no more than two hours.
He had followed the rails to a road crossing. The road was paved, though barely wide enough for two vehicles to pass each other. Dodge had elected to go right, the direction he assumed to be more or less north. That had led him to a farmhouse — belonging to a Mr. Jeffrey Kafer and family — where the better part of an hour was spent answering questions from the understandably suspicious householder. Once he had gained the man’s trust, there was no refusing the offer of supper and a place to sleep. He was desperate to make contact with Hurricane. The Kafer family didn’t have a telephone, but Dodge also knew that there was nothing to be gained by impatiently heading back onto the road. So, after what was almost a good night’s sleep, and a hearty farm breakfast of fresh eggs, bacon, and griddlecakes with honey and butter, he climbed into the farmer’s well-kept 1928 Model A pickup truck and made the last part of the journey — a distance of nearly ten miles — in relative comfort.
“There’s no town constable,” Kafer explained as he pulled up in front of the general store, one of a handful of commercial buildings that occupied the stretch of the highway that constituted Burden Valley’s main street. “But you should be able to place a call to the county sheriff from the phone in the mercantile.”
Dodge thanked the farmer and ventured into the establishment, where he was warmly greeted by the proprietor. “Ah, it’s our visitor. How do you do? I’m Wallace Haines — owner of the general store and town mayor. You can probably guess which job pays better.”
Dodge introduced himself with an easy smile, but he found it a little disconcerting that Haines seemed to be expecting him. Evidently there were few secrets in the small rural town. “I’d like to make a call to the sheriff’s department, Mr. Haines.”
“Sure, sure. Phone’s in the back.” Haines gave him an appraising stare. “I hope you don’t mind me asking, but seeing as I am the mayor and the closest thing to the law we’ve got, might I ask how it is that you came to be here, all scuffed up, hitching a ride from Mr. Kafer?”
Dodge answered this question as he had the night before at the Kafer family dinner table. “I fell off the train,” he said, affecting a guilty expression. “The Broadway Limited.”
“Ah, fell off. That’s a shame. I hope you weren’t in a hurry to get to Chicago. Could take a while longer now. So, ah, why would you be needing the sheriff?”
Dodge did his best to maintain a polite tone. “If it’s all the same, Mr. Haines, I’d rather tell the story just once.”
“I understand. Follow me.” Haines led him to a stockroom in the rear of the store and showed him the telephone, but the proprietor wasn’t finished with his questions. “So you must have walked along the tracks a good little while.”
Something about the man’s tone triggered an alarm in Dodge’s subconscious. “A few miles. I fell near the tunnel.”
“Saddle Mountain.” Haines nodded, sagely. “Did you… ah, see anything out of the ordinary?”
Perhaps because he was already trying to figure out how to live up to his nickname, with respect to the man’s inquiries, Dodge managed to hide his surprise. “I’m not quite sure what you mean?”
“I’ll be straight with you. Some folk hereabouts have seen all manner of strange things in the valley, especially near that mountain. Strange lights in the sky. Some even say there’s a ghost train.”
Ghost train? Why does that ring a bell? And then it clicked. “This is Burden Valley? That Burden Valley? I got a letter from a young man… Jim, I think it was.”
“That’d be Jim Perdue. His brother John and a friend went missing a while back. John turned up half-mad, with no recollection of what had happened, and naught’s been heard from the other fellow, Zeb Hathaway. You say you got a letter?”
“Yes. I’m a journalist.”
Haines nodded again, as if that explained everything.
“But that’s not why I’m here,” Dodge added quickly. “Honestly, this is a coincidence.”
Even as he said it, he remembered what his friend Father Nathan Hobbs often said about coincidences.
“So then… why exactly do you need the sheriff? Because if it has anything at all to do with the Saddle Mountain tunnel, then I can guarantee that you’ll get no help from him. He thinks we’re all bound for the loony bin.”
Dodge stared past the man, his vision fixing on a landscape painting that adorned a calendar, while his mind turned over this new information. Anya jumped from the train in the tunnel… something came out of the tunnel… “a ghost train.”
What’s going on here?
“No help from the sheriff, you say? Well then, I guess I’ll have to ask for help from another source.” He picked up the phone and dialed the operator. Within moments, he had a connection to New York City and the switchboard at the Empire State Building. He didn’t expect that he would find Hurricane still there waiting for him, but the big man would almost certainly have left a message for him. And he did.