Across that barren pan, above the rifle fire and the shouting and cries of the wounded, were the crushing grate and shrill of steel on steel unlike anything the mind could conjure sending a shock wave down the length of the couplings such that the women in the last car were flung over and atop each other.
Son and father reached the mouth of the canyon and were leading their mounts on foot up a screed hill face that looked down on the tracks. Like some foundried Atlas the Mastodon shouldered the brunt of the wreckage. The huge steamer rocked and shunted and slowed and the wheels locked and lost traction and were skidding uselessly. But when the wheels caught and the valves opened, driving the rods forward, the savaged hull of that coal car got screeched from the tracksthe train was through.
The engineer was pale and shaken. He looked to Doctor Stallings and nodded and Doctor Stallings leaned past him and pulled the train whistle. Across the plain a call of defiance.
The train was minutes from the ledge where John Lourdes leaned over and looked down at the tracks.
"We'll jump from here," he said.
Rawbone was behind him and glanced at the rails and saw if things went bad it was a chasm and the rocks and an inauspicious end.
"Mr. Lourdes," he said, "China looks closer."
The train passed through a cut in the rock. Jack B stood on the tender firing down at the last cadre of riders whose mounts had not failed them or fallen back in exhaustion. The train was close enough now John Lourdes could make out the flag inked into the muscles of that shooting arm.
The ground dropped and rose with outcroppings of rock, and the riders drove their mounts over this tortured masonry to the point of death. As the train pulled away one rurale on a raw and maneless beast got off an arrow before the forelegs buckled and the withers fell.
The arrow lifted and turned as John Lourdes leapt to a passenger car roof. It descended, picking up speed in a long whoosh as Rawbone followed suit, cursing the world all the way back to creation but making sure the one thing he didn't lose was his derby. The arrow embedded in the deckboards of a flatcar. The fuse to the dynamite lashed to the shaft hissed and sparkled as both men jumped the couplings from car to car where guards lay dead as the train hiked it up through that causeway along the rimrock.
They stood beside the truck exhausted. Dust streaked where it had caked to the sweat running down their faces and for a few moments they were neither son and father nor federal agent and common assassin, but two men swept up in the machinery of wholesale slaughter who had momentarily escaped with their lives.
The father put the barrel of his rifle to the barrel of the son's as if to acknowledge their surviving. Just then the spark of the fuse along the shaft of the arrow bottlenecked with all that packed graphite and blew the deck of the flatbed in front of them to pieces.
TWENTY-EIGHT
He knelt on the deck trying to reach around and pull it out, but he couldn't get a hold and it was left to John Lourdes, clearing his head and staggering over, to jimmy the stake loose while the father growled and cursed the vile thing out.
Standing, he said to the son, "Mr. Lourdes, for a moment I thought it was you putting a shiv to me."
"Yeah, seeing you on your knees . . . I thought you took up religion."
The flatcar ahead of them, from its screw block to end beam, was pure wreckage. Part of the deck smoldered, part burned. Guards rushed from the cars ahead to blanket the flames. John Lourdes pulled a tarp from the truck to attack the fire and the father, with blood seeping down the back of his shirt, moved to help him when came a terrible jolt that froze both men. What followed was the deck beneath them as it hitched and sidled.
The father was confused, but John Lourdes, with absolute and unequivocal knowledge, understood what this meant. He dropped the tarp, rushed to the edge of the flatcar and, kneeling, looked over the buffer. The coupler of the flatcar ahead had been torn from its screw block. It hung there, attached to the coupler of their flatcar like the dead claw of some iron monster.
John Lourdes stood.
"Mr. Lourdes?"
"We've been cut loose."
The train cars were moving forward through a sweeping passway toward the ridgeline, but it took only a few moments for their section to slow and the one ahead to pull away. The guards trying to tamp down the flames stopped and just stared dumbly.
John Lourdes knelt again and leaned out over the end beam, craning his neck to check the undercarriage.
The father, in pain and bleeding, called to him and John Lourdes steadied back up, his face strained. He stared down into that decline of hills from whence the train had come, trying to calculate how far-at least a mile he thought-before that first turn up from the desert floor where the track was cut through the rock face.
"Mr. Lourdes?"
"The air brakes should hold ... if they haven't been damaged. But if they have-"
The women were on the landing and called out trying to understand. The father came up slowly, favoring his wound, so the son lent him a hoist. The train reached the sun line and soon there was only the faint trailing of its engine smoke.
"They'll come back."
John Lourdes was waiting, feeling, listening-would the brakes hold? "You know what it takes to stop a train on the downgrade? It's like keeping back an avalanche. And reversing it back uphill ..."
"They'll not leave the munitions."
"Neither will we. Get the women up here and off this train, but ahead of it."
John Lourdes crossed to the passenger car landing and pushed past the women and their questions and ran on through the car as the father cursed out orders for them to get over and be quick. Rawbone helped them with a hand or caught them when they jumped and he herded them to the front of the flatbed while he damned their womanly souls.
John Lourdes surveyed the bracings under the back landing and knew there were extra chains on the flatcar for the maneuver he had in mind. When he turned, he saw Teresa standing off alone watching him. But the wary eyes and the collected silence were now clouded with fear and confusion. He went to her and as he put out a hand, his boots had the first hint the cars were slipping backward. The air brakes were failing.
The last of the women jumped from the train and crowded up on the tracks. John Lourdes brought Teresa and, with Rawbone, lifted her down from the flatcar. The train was inching backward and stopping the car became imperative before it picked up speed. By the side railings were piles of heavy chain. John Lourdes dragged one loose and hoisted it up on his shoulder, then ordered Rawbone to bring another as the brakes were giving way.
John Lourdes was at the rear of the passenger car kicking off the door when Rawbone dumped a coil of chain at his feet.
"What are you trying?"
John Lourdes was gasping and his shirt soaked through. As he started to explain, the father went down on one knee and favored his scored shoulder.
The son intended to swing one chain through the door and out a landing window and noose it. He'd do the same on the other side of the door with the other landing window. Then they'd get enough chain and hook it to both nooses and drop it over the landing platform and onto the tracks and up under the wheels to form a kind of wedge braced to the car.
The father looked about and questioned, "Will it work?"