"Come on," he growled at Frost and Schmidt. "We’ll find our own goddamn train."
Greer started off down the tracks at a jog. Frost and Schmidt were right behind him.
"This doesn’t look good," Schmidt said. "We let our train be stolen. If anything happens to the Chesapeake, we can say goodbye to our jobs on the railroad."
They ran a little faster.
Colonel Percy left the first passenger car and climbed toward the engine, sending Cook, Hazlett and Forbes back to join Captain Fletcher in keeping watch over the passengers. He didn't trust Fletcher on his own. None of the passengers in their car had given them any trouble when they announced the takeover of the train. Of course, the Colt revolvers in the raiders' hands had not encouraged the passengers to speak up.
Pettibone stayed to guard the engine. Percy climbed over the tender — an open car stacked high with wood — and onto the locomotive itself, where Cephas Wilson and Hank Cunningham worked like madmen to wring more speed out of the Chesapeake.
Wilson sat in the engineer's seat to the extreme right of the cab. He had the throttle wide open, but he was now working the Johnson bar back toward the neutral position.
"Give me a hand, Colonel," Wilson said by way of greeting. Because of all the steam pressure, the Johnson bar was incredibly difficult to move. Wilson had straddled the bar, with one foot on an iron stirrup and the other on a wooden chock. Both footholds had been put there to give an engineer leverage when wrestling the bar forward or backward. Percy grabbed hold, and the two men managed to work the bar back until it was nearly straight up and down.
"Don't you want this all the way forward?" Percy asked. The Johnson bar was basically a combination of gear shift and throttle. Pushed all the way forward, the locomotive went at its greatest speed, while the middle position left the engine virtually in neutral.
"We're rolling along pretty good now," Wilson explained. "With the reverse lever in that position we'll save wood and water and still make good time."
The engine had been slow getting out of Sykesville and Percy was concerned that unless they built up speed and put some distance between the town and themselves, cavalry might catch them if they slowed down for any reason.
"How is she running?" he shouted over the roaring engine.
Wilson answered with a wide grin. "She can roll, yes sir, she can. With the throttle wide open she'll maybe do sixty miles an hour on a level stretch."
"How fast are we going?" Percy shouted.
Wilson looked out the window at the ground. Any experienced engineer could tell within ten miles per hour how fast his train was going by how blurred the ground below looked.
"About forty," he said.
"Can we go faster?"
Wilson laughed and jerked his chin at the tracks ahead. The bright steel rails closely followed the river bed, twisting and turning with the narrow Patapsco.
"You want us to end up in the river? She won't stay on the tracks at sixty. Not here, anyway. I'll keep her at forty, Colonel. There's still not a horse that can catch us."
"All right," Percy agreed. He would have liked to run faster, but he had to admit that even forty seemed like a reckless speed as the gray, leafless trees flickered past.
"We'll open her up once we get beyond the Patapsco," Wilson said. "It's good, flat country up ahead."
Hank Cunningham shoved by with an armload of wood. His coat was off, his sleeves rolled up, and sweat stood out on his face as he threw open the door to the firebox and tossed a chunk of wood into the glowing red maw. He was careful to keep the wood in an even layer several inches deep so that it created an even heat inside the firebox.
Turning, Percy leaned out from the locomotive's cab as far as he dared and looked back at the tracks leading to Sykesville. There was no sign of pursuit. Of course, they were traveling so fast that no cavalry squadron could keep up, especially over the rough, uneven footing of the track bed. Still, Percy thought it was a good thing that it had been infantry, not cavalry, camped back in Sykesville.
"Wilson, we'll be crossing the Washington Road in about three miles," Percy said. "I want you to stop, and I'll have Willie Forbes shimmy up the telegraph poles to cut the wires. We can outrun cavalry, but we can't outrun the telegraph and we don't want the Yankees to put a barrier across the tracks somewhere ahead of us."
"Yes, sir," Wilson said. He eased the throttle open a notch wider, and they roared along the twisting tracks as quickly as they dared.
Greer found the first body lying face down across the tracks.
“Lord have mercy,” he said, stopping to flip the man over with the toe of his boot. From the man’s face, he recognized him as one of the passengers from the Chesapeake. There was an ugly purple bullet hole in the man’s temple.
He felt a wave of nausea wash over him. The sight of the bullet wound brought back memories of the terrible things he had seen on the battlefield at Bull Run. He forced himself to look away from the dead man.
A shout from Schmidt interrupted his thoughts. “Greer, up ahead!” Schmidt shouted.
Another body was sprawled alongside the tracks. Blood stained the front of the dead man’s shirt.
“They’re shooting the passengers,” Greer said in disbelief. The situation was even worse than he had imagined.
“Maybe these two tried to stop them,” Schmidt pointed out.
“If that’s what happened, then we’re dealing with murderers, not just train thieves,” Greer said. His horror at the sight of the dead men had turned to anger. He clenched and unclenched his fists. “Whoever is doing this needs to be brought to justice.”
“It ain’t right,” Frost agreed.
“Let’s go.”
Greer set off at a run down the tracks, cursing at his engineer and fireman to keep up the pace. Frost was young enough that he hardly broke a sweat as they moved through the dappled November sunshine. He was in good shape from hauling wood from tender to firebox. Greer decided Frost could most likely run all day long, but he only seemed to have one speed and it wasn’t fast enough.
Schmidt was another matter. He was fond of his German wife's cooking, and he washed down his schnitzel and sauerkraut with great quantities of beer from Baltimore's breweries. His huge belly bounced as he ran and his lungs chugged like the steam locomotive he normally operated on these same tracks.
"Mein Gott," he panted. "Let them have the damn train."
"Shut up and save your wind," Greer snapped. "We've got to catch these damn thieves."
"What will we do if we catch them?" Schmidt huffed. "They killed two passengers. What do you think they’ll do to us? We don’t even have a gun."
Before finding the bodies, it hadn't occurred to Greer that the train thieves probably had guns. Neither he, Schmidt nor Frost were armed. Well, he decided, they would worry about that when they found the train. With any luck, the thieves would abandon the train as soon as it ground to a halt.
Greer thought they would have found the Chesapeake by now. They were already three or four miles out of Sykesville. There might have been enough steam left in the boiler to get the train moving, but someone aboard knew something about running trains to get her this far.
He still believed that deserters had taken the train, even if the surly young captain back in Sykesville had claimed otherwise. Many men were making a career of signing on for the bonus money offered new recruits, then deserting and signing up yet again to collect more money. A train would be a handy means of escape for men like that. Deserters might also be desperate enough to commit murder, knowing that a hangman’s rope or a firing squad most likely awaited them if they were caught.